Words aren’t violence

“If you’re one of the Victoria University students freaking out . . .  I have good news. Words aren’t violence. Ideas aren’t things we should be afraid of. In fact you’re at university to hear different ideas and develop reason and knowledge and logic to decide which ideas are good and which ideas are bad. . . The way we decide which ones are bad and which ones are good are by using free speech and debate and discern. . . . ”

Good news, kids. It's OK; words aren't violence. pic.twitter.com/EnhN0Z1KqF

— 🗣 Free Speech Union ✊ (@NZFreeSpeech) April 29, 2024

Too scared to listen

How ironic, and troubling, that Victoria University students are too scared to listen to proponents of free speech:

Victoria University has postponed a planned debate on freedom of speech after concerns the event could become a platform for hate speech.

Last week, student magazine Salient criticised the lack of diversity of the five confirmed panellists – singling out the inclusion of the Free Speech Union’s Jonathan Ayling as a consistent supporter of harmful rhetoric.

Salient sub-editor Henry Broadbent said the Free Speech Union’s support of anti-trans activists and the anti-cogovernance campaign meant his inclusion compromised the safety of marginalised groups on the campus.

“The speech that [the Free Speech Union] are looking to defend is consistently speech that fits under the United Nations’ definition of hate speech, and this is the concern that we have with the university. Why is that you feel hate speech is a legitimate discourse that shouldn’t be suppressed?” 

There is a very important difference between supporting an individual’s or group’s right to speak and supporting their ideas.

He said the presence of RNZ’s Corin Dann as moderator and the office of the vice-chancellor’s assurances that statements would be fact-checked during the debate, did little to persuade him that holding the event would not compromise the safety and well being of marginalised groups attending the university.

“If something harmful or hateful is said – even if it’s fact-checked and shut down immediately afterwards – it can’t be unsaid, ever. This panel is going to be held in the hub, where it’s unavoidable if you’re moving between your classrooms. The question becomes, do you value the safety of your students more or do you value the grievances of Jonathan Ayling more?” . . 

The only grievances I’ve seen or heard Ayling express are about restrictions on free speech. I am a member of the FSU, receive regular emails, get their media releases and follow them on Twitter. I have never read or heard anything endorsing any hateful ideas.

Ayling said his organisation stood up for everyone’s right to speak, and he found it ironic a panel discussion on free speech risked being shut down because of “threats of boycotts and protests”.

“We stand up that weak arguments have their say so they can be shown to be weak arguments, and strong arguments have their say so they can be shown to be strong arguments. It’s a dangerous view that free speech needs to be held back from hurting minorities. The first thing free speech does is protect the minorities.

“If we’re going to live in this idea that everyone gets to have a say, that in a democracy everyone gets to participate in society equally, then we’re going to have to accept that if you disagree with someone or you consider their perspective offensive, or harmful, or belligerent, they still get a say. We have to have confidence in the fact that society as a whole can discern error from truth.” . . .

“If students are not resilient enough or mature enough to be able to deal in ideas – even those that they find uncomfortable – then maybe they shouldn’t be at university.”

Quite.

You can listen to Sean Plunkett interview VU student union president Marcail Parkinson  here.

She shows that she too conflates support for someone’s right to speak with support for what they say.

Quotes of the week

The Government we have today campaigned on delivering tax cuts to the people. They said that if they were elected, they would increase after-tax pay for the squeezed middle by shifting income tax brackets.

And they won. So deliver they must.One thing this country would do well to have is a return to old-school political values. Values that see a newly elected government doing everything possible, despite the odds against it, to honour the promises it made to the electorate.

Delivery against those promises, alongside our overall wellbeing, should be the standard by which a government is judged. –  Bruce Cotterill

Restoring faith in government means that a government keeps the promises on which it was elected. It means a government that prioritises work on the things that matter most to the majority of the electorate. Those things in all likelihood are education, health, crime, transport, and equality of treatment under the law. – Bruce Cotterill

We need a government that delivers on the above while watching the cost base and ensuring that every dollar of taxpayer money spent is spent well.

The last Government prioritised reckless but headline-grabbing promises in terms of housing, poverty, crime and health. They then filled government offices with thousands of additional bureaucrats to give the impression that they were doing something. They increased taxes and borrowed millions to pay for it all. And they ultimately achieved very little.

Most of us would want the opposite.

So now we have a government with a well-publicised and transparent list of things to do, a list that is shared with the public, updated quarterly, and with items that are ticked off in a public manner along the way. They’re seeking to reduce the number of people working in government departments to get the country’s cost base down. And, they’re trying to keep their promise to reduce taxes. – Bruce Cotterill

At a time when both the media and our politicians have major issues of trust, both groups need to double down on recovering the confidence of the people. The best way to do that is for government to be transparent, to honour their promises, and for media to report their activities with accuracy and openness and without distortion. – Bruce Cotterill

We can argue that tax cuts are a stimulus, making it more difficult in an economy that’s fighting inflation. And we can argue that tax cuts rob money from worthwhile government initiatives. Both are good arguments. But we have to remember that the Government was voted in with a series of policies that included the changes to our taxes.

It’s what they promised to do. – Bruce Cotterill

Government is meant to be about the people who comprise a community rather than the politicians themselves. Tax cuts are for the people. In this case, those people will primarily be low- to middle-income earners, the people who work hard all day for modest returns. As “tax bracket creep” has evolved, these people have seen their modest pay increases subjected to increasing levels of taxation for years. These people are the Government’s “core business” and they need and deserve some relief.

Taxation should be about collecting the minimum amount of money from all taxpayers, in a manner that is fair and equitable, in order to enable the delivery of essential and desirable services, firstly for our people to prosper, and secondly, so that we play an appropriate role in the international community.

It may surprise many to learn that the Government is not in business for the various interest groups with an agenda to run or a cause to champion. More and more is being asked of our government. There are already too many things that government does that they shouldn’t. – Bruce Cotterill

Indeed, the quickest way for our Government to get back on top of matters financial is to get out of the things we shouldn’t be doing. We have government bureaucracies that get bigger and bigger every year. In this writer’s opinion, the cost of that bureaucracy is the single biggest issue facing the New Zealand economy. – Bruce Cotterill

The quest for efficiency across government will need to be a multi-term focus if we are to get our cost base back to something that is sustainable. – Bruce Cotterill

Good government is not about building bureaucracies that get bigger and more expensive every year. It is about getting outcomes for the society that government is intended to serve. Big bureaucracies fall into habits of doing business with each other. That is not how outcomes are generated. We need a better, simpler and less costly way.

Thankfully, it feels like we have a government that is focused on finding that better way. I get the impression that Luxon and Willis, despite the odds that are against them, are trying desperately hard to deliver on their promises while making government more efficient. – Bruce Cotterill

However, if we are to recover a level of trust in our parliamentary system, and the politicians who occupy the House on our behalf, those politicians must act in the interests of the people who put them there.

And that means that they must, without exception, deliver on the promises they make. – Bruce Cotterill

Ironically, the media they wanted is, in many ways, the media they got. In place of the tyrannical editors of yesteryear, advancing without fear or favour the interests of the ruling class; the New Zealand news media of today boasts a troop of enlightened journalists dedicated to expanding social justice. The challenge now, for these wise members of the academy, is to explain why the media they wanted is not what so many of its readers, listeners and viewers wanted. – Chris Trotter

All the “summits” in the world will avail their organisers nothing, if all they are willing to listen to are their own fears. – Chris Trotter

I found the term “at risk” in this connection both odd and significant. By “at risk of becoming” was meant, presumably, statistically more likely to become. It is a term taken from medical parlance: for example, doctors speak of obese people (or increasingly of “people with obesity” or even of “people living with obesity”) being at risk of becoming diabetic, or of people with high blood pressure being at risk of having a stroke or heart attack.

Criminality, and ultimately all human conduct whatsoever, is here conflated with disease, and thereby becomes a disease in itself. For example, I am at high risk of going into a bookshop and buying a book. I can no more help it than can a person with a family history of, say, gout, help having a higher-than-average chance of developing gout. Statistical chances rule the world, including the human world; besides which, for me at my age to buy more books is irrational, the sign both of a compulsion and an obsession—which, as everyone knows, are diseases. The only way that these diseases can be cured is for the government to give me so many books that I will no longer feel the compulsion to buy. –  Theodore Dalrymple 

Leniency is compassionate, severity cruel: such at any rate is the presumption of the intellectual middle classes, who, perhaps feeling guilty at their own good fortune, often inherited, by comparison with the classes from which criminals are usually drawn, find in making excuses for the latter, and in proposing lenient treatment of them, a way of demonstrating their generosity of spirit. I have rarely met such a person who has taken full cognisance of the fact that most of the victims of crime, as well as the perpetrators of it, are poor—relatively, that is. Most criminals are not great travellers: they rob, burgle and assault those around them, and since in the right circumstances they will readily admit that they have committed far more crimes than they have ever been accused of (borne out by, or compatible with, the fact that the police solve only a small proportion of crimes recorded by them), it follows that leniency is not necessarily compassionate, at least not if compassion is to be measured in part by its practical results and is not simply a warm, fuzzy feeling of self-congratulation at not being ungenerously punitive. – Theodore Dalrymple 

Welcome to another war of words between the greenies and the government over changes to the Resource Management Act.

With the poor old farmers stuck in the middle, just wanting the chance to be trusted to do the right thing when it comes to protecting the environment. And that’s what I think we should be doing.

You know how people have this concept of Mother Nature and how it’s all peace and love and milk and honey and bees buzzing and gentle rivers and all of that? It’s amazing, isn’t it, how quickly all that goes out the window if the milk and honey brigade don’t like something?   – John MacDonald

But, unlike climate activists and politicians, I’m willing to accept that things aren’t black and white. Which is why I think it’s time we just trusted farmers to do the right thing and let them get on with it.  – John MacDonald

Firstly, I’ve got friends who are farmers and every time I go and see them, I can see that they just want to do the right thing. But, instead, they’ve had governments and government departments behaving like helicopter parents and watching their every move just in case they do something wrong. And that’s nuts.

And secondly, show me a farmer who wants to poo in their own nest.

They don’t. And this is where the greenies lose it. Because if they think farmers want to destroy the natural environment on their properties for short-term financial gain, then they know nothing about how it all works.

Farms are businesses, yes. But they’re also assets. And why would anyone want to do anything to damage their asset? They wouldn’t.

And that’s why I think that, instead of pulling farmers to bits, we should be trusting them to do the right thing.   – John MacDonald

And if you think the Resource Management Act is how you sort out muppets, then you might want to think again. So, we can’t do anything about the muppets.  

What we can do, though, is say to the farmers who aren’t muppets, that we trust them to do the right thing – and leave them to it.  – John MacDonald

What’s happened today will shock a lot of people, because over the last few years we’ve got used to Prime Minsters just putting up with their ministers doing a bad job or behaving badly in public.

It took forever for Hipkins or Ardern to demote the under-performers, and they suffered for it – public opinion of them was tainted.

That is clearly not how Chris Luxon operates, and it’s a good thing.

Because who doesn’t want performance from the people that we pay to run the country? – Heather du Plessis-Allan

If the state does not spend more than it collects and does not issue (money), there is no inflation. This is not magic. – Javier Milei 

Surely we didn’t miss the irony on climate change?

On the day it’s announced we have reduced our emissions now for three years in a row, so good on us, the very next day Transpower, the people who get the electricity into your lounge, tell us yet again that this Winter has issues and peak load and demand might be problematic.  – Mike Hosking

Here is a simple rule of thumb; to not have enough power in 2024 is simply not good enough and it should be seen as an abdication of responsibility. 

The reason we don’t have enough is quite openly admitted. It’s because the renewables are not voluminous enough and not reliable enough to cover the growing demand. 

The transition hasn’t transitioned to the point where we can largely leave fossils behind. 

So, here’s the line for me. Save the planet all you want, even if it is futile given China and India aren’t as interested. But don’t get so hell bent about it that the heater isn’t on in July when its -3 degrees. That’s not a first world country and it’s not a first world approach.  – Mike Hosking

If we don’t have enough power now, how do we power EV’s? How do we power generative AI, the so-called future? It’s a future that requires 10x more power than a Google search.

Talk about cart before the horse.

When we still struggle Winter in, Winter out to do the basics we have allowed ideology to hijack reality.

That is not the future, of the future.  – Mike Hosking

My view is that the State should have nothing to do with broadcasting. The recent optics surrounding the Public Interest Journalism Fund which has given rise to the perception – I emphasise perception – that media were promoting Government messaging has done enormous damage to the media as an institution. It is best that the State cuts its ties with broadcasting in the interests of broadcasters and indeed its own interests. – David Harvey

I would put it like this: while increased wealth above a certain level is not guaranteed to increase happiness, or what is now routinely called human flourishing, attempts to limit wealth to that level are almost guaranteed to result in increased human unhappiness. –  Theodore Dalrymple

I take it that this implies that equality of opportunity is, or would be, a desirable goal: but on the contrary, it seems to me to be a terrible one, among the most terrible that could well be imagined. This is despite the fact that almost no one has a word to say against it. Equality of opportunity is as morally untouchable as grandmothers or kindness to animals. – Theodore Dalrymple

The formal equality of opportunity that we already have is the only form of it that is not inherently tyrannical. Nor is it real, actual equality of opportunity, since the life chances of people born in different circumstances are very different. This fact is not at all an argument against it, however, when one considers what real, actual equality of opportunity would entail.

In the first place, the complete absence of opportunity, provided it were evenly spread, would satisfy the demand for equality of opportunity. Perhaps it could never be entirely equal (someone would have to suppress all that opportunity, after all), but there is little doubt that, by comparison with our present situation, overall equality of opportunity would be increased by the maximal suppression of opportunity.

It is hardly to be supposed that anyone, except an aspiring totalitarian dictator, would want such a thing.  – Theodore Dalrymple

But how does inequality of opportunity arise? The first and most obvious cause is in genetic endowment. Differing genetic endowment is unfair, but not unjust. For example, I should like to have been born more handsome than I was, but there is no one I can blame for this unfortunate fact, and nothing that I can do about it. What goes for looks goes for other attributes too numerous to mention.

There is no way this genetic unfairness can be abolished, except by universal cloning to ensure that all start with the same genetic endowment. From the point of equality of opportunity, it does not matter whether that endowment is good or bad, for everyone would be in the same genetic boat. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is certainly not fair that some people are born into nurturing environments and others into the very opposite. Moreover, it is possible that if environments could be to some degree equalised, marginal differences would become more important. The only way to avoid the unfairness caused by environmental differences is to make the environment in which children are raised (now clones, of course) absolutely identical in all respects, the equivalent of a battery farm. Only thus can the famous level playing field be achieved. Such an upbringing, of course, would make North Korea seem like a school for individuality. – Theodore Dalrymple

On the other hand, it ought to be possible to provide every child with opportunity, though not equal opportunity, for example by instituting good schools that nurture talent and build character. How this is best done is a matter of trial and error, and of experience. No system will ever be so perfect that “no child will be left behind,” to use the cant phrase. But while trying to provide opportunity for every child suggests practical solutions, aiming for something impossible like equality of opportunity supplies an excellent alibi for failure to do whatever is truly possible to give every child opportunity: for what is mere opportunity as a goal when compared to equality of opportunity? Have we no ambition? – Theodore Dalrymple

I have since been crystal clear about my concerns that women are being erased in this debate, and have always been clear that women do not have, nor have ever had, a penis. – Gillian Keegan

For several years, trans activist lobby groups pushed the use of phrases such as ‘trans women are women’ as a tactic to silence debate and fair questions about how gender self-identification clashes with women’s rights.

“Many didn’t recognise the dangers of these slogans early on, including politicians who doubtless thought they were simply supporting a good cause. It takes guts to publicly change your mind. Women’s rights and the safeguarding of children are serious issues that need to be addressed with clear and accurate language. – Maya Forstater

They say that because they believe women to be less than men. A woman is "reduced" to her biology if you recognize than women are female humans, but womanhood is somehow "elevated" when men claim it for themselves. It becomes "more" because they take it away from women.

— 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐔𝐬 (@therestofus5) April 25, 2024

Dawn begins each day. Sunrise speaks to the promise of a better day. From a long-ago battlefield to this morning’s promise, we must leave this ground dedicated to making our worlds better. Then the men buried here will not have died in vain.

Yet we live in a troubled world, the worst in memory.

We have emerged from a global pandemic a more divided world. Regional instabilities and the chaos they create threaten the security of too many.

So we must all do more. Demand more. And deliver more.  – Winston Peters

You will create your own memories and draw your own lessons from being here. But we must all come together, as people and as nations, to do more to honour those who paid with their lives. 

We must protect and care for our young. We must reject and resist those who seek to conquer and control. We must always seek the path of peace. 

Then, and only then, will the men buried here not have died in vain.  –  Winston Peters

Next ANZAC day I’d like to see the news cameras get out of the cities, and come experience an ANZAC service in Dargaville, or Taihape, or Lumsden. Because regardless of nonsense in Wellington, in rural New Zealand We Will Remember Them. – Mark Cameron

Divisiveness seems to be the new aim of the game. Race, political beliefs and religion are all motivators in separating our people. People are more concerned with being correct and proving a point… This is where we can learn more from our ancestors –

They stood as brothers to fight for us. They could see the purpose greater than themselves and put aside their petty arbitrary differences. It makes me wonder what could be accomplished if we could do the same? – Jared Lasike 

We don’t address racism by pretending white people can be black, nor is ableism solved by giving able-bodied people wheelchairs, so why are women and girls supposed to applaud their male imitators, centre them in language and hand over rights their foremothers fought for? 3/X

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 26, 2024

We stand up that weak arguments have their say so they can be shown to be weak arguments, and strong arguments have their say so they can be shown to be strong arguments. It’s a dangerous view that free speech needs to be held back from hurting minorities. The first thing free speech does is protect the minorities.

If we’re going to live in this idea that everyone gets to have a say, that in a democracy everyone gets to participate in society equally, then we’re going to have to accept that if you disagree with someone or you consider their perspective offensive, or harmful, or belligerent, they still get a say. We have to have confidence in the fact that society as a whole can discern error from truth. –  Jonathan Ayling

If students are not resilient enough or mature enough to be able to deal in ideas – even those that they find uncomfortable – then maybe they shouldn’t be at university. – Jonathan Ayling

"Paradoxically, the mere framing of this event has surfaced a depth of feeling and a polarisation of views on how we should proceed, that has made it challenging to even schedule a conversation about how to have challenging conversations." – Vice Chancellor Nic Smith

If we have…

— 🗣 Free Speech Union ✊ (@NZFreeSpeech) April 26, 2024

No man can become a woman. We need as a progressive society to be better at allowing individuals to be socially (because it’s society that’s dictating what is traditionally male/female characteristics) to be as masculine or feminine as they like. Again humans don’t change sex. – Sharron Davies

 

Victims must come first

The defendant in the Posie  Parker assault case has been discharged without conviction and has permanent name suppression :

The young man who assaulted an elderly woman at the Posie Parker event in Albert Park last year has been discharged without conviction, with permanent name suppression granted. This is not justice. The Courts should not silence Kiwis’ from speaking about crime committed against them, says Jonathan Ayling, Chief Executive of the Free Speech Union.

“Little promotes the use of violence more than impunity. Violence in response to speech, even speech of the most offensive kind, must not be tolerated. 

“Victims deserve to be able to share their story. Name suppression gags victims and is salt in a very raw wound. Tens of thousands of Kiwis signed the Free Speech Union’s public letter to the police following last year’s incident, claiming the police failed in their role. This latest insult adds to injury (literally).  

“The Free Speech Union is taking legal advice and considering appealing the decision to suppress Kiwis’ right to speak about this crime.

“Late last year we saw two people wrongfully arrested for peacefully protesting. Now, here’s someone who has physically assaulted a 70-year-old grandmother, and they’re let off. It’s deeply concerning.

“Not only should the defendant be punished, the victim should be able to speak. They should have been able to freely attend and listen at Albert Park in the first place.” 

As for the victim:

The Judge granted the discharge without conviction and permanent name suppression but ordered him to pay $1000 reparation to the victim, Judith Hobson, who made her views of the verdict clear as she left court today.

“You’re a lying little b******,” she said to him. 

In a victim impact statement, she told the court that since the assault, she had been unable to go out and interact with people.

She could not sleep without taking medication and any noise caused her severe stress, she said.

“The crime itself has had a huge impact on my general wellbeing,” she said.

She asked the Judge that the man not be granted name suppression.

“He shouldn’t be able to hide.”  . . 

Police opposed the discharge without conviction but not name suppression.

Why?

The rights of the victim should come before those of the man who pleaded guilty to assaulting her. Too often they don’t.

You can donate to the Free Speech Union to help the fight for the victim’s right to name the man who assaulted her here.

Quotes of the year

Kiwis used to do this sort of thing well; we would go out of our way to help people who needed it. As a country we have always prided ourselves on being small but efficient.

Have we lost that? And what else have we lost? – Tracy Watkins

So here’s my wish for 2023, though it’s the same as last year. That we have a serious conversation about this country’s future, and a pathway through; that we debate a future for our young people without resorting to soundbites, cheap shots and populism. – Tracy Watkins

I’m passionate about stories because stories reach out and help people to make decisions about their own lives.

It’s fiction and stories that are a unique human capacity. It’s only humans who can understand fiction. It’s only humans who can understand the metaphors of music or understand the way a movie can help you make a decision to change your own future. – Dame Miranda Harcourt

We all understand the power of great teaching and how that can lift somebody out of themselves to achieve their ambition and to be the best person they can be.

“That’s what I aim to do is use the tools of great teaching to help actors achieve an inspirational performance because then, of course, it reaches out and inspires people all over the world when they see it and creates change in itself. – Dame Miranda Harcourt

Since 2013, some 2800 medicines have been listed in Australia. That’s almost one a day. For New Zealand, we have funded a trifling 350 medicines for the same period. And yet in Australia there is very little fanfare accompanying medicine funding announcements, unlike Pharmac boasting it is funding a drug it considers “new”.

Why? Because in Australia, their governments see the public funding of medicines as a right, whereas in New Zealand, governments see it as a luxury. – Dr Malcolm Mullholland

All of this uncertainty and lack of transparency leaves patients wondering what’s changed. Pharmac’s arrogant and out-of-touch culture is still there for everyone to see, resulting in the Minister being left red-faced and having to provide media advice to the Crown entity he is responsible for, on how to make public health announcements. As well the minister overturned, in the lead-up to Christmas, the agency openly considering depriving children of cancer medicines.

Pharmac’s perverse culture aside, patients want to know what each political party is prepared to do with Pharmac as the election draws closer. Will Pharmac come under Te Whatu Ora, rather than continue to be a law unto themselves?

Will they heed the advice of the review and amend Pharmac’s statutory objectives? Will they instruct Pharmac to follow Treasury’s wellbeing framework? Will funding decisions have a timeframe that Pharmac will be held accountable for?

The biggest question is how much money are they prepared to give Pharmac? – Dr Malcolm Mullholland

It should also be clear that unless Pharmac is funded properly, its wish list of over 70 medicines will continue to grow with no plan as to how it might fund the other 280 medicines grinding their way through Pharmac’s notoriously slow process.

Even if Pharmac was able to reach the dizzying heights of putting a dent in trying to be average in the OECD by funding all 350 medicines that sit with the agency, we are still miles off funding every medicine in the world. That’s how far behind we are.

We should not have to wait another five years or so for a government to better fund Pharmac so that patients can access what are seen in other countries as a valued human right. That is, the right to life. – Dr Malcolm Mullholland

It is a rather curious feature of New Zealand universities today that they swarm with quite a lot of part-Maoris who share a set of common practices somewhat at variance with the free and open exchange of accurately established knowledge. – Bruce Moon

Falsely posing as the victims of British colonisation and harking back to a non-existent Maori paradise of the past has brought rich, and far too often, illegitimate, material gains to some people of part-Maori descent and great damage to democracy in New Zealand.  – Bruce Moon

The genius of a horoscope is ambiguity. – Damien Grant

Alas, forecasts by newspaper pundits are as worthless as horoscopes. What we scribes for shillings lack is the ability to see the unseen, so we tell you the obvious. – Damien Grant

For myself, I believe we are on a turkey farm. It is my view that the economic path we have been following since the GFC has been setting us up for a massive economic correction on a scale similar to 1929.

I think that when this happens democratic governments will react in the same heavy-handed way they did then, in the same oppressive way they did in response to the pandemic, and that this will exacerbate the economic calamity into years of disruption and misery. – Damien Grant

How can you step back and look at the explosion of sovereign debt, unwinding of decades of monetary prudence combined with sustained disruption in the global supply chain and, oh, a massive war in the heart of Europe, and not conclude that there is risk of total economic collapse?

The west has been reduced to an economic model where business is sustained by consumer spending funded by debt and maintained by printed cash. It cannot continue and it will not continue. Something has to give. Of course, it is possible that we can navigate a path forward that does not involve wiping out the pension savings of two generations and eviscerating the economic fundamentals that sustain those on the margins of economic life; but isn’t at least possible that we can’t? – Damien Grant

I still consider being a school teacher is perhaps the most noble and ennobling career that anyone can have, especially the teachers of the smallest children …like kindergarten teachers, preschool educators and mothers. – Dr Sir Haare Williams

As we look into the New Year, there are a lot of crucial issues facing the country – how do we deal with the ongoing unaffordability of housing (notwithstanding the recent fall in house prices); how do we increase our rate of productivity growth so that we can afford the good things of life that wealthier countries take for granted; how do we improve the serious problems in our education and health sectors; how do we deal with the longer-term fiscal crisis caused by our ageing population.

But of all the problems we face, perhaps none is as important as this: do we want to continue to be one of the few democracies in the world where every citizen has equal political weight, or do we want to become a society where political influence is determined by who our ancestors were? – Don Brash

The increasing use of Maori words in official documents, on signs and in taxpayer-funded media is nuts if it is intended that most of the population understand what is intended. I have always supported taxpayers’ funds being used to support the teaching of the Maori language to those who wish to learn it. But it is crazy to imagine that the Maori language will ever be more than a curiosity, in much the same way that some Catholics still hanker after the continued use of Latin. New Zealand is hugely fortunate that English is our primary language, as it is the nearest thing there is to a truly international language. Using taxpayers’ funds to teach kids who can’t read and write English effectively how to speak a few words of Maori is crazy. – Don Brash

Before Europeans arrived in New Zealand, Maori society was very basic by any standard – no written language, no wheel, no metal tools, no concept of legal ownership, widespread cannibalism and female infanticide. The inter-tribal Musket Wars of the early part of the nineteenth century resulted in a massive loss of life – more deaths in the few decades before 1840 than in all the subsequent wars that New Zealanders have been involved in.

The Treaty of Waitangi was intended to put an end to that, and was eagerly sought by many of the tribal leaders as a way of ending those inter-tribal wars (and perhaps as a way of fending off a French conquest). It involved the chiefs accepting the sovereignty of the Queen, and being guaranteed in return the full possession of their property and “the rights and privileges” of British subjects. In other words, the Treaty unambiguously guaranteed all New Zealanders equal rights.

Indeed, if it had not guaranteed equal political rights, we would now have to discard it and start afresh because there can be no lasting peace in any society where some citizens have a preferred political status by virtue of birth. – Don Brash

Today, diversity in our formal cultural outlets, from gallery and libraries to publicly funded arts, is measured by identity much more than by social or economic class, lived experience or diversity of values.

Working people are seen in crises and crimes. Formal culture is about working class people more than it is of or for them. Those of us eating the wrong food, driving the wrong car, or having the wrong views apparently need to be corrected and educated. – Josie Pagani 

Lest you think I am attacking straw people, there is a cultural purge in our elite institutions. – Josie Pagani 

What is really going on is a form of cultural cleansing: Local is more valuable to us because it ‘’tells our stories’’. But our cultural institutions are telling only some of our stories.

Local is not always more relevant. The music of the Beatles, Adele, Mozart and Ed Sheeran is more relevant to us than Kāpiti driftwood art. The Rolling Stones and Beethoven are global because of their excellence.

Editorial choices will always be needed. Cultural collections need to be curated. My argument is not against selection, but against chauvinism.

If we want to understand which of our creators are genuinely excellent, we need to expose ourselves to world-class alternatives so that we can understand what makes the best as good as they are.  – Josie Pagani 

We are a culturally divided country. Trust in the media is dropping, particularly among people with more conservative views. You might not worry if your views are left, but it does matter in our democracy if a chunk of citizens don’t feel represented. – Josie Pagani 

Today, 55% of New Zealanders regard the media as a “dividing force” in society, against 23% who saw it as ‘’unifying’’.

Intellectual conformity in our elite cultural institutions is leading to division in New Zealand. – Josie Pagani 

It would be too easy, however, to attribute Britain’s manifold problems to one man’s incompetence and lack of principle. This would be to evade thinking about the deep cultural roots of the country’s present malaise, some of them traceable, it is true, to past political choices: but when policies are entrenched, they become cultural.

The opposite of frivolity is not seriousness but earnestness, which is, if anything, even worse than frivolity, for it persuades the earnest that they are working with the best of intentions and dissuades them from consideration of the actual effects of what they do. Earnestness is a kind of moral chain mail that protects against the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism. It also encourages an unholy alliance between sanctimony and self-interest. It dissolves the distinction between activity and work.

In Britain, under the influence of earnestness, a collapse has occurred in the standard of public administration, such that it now inclines both to bullying and ineffectiveness, to making an immensity of shadow work and avoiding real work. Public administrators have found the secret of being frantically busy and doing nothing at the same time. Hypertrophy of rules and interference go hand in hand with anarchy and inefficiency. Those who work in the public administration or are paid from the public purse are assured of pensions of which those who do not work for it or are not paid from it can only dream: and they believe, of course, that they deserve this immense privilege, for, unlike others, they have worked all their lives for the public good rather than for private advantage. That the administrators are protected from the hazards of inflation by their index-linked pensions naturally gives the rest of the population the impression that the people are now there to serve the government, not the other way around.

Every day, one encounters evidence of the incompetence and unseriousness of the public administration, of activity without real purpose. – Theodore Dalrymple

At every turn in Britain, one discovers the same lack of straightforward intellectual and moral probity, a form of corruption worse than the financial kind, insofar as the latter is—in principle, at least—easy to correct. But to correct moral corruption, once it takes hold, is like trying to unscramble an egg. – Theodore Dalrymple

The investigation and adjudication of complaint in a quasi-judicial manner is the perfect instrument for increasing the powers of administrators. That is one reason it wants its workforce, those in subordinate positions, to be as supersensitive to racism and bullying as possible, defining both racism and bullying by the perception of the supposed victims, often requiring no objective correlative of the accusation. This creates an atmosphere of constant suspicion, mistrust, fear, and pusillanimity throughout the institution and promotes the very phenomena it is supposed to reduce or eliminate, for nothing intimidates as much as the threat of being found guilty if accused. While such an atmosphere is hardly conducive to securing the aims of the institution—in the case of universities, high-level teaching and research—one should remember that these are not the aims of the administration. Wokeness is the perfect ideology for the hegemony of an administrative class that it would be an insult to much of humanity to call mediocre. – Theodore Dalrymple

The commissars of equity, diversity, and inclusion had so insinuated themselves into every committee and every hiring decision that they were like spies. For a man who had achieved his eminence by dint of ability and hard work, at a time when, however imperfect, these things still counted for more than the dark arts of bureaucratic ascension, and who still valued the primary academic goals of universities, life became intolerable. He left the university, which he had tried to serve faithfully. It was now a place in which saying what one did not believe was obligatory and saying what one did believe was forbidden, as has always been the case in any totalitarian country: and this in an institution supposedly dedicated to the search for and propagation of truth!  – Theodore Dalrymple

Before the professor left the university, the Department of Human Resources, already a horrible renaming of the Personnel Department (the humble issuer of employment contracts), had become the Department of People and Culture, a name that out-Orwells Orwell. One of its functions, presumably, was to prevent, sniff out, or punish thoughtcrime in the university and to eliminate culture as it was once conceived.

None of the above, alas, is in any way unexpected or unusual nowadays. On the contrary, it is the “new normal.” The atmosphere of suspicion, fear, querulousness, lying, hypocrisy, pusillanimity, denunciation, and paranoia, all in the name of some vaguely defined justice, that Conrad describes in Russia before its second revolution (which, of course, made all of it a thousand times worse), is now commonplace. In human affairs, there is no new thing under the sun, and examples of almost anything can be found in history: it is prevalence of things that changes. I do not recall ever having lived in so pervasive an atmosphere of untruth as that of the present. It is as if a demon of untruth had not merely insinuated itself into institutions but into men’s souls. The faculty of truth, like all other faculties, withers with disuse. A kind of cynical skepticism results, leaving power as the only reality—exactly as Nietzsche suggested. – Theodore Dalrymple

I suggest, though, that the incontinent expansion of tertiary education has much to answer for, producing graduates whose knowledge or skills are divorced from any real economic function. (I am not suggesting that the only purpose or function of education should be economic.) The economy must somehow absorb these graduates, despite their economic uselessness, or they would become dangerous, like the underemployed lawyers of the French Revolution. The easiest way to employ them is by expanding bureaucracy, and extending regulation serves this end. Wokeism encourages this expansion, for it can make indefinitely shifting and imperious demands in the name of righting wrongs, many yet to be discovered. – Theodore Dalrymple

These processes are not unique to Britain. In hospitals, schools, and universities in the United States, the overgrowth of bureaucracy has been startling. But Britain is peculiarly susceptible to the retarding effects of this frivolous but earnest bureaucracy. It has little industry left; it imports half its food and much of its energy. It has a large public debt, much underestimated in size because it does not include public-pension liabilities. It has run a government deficit for decades; its commercial deficit with the rest of the world approaches 10 percent of GDP. Private debt is astronomical. Both government and individuals are addicted to living beyond their means, the country consuming far more than it produces, a profligacy achieving the status of a custom. It is hard to think of strengths that might offset these defects.

This, then, is a time for seriousness—but what we will likely get is earnestness as the handmaiden of overweening personal ambition, the looting of the public purse, and a spiral of impoverishment. – Theodore Dalrymple

The biggest problems in New Zealand’s schooling system are poor literacy and numeracy. This results from factors such as too little direct instruction as compared to child-led learning, inadequate use of phonics, and “fads” such as modern learning environments. We also lack a knowledge-rich national curriculum that gives all New Zealand students a good educational start in life, and with this a basis for democracy and civil society. The evidence is that socio-economic background is the main determinant of differences between Māori and non-Māori educational achievement.

Given all this, it is surprising how much emphasis the Ministry of Education (MoE) is giving to race as a key variable in education. MoE seems more focused on promoting Māori racial and cultural identity than, for example, professional identities. “Māori succeeding as Māori” is a recurring trope. A wisely sardonic Māori kuia once said to me that New Zealand has too few Māori in the professions and too many professional Māoris (sic). This was decades ago, and she spoke in a whisper. By now the prevailing zeitgeist will have silenced her completely. – Dr Peter Winsley

In MoE documents references are made to te Tiriti creating an equal partnership between chiefs and the Crown. However, it is impossible for Māori to be both subjects of and equal partners with the Crown. The “equal partnership” argument is a modern invention absent from the 1840 documents and devoid of credible scholarship.

MoE contends that te Tiriti includes “a promise that Māori would retain their sovereignty (tino rangatiratanga)”. Equating ‘sovereignty’ and ‘tino rangatiratanga’ is invalid. Article 1 of the Treaty/Te Tiriti transfers to the Crown “sovereignty” (in English) or in Māori “kawanatanga” (governorship). Māori acceptance of Crown sovereignty is clear from records of debate among Māori at the Treaty signings in 1840, from the later discussions at the 1860 Kohimarama conference, and from many other sources.

Tino rangatiratanga protects Māori property rights and reflects Magna Carta principles. It could also mean economic self-determination at the individual, whanau and hapu level. However, it cannot mean sovereignty and the right to make laws  as set out in Treaty/Tiriti Article 1. – Dr Peter Winsley

MoE assumes two major “ways of knowing” in New Zealand: science and mātauranga Māori. However New Zealand has long been a multicultural society. Every ethnic, racial or cultural group has a different body of traditional knowledge and belief. This is typically shaped by past learning, the wider physical, technological and social environment, and the influence of ideas, technologies and flows of knowledge from other people and from cross-disciplinary sources.

MoE documents show little real interest in the traditional knowledge and beliefs of New Zealand’s large Asian and other minority (non-Māori) cultures. However, people from these cultures tend to succeed through their own endeavours. – Dr Peter Winsley

All advanced countries invest substantially in science that transcends cultures and is universal. Science follows agreed disciplinary rules internationally rather than local and culture-specific rules.

As Diamond (1997) noted, people in Eurasia and parts of the Americas had the domesticated crops and animals to support economic surpluses, and the trade and other connections to learn from others. However, isolated and migratory groups were limited by their resource base and poor access to new technology and ideas. Some such groups became so isolated that their technological capabilities stagnated and sometimes went backwards. Aboriginal Tasmanians gave up bone tools and fishing gear. Polynesian societies lost pottery-making skills, and Māori whose ancestors sailed to New Zealand on multi-hull sailing canoes (waka hourua) reverted to single hull canoes and forgot how to build and sail larger ocean-going vessels. – Dr Peter Winsley

Before European contact, Māori had no trade connections with the outside world that could open up access to new ideas and technologies. As a result, New Zealand Māori delivered no significant innovation in 800 or so years of pre-European settlement. This had nothing to do with lack of curiosity or intellect. Had the Māori population included Thomas Edison, James Watt, Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates, Ross Ihaka and Steve Jobs they would still be “sucking the cold kumara” in abject poverty because the conditions for science-based innovation were absent.

Science aims to continuously advance knowledge and seek universal truth. In contrast, much traditional knowledge or belief such as mātauranga Māori is local. MoE states that “a mātauranga Māori programme will be locally based, drawing on the knowledge and understanding of the iwi and hapū of the locality where the schooling is located. For an interface between mātauranga Māori and science to be successful, a science programme should also be locally derived.”

MoE’s support for a local focus for mātauranga Māori is intellectually limiting, hampers scalability, and reduces the generalisability of the learning undertaken. It also undermines the vision of a national curriculum that delivers powerful knowledge to all New Zealand students on an equitable basis. – Dr Peter Winsley

Mātauranga Māori is proposed to be woven into our national science curriculum. This may create risks when science and myths are confused. For example, no “mauri” or indeed any other “life force” exists within inanimate objects. Therefore, including such concepts in any science curriculum harms students’ education.

New Zealand graduates need to compete in domestic and international marketplaces. Our qualifications need to be respected internationally and remain portable to other countries. We may value mātauranga Māori, however we cannot expect it to be valued outside New Zealand.

Science involves understanding of how and why things work as they do. It is not limited to learning what is, but also why things have come to be. Knowing how to prepare karaka berries is knowledge; trying to find out why and how they are poisonous, and how preparation removes the poison, is science that can then be a platform for other applications It is these platforms that achieve scalability and leverage off rapidly diminishing marginal costs.

Traditional knowledge is rarely accompanied with a deeper understanding of causation. However, such knowledge can trigger rigorous scientific analysis that can lead to significant advances. – Dr Peter Winsley

Science needs connections to others’ research, and reliable ways of storing and disseminating information. Oral cultures require ways of organising knowledge so it can be transmitted through the generations.  – Dr Peter Winsley

In Māori culture whakapapa became a means of structuring knowledge and facilitating its recall. Māori also encoded useful knowledge in memorable tales. An example is the story of Mahuika’s fury with Māui for wasting her nails and flame, with her last embers deposited in the kaikomako tree. This tale reminds future generations that kaikomako wood can be used to make fire.

Fundamental to New Zealand’s future is its capacity to engage with and learn from the wider world. We must be an open society and be part of the global “Republic of Science”. Our science must be delivered in the language and style appropriate to people overseas. If we talk only to ourselves no one else will listen and over time we will have nothing left to say.

Some argue that mātauranga Māori knowledge can only be known by those inside Te Ao Māori and skilled in kaupapa Māori. It is fundamental in science that no knowledge is protected from challenge, including from outsiders. Knowledge that requires protection is belief, not science. – Dr Peter Winsley

A risk we are creating is that some of New Zealand’s finest minds may be diverted into ideological “research” and political advocacy and fail to develop fully their skills in critical reasoning and rigorous scientific method. Society may reinforce this while it is the prevailing zeitgeist, and then it will walk away, leaving misled graduates in the wrong fields with devalued degrees and angry with a system that duped them.

Mātauranga Māori reflects what Māori have learned or come to believe through centuries of observation. Beliefs that are erroneous need to disappear and not be protected. While mātauranga Māori resulting from observation of environmental processes can be ongoing, modern scientific method has taken over from most traditional “ways of knowing and believing” internationally. Rather than funding mātauranga Māori we will get more value from applying modern science to the priorities Māori and other New Zealanders have and engaging more Māori in outwards-looking science that matters for the world. – Dr Peter Winsley

It is great that science and ways of learning are stirring increasing interest in the Māori community. We should manage science education so we deliver more people of the calibre of Shane Reti, Ross Ihaka and Garth Cooper. We must avoid creating a generation of embittered identarians who blame all that is wrong with their lives on “western science” and colonialisation. – Dr Peter Winsley

We are now at a point where we are not a rich country, we’re a country that needs to get rich if we’re going to have as many nurses per capita as Australia, for example. I do think that we’re in a fight to maintain being unequivocally a first-world country – David Seymour

As we watch the Chinese Government transition from its old, hardline, Covid-19 elimination strategy, characterised by long and uncompromising lockdowns, to a new, laissez-faire, wide open borders (and bugger the health system) strategy, uncannily like our own, we have confirmation that not even the totalitarian regime of Xi Jinping’s Communist Party can operate indefinitely without a social licence.

Not that our own government is returning the compliment by acknowledging the lack of genuine social licences for its own flagship policies – and changing them. There is more than a whiff of totalitarian indifference to public opinion in the Labour Caucus’s blunt refusal to change course on Nanaia Mahuta’s Three Waters project. – Chris Trotter

Undeterred, Labour doubled-down. Constitutional conventions became confetti. The co-governance provisions of Three Waters became stronger and their likely impact on Māori-Pakeha relations even more divisive.

And this situation looks set to be made ten-times worse the moment the public cottons-on to the fact that the cost of borrowing the billions required to “fix” their drinking-, storm- and waste-water systems is to be extracted from the pockets of the poor schmucks who “own” – but do not control – the four vast “entities” at the heart of the Three Waters project. A bitter realisation, that will hit home about the time they open their new-fangled water bills. – Chris Trotter

Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine has dealt what looks like being the final death-blow to the “international rules-based order” overseen by the United Nations. What we deplored, then ignored, in Syria, has come home to the cursèd bloodlands of Eastern Europe.

The global economic system, already rendered dangerously fragile by the financial measures required to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, has received a vicious kick in the gonads from Russia’s combat boots. Rising inflation has ignited multiple cost-of-living crises – even in the world’s wealthiest countries – precipitating social and political conflicts not seen for nearly half-a-century.

But Vladimir Putin’s aggression has done something else. It has stimulated martial feelings long thought dead and buried in the materially abundant (but spiritually impoverished) societies of the West. – Chris Trotter

When the heroism and sacrifice of war seem preferable, and more honourable, than an enervated peace, it is, truly, a terrible year. – Chris Trotter

2022 may have exposed the terrifying scale of Big Tech censorship, but events this year also reminded us of the incredible power of free speech – to unsettle, and perhaps even to topple, our authoritarian elites. So, here’s to 2023 – and to being the dread of tyrants. – Tom Slater

We were told: you have no other option but to surrender. We say: we have no other option than to win. – President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

The march of moral relativism has not made a freer, more content society but an agitated, uncertain one. Post-truth, post-reality, even post-biology, the individual is not liberated, but lost, left utterly alone to ‘arrange things reasonably for himself’. – Brendan O’Neill

Nothing is good or bad in itself, everything depends on the consequences that an action allows one to foresee.’

We see this cult of calculation everywhere today. Industry and growth are judged not according to whether they will be good for us, but through the pseudo-science of calculating their impact on the planet. Human activity is likewise measured, and reprimanded, by calculating the carbon footprint it allegedly leaves. Parenting has been reduced from a moral endeavour to a scientific one – you must now follow the calculations of parenting experts and gurus if you don’t want your kids to be messed up. Benedict was right about our world of calculation – it chases out questions of morality, truth and freedom in preference for only doing what the calculating classes deem to be low-risk in terms of consequences. When everything is devised for us by a calculating elite, freedom suffers, said Benedict – for ‘our freedom and our dignity cannot come… from technical systems of control, but can, specifically, spring only from man’s moral strength’. – Brendan O’Neill

No, I do not share Benedict’s belief in God. I am an atheist. But Benedict’s agitation against the idea that humanity is a consequence of evolution alone was a profoundly important one. A key part of today’s functional rationalism is evolutionary psychology, a science particularly beloved of Dawkinites and the so-called Intellectual Dark Web. It holds that virtually everything human beings think and do can be explained by evolutionary processes, as if we are indistinguishable from those monkeys that first came down from the trees; as if we are propelled into tribal affiliations and warfare and sex by traits stamped into us by the ceaseless march of nature. This, too, chases out the small matter of morality, the small matter that we have risen above our nature and now really are ‘more than all other living beings’, in Benedict’s words. We are capable of choice, we are capable of good. Good – a terribly old-fashioned concept, I know. – Brendan O’Neill

What makes man wonderful?’, argued humanists and theologians in the past. ‘Why is man so shit?’, ask the rationalists of the 21st century. Against their technocracy, misanthropy and evolutionary fatalism, Benedict made a searing cry: human beings are special, human beings are good. This atheistic humanist, for one, found more to cheer in the reason espoused by that Pope of Rome than I did in the petty anti-religiosity of educated secularists. It is no surprise to me at all that some of the heavyweight ‘rationalists’ of the God Wars – Philip Pullman, Stephen Fry – have now fallen for the cult of genderfluidity, a religion infinitely more unhinged than any of the great world religions. This treachery of the rationalists confirms that their guide was not humanistic reason, but mere hostility to religion, especially the Catholic one. If you want to understand reason and truth and why they are so central to human exceptionalism, read not Fry, but Benedict. RIP, Your Holiness. – Brendan O’Neill

How easily we assume that the underdog has virtues, more or less ex officio, as underdog, despite the many times that we learn or discover to our dismay that the underdog, once he becomes top dog, has (at least incipiently) precisely the same vices as the people who previously and until recently persecuted him! The small nation that is liberated from the tyranny of a larger nation immediately begins to oppress a smaller nation. How often has the first fruit of freedom for some been tyranny for others! The drive to tyrannize is a strong one that requires conscious efforts to subdue. I feel it in some small way myself, and consciously suppress, not always successfully, it when I do.

That is why we often find egalitarians to be among the most determined of dominators, who espouse in theory and at a distance what they are unwilling or unable to practise near to themselves. – Theodore Dalrymple 

As we enter 2023, we desperately need to cut the technocrats down to size. The great lie of technocracy is that the experts are best placed to make decisions in the national interest. That they somehow stand above the wayward passions of the electorate or the ideology of elected representatives. In reality, technocrats tend to simply pass off their own prejudices as superior insight. – Fraser Myers

The challenges of our times call for fresh and bold thinking, not plodding managerialism or discredited groupthink. What we need is for the public to be brought back into politics, not relegated to the sidelines or treated with suspicion. This year, we must take on the technocrats. – Fraser Myers

A tactical withdrawal is said to be the most difficult of all military operations. A commander has to take his troops backwards while maintaining contact with the enemy and not being pushed into headlong retreat. The challenge is to not lose discipline during the operation.

It can become necessary when the enemy is simply too strong and an army needs to leave the battlefield to avoid a crushing defeat, or it can be simply to pull back to reach an area that is easier to defend.

Trailing National in the polls, Ardern has decided to retreat and present a smaller target to opponents by postponing the implementation of contentious policies or reducing their scope. –  Graham Adams

Despite the Prime Minister predictably painting a retreat as a result of her government having ambitiously taken on too many issues to deal with adequately, it is obvious she is making a virtue of necessity.

Alongside the government’s well-deserved reputation for being incompetent in delivering even the basics of what the public wants — including roads free of potholes — it seems to have a perverse desire to give them what they don’t want, not least an expensive unemployment insurance scheme and a merger of RNZ and TVNZ.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, but not everyone is convinced Ardern’s prescriptions will help. – Graham Adams

Having been humiliated by her own Minister of Local Government as well as being snookered by the leader of a minor party in short order, Ardern is looking like she belongs to an unfortunate group of commanders — a general whose luck has run out. – Graham Adams

Environmentalism is a modern pagan religion in which an angry Earth must be appeased by sacrificing human lives.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) January 3, 2023

My mother, Valerie Davies, used to remind me when my babies were crying or not sleeping that it was their only way to tell me what they needed. And babies need company and cuddles. Wriggling away from a nappy change or spitting out food wasn’t to annoy but to communicate their likes and dislikes before they could talk.

She had a simple rule: unco-operative or misbehaving children were usually either tired, thirsty, hungry or needed a cuddle and it’s amazing to this day how often it’s true! – Victoria Carter

Imagine not being able to say how you are feeling because no one in your family has helped you understand your feelings of sadness, anger, hurt or puzzlement. What would it be like to never hear regular encouragement or praise, just know a clip on the ear? – Victoria Carter

The police spend more time on family harm incidents than anything else. Every three minutes, on average, the police are called to one. And don’t forget it’s widely believed most of it is not reported.

The more reading I did the more I thought how bloody obvious it is: that if a small child is exposed to violence – either being hit themselves or seeing family members being hurt – moves house regularly, doesn’t get enough food, has no routine, their development is impacted. What was really disturbing was the new research on brain development or lack thereof from the home environment. – Victoria Carter

We need to restore the mana of parenting. We need a social movement for this purpose, it’s not a moral judgment but based purely on what we know from research and science. Emotionally responsive nurturing, especially from birth to around 3 is vital for the healthy development of the brain. – Lesley Max

Nearly 30 years ago the British Medical Journal identified parenting as the most important public health issue facing society … not much has changed in the intervening years. – Lesley Max

If we know this, when are government agencies going to develop strategies to better support good parenting? When are we as a community going to say stop the hitting, any kind of violence? When are we going to agree the most important job is bringing up healthy children and put in steps to make sure that the right support structures are there?

If it takes a village how are we going to get that social movement on the mana of parenting? It’s probably the most important job any of us will have.

I want to see political party manifestos that tackle this issue and offer genuine solutions for children and young people to thrive. Instead of the criminal focus this might do more to nurture good citizens. Which political party is going to focus on the beginning – the parenting – rather than focusing on the crime? – Victoria Carter

Perhaps this will come as a shock to purists, but parents — good ones, at least — do not always tell their children the truth. Preparing a person to live in the world as it is, as opposed to the one they might like it to be, does not always involve confronting them with harsh realities. You ease them in, making difficult judgements about what to reveal, what to withhold. This isn’t dishonesty or pandering; I consider it pragmatism. – Victoria Smith

Having grown up in a household where “just being honest” could be wielded as a weapon to make others feel ugly and stupid, I try to take care over what truly needs to be said. Thereare some truths which I consider important but which I know will not stick, at least not yet. I hold them in reserve. – Victoria Smith

My aim as a parent is not to create individuals who echo my own beliefs. I want them to be people whohave the confidence to be questioning in their own right. Plus, I have enough confidence in my own politics to think they can withstand said questioning without recourse to forced compliance.  – Victoria Smith

When one person’s perception of reality (usually, but not always, the eldest male’s) is prioritised over everyone else’s, the family is patriarchal. I do not want my sons to grow up in a household in which everyone else either has to gaslight themselves into going along with one person’s truth, or must pretend to do so out of fear. 

Young adults who boast of “schooling” their “bigoted” mothers are model patriarchs. They might have won the power play, but they have lost the moral argument. Maybe one day they will find a politics that can bear the weight of scrutiny, ceasing to treat others as mirrors reflecting their politics back at them at several times its actual validity. That is what I had to find for myself, and what I want my own children to discover, in their own time.  – Victoria Smith

Were anyone to suggest incorporating the Genesis account of creation into the school science curriculum, it’s certain that such a suggestion wouldn’t even be listened to, let alone taken seriously. Yet the Ministry of Education considers that Maori creation myths should be woven into the NCEA science curriculum.

How can this be possible in a scientifically and technologically advanced First World country such as New Zealand? – Martin Hanson

To most lay people, science is a body of knowledge about how the world works. But to the scientifically educated, it’s the organised process by which such knowledge is obtained. It usually begins with an observation, leading to questions and a tentative explanation. If this can be tested by experiment, it becomes a hypothesis; if not, it remains speculation. If experimental results do not support the hypothesis, it’s back to square one and a new hypothesis must be tested by more experiments. Only if repeated experiments by other, independent researchers, have results that support the hypothesis, can such knowledge be said to be ‘scientific’. – Martin Hanson

Ironically, it didn’t seem to have occurred to Hendy, Wiles and their supporters, that in their extreme reaction to the Listener letter they were doing a far more effective demolition job on the scientific merits of matauranga Maori than the restrained and polite efforts of the seven professors. They seem to have conveniently forgotten that what most clearly separates science from myth and superstition is the challenging of established ideas in rigorous, public debate. In seeking to prevent criticism and debate they were unwittingly admitting it was not science, but doctrine, thus by implication proving the professor’s case for them. – Martin Hanson

It’s all too easy to despair of the extent to which New Zealand science has become suffocated by matauranga Maori. Certainly, it’s difficult to see how it can be brought back from its present state. –

As I see it, the only way of forcing kiwis to realise how ludicrous is the incorporation of Maori mythology into the teaching of science would be to engineer a new Scopes-type trial, for which we’d need a volunteer to put his or her head on the block. All it would require of the ‘kiwi Scopes’ would be a few carefully chosen words to a science class, such as:

“To say that rain is the result of tears shed by the goddess Papatuanuku is fine in social studies, but to say that it’s science is rubbish or, to use Richard Dawkins’ more colourful phrase, ‘bollocks’”.

That should light the blue touch-paper all right. The government would have to choose between two equally painful courses:

• take the red pill and accept scientific reality or
• take the blue one, kowtowing to the Woke Inquisition, thereby inviting international contempt.

Even without a latter-day Scopes trial, the government would have deservedly painted itself into a corner. Either way, those of us who have long despaired for New Zealand science education can look forward with keen anticipation to the outcome. – Martin Hanson

The country has not got enough eggs. Our dairy could not get enough bread. Since ancient Rome, food shortages are a way to lose popularity.

This time next year, Christopher Luxon will be prime minister. – Richard Prebble

To win, Labour would have to suspend Parliament, illegally put Opposition MPs into home detention, close magazines, commandeer the airwaves for government announcements, have the Reserve Bank flood the economy with printed money and have a massive taxpayer-funded advertising campaign. Would the Government do that again? – Richard Prebble

Hamilton West indicates none of the antivax parties will make 5 per cent.

Winston Peters will not be the kingmaker. For his own selfish reasons, he gave us this Labour Government. – Richard Prebble

2023 will be challenging. Next winter, the health system will be overwhelmed. School pupils will continue to vote with their feet. With 45,000 active P users, no neighbourhood will be crime-free.

Co-governance is unworkable. Centralisation cannot deliver the promised results. The polytechnic reorganisation, the broadcasting amalgamation, and trying to run health from Wellington will be a series of trainwrecks.

Election year is no time to implement a massive compulsory unemployment insurance scheme – the job tax. Labour may postpone or just pass the legislation and make it an election issue. – Richard Prebble

2023 will reveal there has been fundamental change. New Zealand has always been a destination of choice for immigrants. Not anymore.

InterNations surveyed immigrants’ experiences. Out of 52 nations, New Zealand was ranked the second-worst country. Only Kuwait is worse. Immigrants are shocked by our cost of living and low pay. Immigrants tell me our schools, health system and crime were unpleasant surprises.

The Government treated new residents appallingly. During Covid, parents were split from their children for years.

The biggest advertisement for immigration is the immigrants’ experience. Today, they are saying “do not come”. Many are planning to leave. – Richard Prebble

Labour is dropping the immigration criteria, but is failing to attract immigrants we need.

Not only are we failing to attract the skills we need, but skilled Kiwis are leaving. Those who are staying are the ones our schools failed to teach. New Zealand is de-skilling. – Richard Prebble

Sex-based data tells us, for example, that girls do better than boys in higher exams; that women earn less than men; that men are more likely to die by suicide than women. This information allows government to develop targeted policies — but once men can easily and legally become women, and vice versa, it ceases to have any value. A sudden spike in suicide rates among women, or in boys achieving A grades, might be the result of individuals changing their legal sex. How would we know?

It is remarkable that a government would knowingly choose to undermine its own ability to make good policy — and even more remarkable that MSPs would vote for it. – Kim Thomas

So here are two big reasons that free speech is always valuable, and a third that’s particularly relevant for 2023.

The first is that we are meaning-seeking beings. Free speech allows us to discover sources of truth and meaning so that we can organise our lives around them. If we don’t do this deliberately, through the free exchange of ideas and beliefs, it will happen to us by default, as when we simply absorb current ideological fashions or whatever institutions like the state and the market tell us to think.

Passively absorbing ideas also stunts our development. A fully human life involves agency, the ability to make decisions that matter, which is supported by the ability to share and receive ideas and information.

Yes, this includes making mistakes and getting things wrong – and learning and growing in the process.

The second reason to value free speech is that it helps us to realise when we’re wrong and to make better decisions. No-one’s right about everything, so we need others to tell us where we’ve gone astray even when that might offend us or challenge our deepest beliefs.

That’s why true viewpoint diversity leads to better outcomes. Unfortunately, New Zealand research reveals that too many academics are afraid to engage with sensitive topics like te Tiriti or gender, or even to raise differing perspectives. Not surprisingly, many Kiwi students are afraid to discuss similar issues in their lecture theatres.

Now consider that the media, which creates and maintains an essential part of the public square, are mostly drawn from the ranks of university graduates and increasingly see their role as “educating” rather than reporting. This creates a feedback loop or, less politely, an echo chamber which pushes questions underground and questioners to the margins of society, fuelling polarisation and social distrust.

The third reason to value free speech is that it helps hold us together as a society. This year we’ll have another general election. Some of us will get the outcome we want and some of us won’t. If we expect the losers to accept their loss gracefully or, at least, peacefully, we need to give everyone a fair shot at participating fully and making their case.

If some groups feel they have legitimate views that can’t be shared or that are met with hostility, they either won’t participate or won’t accept the outcome of the election. That’s how nations start to unravel.

Freedom has been described as “a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere.” In other words, freedom is not absolute; what it’s used for matters and there are limits to what we should tolerate. – Alex Penk

It’s important to debate the details of the Government’s bill and the Law Commission’s review. But we need to start by acknowledging not just that hate speech is bad, but that free speech is good. – Alex Penk

In 2023, political parties on the campaign trail will need to bear in mind that voters are newly sceptical of being promised something for nothing. And that if they were planning on fundraising by releasing NFTs, they should go back to the drawing board. – Ben Thomas

The benefit system was originally about providing secure income for those genuinely unable to work. That inability to work did not include causing one’s own incapacity or having dependent children.

It has since evolved to become a government tool for equalizing incomes between the employed and unemployed and advancing other ideological goals like the financial emancipation of the female parent from the male parent.

To some degree benefits have become an alternative source of income for those uninterested in the obligations and constrictions involved with being employed. Those who disagree with that statement argue nobody would willingly choose to live on a meagre benefit income.

That may hold water for single people. But the latest incomes monitoring report from MSD shows a couple on a benefit with two or more children receives over $800 weekly after housing costs. – Lindsay Mitchell

Until 2016 wage growth outstripped inflation hence the growing gap. Since 2019 benefits have been indexed to wages. Previously they were only indexed to inflation. Accordingly, the report notes the 2022 “main benefit increases reduced the gap”. That is, income from work became less attractive. – Lindsay Mitchell

So, the income support/benefit system is contributing negatively to the economy in that regard.

But worse, it is being used by the Prime Minister to achieve her primary goal of reducing child poverty.

According to the report, using Labour’s chosen measures which show percentage drops since 2017, she has been successful in this endeavour.

What is omitted from this report is the increasing number of children reliant on benefits.

Is this increase a reasonable trade-off for reducing child poverty? If the higher incidence of neglect and abuse for children growing up on a benefit is acceptable, then the answer is yes.

I disagree. The increase may even be described as the exploitation of children to make the Prime Minister look good. There is no reason why the welcome downward trend for state-dependent sole parents would have reversed bar financial encouragement. – Lindsay Mitchell

Asian households feature the lowest percentage of children experiencing material hardship – around 4% compared to the Pacific rate of around 24%

And yet when it comes to income support:

Eligible families with Asian parents had low estimated take-up in recent years. The late 2010s was a period of rapid growth in the Asian population of Aotearoa New Zealand. Low awareness, uncertainty about entitlements, administrative, personal and cultural barriers to claiming, or reluctance to claim payments among recent migrants may be factors explaining the trends. 

So the benefit system cannot be credited with low Asian hardship. Something else is protecting their children. Probably the self-reliance and work ethic of their parents.

The government can fiddle all it wants robbing Peter to pay Paul under the guise of ‘fairness and equity’. But the downsides to this interference are corrupting incentives which will continue to blight New Zealand’s future. – Lindsay Mitchell

Potatoes aren’t particularly good swimmers and don’t like being submerged in water for long periods. – Chris Claridge

Won’t someone think of the feelings of paedophiles? It seems some public bodies have, and they are willing to change the language of their output to accommodate the sensitivities of this most dangerous group. Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Police Scotland were blasted for referring to those who abuse children as ‘minor-attracted people’, or ‘MAP’, in a report for a European Commission project. It seems that, just as fat people are now euphemistically referred to as ‘plus size’, and men in dresses have been rebranded as ‘transwomen’, child abusers are considered, by some, to be just another minority whose preferences deserve respect. – Jo Bartosch

Notably, MAP is the word preferred by groups who campaign to remove the ‘stigma’ associated with adults who want to sexually abuse children. It is a term often used by dangerous people who believe they have been victimised by a hostile society. It must be resisted. – Jo Bartosch

More recently, the odious euphemism has been given a veneer of scholarly legitimacy by academics. It seems fair to assume that organisations aiming to remove the stigma of paedophilia are influencing policy. Who exactly advised the European Commission to adopt this kind of language remains a mystery, but there are several organisations that push it. – Jo Bartosch

Perhaps universities are a soft target because people who work in the realm of ideas are more likely to be detached from their real-life consequences. In a lecture hall, to talk of paedophiles as a stigmatised, marginalised minority might simply sound edgy rather than dangerous. It might even attract grant funding. But for victims of child abuse, these matters are not simply theoretical.

The academic war on ‘stigma’ of all kinds makes it easier to sneer at anyone who tries to warn about the influence of paedophiles on public bodies. They can be dismissed as hysterical and backward. Ironically, to be seen as judgemental or morally absolutist carries the heaviest stigma today. – Jo Bartosch

This time there is a greater risk that paedophilia could be successfully rebranded. A cadre of queer-theory-addled academics seem to believe that all social barriers exist to be destroyed. Today’s abundance of pornography is also encouraging some people to seek out ever-more extreme sexual fantasies. Meanwhile, many dangerous communities have emerged online, where disordered and depraved individuals anonymously seek each other out and build cultures based on abuse.

It is hard to avoid the feeling that society is now primed for this last taboo to fall. And if it does, there will be those who cheer, and think the social acceptance of paedophiles is progress. Plain-speaking and honesty might be our last defence against this. We must reject the sanitising term ‘minor-attracted people’. This attempt to sugarcoat the reality of child abuse is profoundly dangerous. – Jo Bartosch

The one prediction I am truly confident in is that we will never know what the future holds.

Like those economists who’ve predicted six of the last two recessions, forecasting is a mug’s game. You might as well drive a car blindfolded and get instructions from a person looking out the rear window.

Best to focus on what we are uncertain about, and what we can fix today. – Josie Pagani

Mass hysteria is the spontaneous manifestation of a particular behaviour by many people. There are numerous historical examples: Middle Age nuns at a convent in France spontaneously began to meow like cats; at another convent, nuns began biting one another. In 13th-century Germany, spontaneous dancing broke out and entire city populations danced until exhausted. But perhaps the best-known mass hysteria was the Salem Witch Trials, where people, seized by visions, accused others of bewitching them. Many were executed.

But hysteria episodes are not only historical. They have occurred in modern times as well. Remember the daycare panic of the 1980s, when daycare workers were accused of horrible crimes against children, including satanic abuse. Many falsely accused spent years in jail. Lives were ruined. The strangest thing about that mass hysteria is that it spanned continents. – Brian Giesbrecht

Could it be that some of us are even now victims of self-induced mass hysterias?

For example, what are we to make of the insistence that a man who chooses to live as a woman actually becomes a woman? To most of the world this claim is nonsensical. It is neither scientific nor factual. A woman has XX chromosomes, while a man has XY. Case closed. But to others, a man actually becomes a woman simply by stating that s/he is one. In the future, will this strange thinking be considered a mass hysteria? – Brian Giesbrecht

And are the most extreme of today’s anti-fossil fuel exponents caught up in some version of a mass hysteria? I’m not referring to people with legitimate concerns about global warming and the need to find cost-effective, non-polluting energy. I mean those who insist that everyone must give up all fossil fuels by a date they invent. Will history judge this to be a hysteria? – Brian Giesbrecht

Love you #PrinceHarry but you need to shut up! Makes you wonder the people he’s hanging around with. If it was good people somebody by now would have told him to stop.

— Ben Mcbean (@benmcbean) January 5, 2023

 If you never crowed in public that you have more hair than your baldy bro. If you wished your widowed dad joy with his new partner rather than begged him not to remarry. If you have more tact than to tell your sleepless sister-in-law she has “baby brain”. If you keep your drug and virginity yarns for private late-night laughs. If you didn’t miss your grandmother’s last moments because you were arguing about travel plans. If you can resolve a brotherly beef without an unseemly bundle or, having had one, not speed-dial your shrink.

If you disdain the wittering of psychics, can tell greedy sycophants from loyal counsel and, above all, cherish loving friends who sometimes tell you to shut up for your own good, then you are better than those who live in royal palaces. Take a bow. – Janice Turner

The final version of the New Zealand History Curriculum contained no significant changes in spite of widespread concerns. The consultation process was an exercise in window dressing. The review panel was stacked, dissenting historians were silenced, the terms of reference limited, the period of consultation constricted, and the outcome predetermined.

What has been produced is not a “history curriculum” as such. What has been produced is a perspective on history that is fundamentally based on Critical Race Theory. – Caleb Anderson

We should not be concerned that there are controversial ways of looking at history, debate is the lifeblood of the historical method. But alternative perspectives can be deliberately suppressed for personal or political gain, and in order to advance one perspective alone, creating the impression that alternative perspectives are not credible. As a consequence, critical knowledge is cast to the wind, perspectives become untethered from the events which gave rise to them, and the deliberate selection of some facts, and denial of others, can create questionable conclusions, unbalanced views, and unjustified causes.–

Being open to alternative perspectives forces the consideration of inconvenient facts. This is how ideas are sifted, shaped, refined, tested, some last and some don’t. Legitimate historical inquiry is a natural bulwark against extreme ideas and intentional manipulation. Of course, history practiced legitimately is something of a rough and tumble exercise, you can be confronted with perspectives you find offensive, and you may have to concede or modify a position in light of new facts. But there are nearly always reasons why some facts are left out, or understated, and why some are included, and sometimes overstated. When critiquing a historical perspective, it is often a very good starting point to ask yourself precisely which critical information is left out, there is always a reason for this. – 

With respect to colonisation, we are never told that intertribal slavery existed in almost every colonised land prior to colonization, or that the earliest slave traders were not the nations of Europe, or that tribal groups often lived in perpetual fear of their more powerful and ambitious neighbours, or that colonisation was sometimes a lifeline to smaller tribes fearful of annihilation at the hands of larger tribes.

We are not told that traditional societies were generally highly stratified, with almost no upward mobility, that tribal life was often brutal and short, that cannibalism was sometimes practised, that pantheistic and spiritualistic religions made people fearful, that primitive and labour-intensive technology exposed people to a life of toil, and regularly to the vagaries of famine.

We are not told that sometimes the colonising powers were very reluctant colonisers, that a piece of land purchased by a settler may have been paid for at least a dozen times to multiple owners, that missionaries and foreign service officials were often the most ardent advocates for the protection of indigenous people, that the punishment of indigenous children for speaking their native language at school was often at the behest of their parents.

We are seldom told that the anglo nations were the first in the world to legislate against slavery, that colonisation brought advantages … more comfortable homes became possible with the arrival of nails, written language with the arrival of the alphabet, warm clothing and blankets with the arrival of textiles, better diets with the introduction of new crops, more accountability (and justice) with the arrival of a legal system, a more coherent set of propositional ethics with the arrival of Christianity. It is easy to trivialize these things from our twenty-first-century perspective, but these changes yielded no small gain, and help to explain the eagerness of many colonised people to engage with the colonisers. – Caleb Anderson

Colonisation was often, and ultimately, a brutalising process, and the impacts of colonisation endure. But the history of the world is one of constant colonisation, of the over-layering of people groups, of subjugation and integration, and worse, over and over again. There are almost no exceptions to this. People moved when they needed to, and displaced others when they could. Stronger tribes prevailed, and weaker tribes were assimilated, enslaved, or exterminated. Similarly, the nations of Europe emerged from tribal beginnings and, as a result of often protracted territorial conflicts between these tribes, national borders emerged.

Colonisation is a manifestation of the outworking of universal principles, and reflects powerful human instincts to survive at a minimum, and to thrive at best. Judgment of historical realities needs to be tempered with a realistic, and balanced, vision of human nature, not a myopic and idealised one, and not one which attributes vice almost exclusively to some, and virtue almost exclusively to others.  The proposed new curriculum is not a balanced presentation of the facts, but a cut-and-paste justification for an unbalanced and agenda-ridden view of history. Its core assumptions are selective and highly challengeable.

If anything, history teaches us that we are not so different from those who have come before us, or from those who inhabit a different part of our planet. We have similar motivations, good and bad. Individually, and collectively, we repeat the sins of earlier generations, nuanced and rationalized to our time and context, and commensurate with our ability to do so. We can be cruel when the opportunity for gain presents, when our interests are threatened, or when we are fearful. We sin against others, not always in equal measure, but we sin against them nevertheless. The same precipitating motivational drivers exist for us all, adjusted only to scale and circumstance. This should create within us a reluctance to point our fingers. It is sometimes right to seek redress, but we should be honest about the actions of our forebears too, we should not rest our arguments on convenient facts alone, and sweep inconvenient facts under the carpet.

Radical re-sets, always accompanied by a historical cut and paste exercise, usually do not go well, and can be ultimately catastrophic. –  Caleb Anderson

Perhaps worst of all, in the grip of something akin to a mass psychosis, people began to turn on each other. Knowing what happens when ideas are pushed to (or beyond) their limits (which invariably happens when competing perspectives are disregarded) gives us a taste of how badly things can actually turn out. We could never end in such a place, how sure are you of that?

Repeated comments by the Maori Party, and others on the left of politics, that Maori were subjected to genocide, and a holocaust, are an object lesson in where you can end up when you play loose with the facts of history, and when you can come to believe your own lies. What do they know, if anything, of the experience of the Jewish people throughout the ages? To equate the planned, systematic extermination of six million Jews with the colonisation of New Zealand is unforgivably ignorant. Loose-lipped commentators in the United States have been stood down, and forced to apologise, for anti-semitic comments of lesser magnitude than this, and yet the New Zealand media have barely commented, or challenged, such baseless assertions, it largely passed without notice, more than once

In short, history is impossibly complex, as are the people it seeks to represent.  As there is no truth, but many truths, there is no history but many histories.  Thus what makes history exciting, is also what makes it prone to abuse.  The new curriculum is not a history curriculum in any valid sense. It is a selective view of the past, based on questionable assumptions. The new curriculum seeks to enshrine Critical Race Theory as the primary lens through which we make sense of past and present realities. It silences dissenting views, narrows perspectives, pits people groups against each other, attributes vice to some and villainy to others, and contaminates our national consciousness.

Perhaps worst of all it contravenes the duty of all educators to ensure that their students have a right to their own worldview, to question without fear, to seek the fuller picture, to ascertain motive, and to weigh in light of broader considerations. In short, our students have a right to be free from indoctrination by those who have no tolerance for those who see things differently or who are easily offended.

Critical Race Theory is cleverly hidden throughout this insidious document but it is there nevertheless, the subtle twists of phrase, and the occasional concessions to good sense, make it all the more dangerous. All indications are that this government will muster every mechanism at its disposal to see that this document is implemented to the letter. Instructions to schools have been clear, and problematic books have already been removed from libraries.

Three Waters will not be this government’s legacy, The Aotearoa NZ History document will be its true legacy. As they are consigned to the opposition benches, as they soon will, the left will console themselves that the seeds have been planted … in our institutions, in our schools, and in the minds of the most impressionable, and it is only a matter of time before they will get to water these seeds again. With the left, it is always the long game that counts. – Caleb Anderson

History done well is an adventure, if done poorly, it is best left alone! – Caleb Anderson

The most blatant form of sexism right now is men dressed up as women telling women what it means to be a women.

And it’s the Left who are endorsing and supporting this sexism.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) January 7, 2023

By now most of New Zealand’s public is aware of co-governance, Three Waters and efforts to normalize the Treaty of Waitangi as central to much of New Zealand life and society. In this multi-cultural nation that we have become, it is critical that we respect Māori, and value the good things that Matauranga Māori has achieved for Māori over centuries, but stand firmly against any movement that attempts to place one ethnic or cultural group above others. Our entire society cannot, and should not, be re-configured to enforce the world view of one small, self-identifying minority. Nor should we give ourselves over to the notion that traditional knowledge is somehow the equal of modern science.

How many of the general public are aware of what is happening in education right now? We should be deeply concerned about the refresh of the national curriculum currently in progress within the Ministry of Education and related organizations. The proposed new curriculum is referred to as Te Mātaiaho: A draft Te Tiriti-Honouring and Inclusive Curriculum Framework. We are told that Mātauranga Māori will sit at the heart of the learning areas and that key competencies, literacy and numeracy, will be woven explicitly into each learning area. (Ministry of Education, 2022a) – David Lillis

The entire initiative very frightening indeed, especially the dishonesty whereby we are being led to believe that a Treaty-based curriculum is for everyone and that all of us must get on board. The arrogance and, indeed, deceit and bullying of those three activists and others in forcing a retrograde agenda on all students in New Zealand, regardless of social, ethnic or religious background, for decades to come is more than astonishing and we must now stand up to them and to a Ministry of Education that is complicit in perpetrating a highly-dangerous falsehood. – David Lillis

Sorry – but the refreshed curriculum certainly does not better reflect the aspirations and expectations of all New Zealanders. Quite clearly, the agenda is to empower one ethnic group and bully everyone else into submission and we must not allow ourselves to be taken in by the accompanying misleading and, frankly, dishonest rhetoric. – David Lillis

Again, sorry – but the curriculum refresh panders to activists from a small minority and must be resisted at all costs. If we fail, then several generations of New Zealand students, from all backgrounds, ethnicities, religions and cultures, are going to have this agenda forced on them every day of their primary and secondary education. Pacific students, Asian students, Pakeha students and indeed, Muslim immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, including those fleeing violence in Syria, the Ukraine and parts of Africa, will be forced to absorb the language and traditional knowledge of one self-identifying ethnicity and cultural group as a significant part of their primary and secondary education.

We are told that the current curriculum disadvantages Māori. Does it? Why? Where is the evidence? Māori underperformance in education does not emerge from the curriculum, but instead results mostly from unfavourable socioeconomics. If the curriculum disadvantages Māori, then does it not also disadvantage Pacific students and others? Why only Māori?

The issues for Māori and others are not hurt and pain because of denigration of mātauranga Māori, but rather the validity of indigenous knowledge, including mātauranga Māori, embedded across an entire curriculum, but especially as an alternative to modern science that can be taught in science class. – David Lillis

Always, socioeconomics emerges as a significant predictor of performance (and, indeed, underperformance), while ethnicity becomes largely non-significant. – David Lillis

We may or may not agree with the stated intent of the curriculum refresh to honour matauranga Māori, but should not the primary aims of any curriculum be to support learning for all and enable students to acquire and develop the knowledge, know-how and skills that will enable them to compete in the domestic and international marketplaces? Never should it be the function of a national curriculum to support the nation’s constitution, treaty or other founding document or, indeed, to ensure equality of outcomes. Instead, the objectives should be the support of equality of access and opportunity and to underpin first-class education that enables students to learn and succeed. – David Lillis

Teaching students of science that a special force exists within inanimate things constitutes willful neglect of duty on the part of Government and the relevant Ministries, compromises the education of future students and will bring our national science curriculum and, indeed, the entire NCEA system into disrepute.

Of course, in daily life today we don’t take myths and legends as truth but we do recognize that they are important for the descendants of indigenous people and are part of the great history of mankind. However, we are coming dangerously close to teaching such concepts as truth to young and impressionable children within our revised national primary and secondary curriculum. – David Lillis

Only good can come of teaching our children to respect the views of others. Some class time devoted to Te Reo and Māori culture and history will give all New Zealanders a greater appreciation of Māori culture, their history and their very significant contributions to the New Zealand of today. It stands to reason that we should also introduce students to Pacific cultures, Asian cultures, African cultures and the cultures of Islamic immigrants from the Middle East.

Both Te Reo and Mātauranga Māori should be treasured and preserved. However, imposing large proportions of class time to Te Reo and Mātauranga Māori to all learners, especially if presented as science, must be opposed, given other demands on children’s lives and given a noticeable decline in New Zealand’s recent academic rankings relative to those of other nations (see, for example, Long and Te, 2019). Our children must acquire not only qualifications, but the skills and knowledge that are obligatory if they are to compete in tomorrow’s New Zealand and international marketplaces. – David Lillis

The assertion of systemic bias or racism as a cause of disparity, and thereby providing justification for major policy and legislative change, is evident in domains other than education; for example, in public health and employment in the sciences and academia generally. However, the extent of systemic bias within these domains is difficult to determine objectively and could only be evaluated through research rather than anecdote. Possibly, in many jurisdictions systemic bias acts in favour of minorities, rather than against them, but indeed we must be vigilant in identifying bias and countermanding it wherever it occurs. – David Lillis

Nor should disparate outcomes provide a sole justification for significant change that clearly is intended to benefit one group disproportionately, when other demographic groups are also disadvantaged. Thus, not only Māori have poorer outcomes in education, but also Pacific people and, reviewing the official statistics on health and wellbeing in New Zealand, we see that Pacific people are even more disadvantaged than Māori on certain indices (Lillis, 2022). But Pacific people will not receive a dedicated health ministry within the foreseeable future and nor will anyone else who is non-Māori. – David Lillis

I repeat what I have said before – labels such as racism, systemic bias, conscious and unconscious bias and colonialism have some traction. However, not only may such labels be applied without justification, apart from anecdote, but possibly they may detract from our efforts to address the real causes. The true agents of disparity, principally socioeconomic in nature, may lie largely outside the jurisdictions of education, health and science, and we have duty of care to address those causes.

Finally, conferring special privilege to one ethnic or cultural group will not repair inequality; nor will consuming scarce resources to address structural racism and bias if these factors are small, or in practice no longer present, and if the core structural and systemic problems lie elsewhere.

We must resist the curriculum refresh with all our might. Future generations of New Zealanders are depending on us. – David Lillis

For most of the last century, the “progressives” have been taking over the nation’s education system at every level. Pick any teacher, professor, or administrator and the chances are high that he or she is utterly dedicated to the Leftist project of replacing our liberal (in the true sense of the word) society with their vision of a properly regulated one. By controlling education, the Leftists implant the ideas they favor into students (including collectivism, egalitarianism, and acceptance of authority) while at the same time repressing ones that work against them (such as individualism, skepticism of authority, and belief in the spontaneous order of liberty).

Due to the phenomenal success of that project, school and college curricula are saturated with hostility to Western civilization. Teachers are trained in “education schools” that promote failed pedagogical concepts while at the same time demonizing anything that’s remotely conservative or libertarian. Overwhelmingly, the people who work in state education bureaucracies have been steeped in leftist ideology. They are far less concerned about how well students learn to read, write, and do math than with turning them into zealous advocates for their pet causes.

And once students get into college, the drumbeat for “progressivism” continues. Not every student succumbs, of course, but the heavy leftist slant has a big impact on many of them. – George Leef

Conservative leaders need to wake up to the peril we face from control of education by dedicated Leftists. There cannot be any peaceful coexistence with them, for their intention is to radically transform the nation by indoctrinating its young people. As important as issues like taxes and regulations are, their most important (and most difficult) task is to restore control of education to people who actually want to educate. – George Leef

The speed limit on motorways should be reduced to 64mph. Restrictions could be imposed on going from one part of your city to another. Short-haul flights might be banned, and rings of cameras built around every major town to levy charges on anyone moving in and out. Almost every day brings calls for some kind of curb on travel. And yet, underneath them all is one simple force: a movement by green extremists to take us back to the dark ages. It is effectively a plot to reinvent feudalism, a time when people rarely left their own villages and were taxed if they dared do so.

That’s why, for all the temptation to ridicule the Great Unwashed, we have to take their politics seriously. – Matthew Lynn

The environment should be protected. Carbon emissions need to be brought down and air quality improved. It might even be sensible to encourage people to travel at different times to ease congestion, or to create more pedestrian zones to make urban areas more livable. But that isn’t what this is about. Instead, climate change is being used as cover to wage war on the very concept of travel.

Those wanting to restrict it forget that the economy, science, culture and health all depend on people and goods getting from one place to another. There are few forms of economic activity that don’t rely on the movement of these things. Science would make fewer breakthroughs without experts meeting at conferences. Music would be unimaginably duller without the cross-pollination of rhythms, melodies and beats between continents. Our language would be poorer, too.

It is surely not a coincidence that we began to emerge from the Dark Ages into the Renaissance and then into modernity when travellers started linking up Asia, Europe and America, carrying plants, technologies and, most of all, ideas. We risk shutting down that infinite channel of progress with foolish green virtue-signalling.

Working from home won’t save us, and nor can the internet replace real communication. The world of green extremism is closed and neo-medieval, offering about as much opportunity to people as that enjoyed by a 12th-century serf. Even the Great Unwashed couldn’t survive that. – Matthew Lynn

Amongst his assertions is a claim that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan. That’s not how you behave in the Army; it’s not how we think. He has badly let the side down. We don’t do notches on the rifle butt. We never did. – Colonel Tim Collins

From a security perspective, there is the unwritten assumption that nobody publicly discusses kill counts for the principal reason that it can have security repercussions.

There should be no pride taken in scalps accumulated in any battles. – Tobias Ellwood

The idea that soldiers are trained to see the enemy as chess pieces to be swiped off the board is wrong.

It’s not how we trained people. It’s potentially damaging to say this and the Taliban has exploited his words to accuse him of war crimes. – Colonel Richard Kemp

He has chosen a path that is alien to us in the UK and the Commonwealth, pursuing US identity politics and casting slurs or racism around where none exists in any manner comparable to the USA.

I wonder whose path he has chosen? In the end, I see only disappointment and misery in his pursuit of riches he does not need and his rejection of family and comradely love that he badly needs. – Colonel Tim Collins

Politicians almost universally believe that timely, appropriate and voluntary action to remedy structural economic imbalance should be avoided at all costs because it amounts to political suicide.  Consequently, as studies by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show, in eight out of 10 cases over the past decade, reform was left until the developing imbalance had collapsed the currency or caused some other costly economic or social disaster.  This is the point at which the government that failed to take timely action is normally thrown out of office, and a new party is elected to carry out reforms that could (and should) have been undertaken years sooner.

The idea that governments can retain power by refusing to make necessary and valuable structural reforms is, in fact, nonsense.  It inevitably leads to the downfall of those foolish enough to believe it.  Rather, it is quality decisions, which strengthen the economy and improve the medium-term prospects of the voting public, that are the key to any party’s hopes of re-election. – Sir Roger Douglas

Implementing quality decisions also provides an important insight into the nature of political consensus.  Most governments believe they must have consensus support for reforms before they are enacted, otherwise the actions they take will not be politically sustainable at election time.  The inevitable result is compromised policies.  Our experience in New Zealand shows consensus develops progressively, after the decisions are made and deliver satisfactory results to the public. –

No party holds power forever.  Sooner or later we all find ourselves out of office.  That is the reality of life in a democracy.  We may as well use the time we have to do something worthwhile.  Genuine structural reform, carried through without compromise, delivers greater gains in opportunity and living standards in the medium term than any other approach to political decision making.

What the voting public wants most from politicians is the guts and vision to make decisions of real benefit to them and to their children.  Their future depends on it. – Sir Roger Douglas

Once upon a time, a fully realised person was something one became. Entailing education, observation, experimentation, and sometimes humiliation, “coming of age” was hard work. When the project succeeded, we developed a gradually richer understanding of what it means to be human and what constitutes a fruitful life. This ongoing project was halted only by death. Maturity was the result of accumulated experience (some of it dire) and much trial and error (both comical and tragic), helping explain why wisdom, as opposed to intelligence, was mostly the preserve of the old. We admired the “self-made man”, because character was a creation — one constructed often at great cost. Many a “character-building” adventure, such as joining the Army, was a trial by fire.

These days, discussion of “character” is largely relegated to fiction workshops and film reviews. Instead, we relentlessly address “identity”, a hollowed-out concept now reduced to membership of the groups into which we were involuntarily born — thereby removing all choice about who we are. Rejecting the passé “character building” paradigm, we now inform children that their selves emerge from the womb fully formed. Their sole mission is to tell us what those selves already are. Self is a prefabricated house to which only its owner has a key. –  Lionel Shriver

I further submit: throwing kids who just got here on their own investigative devices — refusing to be of any assistance aside from “affirming” whatever they whimsically claim to be; folding our arms and charging, “So who are you? Only you know” — is child abuse. – Lionel Shriver

We haven’t given these young people a job. Contemporary education strenuously seeks to assure students they’re already wonderful. Teachers are increasingly terrified of imposing any standards that all their wards will not readily meet, so everyone gets a gold star. The Virginia school district of the once-renowned Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology now aims for “equal outcomes for every student, without exception”. A pedagogical emphasis on student “self-esteem” became dislocated from “esteem for doing something” decades ago. Why should any of these kids get out of bed? No wonder they’re depressed.

Minors don’t know anything, which is not their fault. We didn’t know anything at their age, either (and may not still), though we thought we did — and being disabused of callow, hastily conceived views and coming to appreciate the extent of our ignorance is a prerequisite for proper education. Yet we now encourage young people to look inward for their answers and to trust that their marvellous natures will extemporaneously reveal themselves. With no experience to speak of and no guidance from adults, all that many kids will find when gawking at their navels is pyjama fluff.  – Lionel Shriver

There’s nothing shameful about being an empty vessel when you haven’t done anything and nothing much has happened to you yet. Telling children, “Of course you don’t know who you are! Growing up is hard, full of false starts, and all about making something of yourself. Don’t worry, we’ll give you lots of help” is a great deal more consoling than the model of the ready-meal self. We demand toddlers determine whether they’re “girls or boys or something in-between” before they have fully registered what a girl or boy is, much less “something in-between”. Placing the total onus for figuring out how to negotiate being alive on people who haven’t been given the user’s manual is a form of abandonment.

Adults have an obligation to advise, comfort, and inform — to provide the social context that children have none of the resources to infer and to help form expectations of what comes next.  Instead, we’re throwing kids helplessly on their primitive imaginations. – Lionel Shriver

This notion of the pre-made self is asocial, if not anti-social. It separates personhood from lineage, heritage, culture, history, and even family. You are already everything you were ever meant to be, never mind where, what and whom you come from. But seeing selfhood as floating in a vacuum is a recipe for loneliness, vagueness, insecurity and anxiety.

By contrast, a self constructed brick by brick over a lifetime has everything to do with other people. The undertaking involves the assembly of tastes and enthusiasms, the formation of friendships and institutional affiliations, participation in joint projects, and the development of perceptions not simply of one’s interior nature but of the outside world. Character that is rooted in ties to other people is likely to be more solid and enduring. The elderly are most in danger of desolation when they’ve outlived their friends and relatives. Who I am partially comprises decades-long friendships, my colleagues, my fierce devotion to my younger brother, a complex allegiance to two different Anglophone countries, and a rich cultural inheritance from my predecessors.

In my teens, we employed the word “identity” quite differently. We thought having an “identity” meant not only being at home in our own skins, but also having at least a hazy notion of what we wanted to do with our lives. It meant connecting with the likeminded (I found kindred spirits in my junior-high Debate Club). An “identity” was fashioned less from race or sexual orientation than from the discovery of which albums we loved, which novels we ritually reread because they spoke to us, which causes we supported, which subjects interested us, and which didn’t. It meant figuring out what we were good at (I was good at maths, but in second-year calculus I hit a wall) and what we couldn’t stand (me, team sports). – Lionel Shriver

We were as self-involved in our determination to be individuals as Gen Z, but that particularity was commonly assembled from the cultural smorgasbord of other people and what they’d thought and made: Kurt Vonnegut or William Faulkner, Catch-22 or The Winds of War, Simon and Garfunkel or Iron Butterfly, hostile or gung-ho positions on Vietnam. Naturally this is a version of identity subject to change. That’s the point. It’s supposed to change. I no longer listen to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

The self is not found but made, because meaning is made. Rather than be unearthed like buried treasure, meaning is laboriously created, often by doing hard things. – Lionel Shriver

Of course, in constantly reforming and refining who we are, we can lose aspects of ourselves from earlier drafts that we should have kept. I no longer dance alone for hours in the sitting room, and I miss that abandon. For years I crafted ceramic figure sculpture, and I’m not sure that substituting journalism as my primary side-line to fiction writing constituted an improvement. Towards the very end of our lives, many of us will drop pretty much every paragraph we ever added, and we’ll go from novel to pamphlet. – Lionel Shriver

Clearly, some aspects of character, of self, are determined from the off. I’d never have become a nuclear physicist no matter how hard I tried. But the conventional “nature versus nurture” opposition still eliminates agency: you act mindlessly as whatever you were born as, or you are submissively acted upon. Where on this nature-nurture continuum does the object of all this theorising have a say in the outcome?  – Lionel Shriver

Following the modern script, 14-year-olds have learned never to say, “I’ve decided to be trans”, because all my friends are trans and I feel left out, but always, “I’ve discovered that I am trans”. This passive, powerless version of self has implications. We’re telling young people that what they see is what they get — that they already are what they will ever be. How disheartening. What a bore. Whatever is there to look forward to? Many victims of this formulation of existence, which apparently requires little of them besides all that being, must reach inside themselves and come up empty-handed. – Lionel Shriver

By withholding the assurance, “Don’t worry about not knowing who you are; you’re just not grown up yet, and neither are we, because growing up isn’t over at 18 or 21 but is something you do your whole life through”, we are cultivating self-hatred, disillusionment, bewilderment, frustration, and fury. Young women often turn their despair inward — hence the high rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and cutting. Young men are more apt to project the barrenness of their interior lives onto the rest of the world and take their disappointment out on everyone else. – Lionel Shriver

An authentic sense of self commonly involves not thinking about who you are, because you’re too busy doing something else. It is inextricably linked to, if not synonymous with, a sense of meaning. Nihilism, an oxymoronic belief in the impossibility of believing anything, can prove literally lethal. Young men who feel no personal sense of purpose are inclined to perceive that nothing else has a purpose, either. They don’t just hate themselves; they hate everybody. In telling people who’ve been on the planet for about ten minutes that they already know who they are, and that they’re already wonderful, we’re inciting that malign, sometimes homicidal nihilism. Because they don’t feel wonderful. They’re not undertaking any project but, according to the adults, inertly embody a completed project, which means the status quo is as good as it gets — and the status quo isn’t, subjectively, very good.

Transgenderism may have grown so alluring to contemporary minors not only because it promises a new “identity”, but because it promises a process. Transforming from caterpillar to butterfly entails a complex sequence of social interventions and medical procedures that must be terribly engrossing. Transitioning is a project. Everyone needs a project. Embracing the trans label gifts the self with direction, with a task to accomplish. Ironically, the contagion expresses an inchoate yearning for the cast-off paradigm whereby character is built.

We should stop telling children that they’re the “experts on their own lives” and repudiate a static model of selfhood as a fait accompli at birth. Sure, some inborn essence is particular to every person, but it’s a spark; it’s not a fire. We could stand to return to the language of forming character and making a life for yourself, while urging teachers to exercise the guidance they’ve been encouraged to forsake.

As we age, we’re not only that unique essence in the cradle, but the consequence of what we’ve read, watched, and witnessed; whom we’ve loved and what losses we’ve suffered; what mistakes we’ve made and which we’ve corrected; where we’ve lived and travelled and what skills we’ve acquired; not only what we’ve made of ourselves but what we’ve made outside of ourselves; most of all, what we’ve done. That is an exciting, active version of “identity” whose work is never finished, full of choice, enlivened by agency, if admittedly freighted with responsibility and therefore a little frightening. But it at least provides young people something to do, other than mass murder or gruesome elective surgery. – Lionel Shriver

The pretence that we are each of one ethnicity only will not serve us well. It is encouraging racism by the government always choosing to describe people as Maori whenever bad outcomes are being discussed.

We need good and accurate information if we want race and ethnicity to play a reduced role in determining the future of a child in New Zealand.

Or we could focus on improving outcomes for all who are being held back by others and by societal choices, knowing and appreciating that this will benefit disproportionately those who identify at least in part as Maori. – Hilary Calvert 

• Dreary, despondent headlines about pollution and climate change are the norm. But they are not painting a full or accurate picture.
• While Earth is still no Garden of Eden, many countries are making serious efforts to become clean and green. The results are scientifically notable but underreported by the media.
• Human ingenuity is the ultimate resource. In a world filled with bad news, that’s a fact worth celebrating. – Cameron English 

Most people undoubtedly accept that climate change, air pollution, and deforestation are very real problems we ought to take seriously. What fewer of us seem to realize, however, is that the world has taken these issues seriously and made significant progress toward solving them as a result. This observation leads us to an important but oft-overlooked conclusion: Economic growth and technological innovation are making our planet a cleaner, safer place to live. – Cameron English 

One of the best ways to bring a nation out of grinding poverty is to boost its agricultural productivity. The introduction of high-yielding crop varieties during the Green Revolution, led by plant pathologist Norman Borlaug, nicely illustrated how this phenomenon works. According to a July 2021 study, enhanced crops developed between 1965 and 2010 increased food production by more than 40%, saving the world a whopping $83 trillion. Addressing the environmental impact of agriculture, the authors didn’t mince words:

Our paper also sheds light on a concern, often expressed in the literature, that agricultural productivity improvements would pull additional land into agriculture at the expense of forests and other environmentally valuable land uses. We find evidence to the contrary… the Green Revolution tended to reduce the amount of land devoted to agriculture.”  – Cameron English 

Of course, climate change is the elephant in the room. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have increased in recent decades, which has led the WHO and others to warn about the looming public health impacts of heat waves, wildfires, and other natural disasters caused by global warming. Even here, though, the disaster projections that so often make headlines are out of step with the evidence.

For one thing, improved infrastructure (such as widespread air conditioning) has helped prevent a lot of weather-related mortality. Deaths due to natural disasters more broadly have also plummeted: A century ago, natural disasters commonly killed more than a million people annually. Today, that figure hovers somewhere between10,000 and 20,000 deaths per year.

Recent research has shown that fossil fuels have generated far fewer GHG emissions than projected by commonly used climate models, a divergence that “is going to only get larger in coming decades,” climate researcher Roger Pielke, Jr. explainedin November 2020. This means that the worst-case climate scenario grows “increasingly implausible with every passing year,” climatologists Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters argued that same year in the journal Nature. These results led the New York Times to report in October 2022:

“Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years.“ [Emphasis added] – Cameron English 

Human ingenuity is the ultimate resource. We have always faced serious threats to our well-being, but we’re also very good at developing long-term solutions to those problems. In a world filled with bad news, that’s a fact worth celebrating. – Cameron English 

Since I bought my eco dream car in late 2020, in a deluded Thunbergian frenzy, it has spent more time off the road than on it, beached at the dealership for months at a time on account of innumerable electrical calamities, while I galumph around in the big diesel “courtesy cars” they send me under the terms of the warranty. – Giles Coren

And if the government really does ban new wet fuel cars after 2030, then we will eventually have to go back to horses. Because the electric vehicle industry is no readier to get a family home from Cornwall at Christmas time (as I was trying to do) than it is to fly us all to Jupiter. The cars are useless, the infrastructure is not there and you’re honestly better off walking. Even on the really long journeys. In fact, especially on the long journeys. The short ones they can just about manage. It’s no wonder Tesla shares are down 71 per cent. It’s all a huge fraud. And, for me, it’s over. – Giles Coren

There are, of course, plus sides to electric ownership. Such as the camaraderie when we encounter each other, tired and weeping at yet another service station with only two chargers, one of which still has the “this fault has been reported” sign on it from when you were here last August, and the other is of the measly 3kWh variety, which means you will have to spend the night in a Travelodge while your stupid drum lazily inhales enough juice to get home.

Together, in the benighted charging zone, we leccy drivers laugh about what fools we are and drool over the diesel hatchbacks nonchalantly filling up across the way (“imagine getting to a fuel station and knowing for sure you will be able to refuel!”) and talk in the hour-long queue at Exeter services about the petrol car we will buy as soon as we get home. – Giles Coren

And then, as I inched off the dual carriageway at our turnoff, begging it to make the last mile, children weeping at the scary noises coming from both car and father: “Gearbox fault detected.” CLUNK. WHIRRR. CRACK.

And dead. Nothing. Poached elephant. I called Jaguar Assist (there is a button in the roof that does it directly — most useful feature on the car) who told me they could have a mechanic there in four hours (who would laugh and say, “Can’t help you, pal. You’ve got a software issue there. I’m just a car mechanic. And this isn’t a car, it’s a laptop on wheels.”)

So Esther and the kids headed for home across the sleety wastes, a vision of post-apocalyptic misery like something out of Cormac McCarthy, while I saw out 2022 waiting for a tow-truck. Again.

But don’t let that put you off. I see in the paper that electric car sales are at record levels and production is struggling to keep up with demand. So why not buy mine? It’s clean as a whistle and boasts super-low mileage. After all, it’s hardly been driven. – Giles Coren

As the self-satisfied laptop class never tires of telling us, misinformation is the kind of ‘wrong’ information that supposedly dumb people share online – usually something they’ve picked up from some scary populist. Disinformation, meanwhile, occurs when someone – a government official, say – knowingly disseminates something false, to sow confusion and discord, demoralise a target population or harm a political opponent. – Jenny Holland

As soon as the affirmative-care model came under rigorous expert scrutiny, its problems were there for all to see.

However, pushing back against this insanity will require more than just support from credentialed doctors like Hilary Cass. After all, a frequent tactic of trans activists like Levine is to co-opt the language of credentials and science.

We must instead simply trust our own judgement and common sense. When presented in plain English, the lunacy of ‘gender-affirming care’ is clear for all to see. It means pumping people (including children) with synthetic cross-sex hormones and cutting off healthy breasts, penises and testicles. I don’t need a doctor to tell me this is a dangerous course of action.

It is totally legitimate to question the wholesale acceptance and widespread celebration of such radical procedures, especially those performed on minors. It certainly doesn’t constitute ‘misinformation’, as Levine would have us believe. In fact, Levine’s attempt to discredit opposition to gender-affirming care is itself an example of disinformation from a government actor.

Governments, media outlets and tech companies talk constantly about the dangers posed by ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’. But it is clear that these are just the latest rhetorical tools in an attempt to control what the masses think. And what’s more, it is the same people who complain about these problems who are often the biggest culprits. – Jenny Holland

We’re witnessing the Californication of a Prince. The old bantering, streaking fun Harry who later signed up for military service has been replaced by a self-pitying celeb who squeals with glee when he gets a text message from Beyonce. Warring royals once marshalled armies and battled it out in muddy fields; now they write tear-stained tell-alls about their hurt feelings. God help us. –  Brendan O’Neill

Pushing your brother is normal; making your brother a spectacle before the world is not. Harry has betrayed William in a way that will likely deepen their rift considerably. I reckon every man who has a brother is feeling for Will right now.  – Brendan O’Neill

For all of us who scribble for publication, at however low a level, all activities other than writing take on at most a secondary importance. Even meals, necessary as they no doubt are, can come to seem unwanted interruptions of the real business of life, which is writing. We are apt to forget that reading in general, and of our work in particular, is not of the same importance to 99.99 percent of the population, including that part of it that has great power over our lives, as it is to us. It is a humbling thought (humbling, that is, for scribblers) that in many small towns it is easier to find an electronic cigarette or have oneself tattooed than to buy a book.– Theodore Dalrymple

I have long thought that entertainment, or rather the ubiquity of entertainment, is one of the greatest causes of boredom in the modern world. And boredom is itself a much underestimated state of mind in the production of human misconduct and therefore of misery.

The reason that too great a proportion of entertainment in a person’s life leads to boredom (though it is not easy always to decide whether the chicken of boredom comes before the egg of entertainment) is that reality can rarely complete with it for raw stimulation and excitement. Reality, the real world, moves very slowly by comparison with the world as depicted in entertainment, but people for the moment have still to enter the real world from time to time; they cannot lead wholly virtual lives.

When they enter the real world, therefore, they find it dull and boring by comparison with their entertainments; it takes mental discipline and training to find the real world of interest in an age of distraction. – Theodore Dalrymple

We’re sold this dream that marriage equals perfect happiness and conflict-free living. Too many of us haven’t seen our parents practise conflict resolution. In my case my parents divorced when I was young and for a long time in my early married years whenever my husband and I had a disagreement my immediate reaction was – marriage not working, we’re not compatible.

I know when I separated, I thought I didn’t like my husband any more. It was while we were apart that I began to appreciate who he was. I saw him caring for our children with different eyes. I began to appreciate what having two loving parents meant to our children. I began to look at my husband with fresh eyes or maybe it was old eyes, the eyes that had made me want to marry him. – Victoria Carter

Before you call time-out think about the cost of two homes, legal fees gobbling up your savings and the emotional and financial impact on your children. Talk to anyone in a long marriage and they’ll tell you about its richness and rewarding qualities and how it’s helped each partner be happier and more whole. – Victoria Carter

Here, laid bare, is the intolerance and priggishness of people who probably think of themselves as liberal yet can’t tolerate any departure from approved groupthink. – Karl du Fresne

There’s a lesson here: think carefully before you befriend a writer. They can be a spiteful, duplicitous and disputatious lot, and you can never be sure the friendship won’t come back to bite you. – Karl du Fresne

Of course, people generally don’t respond well to being embarrassed and exposed in public. And in the ensuing years, I’ve learned something about truth: It’s way more complicated than it seems when we’re young. There isn’t just one truth, our truth — the other people who inhabit our story have their truths as well. – Patti Davis

Years ago, someone asked me what I would say to my younger self if I could. Without hesitating I answered: “That’s easy. I’d have said, ‘Be quiet.’” Not forever. But until I could stand back and look at things through a wider lens. Until I understood that words have consequences, and they last a really long time. – Patti Davis

Silence gives you room, it gives you distance, and it lets you look at your experiences more completely, without the temptation to even the score. – Patti Davis

I’ve learned something else about truth: Not every truth has to be told to the entire world. People are always going to be curious about famous families, and often the stories from those families can resonate with others, give them insight into their own situations, even transcend time since fame flutters at the edges of eternity.

But not everything needs to be shared, a truth that silence can teach. Harry seems to have operated on the dictum that “Silence is not an option.” I would, respectfully, suggest to him that it is. – Patti Davis

While the term “gender identity” has exploded in popularity as a way for transgender individuals to express the feeling of “misalignment” with their bodies, a group of scientists says that there is no empirical evidence for its existence in biology. 

According to an international group of over 100 clinicians and researchers, there is currently no biological evidence for “gender identity” and no laboratory test that can distinguish a trans-identified person from a non-trans-identified person. Despite this, the belief in “gender identity” is used as the basis for medically transitioning thousands of children and adolescents.

“The assumption of the core biological underpinning for ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender dysphoria’ remains an unproven theory: while biology likely plays a role in gender nonconformity, currently, there is no brain, blood, or other objective test that distinguishes a trans-identified from a non-trans identified person once confounding factors such as sexual orientation are controlled for,” (emphasis original) said the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) in an article debunking false and unproven assumptions used to medically transition children. – Christina Buttons

One of the myths is that “gender identity,” which underlies gender dysphoria, is a biological trait, according to the article. There is evidence that roughly 60–90% of children who identify as transgender but do not socially or medically transition will no longer identify as transgender in adulthood, and many will grow up to be gay adults. – Christina Buttons

Pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Quentin Van Meter has said that there is “zero point zero zero” evidence that the concepts of “gender fluidity” and “gender identity” have any scientific basis. 

Manhattan Institute fellow Leor Sapir says the motivation for attempting to prove that “gender identity” is an “innate, immutable trait” is for political and legal reasons. – Christina Buttons

What they want is a government to come in and turn things around and be able to get things done and that’s really why I think we’ve been having some success. – Christopher Luxon

It creates bureaucracy. It doesn’t create localism. It doesn’t create devolution. Those are big principles for the National Party that we hold dear to. – Christopher Luxon

We’ve had a government flat on the accelerator with massive stimulus spending – a billion dollars more a week, we’ve had a constrained economy with very little immigration, actually meaningful immigration, coming into the country and we’ve had a Reserve Bank that was printing an awful amount of money for a long period of time and actually creating massive asset price inflation and has only just recently taken the foot off the accelerator on to the brake.

But you’ve still got the Government going flat out on the accelerator, the Reserve Bank’s pumping the brakes real hard and the economy’s still very constrained, so you know that’s been the reality of it and I do say it’s been huge economic mismanagement. – Christopher Luxon

I’m more convinced a year into this job, two years into this place in Parliament, that we’re totally, utterly, completely going in the wrong direction. We need a big turnaround, and we need to be able to go get things done for the New Zealand people and that’s what we’re going to work hard to do. – Christopher Luxon

There has to be a better way of improving Maori literacy than jamming it down our throats whilst mangling the English language in the process. – Wendy Geus

In the story of Harry and Meghan, we see an uncomfortable truth. Not about the royal family or the state of modern Britain – but about the state of anti-racism, a once radical movement that has been warped beyond all recognition. It has become a plaything of some of the most privileged people imaginable – a means to demonise any criticism and burnish their moral status.

Where the old anti-racism was radical, brave and fought from the bottom-up, this new ‘anti-racism’ is hectoring, pompous, even aristocratic. No wonder our prince has taken to it so effortlessly. – Tom Slater

Our monopoly soviet health system has all the wrong incentives. All the school dental nurses go on holiday because the children are not customers who have a choice. It’s the school dentist or nothing. – Richard Prebble

The country is wrapped in the red tape of costly regulations.

Government departments regard the production of new laws and regulations to be a core function. Hundreds of civil servants spent their time producing new regulations.

There is not one civil servant whose job description is to stop unnecessary regulation. – Richard Prebble

What about a Regulatory Review Department whose task is to recommend regulations that should be repealed?

Every new spending proposal cannot go to cabinet until it has a treasury report. What if every proposed new regulation had to be assessed by the Regulatory Review Department? New regulations are supposed to have a cost/benefit review. The review is done by the proposing department. The departments never say “this regulation will cost far more than any possible benefit”.

What if before a department can propose a new regulation it has to find two existing regulations to repeal? – Richard Prebble

Let me declare myself. I am an orthodox Christian who welcomes criticism and satire, even ridicule of my faith. I welcome them because they sharpen my own thinking and they give me an opportunity to talk about what I believe.

Hate speech legislation will kill so much of what I enjoy. It will coerce self-censorship and encourage me and nearly everyone else to be a hypocrite, indeed it is remarkably close to making hypocrisy compulsory. And it does that because perpetrators are infatuated by the cult of diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) and muddled about human rights. And in that fog of muddle and infatuation there is no fresh Nor ’wester permitted to clear the air. – Bruce Logan

Understanding “self-evident” is critical. It is peculiar to Western civilisation’s belief in humanity’s connection to the transcendent. For example, our dignity and consequently understanding of freedom, which we all claim to possess, is given to us by God and not by the state.

Self-evident rights include the right to religious belief and expression, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of movement, freedom to assemble together and probably freedom to buy and sell. Once recognised they create the duty for the state to let people get on with them. Their definition does not depend on what the state says.

Then there are other “rights”; the right to education, the right to warm and dry housing, and most recently the right to be able to choose one’s gender. However, these are not rights, they are claims that must be delivered by the state and paid for by the taxpayer. – Bruce Logan

Progressives assert that hate speech legislation will enhance freedom when it will do exactly the opposite. They think that hate speech legislation will give us free “profanely sacred” choice. They assume that protecting one’s chosen identity is the self-evident good; equality for all after all. Hate speech, although without clear definition offends the Progressive’s dignity. Opposition is heretical. – Bruce Logan

Religion configures culture and for that reason it must always be open to satire and criticism. Race, ethnic or national origin are morally neutral. Hate speech legislation will give them political identity and power by default. Instead of ameliorating racism it will intensify it, identifying race or ethnicity above citizenship. Legislation censoring speech is an expansive industry because its foundation is political.

The desire for hate speech legislation in the present cultural context is deeply ironic. It is a critical tool for those who are in the process of wanting to establish a civil religion to replace a de-Christianised morality. Its focus is to place the new identity culture beyond criticism.

The irony is implicit because the progressive notion of human dignity is parasitic. Dignity, for the progressive, rests on a tautology. I have dignity because I’m human; I’m human therefore I have dignity. – Bruce Logan

Faith in the authoritarian state’s declaration of dignity replaces the freedom we enjoy and taught to us by the biblical notion of dignity. Hate speech legislation is simply an alternative way for the state to say that truth and consequently freedom begins and ends here. It is a necessary step in the development of a civil religion to reinforce the cult of “Diversity and Inclusion”.

The consequence is to make criticism of the rising civil religion too dangerous. We already have its avant-garde entrenching the cancel culture of its shock troops in the universities, media and virtue signalling commerce. In the wake of hate speech legislation dissenting debate will become impossible for everyone, but especially for a Christian whose understanding of dignity and morality absolutely confronts the progressive underpinning of the civil religion. – Bruce Logan

We live in an age of suspicion to a degree that I don’t remember from my youth—though I admit that my memory is fallible, and I may be mistaken in this. Perhaps we are no more suspicious of the motives of those with whom we disagree than ever we were, and we always thought that those who disagreed with us were not merely wrong, but evil.

Whatever the case may be, it’s now difficult to discuss anything contentious without the discussion swiftly descending into an examination of the motives of the opponents, as if the truth of what anyone said were dependent on his reasons for saying it: reasons which are themselves usually a matter of conjecture rather than of ascertainable truth.

I doubt that anyone is, or has ever been, entirely free from the temptation to resort to the ad hominem in argument, but name-calling is now a pervasive rhetorical device, especially in discussion of whatever touches on cherished political beliefs but which, on the face of it, should be a matter of objective fact rather than political viewpoint. – Theodore Dalrymple

One suspects that it’s belief that determines the evidence rather than the evidence that determines belief. – Theodore Dalrymple

Once motives rather than evidence and argument are made the focus of disagreement, one enters a labyrinth from which exit is rare. – Theodore Dalrymple

What is true today may be false tomorrow, without anyone having committed an error, let alone fraud. Human psychology isn’t like the trajectory of a planet, which is a natural fact unaffected by observation: it’s reflexive. For example, how I react to something depends on my expectations, and my expectations depend on a very complex number of factors. But psychology as a study seems often to treat the human mind as if it were the solar system, to all intents and purposes unchanging. – Theodore Dalrymple

The end can sometimes justify the means, but often it can’t: it all depends. And what it depends on is that great intangible, judgment. Most people prefer absolutely clear-cut principles that they think can assure them in advance of always being right, whereas judgment, being variable and uncertain, will often lead them into error or wickedness. Nevertheless, life requires judgment and not just principle.  – Theodore Dalrymple

What has really happened is that belief in biological sex has been redefined as bigotry. Standing up for women’s sex-based rights has been rebranded as transphobia. So Rowling’s perfectly normal views, which are likely shared by most people out there, can be talked about as hate crimes when they are nothing of the kind.

This is deeply authoritarian too, this cynical repackaging of dissent as ‘phobia’. Let’s not forget what a phobia is — a malady of the mind, an irrational way of thinking. This echoes Stalin’s antics too, when problematic people were likewise written off as mad and consumed by spite. Rowling has nothing to be ashamed of, but her intolerant erasers do. – Brendan O’Neill 

It must be discombobulating for those, here and in China, or even say Victoria or Western Australia, who fully accepted their government’s then-line that there was no cost too high in the pursuit of zero Covid, to experiencing the current position of those same governments. I know the likes of Michael Baker finds it very confusing.

To the rest of us, it proves one thing. The management of Covid-19, particularly once vaccines were available, was as much a political decision as anything else. Politicians were fond of declaring they were just following the science, but they weren’t especially.

The science didn’t change that much. What changed was the political calculus. Once it was clear that scaring the bejesus out of people and locking them down was no longer politically profitable, politicians quickly moved on to playing down the virus and normalising it.

All this underlines that there wasn’t only one way of doing things. We had choices, particularly once vaccines became available in early 2021. And particularly in this country the second half of 2021 could have been very different if alternative but equally valid political choices had been made to those that were. – Steven Joyce 

There are those of course who think we should forget about going over the entrails of the Covid response. They think it is pointless to look in the rearview mirror. Except that it isn’t the rearview mirror.

We are still living with the impact of the decisions made during the pandemic and the huge financial cost of those will be with us for years to come. The billions lost through quantitative easing could have bought a bunch of new hospitals or paid for a fair few water pipes.

The decision, unique to New Zealand, to shut down massive transport projects during lockdowns has now likely cost billions of dollars and years in delays, as reported just prior to Christmas. The massive fiscal burden has only been reduced by an inflation-driven rise in the tax take, which adds to the cost of living squeeze on kiwi families.

And then there is the human toll. There seems little doubt that some of the anti-social behaviour we are seeing and our falling education performance are a result of people being told that what society previously signalled was important didn’t turn out to be so important during that long 2021 lockdown – like going to school.

In bestowing a knighthood on the Director-General of Health so quickly, the government appears to have already passed judgement on its own performance. The rest of us should be more thoughtful. As our changing attitude to Covid risk in the last year shows, it is possible to make different choices with fewer long-term costs in calmer, more rational times. This, surely, is a lesson we should take from the last two years. – Steven Joyce 

Stanford University has published, to much-deserved derision, a kind of index of prohibited words, that is to say words that could possibly cause anyone, even animals, distress. Of course, if you treat people as eggshells, eggshells is what they will become, especially if they derive some kind of benefit, financial or other, from their fragility.

The university has almost as many administrators as students, in the way that the Bolivian navy had admirals; and in the absences of any other or higher purpose, administrators do not administer, they manufacture administration. They do so both to give themselves things to do and, if possible, to create a need for even more of their kind. A director of something or other soon needs a deputy director; he or she then needs an assistant deputy director, and he or she needs a personal assistant who will soon be so overwhelmed by work that he or she will need a deputy also. And all this, of course, requires the hard work of the human resources department, to ensure that the appointed persons are demographically representative of the general population—only more so, some groups needing special protection like endangered species.

One can just imagine the very hard work, so-called, by the committee that produced the list of prohibited words—breakfast meetings, hastily snatched lunches, and so forth, all to convince them that they were engaged upon something worthwhile and important. In the modern managerial world, no distinction is drawn, alas, between activity and work. – Theodore Dalrymple

Every day the language policing gets more and more ludicrous, but this example, from the School of Social Work of the University of Southern California, takes the cake.  I can no longer say that “my field is evolutionary biology” because that is racist language. The connection, as outlined in the official letter below from the USC group, is that enslaved people went “into the field” in the antebellum South. That makes the word “field” off limits. But farmers were going into the field long before that!

Now the recommended verbiage is “my practicum is evolutionary biology.” At that point people will say “Whaaaat???” And, as several readers note below, the words “field work” for biologists is also unacceptable; I suppose the alternative is “ecological work in the great outdoors”. – Jerry Coyne

The thing that strikes me is that someone had to see the world “field” as racist, and then take action to expunge it from USC’s language. You have to be sniffing around very hard for offense to do something like that. And I suspect that their goal, in fact, isn’t any of the ones they state, but simply to assert power.  How bizarre that these initiatives actually work in today’s America! –  Jerry Coyne

There are good cases to be made for changing some language, but this isn’t one of them. –  Jerry Coyne

I could not do now, the sort of jobs I’ve done in the past because New Zealand has become so prissy and so specific. I hate the term woke, but there’s an element of truth to it. I just wouldn’t bow down to that now. I’m just a bloke and I’m just calling it as I see it. – Paul Henry 

You can avoid saying anything that may vaguely upset anyone, but then what you’re doing is avoiding saying anything at all — and you’re just becoming another script reader. – Paul Henry 

Seriously, people, I get no pleasure from calling out wokeness (even using that word gets me excoriated), for along with that comes opprobrium from the ideologically pure. Even worse: I feel awful that academia, and especially biology, is being distorted and corrupted by ideologues.

One of the examples I used at the Stanford free-speech conference was the inability of people to recognize that, biologically, there are only two sexes in humans. Just two. In our species sex is effectively binary, with only a tiny handful of people who are “intersex” (these exceptions constitute about 0.018% of the species, or about one person in 5600).  Sex is not gender, for the latter is a true social construct because there are far more sex roles or sexual identities than two, although even gender is bimodal, with most people identifying as traditional male or female. A frequency plot of sex would look like two huge lines, each about 50% of the population, with one of the lines at “male” and the other at “female”, and a few almost invisible blips between those lines. A frequency distribution of gender would look more like a bactrian (the two-humped camel), with more intermediates. But the humps would be high. – Jerry Coyne

I believed it was self-evident that sexual dimorphism lies at the heart of female oppression, and that it is the foundation for feminism — yet it is now controversial to claim that the oppression of women is sex-based. It contradicts the idea that women are not oppressed because they are female (many now consider it neither necessary nor sufficient to be female to be a woman) but on the basis of an internal gender identity. I have never understood how such oppression could work but felt that saying so would cause pain. So I remained silent and continued to read New Scientist, sure that the truth would clarify the conversation and heal the hurt.

Unfortunately, “the truth” has done no such thing, and New Scientist is no longer the safe haven it once was. I did not realise how much of my sanity relied on its recognition of the existence and importance of two sexes in humans until articles began to appear which seemed to deny this entirely.  – Octavia Sheepshanks

 After reading one article in which miscarried male foetuses were given a sex (“boys”) but the women who had suffered miscarriages were not (“pregnant people”) I wrote a long and passionate letter to the editor about how it had made me feel (not good). I received no reply, and I began to wonder if my strong belief in the significance of sexual dimorphism in humans was inaccurate and hateful after all. This was the most popular weekly science publication in the world, and it was reporting science as it was. I must be the problem.

Then I encountered the most befuddling article yet. A new form of contraception “for people” had been discovered. After a minor brain adjustment, I established from the sentence “a gel that is applied inside the vagina has been shown to block sperm injected into female sheep”, that this was a new contraception for women. The article was so strange to read that I sought out the original journal article to witness this bizarre wording in situ. When I read the first sentence of the abstract, “Many women would prefer a nonhormonal, on-demand contraceptive that does not have the side effects of existing methods”, I was astonished. Science had not changed; New Scientist had. It had lied to me. (Gaslighting is an overused accusation but resonates here. I intend to avoid one-sided love affairs with magazines in future.) – Octavia Sheepshanks

There is nothing trans-inclusive about pretending humans are a hermaphroditic species. If we were, trans people wouldn’t exist. Perhaps New Scientist, if it wants to include trans people in future(for example, trans men in a study on female contraception) could do so by writing about them? Just a suggestion! Accuracy does not have to mean using the words “women” and “men” — “males” and “females” would include those with all gender identities, including non-binary people.

The alteration of scientific studies to avoid naming the demographic previously known as “women” has serious consequences for anyone female. – Octavia Sheepshanks

Miscarried male foetuses are given a sex and make it into the headline, but the only mention of the women suffering these miscarriages is indirect: “stressful events may activate non-conscious evolved mechanisms in pregnant people to spontaneously abort fetuses that have less chance of thriving in tough environments”.

Presumably, anyone female has these “non-conscious evolved mechanisms” if they exist. – Octavia Sheepshanks

I look forward to a day when I have a place to read about the physical and social implications of research into women’s bodies and health, without limitation. In the meantime, I note that New Scientist remains happy to acknowledge gonochorism in other animals; it recently rejoiced over a study of female robins that discredited the sexist theory that only male robins sing. Maybe I’ll support the liberation of female songbirds until I can read about my own species. In fact, if there’s a rally for feminist robins, I’ll be there with a placard the size of my thumbnail, desperately seeking a new safe haven of sanity. – Octavia Sheepshanks

The respectful compromise would be to introduce a form of legal self-identification for gender identity for trans people while clarifying that this does not change someone’s sex for the purposes of the Equality Act. A clear distinction between gender identity and biological sex in law would balance the legitimate rights of trans people and those of women, protecting both groups against discrimination but establishing beyond doubt that it is lawful to provide female-only services for women as a matter of privacy, dignity and safety. But in Scotland and Westminster, self-described progressive politicians have proved too gutless to advocate balance and compromise. It is marginalised women – in prison, in domestic abuse services, and who require intimate care as a result of disability – who will bear the consequences of their cowardice. – The Observer

Harry and Meghan have gone to the right place. America laps up the celebrity milk that curdles in British stomachs, and the milk they are providing is perfectly flavoured for contemporary taste – sappy, vulnerable victimhood coupled with humourless ultra-sensitivity to the slightest reference to race.

This phase of public puritanism is relatively recent and the older royals will have made jokes they would not make today. Harry and Meghan are milking the zeitgeist for all it is worth in the celebrity market and they are making a fortune. – John Roughan 

Is that how this Shakespearean tragedy ends, with a boring Duke and a botoxed Duchess living out their days in California while the British monarchy, modernized by Charles III, celebrates the enduring reign of William V and looks forward to George VII? Possibly. – John Roughan 

The dying Stuff fleet of newspapers, purchased for the excessive price of one dollar and now fighting for survival, willingly prostituted itself to the government bribe in return for the taxpayer’s unwitting subsidy in numerous different forms, but mainly ridiculously unnecessary full-page government Department advertising and bogus news stories reflecting government policy. The government did this on the pretence of helping sustain the print media but in fact solely to sustain their own political support. Thus the Herald’s competent cartoonists during the disgraceful bribery time were pretty much confined to non-political topics, albeit no longer. Stuff on the other hand, couldn’t afford cartoonists and run ridiculously pointless humourless efforts that have absolutely nothing to say. – Sir Bob Jones

The buying of the print media, so cleverly summed up by Garrick’s cartoon, was nothing less than political corruption of a scale hitherto unknown in New Zealand. – Sir Bob Jones

Since Labour’s arrival in power in 2017 many billions of dollars have been spent on major infrastructure projects. The Government’s Wellbeing Budget 2022 advises it plans to spend a further $61.9 billion on infrastructure investment over the next five years.

In spite of Cabinet directions that Treasury should provide Cabinet regular reports on the performance of all significant investments, not a single major projects performance report has been provided by Treasury or reviewed by Cabinet in the last five years.

According to Treasury’s website, reporting on the performance of major government projects was discontinued in 2017 “due to changes in ministerial priorities.” The verbal version of this provided to us in 2020 was “Ministers have no appetite for this type of report”.

These reports are not supposed to be optional though, for Ministers to decide whether they want them or not. The reports provide important performance mitigation and public accountability functions. – Grant Avery

Large infrastructure projects are notoriously poor performers. The average government infrastructure project globally runs over budget by 40% and projects in New Zealand have been found in a high-profile performance survey to under-deliver their promised benefits by more than 50%.

Transparent reporting on the performance of projects is widely known to mitigate these issues.

Why are Treasury not complying with Cabinet’s directions on investment performance reporting? Why is Government not demanding this accountability? And why is the Auditor General not holding Treasury and Government to account for the absence of these reports? – Grant Avery

I was very, very resolute in what I wanted to do with my life and my career, to the point that the school called in various counsellors and my parents to have a meeting because they thought that, my aspirations were thoroughly unachievable and I should go and work at Tiwai Aluminium Smelter as fitter turner, because I was good with my hands – Peter Beck

I wanted to be able to build the rockets, because there was no way I could go to university and learn how to build rockets, and the engine bolting systems and construction systems and all those kinds of things. –

I figured the best way would be to have the hand skills to do that first. So that’s what I went and did. I ultimately ended up at Industrial Research, which is now Callaghan Innovation or the old DSIR. –

Engineering is cool, but the thing I like about space the most is just the sheer impact you can have on so many people.

“If you build a bridge in a city, the people use that bridge, and it obviously has a tremendous impact on that population group.

“But the wonderful thing about space is you can put literally a little box of electronics on orbit, and it can affect millions, tens of millions, even billions of people, whether it’s providing communication services or weather services or imagery, or whatever. – Peter Beck

I’m very sensitive to aesthetics. So if you look at Rocket Lab, whether it be launch vehicles or any kind of branding or materials, we really care about … we have a saying here, ‘we make beautiful things’….whether it be a rocket or spreadsheet. That’s one of the key elements of the success of the company and the reason why our stuff works, we take the time to make it functional, but also beautiful. – Peter Beck

I have tremendous admiration for an astronaut. I know every nut and bolt there is on the launch vehicle and I also know the risks with space flight, there’s not a lot of margin in the vehicle. And it takes tremendous courage.

When you know too much about something, then it depletes your courage. So, I would be the worst astronaut you can imagine. I’d be looking for wires on every single bolt.

Astronauts just have this amazing ability to turn all that off, focus on the mission at hand, and go and execute it. Some of us are made to do that, some of us aren’t – I’m not. – Peter Beck

In New Zealand … we don’t tend to think big enough. If you’re going to go and do something, it’s no more painful to do something really big than it is to do something really small.

If you’re building a company, you might as well just go and do the really big thing, and just go for it. And if it all doesn’t work, then well at least you had a crack and no harm, no foul.

So choose the thing that you’re really passionate about, then make it big are the pieces of advice that I would give to people.

You’re on this planet for an excruciatingly short amount of time. Choose something that you want to do, and something that you believe is going to have an impact.

At the end of the day … the question that ultimately you reflect back on is ‘well, what did I get done? What did I do with my life? What impact did I have?’

And nobody ever measures impact by the size of their house, or what kind of flashy car they’ve got or anything like that. The true way to measure impact is ‘what did I do for the world?’

Following your passion, and keeping that as a North Star is what I always challenge everybody to do, because ultimately that’s how you define how successful your time on this planet was. – Peter Beck

If a law is objectively evil, but backed by the majority, then the law cannot be questioned. Democracy grants legitimacy to the whims of the majority.

How this plays out in the United States is best answered by those who have a deeper understanding than some itinerant tourist, but in our own land the tyranny of the majority remains a central challenge to those who believe in the sovereignty of the individual. – Damien Grant

A king, de Tocqueville writes, only has physical power, but the majority has both the force and the power of morality to enforce its will on the minority.

He saw the perils of democracy. Sadly, we have perfected them. – Damien Grant

I really don’t have a lot of stomach for this. Most Māori are working and law-abiding like most non-Māori and the constant racial identification of people only feeds resentment and division.

BUT if the Prime Minister wants to crow about what she has achieved for Māori let’s look at what she hasn’t achieved for Māori. – Lindsay Mitchell

If this is the Prime Minister’s idea of achieving for Māori, then she is even more self-delusional than I’d previously entertained.

And if she is returned on this record then we are all deeply in trouble. All of us together. – Lindsay Mitchell

So perhaps New Zealand should adopt its own astrology calendar and make it the Year of the Farmer, a year-long — and beyond — celebration of the country’s food-producing champions. – Sally Rae

Let us not forget what side our bread is buttered on and how it was farming — not our previously greatly-lauded tourism sector — which kept the economy ticking through the global uncertainty and disruption of Covid. – Sally Rae

As well as a celebration of our food producers, may 2023 bring more co-operation, collaboration, communication and common bloody sense when it comes to the relationship between the Government and our rural sector.

2022 was another year of angst and frustration for farming folk, with more protests organised by farming advocacy group Groundswell New Zealand, in response to the raft of regulations. – Sally Rae

Solutions require collaboration — carrots, not canes — and regulations must be achievable, and involve proper consultation, proposals not solely dreamed up by city-based bureaucrats who have never set their squeaky-clean feet on a rural property and do not know a Hereford from a hogget.

Some recognition from the Beehive of the importance of the sector and acknowledgement of the hard mahi that goes on daily in the milking sheds, sheep yards, grain fields and processing plants around the country would not go astray.

Pride must be restored in being a farmer, otherwise there will be no incentive for the next generation — or even some of the current generation — to farm the land.

The urban sprawl — and a plethora of pine trees — will continue on some of the world’s best food-producing soils and New Zealand will be much the poorer for it, increasingly importing products from countries with far less stringent animal welfare controls. – Sally Rae

So bugger the bunny. Let’s make 2023 the Year of the Farmer; remember synthetic is just a fancy word for plastic, so clothe your families and clad your homes in natural, sustainable products, and support — and salute — your local food producers who are outstanding in their field year-round. Literally. – Sally Rae

Fast forward to 2023 and what do Smith’s awards shows that are ‘reflective of the society we live in’ look like? A testosterone fest. People with penises as far as the eye can see. The Brits took the knee to the cult of nonbinary and its awards have never been less reflective of society. It’s almost as if the trans ideology is anti-women. – Brendan O’Neill

There are some important points to make here. First, Sam Smith was not ‘excluded’ from the Brits. That’s just nonsense. It is demeaning to those who have suffered real oppression to describe a bloke’s infantile, hammy refusal to accept a gong with the word ‘male’ on it as oppression. A man saying ‘Ooh, I can’t accept that award because its wording will offend my outlandish identity as a “they”’ is about as far from Rosa Parks as you can get. Smith excluded himself from the Brits by being in denial about his maleness. He, and Corrin and D’Arcy and the other fashionably post-gender celebs, opted out of sex, and by extension out of sexed awards. It’s on them. Why should awards change to accommodate the faddish beliefs of a nonbinary clique?

That’s the other point – the staggering narcissism of the nonbinary ideology. These people really do believe that the entire world should mould itself around their ideology. Male and female awards must be scrapped. Female toilets, changing rooms and other private spaces must be thrown open to men who feel like women. Even language itself must be twisted and bent to these people’s identity feels. So we’re all expected to use ‘preferred pronouns’ and even to mangle grammar by using ‘they’ to refer to one person. My use of the he pronoun for Smith and the she pronoun for Corrin and D’Arcy will be judged by some a heinous act of bigotry. But I am not willing to sacrifice the sense and universalism of the language I use to appease the fever dreams of a minority movement. – Brendan O’Neill

So it is with the trans movement. It expects every realm of society – every awards ceremony, every woman’s space, every linguistic tradition – to bow and scrape before its post-truth, ahistorical belief that people are whatever sex they say they are. The truly oppressive force was not the Brits having male and female categories but the pressure put on the Brits to scrap those categories in order to flatter the narcissistic delusions of a few nonbinaries. This is the opposite of a civil-rights movement. Progressive movements in the past were concerned with changing the world to make it better for all. The regressive, navel-gazing cult of gender play is obsessed with altering the world so that its own adherents never have to encounter an idea or a space that dents their fragile egos. The irony of their misuse of the word ‘they’ is that they are myopically focused on me, me, me.- Brendan O’Neill

Many, I see, are predicting Winston Peters’ return – really? Haven’t we had enough of this showman and the games he plays with your vote?

Are we really going back there again? What is it we all think can be achieved that he hasn’t floated in the last 40 years in public life? I get concerned our memories are short.

At seven percent of the vote, he had 100 percent of the power to choose who governed. Your vote no longer counted. And in going for the untested Jacinda Ardern, knowing the economy was running into trouble, Peters put himself before his country. He ignored the man with the moral mandate and economic smarts and sent him into political retirement and he put in place an accidental Prime Minister, an experimental and vastly inexperienced Government that had made outlandish promises, so much so it wasn’t sure what it could deliver.

So it embarked on two years of working groups and did very little but fumble its way through until COVID hit.  – Duncan Garner

And if Peters is back, he’ll likely lick his wounds on the irrelevant cross benches or personally opt out of heading to Wellington. But the last thing the country needs is Peters on the cross-benches with National, a minority Government, running to Peters for daily support on issues. If that doesn’t speed up the brain drain or even brain fade, then nothing will.

For further insight on Peters, go back up this column and see my earlier comments about him – if he hasn’t achieved his political goals over the past 40 years, will he manage to in the next 40 years? – Duncan Garner

If we look at New Zealand today, we just fought a kind of war: that was the war against Covid. For this war, we gave the state extraordinary powers: to lock us up, to close our borders, to support the economy. But now that we are leaving Covid behind us, we need to return to our liberal traditions. We cannot let the state plan our lives. We cannot let it run large parts of the economy. We need a free market, a free economy and free Kiwis to generate prosperity for us all. And to deliver opportunities for all New Zealanders.

That is what I have learnt from history. – Dr Oliver Hartiwch

A civilisation in which the law may be broken with impunity will not remain a civilisation very long. – Chris Trotter

Now, law enforcement may object that those engaged in such behaviour were later summonsed for their infringements. All well and good, but the public expects – and has every right to expect – that clear breaches of the law, not to mention “the peace”, are confronted as and when they happen. Because, if law enforcement extends no further than issuing summonses after crimes have been committed, and refuses (out of fear or lack of resources) to intervene as crimes are taking place, then the public’s faith in the Police will be shaken to the core.

Law enforcement’s inaction is dangerous for another reason. When the motorcycle gangs take over the streets and the highways, and the Police response is not to require them to observe the rules of the road, but to request that alarmed members of the public exercise patience and forbearance – what is the message being sent?

It is a message of weakness and fear. It is a message which reassures organised criminals that they possess more coercive power than the Police. It is a message that says: if there is nothing to stop gangsters taking over the streets and the highways, then there is nothing to stop gangsters taking over a hospital’s emergency department.

What’s next? If hospitals are no longer off limits to criminals, if medical staff can be intimidated and frail patients frightened out of their wits with impunity, then why not apply the same methods to witnesses, lawyers and judges? If the Police will not intervene to protect our hospitals, then what reason do we have to suppose that they will intervene to protect our courts?

Are those in command of the New Zealand state even willing to ask these questions? Or, are our politicians and public servants committed, instead, to a policy of appeasement? Certainly, there appears to be a general reluctance on the part of the state’s coercive instruments to exert their powers against individuals and groups who depict themselves as the victims of colonisation and white supremacy. Māori and Pasifika have learned that charges of historical and institutional racism have the effect of Kryptonite on the superpowers of the white settler state. – Chris Trotter

To aggressively assert the powers of the State in the manner of Rob Muldoon in 1976, or even of Helen Clark in 2004, is no longer seen by public officials as a clear-cut issue of protecting the equal rights of all citizens by the equal application of all the laws. As currently interpreted by state actors, te Tiriti o Waitangi interposes all manner of caveats against moving decisively against the sort of behaviour on display by the Mongrel Mob at Christchurch Hospital.

Were any New Zealand government – Labour or National – to embark on a rapid build-up of the state’s coercive forces, sufficient to suppress the anti-social behaviour of criminal elements, there would be an outcry. Such a policy would be denounced as irredeemably racist. Its critics would demand to know against whom our beefed-up Police, Corrections, SIS and NZ Defence Forces were intended to be deployed. Would these overwhelmingly white bodies of men and women be unleashed against Pakeha? Or, would they, instead, be held in readiness against the nation’s most exploited, marginalised and institutionally oppressed citizens – Māori and Pasifika? – Chris Trotter

 Tax, tax, tax. That’s how Oxfam believes you will address skyrocketing inequality all over the world. It wants governments to introduce a one-off wealth tax and a windfall tax to end profiteering. It wants a permanent increase in tax for the richest 1 percent of the world’s population – taking at least 60 percent of their income, and an even greater percentage for multi-millionaires and billionaires. – Rachel Smalley

Ultimately, Oxfam says it wants to significantly reduce the number of wealthy people, and the wealth of those people, and redistribute those resources.

Here’s the issue I have with this, though. These huge taxes, almost $3 trillion if Oxfam’s plan became a reality, would be given to governments to redistribute. And that’s why I think this strategy is flawed.

Our governments and politicians have gotten us into this mess. It is their decisions, and their historic leadership, that led us down this path. And if you look at where the most entrenched hardship and poverty is, it’s also where you will find the most corrupt governments. – Rachel Smalley

Why would you take money from the world’s most wealthy people, and place it in the hands of the corrupt monsters who’ve overseen the devastation of their populations or, at best, have just failed to understand or strategise how to counter challenges like famine or drought?

There is a generalised view among some humanitarians and charities that anyone who is in possession of extreme wealth has acquired it through the oppression or exploitation of others. Sure. Historically, in some cases, that is true. – Rachel Smalley

But others with extreme wealth have revolutionised the way we live.

Love him or hate him, Elon Musk changed the way the world moved. Bill Gates changed the way we communicate – he connected the world. So did Larry Page with Google. So did Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Bezos made it easy to buy goods from anywhere in the world. Bernard Arnault made billions out of luxury goods. Gina Reinhart cashed in on Australia’s mining resources. And so it goes on. I’m not suggesting any of these people are great characters, but they’re disrupters and they’re leaders.

So are you going to take money from these squillionaires, are you going to tax them, and give those funds to the governments of Peru, or Ethiopia, or South Africa, or Bangladesh, or Yemen? Or worse, the bureaucrats at the UN? Or do you work with some of these super-brains, these entrepreneurs to try and solve some of the world’s problems? – Rachel Smalley

I’m over-simplifying the issue of course, but you get my drift. Let’s use the brain power of the likes of Musk and Bezos and Gates because they are mega-rich for a reason. They’re super sharp. They’re strategic thinkers. They’re disrupters. They’ve already changed the world in some way, so why not bring them to the table to fix some of the major issues born from historical exploitation, climate change, natural or man-made disasters, or globalisation? Gates is already trying to find a way to combat malaria.

Charities need to get smarter too. They are foolish to sneer and gripe at success. Charities rely heavily on so-called mum and dad donators. But if they’re going to fix some of the major, structural challenges the world faces today, charities need scale and strategy. And it’s the corporate world and entrepreneurs who provide this.

However, whatever we do, we should not heavily tax the most wealthy people in the world and hand over that cash to governments. Politicians have failed to foresee and address some of the greatest issues we now see in housing, education, inequality, health, child poverty, food insecurity and climate change. We’re in a mess because of them. Tax is not the answer. Tapping into the minds of the people changing the world, is.  – Rachel Smalley

One of the biggest problem our country faces is the continuous supply of false prophets who have the ear of government.

They come with ideas that sound workable but in practise turn out to be well less so. Their greatest ability is to ignore the realities which contradict the theory.

This is never more the case than when the politics of the environment (see rural NZ) are dissected. Our Government overrides and/or ignores the overwhelming success of the primary sector’s capacity to produce at a level which supplies significant capital for our health, education and welfare sectors to meet much of the needs of our wider society.

This is a result of the constant rational application to change which now seems to have been set aside in favour of a more “natural” process without the use of science. – Gerrard Eckhoff

The folk who are the new experts live in the cities. They have never actually grown or made anything from a strawberry to a sausage.

All the right people with experience and knowledge are now the wrong people to listen to, or so growers are told. Something to do with other people’s values. The rise and rise of the environmental puritan increasingly influences those in authority.

In the past, synthetic fertiliser has provided nutrient aplenty to help the young plant to produce. We are now told such fertiliser is bad.

The natural way of growing things is best and more in keeping with nature — or so we are told by those who promote that the natural way of growing things is the right way.

Most people die from natural causes which is why we should steer clear of naturally grown foods as one wit once observed — and with more than a grain of truth. (See E coli O157 found in compost.) – Gerrard Eckhoff

It is correct that the Government’s preferred regenerative agriculture works but only if we are prepared to accept a 50% reduction in our productive capacity over the ensuing years.

Meanwhile, traditional pastoral farming continues to add organic matter (carbon) to the soil — only to be taxed for doing so. A 5000-stock unit property will be required to pay $8,500 at a time when lamb and mutton has fallen by 50%.

The use of any chemical sprays as bad for the environment is the common mantra of the environmental lobby group. This, despite killing off viruses that are even worse. – Gerrard Eckhoff

Transgenic is still a word spoken of in hushed tones in NZ society due to political allegiances wrongly insisting that the science behind GM is yet to be proven. The climate science is (apparently) proven but GM is not, so the fear of being ridiculed keeps most of us silent, but not all. (GM science has been contracted out by NZ to Australia and has been for years.) – Gerrard Eckhoff

Hydro electrical generation is totally important and at a reasonable price. Our Government owns around 50% of a lot of hydro electricity generators who naturally enough need lots of water in their rivers. The Government receives healthy dividends from the generators. Such matters were once called a conflict of interest, but what used to be called a principled approach to decision making doesn’t seem to apply anymore.

Should Government continue down this pathway to artificially created food shortages (eggs) — the parable of the little red hen comes to mind but then school children will likely have no idea of what a parable is, even those who bother to attend school. That is another story for another day.

Most understand well that monopolies are bad for a country’s economy, yet governments are absolute natural monopolies with no constraints on their authority, even over our fragile democracy. Ah well we get what we vote for. – Gerrard Eckhoff

I would like to recap some of the more notable, what I term “unnecessary cock ups”.

Why, in the middle of a pandemic would you push ahead with the reform of our hospital system in favour of two new overarching organisations: Health NZ and the Maori Health Authority. Who was behind this and just what was the perceived benefit?

The greenhouse gas reduction plan aims to reduce sheep and beef farming in New Zealand by 20% and dairy farming by 5%. This equates to approximately the value of the entire wine industry and half of the seafood being wiped out.

Jacinda Ardern’s Government have allowed pine plantations to be planted on any class of land: thus prompting investors to buy up productive sheep and beef farms just to plant pines, pocket the carbon credits and then walk away! These sorts of decisions are absolutely mind-boggling! – John Porter

A lack of acumen and competency is exhibited by too many government ministers. Impossible to change, I know, but those ministers who do possess a modicum of skill, need to step up and ensure government decisions are not based on an ethnic bias and that decisions are made only after exhaustive analysis of potential negative consequences.

How is this for ideology eclipsing the need for consequence analysis? The Government has paid out over $30m in clean car rebates to Tesla owners; now it’s recalibrating the scheme because it’s dished out too many discounts. The clean car discount was supposed to be a revenue-neutral policy; subsidies are meant to be paid for by a tax on heavy-emitting vehicles like utes.

I want a government that acknowledges the need for and practices fiscal responsibility. This Government has played a significant part in causing our record inflation, fuelling it with out-of-control spending. Consultancy costs are a classic example. Approximately $30m has been squandered on consultants’ fees for the 3-Waters merger alone! $300m is budgeted to be spent on the TVNZ/RNZ merger. A merger no one wants!

I want a government that ceases using fabricated, extreme climate modelling scenarios to construct doom-laden predictions that allow MPs and government lackeys to scare the public, all to justify outlandish and unnecessary government spending.

I want a government that is actually truthful, open and transparent. – John Porter

I want a government that does not bribe mainstream media to promote its fabricated “Treaty Partnership” agenda. MSM scrutiny no longer exists in New Zealand. They have surrendered their integrity, objectivity and neutrality. These standards have been massively compromised as a condition of access to the Ardern Government’s $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund.

I want a government that does not promote Te Ao Maori worldview; a decolonisation narrative, and the equating of matauranga Maori with modern science as absolute truths.

We need an education system that prepares our young to be global citizens, literate, numerate and grounded in science in a way that places myth and legend in an appropriate perspective. Our education system needs to teach truthfully presented histories, enabling students to acknowledge and understand both the positive and negative aspects of our history. We cannot afford for those who will inherit our country to have a culturally distorted and intolerant perspective.

I want a government that does not believe a desire for social justice and equality for Maori is justification for completely overriding the principles of democracy. –

I want a government that commands police to crack down hard on any criminal activity.

We need a Police Commissioner who does not buy into the philosophy that a return to “baseline level” of criminal activity is acceptable policing.

I want a government that will cease its separatist agenda and govern equally for all. We need to become a country respectful of not just Maori, but all cultures. – 

New Zealand is entering a crucial, and quite possibly dangerous period of our history.

We are encumbered by an authoritarian government that is aggressively crushing our democracy. Plans are afoot, and government-cultivated and -abetted activists are determined to radically change our society.

For the New Zealand that we know and love to survive, New Zealanders need to start asserting that this government must go, and the foundation of democracy, one person, one vote must be the fundamental aspiration of a new government. – John Porter

If Peters cared what the voters want then in 1996 he would have gone with Helen Clark and in 2017 with Bill English. Winston will do whatever is good for Winston.

Peters could not go in coalition with either Clark or English because they are both very principled. Helen Clark would not have the Greens in her ministry, too extreme. Bill English would never have agreed to the pork barrel politics of New Zealand First’s Provincial Growth Fund.

Christopher Luxon may not know it but he could never work with Winston Peters. Luxon sacked his agriculture spokesperson because she made personal representations to the Minister of Agriculture. MPs have always been able to see ministers regarding their personal situation. The Minister himself said there was no apparent conflict of interest.

How would Luxon react if he found his Minister of Racing’s party was receiving substantial undeclared donations from wealthy businessmen with connections to the racing industry?

Any coalition between the non-drinking, early to bed, Luxon and the most famous late night customer of the Green Parrot would not last. – Richard Prebble 

A coalition of the losers could steal the election. Will it work?

If the National caucus remains disciplined and has some sensible policy the party’s support will break 40%.

If Act continues to offer practical positive solutions Labour’s attempts to demonize Act will fail.

Political machinations have a marginal effect on elections compared to the economy. It is the cost of living, crime, failing health services and 7% plus mortgages that will sweep Labour away.

The two by-elections indicate there is a mood for change. Voters who want a change of government will not risk another coalition of the losers by voting for the man who crowned Jacinda Ardern Prime Minister. – Richard Prebble 

Taylor also explains that, although perception is not reality, perception can become a person’s reality (there is a difference) because perception has a major influence on how we look at reality.

In this light, the statement that “fruit and vegetables at the supermarket are so expensive now, processed and junk food actually works out cheaper” deserves examination. – Jacqueline Rowarth 

But fruit and vegetables are not the same types of food as “processed and junk foods”.

Fruit and vegetables are valuable sources of energy, vitamins, minerals and fibre. There is also increasing evidence of additional benefits from the range of phytonutrients they contain.

In contrast, processed and junk food (henceforth termed PJF) tend to be high in fats, sugar and salt.

This makes a cost comparison difficult because the basis of the comparison is unclear – choosing vitamins or fats would result in a different answer. – Jacqueline Rowarth 

But fruit and vegetables are not the same types of food as “processed and junk foods”.

Fruit and vegetables are valuable sources of energy, vitamins, minerals and fibre. There is also increasing evidence of additional benefits from the range of phytonutrients they contain.

In contrast, processed and junk food (henceforth termed PJF) tend to be high in fats, sugar and salt.

This makes a cost comparison difficult because the basis of the comparison is unclear – choosing vitamins or fats would result in a different answer. – Jacqueline Rowarth 

The CSIRO (Australia’s equivalent to New Zealand’s Crown Research Institutes) has examined the typical Australian diet and come to similar conclusions about the cost of PJF but on the environment rather than the wallet.

Researchers estimated that discretionary foods (anything that isn’t an essential or necessary part of a healthy dietary pattern) were responsible for almost 30 per cent of the greenhouse gases (GHG) of an average Australian diet.

Of the core food groups, the two smallest contributors to total dietary GHG were fruit (3.5 per cent) and vegetables (6.5 per cent).

The CSIRO researchers suggested that reducing discretionary food intake would allow for small increases in emissions from core foods, particularly vegetables (from 2.5 to 5.5 servings a day), dairy (from 1.5 to 2.5 servings), and grains (from 4.6 to 6 servings). The nutritional benefit would be achieved at a 3.6 per cent increase in GHG, which the authors described as “small”. – Jacqueline Rowarth 

Two interesting facts in these charts. The first is that retail thefts have gone from around 2,000 to 6,000 which is a tripling since 2018 (and was steady before that).

The second is that less than 8% of retail thefts have resulted in court action. This probably explains why retail crime is out of control – no consequences for the criminals involved. – David Farrar 

• The Health Authority is a separatist institution designed to serve the interests of one ethnic group.
• Three Waters was opposed by the vast majority of Councils and was the subject of a massive petition against it. It gives 50% of the administrative control of drinking water, waste water and storm water to iwi. The latter represent 16.5% of the population.
• The seats for Maori on councils is undemocratic. No other ethnic group is guaranteed representation in local government. – Roger Childs

The Road to Zero: The ambitious aim of reducing road deaths to zero.

It’s an admirable aspiration, but delusional – and even the government’s spin doctors know it. That’s why the “zero” goal is in fact a 40 per cent reduction in death and serious injuries by 2030,

Even that is wishful thinking.

Slogans are not solutions but slogans epitomise the Ardern administration: “The team of 5 million”; “The Road to Zero”.

It’s mindless rubbish, but it’s also insulting. Clearly, those who are actually paid to dream up this “creative” nonsense, think we believe it. Sadly, they may be right enough to get away with it.  – Frank Newman

But should we expect anything more substantial than slogans and puff from an undergraduate with a Communication Studies degree in politics and public relations, and work experience incubated within left-wing politics? Of course not. Clearly, in the make-believe world of Jacinda Ardern, words speak louder than actions.

The Ardern government has been little more than slogans and Orwellian contradictions tailored to a gullible audience: The team of five million – defined by race. A Public Interest Journalism Fund – that prioritises government policy before public interest. 

And so it is with the Road to Zero.  In December 2019 the Government published the strategy for 2020–2030 and an initial 3-year action plan that expired on 1 January.  – Frank Newman

 Maybe 151 fewer people will die on our roads each year by 2030 and just maybe no one will die on our roads by some unknown year in the future. Or maybe it will just be more huff and puff like Kiwibuild which promised 100,000 homes and has delivered 1,366 to date. Maybe the Road to Zero is just more political hot air.

Here’s what the Road to Zero has achieved. It has produced a strategy document.

The problem is words and pictures don’t save lives – they don’t even fill potholes! – Frank Newman

Minimising deaths on the road is a very commendable goal and would be very achievable, if no one were to actually use the roads.  

The real world is always about minimisation and trade-offs, and in that regard one can have more faith in the very smart car makers coming up with solutions aimed at eliminating human error. 

What can be expected from our politicians is that they provide roads that are safe, but then, these are the same people that are challenged by potholes, so expecting safe roads may be a bit ambitious and their Road to Zero is a road to nowhere. – Frank Newman

You cannot and should not do the job unless you have a full tank, plus a bit in reserve for those unplanned and unexpected challenges that inevitably come along.

Having reflected over summer I know I no longer have that bit extra in the tank to do the job justice. It’s that simple. – Jacinda Ardern

Politicians are human. We give all that we can, for as long as we can, and then it’s time.

And for me, it’s time. – Jacinda Ardern

She never appeared to grasp that announcing policy is not the same as implementing it. Press releases do not build houses. Speeches do not end poverty. In the end, it was Jacinda’s constant failure to deliver that made it impossible for her to go on.

If you say “Let’s do this!”, then, Dear God, you have to do it! – Chris Trotter 

So credit to the PM for realising that despite having more time left than most world leaders, she was not going to realise her cherished goals for New Zealand.

What might send a shiver down the spine of some older and more time-limited world leaders (as well as her own successor) is that her problems – even if rhetorically more polished – are quite similar to their own.

And seem equally intractable.

Just run through a list of potential policy-reality clashes: ending relative poverty when statistically poor people show little desire to model your own sensible behaviour; reducing carbon consumption without confronting the truly enormous welfare costs; paying for more health and social welfare without robust long-term market-led productivity growth; building affordable houses without substantial environmental modification and painful disruption to ossified local practice; increasing opportunity and outcomes for indigenous people without creating privilege and double standards. – Point of Order

Barring an economic miracle, it will be hard for the government to slip out from under the burden of Ardern’s policy indecision.  It looks more likely to slide softly out of office on the back of disappointed supporters and disillusioned middle-of-the-roaders.

Meanwhile, the world’s leaders will be asking themselves if Jacinda has made a wise move in beating them to an early shower.

Some will envy her opportunity to reinvent herself and leave behind problems she and her supporters thought she was particularly well-equipped to solve.

Others may take it as a sign that perhaps she wasn’t quite such a world leader – let alone a defining one – after all. – Point of Order

Jacinda Ardern was a dreadful prime minister of New Zealand who failed in substance but succeeded wildly in image.

All her economic instincts were bad, all her strategic instincts were bad. She had a great desire to undo productive economic reform and remove or shut down the engines of economic growth for what should be a nation of limitless opportunity.

Nonetheless, for a time, she was very successful politically.

She had one genuine achievement. She reacted with dignity and moral seriousness to the appalling Christchurch terrorist massacre. – Greg Sheridan

Nonetheless, as a leader you can’t fake it, you have to do it. She certainly did it and she deserves credit for that.

After that, well, the achievement cupboard is pretty bare. Ardern did keep Covid at bay for a significant amount of time. That’s because New Zealand is an isolated island. We got much the same outcome for much the same reason. So did the leaders of Fiji, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands. – Greg Sheridan

Of course Ardern, from the left of her party, instituted one of the most draconian lockdowns outside China itself. Sometimes she made Dan Andrews look like a Milton Friedman/Ayn Rand libertarian. – Greg Sheridan

In substance, Ardern was a flop. She didn’t do the things she promised to do when first elected in 2017. She promised the government would build 100,000 homes, it built barely 1000.

She was a big cheese on climate change, but New Zealand’s emissions, before Covid, went up.

Public service emphasis was meant to focus on the regions of the country. Instead, all power, and many more public servants, went to Wellington.

Ardern talked a good game on human rights in the abstract, but under her leadership New Zealand was a tiny, frightened mouse when it came to Beijing. – Greg Sheridan

But her failure in substance did not much dim Ardern’s international star, for we live in an age of political cryptocurrency, paid out in celebrity bitcoin. Ardern was a perfect princess of woke.

She was young, unmarried, had a child in office and her partner was a stay-at-home dad, and she spoke the woke dialect with a native fluency. Naturally, Manhattan swooned. – Greg Sheridan

But actually doing real stuff in the real world butters no parsnips in the virtual reality of celebrity land. In that strange universe, Queen Jacinda for a time reigned without challenge. – Greg Sheridan

History will record this government as by far the worst in the post-war era. They’ve been disastrously incompetent, financially reckless and brought terrible damage to the social fabric and our democracy with their nonsensical co-government outrage based on sheer lies. – Sir Bob Jones

This is one of the under-appreciated things about cancel culture: its broader chilling effect. The way it shaves the edges off public life, the way it stymies creativity, the way it incentivises everyone to carry on like a career politician, terrified of saying anything interesting. – Tom Slater

So, he has done everything that the cancellers have demanded of him. Retraction? Tick. Grovelling apology? Tick. Promise to ‘do better’? Tick. And yet of course it won’t be enough for them, ever – because, whatever the chattering classes say, cancel culture isn’t about accountability, it’s about vengeance. –Tom Slater

I wish he hadn’t apologised. Apologies only gin up the cancellers and feed the whole infernal dynamic. Ultimately, I don’t think Jeremy Clarkson had much to apologise for, beyond being Jeremy Clarkson and making the sort of outrageous, not particularly funny joke Jeremy Clarkson tends to make. But at the same time, what a sad state of affairs it is that even genuinely contrite individuals might as well not bother now. Cancel culture not only stifles free speech and creativity, it renders genuine apologies pointless. It makes admitting fault a mug’s game. Our culture is so much worse for it. – Tom Slater

Our duty as adults is to safeguard our children. There is a reason we have legislation in place to prohibit children from doing certain things that may cause them harm. Unfortunately, there are organisations and individuals, including those in positions of power, who seek to dilute these safeguards when it comes to matters of sex and gender. This should worry us all. – James Esses

Jacinda Ardern has made the right decision. If she doesn’t have enough in the tank, and if she doesn’t feel that she can lead the country, she is 100 percent right to stand down. I felt sorry for her yesterday. She had just returned from a summer break and she looked stressed, emotionally exhausted, and vulnerable.

Ardern’s biggest critics will no doubt feel a sense of relief but in the coming days and weeks, that will likely turn to anger. There can be no doubt Ardern has gifted National the election, but in her wake, she has left a hotch-potch of huge, expensive and impactful policies that can only be described as half-baked, or half-finished. And every one of these policies looms large on the horizon.

Three Waters, He Waka Eke Noa, the TVNZ-RNZ merger and the restructuring of our health system are all multi-million-dollar behemoths. They form the backbone of an enormous and controversial body of work, and Labour has just lost its most effective political weapon. If Ardern isn’t there to push these through, who will? And what becomes of the billions of dollars we have invested in these policies so far when they all collapse in an ugly heap?  – Rachel Smalley

Labour will come under enormous public pressure to bring forward the election. It is unthinkable that we can sit in a rudderless void with Chris Hipkins or Michael Wood at the helm of the Government, lurching our way through a recession, and waiting for an election in October. Neither of those people, neither Hipkins nor Wood will make any decisions, we’ll just sit and tread water. Now the country, this is the reality, it needs a war-time leader and Labour does not have one waiting in the wings.

If that happens, it will be 2024 before National and ACT can begin to right the ship, and what an even bigger economic mess this country will be in by then.  – Rachel Smalley

New Zealand is precariously balanced economically. The country is facing huge headwinds in a year when no one in Labour is truly qualified to make economic decisions, and I don’t believe Labour can stand up and say ‘we have a public mandate to continue to lead.’ Legally they do, morally they don’t.

In 2020 we didn’t elect Labour, we elected Jacinda Ardern, make no mistake about that. We gave her a single-party majority leadership government. There is no doubt we elected her, not Labour.

Our new Prime Minister, whoever that is, whoever Labour chooses, will have no option but to channel all of their energy into retaining power. The economy will have to wait. – Rachel Smalley

The party cannot appoint a new Prime Minister on Sunday and expect the country to accept its decision.

The only solution is to bring the election forward. Labour must seek a new mandate from the public.

Neither Chris Hipkins nor Michael Wood is students of the economy. And that’s what we need. Someone who can lead the country’s economic response.

Labour, as I said, should not choose our Prime Minister this weekend, we should. Our democracy depends on it, our economical survival does as well. – Rachel Smalley

But while her exit is understandable on a human level, it is confounding on a political one. Labour MPs and supporters have every right to be furious. – Henry Cooke

She leaves the party in far worse shape to fight this election than it would have been under her leadership. Worse, her decision appears to have genuinely surprised the party, meaning succession-planning has not been thought through.  – Henry Cooke

Her legacy will be for historians to figure out. Some will see her as Labour’s greatest postwar leader – a strong leader through massive crises who also gave the party its largest win in decades. Others will compare her unfavourably with someone like Helen Clark – a soldier for the party who stuck around through two losing election campaigns and three winning ones, remaking New Zealand significantly in her nine-year term of power. Ardern has lost the chance to really embed her vision of social democracy into the country with another win. – Henry Cooke

Even if the party was doomed to defeat either way, there is a difference between a close loss and a big one, a difference you can measure in fresh new faces to revitalise your party, and the parliamentary funding desperately needed for research staff.

Ardern’s exit will come as a shock to many international fans, who saw her as a beacon of progressive hope during the Trump years. But it proves a lesson this same movement should have taken from Barack Obama, or indeed Bernie Sanders: investing an actual person with this much political importance is always dangerous. If your plan to win an election hinges so strongly on an individual, you always run the risk of them leaving the field. – Henry Cooke

It was meant to be the most transformational government ever. Now, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government has ended. There was no transformation. – Josie Pagani

I hosted a group of political strategists who came here to learn lessons about how she won in 2017. No one really found an explanation other than her personality and ability to communicate our values.

For everything accomplished, we must weigh what wasn’t. – Josie Pagani

She leaves a divided country.

Sixty-four percent of Kiwis, across all ages, believe New Zealanders are more divided than ever. Particularly problematic for the Prime Minister, women feel this more than men.

The priorities of traditional Labour supporters, working people on low incomes, were put lower on the agenda than Three Waters and merging TVNZ and RNZ.

Jacinda Ardern was willing to spend $678 million to subsidise businesses to decarbonise, but says free dental care is an unaffordable dream. The 2020 estimated cost of free dental care was $648 million.

We are a more unequal country than when she was elected. – Josie Pagani

When challenged on her government’s priority list, the PM ‘’refuted’’, and ‘’rejected’’. The irritability was getting worse. It jarred with kindness.

Labour will be at much longer odds to be re-elected now.

The new leader will need to turn the narrative around and reset the agenda. Re-focus and sort out the underperforming public sector, jettison the identity politics, and deliver a greater share of the economy to wage earners. – Josie Pagani

There’s an old saying that all political careers end in failure. Both John Key and Jacinda Ardern have looked ahead and bowed out on their own terms.

It’s healthy to walk away. 

This could be the chance that Labour didn’t take in opposition to do the work of thinking about what they are there for. Only then will they deserve another go. – Josie Pagani

Ardern stopped short of endorsing a successor – Key made that mistake with English. But denied a real contest, the ambitious and desperate in caucus will white-ant where the new leader falters.

Her popularity, so inextricably linked to the fortunes of the party, leaves a vacuum which her successor will struggle to fill, and in which chaos and restless egos will thrive.

Although her heart wasn’t in it, she was still Labour’s best hope against National. – Andrea Vance 

It’s going to get worse, it’s going to get more painful and they need a government that’s going to get things done for them so they can get ahead. – Christopher Luxon

We can have robust debate and discussion; we maintain civility for each other; we disagree strongly; we don’t have to be disagreeable with each other personally.

And that’s a choice we all get to make here in New Zealand about how we want to carry ourselves and model that out to each other and our teams. – Christopher Luxon

She wasn’t just Prime Minister of New Zealand – and a popular one at her peak – she was a global pin-up for progressive values. She was the beacon of hope among those on the Left who had been destabilised by Donald Trump, Brexit and Boris Johnson. For many, she was seen as a breed apart among global leaders: one who was untouched by the fatal brew of ego, arrogance and self-interest which they saw as inbred into many male politicians.

Ardern’s undoing was in that she appeared to believe that herself. I don’t claim to be able to read her mind, but I would guess that her real reason for resigning ahead of New Zealand’s general election later this year was not primarily that she wanted to collect her daughter from playgroup every day, as she has intimated, but that she could no longer cope with her halo having slipped. When you have been built up into a living saint it must come as a shock to find yourself under attack for failing to address the same old problems which afflict less-progressive national leaders. Inflation, a stuttering economy and rising crime are hardly unique to New Zealand, but they showed that there was nothing magical about Ardern’s politics – the only difference is that in her case she lacked the toughness to weather serious adversity.  – Ross Clark 

The danger now is that in resigning before what was beginning to look like an inevitable defeat at the polls, she will come to be seen by progressives as a political martyr, reinforcing their belief in her greatness, as a female leader who willingly gave up power to be with her family. The reality is that she failed in much that she tried to achieve, and the hero-worship which she enjoyed around the world made things worse by adding to her hubris.  – Ross Clark 

There was once a time when climate change was about science. No longer.

It is now about money and politics. Not just some of it. All of it. –  Barry Brill 

Like COP meetings, the Davos meeting is the very epitome of hypocrisy. – Barry Brill 

Private jet flights are by far the most emissions-intensive mode of transport per passenger-kilometre yet invented. Every Davos flight averaged CO2 emissions equivalent to those produced by about 350,000 average cars for a week. – Barry Brill 

There will now be a week of fine dining: air-flown filet, frenched cutlets, truffle ice cream, the very best cheeses. Despite this, Davos Man will continue to staunchly advocate veganism – and eating proteins from insects – to “save the planet”. – Barry Brill 

The only rational conclusion to be drawn from from all this cognitive dissonance is that these wealthy people do not really believe a word of what they constantly preach about climate change.

They demand pain and sacrifice rules “for thee but not for me”. They say one thing and do another. As the old cliche has it: their actions speak louder than words.

So, they must have some other underlying objective. But what is it? – Barry Brill 

The favourite fantasy of the Western upper class is that the end of the world is imminent and can only be averted if we fundamentally change the way we live. But “we” does not include the seriously wealthy. No. Their heroic role is to make all this change happen. To be leaders. History will record that it was their vision and grit that ensured the future of the human race.

Prof Schoellhammer says it doesn’t matter to them that every alarmist prediction has proven to be wrong – because facts can be trumped by “morality”. Extreme predictions pander to an ersatz-religion that allows the super-rich to simultaneously enjoy their wealth and lecture the rest of the world from a position of moral superiority.

Inter-generational guilt also plays a role. The Newsweek article reveals that the unspeakable “Just Stop Oil” group, who throw ketchup over priceless paintings, are on the payroll of Aileen Getty, the granddaughter of legendary oil-tycoon Jean Paul Getty. Who knew? – Barry Brill 

John Kerry is quite open about financing the political campaigns of candidates who support draconian climate policies. No left-wing candidate anywhere in the developed world could get elected in 2023 without first prostrating themselves before the shrine of climate change alarm.

But buying politicians is not enough unless they can get re-elected.

Public opinion has to be bought as well, and that is a long hard grind : the press, the electronic media, government officials, celebrities, pollsters, academics, trade unions, bloggers, social media gatekeepers, teachers, influencers, the entertainment industry, etc – in every region and district in the English-speaking world. It all adds up to serious money. – Barry Brill 

The numbers of NGO employees funded by wealthy individuals and charitable foundations worldwide runs into the millions[2]. @SDGaction, an NGO, boasts that its members accumulated 100 million ‘transformative actions’ and stunts in 2021 alone, and thereby changed the world.

These activists work all day, every day, on lobbying everybody, everywhere, to demand more extreme and extensive climate policies. The planned outcome is to overwhelm and control the public debate – or to ensure that there is no public debate – and to spread cultures and politics of chronic self-deception in respect of all issues that are related to climate change. They have been remarkably successful. –

You might think that this barely-imaginable cataract of cash could buy almost anything in this money-conscious world. Can it buy scientific research grants? Access to scientific journals? Resolutions at conferences of public-sector scientists? The sympathetic ear of UN officials? Consensus at Davos?

What would happen if all this billionaire philanthropy was to be withdrawn from politicians, bureaucrats, environmental organisations, newspapers, broadcasters, etc?

Would there be anything left of the climate change emergency? Or would it quietly fade away? – Barry Brill 

Man might be defined not as the rational animal, but as the meaning-seeking animal. We invest events with meaning because we prefer to think that there is some purpose behind them rather than that there is none. This is the reason why conspiracy theories are so popular. A malign purpose is better than no purpose at all, for it not only encourages a belief in the possibility of human control over events, and that if only the malign conspirators could be eliminated (the contemplation of the destruction of fellow beings being always delightful to a certain kind of person), the world could be much improved, but it also flatters and inflates the importance and powers of mankind in general. – Theodore Dalrymple

Since World War II, every Prime Minister who has taken office in between elections has gone on to lose.

Holyoake from Holland, Marshall from Holyoake, Rowling from Kirk, Palmer then Moore from Lange, Shipley from Bolger, English from Key. They have all lost. Some, Holyoake and English, put up a fight. Most were swept away in big landslide defeats.

Yesterday, Jacinda Ardern forming a coalition of the losers after the election, despite Winston Peters’ denials, was a real possibility.

Now, nothing can save Labour. – Richard Prebble

If you cannot face meeting the voters you cannot lead an election campaign.

It is nonsense to blame social media and claim things are different today. I went as a student during the Vietnam war to a campaign meeting in the Town Hall that Holyoake addressed. It was a riot. I came away impressed with his courage.

I attended some of Muldoon’s meetings. To say they were hostile is to fail to convey the atmosphere. Muldoon gave what he got back with vigour.

I have had to walk through picket lines of seamen and wharfies to reach public meetings that were stacked with hostile voters.

Yes, I received many threats including death threats. The police insisted on prosecuting two, one who physically attacked me outside a public meeting and another who sent a white powder through the post claiming it was anthrax. – Richard Prebble

In a democracy you have to accept not everyone will love you. Some will hate you. In the country, there are some people who are certifiable. I am sure they all rang me. – Richard Prebble

We all love the Titanic examples. Jacinda Ardern, as captain of the Titanic after it has hit the ice, has said she does not have it in her to try and save the passengers, crew or ship and has taken the first lifeboat.

Regardless of what they are saying publicly, the Labour caucus will be very angry. – Richard Prebble

Theft in supermarkets is common.  It has increased dramatically since someone decided that criminals would not be stopped if they had got passed the checkout and that police would not be notified.  Staff are not allowed to interfere at all.  Security can only intervene if culprits can be caught prior to checkout.  We are not talking about women with large coats nicking a few items in their inside pockets – it is loaded trolleys pushed out the door in full view.

It is one reason for higher grocery prices – we are subsidising petty crooks.  Retail theft amounted to $1.2 Billion last year.  That’s the recorded stuff only. Double it at least. Its over $800 a household and maybe well over a $1,000 if unrecorded crime is added in.   – Owen Jennings

Gang numbers increased 50% between October 2017 and June 2021 to well over 8,000.  The tough end of gang land operates in hard drugs monopolising the trade and pulling serious profits.  The newbies run the car thefts, ram raids, shop thefts and nick stuff from supermarkets.

Police are now caught up in more and more welfare work, dealing with mental healthissues, court time and endless paperwork.  Labour is quick to point out extra police on the beat but the workload is up over 60% and the numbers barely 10%.  More and more of the ‘low level’ crime is simply ignored because of a lack of resource. – Owen Jennings

Those who say jail is not the answer and that more needs to be done to rehabilitate miscreants are losing both ways.  No jail and no rehab.  And so are we.  The anti-jail lobby is working well with lots of help from the bench.  Community service is a very sick joke with limited supervision, no penalties for “no shows” and guys just sleeping it off in the corner.  Ankle bracelets and home detention means more porno movies and Maccas delivered by courier.

The answer?  Education and heavy intervention taking control through mentoring and tough love.  That is another story for another time and, sadly, avoided like a plague. – Owen Jennings

I don’t think women are in a unique position here.

What I think is different for Prime Minister Ardern is that social media is a much bigger factor than it was for Prime Minister Clark or myself.

What happens is if an abuser then has a voice, others amplify that voice. – Dame Jenny Shipley

Democratic government is about our parties and our nation and our best prospects. – Dame Jenny Shipley

This is not new.

To some extent, you have to accept that. It doesn’t make it right. “It’s not good for New Zealand, it’s certainly not good for leaders, and I don’t think it’s a reflection of who we are.

We can debate policy and disagree, but we do need to respect the people who step up and take the leadership responsibilities.

Stick to the issue, not the person. You demean yourselves as you try and demean others. If you can’t win the argument, shut your mouth and get off social media.

We should watch what’s good for New Zealand, rather than putting personal pressure on the individual leaders, whether they are women or men. – Dame Jenny Shipley

Sad to say, Chris Hipkins has been a key figure in an incompetent government that has pushed up almost every bad social statistic. And I haven’t mentioned this government’s very destructive racial policies that might well do more than any of the failures listed above to finish off his time as Prime Minister on 14 October. A few hardy souls think he could pull Labour up, but after a probable momentary blip in the polls, I suspect that six years of a mostly dead-loss administrative record will sink the Hipkins Ministry. It’s a pity. With more able, less dogmatic colleagues, he might have had better prospects. – Michael Bassett

We are facing Chris Hipkins as PM, who is firmly identified with Ardern’s failed policies.

More importantly, we are living in a broken society. Our health system is overwhelmed. Excess all-cause mortality is at record highs. Our school system is in crisis. Social cohesion is at a low ebb. Crime is rising. The cost of living has skyrocketed. More of the same policies are not going to solve these crises. If nothing is changed, the coming year will bring a harvest of bankruptcies and mortgagee failures. – Guy Hatchard

In the Lebanon, everything depends on which religious community you belong to, even your water and electricity supply (both intermittent and unreliable). Overseeing the whole polity are corrupt, kleptocratic, oligarchic leaders of various religious, political, and territorial fiefdoms, who dispute hegemony among themselves but nevertheless display a certain class solidarity so that nothing should change fundamentally and they remain permanently in charge. Protests and revolutions come and go, but the elite go on forever.

The potential for violence is always there, and indeed often breaks out; but most of the population, accustomed to chaos and breakdown, has become adept at survival. Life for them is a question of overcoming everyday obstacles, combined with evading the conflicts around them. Meanwhile, the elite live well.

No analogies are exact, but Western societies seem to be fracturing into various confessional communities each of which, like the Maronites, Druzes, Shiites, Sunni, and others, claims its share of the politico-economic spoils. They struggle like worms or grubs in the tins in which anglers keep their bait, while an unchanging elite preside, or at least glide, godlike, over the whole. In the meantime, public administration deteriorates, infrastructure rots, and inflation rockets. – Theodore Dalrymple

Go to the ant, thou sluggard, advises or even demands the Bible, addressing itself to the idlers among us, consider her ways and be wise. If I were revising the Bible today, I might write, “Go to the Lebanon, thou citizen, thou investor, consider its ways and be wise.” But the problem is that no one learns from the experience of others, and quite often not even from his own, let alone from valid deductions from self-evident premises. Man is the rational animal that somehow manages never to learn, at least not how to live. – Theodore Dalrymple

It’s just a bit of admin. That’s the line given by the SNP and supporters of the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill (GRR) which the Westminster government blocked this week. Letting a male person obtain a female birth certificate just by making a simple statement is no one else’s business. So keep out, shut up.

How maddening when women won’t. But equality law — a confusing, contradictory mess which needs urgent revision — is a delicate ecosystem: rights of trans people set out in the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) are balanced against women’s rights in the Equality Act 2010. The GRR lands in this like dynamite lobbed in a fish pond. You can only support the GRR getting royal assent if you’re happy to forsake women’s rights. – Janice Turner

For starters emergency housing is in the social development portfolio. The take-over of motels leading to social mayhem (think Rotorua) has been a tragedy for those housed in them and those in their surrounds. The waiting list for public housing has sky-rocketed since Sepuloni has been Minister. – Lindsay Mitchell

Worst of all Sepuloni has overseen a rise in children living in unemployed homes. The damage to their outcomes is well researched and documented. But unheeded by this government whose sole focus has been to lift incomes with their fingers firmly in their ears over the unintended consequences of paying people to do nothing … except have children.

If all of the above is “excelling” I hate to envisage what failing looks like.

Sepuloni has not been a great Minister. That the media are painting her as such demonstrates ignorance and bias. The only thing that has kept the social development portfolio largely away from the headlines is the comparatively worse performance of police, education and health. – Lindsay Mitchell

It’s all well and good that they [World Athletics] are putting restrictions in on the testosterone levels, and extending the number of years to qualify and so on… but none of that matters. They’d still be miles ahead.

I mean, the women’s shot is half the weight [of the men’s]. Apart from all the strength they’ve gained over the years, there is the height advantage, the wingspan, all the things hormones can’t replace… hip angles, lung capacity etc. Training would be easier for them. That’s just a fact.

If this happens I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a lot of world records fall to trans athletes. – Amelia Strickler

Basically all governing bodies right now are under pressure to issue guidelines. We’ve basically been waiting for it. The fact that World Athletics, one of the biggest, has not [put] its foot down, I think it is really, really upsetting. I think these rules really could open the floodgates.

There will be a lot, I think, who say ‘Well, I’ve waited. I’m ready to compete. What do I have to do?’ And you know, women will be out of a job. Even if there are only a handful, do you put the feelings of a few above an entire sex? – Amelia Strickler

I haven’t come across anyone who is like ‘Oh, it will be fine.’ Even the guys are like ‘Yeah, you’re screwed’. There are jokes made [in training] like ‘Oh yeah, I feel like being a woman today.’ –

I’ve got no problem with trans women competing in a different category. Sport should be for everyone. This is about protecting women at the end of the day. I hope more of us band together to prevent this because it’s going to be the end. – Amelia Strickler

Some of the headlines have been ridiculous. There was one headline I saw the other day about the Prime Minister being driven from office by online trolls. I mean, that is so melodramatic.

It’s just bizarre because, one, it assumes that she’s reading all of the online troll messages from the misogynists and whoever. And second of all, it kind of undermines the fact the polls weren’t going well – Ryan Bridge

Any smart politician will look at that and they will say, ‘Do I have another campaign in me? Do I really want to be scrapping with Chris Luxon over the cost of living when I’ve just got us through COVID? I might be going on to some international job after this. The longer I am here, the worse my reputation will be tarnished as I go through a very bloody campaign. Wouldn’t the smartest thing to do would be to pull out now?’ And I think that’s what the Prime Minister’s done. – Ryan Bridge

I think it’s a little bit condescending and perhaps a little naive to say that this [online hate] played a role. 

Nobody gets to be Prime Minister without having a thick skin, nor does any Prime Minister have the time or inclination to spend their time scrolling through Facebook or Twitter comments. – Brigitte Morten

Watching Jacinda Ardern’s departure speech, I reflected that even though I invented the word cry-bully – ‘a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper, duplicit Pushmi-Pullyus of the personal and the political’ – in this very magazine way back in 2015, it’s never had so many adherents as in the past couple of years, especially in the political arena. From Trump refusing to accept he’d lost an election to Matt Hancock ‘looking for a bit of forgiveness’ from his jungle camp-mates, the age of the over-emotional politician is upon us.

And now here was Ardern – the Adele of Antipodean politics, every trespass against her public judged more in sorrow than in anger because she really did mean well– quitting her role as prime minister of New Zealand after five years and fighting back tears as she delivered her dying swan-song. – Julie Burchill

So much for the crying bit – but what about the bullying? Ardern’s velvet glove concealed a pretty heavy iron fist. She promised to reduce migration, with disabled migrants getting particularly short shrift. Her Covid policy was draconian, preventing New Zealanders abroad from returning and punishing unvaccinated citizens. In a speech at the UN she stressed the importance of not letting climate-change sceptics have freedom of speech on social media. Her hijab-cosplay in the wake of an attack on a mosque was yet another grim example of a privileged western woman showing off by wearing what is for millions of non-western women a living shroud worn under threat of death, as we see most recently in Iran.

But none of this stopped her from dazzling the useful idiots of the liberal press after she became the youngest head of government in the world when elected at the age of 37. – Julie Burchill

 If it was any other politician, her desire to escape a spotlight she seemed to find quite enjoyable as she posed for selfies in shopping malls might cause cynics to speculate that there was a dirty great scandal on the way and that this was just a politician looking to get the hell of out Dodge before the storm broke. But this is the hallowed Jacinda, who must not be confused with your average nasty politico when her public image seemed more in line with that of a religious leader; as the usually tough Beth Rigby tweeted ‘I’ve only ever seen political leaders forced out or voted out… but in Ardern we find a rare exception, who again shows us how to lead differently’.

But impersonating the Dalai Lama butters no parsnips with an electorate who are wondering whether they can afford the price of a pat of Anchor. In 2020 Ardern’s Labour party took more than 50 per cent of the vote – the first time a single party has achieved this since 1951 – but it’s likely that it would now poll less than 25 per cent. And it might be the ladling on of the virtue-signalling which has made former admirers of Ardern even more disillusioned than they would be with regular politicians. – Julie Burchill

Ardern – Big Sister with a side-order of saint – has been used frequently as a weapon with which to beat other unashamedly tough female politicians by Woke Bros who believe that females should happily surrender everything, from toilets to trophies in the name of #BeKind. – Julie Burchill

Once more, the demise of a female political leader has made me feel something I’m sure I’m not meant to feel – and that’s nostalgia for the sheer inappropriateness of Margaret Thatcher, barging her way into the twentieth century global village and behaving as no female politician ever behaved before or since. Though I was fascinated by Mrs T, I never once voted for her – I pretended I did, but the tribal pull of my Communist upbringing was still too strong. But watching Ardern shuffle moistly off of the world stage, I do wish that Attila the Hen was still here; how no-nonsense she was compared to the trans-maids of Labour and the Tory dullards May and Truss who sought to imitate her style. I’d love to see her reaction when faced with the idea that women can have penises or that policemen can work from home. Or indeed, the equally outrageous idea that a woman who reaches the top of the political greasy pole at the age of 37 can be some kind of secular saint ­– rather than just a fresh take on a carpet-bagger, whose shtick is now revealed as wearing perilously thin. – Julie Burchill

The abuse that has been directed at Ardern is horrific and it has escalated dramatically since the Delta lockdown. There can be no justification for it. None. It is vile, gendered, and intimidating. Let me state, on the record, that what Ardern endured is beyond unacceptable.

However, if you want to address a problem, you have to look at what’s causing it. Some of the vitriol and abuse is from a deeply ingrained misogyny in our society. It’s prevalent in our communities, in some demographics, and the abuse comes from women too. Sit with that for a minute. Many feminists – and I am one of them – don’t want to confront the existence of female misogyny in New Zealand, but it’s there. Female misogynists live among us. In decent numbers.

But the volume of abuse that has been directed at the Government and Ardern is enormous, and it has escalated. And that’s because of some of the decisions this Government has made. Some of those decisions have left normal, law-abiding people feeling caged, controlled, judged, fearful and trapped – and when people feel controlled, and they can no longer determine their own destiny, income, or their ability to provide for their family – they rise up. Anger becomes rage. Rage becomes abuse. – Rachel Smalley

Ardern lost her way this term. She went from being a very good communicator in the first three years, to talking ‘at’ us in her second term. Not to us, or with us. It was at us. Ardern’s communication style changed with the arrival of Delta – it centred on control and fear.

If you, as a Government, tailor your communication so that it divides society and pits the vaccinated against the unvaccinated, if you split families and deny New Zealanders the right to come home, if you make Kiwis enter a lottery to return to their country, if you use the COVID death count as the only method by which you judge the success of your response, and if you don’t listen to people when they arrive on the steps of the Beehive in their thousands and call for change, people get angry. Really angry. – Rachel Smalley

If Chris Hipkins takes away one learning from Ardern’s leadership, it is this. You don’t have to have all the answers. But you do need to listen to the people you govern.

Ardern, perhaps believing it was a sign of weakness, never engaged with some of the brilliant corporate and entrepreneurial minds that offered to help with our economic recovery. The Government never listened to the health sector as they pleaded for more nurses. It didn’t listen to the people running our hospitality and tourism businesses who had come up with ways to protect us, and at the same time enable their businesses to survive. Instead, desperate people who had spent years building a business, had to stand by and watch it collapse. It is people like this who got on social media and raged at Ardern. – Rachel Smalley

There can be zero tolerance for the abuse that has rained down on Ardern. However, to ignore the factors that have helped to fuel the escalation of abuse against her and the Government means we have learnt nothing.

This Government, led by Ardern, sat in a silo and listened only to those who supported their narrative. People’s lives and livelihoods crumbled. That fuelled a rage like we have never seen before.

We can learn from it, or we can spend the next year yelling at each other that Ardern was driven from office because of it.

Here is the uncomfortable truth for many. Ardern walked away. It was her choice to do so, and I applaud her for doing what’s right for her and her family. But Ardern wasn’t driven from the job. Ardern ‘is’ human. She likes to be liked and there’s nothing wrong with that. But make no mistake. Ardern chose to walk away from the job. – Rachel Smalley

Ardern knew better than anyone that she couldn’t win this year. She had more critics than supporters. The adoration that gave her a single-party majority government, had left the building. It’s a bitter pill to swallow if you’re one of her backers. I know. Why? Because I voted for her too.

So if you’re a politician, sit up and take note. You aren’t the only humans. Stop thinking of us as nameless, faceless people in polls. Stop thinking of us as numbers. Stop thinking of us as your voter base, or swing voters, or some other way you chose to categorise us. Instead, find better ways to listen to us. Truly hear us.

Because guess what? Just like you, we’re human too. – Rachel Smalley

He can say what he wants but the reality is, it’s the same staff, same team, same people, same outcome.

It’s a party that is frankly out of touch with New Zealanders. When you see rapidly rising food prices, you’ve seen business and farmer confidence at all time lows, interest rates going through the roof, schools costs, this is a party that has actually lost touch and is out of touch with New Zealanders – Christopher Luxon

We are going to have a very close election, no doubt about it.

We need to change this country and we need a government that can get things done and that’s what I am going to do. – Christopher Luxon

But neutralising unpopular policies won’t be a game changer; finding a connection with voters with a message that resonates is what sets leaders apart from politicians. That’s the political hoodoo bit – and it can’t be learnt. Just ask Phil Goff, David Cunliffe, David Shearer, or Andrew Little. – Andrea Vance

Ardern’s cult-like status, and the legacy of Labour’s remarkable turnaround under her leadership, was enough to hold the party machine together in the face of such huge problems. Hipkins won’t have that backstop.

If voters fail to deliver him the hoped-for political honeymoon he might find that the runway has suddenly got a lot shorter. – Andrea Vance

Ultimately, though, Hipkins’s prospects will be determined by how much New Zealanders paid for their groceries, Christmas presents and holidays at the end of last year, and how firmly the Reserve Bank responds in February.

If any recession is modest or avoided, unemployment stays low, inflation falls back towards the mandated 1-3 per cent band and the All Blacks thrash France at the World Cup opener in Paris on September 8, then Labour should scrape home for a third term. If any of those go wrong, Hipkins is toast. – Matthew Hooton

And lo, it has come to pass. The rise of gender ideology — which for too long was dismissed as too niche and irrelevant to discuss by those too sexist or just too cowardly to listen to women’s concerns — has now exploded into a constitutional showdown, with the UK government blocking Nicola Sturgeon’s wildly unpopular gender recognition reform bill.

For those of us who have been writing for years about the insanity of rewriting the law to accommodate something no one can even define (is gender a feeling? A soul? Simple masculinity or femininity?), this feels a bit like watching your local cult band play at Wembley. Or, to put it from the perspective of those who desperately tried to pretend no problems could possibly arise from a philosophy that tries to rewrite the human experience, insisting being a woman is a mere feeling rather than a fact, this is like having a stain on your ceiling which you tried to ignore, only for it to then cause your whole house to collapse.
It was inevitable the fantasies sold by gender activists would crash on the hard rocks of reality, and not just because of the endless internal contradictions (if gender is different from biological sex, and given that sport is segregated by sex, why are trans women now on women’s sports teams?). The movement is increasingly underpinned by a frothing misogyny that is becoming all too visible to even the most casual observers. – Hadley Freeman

Gender activism has become the permissible face of misogyny for a certain kind of allegedly progressive man. It gives them latitude to call women derogatory names and make spittle-flecked videos, insisting that anyone who has a problem with male-born people in women-only spaces is on the wrong side of history. The effect is men’s-rights activism, but the energy is very incel — shorthand for people who are “involuntarily celibate”. Incels rage online about women who selfishly refuse to have sex with them; gender activists rage at women who won’t just bloody well shut up about their concerns about safety and say what the men tell them to say.
One of the sadder fallouts is the wedge it has driven between women and gay men. Once they were natural allies, not least during the Aids era, when so many women stepped in as caregivers to men with HIV. – Hadley Freeman

Sturgeon is making a big mistake in thinking that by denying science and trashing women’s rights she looks progressive, because the public are smarter than that. And as with all the angry “passionate” men, women won’t forget what she’s done, and they won’t forgive. – Hadley Freeman

In just over a year, we have witnessed the disintegration of a leader whose 2020 tenure of absolute electoral driven power started with overwhelming public support, gratitude and reverence but descended into a myopic and confused authoritarian rule. We have graphically endured a lesson of incoherent government and state overreach which has been on a march of portentous marginalisation through the private sector. It has elevated a ballooning and unproductive state sector of ‘bourgeois’ excess.

The descent to implosion started with the alienation of the vulnerable rural poor, sole traders, the unvaccinated, small business and economic sectors that could not adjust to lockdowns and the downstream consequences of dislocation. Then bewilderingly the whole rural sector was signalled as the primary target of climate change ideology that was more like an atheistic religious purge. This however was only ‘opium’ to the urban green economic activists in a Wellington bubble. Not content with this tirade of totalitarianism and messing with the means of production the Labour government drove the ‘out of control’ train of 3 waters, a dual racially divided health system and the continued and extending legislative requirements of ethnic consultation. Indigenous elites can increasingly demand influence and potentially equity before any progressive economic or environmental change can occur.  – Alistair Boyce

The structure is elitest and tribal. This is opposed in its very nature to ‘western’ democratically structured governance with potential equitable redistribution of wealth (i.e. Democratic socialism in action).

This Labour government have significantly eroded the NZ democracy and its sovereignty by caving into an apologist academic elite whose catch cry is to blame all society’s ills on the effects of post colonialism without acknowledging economic, social and political progression and benefits. The prevailing Treaty of Waitangi analysis is opportunistic as opposed to realistic.

Indeed, under this Labour Government the rich and propertied have prospered while by any measure the disadvantaged pains have dramatically increased. Buying a house for most socio-economic demographics is now an impossible dream. The egalitarian socialist democratic ideal has been replaced by a new totalitarianism where ethnic and economic elites prosper, the state sector is elevated in a new realm of ‘woke’ privilege and the disadvantaged now have no hope or aspiration to climb out of the mire of socio-economic depravity. Lawlessness is endemic, on the rise and set to remain, becoming the next government’s problem. – Alistair Boyce

Any balanced debate of ‘co-governance’ has been actively stifled through control of the messaging through mainstream media by NZ on AIR and the State Journalism fund to the point where mainstream media business models are no longer sustainable without government funding. Any alternative view or debate on the government led version of co-governance is ridiculously labelled as racism. Most New Zealanders under 30 and substantial other socio-demographic segments no longer trust the simplistic homogeneity of mainstream pro co-governance ‘propaganda’.

The people are not fooled and were never consulted in the 2020 election campaign on the radical policies to come. Consequently large, marginalised segments turned into an active fifth column which proceeded to personalise, taunt and harass the government and in particular the leader responsible. Mainstream media analysis is missing the point. The reaction of the people is an effect of the cause, a betrayal by state sponsored totalitarianism, and they have been marginalised in greater numbers than arguably any NZ constituency ever before. It was a battle of wills. Jacinda Ardern was faced with the impossibility of taking the blame and directing a recourse going against both ethnic and academic elites and still losing an acrimonious and unforgiving election. The PM raised the white flag choosing to leave the field of battle than capitulate in a spiteful and vicious public election campaign.

Now Chris Hipkins inherits the battle and the impossible plan without a compliant and grateful mandate, but still with the power of absolute government. Without political restraint and in the absence of strong and coherent leadership, unrestrained power has been a poisoned chalice for Labour. How Hipkins deals with the Maori caucus and co-governance not only in practice but through the power of the state will determine the fate of Labour and himself. A double down on existing policy will result in an acrimonious division of NZ society and electoral annihilation. The choices of restrained continuance or a ‘cup of tea’ with a modified agenda probably won’t be enough to win the election but it might prevent a 4-term government tenure of the centre right. – Alistair Boyce

 It appears the dangerous and impossible experiment is over and unwittingly, naturally market led Liberal Democracy is winning the battle, reverting it to a skirmish and hopefully avoiding a damaging and unwinnable social war.

The likelihood is Chris Hipkins will hang on uncomfortably until October 14, fighting fires. Hipkins will get burnt like Labour leaders before him. Being a boy from the Hutt with another ‘westie’ (no matter how diverse) for deputy will not save him, as Grant Robertson could probably predict. That story could be breaking news and will wait for another day. In the meantime, Robertson has carefully removed himself and the economic equation from the immediate reckoning leaving the new PM the poisoned chalice and nowhere to run.

The lasting legacy will hopefully be a nonapologetic restrengthening and re-correction of an effective, equitable and democratic policy framework based in proven Western Liberal Democratic traditions. An ‘Aotearoa New Zealand’ that might help working kiwis, the disadvantaged in equal measure and small business get through the imminent recession, believing a better future is to come. But for the near future that will be in the hands of Hipkins, Robertson and the dynamic of direct democratic power…hold on to your seats, it will be a wild ride!  – Alistair Boyce

The menace of misinformation has been used to threaten free speech everywhere, from Nigeria to Russia to New Zealand to France to China. Nowhere, however, has the debate been as heated as in the United States, where Russian dis- or misinformation is widely believed to have influenced the results of the 2016 election which put Donald Trump in the White House.

However, a stunning article published earlier this month in a leading science journal, Nature Communications, suggests that the Russians probably wasted their money. The misinformation gushing across Twitter and Facebook made hardly any impact on voters’ views. After studying election activity on Twitter, a group of American and European experts in social media and politics found that there was “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior”.

This doesn’t mean that Russia didn’t work hard to sway public opinion – simply that its Internet Research Agency failed. – Michael Cook

The hysteria about the Russians sowed the seed of distrust amongst American voters. If Trump had been elected in a manipulated election in 2016, it was entirely plausible that Biden was elected in a manipulated election in 2020. The researchers conclude:

Indeed, debate about the 2016 US election continues to raise questions about the legitimacy of the Trump presidency and to engender mistrust in the electoral system, which in turn may be related to Americans’ willingness to accept claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election … Russia’s foreign influence campaign on social media may have had its largest effects by convincing Americans that its campaign was successful.

In short, where Russian saboteurs failed, the American media succeeded – they spread discord and division throughout the nation. There is a straight line between gullibility about Russian bogeymen and the “stop the steal” invasion of Capitol Hill.

The question of how much toxic misinformation on social media influences public opinion is far from settled, as the authors of this article acknowledge. But it seems sure that Jacinda Ardern’s dream of censoring the internet deserves to fail. – Michael Cook

I think it has been quite a divisive and immature conversation over recent years, and I personally think it’s because the government hasn’t been upfront or transparent with the New Zealand people about where it’s going and what it’s doing. – Christopher Luxon

I think about Kōhanga Reo, I think about Whānau Ora, innovations that were delivered within the coherency of a single system of delivery of public service.”

We believe in a single coherent system – not one system for Māori and another system for non-Māori – for the delivery of public services. Things like health, education, and justice, and critical infrastructure like three waters.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t want Māori involved in decision-making and partnering with Māori, we have a principal objection because New Zealand has one government: it’s elected by all of us, it’s accountable to all of us, and its public services are available to anyone who needs them.”

While we oppose co-governance of public services as just discussed I want you to know the National Party wants a New Zealand where Māori success is New Zealand’s success. – Christopher Luxon

Absolutely, a 50 year plan would be fantastic. One that couldn’t be hijacked by ideology or some blue sky thinking. 93% of our goods are delivered by truck and you can talk all you like about how that needs to change, this is what’s happening right now. You want your bread, you want your milk, you want your chicken, you want your furniture. Basically, you want anything that makes your life a life a lifestyle. It’s delivered by truck. And while we have that level of goods being delivered on the road, and while we have this level of degradation on our roads, it’s costing you and me. When the trucking companies have to repair their trucks because of appalling potholes, they don’t wear that themselves. They pass on that cost. And so we all have to pay for the degradation of our roads. – Kerre Woodham

Much has been written about Jacinda Ardern having to deal with the Christchurch terror attack, the White Island eruption and the Covid-19 pandemic. It is worth remembering that dealing with crises and disasters is part and parcel of being a Prime Minister. During his time in office, John Key had to deal with the Global Financial Crisis, two Christchurch earthquakes, the Pike River Mine disaster, and the Swine Flu pandemic.

But he could also point to his government’s significant record of achievement in managing the country from recession to a “rock star” economy – by reducing government spending, lowering the debt, freeing up the labour markets, and reforming welfare to support more long-term beneficiaries out of dependency and into work.

And that’s the problem for Jacinda Ardern. When she looks at her legacy, what has she achieved?

She claims to have improved child poverty, but the record shows otherwise. She claims to have built houses, but 1,500 is not the 100,000 promised.

Instead, tens of thousands of families are living in motels, crime is rampant, immigration failure has created a nation-wide shortage of workers, union control has removed flexibility from the labour market, the welfare system has again become a trap for long-term beneficiaries, and the inclusion of employment and house prices in the Reserve Bank’s mandate has taken the focus off inflation, leading to the serious cost of living crisis that is now enveloping the country. – Dr Muriel Newman

On balance, she deserves credit for knowing when to throw in the towel if her heart is no longer in it. But Ms. Ardern leaves with much of her promised agenda unfulfilled. It’s been thrilling to be on the world map. But in the end, her years in power were like those maps that left New Zealand off: flawed and incomplete. – Josie Pagani

In the wake of Ardern’s abrupt resignation, the mainstream media are determined to convince us she was hounded from office mainly because she is a woman and had to fall on her sword to escape unrelenting “gendered abuse”.

The fact Ardern has overseen a bonfire of what was a vast store of political capital just two years ago and was facing a resounding defeat at this year’s election has mostly gone unremarked among the flood of columns defending her as the unfortunate victim of trolls and misogynists. – Graham Adams

Well, journalists and commentators are angry — but not at her. The object of their ire is mainly the allegedly mean-spirited, stupid and ungrateful public, who apparently refused to sufficiently acknowledge and respect her virtues as Prime Minister. – Graham Adams

The increasingly visceral reaction to her steady undermining of democracy, and her government’s general incompetence, seems to be interpreted by many commentators as a case of voters failing her rather than the reverse.

Against reason, we are effectively asked to believe that a nation that gave Ardern an unprecedented majority in 2020 — alongside personal popularity ratings in the 70s that outshone anything John Key achieved — has become a deeply misogynistic nation in just two years.

And this despite the fact Ardern herself has denied that misogynistic abuse played any part in her resignation. As she told Newshub when asked whether misogyny influenced her decision: – Graham Adams

It is evident from many reports that women in politics do receive more personal abuse than men but there is nevertheless a glaring imbalance in the type of abuse each sex gets and how they are expected to deal with it. Male politicians are personally abused in ways that would be unthinkable if directed at females. – Graham Adams

Usually, a captain abandoning a sinking ship ahead of the officers, crew and passengers in the first lifeboat available is regarded as an unforgivable act of cowardice. The fact he or she might be tired, or stressed, or overworked never trumps their duty to those in their care.

Astonishingly, in New Zealand, most journalists have preferred to blame the passengers for losing faith in their captain despite the fact she has recklessly steered the ship of state, and her party, onto the rocks. The media appears to believe the passengers are at fault for objecting to the fact Ardern was taking them on a voyage they mostly hadn’t agreed to be on.  – Graham Adams

Ironically, Ardern has been complicit herself in an extraordinary legislative move to make misogyny official government policy.

The passing of the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act in 2021 — which introduces a self-identification process for changing the sex shown on a person’s New Zealand birth certificate — effectively makes being a woman a state of mind.

By making the definition of a woman a moveable feast that includes biological men she has helped erase the scientific and common-sense definitions that underpin women’s sex-based rights.

Now that’s misogyny. – Graham Adams

Those who continue to ferociously support Ardern, are those who can’t see beyond the health response. Yes, the decision to lockdown in March 2020 was a life-saving and unprecedented decision. The failings came afterwards. The management of our economy, and the failure of the leadership team to horizon-scan on issues like accessing the vaccine, rolling it out, the economic response, and the crucial role that immigration was going to play in lifting our productivity. That was lost, it seems, on Labour’s leadership team who went back to the text books — they opted for ideology as opposed to responding to the dynamic reality we were living in.

Now, that’s what Hipkins has to shoulder. Policy, policy, policy. What is he going to do? – Rachel Smalley

And that’s what Hipkins has inherited. He is going to have to face into the policy and reform vacuum that Ardern has left in her wake. What to keep? What to ditch? And what of the hundreds of millions of dollars, in fact, it will be over a billion, that has been invested in some of these policies that he will shelve. In a country with significant child poverty and inequality issues, that will be a very uncomfortable pill to swallow for Kiwis.  – Rachel Smalley

I am sure Hipkins is sincere in his belief in state education. His allegations regarding charter schools were reckless. An independent report found they were wrong. Māori and Pasifika pupils greatly benefited from charter schools.

Hipkins has announced he is doing a review of Labour’s policies. Reviewing Labour’s opposition to charter schools would be a good start. New Zealand’s ranking in the international educational comparison tests are the lowest ever. Māori and Pasifika pupils are voting with their feet and fleeing state schools. – Richard Prebble 

The most reliable predictor of election results is the right way/wrong way poll. For around 18 months the polls indicate most of us think the country is going the wrong way.

Hipkins can only win an election if he can produce a new agenda to take us in a new direction. He has no mandate for a new direction. He can only get a new mandate from an election. I do not know if Hipkins can win a snap election. I know if he waits until October Labour will be swept away. – Richard Prebble 

The Budget is due in May. With Robertson at the helm, Hipkins has an experienced Minister of Finance in budget processes. But that Minister of Finance is also experienced in spending large amounts of taxpayers’ money. Hipkins has promised to address the ‘inflation pandemic’ but high fiscal spend doesn’t help with this.

Perhaps the hardest thing for Hipkins to be able turn the boat around, is all the Government has said on its reform agenda. Being a senior member of Ardern’s team, he has been rolled out numerous times to defend government policies, thus providing plenty of file footage for use in the media and in Opposition attack ads.

Hipkins’ biggest selling point as the new leader is the experience he brings to the role. But he cannot distance himself from the Ardern era. He received the two-thirds majority needed to get leadership within 48 hours of Ardern’s announcement, which is likely to mean he needed to make a lot of concessions to his caucus colleagues.

Hipkins may be speaking a big game of going back to ‘bread and butter’ issues, but the logistical and political costs are likely to impede any ambitious U-turns. – Brigitte Morten

Ihe Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighbourhoods by John McKnight and Peter Block led me to realise that we, as citizens in the broadest sense, had ceded our power to central and local government at great cost to our sense of agency as communities. And that’s what the aftermath of the earthquakes had restored for a moment in time.

These writers warn us of the dangers of the dependency that results from governments fixing our problems for us; robbing us of our capacity to problem-solve, and reducing our ability to build resilience. And that is something we are going to need in spades as we confront the challenges we know are coming our way. –  Lianne Dalziel

Do we want to be consumers of government services, or citizens active in our neighbourhoods and communities, helping to solve problems that affect us all? – Lianne Dalziel

To anyone living with a rare disease, there are new, promising medications being developed constantly, so… don’t give up. Don’t give up on hope. There are always things being developed that can be life-changing. – Judy Knox

Imagine if mainstream British politicians were photographed at a demo at which someone was holding a placard that said ‘Decapitate coconuts’. A demo at which there were open, horrendous expressions of violent contempt for black people who hold the supposedly wrong views. A demo at which it was stated that such sinful ethnic-minority people should not only be executed but eaten, too. ‘I eat coconuts’, one of the signs might say. There would be uproar, rightly so. It’s unlikely the politicians would keep their jobs for long.

Well, the sexist equivalent of this scenario did happen, for real, in Glasgow on Saturday. Politicians were seen standing in front of protest signs that fantasised about visiting bigoted violence, not upon morally disobedient black people, but upon morally disobedient women. TERFs, as they’re called, which literally means ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’, but which really means witch, bitch, scold, hag. Anyone who has witnessed a hardline trans activist spit out the word ‘TERF’ will be under no illusion as to the misogynistic menace that underpins that four-letter slur. Yet while there is concern over what happened in Glasgow, there isn’t as much public fury as one might expect. – Brendan O’Neill

 Not seeing two hateful placards is kind of forgivable – not seeing that trans activism now seems to consist of little more than angry men bellowing ‘witch’ in the faces of women who have the temerity to disagree with them is not.

We need to talk about the hatred for ‘TERFs’. It is out of control. It is the most vehement form of bigotry in the UK right now. Over the past few days, we haven’t only witnessed gender-deluded men in Glasgow saying ‘Decapitate TERFs’. We’ve also had Reduxx magazine reveal the identity of the Scottish trans activist – a man – who wrote despicable violent tweets about someone driving a car into one of Kellie-Jay Keen’s gatherings of gender-critical women, so that we might see TERFs ‘exploding like bin bags full of baked beans on your windshield’. The same gender jihadist spoke about murdering Rosie Duffield with a gun and JK Rowling with a hammer. – Brendan O’Neill

A political party that harbours men who dream of battering women, and whose elected representatives are seen next to banners calling for women to be beheaded, and whose councillors compare women who defend their sex-based rights to the people who oversaw the industrial slaughter of Europe’s Jews has a very serious problem, doesn’t it? –  Brendan O’Neill

Sexist hate is a daily reality for women who question the idea that you can change sex. Witness those clips in which mobs of masked men yell ‘fucking scum’ and ‘fucking piece of shit’ at Kellie-Jay Keen and her gender-critical friends. See the rape and death threats visited upon JK Rowling every week. ‘You are next’, a lowlife said to her when she expressed sorrow over the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. Or just behold the low-level intimidation that attends virtually every gathering of ‘TERFs’. There will always be gangs of men outside gender-critical meetings; men horrified by the idea of women speaking among themselves about their rights; men who ridiculously believe that their feeling of ‘womanhood’ and badly applied lippy makes them women, too. Better women, in fact. As India Willoughby tweeted at the weekend, ‘I’m more of a woman than JK Rowling will ever be’. That’s misogyny, too. The idea that a man – yes, India’s a bloke – even does womanhood better than women is testament to the low view of womankind that’s been whipped up by the trans cult.

Any movement that attracts so many bigots really should have a word with itself. Any activist set that helps to make it fashionable again to call women witches really should engage in some self-reflection. For here’s the thing: while it might be the outliers of the trans cult who scream witch and issue death threats and say ‘suck my girldick’, their tirades only express with greater ferocity and spite the misogyny that is inherent to modern trans activism. The root idea of the contemporary trans movement – that ‘transwomen are women’ – is itself misogynistic. Its reduction of womanhood from a biological, social, relational phenomenon to a costume that anyone can pull on, even people with dicks, is profoundly sexist. It dehumanises women. It denies the specificity of their experiences. It turns womanhood into a feeling, something flimsy.  – Brendan O’Neill

The mantra ‘transwomen are women’ underpins the resurgence of misogynistic thinking. There is a traceable line from this mainstream chant to the fringe cries of ‘cunt’ aimed at any woman who says transwomen are not women; that there’s more to being a woman than feeling and image. The violent hatred for ‘TERFs’ might mostly come from unstable individuals online, but it expresses the sexism and intolerance that are absolutely key to trans activism more broadly, and in particular to its belief that a man can be a woman. We need a firmer fightback against the hatred for ‘TERFs’ and in defence of the things that are threatened by this new witch-hunt – women’s rights, freedom of speech and scientific truth. – Brendan O’Neill

Recently, the private schools and in particular some of the more established public schools, remind me of the iceberg that has melted over time, weakened by their misplaced love of child-centred learning and rejection of adult authority over decades. In such a fragile state, when the woke brigade comes searching, these schools flip right over, suddenly and without warning, bowing to the incessant cry against the privileged.

Once upon a time, public schools were bastions of traditionalism, setting the standard for the rest of us. The richer in society used to have a sense of duty towards those less fortunate and these schools made it their raison d’être to inspire young men and women to serve others. Many graduates from these schools would seek careers that would allow them ‘to give back’ and live out their duty. – Katharine Birbalsingh 

Help out at the local soup kitchen? Join the army? Become a teacher? Why do that, when all you have to do is join a Twitter mob that will cleanse you well enough to earn a quarter of a million a year in the City and read the Financial Times – Katharine Birbalsingh 

Hipkins’ actions so far have been positive, enthusiastic, and polished, further encouraging a hitherto increasingly anxious caucus that the party’s fortunes may be about to change. With Parliament resuming in three weeks, this is all good news for Labour. However, the rapture notwithstanding, Labour’s electoral mountain remains as high as ever.

In addition to all the usual problems facing a government in election year, Hipkins faces three potentially insurmountable challenges to conquer before election day – time, the deteriorating economy, and the “Jacinda factor”. – Peter Dunne

Even if he manages to successfully overcome these hurdles, Hipkins still faces the biggest one of all – history. Since Peter Fraser succeeded Michael Joseph Savage in 1940, six prime ministers – Holyoake, Marshall, Rowling, Moore, Shipley and English – who have taken over during a parliamentary term have lost the next election. While Labour’s delight in the smooth way in which this week’s dramatic transition has been handled is understandable and justified, it is but one step in the confirmation process. The final, decisive word rests with voters, who will have their say on election day. – Peter Dunne

We are very conscious that lower-income New Zealanders are being absolutely smashed by inflation.

The great shame is that Labour increased the minimum wage so much in previous years, but what you’ve seen has happened is that they have not been able to increase it as much in these inflationary years because they know it will be passed on. – Nicola Willis

Now, every year National was in government we increased the minimum wage – we think that is the right thing to do – but how much you do that by is a very careful balance.

Because what we don’t want is workers on the one hand being paid more, but on the other hand having to pay so much more in costs at the supermarket, on rent and other things that their wages just get eaten up. – Nicola Willis

Starmer has unwittingly revealed what ‘Davos Man’ is all about: he’s about escaping the irritating plane of democratic decision-making in preference for the rarefied company of the 21st century’s self-styled philosopher-kings. He’s about liberating himself from the constraints of democratic politics – especially the constraint of being answerable to the masses – in favour of chumming about with the better-educated, better-dressed better people of the World Economic Forum. For Starmer to dismiss Westminster, the Mother of Parliaments, the one institution over which British citizens have some direct and meaningful control, as just a ‘tribal, shouting place’ is depressingly revealing. It reveals his contempt for parliamentary democracy, and it reveals Davos Man’s belief that politics is better done away from us pesky plebs.

The World Economic Forum has been taking place at Davos in Switzerland every year since 1971. It’s an ‘annual jamboree for plutocratic banksters, avaricious industrialists and superannuated spongers to come together in an orgiastic eulogy to global capital’, in the apt words of the Spectator. – Brendan O’Neill

In Britain, a democracy, aspiring PM Starmer is constantly bombarded with tough questions, like ‘Do women have penises?’. He’s forever torn between the Remoaner instincts of probably every single person he knows and socialises with and the Brexit beliefs of vast numbers of ordinary people, including Labour-voting people. He has to go into the House of Commons, that tribal hellhole, and submit his vision for the country to the criticism and even ridicule of his fellow elected representatives. What a nightmare! Far better to be in the cushy surrounds of Davos, far from the madding crowd, in polite, agreeable meetings with polite, agreeable people, where you’ll never bump into a Brexit voter or a ‘TERF’ asking you yet again if women can have penises. Davos is sweet relief for a political class that likes politics but not the public.

This is what Davos has always been about. It is nearly 20 years since the political scientist Samuel P Huntington popularised the term ‘Davos Man’ to describe an ‘emerging global superclass’ of ‘gold-collar workers’. Huntington nailed Davos Man. He’s part of a powerful ‘class’ that is ‘empowered by new notions of global connectedness’, he said. Davos Man is ostentatiously ‘post-national’, said Huntington. These elites ‘have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations’. – Brendan O’Neill

This is the key dynamic in globalist politics. Globalism is not a plot by sinister rich people, even if the WEF’s use of phrases like ‘the great reset’ and ‘global redesign’ are a tad chilling. Rather, it is the outward, physical manifestation of national elites’ turn against nationhood; of their search for new forums beyond borders, and beyond public accountability, in which they might make decisions. For much of the postwar period, and with real vim since the 1970s, insulating political decision-making from public pressure has been the great cause of the modern political establishment. Hence, we’ve had the rise of the European Union, the founding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, annual gatherings like COP and Davos – all justified on the basis that there are some issues that are so large and complicated that it is preferable for them to be discussed and decided upon by clever people untethered from the low-information urges of ill-read national populations. Davos is less the cause of the crisis of democracy than its beneficiary.

The end result of this cult of political insulation, of elevating policy from the national sphere to the global one, is the rise of a new elite that views itself as borderline godly. – Brendan O’Neill

There’s a religious fervour to nutty comments like these; a fantastical vision of oneself as the messianic deliverer of humankind from doom. Now we know what happens to the political elites when they free themselves from public pressure, from us: they go mad.

It’s time to bring them all crashing back down to Earth. Back to the terrestrial world of nations and politics and accountability. Back from Davos to London and Washington and Paris. So what if they’re bored with the institutions of national democracy? These are the institutions through which the rest of us can express our interests and keep politics fresh and responsive. The gold-collared superclass might have little need for national loyalty and national government, but the working classes still do. – Brendan O’Neill

Prior to Ardern’s resignation, Willis said “It’s well past time for the government to present a real economic plan.” And she said the government had to come back from the Christmas holiday and deliver one. They didn’t. It’s now January 26th, and the government came back from holiday and delivered a resignation. There is still no plan. Inflation is static — a stonking 7.2% – and we can feel the cool winds of a recession blowing in.

The pomp and ceremony is over for Hipkins now. He has to get on and deliver – something his Government has never really achieved in five years. And when he puts forward his economic plan, he does so knowing that a student of one of our most effective Finance Ministers is watching on, and she’s waiting in the wings. – Rachel Smalley

Now, in his first speech as incoming PM, Chris Hipkins said his focus would be on the economy & cost-of-living. It constitutes a full re-branding of Labour. Why do that? To answer that question, let’s first define former PM Ardern’s legacy.

In a line, it was a focus on non-economic and moral issues. If you read Ardern’s Harvard address, it refers to the likes of abortion, gun-control, “misinformation” on the Web, future of democracy & her “kindness” agenda. She never spoke a word about economics. Of course, Harvard students & professors would not take well to being lectured on that subject – but loved every word of her class on the morals – giving her a standing ovation.

But that’s not where it ends. Ardern also tried to be a climate change leader & championed minimizing Covid-related health issues during the pandemic by imposing strict rules, which led to large economic costs. Those economists who advocated quantifying the benefits of these rules against the financial costs were branded cold, heartless types at the time – folks who callously put a monetary value on human life. – Robert MacCulloch

Ardern’s leadership only saw an ad-hoc, stitched together set of reactions to put out the many fires blowing up in the Kiwi economy. However, with no guiding economic model behind her, I believe her sincere & earnest attempts to put out those fires proved immensely stressful and over-bearing.

Today, Kiwis are too busy paying food, petrol & mortgage bills to philosophize about trade-offs between freedom of speech and disinformation on the web with kids at Harvard. Surveys show the cost-of-living is our chief concern.

That’s why Hipkins first act as PM was to rebrand Labour. He thinks Ardern’s reputation as a global leader righting the world’s wrongs has morphed into a domestic liability. Hipkins is branding himself as “chippy”, an ordinary Hutt Valley kid who needs to save his own finances before he can save the world. – Robert MacCulloch

 Many commentators are now suggesting that Labour will abandon identity politics and move to the “bread-and-butter” right.

But there’s a deeper problem our new PM must contend with; the issue of trust in institutions, particularly in the government. A recent Herald poll showed that 32 percent of respondents found the government untrustworthy, and 15 percent found them very untrustworthy. The Herald also found that 64 percent felt the country had become more divided.

It is important to remember that leadership choices and decisions have far-reaching consequences. Leaders are responsible for the environment they create. Cheerfully saying that you are happy to create a two-tier society with vaccine mandates after consistently rejecting the idea erodes trust. Trying to vote through an entrenchment clause in the already controversial Three Waters bill does the same. As do financial stimulus packages that exacerbate the gap between rich and poor. – Jason Heale

But here’s the thing; as a representative democracy, it is ultimately our responsibility as citizens to hold leaders accountable by voting. During their time in office, we also have the privilege of providing feedback in various forms, whether through writing to them or protesting if we feel we are not being heard. The way we do it demonstrates the trust deficit that many are seeing.

Given that a week is a long time in politics, the election is quite far off. A Curia Poll of people who voted for Labour in 2020 shows that many key policies are unpopular. In fact, our new leader’s primary challenge is rebuilding our trust in the government. That will heal divisions. As Thomas Simpson has written, “there is evidence from the US that political polarisation is now affecting the ability of ordinary citizens to engage with each other on issues which are politically significant.”

The trust challenge is a big ask; Ardern turned her party around within weeks in 2017; Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has to turn the country around in a matter of months. – Jason Heale

Politics has become a struggle between those with knowledge capital, versus those with financial capital. The people left out are those with neither. They used to be called the working class, and I’m on their side. – Josie Pagani

AI is picking up the way ‘’progressive left’’ voices present to the world. Thomas Piketty calls it the “Brahmin left”, those who see their mission as clerics instructing the masses. The goal is not necessarily growth or affluence for the many, but a society shaped by their own beliefs.

When did the left stop talking about poverty first, and the hope implicit in lifting people out of it? – Josie Pagani

The left mimicked by AI is not hopeful, it is catastropharian. We are close to extinction, not the authors of a world within reaching distance of being free from poverty for the first time in history.

We were once nation-builders, whose pitch was hope. Norm Kirk put it into poetry at a time when politicians were more preacher than party. He believed everyone wants someone to love, somewhere to live, somewhere to work, something to hope for.

Robots see a left in which optimism and red-blooded moral crusade have been replaced by a professional political class whose 10-point plan beats a 5-point plan.  –

The educated class supports a version of ‘’diversity’’ that manages to exclude diversity of opinion or life experience.

I’m not so interested in the horse race of politics – who is up or down. Politics for me is the joyfulness of life, or why bother? – Josie Pagani

Labour, I believed, needed to face some uncomfortable truths. I am not qualified to unpack the origins of misogyny in New Zealand – that needs to be explored by a team of psychiatrists and social anthropologists. However, I do believe the escalation in generalised online anger is fuelled by New Zealanders who, for two years, didn’t have a voice.

The Government didn’t so much run a tight ship through Covid, it ran a submarine.

It engaged only with those who supported its narrative, and never critically appraised its decisions or strategy. For months, we saw only Ardern, Ashley Bloomfield, and Grant Robertson. Progressively, we saw Chris Hipkins too, but our lives were shaped by four people who, collectively, didn’t engage with or listen to the people they governed.

If you deny people their freedom – even if you believe it’s in their best interests – and you don’t provide an opportunity for open communication, you will ultimately create angry, caged animals. This doesn’t in any way justify the horrific abuse that Ardern has received, but it hopefully suggests that New Zealanders can pull themselves back from the horrible, polarised place we find ourselves living in today. – Rachel Smalley

Words are lovely. Saying the right thing is great but doing something, anything, shows you really mean it.

I have no doubt he’ll get there eventually, but if you’re sworn in as Prime Minister on the same day the annual inflation rate is announced and it’s stubbornly stuck at 7.2 percent, you should be asking your finance minister for something, anything that’s in the works or relatively easy to hustle together to announce at your first big, official public moment in the job. – Tova O’Brien

This new regime is promising change in the weeks and months ahead, promising greater support for low and middle-income earners and small businesses. 

Getting out there and listening as the PM is doing with businesses here in Auckland today is important, statements of intent are important. 

But when people can’t afford crumbs, throwing a morsel their way will fill bellies and petrol tanks far more than words and meetings ever could. – Tova O’Brien

One of the characteristics of fame is that it is essentially Faustian in nature; to become a celebrity, one must sell one’s soul to the devil. It’s a highly questionable idea — why should there be such a price for being proficient at acting or music, for instance? — but it is one that persists, regardless of continual pushback from those in the public gaze. The reason it does so is not just down to the power of the media but also because it offers a sense of justice, or at least morbid satisfaction, to the public. We can look at the rich and famous, with wealth, status and lifestyles beyond our wildest dreams, and assure ourselves that there has been a terrible cost to their integrity, privacy and ultimately wellbeing, and suddenly the world seems just a little bit more balanced and just. Even the paparazzi, hated and courted by celebrities, have this Mephistophelean quality. – Darran Anderson

What is particularly illustrative and sympathetic about Prince Harry’s relationship with fame is that it was not chosen. In the traditional Faustian transaction, the would-be genius or celebrity sells their soul, knowing that the cost is damnation and believing that the gains will be worth it. With the royals, fame is hereditary, which is as much of a curse as a blessing. The transaction is one-sided. No deal is made and yet the individual assumes precisely the same debt. In a world, even a country, where children are born into horrendous poverty and deprivation, it’s difficult to have sympathy for someone born into immense privilege. Yet it is warranted, given that child we watched walking along forlorn at his mother’s funeral did not choose any of this.

The problem is that Prince Harry is now a man and no longer a lost boy. Though he has chosen an arguably noble route of walking away from an environment that had shunned him, and he has the right to speak his mind and tell his own story, he has not walked away from fame. Sympathy, like any resource, is finite. It is entirely reasonable to wish to escape the stilted environment expected of the royals, the stiff upper lipped omerta that hides a multitude of pain and sins, the expectations to be a well-turned-out blind eye-turning mannequin (some years ago, I found myself in the unlikely company of a drunken lord who informed me that the royals were pitied by the rest of the aristocracy).

It is even more understandable to wish to escape the glare of the lens that played a part in the death of a beloved parent. Having chosen Meghan and America, Prince Harry had the chance to transcend fame and to effectively defeat the presence that has seemingly haunted his life. He could go semi-privately into any number of ventures. Harry was not, after all, a signatory to the Faustian pact. One of the most tragic aspects to what has been unfolding is not just the painful reality of a family schism, but rather that at the brink of escape, Harry decided to return to the table to sign the contract. – Darran Anderson

The point where sympathy dissipates is with this issue of fame, the courting of it rather than the walking away. This is where the public’s role in the Faustian bargain comes in. This is what differentiates celebrities from the rest of us, the point of departure, and the judgement can and may well be merciless. By aiming for the echo chamber of the terminally online and the patronage of the American establishment, the wider sympathy is lost. It is especially frustrating as the prince had a chance to get out. – Darran Anderson

Here lies the deeper issue. Whatever you think of Harry and Meghan or the Royal Family, you are expected to think something — whether acolyte or tormentor. The public are the essential piece of the Faustian contract, as much as the media. We are its creditors. When it is signed, what might begin as human sympathy becomes a detached form of judgement. The figures we gaze at become dehumanised, either as saints or demons. The weight of having to play these roles or simply being perceived as such is no small thing, though we can always say they are well renumerated for their troubles. It is worth considering what the gaze of the media does to such figures, and Prince Harry’s life is an ongoing example, but it is also worth considering what it is doing to those of us who watch. – Darran Anderson

Accuracy is the cornerstone of journalism, especially when it comes to news reporting. If a man appeared in court, claiming to be a brain surgeon when he was actually a hospital porter, we wouldn’t expect a headline announcing ‘brain surgeon convicted of rape’. The same rule should apply to other obviously untrue claims.-

At a time when it has become routine for male defendants to be referred to in court reports as ‘she’, such a high-profile case presented newspapers and websites with a stark dilemma. The judges’ bench book, which consists of guidance rather than law, says it is a matter of ‘common courtesy’ to use the personal pronoun and name that a person prefers. Many women and some lawyers, however, think it is ridiculous — and insulting to rape victims — to enforce a pretence that a male defendant is female. – Joan Smith

The state the courts have got themselves into by submitting to the demands of gender ideology is vividly illustrated by the judge’s remarks to the defendant in this case: “Ms Bryson, you have been convicted of two extremely serious charges, this being charges of rape”. A woman cannot be convicted of rape, which is an assault involving the use of a penis. In a bitter irony, the prosecutor described Bryson’s evidence as “entirely incredible and unreliable” — yet the court accepted his claim to be a woman.

No one who has seen pictures of Bryson arriving at court in skin tight leggings believes that for a moment. Accepting his claim at face value has dire consequences, because it has been reported that he will be housed in a women’s prison while awaiting assessment, despite being convicted of violence against women.

Journalists should be calling out this nonsense, not going along with it. If editors feel it is being imposed on them by the justice system, why aren’t they campaigning against a blatant attack on press freedom? If it’s trans activists they’re afraid of, they need to get a backbone. Distrust of the media is widespread and this practice of ‘misgendering’ rapists is making it worse. – Joan Smith

It’s often difficult to distinguish the cunning from the stupidity, the foolishness from the evil, of the political class.

In Scotland, a bill has been passed to make it easier for 16-year-olds to change their gender on official documents and to be recognized as their chosen gender (the word sex has, of course, been expunged from the discussion, and will soon be as redundant as the word “unhappy,” which has now been replaced in common parlance by “depressed”). – Theodore Dalrymple

The multiple confusions of all this need hardly be pointed out. The term “gender assigned at birth” makes it sound as if the sex inscribed on a birth certificate was decided by the flip of a coin, that it was completely arbitrary and had no basis in objective reality independent of anyone’s will (it’s sex, of course, not gender, that’s assigned at birth). Moreover, to live as someone of the chosen different, that is to say opposite, gender suggests that there’s an essential difference between male and female, which difference it’s the ultimate object of transgenderism as an ideology to deny. If there weren’t such a difference, how could it be recognized that someone had lived as either of the genders? There would be no need for certificates. – Theodore Dalrymple

Naturally, not everyone in Scotland is opposed to the bill and there have been demonstrations (not very large ones, it’s true, but noisy and attention-receiving) in favor of it. I think this must be the first time in recent history, at any rate, that there have been demonstrations demanding what amounts to the abrogation of adult responsibility towards, and manipulation and abuse of, immature young people.

The most important question, perhaps, is what’s next on the progressive agenda, once the right of children to change gender (with present technology, they can’t yet change sex) has been granted? There will surely come a time when progressives will grow bored with the issue and seek another to give meaning to their lives.  – Theodore Dalrymple

Apparently, political agendas are okay in science so long as it’s your politics being promoted. The sad part is that so much of science is being damaged by the failure of advocates to understand that science is supposed to be largely free from political slants, and when a political viewpoint has permeated science, as in the Lysenko affair, it has always been harmful.  And make no mistake about it—the conception of DEI being promoted as the future pathway to “inclusive equity”, both here and in other science societies, is indeed an ideology, and one that can be rationally debated instead of being taken as a given that must be enforced. – Jerry Coyne

A child’s wishes must be taken seriously, but can be only one factor in reaching an overall decision about their best interests, in a highly charged and complex situation. Given the uncertainty surrounding diagnosis and treatment of gender dysphoria, the UK should, like Finland, Sweden and France, follow a more cautious path; we should end medication and medical transition for children and adolescents now. – Dr David Bell

The city has been badly let down: by a calamitous lack of under-investment in critical infrastructure, a mayor who lacks all the right qualities for leadership. Local emergency management, and critical transport agencies were caught napping. – Andrea Vance

This Government is already on thin ice with Aucklanders. There is no coming back from mishandling the emergency response.

And let’s not get carried away by a promising start. Hipkins is just a fresh coat of paint. The same weaknesses remain – competence and delivery. – Andrea Vance

Shuffling the chairs around the Cabinet table, and dumping a couple of policies, won’t be enough to convince a grumpy electorate Labour has really changed. – Andrea Vance

And so it ends. A most remarkable premiership has run its course and all we have left are the memories.

Well. We also have $60 billion of additional sovereign debt, an expanded social welfare roll, inflation, a generation locked out of homeownership, expanded restrictions on free speech, and a container-ship of social meddling, from a ban on plastic shopping bags to a law preventing the sale of cigarettes to anyone born during or after the reign of Sir John Key.

Ardern’s zenith was in the weeks after the Christchurch terror attacks.

Her leadership was powerful and sincere. The collective response to her genuine and empathetic reaction ensured that anger, both domestically and internationally, was directed at the one place it belonged: the terrorist. – Damien Grant

However, this brief season of national unity was used to force through a prohibition and compulsory acquisition of a range of firearms with minimal engagement with the usual democratic processes. – Damien Grant

Much has been written about the Covid response and the merits of the decisions taken. We are now in a position to reflect on the costs; both economic and social.

Under Ardern’s guidance we became a nasty team of 5 million.

We hounded the unclean out of their employment and our cafes. For anyone whose understanding of history is more extensive than whatever is taught in our schools, the sight of citizens having to show their papers to board public transport or attend a lecture was dispiriting. As was the public’s uncritical compliance.

Worse was to come. The Fourth Estate cowering on the balcony of the Third Estate as the marginalised, disenfranchised and desperate ranted in impotent rage on the lawn below is a metaphor for how civil society evolved under Ardern’s guidance.

Those protesting were not rivers of filth. They were driven by desperation and often delusion into an act of insanity no more deranged than demanding that a man languish in managed isolation as his father died in a nearby hospital.  – Damien Grant

As we look back, it becomes clear that we were in the grip of hysteria that was being used by the state to drive compliance.

What was done was done with pure intentions by those who believe with certainty that sacrificing the individual for the collective good is not only just but necessary. It is a rationale with a troubling legacy.

Yet the real gift Ardern has left the land of the troubled long white cloud is in the area of race relations.

Like most Pākehā I am not that interested in the Treaty. I have read the various versions, written columns on the topic, but like our current Prime Minister I’d struggle to rattle its principles off if put on the spot. And yet I, like most of my contemporaries, am perfectly happy with the process of dealing with historical grievances.

If land was taken, it should be returned, and if it cannot be then compensation paid.  – Damien Grant

I am suspicious about the elastic and ill-defined principles of the Treaty and believe that the Tribunal itself is operating outside its statutory remit.

Equally, I am aware that those whose lands were taken and ancestors attacked and killed by colonial forces breaching the Treaty’s undertakings feel that the regime is far too parsimonious, slow, and the compensation inadequate for the wrongs committed.

If you look around the post-colonial world, New Zealand has navigated these issues far better than most. The cost, in terms of our GDP, has been trivial, and the advantages of having a robust if imperfect process for resolving historical grievances far outweigh any errors at the margins.

Into this delicate balance crashed Ardern and her progressive thoughtlessness. – Damien Grant

We are moving from a regime where historical wrongs are being addressed, to a state where one ethnic class has an inherent and enduring political status that is based on their ancestry. This cannot end well.

It is possible that the reform remains in place amid a growing resentment in the wider population.

There will also be disenchantment when it becomes clear that this change does not benefit the rank and file within Māoridom but only those with the skills connections to capitalise on the opportunity. – Damien Grant

Ardern will forever be popular among those who are delighted not by what she did, but who she was.

In this she was the perfect post-modern prime minister for a generation who believe your identity matters more than your character, and where your intentions carry more weight than the outcomes of your actions. – Damien Grant

 People have stopped listening to Labour and simply don’t believe their promises. He can cancel a few things – but are they cancelled or just postponed?

Hipkins has been an integral part of the Ardern Government. As a senior minister and a close confidant of hers, he has approved and led much of the work that has been proven to be very unpopular.

Will people believe that he has changed his mind? More likely they will think that he is only cancelling some projects because he wants to win the next election. What happens if they do win? – Paula Bennett

Hipkins has already stated that he wants to see changes to our tax system. That he doesn’t believe the current system is fair, but he won’t make changes before the election. What will those changes be if he is PM after October 14?

We do know what Hipkins stands for. He has led much of the unpopular policy work over the past few years and he has not changed his ideology overnight. At a personal level I wish him well. However, this change of guard will not be enough to change the minds of the majority of New Zealand voters. – Paula Bennett

New Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ most urgent task is to convince Labour-sceptical voters his Government is different to Jacinda Ardern’s.

To do that, he needs to cut Three Waters immediately.

Nothing else would signal change as clearly as ditching Three Waters.

This policy is radioactive to voters. It is a symbol of how distracted and arrogant the Ardern government became.

Nothing screams “distracted” more than Labour pouring huge amounts of energy, money and time into water reform while Kiwis struggle to pay their mortgages and grocery bills.

Nothing screams “arrogant” more than Labour forging ahead with a policy voters hate. Hatred is not a strong word in this case. Voters filled town hall-style roadshows opposing it, they erected signs along rural roads begging the Government to drop it. Sixty per cent of Kiwis opposed it. Only 23 per cent supported it.

Few Labour policies generated more negative headlines. From the early dirty-tricks TV advertising campaign designed to scare voters with nonsense threats of filthy water, to Nanaia Mahuta’s attempt to entrench part of the law behind her colleagues’ backs. It’s been a dog from start to finish. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Hipkins will have a Herculean task on his hands convincing Mahuta to kill her darling. She has 14 other Māori MPs backing her up. 

The power behind the throne stays the same. Ultimately, a change in leader changes little.

This will test Hipkins’ mettle. How badly does he want to win the election?

On currently polling, he will lose. He can do any number of other things to try to win over voters: crackdown on crime, relieve cost-of-living pressures, wipe student debt. But, those things take time. Weeks, months, years. If he starts his prime ministership defending and pursuing a deeply unpopular policy, he’ll have lost the argument already. The phone – as they say – will be off the hook. What comes after that is defeat.

This is his chance to prove to upset voters that a Hipkins Government is not more of the same. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Mark it in your diary: the bicentenary of the Gaols Act 1823. The work of the social reformer Elizabeth Fry, this landmark law mandated sex-segregated prisons with female inmates guarded by female wardens. When women were incarcerated among men, Fry observed, they were exploited, terrified and raped. She established a principle which became enshrined in international law, from UN protocols to the Geneva conventions. How, then, was history rewound, 200 years of evidence memory-holed, so that this week the double rapist Adam Graham was remanded in Cornton Vale women’s prison? How could a “robust” risk assessment by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) conclude he was safe? – Janice Turner

It is a sobering reality that among the many pressures young people encounter today the constant barrage or doomsday predictions is taking a devastating toll.  Being told the world will end removes the will to live especially if accompanied by a plethora of other negative impacts.

Many of the predictions are simply rubbish, a product of scientists desperate to hang on to funding or a tenure combined with a media using sensationalism to try and stay profitable.

The psychological pressure is becoming worse.  Not content with playing havoc with young vulnerable minds by piling fear upon fear using unusual weather events as weapons the climate change monsters are now setting impossible targets that they already know full well will be missed creating greater panic and feelings of hopelessness.

This manipulation of impressionable minds is unforgivable. 

‘Net zero’ by 2050 is blatantly unreachable. – Owen Jennings

Having aided and abetted the Extinction Rebellion nonsense the catastrophic propounding scientists and their media lapdogs are now teasing the fearful with unobtainable goal setting.  It is evil mind games. – Owen Jennings

Allan’s reform proposals will criminalise Folau’s critics. Are new blasphemy laws really what the Minister of Justice wants? –  Roger Partridge

The decision by Sport Northland to deny ‘Stop Co-Governance’, a community group, use of their Whangarei venue to hold a public meeting is illegal and defies the rights given to all Kiwis to voice their political opinions. This case, yet again, illustrates the contempt held by many for the foundational liberty of free speech, and it cannot be allowed to stand,  – Jonathan Ayling

Ardern was the target of an extraordinary amount of abuse, but the toxicity extends further than the outgoing prime minister. Over the last decade or so, any public figure or politician – regardless of their politics, gender, and ethnicity – has become increasingly targeted for abuse, especially online. It began well before Ardern’s prime ministership.

Any sober observance of John Key’s time as prime minister shows the incredible hatred and abuse directed his way in the eight years he was at the top. This included his family, and Max Key claimed in 2016 that he received “death threats twice a week”.

Some of the aggression towards Key wasn’t even widely condemned. When gallows and death threats were cartoonishly made in leftwing protests, they were generally contextualised as expressions of anger and contempt for some of his policies as Prime Minister.

But a line was crossed in Key’s time – encapsulated by leftwing rapper Tom Scott’s “Kill the PM”, which spoke of assassinating Key and raping his daughter. At the time, the song and its artist had plenty of defenders on the left.

Since then, New Zealand society has become much more polarised. A survey published by the Herald in December showed 64 per cent of New Zealanders believe the country has become more divided in the last few years. – Bryce Edwards

Yes, there were and are huge numbers of vile, sexist putdowns directed at Ardern. But the story of her rise to great heights has shown that her gender or becoming a mother while in office haven’t held her back in the slightest. If anything, New Zealanders strongly celebrated the progressiveness of having a prime minister become a mother while in office.

And the fact that the New Zealand Parliament now has a majority of women says something very striking about how gender is not the barrier for electability that it once was in this country. It could be argued Ardern’s gender and motherhood have been an electoral asset rather than a liability. – Bryce Edwards

The leveraging of Ardern’s personality and star power epitomised the trend in politics for election manifestos, policy, and ideology to be de-emphasised. In fact, politics has become “hollowed out”, and substance and depth are now missing in democracy.

Few people join political parties, and the historic ties between parties and traditional constituencies have been eroded. Without the social anchors of strong ideologies and ties to social class and other demographics, elections are more about personality and the attributes of leadership than ever before. – Bryce Edwards

The unfortunate flipside of having one personality embody and represent a party and government so entirely is that when the popularity of that institution plummets, it’s the personality at the top who becomes the magnet for all the discontent. Unfortunately for Ardern, by having her personify the Labour Government so totally, this has meant that she has been the recipient of, first the adulation, and now the blame.

Labour’s spindoctors might well have been smart to push Ardern to do the cover shoots, and develop a big media presence around her personality and charisma, but ultimately it became a double-edged sword.

The lesson is that the hyper-personalisation of politics is deeply harmful and unhealthy for all involved. The antidote is to shift away from personality politics. New Zealand political parties must rediscover their soul and substance, and not be based so much around leaders. They need to recruit members again, encourage their participation, and focus on policy development. Politics should not be an elite activity.

The media, too, could learn to focus less on personalities. The total concentration on Ardern’s star power was such easy journalism. But it came at the expense of a policy debate. – Bryce Edwards

We need a debate about polarisation and toxicity in New Zealand politics. An increase in toxicity, and especially the gendered and racial nature of it, is likely to increase. We need to find a better way forward.

But this is very different to presenting Jacinda Ardern as a victim. As some commentators have pointed out, this desire to turn her into a victim of abuse is somewhat paternalistic and patronising. Former prime minister Jenny Shipley has warned, for example, that “If we overemphasize the abuse question, it implies women can’t do this job and that’s not true.”

Even worse, is if partisans and liberal-leftists attempt to use Ardern’s departure to provoke a culture war. By painting a picture of “the deplorables hounding the Prime Minister from office”, such voices are just increasing the toxic polarisation in a way that prevents a sober discussion of the problems.

An unsophisticated condemnation of political opponents just drives up tensions and looks like petty opportunism rather than a genuine concern to help find a solution for a real problem. Instead of reducing the hate and rancour, such “call out culture” methods tend to be counterproductive and are a dead-end.

Instead, what is urgently needed is a better understanding of what is driving social divisions, and an acknowledgement that the increased abuse of politicians comes largely from our unhealthy personalisation of politics.

This focus on individual politicians and New Zealand’s shift away from collective ways of doing politics is fuelling a hyper-individualisation by which political careers live and die, leaving us all the poorer. – Bryce Edwards

One can well imagine the Prime Minister going through the Christmas briefing papers with care, then looking at the family, at the unread books, at the sun and the possibility of going fishing – and contemplating resigning. – Brian Easton

It can’t, obviously, be that people get more enjoyment about some things than others, and that making your own mind up about what you’re going to enjoy, and in what measure, is part of the joy of being part of a free society.

The last thing we would want to do, of course, is to organize a whole economic system around that idea.

The advertising of junk food is, to quote Jebb one final time, ‘undermining people’s free will.’ What we need to do, and fast, is to crack down on the office profiterole-profferers and Schwarzwaldkuchen-suppliers and put an immediate ban on all advertising of nice, tempting things.

Only then will be truly free of the scourge of office cake. –  Dr James Kierstead

The Government giving itself only three days to choose a new Prime Minister seemed, at least initially, heroic. If you take them at their word, pretty much nobody except Hipkins knew until Ardern rocked up to caucus and shared the news on Thursday. And yet, magically, consensus candidates for both PM and deputy were arrived at by Saturday morning. It was almost like they knew the answer to the question before they asked it.

The second one still has me scratching my head. Why would the outgoing Prime Minister announce the election date and then promptly resign? Isn’t that one of the most obvious things you’d leave to your successor?

It only made sense if Ardern’s successor and their campaign chair (Megan Woods) were all in on the plan, and everyone had agreed on the new team ahead of time. And my strong hunch is they were.

Third, Grant Robertson was remarkably relaxed about not becoming the leader and sacrificing his Deputy PM role. Now we know why. By jettisoning his Wellington-based electorate yesterday, he signalled he has his eye on the exit sign as well. – Steven Joyce

All this might be considered trainspotting except that it highlights that Chris Hipkins is very much the continuity choice for PM. These are the same people rearranging the deckchairs to make room for the fact that one of their number (quite reasonably) wanted to retire, but to leave everyone else’s position broadly intact.

There was no public debate about policy, no discussion about who best to lead the party and whether it should go in a different direction, just a “Jacinda’s going, you’re up Chris” agreement.

Sure, they will talk about changing things and Hipkins has done little else for the past few days. He of course can read the polls. Ardern was doing the same before Christmas, so even that is continuity. – Steven Joyce

And that’s the problem. From Hipkins down, these are the people who, for better or worse, have made all the decisions over the past five years which have landed us where we are. Robertson is responsible for monetary policy settings and the re-signing of Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr. He’s responsible for the huge increase in the tax take that is squeezing Kiwi families and the gargantuan levels of inflation-stoking government spending. He’s allowed his colleagues to go nuts with the regulatory burden on businesses, and the convenient pandemic-driven curb on immigration is straight out of his “Future of Work” playbook.

New Deputy PM Carmel Sepuloni has overseen the explosion in the use of motels as emergency housing and the rise in the number of working-age people on a benefit despite low levels of unemployment.

Hipkins himself has driven a massive expansion in the size of the public service, a poorly executed centralisation of the polytechs, and shrugged off some of the poorest attendance records our school sector has ever seen. To say nothing of obstinately refusing to alter some of the most egregious settings during the Covid lockdowns and border closures which left such a sour taste with so many New Zealanders.

Even if the four at the top really wanted to repudiate some of their previous decisions in order to win re-election at the end of the year, will the key factions within the Government allow that to occur?

There are two big decision drivers in this Government, the unions and the Māori caucus. The unions bring the money and the volunteers, and the Māori caucus can count. Not only do they have the biggest bloc of votes in the Government, they are the only group in parliament which can at least theoretically side with the Opposition and defeat the Government in a vote. None of that has changed. – Steven Joyce

There is nothing wrong with continuity when the people are broadly happy with their lot. In 2016, continuity was the imperative. But when the polls are dropping and the public says you are heading in the wrong direction, continuity is not what you need. If those at the top of the tree can’t shed some of their pet beliefs and deliver real change, the public will no doubt deliver it themselves.

So when the new Prime Minister talks about a re-set, are we talking about change to the core belief systems that landed us where we are today? Or are we being set up yet again with more of that pre-eminent skill of the sixth Labour Government, its sophistry, albeit this time delivered in a more folksy, self-deprecating manner? – Steven Joyce

Auckland’s floods are not our Chernobyl disaster. But they are a devastating disaster nonetheless. We will have to reckon with billions of dollars of property damage, disrupted lives and, worst of all, the loss of irreplaceable human lives.

And while the bureaucracy did not cause the flood, it does seem that a bureaucratic mindset impeded swift decision making and an effective response to protect the public. Which is no surprise because that is the deadening effect that bureacracy and officialdom has on leadership. – Liam Hehir

Bureaucratic structures, like the ones that failed Auckland so badly, are characterised by hierarchical structures, set rules and procedures the and division of responsibility. People with a rationalist mindset love these structures because they think they deliver efficiency and accountability to government operations. In practice, however, they create a diffusion of responsibility through impersonal forces, leading to people refusing to take accountability.

One of the major issues with bureaucracy is that it can create a culture in which people are more concerned with following rules and procedures rather than taking immediate action to address a problem or situation. After all, you can’t be criticised for following the rules. Because responsibility is shared, with no responsibility for the outcome, a sense of detachment sets in even in the midst of suffering. – Liam Hehir

Populists often campaign on promises to shake up the status quo and disrupt entrenched bureaucracy, but once they attain power, they often find the comforts and excuse making of bureaucracy too easy to hide behind. This is particularly true in situations where difficult decisions must be made and accountability is required. – Liam Hehir

How much confidence should the public have in authorities managing natural disasters? Not much, judging by the farcical way in which the civil defence emergence in Auckland has played out.

The way authorities dealt with Auckland’s extreme weather on Friday illustrated how hit-and-miss our civil defence emergency system is. In particular, the communications failures made the crisis much worse than it needed to be. – Bryce Edwards

Although the mayor, as well as the emergency systems and authorities, obviously didn’t create the disaster, they had a responsibility to mitigate its worse effects, which they did not do. Lives have been lost, the public has faced significant disruption, and there have been billions of dollars of damage to property. The failures of authorities mean that these consequences have potentially been much worse than they needed to be. – Bryce Edwards

Jacinda Ardern quitting seems like a long time ago now given all the news we’ve had since. But I can tell you my first thought was not – oh dear, misogyny forced her out. The true reason of course was the polls, the research, the divisiveness, the polarisation, the fact Labour was on a hiding to nothing with her at the helm.

Epic failures to deliver on so much, the arrogance that had crept in, the fact she clearly couldn’t stand the reality of not being popular anymore. Those jumping to assert that it was misogyny only discredit all women in leadership positions. We’ve had female leaders in this country for years, they hold their own, they don’t need coddling and defending and protecting.

Ardern just didn’t like the idea of losing. She wasn’t up for the grind of election year on the hustings with people giving her a hard time. And fair enough, that’s on her. I don’t begrudge her wanting to pull the pin on her ‘team of 5 million’ when it didn’t suit her. But even she didn’t want the misogyny defence. Even she argued that wasn’t a factor. She just didn’t want to do it anymore. Fair cop.

Although the whole thing did remind me of an Air B&B guest who trashes the place, in our case the country, then leaves without cleaning up. It was not – as may’ve been inferred – some late summer holiday revelation she had either. We now know it was all planned and arranged back before Christmas.   – Kate Hawkesby

Canny and clever of the Labour party? Or Machiavellian? It doesn’t really matter, the point is she’s gone, and somehow the media got sucked into thinking that a new leader means a whole fresh new Labour. 

How? It’s the same old government with the same old policies with the same spending habits and dysfunction that we’ve seen all along. Nothing’s changed. The guy who wouldn’t listen to dairy owners over ram raids, or fix the Police portfolio when he had it, or improve our woeful education or sort our Covid response in a way that didn’t divide the entire country, is now in charge.  – Kate Hawkesby

 Well last night’s two polls tell us it may be better optics for voters – who also seem sucked into the fiction that a new leader means a whole new approach to governing.

So a honeymoon bump? Or can Chippy turn it around for the party? I mean he doesn’t grate the average Kiwi the same way Jacinda Ardern did, but he’s still Labour, and they’re still useless.

So, my biggest surprise over the holidays was not Ardern quitting or Hipkins coming in, but the sycophantic response to it where he’s been painted as some kind of Messiah, and her as a dearly departed Saint. – Kate Hawkesby

The good news is there is no need to worry about Co-Governance anymore! Co-Governance is a thing of the past now!

The bad news is, we are now entering the stage of governance according to the Maori world view, and that is governance according to Te Ao Maori.

Te Ao Maori means respect and acknowledgement of Maori customs and protocols, it means embracing the Maori story and identity and recognising what that means, not just for Maori, but for all New Zealanders. – John Porter

New Zealand’s education is already in a perilous state. Why are we installing the vision of a minority at the centre of New Zealand’s secondary education system? This, without formal approval from the public, can only be described as a radical step with far-reaching and long-term consequences. – John Porter

If you want to influence and change thoughts or actions, where do you start? In education of course. In particular, the most impressionable: the younger generation.

Using education to influence and change thoughts or actions can be described as employing soft power.

Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes one prefers or desires. That can be accomplished by coercion and payment or attraction and persuasion.

Soft power employs persuasion and attraction to obtain the preferred outcomes. – John Porter

Very quietly and with no public debate (I can’t find any record of public debate), we see rollout starts in 2023.

To me, this simply continues Labour’s sponsorship of the Maori caucus and activists’ coup-by-stealth strategy.

Say nothing or very little and, lo and behold, we have governance according to Te Ao Maori! – John Porter

And so — pouff! — five and a half years after that interview, Ardern reached the end of the political road as Prime Minister of New Zealand (or “Aotearoa New Zealand” as she prefers to call the country).

Her sudden political irrelevancy was confirmed by polling taken after her resignation. It’s what anyone quitting a job, or a relationship, secretly fears most — that their colleagues or lover will be much, much happier without them.

That appears to be the case for Ardern. Two polls on Monday evening had Labour rocketing up the charts. – Graham Adams

Yesterday’s darling, Jacinda Ardern, plummeted to just five per cent — a figure presumably composed of loyal voters who either hadn’t heard she had resigned as prime minister or didn’t want to believe the terrible news, in much the same way the bereaved sometimes can’t believe their loved one is no longer going to walk in the door again.

Despite the brutal confirmation that she had become a liability to her party, and that voters prefer a Labour government without her at the helm, few doubt that Ardern will fall on her feet.

In fact, Ardern’s resignation and political death has undoubtedly been sensible in terms of her future — bringing to mind US writer Gore Vidal’s quip about the death of his literary rival Truman Capote as “a wise career move”.  – Graham Adams

Ardern prudently jumped ship before what promises to be a messy and possibly incendiary election campaign year kicks off in earnest.

And one that would have likely been humiliating for her as well given the intense animosity towards her had already prevented her from campaigning publicly in the Hamilton West by-election in December, which saw the Labour candidate win only 30 per cent of the vote.

By leaping for the lifeboats before the election wrangling gets properly under way, she has at least protected her battered reputation from further damage. – Graham Adams

Curiously, commentators — both here and overseas — have told us that Ardern left “on her own terms”. This is a new and interesting use of the phrase given the polls for both Labour and her personally had previously been in freefall.

In fact, for a Prime Minister faced with a bruising and bitter election campaign when the peculiar diet of empathy and kindness she had recommended as a panacea for the nation’s ills had mostly made things worse, her choice of whether to continue in high office must have seemed to her to have been devised by Hobson himself.

Very few commentators have been unkind enough to point out that Ardern had become Prime Minister in name only — as the entrenchment debacle last November showed.

Has there been a more pitiful sight than a Prime Minister abasing herself by claiming a late-night deal stitched up between her own Minister of Local Government and a senior Green MP to entrench an anti-privatisation clause in Three Waters legislation was a ”team” mistake?

It was painfully obvious that Ardern had to prostrate herself before Queen Nanaia, who remained entirely unrepentant about the humiliation she had visited on her boss (and her new boss, Chris Hipkins, as well, who was obliged to go along with the charade).

Everyone could see who held the whip hand — and it certainly wasn’t Ardern. – Graham Adams

The good news for Ardern is that much of the wider world doesn’t view her as the liability she had become for the Labour Party in New Zealand.

There has long been talk that, as Prime Minister, she was always conducting herself with one eye on the possibility of a plum job at the UN to take up post-politics, but she undoubtedly has other lucrative options as well. – Graham Adams

Ardern’s “values” will make her a shoo-in for addressing any “progressive” organisation keen, like her, on crimping free speech, and for those in favour of a “tweaked” democracy where the principle of “one person, one vote of equal value” is seen as “overly simplistic” — as she told Jack Tame on TVNZ’s Q&A last July.

And she will be prized by any organisation, of course, that wants to hear paeans to kindness and empathy, or jeremiads about misinformation and disinformation.

New Zealand has clearly had enough of all that, but the world will soon be Ardern’s glistening oyster. – Graham Adams

Somehow or other we need to rub together and live lives which are productive, where we co-operate with each other, where we compete with each other but we don’t do terrible things to each other. – Judge John Brandts-Giesen

There is no point in you playing the colonisation card and saying that it’s all being caused by other people.

Ultimately you make your own luck. – Judge John Brandts-Giesen

Economists write about the “wealth effect”, how rising house prices make us feel wealthy. The average Auckland household has been amazed to discover they are millionaires. Of course, it is only on paper unless they sell their house.

But the wealth effect is real. People feel wealthier; they are more willing to invest and spend.

The poverty effect is just as real. Many Aucklanders have lost 20 per cent of their wealth in the last year. Despite Mayor Brown’s cost-cutting, the Auckland Council faces huge costs. The weekend’s rain event confirms that the city’s infrastructure deficit is enormous. – Richard Prebble 

One of the advantages of our housing market is the willingness of Kiwis to move home. It makes for a flexible labour market. Downsizing in retirement means our housing stock is better utilised. A slowing housing market slows the whole economy.

For those forced to sell in a declining market, such as a divorce settlement, the house sale could be a life-changing loss in wealth.

As house prices have fallen all over the country, the poverty effect is countrywide.

There is nothing Hipkins can do about the poverty effect. Every month as the price of houses fall, home owners will feel poorer. Those with mortgages will have a double whammy, higher mortgage costs and a house that has lost value.

No matter how skilfully managed, it is events that overwhelm governments. – Richard Prebble 

The Cabinet reshuffle yesterday was all the confirmation we needed, as I said yesterday, that this is the same old government doing the same old stuff. 

Which is to be expected because they were never going to be able to just bring in fresh new experienced faces to shake everything up, because they don’t have any. – Kate Hawkesby

But here’s the biggest scandal in the whole thing, the most absurd, bizarre and inexplicable thing out of yesterday – well actually there’s two. But let’s start with the first one, the main one.

Michael Wood being made Minister for Auckland.

On what planet did Chris Hipkins look at the what Michael Wood’s been doing and go.. you know what? Awesome for Auckland. Let’s give him that.

I mean, come on, this is the guy that Aucklanders hate. And I mean loathe. And it smacks of a Wellington-based politician not to know that and be so disconnected from the real Auckland that he went so far as to put this guy in charge of it.

This is the guy whose genius idea was to build a cycle way across the Harbour bridge, which could not have attracted more protest and fall out before it got so unceremoniously canned. He’s also the guy who wants to lower the speed limits on all our roads. Thus grinding to a halt any productivity left in Auckland at all.

He’s also the guy wanting to dig up Auckland for light rail. As Transport Minister he’s done absolutely nothing about the woeful state of the roads, the potholes, the public transport, all of it’s a shambles.

Not only that – to make matters even worse, he’s also Immigration Minister. The very guy who has kept workers that very sector has been crying out for out of this country. Same guy.

The greatest irony of all was Hipkins comment on it which bordered on farce when he said, “When Auckland succeeds the country succeeds.” And yet, inexplicably, he thinks the guy who can help make that happen is the biggest impediment to success and productivity that Auckland’s ever seen. It beggars belief, doesn’t it?  – Kate Hawkesby

What is Hipkins seeing in these guys that we are not? Or is it, as I said at the start, that the Labour party just doesn’t have any talent and that’s now been laid bare for us all to see. – Kate Hawkesby

In a cost of living crisis, does none of this not concern us?

Are there not better uses for the money? Is it not a lesson in working out what you want to do, how you want to do it and how determined you are to actually deliver, before you open the wallet filled with money you don’t actually have anyway?

I just don’t see how a bloke, and they are all blokes, can take a job that doesn’t exist, in an entity that may never exist, accepting tax payers dollars – to twiddle your thumbs in a transition group going potentially nowhere. – Mike Hosking

Events has also taught us another lesson, a potentially dangerous one for a consumer society that requires for its functioning the constant renewal of desire: namely that a great deal of what we covet, desire or think necessary for our happiness is of very marginal or no importance at all to our well-being. But this, too, is a lesson that is likely to be soon forgotten: for if we had truly understood it, we should not have needed to be taught it in the first place. Normal shallowness will be resumed as soon as possible, as power is restored after a brief interruption. – Theodore Dalrymple

The emotion caused by an intimation of mortality is difficult to disentangle completely from sorrow in itself at the death of someone whom one has known and esteemed. So long as they lived, I could deceive myself, at least partially, into believing that nothing fundamentally had changed since retirement: that life would go on for ever and that age could not wither us. It can, it does, and it must. – Theodore Dalrymple

The mental picture when that legislation was passed was of someone who would not cause any upset in a women-only changing room, toilet, ward or prison, because everyone would just accept he was a woman. Events of the last few days should have made it vivid to everybody that that is not the cohort we are dealing with now. The trans umbrella is now taken to include people . . . who cross-dress for erotic purposes. – Naomi Cunningham

The proof in the pudding that if you hand out free stuff people become addicted, is to be found in the already alarming concerns being expressed as to how life will continue at the end of this month, and then again, at the end of March when the fuel subsidies come off.

The warning is already out from the transport people over the price of everything that’s transported, which is, well, basically everything.

Costs will have to be passed on – it’s the phrase of the age.

It was always going to be that way even though petrol is cheaper now than it has been – oil is at $85 or so a barrel.- Mike Hosking

We do of course still have a cost of living crisis, which the subsidy was supposed to offset.

But as the figures have shown at 7.2 percent, it is clear we don’t have the slightest idea how to reduce inflation and giving out subsidised stuff so that costs can be passed on only leads to more and more inflation. Which leads to us asking for pay rises, which leads to more inflation and so it goes.

The only way out of inflation is to bite the bullet and soak up some pain.

But Governments aren’t into that, especially in election year, and we aren’t into it any year. Especially if we can simply cry that we are poor and we’ll pass the cost on anyway.

False economics aren’t hard to understand, but they are dangerous to dabble in and almost impossible to get out of. – Mike Hosking

You can’t understand the economy unless you understand human nature and human circumstance.

The conversations that resonate with me are when I meet with families, and I talk to them about the sacrifices they’re having to make in order to make their mortgage payments; when I talk to small businesses and I understand what their priorities are and what’s driving them nuts and what would actually help them turn the dial.

And you have those conversations when you’re on the ground and when you’re talking to people.

And so I think the hours I spend talking to mums and dads on the doorstep, talking to educators, talking to small business owners will be crucially important and making sure I’m in touch with the real economy. – Nicola Willis

We believe that we are not getting enough value out of the spending that’s currently occurring.

And we put that down to a lack of discipline and the way that that public service has been both instructed and held to account for performance.

We want to have a return to targets, clear, measurable, specific targets that both give clarity of where performance is, but also being encouraging collaboration and encouraging a focus on single issues.

We think this Government’s had a tendency to throw the kitchen sink at public agencies, and they are left wondering which bit to pick up and which bit to relax, and the result is that not enough gets done.

So we want to bring back targets in focus and more discipline and getting execution out of money. – Nicola Willis

There is no question that New Zealand, in order to be able to afford the living standards New Zealanders rightly expect, like the continued progress in improvement in frontline education and health services, then we will need to grow our capacity to pay for those things.

I think the best way to do that is by growing the productive capacity of the economy, and that’s where we have stood historically as a party; that if you want better services, you want to be able to afford the things that we all want, you grow your economy.

You have to back the productive sectors and businesses. – Nicola Willis

We think there are some things that are easily forgotten and that I fear the current administration is forgetting that are critical to growth and investment.

And they are business confidence, business certainty and a stable fiscal and regulatory environment, and by that, I mean some of the orthodoxies matter.

We think the Reserve Bank mandate measures should be focused on price stability.

We think having the willingness to review their performance with the amount of stimulus they did is really important.

We think that having a really laser focus on what is the cost of the regulatory burdens being imposed on our productive sector.  “We think it’s important that you have capital flows working so that people can access funding.

We think it’s important that people can access labour; I think there’s been a tendency to think that the current immigration challenges are short term, are momentary, but I tend to think that we’re going to see a medium term demographic pressure where the rest of the world will be competing for skilled workers.

And we in New Zealand are going to have to make sure we’ve got our citizens and our offering right if we’re to have the people needed to fuel productive growth.

And I do think this question of being disciplined about the way the Crown does its part of the economy, how it delivers outcomes is also important. – Nicola Willis

I think New Zealand does get debt, and we are seeing now that a huge part of what’s driving our increase in costs are interest costs.

We are a small country; we are exposed.

We need to be prudent about debt but equally, and this is important; we do see the case for investment in productive infrastructure and infrastructure that supports good growth.

And we do need to make those long-term investments and consider New Zealand’s overall wealth position and not just not just the operating position.

And so those are the things that we’re weighing up.

But will we remain careful? Well, we remain fiscally orthodox. Yes, this is the National Party. – Nicola Willis

The extension is an extremely dumb economic policy; it gives three times as much support to those on the highest incomes who don’t need that much support, compared to those on the lowest incomes who need the support the most. – Brad Olsen

New Zealand is the second least corrupt country on earth according to the latest Corruption Perception Index published yesterday by Transparency International. But how much does this reflect reality?

The problem with being continually feted for world-leading political integrity – which the Beehive and government departments love to boast about – is that it causes complacency about the existence of real corruption and shortcomings in our democracy.

For example, one of the biggest failings in New Zealand’s political system is our entirely unregulated system of corporate-political lobbying. Unlike similar countries, we have virtually no laws and regulations to keep the political power of vested interests and the wealthy in check. This means that the lobbying industry is booming, and corporate lobbyists are able to move back and forwards between senior government positions and private businesses with almost nothing to prevent conflicts of interest. – Bryce Edwards

Lobbyists running the Beehive have become quite a recurring theme since Labour came to power. When Jacinda Ardern became prime minister in 2017 she immediately got rid of her existing Chief of Staff, Neale Jones, who straight away became a lobbyist. She then employed another well-known lobbyist, GJ Thompson, who helped set the Government up, employed the staff, and then shifted straight back to the private sector to help corporates lobby the Beehive.

Yesterday we learned PM Chris Hipkins has hired another lobbyist to run the Beehive – Andrew Kirton. The new Labour prime minister has therefore followed Ardern’s democratically dangerous precedent of bringing in someone from the world of corporate power and influence, who is likely to eventually go back to lobbying afterwards. – Bryce Edwards

The conflicts of interest involved in having corporate lobbyists come in and run governments are immense. In other countries, it would be illegal. Here in New Zealand, unusually, there are no rules preventing lobbyists from coming in and out of top political rules.

While lots of media analysis is given to the ministers running the country, especially when there are reshuffles, there is a lack of acknowledgement that it is the unelected officials in the Beehive who often have much more power and influence over what happens.

Therefore, it is disappointing that Kirton’s appointment is not receiving much publicity or scrutiny. So far, the news items about his appointment don’t even mention that he is a lobbyist, and instead there is a vague mention of him being a “PR man”. – Bryce Edwards

It’s time to have some clear rules about ministerial jobs and the lobbying industry. Currently, there is nothing in the Cabinet Manual to prevent the likes of Kris Faafoi or the various lobbyists from moving in and out of the Beehive. And of course, once Kirton finishes his job as Chief of Staff, perhaps in October, he will be free to go straight back into the corporate world lobbying government again.

At the very least, when lobbyists come into positions of political power they should have to manage their conflicts of interest with full transparency. If lobbyists are to be allowed to take on jobs running the Beehive, a condition of employment should be the full public disclosure of the clients of their lobbying firm. But don’t expect to find out who Kirton’s Anacta worked for anytime soon. This isn’t the culture in the Beehive.

When she was prime minister Jacinda Ardern was frequently lampooned for the promise that her government would be the most transparent government ever. We are yet to see how transparent Chris Hipkins will be, and how much he is willing to allow decision-making to be tied up with vested interests. But he is off to a very poor start by giving his top position to a corporate lobbyist. – Bryce Edwards

This Government, and the ministries that operate under it, have become far too comfortable with telling people to remain at home, and put their lives on hold.

Telling us to keep our kids out of school for a week is not a solution to a political problem.

It shows a frightening lack of critical thinking – an attribute that every senior leader should possess. – Rachel Smalley

You don’t stop kids in Otara from going to school because you want to clean up the streets in Herne Bay. Thankfully, the order to close has been lifted.

However, it also revealed just how reliant some of us have become on bureaucrats to tell us if our world is safe or not.

Know this. If you are a parent and you’re relying on a civil servant in an office in Wellington to tell you whether it’s safe for your child to go to school in Auckland, then you are doing it all wrong.

You, as a parent or caregiver, are your child’s first and last line of defence.  You decide. You do a risk assessment of your family’s circumstances, and you make the call. You know your child, you know your school, you know your suburb. It’s what we do as parents – we respond and react to the world and environment around us, to help our children learn and grow and negotiate life.

And at the same time, every day we place our trust in our child’s school. We trust them to make the right decisions. To protect them. To respond to a wide set of ever-changing circumstances and to ensure they are safe.  That’s why the Ministry should have passed the decision over to Principals to decide if their school could open or not. – Rachel Smalley

Parent. Look around you. You know what to avoid and what to do to keep your child safe. And it may be, in your area, that the safest option is to keep your child at home. Or your school may choose to stay closed. But that’s because you, as a grown-up, have made informed decisions about your child and the situation you’re operating in. You’re not waiting for a government ministry or the local council to tell you how to think.

What else irks me about this? Decisions like a blanket closure teach our children to avoid adversity, and to shy away from any situation that, God forbid it might help them build resilience. We’re teaching them that if it’s a bit challenging outside, stay at home. If you come across a few roadblocks on the pathway of life, step back from them and wait for someone to clear them away for you. Don’t try and find a solution.

And we are also teaching children that they are not in control of their own destiny….that there is no such thing as self-determination, and if in doubt they should always look for an institution or an organisation that will tell them what to do.

Instead, we should be teaching our children that every problem provides an opportunity for a solution. Yes, it’s wet outside. Yes, there are slips and challenges. And yes, it might be a bit scary. But this is how we’re going to mitigate those risks and concerns. It’s called life. And sometimes, it ain’t easy.

Let’s stop living in a nanny state. This is New Zealand, for goodness sake. So if you think it’s safe and you have the means to do so, put some gumboots on your kids, and get them off to school. – Rachel Smalley

That New Zealand has not been out of the top two places for a decade is testament to our commitment to being a transparent and honest democracy.

However, I note that over the years, New Zealand’s score has declined from 91 to 87. It is also concerning that Transparency International has pointed to a ‘gradual decline’ in three of the eight indexes that contribute to our global ranking. – Peter Boshier

We live in a world where opinion can pass as fact and misinformation can be easily spread. Now, more than ever, we need a public service, judiciary and government beyond reproach, – Peter Boshier

You can’t provide a clean car subsidy AND subsidise petrol at the same time.  That’s like David Lange banning nuclear warships, and at the same time he’s enriching uranium in Eketahuna.

Honestly, can anyone in our revenue and tax entities in Wellington think critically? Was there another solution? Can’t we support our most vulnerable kiwis in another way?

If you lower fuel prices, it will increase consumption and isn’t it extraordinary, that the same party who told us five years ago that climate change was our nuclear-free moment will now consider it a vote-winner to subsidise a fossil fuel.

If you believe in climate change, then live your truth people. You can’t yell at society to act on climate change, and then drink from a subsidised fuel pump.

There are better ways to provide targeted relief to kiwis – it just requires the Government to implement policy, instead of chasing populism. – Rachel Smalley

Social discourse is the tool of social interaction that acts as a carrier of meanings, ideas and values in society.

Wrapped up in that are manners and etiquette.

Etiquette is the set of norms of personal behaviour in polite society, usually occurring in the form of an ethical code of the expected and accepted social behaviours that accord with the conventions and norms observed and practised by a society.

Manners are a way of behaving towards other people. – Steve Wyn-Harris 

I know I’m not alone in thinking that what seems like an old fashioned idea – that good manners are important – is still as relevant today as always.

I’m not religious but the Bible’s Golden Rule, “so in everything, do unto others what you would have them do to you …” (Matthew 7:12) is a sound principle. So sound that all other religions have similar rules of conduct.

I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable about the change in social discourse in recent years. Not just in this country but all around the world.

Social media is not the primary cause but it certainly allows keyboard warriors to express their outrage and nastiness, often behind anonymity. – Steve Wyn-Harris 

When you hear that your prime minister – whoever that may be – has protection because of the number of death threats but, worse, so do her partner and four-year-old child, also because of threats, a rational and sane person has to believe that this is not the country we want it to be.

The threats need to be taken seriously because the mosque shootings show there are individuals even within this society who go beyond being keyboard warriors.

It’s not just the likes of politicians and journalists who have hate and unpleasantness directed at them in these times. – Steve Wyn-Harris 

None of us is ever going to agree with everyone else’s ideas or policies, and there are some people we may not particularly like.

But don’t we all want to live in a civil society that functions peacefully and where manners are important and other people aren’t threatening our own family members or directing public hatred in our direction?

Well, I do, and it may be a naïve position to take but we as a society should learn from this recent experience and as individuals do everything to discourage this behaviour. – Steve Wyn-Harris 

But history will record the Ardern government as our most incompetent with a legacy of disastrous decisions. Not only was Hipkins a key player in those hugely damaging blunders but he lacks any leadership imagery and instead oozes an uninspiring scout-masterly zeal. – Sir Bob Jones

White privilege is a myth. There are white people who are dirt poor and white people who are filthy rich. The racism of the Oscars is a myth, too. Witness the recent stunning successes for Latino directors, Korean directors, black-themed movies. As for Riseborough’s ‘privilege’ – this brilliant, chameleon-like actress has now been brutally reduced to her skin colour alone and there is virtually nothing she can do to push back against that. If she protests, she’ll be accused of ‘white fragility’, of shedding ‘white tears’, of using her power as a ‘white woman’ to harm others. She has been racialised and silenced. Some privilege that is. It’s clear as anything now: the new elites use the shaming accusation of ‘privilege’ to protect and extend the true privilege they themselves enjoy. – Brendan O’Neill

The great irony of the current political landscape is that without a viable centre party, Labour and National’s race towards the centre risks being undone by the parties to their extreme. – Thomas Coughlan

This week I see with horror a headline online ‘Three Waters appoints three CEOs’ and my worse fears were realized… Business as usual.

So, this was the kind of bread and butter stuff affecting struggling New Zealanders that Hipkins our new PM was referring to addressing? Fine words Chris, but behind the scenes nothing has changed.

Same circus different ring master – Wendy Geus

Through her great wit, expressed through her characters, Jane Austen offends everyone in her novels. She is the mistress of offence. That’s why we love her work. Students love her too.

But some academics still seem to think their students are snowflakes and need coddling. How often do we have to remind them, and university management, that students are adults? They must stop infantilising them. – Professor Dennis Hayes

There are deep problems with “kindness” as a political philosophy. If kindness is the answer to all problems, then the problems must be caused by unkindness. And people who disagree with you must be unkind people. Obviously you don’t have to listen when unkind people try to tell you anything. And you certainly don’t have to offer them the same concern or compassion as other people. Their unkindness is their own fault. You don’t have to do anything for it, or for them. And so “kindness” ends up being without empathy, the opposite of inclusion. Adern’s inability to deal with people who disagreed with or were disadvantaged by her government’s policies was striking. She seldom even attempted to speak to them and seemed incapable of winning over anyone who opposed her. In the end, her promise was empty. When policy problems could not be solved by having good intentions or meaning well, she had little more to offer. About a month before Christmas she announced that from now on she was going to concentrate on the economy, which begs the question: what had she been doing before then? Once she felt the need to grapple directly with the issues that most other responsible politicians concentrate on and struggle to solve, it seems that her motivation ebbed away. A fairy tale is over. Let’s hope there is going to be a happy ending. – Ian Thorpe

Journalism hinges on words. Used properly, they are precision tools. But a generation of journalists has emerged which doesn’t hesitate to use ideologically loaded terms of denigration to discredit people they don’t approve of.

Some of this can be put down to sheer ignorance – the inevitable result of an education system that produces journalists with only a rudimentary grasp of the English language and which does little to encourage respect for the accurate use of words.

To read any newspaper, even some of the more reputable ones, is to gasp at the amateurish writing and the frequency of solecisms that would in the past have been intercepted and corrected by sub-editors. – Karl du Fresne 

Ignorance, however, only goes so far as an explanation for the misuse of words.  A lot of it is attributable to prejudice and malice, most of it ideologically based. Hence the frequency with which we see the use of conveniently vague but disparaging terms such as far-right, alt-right, racist, fascist and misogynist – labels used to discredit any political position that doesn’t align with those of the political, bureaucratic, academic and media elites. (It’s another striking paradox that while we supposedly have a proliferation of malignant groups on the right, it’s almost unheard of for the media to describe any person, group or political party as “far left” – still less to suggest that anyone qualifying for that description could have less than wholly noble motives.)

The absurd and dangerous term “hate speech” should be seen in the same light. In the woke glossary adopted by the mainstream media, “hate speech” means any expression of opinion that upsets someone. But the term is used very selectively, because those pushing for the adoption of so-called hate speech laws are not remotely interested in protecting the feelings or opinions of people they dislike. On the contrary, they freely indulge in vile and repugnant invective against them. Hate speech laws are intended by their backers to run one way only: to shield people and ideas they approve of.  – Karl du Fresne 

Perhaps more to the point, the loaded phrase “hate speech” has been promoted with no regard for the real meaning of that word “hate”, which describes an emotion so extreme and intense that historically it has led to genocide and other atrocities. By applying the term to the expression of opinions that do no more than offend sensitive minority groups, the language activists have grossly misappropriated its meaning. But it serves the valuable purpose, for them, of providing a pretext for the outlawing of ideas they don’t like.

All this has implications for public trust in journalism. When readers can no longer rely on words being used with accuracy and respect for their established meaning, and when derogatory labels are used as lazy substitutes for accuracy and considered analysis, with not even a fig leaf of substantiation, journalism loses its moral authority. It risks being reduced to the level of propaganda, vilification and simplistic sloganeering. – Karl du Fresne 

 It’s grimly ironic that the same techniques are now used in the Western media by people who smugly think of themselves as liberal. The “othering” of dissenters is an inevitable (and make no mistake, intended) consequence.

I wonder, do those impostor journalists who so freely use damning terms such as “misogynist” stop to think what the words actually mean? – Karl du Fresne 

That such accusations are self-evidently preposterous doesn’t stop those who make them. And the frightening thing is that this virulent bigotry appears to have permeated the highest levels of the news media, where editorial gatekeepers decide what stories to cover and which opinions New Zealanders should be exposed to. – Karl du Fresne 

Inflation is high and the government says we’re in a cost-of-living crisis, with groceries and building materials front and centre. But those Korean companies’ roofing steel, along with galvanised wire from Malaysia and China, are hit with anti-dumping duties. So you’re protected from affordable building products. Doesn’t it warm your heart? Tariffs are love.  – Dr Eric Crampton

https://twitter.com/PronouncedHare/status/1621238368129662976

It is reasonable to wonder whether any conceivable harm to a few on hearing the occasional upsetting term outweighs the harm to everyone in suppressing speech. Or whether overcoming the relatively minor discomforts of an unintentional, insensitive or inept comment might help students develop the resilience necessary to surmount life’s considerably greater challenges — challenges that will are not likely to be mediated by college administrators after they graduate.

Rather than muzzle students, we should allow them to hear and be heard. Opportunities to engage and respond. It’s worth remembering how children once responded to schoolyard epithets: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me.” Narrow restrictions on putatively harmful speech leave young people distracted from and ill-prepared for the actual violence they’ll encounter in the real world. – Pamela Paul 

Most important of all, though, is that the bill has made clear that deadly violence of this sort and words are all on the same spectrum. Making a joke about someone’s God, saying that there are only two sexes – there’s little, of course, to distinguish such things from terrorist atrocities.

This is crucial, since our society has previously been acting on the assumption that speech and violence are significantly different, and that it’s precisely our ability to discuss things that allows us to avoid ghastly violence.

What fools we were! – Dr James Kierstead

When violent crime has increased by nearly a third, ram raids are continuing largely unchecked, and when Kiwis continue to face unacceptably long delays in the courts, any sensible Justice Minister would focus on effective responses to those challenges.

Hate speech legislation by contrast is not needed, and it will unnecessarily narrow free speech and expression in our country. – Paul Goldsmith

A fallacy that may have relevance this week is argumentum ad novitatem (‘appeal to novelty’). This fallacy is committed when a claim is made that a new thing is better than an old one, simply because it’s new.

Like other fallacies, the appeal to novelty has intuitive appeal. People like shiny new things and are biased towards thinking they’re better than old ones.

Two political polls were released last Monday evening. They were the first out since Chris Hipkins’ elevation to the Premiership. In both, the Labour government enjoyed increases in support of about five percentage points.

On Kiwiblog, pollster David Farrar listed the change in support for both major parties in the first poll following each leadership change since 1974. Following 17 of the 20 changes, the relevant party’s support rose. Yet only three of those new leaders went on to win the following election. –

Whether or not appeal-to-novelty has anything to do with this week’s poll results, Farrar’s data suggest that it often influences voters’ views of new leaders.

Democratic elections work most effectively if people cast their votes rationally. But the pattern of new leaders enjoying an initial rise in support only to go on to lose, is just one of many phenomena that challenge that assumption.

Even so, free elections entail the freedom to vote irrationally. And despite our all-too-human flaws, democracy has yielded the most prosperous societies in history. – Dr Michael Johnston

As a libertarian when a government cuts taxes I am pleased, even ones that are purportedly a user fee, because in fact so much of what is collected from those user fees is not directed to services consumed by the users – in this case fuel tax and road user charges.  It would, after all, be much better if the amount collected was what is needed to pay to maintain and upgrade the roads, rather than be directed to pet projects designed to “change behaviour” (subsidise transport modes you aren’t willing to pay to use),.

However, it reeks of hypocrisy, as the Ardern/Hipkins Government proceeds to undermine a land transport funding system that once was seen as a shining example in a world where political pork barrelling is so often the order of the day (see Australia and the United States).  It’s much more than that though. – Liberty Scott

So you have a Labour Government that says tax cuts (proposed by National and ACT) will threaten health and education…. but then implements tax cuts, completely blanking out the fact that this either means less money for other spending or it means more borrowing – for tax cuts.  How “sustainable” is that?

It says tax cuts will benefit the rich the most, and then implements tax cuts that do just that.

It says cutting fuel tax will jeopardise spending on transport, and then implements tax cuts on fuel.

Finally, it claims climate change is the great crisis that especially needs New Zealand, the country that emits 0.09% of global CO2 emissions  must radically change how it lives, by constraining private motoring, but then subsidises road use like no government in recent history.

Votes are much more precious that policy objectives though, as is leaving a fiscal bomb for the other side if the election is lost, although if it were up to me, the next government could think long and hard about whether it subsidises public transport and rail from general taxes anyway (assuming it wants to do that), and leaving fuel tax and RUC for roads only. – Liberty Scott

In my experience, everyone supports the right to freedom of speech, as long as it’s their own speech or the speech of people they agree with. But most speech falls outside that category. Most people would ask: why support the right of people to say things you hate, or fear or that you regard as dangerous?

That’s an intuitively reasonable question. I like some of what some people say, am indifferent to a lot of what is said and think we’d all be better off if some of what is said was never said. – Ira Glasser

Why defend the right of people to express views when such people, if they gained the power to do so, would eliminate my views, and maybe eliminate me?

For me, the answer is strategic. I can never be certain who will have political power. I can never be certain that the only people who get elected will agree with me. I know – because it has happened many times – that people will gain political power who will, if they can, act to punish me or people I agree with, because of our views. So what I need is an insurance policy. I want insurance against the probability that people in power will suppress or punish me for my views. – Ira Glasser

Sustainable energy, infrastructure, climate change mitigation and the continuation of modern life as we know it relies on mining,” Vidal says. “This is why the world is demanding more mining, not less, and certainly not bans on new mining or anti-mining rhetoric to politically play to a few.

“It would be concerning if by taking an anti-mining stance in this Bill, ideology isolated New Zealand from the rest of the world in the quest to resource a better future with minerals, responsibly mined in an employment environment that values worker health and safety, working conditions, and remuneration.

“The way we mine in New Zealand, within strict employment laws and stringent environmental rules and regulations is a benefit. It is not the case the world over. When people start looking at the provenance of their mined minerals, we are a country that stands out on the side of good. – Josie Vidal 

It’s been over a week, and it’s remarkable that Jacinda Ardern has simply disappeared from the politics of a country she exercised almost unprecedented levels of power over, for the previous few years. The (leftwing statist post-modernist identitarian) world has cried out “why”, and far too many have come to the conclusion that it’s no doubt sexism (in the country that gave her the greatest electoral mandate of any Prime Minister since 1951, and had previously had two female Prime Ministers).

However, Ardern’s resignation appears on the face of it to reflect two things:

• Fatigue from someone who isn’t intellectually or emotionally able to handle the time and the stress of the position
• Fear of an election campaign during which scrutiny will be its highest and the chance of defeat the strongest yet. – Liberty Scott

Of course in this neo-identitarian political age (a variation on classic chauvinistic identitarianism), Ardern’s age and sex were notable as an “achievement”, enhanced by her clearly being someone who never seemed to covet the role (which is now born out by her fatigability), made her a darling of international media.  The Anglosphere in particular is dominated by mono-linguistic types who pay little attention to the likes of Sanna Marin, the Finnish (young female) Prime Minister who chose to ignore the wrath of Vladimir Putin and seek Finland’s membership of NATO. – 

Ardern was notable for embracing an explicitly sympathetic and emotional image to leadership, and for declaring how kindness in government is a virtue. This is extraordinary from a politician who has led a government that, by and large, has sought to take more of people’s money, borrow more from future generations and to direct and centrally manage and control more intensely than any government since the Muldoon era.

I suppose Ardern will regard the generosity of her government with welfare benefits to be “kindness”, which of course is really kindness with other people’s money.  That “kindness” certainly will have relieved some poverty, but also contributes towards a dependency on other people’s money, and the labour shortage that has emerged since the end of Covid restrictions. – Liberty Scott

New Zealand has both a critical skills shortage, a restrictive approach to immigration and is generous to those who don’t want to work, but Ardern can’t connect the dots.  At no point has this government noted that being too “kind” with other people’s money encourages people to be economically idle.

The reality of the “kindness” narrative is no joke to the victims of ramraid attacks, and the growth in crime, because the “kindness” is interpreted as there being an easy ride for perpetrators.  The fact so many of the victims are recent migrants who own businesses is a community that maybe sees less kindness in the rhetoric, particular the notion that the reason some young people drive cars to steal stuff is claimed to be poverty, rather than opportunistic nihilism.

Another group not feeling the kindness includes immigrants who invested time and money into New Zealand and have been told to fuck off back home leave.  – Liberty Scott

Ardern’s Government was kind to the “right” kind of people, such as people working in horse racing, international film producers, America’s Cup syndicate employees, minstrels performing and businesspeople with stands at the Dubai Expo.  Average New Zealanders don’t have that sort of “pull”.

Then there are the Afghans who helped New Zealand forces not getting automatic visas to move to NZ after the Taliban took over.  What could be less kind that for people who worked with foreign forces not being granted residency when their psychopathic totalitarian enemy takes over?  However, the Ardern Government’s attitude to foreign policy was more about signalling virtue than substance.  Calling for a ban on nuclear weapons is the sort of naive student politics that demeaned Ardern, as was calling climate change her generation’s “nuclear-free moment”. Then again if she meant New Zealand taking action that would have no impact on a global issue or problem (which is what the nuclear ban achieved) then she might have been right.

A lot of money has been spent by the Ardern Government, yet the performance of public services continues to be woeful, not least because the incentives of prioritising the interests of vocal professional unions are not on consumers of those services.  – Liberty Scott

The narrative now being conveniently trotted out about Ardern is the abuse she receives from critics, and certainly no one can justify threats of violence against her and her family.  Yet her main opponent in 2020 was Judith Collins, and abuse of her is largely brushed to one side, and of course many of those who decry abuse of Ardern are more than happy to tolerate abuse of male politicians as Graham Adams wrote in The Platform.  I’m old enough to remember the constant references to Robert Muldoon as “piggy”, and the idea that somehow people shouldn’t be able to throw pejoratives at women in power any less than men is rather chilling.  People have the right to call their leaders names and be rude about them, even if it is puerile and they don’t like it, what they don’t have the right to do is to threaten them. Ardern undoubtedly gets some nasty threats, and different ones from men because she is a woman, but it’s intellectually lazy polemics to claim that the country that granted Ardern a remarkable mandate in 2020 is also dripping misogynistic hatred of women in power (despite having also granting a mandate for Helen Clark to govern for nine years), when hatred of men in power is just brushed over as part of the game.

It’s good for Ardern to give up, nobody should be in the job if they find it too difficult, but just over a week on, and it is clear that Hipkins has just tweaked the dials, and done little other than give the impression he’s a bit less woke-authoritarian, and he’s more than willing to extend unfunded tax cuts (fuel tax/RUC discount) and say he’s “reviewing” policies that Ardern and her whole government were dead keen on hanging their hats on. – Liberty Scott

My observation of the week is a lot of people didn’t really perform the way they should have.
But as I have said several times this week, I wasn’t expecting them to.

This country has been littered over the years with various disasters that weren’t dealt to properly because the people who frequent the emergency and civil defence offices are fairly mediocre.

You can add the Ministry of Education in this time around. Blame Wayne all you want but their performance was spectacular in its level of incompetence. – Mike Hosking

Wayne is a cantankerous old sod who doesn’t suffer fools. But here’s the thing – we knew that.

I think I might have had the advantage over many who got all agitated, given I wasn’t expecting much from anyone, I wasn’t disappointed.

You see, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t ignore local body politics the way most people do and then get grumpy when they don’t perform, it’s a two-way street. – Mike Hosking

Which brings us to the media. He doesn’t like the media and the media don’t like him.

Add also the fact the media in general take themselves too seriously. So when he calls them drongos, 1) he is right but, 2) they shouldn’t get so tetchy about it.

Wayne isn’t setting the world on fire but equally there is no doubt in my mind the media are out to get Wayne because they wanted Efeso Collins to win and they can’t believe the rest of the world doesn’t think like they do. – Mike Hosking

Which brings us back to the start of this – if we all actually participated in democracy a bit better this whole week might have been a lot different. – Mike Hosking

Journalists fawned over Jacinda Ardern and never highlighted her well-documented capacity to say one thing (“He Puapua hasn’t been to Cabinet”) while her ministers were busy implementing its recommendations. When the change came, journalists were happy to accept Chris Hipkins and laud his past achievements without being too specific about what they were. It was left to others to point out that under his watch as Minister of Education 50% of Kiwi kids were now wagging school. – Michael Bassett

Nor has any media outlet that I’ve seen probed the new Prime Minister’s confusing early utterances on co-governance. Yes, journalists informed us that neither Ardern nor Hipkins seemed to know the three short clauses of the Treaty of Waitangi, something in itself I’d have thought warranted comment? Hipkins tells us that he thinks co-governance hasn’t been explained adequately to the wider public who find the concept confusing. One might therefore have expected journalists to delve into what, precisely, the government meant when ministers incorporated this “misunderstood” concept into lots of Acts of Parliament over recent years? It might well have carried different meanings in different Acts. How will we ever know? – Michael Bassett

But of course, if the term “co-governance” can’t be adequately understood by the wider public, how on earth can “mahi tahi”? Constant use of improperly translated Maori words for everyday concepts in a world where only 3% of the overall population can speak Maori fluently lies near the heart of the public’s current unease with this government. The rush to re-name government departments, health facilities, universities with Maori names that almost nobody understands, not to mention the errors of fact that lie behind much of the New Zealand history curriculum signed off by Chris Hipkins as Minister of Education, and now taught in schools, is deeply worrying. People have a right to be able to comprehend the world in which they live and pay taxes. The nuts and bolts of co-governance must be spelled out by Labour’s ministers. – Michael Bassett

The longer this government is in power Maori demands keep ratcheting up. A clear explanation of co-governance is urgently needed. It is the responsibility of the Prime Minister to provide that. It shouldn’t be left to the unelected Judiciary. Nor can it be left to interested parties to provide their own versions.

What is becoming clear is that this Labour government is swimming out of its depth. In their determination to empower Maori with legislative authority and resources beyond what their population warrants, the wider public sees a growth of racial division throughout the land. Even if the new Prime Minister manages to redefine what he means by co-governance he won’t succeed in convincing 83% of the population of New Zealand that enhancing the rights of a small minority of the population over the rights of everyone else will do anything more than keep irritating the political scene. The reality is that Maori, Europeans, Pacific Islanders, Asians and those from other parts have equal rights if they are citizens of New Zealand. Article 3 of the Treaty that neither Ardern nor Hipkins seems to have read guarantees “the same rights and duties of citizenship” to all.

As they go about their jobs, media editors would be wise to remember that they owe a greater loyalty to the words of the Treaty than to the Labour government that is paying them out of the Public Interest Journalism Fund. It is public money, not a party political handout. Keep on behaving as you are and you guarantee that the PIJF will soon come to an end. – Michael Bassett 

Note to trans activists: no amount of cosmetic surgery turns a man into a woman. – Brendan O’Neill 

Just when you thought the trans ideology couldn’t get any crankier, here comes the face reveal. This is when a man who’s becoming a woman, or thinks he’s becoming a woman, takes to social media to unveil his surgically ‘feminised’ face to the world. Gone is his square jaw and big nose, fleshy giveaways of maleness, and in their place is a thinner, more dinky nose and pert cheekbones. Behold my womanly visage! It’s like a woke version of PT Barnum’s museum of freaks. Barnum pulled back the curtain to reveal women with beards – the face reveal invites us to roll up, roll up and gawk at the man who turned into a lady. – Brendan O’Neill 

The cult of the face reveal tells us a lot about the woke moment, none of it good. First, there’s the staggering and sexist double standards when it comes to cosmetic surgery. For decades now, the cultural elites have sneered at women who’ve gone under the knife to get a smaller nose or bigger breasts. Whether it was the Baywatch beauties of the Nineties getting silicone implants or even the Essex girls of the Noughties going for a less invasive vajazzle (Google it), the verdict was always the same: what shallow, self-obsessed broads! Yet now we’re meant to fawn over men who undergo insanely more meddlesome surgery in the mistaken belief that it will make them women. The same kind of talking heads who were aghast at vajazzles think a penectomy followed by vaginoplasty is absolutely fine (Google it. Actually, don’t.) – Brendan O’Neill 

The language our society uses changes dramatically when it comes to male-to-‘female’ surgery. Women’s cosmetic procedures are always jobs: ‘boob jobs’, ‘nose jobs’. Words like ‘plastic’ and ‘fake’ are bandied around. Magazines publish lists of celebs rumoured to have fake boobs. Trans surgery, in contrast, is ‘healthcare’. ‘Gender-affirming healthcare’, they call it. One outlet described Mulvaney’s FFS as a ‘trans-healthcare milestone’. It would be a brave soul who referred to a transwoman’s breasts as fake or plastic. They’d be cancelled in an instant. Which is ironic, because transwomen’s breasts are fake. The likes of Pamela Anderson are accentuating their real breasts when they have cosmetic surgery, whereas men who identify as women are basically giving themselves glorified moobs when they take ‘titty skittles’, as Grace Lavery refers to progesterone supplements.

These double standards expose one of the most sinister elements of the trans ideology: its belief that transwomen are not only actual, literal women but are better women than biological women. They’re the truest women. Embrace ‘your true self with gender-reassignment surgery’, surgeons say. We’re told that, through radical surgery, men who want to be women can ‘become their real self’ and find their ‘true identity’. Real, true – it’s about as far as you can get from the ‘fake tits’ discourse that swirls around women who have cosmetic procedures. The implication is that the body of the man who ‘becomes a woman’ is more authentic than the body of an actual woman, because he had to suffer so much to get it. His ‘femaleness’ is hard won, and thus holier.  – Brendan O’Neill 

The entire idea of FFS – as I will be calling it from now on – is misogynistic. It really does reduce womanhood to costume, to performance, a mask that can be pulled on by anyone, including those of us who have penises.  – Brendan O’Neill 

The belief that some hormones, a bit of face chiselling and a name change are all it takes to become a woman is profoundly chauvinistic. It robs womanhood of its biological, social and relational truths and makes it mere garb, to be donned by all who desire – Brendan O’Neill 

This is trans activism summed up: the entire category of woman undemocratically reimagined and rebranded to make it inclusive of men. They really are happy to overthrow millennia’s worth of science and truth, especially the truth that women don’t have dicks, just to make themselves feel better when they’re strutting around the pool in a two-piece. –  Brendan O’Neill 

 Here’s the thing, though: Mulvaney is only a zanier expression of the sexist self-delusion that underpins the entire modern trans movement. Dylan, you raised Frankenstein, and now it falls to me to tell you that just as Frankenstein’s monster never became human, so people born male never become female. No matter how much FFS they have. – Brendan O’Neill 

The policing of harmless language is becoming more ridiculous by the day.  –Simon Evans

The Associated Press (AP) had a good deal of oeuf on its mush last week, after one of its Twitter accounts warned journalists not to refer to the French as ‘the French’, as this could be dehumanising and offensive. – Simon Evans

The French were not singled out by the AP as a sensitive, easily diminished race. They were in a list of categories, with whom equal caution was advised. Most of the others, however, would be more universally pitied or condemned, such as ‘the poor’, ‘the mentally ill’ and ‘the college-educated’. So you can see why the French got le hump. After the French embassy in the US mockingly changed its name to ‘the embassy of Frenchness’, the AP apologised and deleted its tweet.

The AP’s general idea is that when the definite article (‘the’) is used to, well, define articles, to create sets, it can feel restrictive and even narrow to those who find themselves inside those lines. They would like to think they have more to offer to the world than their shackles. And I do understand that. Especially when those words gesture to a stereotype. – Simon Evans

The AP’s view is that one should find softer terms that suggest any given category is just a shade or perhaps a footnote in a person’s life – almost an afterthought, rather than a hard outline. Rather than ‘the poor, the mentally ill and the college-educated’, we should say things like: ‘Those living without funds, those facing mental-health challenges and those burdened by delusions of competence, aka bleeding know-it-alls.’ The problem is that this is only a mincing step away from the knowingly ridiculous, absurdly genteel variations you sometimes hear, such as ‘animals of the canine persuasion’.  – Simon Evans

It’s all very depressing. And this, remember, is not some deluded student body or a small municipal committee that has been captured by the woke. This is the AP – by some distance the largest and most authoritative news agency in the English-speaking world, and the source of the default style guide to writing elegant journalese. This is the guide hacks resort to in order to avoid getting hacked up by the sub. This is going to affect the copy you read (elsewhere at least).

While it’s obviously delightful, as a rosbif, to see insinuations of Frenchitude treated as if they were as intrinsically insulting as a ‘your mum’ joke, there is a wider if rather joyless point that needs making here, too – about the pointlessness of policing language.

The reason this nonsense is ever coiling around our ankles is very similar to the reason that we have, every day now, some fresh outrage in the name of trans rights or diversity, equity and inclusion. It speaks to a determination to overthrow the tyranny of language. It arises from a suspicion that language itself is to blame for human behaviour – that language has not so much described the world, but has created it.

It is possible, of course, to dehumanise a group by focussing on one aspect of its character, whether it is a nationality or something morally freighted. But you are not going to stop people making assessments of people, and noticing how groups vary. Nor – within limits – should you. Pattern recognition is a key human trait. It’s part of what makes us so adorably goofy. – Simon Evans

It might be hoped that this little French embarrassment alerts the AP to the folly of its Grail quest of creating a more sensitive lingua franca. Every so often, I like to hope that institutions like this, when captured by some mutant form of political correctness, will one day catch sight of themselves in the mirror, and like B-movie zombies – sorry, people living with being dead – recoil with horror.  – Simon Evans

Comment on the merger of polytechnics and industry training boards was conspicuously hard to find when the virtues of new Prime Minister Chris Hipkins were laid out.

No doubt, Labour was keen to give minimal mention to the unwise changes and the costly and delayed transition that was taking place under Mr Hipkins’ watch as minister of education.

The media, in the traditional honeymoon period for new prime ministers, had other focuses. Mr Hipkins, at least for now, received a free pass.

But the merger, ill-thought-out from the start, has been a dog.

It has taken towards four years, has already built an expensive bureaucracy and it will do little to help those who really matter, the “learners”. The establishment budget from the Government to the end of last year was $121million (although costs also have been put at $200million), and a lot more is going to be needed. – ODT

The Government has told New Zealanders that the primary goal of the Three Waters reform is to deliver good water services and related infrastructure in an efficient and financially sustainable manner. And the Auckland floods have certainly underscored the importance of reliable water infrastructure (though whether it is advantageous to wrest the responsibility for stormwater away from local councils, where it sits rather logically alongside urban planning, and centralise it, is an open question). The problem is that next to nobody believes that the plan that’s on the table is going to do the trick.

The WSEs will be so encumbered by a toxic combination of debt and dictates and directives that there is a risk that good water services in New Zealand are never delivered at a reasonable cost. And moreover, there is also considerable risk that one or more of the entities staggers under its massive debt and falls foul of the attendant covenants while in the midst of a multibillion-dollar build programme (recall that the plan is for these WSEs to quickly shoulder debt that amounts to some 8x their Ebitda, a load which S&P describes as “highly leveraged”). – Kate MacNamara

The competencies on the boards will need to include mātauranga Māori, or traditional Māori knowledge. And it’s not hard to imagine how a contemporary interpretation of Māori knowledge might find itself in conflict with some of the other public goods the WSEs are supposed to pursue: efficiency for example or financial discipline.

And there’s more. All iwi and hapū in the area covered by each of the WSEs will have the right to formulate directives, known as “te mana o te wai statements”, for their respective WSE. The scope of these is very loose and could extend to anything from employment and investment goals to environmental protection. We have little idea of how these directives will be used, only that the cost of improving the skills of Māori to participate in guiding the delivery of water services is, according to the DIA, an uncalculated cost and one that it will be borne by the new WSEs and therefore paid by water ratepayers.

There are hundreds of iwi and hapū in each of the water services areas (with the possible exception of area D, the lower South Island), and there may be hundreds of such directives, possibly conflicting one with another or with Wellington’s Government Policy Statement for the entities, or with the strategic direction from the Regional Representative Groups, or with the priorities of local councils and ratepayers, or with the stipulations of either of the two water regulators (economic and water quality). – Kate MacNamara

Hipkins would need a powerful spell to get it past his Māori caucus, but it could earn him a new desk plaque. A cursory search of the internet’s novelty shops for options throws up: Suck less. It’s not much of an election slogan but in the age of aspirational goals in politics, it’s a start. – Kate MacNamara

Trust the Italians to know what a woman is. The land where the twin peaks of femininity are the mamma and the sex bomb has a separate jail exclusively for ‘transwomen’.  – Julie Burchill

In the current trans debate, both sides see their humanity and dignity disrespected by either of the options on offer (make people with penises use male facilities even if they answer to ‘Penelope’ / allow female facilities to be swamped in male genitalia). Yet whenever a third way is suggested, like the Italian prison solution, it’s notable that the trans activists get very cross indeed. This is telling. If they really fear male violence in public conveniences or other sex-segregated spaces as much as they claim, a third option would be perfectly acceptable to them. But if their desire is to gain access to women’s private spaces, then they will hold out for that option.

Only a very silly person indeed believes that transwomen are only ever shrinking violets who just want to press wild flowers and urinate sitting down. Many of them are dirty great bruisers who could easily work as bouncers if the bottom fell out of the sissy-porn market. Make no mistake, trans ‘rights’ is the first ‘liberation’ movement both inspired and fuelled by pornography. Various ages and trials of a woman’s life can be sexualised, from the trans predilection for dressing up as little girls to the ghastly fake babies (don’t ask), which allow men to ape gestation and childbirth. Lesbians, of course, are the most loved and hated targets of these autogynephiles, which is thoroughly in line with porn-scored desires. – Julie Burchill

Incarcerated women have been failed by society every step of the way. Now, to take their wretchedness to another level, they are asked to meekly submit to an experiment in which convicted rapists are placed among them.

The fact that privileged female MPs who call themselves feminists put the porn-fuelled desires of men, even of rapists, over the rights of the most vulnerable women in society is a very bad look indeed. –  Julie Burchill

A visitor to New Zealand who read the Natural and Built Environment and the Spatial Planning Bills would assume our country was populated largely by Māori tribes whose customs and traditional knowledge could solve resource management challenges. In reading the Bills in more depth she would infer the tribes were impeded in using their knowledge by a powerful, yet unhelpful entity termed “the Crown.” To her relief she would then “learn” that 183 years ago the tribes and Crown had signed a Treaty which stipulated principles and the Crown’s obligations in relation to Māori. Legislation based on these principles and obligations was being enacted to ensure Māori had adequate input into natural and built environment and spatial planning issues.  – Dr Peter Winsley

However, when reading the Bills in isolation she would not realise that self-identified Māori make up only about 16% of the New Zealand population, and almost all have some non-Māori blood. Furthermore, few live on tribal land or live in tribal ways. If our visitor then read the Treaty itself, she would learn that the Crown obligations and principles stated were not actually from the Treaty and had in fact been invented from the 1980s on by judicial, political, and tribal activists. She would be surprised to learn that the Bills largely ignored 84% of the New Zealand population.

However, the biggest surprise of all would be the argument legislators seemed to be making that resources are best managed using Māori tribal customs (tikanga) and traditional knowledge (mātauranga Māori) rather than modern scientific methods and disciplines such as ecology, geology, planning, surveying, architecture, building, infrastructure, and property and contract law. – Dr Peter Winsley

The Natural and Built Environment and the Spatial Planning Bills are part of a wave of New Zealand legislation that departs from the progressive arc of history and are regressive. These Bills create new race-based rights and privileges that further divide New Zealanders.

The 1986 New Zealand Constitution Act marked the point where the Crown’s role was reduced to the symbolic and procedural, and our democratically elected Parliament became sovereign in New Zealand. In a Parliamentary democracy power comes from people’s votes not out of the barrel of a gun, or from tribal, judicial or political activism. Authentic democracy can only function in an open and informed society where people have equal rights and exercise them. This is what we are rapidly losing. – Dr Peter Winsley

Instead of treating all New Zealanders as equals regardless of race, this legislation confers extra rights on Māori. Despite some implausible Crown legal advice, the legislation seems to clearly breach section 19(1) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 that ensures freedom from discrimination based on race.

Compared to the current Resource Management Act the proposed new system erodes democracy and accountability to voters. It shifts much decision making to non-elected tribal representatives who may wield power far beyond what their numbers justify. While many of these people will be knowledgeable, skilled and dedicated, the overall impact is to reduce the pool of available (non-Māori) expertise that can be brought to bear in natural environment protection and resource management.

Good law needs to use unambiguous language, be clear in intent, provide certainty, and be workable. That is, people must understand and be able to respond to it. Common law has been built up over many years as precedents have been established and shared understandings have been widely adopted.

Terms such as ‘tikanga’, ‘kaitiakitanga’ and ‘mātauranga Māori’ are core elements of the legislation. Precise definitions of these terms will be needed for the legal system to function effectively. – Dr Peter Winsley

Inevitably there will be conflicts between tikanga and mātauranga Māori assertions and evidence from modern, universal science. The former may depend on custom and authority and the latter on evidence, and it is evidence that must prevail in a modern, open and secular society.

The legislation seeks to make Māori custom or tikanga sources of law within New Zealand. – Dr Peter Winsley

The resource management reforms are more about instituting a race-based system than creating a more efficient resource management system. It may be appropriate to intervene to overcome barriers to Māori engagement in resource management or any other such fields. However, the Bills do not remove barriers so much as create powerful new race-based institutions and regulatory processes that privilege Māori over all other New Zealanders.

The government would be wise to withdraw the proposed Bills and replace them with enabling legislation that does not discriminate on race lines. This legislation should vest decision-making in local communities and focus on improving the speed and lowering the cost of local decision-making processes. Decision-making must be accountable to affected communities, including but not limited to Māori. – Dr Peter Winsley

We’ve always considered ourselves a good society, and rightly so. But we’re struggling to maintain that position. The reality is that every aspect of a good and decent society requires serious improvement in our special little country. We may be sliding, but that slide is reversible.

You could say that this is merely a list of issues with little in the way of solutions. However, you can also read it as a list of aspirations or priorities. Aspirations to do better across a variety of areas where we’re currently not doing well. A shopping list for our future leaders if you like. Would you rather spend one billion dollars on helping overseas countries deal with climate change or on three new hospitals? – Bruce Cotterill

One thing you learn when entering public debates in the modern era is that you should be prepared for a trashing if you choose to defend people who speak out against those who set the rules that govern our society.

It isn’t hard to work out that the aim is to silence those who have, because of their own life experience, formed an opinion which may differ from the popular narrative.

And, as if to deter any support for these renegades,  you yourself will become subject to similar character assassination simply because you have chosen to bat for the other side.

It becomes a disgraceful exhibition of what happens when journalists have sold their soul to the highest bidder – the popular woke agenda. – Clive Bibby

Imagine that you’re a young white man, and that your lifelong ambition is to be a pilot. You put in hours of swotting up and apply to join a Royal Air Force (RAF) training programme. You sail through the aptitude tests, only to be knocked back after a Skype interview. You’re told it’s because you lack leadership skills – even though the course was intended to train you up in precisely this area.

Then, months later, you learn that women and minority-ethnic candidates had been ‘fast-tracked’ for the role. You learn that ‘around 160 cases of positive discrimination had taken place’ at the RAF. All, apparently, in an effort to meet ‘aspirational diversity targets’. You’d be forgiven for concluding that your gender or your skin colour was what led to your rejection. –  Joanna Williams

In the UK, ‘positive action’ is exempt from the usual rules against employment discrimination. Employers are allowed to assist groups of people considered to be ‘under-represented’. This is supposed to be limited to removing obstacles in order to create a level playing field for selection. But where removing barriers stops, and providing unfair advantages starts, is far from clear. Indeed, so blurred is the line between positive action and discrimination that even major employers – such as the RAF – can come a cropper.

This week, the House of Commons’ Defence Select Committee heard that ethnic-minority and female pilots were recruited to training programmes over better qualified white pilots in around 160 instances between 2020 and 2021 – all in order to improve the RAF’s diversity profile. That’s 160 men who had worked hard to fulfil their ambition, but failed on account of their sex and skin colour. We need to stop with the euphemisms: this is not ‘positive action’, it is sexist and racist discrimination.

This discrimination is not just a blow to the rejected applicants – it is also bad news for society as a whole. The public can be put at risk if key services are staffed by people who are not best qualified for the job. –  Joanna Williams

A police officer should be able to complete a crime report. But this week it emerged that the Metropolitan Police have been accepting ‘functionally illiterate’ applicants in a bid to meet diversity targets. In 2021, Dame Cressida Dick, then Met commissioner, promised that 40 per cent of the force’s new recruits would be black or ethnic minority by 2023. In order to meet this seemingly random goal, entry requirements have been lowered. Back in November, a review of recruitment and vetting by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services found that nearly 10 per cent of police officers should never have been admitted into the force.

Perhaps most troubling of all is the way that positive discrimination breaks the unwritten social contract that says through working hard, studying and playing by the rules, you can get on in life. It sends a message to certain people that their sex and skin colour will count against them, no matter how much effort they put in or talent they have. Racism and sexism are then legitimised.

This doesn’t just create new prejudices against supposedly privileged groups. It also breathes life back into outdated tropes. The efforts of qualified, capable women and black people, fully deserving of the jobs they have, are also undermined. When positive discrimination becomes the norm, people start to assume that success can only be achieved through a helping hand, rather than on merit. – Joanna Williams

Labour announced this week that if it wins the next election, it plans to introduce a new Race Equality Act. This would make it legal for black-led businesses to be given extra help to procure lucrative government contracts. Turn this on its head for a moment and the problem is immediately clear: white-led businesses will not be treated in the same way. They won’t be given extra help. The playing field will not be levelled, but tipped according to skin colour.

Tackling inequality is important. But it must not come at the cost of fair recruitment practices or getting the best people into public-service roles. If it is a lack of qualifications holding people back from getting the jobs they want, then we need to look at improving our education system, not selectively lowering entry requirements. Whether we call it positive discrimination or positive action, this grossly unfair practice benefits no one. –  Joanna Williams

Parties generally have to win Auckland to win the election. But for Labour – and for this year – it’s more true than in most elections.

That’s because Labour’s short of options. Rural NZ is out. Farmers and conservative county voters are too irritated. Three Waters, the climate levy plans, winter grazing rules, the ute tax. Labour’s bracing itself to possibly lose even the Napier electorate, a seat that’s spent more time in Labour’s than in National’s hands. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Generally speaking, Auckland is fed up with Labour.

It is hard to overstate the frustration and anger that developed in the city during Covid.

The lockdowns kept coming. They went on longer than Aucklanders thought was necessary. Jacinda Ardern was too patronising. She gave Aucklanders the freedom to picnic at friends’ houses but the instruction not to wee in their indoor loos. It would’ve been funny if nerves weren’t frayed. Then the city felt abandoned. Ardern didn’t visit. Then she was pressured, but when she came she flew in and out faster than the average international traveller spends in transit.

So last year, for the first time in the super city’s history, it gave the Labour candidate for mayor the finger and voted for someone else. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

He’s the man who thought spending $785 million for cyclists to get across the harbour was a good idea. Most of Auckland didn’t. It was so unpopular he had to kill it. He also thinks spending up to $29b on a light rail project to the airport is a good idea. He might soon have to kill that too.

As Transport Minister he personally made the call that led to roading authorities dropping speed limits on 1600 roads around the city. As Immigration Minister, he’s the guy keeping out the migrant workers that Auckland businesses keep telling the Government they desperately need.

It seems unlikely he’s the perfect man to win Auckland back for Labour. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

HOW OFTEN do politicians apologise? Sincerely apologise? Not offer voters the weasel words: “If my actions have offended anyone, then I apologise.” That’s the apology politicians offer when they don’t believe they’ve done anything to apologise for. The question is: how often does a politician offer voters an apology like this?

I dropped the ball on Friday, I was too slow to be seen …The communications weren’t fast enough – including mine. I’m sorry for that.

The politician speaking those words is Wayne Brown, the Mayor of New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. Justifiably criticised for his inadequate initial response to the torrential rainstorms that deluged his city on Friday 27 and Saturday 28 January 2023 (since described by meteorologists as a one-in-200-year weather event) Brown has publicly owned-up to his personal failings and said “I’m sorry.”

Not that Brown will receive the slightest positive acknowledgement from his many media critics for stepping-up and accepting his share of responsibility for the multiple failings of public agencies that occurred on the night of Auckland’s devastating rainstorm. The reasons for this are relatively straightforward: Brown is male. Brown is white. Brown is over the age of 65. Brown is also known to be openly contemptuous of journalists. And, most importantly, Brown defeated Efeso Collins, the mayoral candidate many (most?) Auckland journalists wanted to win. – Chris Trotter

It is remarkable how adept – and shameless – young and supposedly well-educated New Zealanders have proved to be at discriminating against their fellow citizens on the grounds of age. Journalists who would lavish barrels of ink on any person writing disparagingly about the personal appearance of a female politician, nevertheless feel free to dwell upon the ravages time has wrought upon the features of a “grumpy old man”.

That discrimination on the basis of age is outlawed in New Zealand cuts almost no ice with the sort of journalists who glibly describe Brown as “The Boomer King”. It is almost as if the journalists responsible for such ageist slurs are unable to recognise in themselves the same, deeply-ingrained, discriminatory impulses that they condemn so bitterly when manifested by racists, sexists and homophobes.

One can hardly avoid the conclusion that these ageists’ hatred for older human-beings is every bit as visceral as the racists’ hatred for people of colour, and the misogynists’ hatred of women. That they nevertheless feel free to express their prejudices openly is as worrying as it is shameful. Where is the Human Rights Commission when the “hate speech” it condemns so vigorously – and promptly – when directed at Māori, women, Muslims and the LGBTQI community is aimed, instead, at older New Zealanders?

The oddest thing of all about ageism is that every single person who indulges in it will one day (absent the worst sort of bad luck) grow old. How much racism would there be if every White person slowly became a Black person? How much misogyny, if every man turned gradually into a woman? When old age is humankind’s common destiny, ageism makes no sense at all. – Chris Trotter

That Wayne Brown proved the accuracy of the aphorism, by soundly defeating his younger opponent, Efeso Collins, in the mayoralty race of 2022, did little to improve his already poor relationship with “progressive” Auckland journalists, many of them a whole generation younger than himself.

Jacinda Ardern’s “Politics of Kindness”, and her Government’s strong support for Māori and Pasifika, encouraged the Prime Minister’s generation to look forward to Collins becoming the Auckland super-city’s first Pasifika mayor. If Auckland voters had been willing to elect Labour-endorsed has-beens like Len Brown and Phil Goff, then surely, Efeso would be a shoe-in? That Aucklanders might elect a “grumpy old man” like Wayne Brown struck Ardern’s generation of activists as preposterous. They were confident that their assumptions about the nature of contemporary politics and the shape of Aotearoa’s political future were unassailable.

That Brown won the mayoral race easily – principally by applying basic electoral principles to the structuring of his campaign – threw into sharp relief the organisational deficiencies of a generation encouraged to accord bold declarations and positive intentions the same ontological status as actual achievements. As an engineer, Brown is only interested in what works. So instructed, his advisers told him to target only those Aucklanders with a proven track-record of participating in local government elections. These tended to be older, and considerably less tolerant of political dreams and visions, than the younger, typically non-voting, Aucklander.

As it became increasingly obvious that Brown’s pragmatic, non-ideological, “Mr Fix-It” pitch to the active Auckland electorate was going to overwhelm Collins, the active dislike of “progressives” – most particularly those located in the younger generations – grew. Among the least successful at hiding their animosity towards Brown were the city’s journalists – a failure that convinced the newly-elected Mayor that he would be better off not engaging with them. – Chris Trotter

The reaction of the New Zealand news media – especially those elements of it based in Auckland – was depressingly similar to the United States’ news media’s reaction to Donald Trump’s “impossible” presidential victory of 2016. Unable to accept that it was the political incompetence of “their” candidate that made a Trump victory possible, the American media instead abandoned completely its cherished principles of fairness and balance. Henceforth Trump was the enemy to whom no quarter should be given. Brown, who had also won on the votes of “deplorables” and, like Trump, held most journalists in contempt, would be treated as a reactionary interloper.

It should not be thought, however, that journalists were alone in their animosity towards Brown. Across the entire Auckland City bureaucracy similar misgivings were growing at the prospect of Mr Fix-It telling the Council’s highly-paid managers and professionals how to do their jobs. It would certainly explain why, when the deluge struck, and many of the Supercity’s bureaucrats failed to respond effectively to the emergency, their first instinct was to make the Mayor the scapegoat for what was clearly a system-wide failure. And why the first instinct of the city’s “progressive” journalists was to help them.

Hence Brown’s all-too-public frustration and anger at his inexplicable early exclusion from a number of crucial informational loops. That exclusion in no way excuses Brown’s failure to be seen and heard by Aucklanders as the floodwaters rose and the crisis deepened, but it most certainly does explain them.

And Brown, at least, has had the decency to say he’s sorry. It would be most unwise, however, to hold one’s breath in anticipation of Auckland’s anti-Brown journalists and bureaucrats doing the same. – Chris Trotter

After every downpour, the desert flowers. It is a beautiful thing. Seedlings that have lain in stasis, sometimes for decades, spring to life.

So it is with climate change enthusiasts after each storm, cyclone, or howling gale. These earnest, gentle folk emerge from whatever chrysalis they have been sequestered between storms to bask in attention and relevance, before retiring back to their academic sinecures until the next scheduled photo opportunity or select committee hearing. –  Damien Grant

Given the weight of water that fell from the heavens, what is remarkable isn’t the instances of flooding, but the lack of them. – Damien Grant

For generations, engineers, civil and electrical, have designed, built and maintained the roads, powerlines, culverts and drains that were tested to their limits and, in a small number of cases, beyond them.

We are in this fortunate position because Auckland is a first-world city and has been able to afford to invest in its infrastructure and its people. – Damien Grant

In this we are not an outlier. One of the features of humanity’s recent history is that deaths from natural disasters have been falling, especially in the West, even as the population has been rising.

The primary reason for this is wealth. Rich nations built better and this matters when disasters hit. This isn’t controversial, but into the mix comes the complexity of global warming. – Damien Grant

The explanation for last week’s floods is that global warming results in the atmosphere being able to hold more water, which means that we can expect heavier and more prolonged rainfall going forward.

I can accept this without understanding it. What I cannot accept is that the solution to this problem is for New Zealand to reduce our standard of living in an attempt to placate the weather gods. – Damien Grant

We are bringing agriculture into the Emission Trading Scheme, and we now have the Carbon Zero Act that will provide a drag on economic growth over the coming decades.

The thing the environmentalists fail to address is the cost of their policy prescriptions. It is massive.

In the Regulatory Impact Statement for the Zero Carbon Bill, the cost was projected at between $7 and $12 billion per year, each year between now and 2050. This is cumulative and, almost certainly, absurdly optimistic. The overall cost of this single climate policy alone is around $300 billion.

We use carbon to power our cars, improve the productivity of our farms and heat our houses. It is the lifeforce of this country and we use it because it is cheap.

If we use alternatives we become poorer and – here is the kicker – the climate changes will continue.

The carbon that we emit isn’t the carbon causing the flooding. We are enjoying the pollution generated in New Delhi, New York and Beijing. –

We can make ourselves poor. We cannot stop the rains. – Damien Grant

We need to generate income in order to raise taxes and rates in order to build infrastructure. We need high incomes so homeowners can purchase quality buildings that will withstand the worst that mother nature throws at us.

Some estimates put the cost of last Friday at half a billion dollars. This is ugly, but it is a fraction of the cost we are imposing on ourselves in a futile effort to turn back the tides.

The solution to the problem of climate change is not simple and it cannot be achieved by the sacrifices that we make on these shores.

Those demanding we curtail our dairy industry, cease oil and gas exploration and pay ever-heavier carbon taxes do not confront the problem that these noble aspirations will have no impact, other than to reduce the ability of their fellow citizens to build the quality of infrastructure needed to cope with the increasing variability of weather challenges that their own models predict are in our future. – Damien Grant

There is nothing that says an inquiry means politicians can suddenly take the fifth and avoid responsibility for the duration of the investigation.

There is no right to remain silent for politicians and officials. – Tova O’Brien 

There was Dame Annette King, a political mother to Ardern and Hipkins from their earlier years. Now the High Commissioner in Australia, she stood among the media enjoying the show while Hipkins was speaking – occasionally offering her own running commentary on questions. At one point, he was asked what advice she had given him. “Heaps,” she said, not quite beneath her breath.

Hipkins’ start has meant he has not yet had time to invest in the wardrobe for such events – so she might want to advise him to invest in a tidier pair of shoes. – Claire Trevett

So another Waitangi weekend done and dusted.. and what did we learn?

Well, not much. I think part of the disconnect around it these days is the coverage of it. Why does it always have to get so petty?

What we learned was – who spoke with notes and who didn’t, who spoke te reo and who didn’t, who attended what and who didn’t. How is that taking us anywhere or telling us anything or bringing us closer as a nation?

We are not being well served here when we let the sneerers on the sidelines get news headlines out of their pettiness. – Kate Hawkesby

One of the arguments around our National Day is how we engage and involve people more in it and I’m not sure scaring them away from participating by judging everyone on how they participate is the answer. 

I personally could not care less who spoke from notes and who didn’t, I’m not sure off the cuff speeches are necessarily any better than ones with notes. Off the cuff speeches can get rambly and long winded.. and if you’re someone with a message to get across and want to make your points well, then having the foresight to prep and make notes on that seems like the right thing to do. 

So another day of petty point scoring and judging and in that is the lesson as to why Waitangi Day is something many people are choosing to ignore, rather than participate in. – Kate Hawkesby

Chris Hipkins is, at his best, a genial, funny and laid-back leader with strong relationships with the Parliamentary press gallery. He was often touted by the media as a “fixer” for the Ardern government, tasked with handling difficult and sensitive ministerial portfolios. As is so often the case with politics, however, the reality is different. – Liam Hehir

It is unlikely that this track record will really hurt Hipkins. As a new prime minister, voters will give him the benefit of the doubt. The press gallery also seems in no mood to apply the blowtorch to the man they affectionately call “Chippy”.

Hipkins has talked a big game in terms of reorienting Labour away from controversy and towards everyday concerns.

If he can deliver on lower inflation without increased unemployment then Hipkins may well be set for two terms (or more). But if not, then that will be something voters will not forgive.

But if past is prologue, his ministerial career is not encouraging. – Liam Hehir

It is now Islamophobic to talk about anti-Semitism. Dare to comment on anti-Jewish racism and you risk being called a racist yourself.- Brendan O’Neill

The women who spoke at the Glasgow rally are not just a wee a bit miffed about this – they are burning with righteous rage. This anger has made them effective and eloquent mouthpieces for an emerging women’s movement – a worldwide campaign against men who treat female bodies as fetish-wear. Representative of every sector of society, Standing for Women supporters are not moaning about ‘manspreading’ or penning articles in Gender Studies journals, they are demanding the rights back that the trans lobby has taken from them. – Jo Bartosch

It was hard to escape the impression that these were well-intentioned young people looking for a worthy counter-cultural cause. Inadvertently, they had somehow found themselves dancing on the side of both the establishment and of convicted sex offenders. – Jo Bartosch

It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that New Zealand is rapidly approaching a crisis point.

There are now two fundamentally different views of our future and there is no way to reconcile them.

On the one hand, we have the view implicit in the Government’s programme: that New Zealand is not a single country with citizens having equal rights irrespective of when they or their ancestors arrived in New Zealand, but rather a country with two classes of citizen. In one class are those who chance to have one or more Maori ancestors, always now with ancestors of other ethnicities, often indeed with those other ethnicities being in the majority. In the other class are all the other New Zealanders. And those with one or more Maori ancestors have, by virtue of that ancestry, inherently superior rights. – Don Brash

That ignorance has been fostered by the partisan advocacy of the Waitangi Tribunal which, contrary to the long-agreed interpretation of what happened when the Treaty was signed in 1840, has recently taken to asserting against all the evidence (of the speeches made by the chiefs who signed the Treaty and again subsequently at the Kohimarama conference in 1860) that the Treaty did not involve Maori ceding sovereignty to the Queen. – Don Brash

It is certainly true that turning back will be incredibly difficult. The notion that Maori chiefs did not cede sovereignty in 1840, with all the dangerous implications of that, has become deeply imbedded in the public sector – in our schools and universities, in local government (at least in Local Government New Zealand), in the taxpayer-funded media, and in government departments. In this view, those with Maori ancestors have a fundamentally superior right in the governance of the country. It is a view which is, of course, totally inconsistent with any notion of democracy.

But despite the assertions of what might be called the “anti-democrats” there are still those who believe in a society where every adult citizen has the same political rights. Indeed, I suspect that numerically they are in the substantial majority. 

Apirana Ngata, perhaps the greatest Maori leader we have seen since 1840, asserted in 1940 on the centenary of the signing of the Treaty that “Clause 1 of the Treaty handed over the mana and the sovereignty of New Zealand to Queen Victoria and her descendants forever, that is the outstanding fact today.  – Don Brash

David Lange gave a seminal speech in 2000 in which he said “democratic government can accommodate Maori political aspiration in many ways. It can allocate resources in ways which reflect the particular interests of Maori people. It can delegate authority, and allow the exercise of degrees of Maori autonomy. What it cannot do is acknowledge the existence of a separate sovereignty. As soon as it does that, it isn’t a democracy. We can have a democratic form of government or we can have indigenous sovereignty. They can’t coexist and we can’t have them both.”

In his valedictory speech on leaving Parliament in December 2000, Simon Upton said “I must express grave misgivings about those who would attempt to build a constitutional debate around an assertion that the Treaty involves a partnership. Not only is that not what the Treaty says. The idea perpetuates a fiction that we can solve our differences through negotiations between Maori and an abstract entity called the Crown.”

In a major speech in 2002, Bill English asserted that “the Treaty created one sovereignty and so one common citizenship.”   – Don Brash

It would be nice to imagine we can gloss over the chasm between those who believe the Treaty provided for co-governance and those believe in a democratic society where every citizen has equal rights by translating co-governance as “mahi tahi” (working together). We can’t. It is simply not possible to believe that the Treaty created a partnership between those with some Maori ancestry and the rest of us, and simultaneously believe in democracy. The two are fundamentally inconsistent.

In my view, the meaning of the Treaty is very clear: it involved chiefs ceding sovereignty to the Crown, having their property rights protected, and being guaranteed the same rights and responsibilities as the citizens of England. It was an extraordinarily enlightened document for its time – indeed, for any time. Nothing like it happened in Australia, or North America.

And for the most part, we have all behaved as if this is what the Treaty meant – Maori New Zealanders have served in the Army and in the Police, have gone overseas with passports issued by the government of New Zealand, have accepted social security benefits from the New Zealand state, and have voted in general elections for more than 150 years.

If it could be shown that the Treaty did not provide for equal citizenship, we would have to abandon it: there is no future for New Zealand – none at all – if some citizens are accorded superior rights based on their ancestry.  – Don Brash

Former Covid minister Chris Hipkins’s prolonged public argument with, and humiliation of, pregnant journalist Charlotte Bellis, stranded in Afghanistan, the land of the Taliban, is one of my most ghastly memories of the debacle which was the Covid response. – Wendy Geus

Hipkins cornered proves to be a very dangerous animal who reverts to lying, obfuscation and personal attack (note his latest comment to Luxon over Three Waters), as he did also with the two women who went, it turned out, legitimately, to Northland but were labelled by his Government as “prostitutes breaking the law”.

For him ‘sorry’ really was the hardest word, and he didn’t issue an apology until legal action (by Bellis) forced him to. Dozens of other women also wanted to come home to have their babies, but Hipkins and his Labour Government viewed, for example, 66 DJs’ reasons to enter NZ as more legitimate than vulnerable NZ citizens, and there are many other heartbreaking stories of families kept apart during bereavements, sickness and milestones such as weddings and birthdays by this Government’s cruel, twisted policy.

Targetting a vulnerable woman stranded in a war-torn and dangerous country in such a blatantly public way surely was misogynistic of Hipkins. However for Labour and the media the ends justify the means for their victims and there was no mention that this could be misogyny. – Wendy Geus

I bring up the subject of misogyny as the media have been reverting to it a lot in an attempt to protect the reputation of Ardern, who resigned, basically, because she had screwed up big time and knew ‘it was time’ to resign (before she was pushed or lost the next election).

According to media she attracted such criticism and hatred due to her sex. They prefer to ignore the reasons behind it. They are determined to turn her into a martyr and label any criticism of her as misogynistic in order to shut down conversation; they conveniently ignore her egregious behaviour, not least her lack of success in all public service delivery areas and being the first PM to introduce He Puapua – a separatist regime based on race and driving division in our society, and then denying or ignoring its existence. Hipkins is leaving it bubbling away in plain sight and behind the scenes whilst he does a sleight of hand to try to fool us he is dealing with it. – Wendy Geus

Then there was former National leader Judith Collins who got regular, cruel, vicious cartoons and nasty comments on her demise: no kindness there based on her female status. She bravely, correctly, called out He Puapua’s racist, separatist intent early in the piece, but was abused and called ‘racist’. (Of course!) This was misogynistic, but condoned by most too scared to speak out. – Wendy Geus

Censorship definitely exists in NZ with a small incestuous cabal of bought and paid for news media deciding what is acceptable, funded by the former PM’s PIJ scheme and dependent on their acceptance of her Government’s radical interpretation of the Treaty.

Totalitarianism. Not misogyny.

I am hopeful that Christopher Luxon attempts again to state his views calmly and clearly in the incendiary environment of the Waitangi celebration. Expect the word ‘racist’ to be freely tossed about by those who have no legitimate argument to counter his words.

He might be a bit ‘vanilla’ (compared to the departed ‘media star’ PM), but his calm, composed, temperament worked well at Ratana and is an advantage in standing up to the bully media. Labour is led by a new leader who is already reverting to personal attacks on Luxon in the absence of a good argument to counteract National’s simple need not race approach to the delivery of public services – an approach which puts all New Zealanders on a similar footing.

Sounds fair to me. – Wendy Geus

One of the things that may be revealed out of the weather mess is the fact we are woefully underinsured as a country.

It’s these sorts of things that mark you as first world, or otherwise. – Mike Hosking

It is overdue for us to make some big calls around building and location. –

We live next to rivers and hear the tale of despair on the news of the person who hired a rug doctor for the sixth time. Why live there?

If we can’t get the basics right, and clearly we can’t, what hope do we have in making big, bold, futuristic calls on things like build quality, location, planning and insurance.

Maybe we will focus a bit more clearly when the insurance premiums arrive and we are shelling out for our lack of foresight. Mind you, you can only focus on that if you get a bill.

And that, as we have seen and will see, is a major part of the problem. – Mike Hosking

“Is he a racist like you” asked my seven year old moko.

We were watching a CNN news item about President Biden.

Shocked, I asked “Why do you say that?”

“Is the President of America white?” he said. “White people are racist”.

I explained President Biden is white but he is not a racist. Our discussion revealed my grandson has no idea what is a racist. Perhaps he heard Mr. Tuku Morgan of the Iwi Leaders Forum on TV saying “the attack dogs of the National party and Act as they fan the flames of racism and anti-Māori sentiments”.

The Prime Minister had the opportunity to distance himself from Mr. Morgan’s statement. Instead Chris Hipkins said:

“People can form their own judgments about that but I certainly think the opposition, National and Act have, as they’ve done in the past, they’ve used uncertainty to try and stoke fear.

The selection of Mr. Tama Potaka for Hamilton West is evidence of Mr. Luxon’s desire for National to represent all New Zealanders.

David Seymour is proud of his whakapapa. He leads a caucus with three Maori MPs.

Chris Hipkins knows that neither Christopher Luxon nor David Seymour is a racist. – Richard Prebble

Co-government arises from Labour’s decision to put a radical revisionist version of the treaty at the heart of all its decisions. The revisionists claim the treaty is an agreement between Queen Victoria and 500 or so native chiefs to govern in partnership forever.

To meet this revisionist treaty Labour is establishing co-government with unelected, unaccountable, self- selected, hereditary tribal elites. It is the opposite of everything Labour used to stand for – Richard Prebble

Here is the heart of the issue. New Zealand has been since 1853 a Westminster parliamentary democracy. Those who rule us are under the rule of law and accountable to us, the electorate.

Parliamentary democracy is fundamentally at odds with being governed in partnership by hereditary tribal leaders. It does not matter whether the Prime Minister calls it a partnership, co-governance or mahi tahi,(working together); it is incompatible with democracy.

New Zealand is not a democracy when one partner is accountable to the electorate and the other partner is not.

Even if the revisionists are right and some chiefs misunderstood the treaty they were signing, it is not a reason to abandon 170 years of parliamentary democracy.

The treaty granted rights not just to the chiefs but to all Maori. Article three of the treaty grants Maori full citizenship rights. Maori have had voting rights from the first election in 1853. To reinterpret the treaty as a partnership is to reduce everyone’s citizenship rights, including the citizenship rights granted to Maori.

No doubt it was galling to some chiefs to discover that the treaty means every Maori has an equal vote. The treaty is why no New Zealand court has ever upheld slavery. While it did not happen immediately, the treaty freed Maori who were slaves and gave them full citizenship including the right to vote. – Richard Prebble

Good on Chris Hipkins for holding a review of Labour’s policies. A top priority must be to decide whether Labour stands for democracy.

Here is my thought. No wonder my seven year old moko thinks white people are racist when our government judges him on his race.

Why not a New Zealand where what is most important about my moko and I is not our different tribes, which is no business of the government, but us as individuals?

It is a powerful message to send to all seven year olds. One person, one vote, values us all equally. – Richard Prebble

With the new minimum wage, but no change to tax thresholds, if someone on the minimum wage works 41 hours in a week they'll be in the 30% tax band.

— Michael Wagener (@Mykuhl) February 8, 2023

It’s wild to me that a graduate teacher (with a student loan) on roughly 54k will only earn $13 more a week in the hand than someone on minimum wage. Why would you bother? pic.twitter.com/AT3zUEaS4K

— Megan Morse (@MeganHands8) February 8, 2023

The rule, ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,’ creates incentives to demonstrate minimum ability and maximum need. The inevitable result is poverty. – Richard Fulmer *

Almost everyone who has had to deal with the RMA knows it is a terrible piece of legislation. For 20+ years politicians have tried to improve it, but failed to do more than modest improvements.

So I was excited that the Government was going to not just amend it, but replace it entirely with entirely new legislation. I thought nothing could be as bad as the RMA.

I was wrong.

What Labour is pushing through Parliament is so deeply flawed that it is unfixable. It would be not just worse than the RMA, but worse by an order of magnitude. Why?

Well the pithy one-liner is “co-governance for your deck”. But it goes well beyond that. – David Farrar

Federated Farmers have done an example of what this new law would mean in terms of someone wanting to do some commercial fishing and someone wanting to milk a cow.

The commercial fishing boat has simple rules. They buy some quota and they can catch fish. Their petrol supplier buys some ETS units, and they can burn petrol on their boat. Fairly simple.

But if you are a farmer who wants to milk a cow you have to get a resource consent with decision makers considering water, cultural heritage, biodiversity, te mana o te wai, greenhouse gas emissions, natural features of landscapes, the need for highly productive soils to be maintained, te oranga o te taiao, the mauri of the land, plus the intrinsic relationships of local hapū. – David Farrar

Yes, you read that right: 16. At an age when boys are eating boogers and lighting farts, getting more tattoos than the average sailor, and having sex with high school girls. At an age when girls (they’re not even close to being “women”) are pondering sex change operations and seeking out abortion services and getting even more tattoos than the average hooker. And these are the unformed humanoids with whom the Democrats (unformed humanoids themselves, to be sure) want to entrust the nation’s future?

So yes: repeal the 26th. And then restore the status quo ante, to 21. – Michael Walsh

The level of retail crime incidents has doubled over the last four years. You could call it a pandemic of retail crime. – David Farrar

This week’s bonfire of policy was also a bonfire of cash. The Hipkins-led Government finally ditched the RNZ-TVNZ media merger, but only after wasting about $23m on consultants to design the failed project. Other ditched policies also incurred millions of dollars in business consultancy fees.

Much of this was spent on the “Big Four” management consultants: Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst and Young (EY) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). External contractors have become an increasingly large part of Labour’s public policy-making process. Critics say they are superseding the role of the public service in designing state programmes.

A Billion dollars a year on business consultants

In everything from health to water infrastructure, the Government has become reliant on these private sector consultants to come up with new ways to do things and tell the politicians how to sell it. And they’ve been charging huge amounts. We now know that the public broadcast merger consultants were being paid up to $9000 per week, per consultant.

The most recent figures released by the Public Service Commission show that the Government now spends $1.244 billion a year on such contractors. And it’s rising fast – last year the consultancy spend was up by a third ($300m). Much of this was spent on health reforms, the polytech centralisation, and Three Waters. – Bryce Edwards

The Three Waters reform programme has been particularly lucrative for the management consultants – three of the Big Four have been employed – PwC, EY and Deloitte together charged a big chunk of the $21m of consultancy work up until February last year, as revealed by the Herald’s Kate MacNamara. She found that EY was the biggest contractor, billing for $5.2m. In addition, consultancy firm Martin Jenkins – closely linked to Doug Martin, who chaired the water working group – charged $2.5m.

PR was also a big part of the Three Waters bill. The firm Senate Communications seem to be the main biller, receiving $616,281 for advice to the Beehive on selling the reforms to the public. Unfortunately, the PR campaign ended up being perceived as “propaganda” and garnered a telling-off from the Public Service Commission.

The advertising campaign using cartoons of slime-covered children and sick ducks failed to win public support, and had been concocted following the advice of another PR specialist that the Government should employ the use of “emotive marketing” instead of “information first” public service-style advertising. – Bryce Edwards

More money for “consulto-crats” than delivery of public services…

So, although many of Labour’s reform proposals have failed, they have been a real winner for the business consultants employed on them.

The “consulto-crats” have also become a big part of the health reforms. DHBs were already spending a lot on management consultants prior to Labour’s centralisation. But this has ballooned under the new model. According to health commentator and former executive director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, Ian Powell, “In the over 30 years I’ve been involved in the health system I’ve not seen a government more dependent on and influenced by business consultants”. –

Conflicts of interest abound. There are just so many links between the different consultants used in government. Just one example – Labour contracted former New Zealand director-general of health Stephen McKernan to head its health reforms Transition Unit. Kate MacNamara reports that EY, where McKernan is a partner, then became the “single largest beneficiary of the contractor spending”. Apparently, 80 per cent of the Unit’s consultancy spending of $2.27m went to EY.

Management consultants are the new powerful vested interests – Bryce Edwards

The “Big Con” of consultancy

So, is the new consultant-bureaucratic industrial complex good for democracy? Is it in the public interest? And what does it mean for our political system to be so strongly dominated by private sector management consultants?

In New Zealand, journalist Dileepa Fonseka wrote last year that “Consultants have become an entrenched part of the machinery of Government.” He says that there’s a Wellington joke about the modern structure of government: “There are three branches of government: the legislature, the judiciary and MartinJenkins.”

Although this trend seems to be particularly well-advanced in this country, it’s part of a global problem. – Bryce Edwards

“The ‘Big Con’ describes the confidence trick the consulting industry performs in contracts with hollowed-out and risk-averse governments and shareholder value-maximizing firms. It grew from the 1980s and 1990s in the wake of reforms by both the neoliberal right and Third Way progressives, and it thrives on the ills of modern capitalism, from financialization and privatization to the climate crisis. It is possible because of the unique power that big consultancies wield through extensive contracts and networks – as advisors, legitimators and outsourcers – and the illusion that they are objective sources of expertise and capacity. To make matters worse, our best and brightest graduates are often redirected away from public service into consulting. In all these ways, the Big Con weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments and warps our economies.” – Bryce Edwards

Of course, the current government won’t welcome debate. Prime minister, Chris Hipkins, once railed against the use of consultants by the last National Government – criticising what he saw as the ballooning use of business contractors. But since he became Minister of Public Services in 2017, their use has only skyrocketed.

Part of the increased use of contractors has been due to the arrival of the Covid pandemic, which stretched the public service in certain areas. But this lucrative new opportunity shouldn’t be simply allowed to turn into a permanent state of affairs.

The “bonfire of policy” occurring at the moment is a good time to examine the dominance of business consultants in government. Some say the public service has become bloated, and others that it has been hollowed-out by the entry of management consultants. Either way, this culture of consulto-crats poses huge questions about vested interests, and brings the integrity of policymaking into question. – Bryce Edwards

*Hat tip: Not PC and Not PC again

Few of us who live in modern countries can see the stars at night, or more than a few at most. This is because of light pollution, the production of artificial light at night that is not strictly necessary (though what is not strictly necessary is probably itself incapable of strict definition—what is unnecessary for you is necessary for me). A recent article has suggested that 80 percent of Americans and 60 percent of Europeans never see the stars. – Theodore Dalrymple

The thought of our own insignificance when we look up at the stars is potentially a dangerous one, though I do not go so far as to say that it has actually been responsible in practice for any of the great crimes of mankind; for if we are totally insignificant, what does anything really matter? If nothing really matters, what does it matter how I behave? And if it does not matter how I behave, then I might as well do whatever I can to achieve my ends, to take maximum pleasure from my fleeting existence. If that involves harm to others, so be it; after all, nothing matters and everything will be the same in the end, indeed very soon by comparison with the age of the universe. Eat, drink, and rob and steal, then, for tomorrow I die.

Wrongdoers often turn philosopher as soon as they are accused of having done wrong. Their philosophizing is always post facto, but they may nevertheless by instinct have mastered rhetorical devices. For example, if accused of theft, they will immediately ask for what they have never asked for before, namely a defense or justification of the system of private property, so unequal in the distribution of its largesse. Since the person thus apostrophized has probably never considered the question himself, he suddenly finds himself at a disadvantage, in an awkward spot. He can only stutter an answer, which makes him look unsure of himself. Thus, the wrongdoer secures a rhetorical victory.

Anyhow, the fact, or supposed fact, that nothing matters is an excellent and reassuring excuse for those who would behave badly to secure an advantage to themselves. Looking up at the stars, then, if they were visible, might conduce to the spread of amoralism.

On the other hand, not being able to look up at the stars, thereby being made aware of how tiny we are, might conduce to self-importance and small-mindedness. Our own affairs then grow in significance and occupy the totality of our minds. We lose the habit, and therefore the ability, to judge the size of our concerns with anything else. We have no sense of the order of things, especially if, at the same time, we do not study history; and minor inconveniences then become for us tragedies of the first magnitude. Thus we become egotistical, self-obsessed, ill-tempered, self-absorbed, and trivial-minded.

As is so often the case, we need a happy medium, or rather the ability to hold two opposite things in our mind at the same time: We are everything and nothing. We are the only beings in the universe (so far as we know) who, or that, can assign importance or significance to anything; but at the same time, we are very small. – Theodore Dalrymple

We are, of course, nothing by comparison with infinite magnitude and glory of God; yet we are of special and unique significance to that being infinitely greater than we, who has created us in His image. Hamlet expresses this perfectly:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! How infinite in capacity! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust!

The paragon of animals, the quintessence of dust: What a perfect summary of our existential situation!

And yet, for all its perfection as an understanding, Hamlet, as we all know, ended badly, as did all those who surrounded him. Man could be defined as the creature who is capable of making the worst of anything! In Russia, they say, all roads lead to disaster—but not only in Russia, perhaps. – Theodore Dalrymple

Thanks to PM Chris Hipkins’ reshuffle, transport minister Michael Wood is going places. Shame about the rest of us.

Transport in New Zealand – both public and private – is poked.

Commuter services (buses, trains and ferries) in our towns and cities are under huge strain, making life a misery for anyone trying to get to work or children to school. Or even a concert.

The road network is collapsing.

At the minor end of the scale, the country’s road surfaces are in desperate shape. No need for the Government to officially lower speed limits, the potholes are bone-shakingly effective judder bars.

More scary is that arterial routes are regularly compromised by slips and subsidence in severe weather.  – Andrea Vance

Climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated all these problems. But most predate the virus.

In part, they are due to chronic under-investment (higher taxes and road tolls are not popular policies).

But also, the way transport and its infrastructure is delivered and maintained is fragmented and dysfunctional.

Waka Kotahi, the land transport agency for which Wood is responsible, is currently one of the Government’s most problematic departments.

It is under fire because the road network is in a mess, and it can’t seem to deliver major projects on time or on budget. – Andrea Vance

The agency also has a deserved reputation for being wasteful. From the $51 million squandered on the abandoned cycling and walking bridge project across Auckland’s Waitematā harbour, to the $70m-plus spent on the doomed light rail project.

Let’s Get Wellington Moving (which WK oversees with the local authorities) has spent $83 million – $47m on consultants – and delivered only a pedestrian crossing. In EIGHT YEARS. And the walkway cost an eye-watering $2.4m.

It also has one of the largest PR teams of a central government agency – at last count 88, more than three-quarters of which are earning more than $100,000. If only we paid bus drivers the same salaries as comms staff. – Andrea Vance

Around $15m was allocated to an advertising campaign to make roads safer, but recently officials admitted their ‘zero’ target is unrealistic. It missed a target to build 100km of median barriers per year, managing just 13km last year. – Andrea Vance

Councils with large urban centres are driving climate change policies to get people out of their cars and onto public transport.

The trouble is they are neither responsible for the network (in the hands of regional councils, other agencies and private operators), nor have successive Governments funded, nor allowed them to raise money to build, new infrastructure. – Andrea Vance

Not all these problems are Wood’s fault – but they are his to solve. How then can he take on another, hefty job?

Climate change makes transport one of the most important portfolios. Resilience needs to be built into the system – and quickly – as storm events increase. Public transport is also one of the most important elements in the drive to build a net-zero emissions economy.

If the Auckland portfolio is to be anything more than symbolic (or a cynical move to soothe the city), it should command much of a minister’s attention.

The city deserves more than a part-timer, especially now.

And to get transport back on track, Wood can’t really afford to take his eyes off the road. – Andrea Vance

You’ll no doubt be familiar with the term “jumping the shark”. It was coined in 1985 by the American radio personality Jon Hein in response to a 1977 episode of the US sitcom Happy Days, in which The Fonz, played by Henry Winkler, jumps over a shark while on water-skis. It’s a creative – if pejorative – term to describe when something has dissolved into so much farce that it signals it is well past its best and in decline – if not on its way to oblivion. And it could not be a better descriptor for Nicola Sturgeon’s absurd political performance over the past few months.

In the aftermath of the UK Government vetoing her gender recognition law, Scotland’s First Minister has had her head in Jaws’s mouth for several weeks now thanks to her ludicrous stand on Adam Graham, the transgender double rapist.  – Camilla Tominey

In a victory not just for common sense but for women’s safety, the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) confirmed that all newly convicted transgender prisoners will initially be placed in a jail based on their birth sex until a wider review is completed. – Camilla Tominey

So what we have here is essentially a complete rejection of the founding principle of Ms Sturgeon’s hare-brained Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which stated that anyone over the age of 16 can self-declare their gender, without a medical diagnosis and with few or any legal protections. – Camilla Tominey

I cannot be alone in thinking the world has gone stark, raving mad when a political leader, a supposedly highly educated person, cannot identify an adult human male double rapist when they see one.
Notwithstanding her own political fate, however, Sturgeon’s reality-defying obstinacy has actually done us all a favour.

For the complete implosion of her transgender policy must finally have opened millions of people’s eyes not only to what’s been going on in Scottish prisons, but also to the wider spread of extreme gender ideology in hospitals, schools and companies across the UK.

For far too long these organisations have unthinkingly pandered to the extremists at the fringes of this debate out of some politically correct quest not to hurt people’s feelings, with big corporations insisting that employees state their pronouns and NHS websites providing guidance on menstruation while omitting the word “girl”.
But as we have learnt with cases like Graham’s, feelings don’t matter more than facts. – Camilla Tominey

We should, of course, show compassion to all human beings, whether they be male, female or indeed transgender. But that should not mean denying biological sex, or jeopardising the safety of other groups, including women. Transgender people have rights under the Equality Act – but then so do women, as several recent cases have clearly established.

It is the job of our politicians to ensure that these rights are balanced and that the interests of one group are not allowed to trump another.

Not that the extreme gender ideology crowd think like that. It’s a scandal that the “if-you-stand-up-for-women-you’re-a-Terf” brigade of illiberal progressives won’t acknowledge the truth of this matter.
It’s even more outrageous that they portray those who do so as “transphobic” bigots when “biologically correct” would be a more apt description. And they have had some success in recent years in bullying or guilting people into going along with their agenda. – Camilla Tominey

And now, Sturgeon’s blundering policy failures have opened millions of people’s eyes to the fairy tales that they had been led to believe were true.

The only species thought to be able to change their biological sex, besides clownfish, are sharks, funnily enough. Some scientists believe that the big sharks change sex when they reach a certain size, with males becoming females. The switch may ensure survival by allowing the largest, most experienced sharks to give birth to young.

But humans aren’t fish and never have been – although some humans are undoubtedly clowns.

What should be a factual, calm debate has been turned into a theological question about whether you “believe” transwomen are women. In revealing the farcical nature of her flawed arguments, Nicola Sturgeon has given us the chance of a reformation. – Camilla Tominey

A survey of Canadian opinion carried out for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute found that the majority of Canadians still think that prisons should remain segregated by sex: to which one is inclined to add, amen to that.

All surveys of opinion are subject to caveat, of course; one can rarely be sure that they’re representative of the population as a whole, or that respondents weren’t trying to please the inquirers, or that the wording of the question asked didn’t affect the outcome.

For me, however, the most significant finding of the survey was that 28 percent of respondents believed that male-bodied prisoners who identified as women should be imprisoned with women, 6 percent more than those who thought they should be imprisoned with men. The rest thought they should have separate facilities of their own.

The evolution of opinion is probably impossible to estimate with any certainty, though it’s possible to guess. The question was never asked 20 years ago, and indeed couldn’t have been asked, so bizarre would it have seemed. The answer probably would have been a laugh rather than a verbal answer, and the very fact that it wouldn’t or couldn’t have been asked 20 years ago is itself highly significant. The question wasn’t then even a question, at least not for the general public: and the year 2003 isn’t yet ancient history. – Theodore Dalrymple

My surmise is that they were younger and more educated than average or than the 72 percent of the people in the survey who thought that prisoners with male bodies should not be imprisoned with women. The sad fact is that, as George Orwell once remarked, it’s necessary to have a higher level of education than average to believe in a certain type of absurdity. This is even more the case today when so much of our education seems to fall into two stages: indoctrination by others followed by auto-indoctrination.

One might have thought that educated people in general, and intellectuals in particular, would be less susceptible to evident absurdity than the uneducated and the great mass of the population: But one would be mistaken. And there’s a good reason for this.

The status of intellectual requires that one has thoughts that aren’t those of the great mass, or at any rate the majority, of mankind (and even with the massification of the intelligentsia as a result of the expansion of tertiary education, the intelligentsia remains a minority). For the modern intellectual, the search for truth becomes the search for rationalizations for whatever strange beliefs distinguish the intellectual from the hoi polloi. Ideology is to the intelligentsia what superstition is to the mass of mankind; and not to have opinions that clash with those of the majority is, for an intellectual, to lose caste, like a Brahmin who crosses the sea. What’s the point of being an intellectual, after all, if you come to a conclusion that everyone already believes to be the case?

The majority isn’t always right or intellectuals always wrong. What was regarded as perfectly normal, acceptable, or even virtuous in one age is regarded as self-evidently monstrous by another, often as a result of the efforts of intellectuals to alert the population or powers that be to the moral monstrosity of what they accept without question.  – Theodore Dalrymple

 It’s the undoubted fact that the majority has often unthinkingly subscribed to a horrible or vile morality that gives the intellectuals their opportunity to promote destructive certainties. A false syllogism goes something like this:

The majority thinks that prisoners with male bodies who identify as women shouldn’t be sent to women’s prisons. The majority is often wrong. Therefore, prisoners with male bodies who identify as women ought to be sent to women’s prisons.

What’s surprising, perhaps, and deeply significant, is that a proportion of the population that’s far from tiny—more than a quarter, if the survey I have quoted is accurate—can be brought to believe something so counterintuitive in so historically short a time. A view that not very long before would have been considered absurd and even unthinkable has become almost an orthodoxy for a certain proportion of the population.

And while it rests a minority view for the moment, it’s the view of what in the long run is the most important part of the population, the intelligentsia: for democracy notwithstanding, the vote of the intellectual has at least quadruple the weight of that of the average citizen, who will either follow him in the end or have his views imposed upon him. – Theodore Dalrymple

Instead of admitting that the Treaty was a contract that established the Queen as our Sovereign, protected private property rights, and gave Maori the same rights and privileges of British citizenship as every other New Zealander, the tribal elite are undermining democracy by promoting the lie that Maori are in a ‘Treaty partnership’ with the Crown to elevate themselves into a ‘power-sharing’ ruling aristocracy.

As an ardent disciple of Marxism and identity politics, Jacinda Ardern’s ignorance about the true meaning of the Treaty led our former Prime Minister to embrace the tribal elite’s agenda, dividing New Zealanders by race and introducing Apartheid into the delivery of public services.

Former Labour Prime Ministers did not allow themselves to be ‘captured’ in this way. – Dr Muriel Newman

Even though the Treaty is clear that Maori ceded sovereignty to the Queen – and that it is constitutionally impossible for a partnership to exist between the sovereign and the governed – the ‘Treaty partnership’ fabrication has flourished under Labour.

Critical public services are now controlled by Maori. As a consequence of the health system being under the influence of the tribal elite, we now face the intolerable situation where health care is no longer being prioritised on the basis of clinical need, but by race. Indeed, warnings are now emerging from those working within the sector that some areas are in such a mess, they are in danger of collapse.

Then there’s the universally hated Three Waters scheme that not only confiscates services and infrastructure from councils, to put control firmly into the hands of Maori, but it forces ratepayers to underwrite the massive debts that these new mega agencies are expected to accumulate.

As a result, Chris Hipkins needs to understand that it’s not just co-governance that should be scrapped, but the whole scheme – including the devious Te Mana o te Wai provisions, which effectively give local Maori full authority over the management of water in each catchment area.

New Zealanders need to reject any cosmetic changes the PM is likely to introduce, and strengthen the call for Nanaia Mahuta’s entire scheme to be thrown out. – Dr Muriel Newman

In true Orwellian style, iwi leaders have the audacity to claim that those who want every New Zealander treated as equals are racists, while those who want the country divided by race, are not!

For most people, the concept of their skin colour being used to determine their rights, is utterly abhorrent. Kiwis have never wanted to be divided by race, which is why the on-going attempts by separatists to establish Maori seats in local government, failed in almost every referendum.

It is therefore unsurprising that the public is now objecting to enforced racial categorisation. And that’s the bottom line: Kiwis want to be treated as equals, united as one people under one flag, with New Zealand, one nation – a country of equal citizens, not a collection of competing tribes.

This is what Chris Hipkins needs to recognise if he is to succeed as our country’s leader. He must govern for all New Zealanders, if his party is to regain the confidence of middle New Zealand. Tinkering with policies will not be enough.

And that’s also what Christopher Luxon – and his National Party – needs to realise if he is to have any hope of one day becoming our Prime Minister. Governing for all New Zealanders is the only way to build a successful future.  – Dr Muriel Newman

What drives most of us is convenience. It’s why you should never trust polls on matters where the question involves any form of fanciful theory.

What we say and what we do are two different things, not always, but generally.

It’s why the public transport fans have failed so miserably. On a whiteboard it sounds plausible but on any given busy day it’s not real, it never has been real and it never will be. – Mike Hosking

The theory was we would use EV’s and batteries and solar and wind and sunflower seeds. But the reality is none of those things are reliable enough or available enough.

As they currently stand, they aren’t actual answers. They are alternatives of a temporary nature and, given that, there is no point in getting all angsty about profits and wanting to put a windfall tax on them that is talked about.

That gesture is driven by our own anger and frustration at being wrong about the future and wrong about our overall intent.

It’s not BP‘s fault the war started and it’s not BP’s fault we all want to use more and more oil. They are only doing what they have always done, which is supply a demand.

That is why the whole model hasn’t worked – we keep demanding more. – Mike Hosking

The zealots are asking us to do something we won’t do, which is go backwards.

Farmers know this. The way to reduce emissions is reduce cows, make less money, eat less meat and do less farming.

The oil zealots want us to catch buses that don’t go where we want to go, even if they turn up in the first place.

We will not do it and we are not doing it.

Our reality, and its smooth operation, will trump ideology every time. – Mike Hosking

The 2022 New Zealand Honours acknowledged and recognised around 200 citizens who had made meaningful contributions to the well-being of our country. 

On reading, I could only identify two or three names who had contributed directly to creating the wealth which fuels our society’s ability to address well-being. 

The list lacked diversity.

New Zealand as an entity is no different than the corner dairy. Its survival and growth depend upon customers purchasing products and services that more or less fall within the general categories of Food, Fibre, or Fun (tourism). New Zealand produces these products and services very well and, in many cases, we lead the world in design, quality, sustainability and reliability. – John Wren

So just like the corner dairy, it is only the profit from “New Zealand Inc” that can possibly create the rewards we need to fuel what we refer to as “well-being”.  The government and their supporting bureaucrats appear to be blind to how fundamental this is – as we can clearly see in their selection of the heroes who were honoured at the New Year.

The heroes we should recognise are those, who through their commitment, passion and personal risk, have built businesses that contribute to enhancing the well-being of every New Zealander.

Unfortunately, this government and its advisers don’t understand that diversity must be all-encompassing – recognising not only social, ethnic and gender but also productive wealth creation. – John Wren

The government is increasing the minimum wage from $21.20 to $22.70 from 1 April next year. At the headline level this is a 7% increase, which is roughly the CPI increase in the past year. So this is an inflation adjustment, in real terms people on the minimum wage will stay exactly where they were.

But is that true? We know from the EMTR series that the abatement rates are a problem. We also know that the minimum wage is getting awfully close to the 30% tax rate, so bracket creep may mean that we’re not getting full inflation compensation.

Who is really getting the bulk of the minimum wage increase. Spoiler alert – for many of those most in need, the government will be pocketing 80% of the minimum wage increase. They’re asking businesses to pay more, but the lion’s share of that money is going directly into government coffers, not to the people they would profess to be helping.- Paul L.

The bigger problem is when we get into people who are receiving any government support – a partial benefit, accommodation supplement, or working for families tax credits.

Consider someone who is a sole parent with two children, one between 3 and 5 years old, and one over 5 years. Because the youngest child isn’t in school yet they’re working 20 hours a week. Their household income before the minimum wage change was $869.14. After the minimum wage change their income is $874.14, an increase of $5 per week. Their $30 pay rise has mostly been clawed back by the government in abatements. While their pay went up 7% (the inflation rate), their household income has only increased 0.6%. They are 6.4% worse off in real terms, or $55 a week worse off than before the inflation and minimum wage increase. That would be a big impact on a household with two young children. – Paul L.

I’m not suggesting that there shouldn’t be a minimum wage increase. What I’m saying is that when the government claims it’s compensating the lowest paid for inflation, they’re not. Many of these people are worse off, whether because of bracket creep or because of abatements on government programmes. The people who aren’t worse off are the people with no other income, and who are working part time – i.e. students living at home, second income earners in a high income household. The poorest and those most in need are worst off. – Paul L.

1. People think that inflation hurts rich people. It doesn’t. Inflation has a major impact on poor people for exactly these reasons. Even with a very significant minimum wage increase many poor people are still much worse off. This is why the right wing, and economists in general, think inflation is bad. Not because they’re evil and hate the poor. Because they know it hurts the poor
2. Every generation seems to need to learn again that inflation is bad. It’s been 30 years since we had serious inflation, most people in power have forgotten about it. There’s still plenty around who know – Helen Clark, Don Brash, Richard Prebble, Jenny Shipley would all be able to articulate why we should have been careful about our monetary policy. We weren’t, we have a mess, and now it’s going to hurt a lot of low income people. We can’t change that now, but we can learn.
3. Inflation adjusting the minimum wage is better than nothing – I’m in no way arguing we shouldn’t have done it. These people would be worse off without that change.
4. Actually compensating these people for the cost of living pressure requires changing more than just the minimum wage – all these abatement rates/thresholds need to be touched, and the benefit rates will need to be changed. When inflation is only 2% you can get by with doing it every couple of years. At 7% it’s too big an impact – it will need to be done soon.
5. When the Labour government claims that they’ve inflation adjusted the minimum wage and it’s fine, realise that that’s not true. And when the media or people on twitter claim that these people are now OK for cost of living pressure, that’s also not true. And it’s especially not true for those most in need – sole parents with kids, people living on their own – those people receiving support from other government programmes. – Paul L.

I do not think about or write about aging. I do not think of myself as old – don’t look or act or dress old – and don’t think of myself as a senior citizen. I’m not in denial, I just have more vital things to do and think about and be. I’ve long been at ease with the thought that there was a time when I did not exist, and the time will come when I will not be again. It’s the Way of all Life.
The ticket I got coming in is for a round trip.
OK with me. – Robert Fulghum

If and when the new Prime Minister gets around to his bread and butter reset, the work he has to do on Three Waters is going to be something to behold.

That’s a genuinely complex issue that either most of us don’t get, or don’t want to – or a combination of the two.

And it’s the co-governance aspect of it that kills it.

Co-governance is not the way forward in this country, or indeed any country. The line they are now using is the one where we apparently misunderstand what it is.

So that’s the part I am most looking forward to – what part of us handing over a chunk of the running of our water, or an entity, or the country, don’t we understand? –  MIke Hosking

And that’s why, for all the ground we have made, we have still gone backwards.

Because in trying to address past wrongs we have opened ourselves up to the inevitable mission creep.

The tribunal is now so activist it’s absurd. The only upside is we never gave them actual power outside of recommendation.

And the likes of the Human Rights Commissioner have drunk so much Kool Aid they’ve ended up blurting out a volume of extremism we can only laugh or sigh at in dismay.

We either move forward or we don’t and Hipkins now has the task of explaining why this level of extremism is; 1) remotely acceptable and, 2) more importantly for him, electorally viable. – MIke Hosking

We’ve just seen a prime minister cancel a huge amount of projects that have been a stupendous waste of time, energy and money for New Zealand … it’s quite incredible to me.

It’s been ‘let’s do this’, and then ‘let’s not do this’. – Christopher Luxon

We can do well by doing good … I believe that, you know, deeply. – Christopher Luxon

Brad Olsen was on the show late in the Business Hour yesterday arguing the Government had to hike the minimum wage by a full $1.50 yesterday.

Because it had to be in line with the annual inflation rate.

If you look at the minimum wage in the isolation of one year, yes that’s an easy trap to fall into.

But you have to look at the minimum wage over the duration of the last six years of this Government.

It has gone from $15.75 to $22.70.

That’s a $7 increase in six years. That’s 44 percent.

Hands up, who else got a 44 percent pay rise in the last six years? – Heather du Plessis-Allan

So now, what we have is reportedly one of the highest minimum wage rates in the world in an economy that has among the lowest productivity in the developed world.

This doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t make sense to keep bumping up the pay of teenagers so they’ve got heaps to blow on new sneakers.

While making it harder for their employers, who might be parents running a small business, to square the books. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

SUPPOSE THEY MADE A REVOLUTION, and nobody noticed. Suppose the “Cabinet Office” ordered the nation’s public servants to implement an unmandated revolutionary transformation of New Zealand, and they complied. Suppose one of the leading authorities on Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Dame Claudia Orange, confirmed that this revolution was, in fact, a done deal. – Chris Trotter

Now, forgive me, but my understanding of revolutionary change is that it does not, and cannot, take place without the “general public” being aware. The active participation of the people in replacing a regime that has, in their eyes, lost all political legitimacy, is pretty much the definition of a revolution. The idea that not only could such a profound upheaval have taken place, but also gone past the point of no return, without the people either noticing it, or sanctioning it, is, quite simply, absurd.

So what should we call a programme initiated by the “Cabinet Office” (Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet?) with the ultimate intention of transforming the nation’s constitutional arrangements in such a way that the “consent of the governed” need not be confirmed by democratic means?

Given that New Zealanders have lived through such a transformation before, when the programme of ruthless economic “reforms” known as “Rogernomics” was unleashed upon them without warning, and without an electoral mandate, between 1984 and 1987, then it seems only fitting that this latest attempt to impose transformational change from the top down be described in the same manner. What New Zealanders have been experiencing since 2019 is a “bureaucratic coup d’état”. – Chris Trotter

Were the recommendations of “Matike Mai Aotearoa” and “He Puapua” to be followed, the manner in which New Zealanders are governed, and the rights and privileges they are heir to, would indeed be transformed – out of all recognition.

Race Relations Commissioner, Meng Foon, has responded to the reports by committing himself to the long-term goal of “Eliminat[ing] racism in Aotearoa in all forms, in all organisations whether it’s government, non-government organisations, businesses, amongst our communities.”

New Zealanders anxious to learn how this elimination might be accomplished – especially given the Human Rights Commission’s acceptance that racism and white supremacy are baked-in to New Zealand society – should probably study the “re-education” centres established by the Chinese Government in Xinxiang to eliminate radical Islamist ideology from all mosques, schools, organisations, businesses and communities of the Uighur people.

It is difficult to believe that Labour could be contemplating a bureaucratic coup-d’état even more destructive than Rogernomics. If they are, then – this time – they will provoke a real revolution. – Chris Trotter

If we are going to change our constitutional arrangements in a fundamental way, this needs to be done in a coherent, planned manner, with wide community support, not by Te Puni Kokiri mission creep, or the stumbling we have witnessed so far, where nobody professes to know what’s going on.

We have the longest continuous universally franchised parliament in the world, from 1893 and counting. The Bill of Rights Act reinforces that position, with section 12 stating that elections to the House of Representatives shall be by universal suffrage and by secret ballot. So it should be with all subordinate public decision-making authorities.

Labour’s constitution also states that the natural resources of New Zealand belong to all the people yet, with regard to perhaps our greatest natural resource, the current Three Waters proposal offers equal governance authority to 84% of the population on the one hand and 16% on the other.

There is nothing in the Treaty, our primary source document, that provides for that inequality. It is just plain wrong (and unpopular).

Mana whenua definitely need to be involved in resource management. Co-management under a democratically elected authority is definitely better than co-governance.

Squaring the circle won’t be easy, but a proper, formal process is guaranteed to produce a better result than the slow motion drift to the destruction of democratic accountability. – Sir Kerry Burke

Hipkins is doing a reasonable job of selling the nonsense that burning these bad ideas will help alleviate the cost of living crisis. Of course it won’t. Killing off the merger won’t put food on your table. Saving the $330m it would cost is chump change in the Government’s annual budget.

The truth is, the bonfire just increases Hipkins’ chances at the next election. It means he doesn’t have to waste time and political capital constantly trying to convince voters that these bad ideas are good ideas. Listening to Ardern’s double-speak about all these policies was part of what led to her popularity falling in the end. – Heather du Plessis Allan

Cutting Three Waters will probably be the biggest test of Hipkins’ political management skills. He needs to go far enough to convince voters to accept it, while convincing the Māori caucus to swallow that dead rat. Then he needs to unwind a law already passed.

Time is not on his side. He can’t dawdle so long that he loses the momentum of the current sense of change. Sooner is better so that he can stop looking backwards and start looking forwards.  – Heather du Plessis Allan

Once he’s finished telling us what his Labour Government will not do, he’s going to have to start telling us what they will do.

The list of gripes voters have is long. Retail crime. Potholes. Falling house prices. Rising mortgage rates. Grocery bills. Warnings of winter power outages. Truancy in schools. Falling literacy and numeracy rates. Looming winter strain on a badly stretched health system. More kids sitting on the dole. Traffic congestion in major cities.

Somehow he’s going to have to sell his plan for fixing all of that, while convincing voters that this plan will actually fix those things, unlike Ardern’s plan that didn’t fix any of them. – Heather du Plessis Allan

Even going on just the last couple of weeks, New Zealand’s creaking education system seems uniquely unsuited to dealing with these sorts of disruptive challenges. The idea that its hapless top-down, one-size-fits-all culture could respond quickly and effectively to take advantage of new technologies is laughable.

The latest unsettling evidence of the ridiculous rigidity within education was the debacle that was Auckland’s return to school this year. On the back of the freak rainfall event on Anniversary Weekend, the lumbering Wellington-based education ministry decided on Monday it should close every school in Auckland for the first week of the school year. All 600-odd, plus another 1200 or so pre-schools.

There were some that needed to be closed as a result of flooding, or slips in the vicinity. – Steven Joyce

In a sign the bureaucrats are still drunk on the power they took for themselves during the pandemic, they decided individual principals and boards of trustees could not be trusted to make the decision about when it was safe to open their doors. And this despite the fact that these same people are nominally in charge of the education of hundreds of children every day.

The ministry panicked and pulled the pin just as schools were looking forward to their first non-disrupted year since 2019. Once again we demonstrated to a generation of impressionable school-age children that, despite our protestations to the contrary, schooling isn’t really that important. No wonder they can’t be bothered going.

It got worse. About a day later, the officials were apparently having second thoughts. Maybe early childcare centres could open, and then possibly some schools. And then yes, they should open on the Thursday, except for those that couldn’t. It was appalling and cringeworthy. Principals, teachers and parents suffered daily whiplash as bureaucrats and their political masters in Wellington micro-managed Auckland’s schools to within an inch of their lives, trusting no one but themselves despite their all too obvious limitations. –

 The public health wallahs we became so heartily sick of during the pandemic were back to tell us that fully half of all schools should be given government-provided school lunches, and eating a government-provided lunch should be compulsory at those schools so as to not offend anyone.

The airwaves immediately filled with stories about unappetising government-supplied lunches, huge wastage, and parents affronted that only officials in Wellington can tell them what is healthy for their kids. Arguments raged over the lack of choice in government-sanctioned menus.

The contrast is apposite. The bureaucratic machine takes more and more power from schools and parents at the same time as a new piece of technology threatens to literally eat their lunch. We have poorer and poorer academic results in our schools, students are staying away in droves and out-of-control officialdom is busy dumbing us down even further, taking responsibility for the food our kids eat and deciding whether it is safe to open the gates. – Steven Joyce

Health officials in Wellington took decisions to leave hospitals empty for long stretches during the pandemic and in doing so created the longest waiting lists of unnecessarily suffering people of all time. They are apparently going to solve this mess by taking even more power for themselves to micro-manage every public hospital in the country.

Our politicians need to lift their sights. Squashing an ill-advised merger of old-media companies is all very well, but they are missing the main game.

Centralised monopolistic public services have surely reached their limits. Its time to de-power the civil service in Wellington and encourage innovation, experimentation and great teaching in our education system. Yes, even pay more for top performance. Where is the fresh thinking from both sides of politics about how we can get away from the bureaucratic dead hand that is stifling us?

Clever new technologies like ChatGPT are more evidence the revolution is coming. The question is whether our kids will be ready to participate in it, or will even more of them be passed by in the interests of an overweening bureaucracy? – Steven Joyce

Amazing what happens when you are staring down the barrel of defeat. All the principles that PM Hipkins had purported to hold over the past five and a half years have just flown out the window. Or have they?- Paula Bennett

To be fair most people weren’t listening too closely to what they wanted to do because they didn’t believe they could actually deliver anything. It was a waste of time listening because the reality of it actually happening was slim to none. Except then the media and opposition started doing their job and asking questions about costs and consultants. The numbers were staggering.

Not many people cared about the RNZ/TVNZ merger until they heard that tens of millions had already been spent and it would then cost another $350 million. The wasted money on investigating the harbour bridge cycleway and light rail was already over $100m. They may not be able to deliver but they sure can spend money on nothing.

Hipkins was one of the three designers of the Government’s policy agenda. He wasn’t a spectator who just did as Jacinda Ardern wanted as he now wants you to believe. He was an integral part of policy development and design. His backtrack this week on a few initiatives is cynical politics at its best.

He helped design bad policies that they failed to sell to the public. They wasted millions of dollars in consultancy fees and public service time. He believes in these policy initiatives that he cancelled this week and has only postponed them because polling told him they are unpopular. He believes in social unemployment insurance and the RNZ/TVNZ merger. As such, you have to believe that these are on hold and not cancelled. You cannot trust that these policies will not be back on the Government’s agenda if they are back in government post-election. – Paula Bennett

As I’ve often written, Labour governments have commendably shaped modern New Zealand for the better, notwithstanding some inevitable blunders and excesses. But I have absolutely no doubt the current one, with the perspective of time, will be recorded as the most incompetent and socially and economically destructive in our history.

They leave a legacy of massive needless debt, a badly damaged economy with thousands of small businesses destroyed, a history of slap-dash financial irresponsibility and ironically, of an unknown but reportedly sizeable number of preventable deaths with the ceasure of life-saving operations following the closure of surgical activity for a lengthy period in 2021. But perhaps their greatest crime is their disgraceful attempt to abolish the most basic underlying principle of democracy, namely one vote per adult and not the 2% of the population who can claim 50% or more of Maori ethnicity receiving half of the management function of public institutions based on ethnicity. This they described as co-government which they endeavoured to justify on a totally bogus interpretation of the Treaty. – Sir Bob Jones

Those seeking to make hate speech illegal are relying, increasingly, on the concept of “stochastic terrorism” to justify their plans for extensive political censorship. Stochastic, in this context, is best explained as the problem of identifying precisely which one of the ten thousand antisemitic readers of an incendiary online posting is going to borrow his brother’s rifle and walk into the nearest synagogue.

The promoters of hate speech laws argue that it is enough to know that those contributing to the creation of a climate of hatred and prejudice will, eventually, succeed in provoking a deadly political reaction. Although it is virtually impossible for the authorities to identify exactly which one of these ten thousand potential terrorists will pick up a gun, the statistical certainly remains that someday, someone will.

Better, therefore, to legally prohibit extremists from building-up the sort of highly-charged political atmosphere that can only be earthed by a bolt of terrorist lightning. No antisemitic literature, no antisemitic movies, no antisemitic blogs and – Hey Presto! – no antisemitism!

Quite apart from the immense cultural wounds such an approach would inflict – no Merchant of Venice – it is far from certain that such extensive censorship would be effective.  – Chris Trotter

The hate speech legislation packed off to the Law Commission by Prime Minister Hipkins proposed to limit the extended protection of our human rights legislation to religious communities alone. This offered considerably less protection for “vulnerable groups” than had been promised in earlier recommendations, and yet, even when limited to religious belief, the potential for conflict remains high. The Bible and the Koran both contain passages that are, at least on their face, antisemitic. Should both holy books join Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in the sin-bin? – Chris Trotter

Truth is a hard goddess to like – and even more difficult to serve – but among all the other gods she stands alone for keeping her promise to humanity. “I cannot shield you from the pain that comes with me,” she told us, “but I am your only sure protection against those who would have you believe that happiness is ignorant, and that lies can set you free.” –

So we’ve not learned much from lockdowns have we? We still go crazy, we still panic, and supermarkets still can’t seem to plan ahead for that.- Kate Hawkesby 

Any doubts that the cost of living’s worst effects were starting to bite, and bite hard were confirmed this week when a group of health professionals urged the Government to expand its free lunch scheme to more schools.

Health Coalition Aotearoa, a group of more than 55 health academics and 65 medical organisations, said more children than ever needed the scheme, attributing the reason to soaring food prices and the recent Auckland floods. – Janet Wilson

You may well ask how can half the country’s school-aged children need the state to provide them with food?

Implicit in that question is a judgement that researchers say is the problem that renders poverty invisible.

Yet while material hardship rates have decreased since the Global Financial Crisis, poverty for single-parent families remains above comparable countries in Europe and food insecurity is now beginning to become an issue in two-parent working families. – Janet Wilson

With food inflation at 10.1% for the year ended last October, its fastest rate in 14 years, food insecurity is silently rippling into Kiwi homes forcing parents to miss meals, so their children have enough to eat. – Janet Wilson

With Stats NZ revealing that fruit and vegetables had increased by 17%, meat, poultry, and fish by 10% and grocery items by 9.7%, food insecurity is less about poor personal choices and more about the struggle to access nutritious food that’s stratospherically expensive.

So how can New Zealand be a land of plenty that produces enough food to feed 35 million people a year, yet one in five Kiwi kids experience food insecurity and have poor access to good food? –

The researchers contend that rather than attributing hunger to individual decision-making these narratives hide the more pressing realities of inadequate incomes, insecure work, high rents, and lack of access to suitable land for growing food.

As the number of food insecure families grow, simplistic narratives about individual responsibility and poor choices need to be replaced with more equal access to good, nutritional food.

Food in schools programmes, while well-intentioned, in effect masks the wider issue of why the food insecure can’t get access to good food. – Janet Wilson

So   was  it  really  a  bonfire  when  incoming Prime  Minister Chris Hipkins put a  match to  several of the Ardern government’s policies?

Certainly  his  supporters  (and some  within the  media commentariat) hailed the  move as  being bold, although  the ACT party argued that far from setting a bonfire of his own policies, “he has burned a little undergrowth and left a few weeds smouldering for the future”.

Critics   were   not  slow  to point out  that Hipkins  had done nothing to rectify  those  “achievements” in his own portfolio  of  falling standards of education and rising  truancy in primary schools, not to mention the disaster of the  polytechnics merger.

Even now  with  his avowed  focus on “bread-and-butter” issues,  the  decision to  raise the minimum wage rate by the largest aggregate amount since 1997 could push many of its beneficiaries  into a  higher tax  bracket, in effect recycling much of it back to the  government’s own coffers. – Point of Order

Who  cares if a huge deficit is  bequeathed to  the next administration?  Every previous  outgoing Labour government  has done so. – Point of Order

The  trouble  for the Hipkins  team is  that the Ardern  government has wasted  so  many  millions  on projects like  the  proposed merger of  TVNZ  and  Radio NZ, now off the  table,  that  extra  funds have  to  be found  to keep those outfits functioning. – Point of Order

With extreme events likely to become more common, we all have to think about the tradeoffs we might have to make to future-proof our homes and our cities and towns.

It’s lucky for us, however, that we have our other superpowers, like knowing when to look out for others, and being a helping hand for anyone who needs it. .

We’ll need to draw on that over the coming days.

Kia Kaha. – Tracy Watkins

We understand that people are doing it really tough but the tough political decisions had to be made.

Here’s the question: What do you do for teachers? What do you do for police? What do you do for defence? Are you going to do it for everyone, Michael?

This… [is] the inflationary price/wage spiral that we’re going to get into that the Federal Reserve in America, that the Reserve Bank here is worried about. This Government isn’t worried about it but everybody knows it’s where we’re going to end up. – Erica Stanford

I’ve been reading about Three Waters over the weekend.

It’s a mess. We knew it was a mess but the headline grabbing aspect of the mess is around co-governance and how unpalatable that is to most of us.

Willie Jackson said as much last week. The argument has been lost, David Seymour and Christopher Luxon have successfully driven the discussion to a point where the Government doesn’t stand a chance. – Mike Hosking

But here’s your next big hurdle, and it’s what I think most of us haven’t understood, who is liable? You know, for the bill.

We haven’t understood because the question hasn’t been answered until now. But also, I suspect even if it had most of us haven’t wandered into the weeds of this thing and got our head around it.

Some of the local bodies have, hence they’ve never liked it. – Mike Hosking

The answer around liability is another crime in a series of crimes.

It’ll cost, by Government estimates, up to $180 billion. To borrow that you need some sort of assurance. And this is the rub – the Government wants to stick it on the ratepayer.

The Government covers none of it. Think about that.

The four water bodies simply tell lenders if it all goes wrong, we will use a property rating mechanism – in other words, you and me.

So the council have had their assets taken off them but the public are on the hook for the debt. And you wonder why councils don’t want a bar of it. –  Mike Hosking

What fool unilaterally has their investment and assets removed from them, handed over to a new body, partially or not, we are yet to see, run by Māori and then the debt liability is handed back to you. On top of the fact that the pricing of the project you have no control over.

And then you, as the council, are charged with collecting the money from the punter at a price agreed to with the water authority that may or may not suit you.

Have you ever seen a more bewildering one-sided cock up of an idea?

This alone is every reason you need to get rid of the Government. They’re insane. – Mike Hosking

Always good advice… 😉 pic.twitter.com/ijIepFacxS

— RFTTE (@rftte) February 12, 2023

 

The fact that the local voice, the knowledge of the local people is being weakened.

My message to Government would be to butt out and let local government work out these things; work with us rather than telling us what to do, – Carmen Houlahan

It really does not seem like a simplification process. To me it sounds like lots of bureaucracy and centralisation of power and control.  – Jules Radich

Its quite ironic that in the same breath they are trying to task local government with how to get people more involved on a local level of participation … when in fact their voice is being taken away – Jules Radich

These are important issues but they are deeply, deeply complex issues about who pays for it fairly in terms of insurers, individual property owers, taxpayers, ratepayers, is it this generation, future generation … it will be a multi-decade effort and it’s really important that we can work together in a bipartisan way.

“I think it will be part of a review, a good set of questions to ask why over 50 years there’s been houses built in places that maybe aren’t appropriate now and we should be really clear about that, so making sure councils have authority and power to do that will be important. – Christopher Luxon

The reactions by media chiefs and cultural commissars to accusations that government cash has bought the media’s support or silence — particularly on co-governance — has been marked by bewilderment, defensiveness, exasperation and anger.

Some of that reaction stems from the fact that a very specific criticism of the fund — that it requires the media to endorse a particular view of the Treaty of Waitangi — metastasised quickly into the widespread belief the media had been “bought” generally.

Once that view had taken hold, no matter how loudly editors and journalists insisted they were robust critics of the government, the damage had been done. The widespread disdain for the recipients of the fund’s cash was summed up by the epithet “The team of $55 million” — a play on “The team of five million”, which Jacinda Ardern used to rally the country behind her Covid management strategies. – Graham Adams

The first of the general eligibility criteria requires all applicants to show a “commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to Māori as a Te Tiriti partner” — alongside a commitment to te reo Māori. The section describing the fund’s goals includes “actively promoting the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, acknowledging Māori as a Te Tiriti partner“. These criteria may appear uncontroversial to most government bureaucrats and media managers but they are very contentious to the many New Zealanders who don’t accept that the Treaty implies a partnership of any kind — let alone a 50:50 power-sharing agreement between the Crown and iwi, which Three Waters, for instance, incorporates. And it’s not as if rejecting the claim that the Treaty implies a partnership is a fringe opinion.

In his Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture in 2000, former Labour Prime Minister David Lange described that view as absurd: – Graham Adams

The defence of the fund on the grounds that most of the projects approved by NZ on Air are not directly concerned with the Treaty has been dismissed by critics, who say the criteria have an insidious effect by  functioning as a “good behaviour” bond for any organisation that wants to access taxpayer cash.

Just how seriously PIJF applicants take the requirement to swear allegiance to the approved view of the Treaty was revealed when details of NZ on Air’s assessment process were released in 2022 under the Official Information Act. – Graham Adams

Perhaps the biggest blow to the fund’s credibility was the publication of a report in March last year that expanded the criteria stated in the funding application documents. Titled the “Te Tiriti Framework for News Media”, it was commissioned by NZ on Air — at a cost of $33,350 (plus GST).

While NZ on Air advised that the “framework” was offered only as “guidance”, any media organisation hoping to tap into the fund’s millions would have been under no illusions about the stance they should take towards the Treaty.

Indeed, the report begins with a firm instruction: “Mass news media organisations need to consider, explore, build on and implement this framework in ways that show commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi.”

Examples of the “guidance” include:

• • “Māori have never ceded sovereignty to Britain or any other state.”
  • “…our society has a foundation of institutional racism.”
  • “For news media, it is not simply a matter of reporting ‘fairly’, but of constructively contributing to Te Tiriti relations and social justice.”
  • “Repeated references by the government to the English version [of the Treaty], in which Māori supposedly ceded sovereignty, have created systematic disinformation that protects the government’s assumption of sole parliamentary sovereignty.” – Graham Adams

Despite such firm evidence of what NZ on Air expects from applicants, many senior journalists still seem unable to accept that demanding adherence to a certain editorial position on the Treaty as a requirement for funding is an outrageous abuse of government power and taxpayer money.

Equally, they seem reluctant to accept it was a massive blunder for media organisations to agree to such criteria. Nevertheless, a few media managers have admitted privately the PIJF has been a disaster for them. – Graham Adams

As the concepts of co-governance and partnership increasingly become a flashpoint in this year’s election campaign — at a time when the government has been steadily inserting them into a swathe of legislation and policy ranging from education and health to the RMA and Three Waters — a question remains over just how much the fund’s criteria have crimped that debate.

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins insists that many voters are suspicious of co-governance only because politicians haven’t explained the concept clearly — but that failure also falls squarely on the shoulders of journalists. – Graham Adams

In short, for Stuff there is no debate to be had over the question of whether the Treaty implies a partnership — in much the same way it prefers not to publish criticism of anthropogenic climate change or transgender activism. – Graham Adams

There can never be a definitive answer to the question of exactly how much the Public Interest Journalism Fund has helped shut down criticism of the Treaty at a crucial time in our political history. But by accepting its conditions, it is undeniable that the media has inflicted a terrible wound on itself by being seen to have compromised its principal assets — trust, credibility and independence. – Graham Adams

The lesson to media organisations seems clear: if the government ever comes calling with a bag of money that requires editorial prescriptions to be followed, take the advice of the advertising campaign that ran in the early 1990s to discourage children from experimenting with illegal drugs — and just say no. – Graham Adams

That faint squealing noise Australians have been hearing over the past couple of weeks was the sound of New Zealand’s Labour government slamming on the brakes. The distant smell of burning rubber can also be explained. That was the same government executing a handbrake turn.

Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation last month triggered not only a sharp political reset but a pronounced change in the country’s mood. Ardern may have enjoyed worldwide adulation, but in two terms as leader she had become an increasingly polarising figure at home. Her departure resembled nothing so much as the lifting of a spell. – Karl du Fresne

Ardern’s departure – which was spun as a sudden decision, but turned out to have been carefully plotted weeks beforehand – could be interpreted in two ways. One was that she saw defeat looming at next October’s general election and didn’t want to go down in history as a failed prime minister. (That was the rat-and-sinking-ship theory.) The alternative explanation was that she realised she had become a liability to Labour and wanted to give her successor time to regroup before going to the polls. (That was the noble self-sacrifice theory.)

Either way, the portents were clear. Not only did opinion surveys show Labour in steady decline and its National party opposition in the ascendancy, but Ardern’s personal popularity had slumped to the point where she had fallen into the negative approval zone, where voters who liked her were outnumbered by those who didn’t.

It was a dramatic demonstration of what some political scientists call the Obama effect, where a leader is admired abroad but not so much domestically. It also reinforced the fundamental truth that ultimately, the only people in a position to truly judge whether Ardern was doing a good job were those who had to live with the consequences of her government’s policies. When it comes to the crunch, rapturous applause from left-leaning overseas commentators is just so much meaningless noise. – Karl du Fresne

The Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 was a crucial turning point. Ardern’s earnest ‘be kind’ shtick and her patronising entreaties to the ‘team of five million’ soon took on an unmistakeably totalitarian tone. State-imposed mandates that barred unvaccinated people from working were seen as cruel and heartless. The same was true of a chaotic and randomly unfair isolation and quarantine system that prevented New Zealanders overseas from returning home, often in heartbreaking circumstances.

To many people, Ardern became the face of authoritarianism – ironically, the exact reverse of the compassionate image she sought to convey. Her daily televised pep talks from what was derisively labelled the Podium of Truth, so named because of her statement that the government was the sole source of reliable information about the pandemic, aroused as much scepticism as shoulders-to-the-wheel fervour.

None of this was helped by the growing public perception that Ardern was protected by sycophantic journalists. New Zealanders expect the media to subject the government to rigorous critical scrutiny, and they didn’t see that happening. In the end, the media’s fawning over Ardern became a negative. – Karl du Fresne

Covid aside, what most damaged Ardern was the growing public realisation that her government was pursuing a radical agenda for which it had no mandate and which it demonstrably lacked the competence to execute. Even as homelessness, gang crime and child welfare issues escalated, Labour ideologues seemed more concerned with promoting disruptive and destabilising changes in health, education and local government. As with some Labour regimes in the past – and with Australia under Gough Whitlam – there was a striking mismatch between ministerial ambition and ability.

So now Hipkins has embarked on a desperate salvage operation, reshuffling Labour’s cabinet, demoting his most unpopular minister, the divisive Nanaia Mahuta, and pledging to focus on ‘bread and butter issues’ such as the cost of living. He has also signalled the likelihood of a rethink on some of Labour’s most ideologically toxic policies – notably, Mahuta’s push for what is euphemistically termed Maori co-governance over the nation’s water resources. – Karl du Fresne

The Bill of Rights Act says that everyone aged 18 and over has the right to vote. The Supreme Court says that setting the voting age at 18 is inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act. Astute readers may have noticed a contradiction, one that arises out of the Make It 16 decision issued by our highest court late last year. It’s the result of a tangle of legislation and judicial logic which, when unravelled, is a good illustration of why the courts shouldn’t be asked to resolve contentious social and political issues like this. – Alex Penk

The Electoral Act 1993 sets a minimum age of 18 for voting in general elections. Section 12 of the Bill of Rights Act says that qualified voters “of or over the age of 18 years” have the right to vote in Parliamentary elections. However, section 19 of the Bill of Rights Act says that everyone has the right to freedom from discrimination including age-based discrimination, with “age” defined as any age from 16 onwards. The age-based non-discrimination right was actually inserted into the Bill of Rights Act three years after it was first passed, apparently without anyone noticing that this created a contradiction between sections 12 and 19. This contradiction opened up a line of argument for Make It 16, who were seeking a declaration of inconsistency—a formal statement that the voting age of 18 is inconsistent with the fundamental rights and freedoms in the Bill of Rights Act.

A majority of the Supreme Court judges resolved this contradiction with a rather creative interpretation of the Bill of Rights Act. Section 12, they said, only guarantees that the voting age won’t be raised; it doesn’t mean that it can’t be lowered. The majority justified this conclusion by invoking section 6 of the Bill of Rights, which says that wherever possible, “an enactment” should be “given a meaning that is consistent with the rights and freedoms contained in this Bill of Rights”. In other words, section 12’s specification of the voting age should be interpreted in a way that’s consistent with section 19’s prohibition on age discrimination.  – Alex Penk

First, it seems frankly implausible that Parliament would have thought it was creating some sort of sliding scale rather than fixing a specific voting age, especially when you look at the actual legislative history.[1] Only Kos J, writing a sole minority opinion, did this in detail. Disagreeing with the majority’s interpretation, he concluded that Parliament meant to prevent the voting age being raised or lowered because a change in either direction, “is not a neutral political action” but one that will inevitably “benefit some parties disproportionately.” He noted too that the voting age is one of those rare entrenched provisions in the Electoral Act—a provision that requires a super-majority vote of 75 percent of MPs or a majority in a referendum to change—meant to settle the position and end a history of “Parliamentary tinkering with electoral law”.

Second, it’s hard to see how the interpretive direction in section 6 can be used to resolve inconsistencies within the Bill of Rights itself. It’s entirely circular to say that the Bill of Rights Act should be “given a meaning that is consistent with the rights and freedoms contained in this Bill of Rights”. This just begs the true question—what do those rights and freedoms actually say?—and the confusion provides cover for judges to resolve conflicts between rights in a way that fits their preferred view, in this case using section 19 to reinterpret section 12. There’s no reason this logic couldn’t be used to justify the exact opposite approach—using section 12 to reinterpret section 19—but in fact the whole issue is a red herring.

As Kos J said, the real issue is how to resolve the conflict between a specific provision, section 12, and a general one, section 19. Like him, I think the best way to do this is to say that, “the explicit right to vote in parliamentary elections at 18 years, grounded in the constitutionally-entrenched provisions of the Electoral Act and affirmed by s 12 of the Bill of Rights, prevails over the generalised right to freedom from discrimination affirmed by s 19.” – Alex Penk

Then the majority got into policy-making territory, though to be fair that’s not entirely the court’s fault. The Bill of Rights Act says that rights are subject to “reasonable limits” that are “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” So the courts will only say that a law is inconsistent with the Act if the law creates an unreasonable, unjustified limit on a right. But asking judges to decide what is “reasonable” and “justified” in a “free” and “democratic” society is an intensely value-laden exercise, not a legal one, the kind normally reserved for politics. Judges are clearly sensitive to the perception that they’re straying into politics, and the majority was at pains to stress that it was simply stating what the rights mean. – Alex Penk

These are not legal questions; they are questions of social science and policy, and this is not how policy should be made—on the basis of a solitary and uncontested study containing no New Zealand participants, provided by a Commissioner who has been advocating for a lower voting age since at least 2018, supported by the assertion of a mid-ranked academic at an overseas university. Compare this to the Parliamentary process which, at its best, gathers comprehensive research, puts it through an open and contested process, and offers a measure of transparency via Select Committee deliberations and ultimately accountability to the electorate.

The Attorney-General also played an eyebrow-raising role in all this. First, the Court said he was required to provide positive justification for a voting age of 18—in other words, to offer evidence to support the current position. But the Attorney-General wasn’t able to do this, and so was limited to arguing that 18 is within a range of reasonable possibilities. The Court therefore relied only on the evidence from the Children’s Commissioner, and made the declaration of inconsistency that Make it 16 sought. But the judges said that limiting the voting age to 18 could potentially be justified—it just hadn’t been in this case. Second, and more concerningly, the Attorney-General had also begun his case arguing that section 12 disposed of Make it 16’s case, but abandoned this argument before the case began. Kos J was particularly unimpressed by this, describing it as a “regrettable” choice and noting: “Important questions of public rights before this Court cannot just be resolved by forensic choices made by parties.” It’s difficult to understand why the Attorney-General made this choice—though a cynic might think it had something to do with the fact that the Attorney-General isn’t just a law officer but a member of the Government, the same Government that immediately greeted the Court’s declaration with an announcement that it would introduce legislation to lower the voting age.

For now, opinion seems firmly against changing the voting age but what is changing, in this era of declarations of inconsistency, is the role the courts are playing in political issues. They are ill-suited to this; it’s not ideal that arcane arguments about legal interpretation play such a large role in a case like this. And as this case demonstrates, courts are limited to the issues raised and the evidence supplied by the parties—or not, in the case of the Attorney-General. Whatever his reasons, when a single party’s litigation strategy can have such far-reaching implications it illustrates why issues like this shouldn’t be decided by the courts. – Alex Penk

When our highest court says something is inconsistent with fundamental human rights, that tends to stick in the public consciousness and to motivate political action. Just look at the power to make declarations of inconsistency itself, a power that wasn’t in the Bill of Rights Act and was invented by the courts, to be eventually acknowledged in statute by Parliament. Will the same thing happen with the voting age? Who knows, but with the courts taking this kind of approach, expect to see more cases like this. – Alex Penk

There is responsibility when you take on the role of public service, you have a responsibility to the people that you’re representing”.

It’s important that egos and collaboration and civility, and actually you can disagree strongly without being disagreeable or personal with each other. That behaviour and that character and that leadership really matters. – Christopher Luxon

You don’t just have council because it’s a squabble-fest. You’ve actually got to get things done for people.

As you’ve seen even in the last round of elections across the country, people are frustrated with politicians not getting things done.

That’s my call to all politicians is that we have to model out the standards of leadership that we want to see in our fellow citizens. We’ve got to carry ourselves with civility. – Christopher Luxon

The full economic and financial cost will take some time to realise. We know the biggest economic costs are going to be in the form of lost capital and lost economic opportunity. – Caralee McLiesh

What we are talking about is inflation-adjusting tax thresholds which we think is just entirely fair, done in many countries around the world and is a completely reasonable thing to be able to do to give people more of their own money to navigate a cost of living crisis which is the other big challenge we’ve got.

What we have got to make sure is we do a proper assessment of what the damage actually is and what support is really needed and then we make sure we apply those funds with good economic responsibility and we are prudent economic managers because it is taxpayers dollars and most important is we actually get things done. – Christopher Luxon

As a former CEO, who is used to spending money and making investments, it is about what you do with that money and how you get a return on that and how you get things done that deliver benefits for New Zealanders. –

The focus has to be on making sure Kiwis are safe, making sure we are supporting them, making sure we start the clean-up, and then obviously making the assessment of what is needed. –Christopher Luxon

Politicians want their positions more than anything else. If being pro-trans to this extent loses a significant politician her position then many other politicians will not be, stop being, pro-trans to this extent.

In more detail here there’s a very vocal part of the political class demanding many things for the trans cause. Among the general public not so much. And that’s the thing about this democracy kick – at some point the general public do get asked. – Tim Worstall

The British Government has a new policy around unemployment and it’s the old carrot and stick.

There isn’t anything new around employment thinking. It’s a combination of rules and incentives, the state of the market place in terms of jobs and the mix of attitude of those looking for work and the amount of assistance the state Government is prepared to offer.

In Britain they are cracking down, so you need to meet your welfare officer or get penalised or apply for jobs or get penalised. If you don’t play ball you will lose your benefit.

Here, it’s the opposite – if you don’t want to work no one seems to care. – Mike Hosking

Thousands upon thousands of young people are not only without work, they are not in training, not looking to improve themselves and aren’t in education looking to add to their CV’s.

They are literally doing nothing and for that we support them financially in some cases for years on end.

The great crime in that is, 1) they are young and therefore you are robbing them of a future that could be vastly different, and, 2) it comes at a time of extraordinary amounts of work.

It would be nice to think you could sort yourself out, that you are self-motivated or someone around you is there to help you on your way. But for clearly too many, that simply isn’t their reality. – Mike Hosking

This all resonates with me because the age group we are dealing with are the 15-24-year-olds. That’s the age of all five of our kids.

They are all doing their own thing but what we told them as parents was you could do whatever you want, as long as it wasn’t nothing. – Mike Hosking

Although we vote for polices that affect us our sense of the economy, health waiting lists etc, tell me how you can vote for a Government that for five years has allowed that number to get where it is, at a time when answers have been so plentiful?

If it’s irresponsible as a parent, then surely it’s as bad for a Government.

What Government can justify writing off the next generation by literally doing nothing except handing out money with no expectation of social, moral or economic improvement? – Mike Hosking

British writer Samuel Johnson quipped: “When a man knows he is to be hanged… it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Eighteenth-century gallows humour is obviously just as apt in the twenty-first as we watch Chris Hipkins make a show of jettisoning many of Labour’s policies he apparently backed just a month ago.

The prospect of his party being hanged at October’s election has obviously concentrated our new Prime Minister’s mind to such a marked extent he has lost the sense of embarrassment most political leaders would feel about extravagantly ducking and diving to get away from what have clearly been highly effective Opposition attacks. – Graham Adams

For its election slogan, the Labour Party might consider adapting Groucho Marx’s famous line to read: “If you don’t like our principles, don’t worry, we’ve got others (and any or all of them may be abandoned at short notice!)”

What must really be confounding to the Opposition is that Hipkins is being hailed as stunning and brave on account of his dramatic retreat while questions are being asked about his opponents’ performance — with Luxon in particular under fire.

Some in the media have seized on a handful of polls taken while Hipkins still enjoys the novelty factor of being the nation’s new Prime Minister and have decided that Luxon is a lacklustre leader and that National has lost direction.

This despite the fact Luxon — aided by David Seymour — has just seen off Jacinda Ardern, a celebrity politician who even a year ago was a very popular Prime Minister, and has forced her successor to retreat swiftly on several fronts.

Journalists seem to have fallen for Hipkins’ implausible impersonation of a new broom — which can only be said to be true inasmuch as he has lifted a corner of the Labour government’s tattered carpet and is busily sweeping as much contentious policy under it as possible so it is firmly out of sight before the election. – Graham Adams

As National leader Christopher Luxon put it: “Chris Hipkins has been part of this Labour Government and been part of that engine room with Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson driving all of this agenda.

“It’s rather disingenuous — and some clever Jedi mind trick really — if you say, ‘I have got nothing to do with that and now I believe this… I actually think it could be all about the economy.’

“Well, where have you been for the last 15 months?”

Why would anyone imagine Hipkins is deeply dedicated to reforming Labour policy — especially co-governance — rather than superficially reacting to polls that had been plummeting?

And why would anyone imagine that the very same policies Hipkins is now jettisoning won’t be resuscitated if Labour finds itself in a position to form a government in October? – Graham Adams

The initial signs are not promising. He has — without a trace of embarrassment or awareness of public sentiment — suggested that rebranding co-governance as “mahi tahi” (“work as one”) might be helpful. In fact, he has been reported as saying he “loves the phrase mahi tahi”.

Does Hipkins really have such a low opinion of those opposing co-governance that he thinks that will do the trick? Does he have no idea how much resentment exists already to renaming government departments and government policy with Māori names? – Graham Adams

For a Prime Minister to pass off widespread opposition to a reshaping of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements as fear-mongering should be beneath him.

It appears not to have crossed Hipkins’ mind that many New Zealanders object to co-governance because of fundamental concerns around the erosion of democracy.

Their “fear” is that principles of “one person, one vote, of equal value” — and policy being based on need not race — are being overturned in favour of a society where ancestry can confer rights denied to everyone else. – Graham Adams

Perhaps New Zealanders’ fierce attachment to democratic principles is something that Hipkins — like his immediate predecessor, Jacinda Ardern — simply doesn’t understand.

What is particularly hilarious is that Hipkins is pretending that once the public understand more about co-governance they will fall in love with it.

In fact, the real danger for Hipkins is that the mainstream media will actually do its job and voters will get to see clearly what the government has planned for them via the notion of “partnership” — and its offspring “co-governance” — which under this government has been intricately laced through official policy from health and education to Three Waters and the rejigged RMA legislation. – Graham Adams

Hipkins will be hoping fervently the public doesn’t suddenly grasp the scale of the revolutionary changes that have taken place under the government he has served in for five years — and that have been imposed without any specific public mandate.

If they do, their fury will see Labour crushed in October — no matter how much Hipkins likes to posture as the fresh-faced new boy suddenly dedicated to “bread-and-butter” issues. – Graham Adams

January 2023. It all started so well.
A 5% jump in the polls just for becoming PM – nothing else.

This probably reflected the return of borderline reasonable ex-Labour voters desperately hoping the party would revert to its traditional core policy of just trashing the economy, rather than democracy as a whole. An outpouring of relief that Jacinda’s minority-obsessed, divisive and authoritarian rule was apparently over, rather than faith in Chippy’s abilities to run the country.
Nevertheless, trying to maintain the momentum, he pushed forward. That’s when the cracks began to show.  – Derek Mackie

But….. and this is where Chris revealed his true Left-wing, woke credentials. He only postponed the hugely expensive Unemployment Insurance Scheme, a direct tax by any other name, which would see families paying another 3% of their earnings to keep redundant workers on the couch watching Netflix on 80% of their former salaries for up to 7 months.

And, the anti-free speech and divisive Hate Speech legislation was referred to the lefty lawyers at the Law Commission for review. In other words, wait until after the election then magically revive it.

Then he made his really big mistake. He actually promised to fix the economy, crime, health and education….well, eventually! Not that he really thought there was much wrong with the last three, particularly crime and education, which he felt he had presided splendidly over.

And, he pledged to concentrate on the bread-and-butter issues and get rid of all the woke nonsense. Although, any mention of winding back Labour’s separatist co-governance agenda was conspicuous by its absence or hidden in a smokescreen of “mati tahi”, Chippy’s new favourite Maori phrase.

However, he did promise to explain better to the public how he was going to turn NZ into a two-tier, tribal-ruled, apartheid state. Gee, thanks mate for the clarification!  – Derek Mackie

I’ve followed Rowling’s saga from the beginning, and have read her supposedly “transphobic” tweets and her account of “reasons for speaking out on sex and gender issues.”  I’ve also seen the social-media mob go after her to the extent of some of the offended burning Harry Potter books! And it won’t be news to you that in this issue I’m pretty much on Rowling’s side.

I have seen nothing “transphobic” from her: no hatred of trans people at all. What she’s demonized for is insisting that transsexual women, while deserving of the compassion that should accrue to all humans, are not identical in every respect to biological women. She does not agree in the literal sense with the mantra “trans women are women”, and has explained why. She is navigating a tortuous path between the rights of biological women and those of transsexual women, and has been attacked because she sometimes uses sarcasm and humor to make her point.

But one thing I haven’t seen in her is a fear or hatred of transsexual people. What I have seen are bravery, persistence and compassion in the face of “Rowlingphobia” (now she’s being called a “Nazi”), but also her fierce conviction that some trans activists are trying to infringe on the rights of biological women, rights that are not 100% in synch with the rights of transsexual women. – Jerry Coyne

This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.

So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia? Surely, Rowling must have played some part, you might think.

The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people.

You might disagree — perhaps strongly — with Rowling’s views and actions here. You may believe that the prevalence of violence against transgender people means that airing any views contrary to those of vocal trans activists will aggravate animus toward a vulnerable population.

But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic. She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing. There is no evidence that she is putting trans people “in danger,” as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist. – Pamela Paul

Rowling could have just stayed in bed. She could have taken refuge in her wealth and fandom. In her “Harry Potter” universe, heroes are marked by courage and compassion. Her best characters learn to stand up to bullies and expose false accusations. And that even when it seems the world is set against you, you have to stand firm in your core beliefs in what’s right.

Defending those who have been scorned isn’t easy, especially for young people. It’s scary to stand up to bullies, as any “Harry Potter” reader knows. Let the grown-ups in the room lead the way. If more people stood up for J.K. Rowling, they would not only be doing right by her; they’d also be standing up for human rights, specifically women’s rights, gay rights and, yes, transgender rights. They’d also be standing up for the truth. – Pamela Paul

Of course, some children really are trans — and benefit hugely from getting help with transitioning. Ironically, they have now lost a clinic designed to assist them, thanks to the stupidity and short-sightedness of ideologues.

We are now approaching — albeit cautiously — a place where politicians and professionals should at the very least be able to question certain practices without being dismissed as bigots.

That said, as we have seen from the recent debate around Nicola Sturgeon’s ill-thought-out self-identification legislation, a lot of people are still afraid of tackling the gender ideologues. And understandably so: the activists are very powerful and some are very persuasive.

They dominate social media, targeting the young and impressionable, casting themselves as the enemies of old-fashioned and outdated values; pioneers of a newer, more progressive age of self-expression and tolerance.

Some present themselves as harmless entertainers. Others have a more direct agenda, proffering gender reassignment as an easy, fun and, in some cases, lucrative lifestyle choice.

Provided no one challenges them, they are all sweetness and light. Express even a bat-squeak of concern, however, and they can be utterly vicious. Witness the recent ‘decapitate Terfs’ placards at pro-Sturgeon rallies in Scotland. – Sarah Vine

Terf — or trans-exclusionary radical feminist — is the trans fanatic’s (misogynistic) preferred acronym for anyone, be they concerned parent or cautious professional, who dares question the wisdom of not merely allowing but, like the Tavistock, actively assisting young and vulnerable children to start altering their gender.

By demonising all opposition, trans ideologues have, over the years, skilfully and successfully shut down almost any debate on the issue. – Sarah Vine

All this amounts to a scandal on a truly titanic scale, one that affects not just the lives of individuals such as Keira Bell, who will have to suffer for ever from the after-effects of the treatment she underwent, but also for everyone who has ever been made to feel like a bigot in this toxic debate.

Because this is not just a catastrophic betrayal of thousands of vulnerable children and their families by a taxpayer-funded institution that allowed itself to be infiltrated and influenced by a highly politicised ideological agenda.

It’s also an example of what happens when all debate is stifled, and of the harms that occur when free speech is shut down and legitimate questioning of motives and methods is sacrificed on the altar of wokeness. – Sarah Vine

History teaches us that wherever good people are silenced, bad things happen. I have no doubt that in years to come, when we look back on what happened at the Tavistock and at the whole situation surrounding the trans debate in general — such as convicted rapists being allowed to declare themselves female and serve jail time in women’s prisons — people will shake their heads in disbelief that such things were ever allowed to happen.

But happen they did, and not because no one saw what was going on.

They took place because the rest of the world was too busy covering its own sorry backside — too busy being woke, too busy painting pointless rainbows on pedestrian crossings, too busy organising ‘inclusivity seminars’ and paying trans activists to teach primary-school children that biological sex is a ‘construct’ — to see that many vulnerable children were being consigned, like Bell, to a lifetime of ill-health and regret.

In short, too busy paying lip service to a bunch of politically correct bullies, while ignoring those who really need society’s protection. It is, I’m afraid, the story of our times; and, as many of us warned and Hannah Barnes’s book shows, it’s a shameful one. – Sarah Vine

What an extraordinary week.

I’m not just talking about the devastation, the tragedy and the heroism, although all that was remarkable enough.

What was also exceptional was the manner in which the country responded. Cyclone Gabrielle gave us a tantalising glimpse of a New Zealand that most of us grew up in and recognised – a country where people set aside real or imagined differences and pulled together in the face of a common crisis. – Karl du Fresne

We have been through a sustained and bruising period of division and polarisation, the purpose of which seemed to be to pull us in different directions based on race, gender, sexual identity and other markers of “otherness”.

But in recent days we have witnessed the re-emergence of the old New Zealand: a country in which people recognise that all of us – urban and rural, male and female, Maori and Pakeha, young and old, queers and heterosexuals, immigrants and those born here – are bound by common interests, values and aspirations and need to pull together when our national wellbeing is threatened.

We have seen the very best of New Zealand in the way communities rallied and turned to their own resources, and in the way emergency services personnel, many of whom were themselves directly affected by flood damage, selflessly responded to the urgent needs of others, often at great personal risk – and in two cases, with fatal consequences.

We have seen an outpouring of public support for the thousands of people whose properties have been destroyed and who must now set about trying to rebuild their lives. Farmers, horticulturists and orchardists are some of the worst affected and it’s possible the disaster will have a positive outcome in the form of a greater public appreciation of the rural sector and its importance to the rest of us.

We have been reassured and impressed by the performance of community leaders, sector representatives and local politicians who suddenly found themselves thrust into situations for which there was no chance to rehearse.  – Karl du Fresne

We have been generally well served by the media, especially the broadcast media, who were tested to the limit. In the first two days the mayhem was so widespread and fast-moving that it was hard for news outlets to keep up. Just as reporters were getting to grips with one major development, another story broke somewhere else. I can’t recall any other crisis when the media focus kept shifting at such a dizzying pace – from Muriwai to Tairawhiti, Northland to Hawke’s Bay. Power failures and communication breakdowns made the job even harder, but reporters rose to the challenge.

Radio in particular came into its own. It’s unique in its ability to keep on top of a fast-moving and fluid (forgive the pun) situation. Radio reporters are highly mobile and can phone in their reports from wherever things are happening. Programme schedules aren’t rigid, unlike TV, and can be interrupted whenever news breaks. Moreover, you can listen to the radio pretty much wherever you go and whatever you’re doing.

The crisis also served as a striking reminder of the limitations of digital technology. When a smart phone is useless because cell phone towers are out or the phone can’t be charged, a battered transistor radio – as one farmer marooned in a remote area of Northland attested this morning on RNZ – can be a lifeline. – Karl du Fresne

To summarise, in the worst of circumstances we have glimpsed the best of New Zealand – a New Zealand many of us feared was changing beyond recognition.

For five days, ideological agendas and their vociferous, mischievous champions have been sidelined. The constant discordant static of division has been silenced. New Zealanders have had far more pressing issues to focus on – practical issues of survival and recovery.

They have been given a vivid reminder of the importance of social solidarity at a time when it was never more desperately needed. The question now is whether this spirit can be sustained once the immediate crisis has passed. – Karl du Fresne

Newly-minted Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has had some sort of road, excuse the pun, to Damascus experience by announcing we need to “get real” about our roading

He says some of them will need to be moved to be more resilient. No kidding Chris, you road-hater from the political party of road-hating.

The political party that killed any number of significant roading projects that would see major state highway improvements. They jettisoned them so we could have bus lanes, cycleways and light rail that is $70 million deep on consultants without a millimetre of track laid two years after it was supposed to finish. – Mike Hosking

I am praying at some point most New Zealanders wake up to this fraud, if you haven’t already.

This from Chris “I-have-a-truancy-announcement-to-make” Hipkins, despite the fact, as Education Minister, he ignored the issue for years. ‘But I can’t make that this week because I have an emergency to deal with as Prime Minister.’

‘And as Prime Minister I have seen roading in a state that it shouldn’t be, despite the fact I sat in cabinet for the past five years promoting e-bikes and buses that don’t turn up, because we have no drivers, because my Minister for Auckland, who is also Minister for Immigration, doesn’t let anyone into the country.

You can’t make this stuff up. This guy is the biggest, bewildered wonk we have seen out of Wellington in many a long year. – Mike Hosking

Chris at least is about the place. But the problem with that is in an emergency you see the real “them” and the frightening part of the real Hipkins is it seems he’s never left Wellington and when he did he couldn’t believe what he saw.

The rest of us have lived it for five years and he didn’t quite get the message.

So, Chris – the roads are an issue are they? Who do you think has overseen that particular disaster? – Mike Hosking

It is a hard time to be a farmer in the North Island, this week especially.

Yes, the cyclone has affected a lot of people, not just farmers, in some cases devastatingly. But the farming community have got to be among the worst affected.

I really don’t mean to minimise this cyclone for anyone else, but farmers are isolated.

They will probably be the last to have their power reconnected, the last to have their bridges fixed to get the milk tankers in; they’ll be the last ones in to the supermarket in town. And they’ll be the last ones to have someone turn up at the door and ask if they’re ok

And when most others affected have replaced the roof and dried the carpet, farmers will still be shifting forestry debris off their land, they will still  be counting the loss of dumped milk, spoiled kumara, damaged avos, wiped out maize crops, and lost apples for months, if not years. –  Heather du Plessis Allan

In case you’ve forgotten, they had Covid shutting the borders and keeping workers out.

To this day, they’ve watched unharvested veges rotting in the soil, fruit rotting on the trees, the winter grazing regulation dreamed up in Wellington, the ute tax, the climate emissions levy, and now the planned RMA reform coming at them.

The forestry conversions are threatening communities, they’ve had the flooding in Gisborne just over a year ago, the frosts on central North Island farms last winter, and the flooding on Franklin District farms last week.

It has been a lot for farmers. – Heather du Plessis Allan

We rely on these guys.

We don’t think of that a lot, but they bring tens of billions of dollars into this country to help pay for our kids’ education and our parents’ healthcare.

Spare a thought for them, because they’ll be the last ones to make a fuss.

And when this cyclone doesn’t even feature any more in the news cycle, the effects of it will still be weighing on farmers’ minds.   – Heather du Plessis Allan

Nah, we’re just three Māori boys – Mikey Kihi, Rikki Kihi and Morehu Maxwell

Economist Herbert Stein once said that ‘if something cannot go on forever, it will stop’. Today, there is growing evidence that ‘Stein’s law’ is coming for the renewables industry, particularly for wind and solar power.

After investing billions of dollars into the green-energy transition, many of the major players in the energy sector are now shifting their priorities. The global energy shortages of 2022 seem to have woken much of the world up to just how impractical renewable energy can be. – Ralph Schoellhammer

The year 2022 marked a decisive shift. Energy security replaced climate change as the world’s top priority. And while politicians’ green rhetoric will carry on as normal, the markets are reflecting this transition. In the US, the market for green bonds has already started to stall as producing clean energy has become less of a priority than producing energy full stop.

This process is not likely to be smooth, however. Politicians and CEOs could still be held accountable for their over-ambitious green promises of recent years. – Ralph Schoellhammer

The energy crisis was a major wake-up call for the world. It was a reminder that our energy supplies are far more fragile than we often realise. And it made it clear that green technology can rarely be relied on. The exception to this rule is nuclear power, which can produce vast quantities of electricity without any carbon emissions. Despite this, during last year’s global energy crunch, working nuclear power plants were shut down across the world, from California to Germany. This will be seen by future generations as a moment of absolute madness. As will attempts to phase out fossil fuels before reliable replacements are available.

To return to Herbert Stein’s quote, there is a positive to stopping something that cannot go on forever. It forces us to face up to the reality of our energy needs and to reject the green delusions that have dominated decades of policymaking. A complete overhaul of Europe’s energy strategy is long overdue. We cannot afford to keep ignoring reality. – Ralph Schoellhammer

Nothing speaks to the madness of the modern elites better than their war on farming. Consider France. One day President Macron is telling the world to get serious about ‘food security’. Post-Covid and with war raging in Ukraine, we must make sure food keeps being made and transported around the world, the French government says. Yet, at the same time, that same government, without missing a beat, is bringing in pesticide bans that could devastate sections of France’s own agriculture industry. Which could even lead to the closure of farms. Behold the schizophrenia of the 21st-century establishment. – Brendan O’Neill

Don’t worry if you haven’t heard about this latest farmers’ revolt on the continent – the tractor uprising against the laptop elites rarely makes the mainstream news these days. The farmers are furious over the government’s ban on neonicotinoids, a chemical that kills insects that eat plants. Such insecticides are potentially harmful to bees, and so farmers will be forbidden from using them. And the fact that the ban will hit sugar-beet farmers particularly hard, potentially leading to the closure of sugar factories? Doesn’t matter. Bees come first.

For sugar-beet farmers, neonicotinoids are essential for staving off yellows virus, a pathogen spread by sap-sucking insects that causes beet leaves to turn yellow and which can reduce crop yields by up to 50 per cent. The farmers who took to the streets of Paris this week are worried about a ‘further decline in beet plantings’ and, consequently, ‘sugar-factory closures’. ‘Macron is liquidating agriculture’, one of their banners said. ‘Save your farmer’, cried another. As Reuters reported, the farmers believe the government’s ‘excessive pesticide curbs’ run counter to its ‘calls to boost food security in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine’. – Brendan O’Neill

The French clampdown on neonicotinoids sums up so much that is wrong with modern politics. The ban is a diktat from an unaccountable technocracy. It was under pressure from the European Union that France overturned its longstanding policy of allowing beet farmers to use neonicotinoids even though their use is forbidden elsewhere in the EU. Last month, the European Court of Justice decreed that France was behaving illegally and should immediately stop using these toxic substances that are bad for bees. So much for French sovereignty. With the stroke of a foreign judge’s pen, beet farmers in France have had their ability to make a living thrown into jeopardy. No wonder so many working people feel they aren’t in control of their own lives anymore.

The EU’s callous issuing of a decree that will hurt hardworking French farmers echoes its antics in other member states. Dutch farmers have been in a state of revolt for almost four years now after the EU put pressure on the Dutch government to cut nitrogen emissions in the Netherlands in half by 2030. Such a mad, drastic policy would be devastating to farmers’ livelihoods, potentially leading to the closure of 3,000 farms. Ireland is also being bullied by the EU to slash emissions by between 22 and 30 per cent, which Irish farmers believe could cost their industry €4 billion and 56,000 jobs. It isn’t only in the unhinged oligarchy of the EU that farmers are being prevented from farming. Justin Trudeau wants Canadian farmers to cut nitrous-oxide emissions by 30 per cent by 2030.  – Brendan O’Neill

We need to talk about the irrationalism of the global elites’ hostility to farming. Last year, the UN estimated that 180million people are facing ‘food crisis’ right now, and yet various governments around the world are making it harder for farmers to grow food. What’s more, banning an insecticide like neonicotinoids in yet another Western country – France – does not mean the world will become a ‘cleaner’ place. As this week’s protesting French farmers pointed out, France will just end up importing more sugar beet from ‘countries that allow neonicotinoids’. Slowly destroying farmers’ livelihoods, and for what? Not for a world free of chemicals. That stuff will still be used, somewhere else, to make food French people will end up eating.

This cuts to the rotten heart of the elites’ anti-farming agitation. Self-styled virtuous nations seem content to outsource the ‘dirtier’ aspects of farming to other countries, just as they’re content to get coal from Africa or China. This means our morally pristine countries can wallow in eco-virtue, safe in the knowledge that the hard, filthy work of mining for coal or making sure sugar-beet crops don’t get devoured by diseased insects is being done by other people in other parts of the world. Preserving our virtue takes precedence over preserving our industries and the jobs they create. Being eco-pure is more important to the new elites than the ability of working people, whether coalminers or beet farmers, to earn a living and contribute to society.

This is how estranged from reason and reality the 21st-century elites have become: in the crazy tussle between food and signalled virtue, they choose the latter. It’s what happens when we’re governed by the out-of-touch, by a cushioned pyjama class that rarely ventures out of its metropolitan bubble and whose every whim is met by an ill-paid precariat. We end up with rulers who know little, and care less, about how things are made; about the importance of agriculture to the continued existence of humanity; about the necessity of industry; and, most importantly, about the centrality of work to working people’s sense of meaning and autonomy. Only an establishment that had completely lost connection with the material world of things and production and jobs could so cavalierly say, ‘Let’s close down a few thousand farms to save the bees’.

This is why the farmers’ fightback matters. This is why we should cheer the revolt of the tractor classes against the laptop classes everywhere from Canada to France to the Netherlands. Because these people are fighting for more than their right to work and make food. They’re also fighting to restore reason and sense to the otherworldly realm of technocratic rule. – Brendan O’Neill

According to the clerics of the Green Cult, once we blow up our last coal mine, send all diesel engines to the wreckers, stop using concrete, reinvent sailing clippers, cover the grasslands with solar clutter and the hills with wind machines and then slaughter all of our cattle. . .  global climate will become serene – not too warm, not too cold. Wild weather will cease, and there will be no more droughts, floods, cyclones or snow storms and no more plant and animal extinctions.

But the records written in the rocks tell a far different story about climate changes. Even when nature was in full control, it was not a serene place. – Viv Forbes

The international commentariat may be forgiven for believing new PM Chris Hipkins has relaunched the government rather well.

First a clever pivot to the centre and now a compassionate and inclusive focus on disaster recovery.

Giving credence to rumours that the key strategic brains agreed and executed a skilful change of direction rather well. – Point of Order

And yet, there’s something not quite right about this narrative.

It’s hard to explain away the binned policies (or is that postponed?) as ‘too far, too fast’ or an excess of zeal.

To many – both inside and outside New Zealand – they seem nicely representative of the direction in which the government (certainly the Ardern version of it) hoped to travel. They even seemed to be trying to actually implement some of them.

Their termination – so far without replacement – will leave the voting public with a short record of concrete policies to consider. – Point of Order

One of the weaknesses of small country media consensualism is that it obscures the divisive elements of the government’s approach to date.  Even – or perhaps particularly – when it has been able to build majority support for that.

The result has been something of a soft ride for the cultural and social intolerance of the government and its supporters in public – and indeed private – institutions; failure to probe the impact of rule by the government’s preferred experts; and celebration of positive discrimination for favoured groups.

Above all of this, not much questioning of the gradual effect of the government’s spending more money on its supporters’ ever-narrower needs – and then limiting the ways the other people can spend what’s left. This gets particularly problematic when the growth machine stops.

You can’t blame any democratic government for making use of slightly-stretched claims of national unity.  But it’s unprofessional (for both politicians and journalists) to believe them too much.  Good politicians must always be aware of the need to agree to disagree. – Point of Order

The only possible response is contemptuous ridicule. I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words. I am a professional user of the English language. It is my native language. 

I am not going to be told by some teenage version of Mrs Grundy which words of my native language I may or may not use. – Richard Dawkins 

We exist for a flash of time, a spark of consciousness in an eternity of oblivion. Perhaps the only self-aware sentient living organism anywhere in the cosmos.

So how is it that, amongst all that we can and have achieved, we remain capable of the sort of production-line evil that prompted the good people of Portland to affix a metal teddy bear to a stone walkway as a remarkably simple but brutally effective statement of commemoration?

What madness, what flaw in our individual or collective souls lead a civilised, modern nation to bundling mothers and their children into fake showers and gassing them, knowing that they would die huddled together, naked, terrified and confused in their final moments. – Damien Grant 

Eichmann claimed that his only alternative was suicide, but Arendt retorts: “…this was a lie, since we know that it was surprisingly easy even for members of the extermination squads to quit their jobs without serious consequences for themselves.”

It wasn’t just a crime against humanity. It was a crime by humanity.

There is no specific marker for this article, and that is the point. It is good to remind ourselves of what happened, and not assume that this event was an anomaly which we need not trouble ourselves with. – Damien Grant 

Both Eichmann and Korczak belong to our shared humanity. We always have choices and taking the time to remember what occurred is one we should make more often. – Damien Grant 

Despite decades of warnings about extreme weather events, New Zealand was defenceless and overwhelmed by the brutal storms.

Nearly six years ago, Jacinda Ardern declared called climate change “my generation’s nuclear-free moment”.

But her government became preoccupied with stopping the missiles, but neglected to build the bunkers. – Andrea Vance

All good policy requires a direction of travel. Now we’ve got two… But we’ll have run out of roads before we get there.

The most severe impacts of these more frequent and intense storms are felt on our road network. As part of the mission to reduce emissions, transport agency Waka Kotahi was tasked with reductions of 41% by 2035.

It was to reduce our reliance on private vehicles by improving public transport, walking and cycleways. But the agency’s budget didn’t expand to meet these new demands, and keep pace with the black hole that is maintenance.

This is also a policy direction that favours the urban and wealthy over poorer, rural and remote communities. – Andrea Vance

Councils are meant to pick up half the costs of repairing damage to local roads, which is fine in theory, but they don’t have the money either. Some of the damage was exacerbated by forestry slash – an industry that sends a large chunk of profit overseas – and despite repeated warnings, the Government failed to act. – Andrea Vance

For safe and reliable access to drinking water, we need more storage, better protection from contaminants and more stormwater capacity, as well as protection from salt-water intrusion, reduced flow in drought conditions, and the relocation of low-lying facilities.

None of these is controversial – and yet the Government managed to make it so, as well as an unholy mess of reforms. If a new government is elected, those reforms will be repealed, setting that work back years. – Andrea Vance

That approach is deeply fraught – moving communities with deep ties to a location is complex, sensitive, and likely to take decades. Vulnerable residents don’t have the luxury of time, and necessity may dictate greater protection (which we haven’t planned or budgeted for) rather than relocation. – Andrea Vance

1. Had New Zealand cut emissions like the  Green Party/Alliance since 1990, or any other climate change activists wanted, it would have made zero impact on whether or not the cyclone would have happened. – Liberty Scott

2.  Had New Zealand cut emissions like activists wanted, along with all of their other policies, New Zealand would have been measurably poorer with less investment, lower GDP, lower population and less tax revenue for government. New Zealand would have had fewer exports, fewer imports and had even less resilient infrastructure, because the hard left would have ensured all infrastructure was underpriced (so having less money for capital) and there would have been no private investment in most infrastructure.  

and if New Zealand DOES slash emissions regardless of cost following this, the odds that another cyclone will devastate part of New Zealand do not change one iota. – Liberty Scott

Yet the best way to respond to the threat of climate change and the threat of natural disasters is wealth, economic growth and building infrastructure for resilience.

Whether it be back-up power for cellsites, bridges that can withstand the debris from cut forests, stopbanks or simply re-emphasising what people can do THEMSELVES for civil defence (non-perishable food, water, batteries for transistor radios).

Shutting down industries, denying people mobility they wish to pay for and kneecapping New Zealand exporters that face competition from subsidised and protected rivals in other countries makes people poorer, it makes it more difficult to pay for more resilience in road, water, communications and energy networks, which ultimately users will (and should) pay for.

It’s why Japan survives big earthquakes better than Turkey. – Liberty Scott

This Government is good at emotion. As was pointed out various times last week, it does disaster politics well. The Ardern years have been saturated in it.

What the country needs now though is action. This lot, if the gang looting and the Police Minister’s vigilance on it is an example, will once again talk big, but deliver little, if anything – Mike Hosking

Nicola Sturgeon may be on her way out – but after 16 years of SNP rule, Scottish schools are still places of indoctrination. This may sound like a hyperbolic thing to say, but that’s the only conclusion you can draw when you look at what Scottish educators and the Scottish government are saying themselves.   – Dr Stuart Waiton

Take the General Teaching Council for Scotland’s Standard for Headship, which sets out the professional framework for what a headteacher, teachers and schools should be all about.   

You would expect such a document to be all about imparting knowledge and aspiring to teach every child as much as possible. Instead, it is a horrifying mix of therapeutic new-speak that stresses the need for teachers and headteachers to focus on the matter of social justice.  

In the 16-page Standard for Headship report ‘social justice’ is mentioned seven times.  – Dr Stuart Waiton

The terms sustainable or sustainability appear 23 times in the document. This includes what some would see as a Malthusian demand for ‘respect for our natural world and its limited resources’ as well as a call for ‘learning for sustainability’, whatever that means.

This new doctrine is highly therapeutic, with the entire document grounded in a need to ‘promote health and wellbeing’ and ‘emotional intelligence’, which, as part of our culture of social justice, is ‘enabling’ and ‘empowering’ pupils to be ‘safe’ and ‘caring’.

This melding together of social justice moralising and therapeutic language permeates through the entirety of the Scottish education system. Education in Scotland is no longer viewed as a way of passing on vitally important knowledge to children, but rather as a way to ensure that ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ are embedded in our children’s minds.  – Dr Stuart Waiton

Elsewhere the Scottish government and Education Scotland have worked to ensure that teachers are ‘Embedding race equality in school’. This is not simply about treating people equally, quite the reverse in fact. Rather it is about the promotion of Critical Race Theory and the divisive and self-loathing idea of ‘white privilege’, which is endorsed by Education Scotland.  – Dr Stuart Waiton

Perhaps worse of all is the Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools guidance document, a policy that would fit comfortably on the shelves of the most extreme trans activist.

Schools, for example, have to ensure that children, ‘demonstrate an understanding of diversity in sexuality and gender identity’. From age 12 children can self-identify and receive support and validation from schools. The school will develop a ‘support plan for the transgender young person’, thus creating a ‘safe space for transgender young people to be themselves and have their identities respected’.

If parents don’t support this development it is implied that they are a wellbeing concern. But then, many parents will not even know that this gender fluid ideology is being adopted or that their child is being transitioned with the help of the school as, ‘it is best to not share information with parents or carers without considering and respecting the young person’s views’.    – Dr Stuart Waiton

It’s entirely fair for young adults to be able to debate the merits of Marx versus Malthus or the differences between critical race theory and colour-blind anti-racism. And we should be able to discuss transgender policies too – even though many universities appear to be uncomfortable with any debate on this issue.  

But this is school education we are talking about. Many of these ideas are not part of a debate, they are a dogma, a form of cultural engineering, where ideas and outlooks that the majority of the Scottish population oppose are forced onto children.

For those who are directing this process there is a clear attempt to ‘change the culture’ of Scottish society through the politicisation of the curriculum. – Dr Stuart Waiton

The Scottish Union for Education will challenge these illiberal (and indeed illiterate) developments and aim to create a framework for ordinary parents, grandparents, teachers and communities to make their voices heard. It may appear to be a tough ask, but I am convinced that the majority are on our side and for the sake of our liberal and democratic society, something must be done.   – Dr Stuart Waiton

Quite so, kids love naughty. Part of the whole process of testing boundaries. So, and therefore, kids must not be allowed to test the boundaries of the current orthodoxy for who knows what Emperor’s clothes moments might arise?

That fear in itself showing the weakness of the current orthodoxy, of course. – Tim Worstall

I really do believe [these books are] of their time and they should be left alone. Roald Dahl was a great satirist, apart from anything else. It’s disgraceful.

It’s this kind of form of McCarthyism, this woke culture, which is absolutely wanting to reinterpret everything and redesign and say,’oh, that didn’t exist’.

Well. it did exist. We have to acknowledge our history. – Brian Cox

If we start down the path of trying to correct for perceived slights instead of allowing readers to receive and react to books as written, we risk distorting the work of great authors and clouding the essential lens that literature offers on society. – Suzanne Nossel 

The editors at Puffin should be ashamed of the botched surgery they’ve carried out on some of the finest children’s literature in Britain.

As for me, I’ll be carefully stowing away my old, original copies of Dahl’s stories, so that one day my children can enjoy them in their full, nasty, colourful glory. – Laura Hackett

‘This is truly extraordinary. This is the reading list of anyone who wants a civilised, liberal, cultured education. It includes some of the greatest works in the Western canon and in some cases – such as Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent – powerful critiques of terrorism. Burke, Huxley, Orwell and Tolkien were all anti-totalitarian writers.– Andrew Roberts

A number of books are singled out, the possession or reading of which could point to severe wrongthink and therefore potential radicalisation… It seems that RICU is so far off-track that it believes that books identifying the problem that it was itself set up to tackle are in fact a part of the problem. – Douglas Murray

It almost seems like a joke. House Of Cards was actually a satirical view of Right-wing politics. This list includes more or less the entire classical canon of literature and some of the very best British television programmes ever made. – Andrew Davies

No-one was closer to the former PM than Grant Robertson, a career politician despite his protestations, with Prime Ministerial ambitions. Grant is a clever bugger and knows only too well the government will be massacred this October. He also knows, as our post-war history shows, that following a heavy defeat, better to let some-one else be the fall-guy then move on him or her a year before the next election, or in good times (which won’t be the case in the next few years), let two successive election fall-guys cop it, as we saw with Labour following Key’s 2008 succes.

The incoming National government will  face a mountain of problems so it’s my pick Grant will make his move in early 2026 when a victory could be feasible. – Sir Bob Jones

You’ve got to look after the people you love and just do whatever you have to do at the time. – Ethan Cross

Labour have worked hard to say that attendance started declining in 2015 and therefore National is to blame. That is – by and large – a myth.

Labour – under former Minister of Education Hipkins – have driven this off a cliff. – Alwyn Poole

We have 120,000 chronically absent, over 10,000 enrolled nowhere, she says average full attendance up to 46% – but their main policy is 84 more truancy officers. Nothing about improving schools, improving teaching standards.

When high decile State school students (low Equity Index Number in the new parlance) are not seeing the point of going to school as they are finding more efficient ways of learning – the system is shot. – Alwyn Poole

It is widely accepted by those who follow such matters that the Waitangi Tribunal has become wildly activist.

It is now, without question, a brilliant example of a decent idea gone horribly awry. – Mike Hosking

Ironically, history increasingly shows the Government’s that have made the most progress have been National ones.

Chris Finlayson of late and Doug Graham before him made major inroads into settlements, whereas the current Labour Government, like so much of what they do, amounts to little. – Mike Hosking

Anyway, the tribunal in their latest report tells the Crown off for not funding Māori adequately so they can make their claims.

What makes the tribunal so activist is this sort of statement and the thinking behind it is par for the course. What is adequate?

And given the system is invented, you have always needed a quid pro quo approach. What is a just settlement? Is it money, is it an apology, is it land or is it all three?

Every case is individual.

But somewhere along the way it’s spiralled out of control. It’s become an industry as individual lawyers have made millions. The tribunal seems intent on being here forever dealing with historic claims despite, if you remember, under Jim Bolger’s Government there was an attempt to put a timeline on it all. – Mike Hosking

Surely at some point the historic claims should be registered and settled. Just how long do you need to want to rectify something you argue went wrong over 180 years ago?

How many lawyers, how much research, how much funding?

The path to ratification has been open since the mid 70’s and we are still scrapping over funding for claims. Surely boundaries have to be drawn and timelines have to be put in place? – Mike Hosking

Good intention is one thing.  A runaway train is another. – Mike Hosking

It’s easy to become inured to the madness of the culture war. Stories of Peter Pan being slapped with trigger warnings or God going gender-neutral are 10 a penny these days. They can sometimes wash over you. Not because they are unimportant – far from it. But because they are so ubiquitous. Every institution from the Wellcome Collection to Splash Mountain has fallen to some flavour of woke regressivism. Language is warped to flatter a few narcissists. Old art works and new are censored at the behest of hysterics. Such cases don’t surprise us anymore, no matter how deranged and illiberal.

But once in a while the authoritarians who make up our cultural elites outdo themselves – and remind us how much is at stake in this thing we call the culture war. The rewriting of the late Roald Dahl’s books is one such story. When the Telegraph revealed yesterday that Puffin, Dahl’s publisher, has made ‘hundreds of changes’ to his beloved children’s books, in line with suggestions from so-called sensitivity readers, the response was one of horror and disbelief. An author beloved by generations of children for his magical, spiky and sometimes sinister work has had his literary edges sanded off. All new copies will feature the newly cleansed text. Dahl’s words and stories will be changed forever, no longer truly his own, all because some weirdo with a red pen thinks they know better. The philistinism, the cultural vandalism, is stunning. – Tom Slater

What is it that made these sensitivity readers conclude that Dahl’s books must be changed, so they ‘can continue to be enjoyed by all today’, in the words of Puffin? The word ‘fat’, for one. That’s gone from every book – sparing the blushes of characters like Augustus Gloop, the fat lad from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The Oompa-Loompas are now no longer ‘titchy’ or ‘tiny’. Just ‘small’. They’ve also gone gender-neutral for good measure, with ‘small men’ swapped for ‘small people’. Perhaps most outrageously of all, whole lines have been rewritten and brand new lines added, seemingly to pre-empt any prejudice that might otherwise curdle in the minds of young readers. In The Witches, a line describing a witch posing as a ‘cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman’ now casts her as an aspirational girlboss, ‘working as a top scientist or running a business’.

That last edit sums it all up. It’s the PC takeover of culture in a risible little nutshell. Propaganda has triumphed over creativity. Being on message is now infinitely more important than storytelling and nuance. Even in children’s books. Perhaps especially in children’s books. Indeed, there seems to be a particular interest in giving kids’ lit the identitarian acid wash. – Tom Slater

We live in infantilised times – in which speech, culture and even history is censored and rewritten to avoid rattling our brittle spirits. And while we treat adults as children we seem to treat children as robots – to be programmed with the right views and sensibilities rather than left to explore. This can only impoverish literature and repel young people from it. Part of Dahl’s enduring appeal, in spite of JK Rowling’s hostile takeover of kids’ bookshelves, is precisely his appetite for the dark, violent and grotesque. ‘When writing stories, I cannot seem to rid myself of the unfortunate habit of having one person do nasty things to another person’, he once said. The magic and misanthropy of Dahl’s work, notes his biographer, was informed by the Norwegian fairy tales he was raised on and a personal life full of tragedy. To sanitise his work is to completely, utterly, idiotically misunderstand what marks it out in the first place. – Tom Slater

These are the people who have taken over our cultural industries and institutions – idiots who have no idea what it is they are destroying. This sanitisation of literature isn’t coming from outside pressure. There was no big petition demanding Dahl’s works be given a rewrite. The barbarians are inside the gates. The sensitivity readers – a growing industry within the publishing world for many years now – were hired by Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company, which is now owned by Netflix. The review began when the company was still run by the Dahl family. We desperately need to push back against this new philistinism among our elites; against this vandalism posing as progress. – Tom Slater

My starting point is I want a society where we maximise happiness. If people can live happier lives by living and identifying as a gender different to their biological sex, then we should be fully supportive of that as a society.

I can only imagine how hugely challenging it must be to not identify with your biological sex, and the mental health challenges involved with that. I absolutely support people being able to change their gender to reflect their sense of identity, and we should support and accept that both as a community and as individuals. – David Farrar

But, and of course there is a but, there are some situations where biological sex needs to still be regarded as a factor, not just gender identity. I’m going to outline some of those areas below. Returning to my theme of maximising happiness, we should be fully supportive of allowing people to live and participate in their gender identity, unless doing so might reduce happiness to others. By that I don’t mean reduce happiness in the sense of personal disapproval, but in terms of substantive harm.

This is not an issue such as same sex marriage (which I actively campaigned for) where there was no real balancing of competing interests. Allowing same sex couple to marry doesn’t negatively impact anyone else, but (for example) the issues of trans participation in sports does bring in competing or clashing interests of inclusiveness vs fairness.

Now where things get difficult is that some (not all) trans people feel any discussion of these issues invalidates their identity, and marginalises them further. And I accept this can be the case. But I don’t think the solution is not to ban discussion and label any women who disagrees as a TERF. It is to try and have the discussion in a respectful way.

As a society I believe we need to recognise people have a biological sex and a gender identity. In most cases they are the same, not not all. Generally the gender identity is what should be determinative, but there are a few areas where biological sex is also a factor. – David Farrar

The terms sex and gender should not be used interchangeably. Sex is dichotomous, with sex determination in the fertilized zygote stemming from unequal expression of sex chromosomal genes. By contrast, gender includes perception of the individual as male, female, or other, both by the individual and by society; both humans and animals have sex, but only humans have gender.

Now it is also worth nothing that while biological sex is for most people a binary issue – you are male XY or female XX, there are some who fall outside those two. Sarah Bickerton wrote an excellent article in Stuff on how she is intersex. Also another article on Sarah here.

The fact some people are intersex doesn’t change the fact that there are still biological differences between men and women. Humans are described as a bipedal species, even though some humans are born with a disability where they are not bipedal. – David Farrar

Another language issue is the drive to remove the word women from the language. Instead of pregnant women, we now have pregnant people. This is silly. If you want to be a man, great – go for it and transition. But if you want to be pregnant and have a baby, that is hardly consistent with wanting to be a man. Now on an individual level, you should respect what choices someone has made, but that doesn’t mean you have to throw out the word women from all literature. – David Farrar

 Most scientists have concluded that biological males who go through puberty as males have significant advantages in terms of strength and speed that persist, even if testosterone levels are decreased. A review of the latest science found adult male athletes have on average a 10-12% performance advantage over female competitors in swimming and running, 20% advantage in jumping and 35% in strength-based sports.

One should have sympathy for transgender athletes. They work and train hard to get to the top tier, and banning them from competing because they are transgender is harsh on them. And no, I don’t think anyone would go through hormone and/or surgery just so they can better comparative sporting results.

But you also have to have sympathy for the female athletes who are biologically female. They can train just as hard and be the best in the world, but then have someone who is not biologically a female beat them, and feel that nothing they can do will allow them to win.

The trade-off is inclusiveness vs fairness. – David Farrar

This article details how media are routinely referring to some rapists as female. The general rule is refer to someone using their gender identity. But if an offender has a penis and has raped someone, then I think it can revictimise the victim to have their offender described as a woman in court documents and reporting. In this rare case, the rights of the victim should have precedence over the identity of the rapist. – David Farrar

The key point is that one should not start with an assumption that transition is the answer to every child who has gender incongruence. It may be the correct course for the majority, but there is a legitimate concern that in some clinics, you are not allowed to argue against transition. There are concerns that some (not all) of the children wanting to transition may just have same sex attraction.

Just in the US there has been a 300% increase in gender dysphoria diagnosis in five years. It is not anti-trans to want to know what is causing this increase – is it just increased social acceptability and awareness, or is it that it is being diagnosed wrongly for some?

Two long-time feminists raise issues in this op ed about why gender confusion and transgender is not the same thing and caution is needed. – David Farrar

It is worth noting that these are mainly issues around the margin. The vast majority of trans people are not competing in the Olympics, in prison etc. The most important thing, in my view, is to treat people who are trans with kindness and respect for their gender identity. If you are a parent of young children, there is a chance your child may turn out to be trans, and I am sure you would want them to have a great life where they are adored for the unique individual they are. – David Farrar

Someone wrote to me over the weekend and made a really good point after I talked about the resilience of people last Friday. 

They said it was true, that often times a disaster can bring out the best in people or —as we’re seeing with the looters— the worst, in some cases. But they made the point that a part of that optimistic and resilient nature also prevents us from complaining because we don’t want to appear as whingers when there’s always someone worse off. 

But as a result of that, they pointed out, the focus can shift away from questions that need to be asked. And as a resident of Hawkes Bay, these were his questions: what are the three things you need to be working in a disaster? Communications, power and roads, he said. What failed in Hawkes Bay, and continues to fail in many parts: communications, power and roads. – Kate Hawkesby

 His point being, the questions needing to be asked are sometimes obvious ones, but the solutions won’t necessarily be simple.

And we are seeing now, more and more questions coming to the fore, more and more people getting angry about their circumstances. Napier’s deputy mayor over the weekend said she was “going rogue” in pointing out that the Cyclone had ‘laid bare the lack of support and investment the Government’s given the city recently.’ She said ‘the slow erosion of government services in Napier over her lifetime was “embarrassing”, as was the 2 million dollar support package announced by the Government for East Coast communities,’ she said.

She claimed Napier as a community had been abandoned by government from services they should have had. – Kate Hawkesby

Piha residents west of Auckland have said they feel isolated and angry, forgotten about. 

Hawkes Bay residents still without power or access are angry, Gisborne residents feel forgotten in many parts. 

There are areas where debate’s ensuing over who’s responsible for what – is it a council issue, a central government issue or a transport agency issue? Who will own the issue and who will fix it? How much will be spent and is it enough? Is it as simple as to say oh well this is climate change – or are there infrastructure problems that exacerbated things? And if so, how do we track down all those issues and pin point exactly where they are? How do we plan for fixes and budget for them and execute them before another catastrophic event? How much gets politicized? And so it goes. 

So although people are resilient yes, I think they are starting to ask the hard questions and demand answers, and more than that – look for long term real fixes that go beyond short term band aid solutions. – Kate Hawkesby

The government’s most recent failed attempt to enact hate speech laws shows just how difficult it is to strike the right balance between free speech and the protection of religious beliefs.

The tension between free speech and the protection of religious beliefs has long been a subject of debate around the world, and the complexities of hate speech laws have become a challenging issue. In New Zealand, this debate has been especially prominent in recent decades, with several high-profile cases and tragic events bringing the issue to the forefront of public discourse.- Thomas Cranmer

While the intentions behind these laws may be noble, their practical application is often called into question. Critics argue that such laws can be used to silence legitimate criticism, artistic expression and intellectual inquiry, while doing little to prevent violent behaviour. – Thomas Cranmer

These overzealous reactions by the authorities serve to highlight that the unintended consequences of hate speech laws extend far beyond academic discourse, artistic expression, and political speech. They can also have a chilling effect on everyday social interactions and conduct. As George Orwell chillingly warned in his dystopian masterpiece ‘1984’, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”.

This warning is especially pertinent to religious hate speech laws, as their broad and ambiguous definitions can be exploited to stifle free expression and curtail open dialogue, even in settings where diverse viewpoints are crucial. The potential for censorship and self-censorship is a real and constant danger when governments are given the power to regulate speech. Therefore, whether you are a provocative artist, a daring comedian, or a regular member of the public, it is crucial to oppose hate speech laws that threaten our fundamental right to free expression. – Thomas Cranmer

 Last year I wrote that the proposed $14 billion Auckland Light Rail project was a Harry Potter fantasy.

Why? Because politicians love the allure of trains. Our new Prime Minister has confirmed it, with the light rail link surviving the Government’s policy cull, at least as it was announced earlier this month.

For voters, trains are an easy sell too. They’re the aspirational form of public transport.

And because new rail projects take so long to build, voters get to pretend that someone else will pay for it.– Sam Stubbs

First let’s look at the train line we’re already building, the Central Rail Link (CRL). It’s 3.5 kilometres long, with a current cost estimate of $4.4 billion. That’s $1.25b per kilometre, making it the second most expensive rail line in the world, ever. Only New York has spent more. It’s not a competition anyone wants to win.

But it gets worse. $4.4b is a 2019 estimate, with a clear warning recently that it will rise.

That could mean a final bill of more than $5b, compared to the original 2010 estimate of $2.3b. – Sam Stubbs

Let this be a lesson for us all. The real bill for a single light rail line is likely to be much higher than the $14b “estimate” the politicians currently use to justify the project.

Why could they get it wrong a second time?

Once again, let’s look at the maths. The line is estimated at 24km, 12 underground and 12 overground.

So assuming the current cost of the central rail link of $1.25b per km, that’s at least $15b spent on the underground section, before we get to the other 12km overground.

If we repeat the Central Rail Link experience, and double the original estimate, the proposed line could cost over $28 billion. – Sam Stubbs

Is there a better way?

Yes, and it’s cheaper, faster, easier, and leaves billions for the new infrastructure we will surely need.

When done well, dedicated busways really work. The key infrastructure required – roads – are usually delivered in New Zealand on time and on budget, because we do them often.

A dedicated bus network could be expanded much further, in a much shorter time, and at a much lower cost, than a train based solution. – Sam Stubbs

So $650m would replace every public bus in Auckland with a new, more pleasant, quieter, electric equivalent.

Auckland Transport trials show that every electric bus saves $10,900 in operational costs and 160 tonnes of carbon dioxide, every year.

An all-electric bus fleet would prevent 128,000 tonnes of carbon from going into the atmosphere, and save $8.7m in operational costs, every year.

Yet under current planning, we will only get to a zero-emission bus fleet in Auckland by 2040, and will still be buying brand new diesel buses for the next three years.

In 2021 the world had 425,000 electric buses operating. New Zealand had 19. Go figure. – Sam Stubbs

We could do all this, and still have plenty of change from $14 billion for more flood protection, or hospitals and schools, across all of New Zealand.

Our politicians do have to choose between trains, drains and automobiles. They can’t fund them all. – Sam Stubbs

THERE IS A LESSON to be learned from Cyclone Gabrielle, but far too many New Zealanders are refusing to learn it. From Climate Change Minister James Shaw’s portentous quoting of Winston Churchill, to Jack Tame’s hectoring of Finance Minister Grant Robertson for supposedly moving away from “mitigation”, Gabrielle is fast becoming one of those crises that political actors deem “too good to waste”.

But, if we are, indeed, entering a Churchillian “time of consequences”, then a moment’s reflection should tell us that the “mitigation” ship has sailed. The best we can hope for is a government committed to doing everything within its power to help us adapt to unstoppable global warming. – Chris Trotter

The central problem confronting the world’s leaders is a brutally simple one: to combat global warming effectively, four-fifths of humankind would have to foreswear the life that the burning of fossil fuels makes possible; and since no leader would dare demand that his people make such a sacrifice, global warming cannot be significantly mitigated.

Which is why, whether they are willing to admit it or not, governments around the world are focusing their efforts increasingly on adapting to the consequences of a warming planet. The primary lesson which Cyclone Gabrielle delivered to New Zealanders last week is that, domestically, these adaptation efforts have been woefully insufficient, and that much, much, more work is needed if New Zealand is to function (and hopefully flourish) in this “time of consequences”. – Chris Trotter

Cyclone Gabrielle, in all her exogenous fury, has left our political parties with scant room for manoeuvre. The damage inflicted by the storm must be fixed, and the funds to do the fixing must be found. Moreover, politicians who insist Gabrielle’s primary lesson is that the personal and societal sacrifices bound up with climate change mitigation cannot now be avoided, are likely to get a very short shrift from those whose houses, farms, orchards and livelihoods have been destroyed.

The political party that promises to make good the damage of Gabrielle, while offering an adaptation strategy for ensuring that such destruction does not become an annual event, is going to be much more warmly received than one which asks every voter to don a hair shirt and do without the wonders of our fossil-fuelled civilisation. When U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney said “the American way of life is not negotiable”, he wasn’t kidding. – Chris Trotter

When lives and livelihoods have been lost, it is no time for politics. So National’s Gerry Brownlee agreed to the adjournment of Parliament, saying “I simply say to the minister, thank you for your engagement and thank you for the work that you’re doing.”

In a national emergency, it used to be that Parliament was summoned so MPs could be briefed and consulted. Parliament never adjourned for WWI or WWII.

National declared a political truce but Labour and the Greens have not. Both those parties used the adjournment to create the narrative that they are best to handle the disaster and climate policy. – Richard Prebble

New Zealand should support the global effort to combat climate change, but no reduction of emissions by this country will reduce the frequency and severity of cyclones. In our Parliament there is no bickering over the reality of climate change. There is bipartisan support for getting New Zealand to zero emissions.

The party in denial is the Greens. Their refusal to accept that climate change is here regardless of any reduction of emissions by New Zealand, is the reason why in government, the Greens have not promoted policies to help the country adapt. – Richard Prebble

Economics Professor Robert MacCulloch says in his blog that this Government has done almost nothing to assist the regions to adapt. Instead, Labour proposes white elephant projects for Auckland like a cycleway over the Harbour Bridge and light rail to the airport. – Richard Prebble

Labour can promise to borrow all the gold in Fort Knox but it cannot rehabilitate without a law change. Parliament had to suspend the Resource Management Act (RMA) to enable Christchurch to rebuild. Labour has announced there will legislation for this disaster.

Local bodies told the parliamentary select committee considering Labour’s proposed RMA replacement that it is unworkable. Unless the proposed legislation is a U-turn on Labour’s proposed planning laws, the affected region will never be rehabilitated.

The paperwork for an infrastructure project can take 10 times longer than it takes to build.

Ukraine’s infrastructure is being destroyed by Russian missiles. But the Ukrainians are rebuilding in the middle of winter, in the middle of a war, at an astonishing rate. It can be done. – Richard Prebble

Simon Bridges chaired the select committee into the Covid response. He held a press conference and outlined what the committee had found: tracing was not working, testing was inadequate and the lockdown was longer than necessary. The media crucified him. His caucus rolled him.

Eventually, the Government adopted all of Bridges’ suggestions. If National had held Labour to account, the changes would have come earlier, saving a significant social and economic cost. Being an effective Opposition could not have resulted in a worse election result.

National must hold the Government to account. Christopher Luxon should follow his instincts. He was the first MP to call on the Mayor of Auckland to declare a state of emergency. – Richard Prebble

A fictional parody can hardly be accused of breaching their privacy. All South Park has done is roast Harry and Meghan for their hypocrisy – and deservedly so.

Clearly, the royal couple don’t like it when the lower orders speak back to them. They generally expect to be lauded for their ‘insights’ or to be showered with human-rights awards. In the cosseted world of Harry and Meghan, anything less than effusive praise will not do.

Thankfully, we have come a long way from the days when Trey Parker and Matt Stone might have been sent to the Tower for their satire. But the prospect of lesser legal action should still trouble us deeply. Our right to mock Harry and Meghan must be vigorously defended. – Fraser Myers

Sadly relatively few people seem to grasp that the frequent calls for ‘zero tolerance’ against anti-Semitism actually undermine the struggle against Jew hatred. If anti-Semites are not even allowed to express their opinions, bigoted though they are, it becomes impossible to challenge them.

Indeed the demand for zero tolerance is not a brave stance against anti-Semitism but, on the contrary, an evasion of the need to combat it. Demanding the authorities muffle an argument is not the same as making counter-arguments. Of course hard core bigots are rarely swayed but the battle is for public opinion more generally. – Ted Deutch

Of course it is understandable that Jewish organisations in particular should favour zero tolerance. They often have good reason to feel scared and isolated. The problem is that not only is such an approach wrong it principle but that it makes matters worse in practice.

The principle is easy to state. In a free society people should be able to express any views they like. Those who disagree should be equally free to argue against them. There should be freedom for those who speak and freedom for those who have contrary views. Nor should it be forgotten that the public needs the freedom to work out where it stands on any issue.

But the practical reasons to support free speech are also vital. For a start making the expression of anti-Semitic ideas illegal means they cannot be countered. Banning something is not the same as challenging it. On the contrary, as stated earlier, it is an evasion of the responsibility to counter it – Ted Deutch

A key problem confronting anyone trying to tackle anti-Semitism today is that if often takes a coded form. Most notably much of the vitriol aimed at Israel is an implicit form of anti-Semitism.

That does not mean that any form of criticism of Israel is invalid. However, much of  the flack aimed at it relies on standards that are not applied to other countries. Such anti-Semites often use coded language, such as singling Israel out as an ‘apartheid state’, to portray the country as a symbol of Jewish evil.

In this way they can avoid using explicitly anti-Semitic language.

A zero tolerance approach towards anti-Semitism makes it harder to pin down. Anyone who wants to fight anti-Semitism effectively needs to recognise a difficult truth. A pre-condition for a successful battle against this form of hatred is to give anti-Semites the freedom to express their poisonous views. – Ted Deutch

The task is more than “lifting back up”, of course, and for the most part the prime minister’s opening speech reiterated the steps outlined already in the response. There is only so long that he and his newly assigned cyclone response minister and taskforce will be able to avoid talking specifics.  – Toby Manhire

Even though the same person who prides himself on our prudent balance sheet is the same person who decides how much we spend on bridges and hospitals and housing, there is somehow an implacable distance between the two.

This is embarrassing, because they could not be more related. To put it as plainly as I can: our debt is low because we have refused to spend money building the things we need. That infrastructure deficit is very real – the combined past and future gap is $210bn, according to the Treasury – but it’s not recognised on those balance sheets we brag about, therefore it magically disappears.

At a personal level it’s like driving around in a car with bald tyres, two indicators out and a boot that doesn’t shut anymore after a prang. Yes, the owner has more cash in the bank – but only at the cost of risking their life and the lives of others as a result. Multiply this by five million and you understand roughly where we are as a country – it still works, but it’s a mess and kinda scary a lot of the time. – Duncan Grieve

It’s the unspoken headlock paradox of New Zealand’s politics, subject to a bipartisan, mutually-assured destruction pact. A typical exchange occurred in 2008, when Labour’s Cullen described National’s plan to borrow to fund infrastructure as “Muldoonist” in 2008. 

Basically, if you have to choose between getting a sticker and a biscuit for keeping our debt low and actually spending the necessary money to build and fix our stuff, finance ministers will always, always keep the debt low. This was caused in part by sovereign debt defaults and crises, which rightly chilled governments to the bone – but we are an incredibly long way from such scenarios. The saddest thing is that fear means that we have just, over the past year, seen the abrupt end of a lengthy period in which vast sums of money was available to the government at very low interest rates way out into the future. Now inflation has roared back, and that door is closed. – Duncan Grieve

Events, even the most awful, can provide cover for politicians to do things they really want to do, but could not find the will to. The scale of this disaster, which is actually a mere data point on the way to the bigger cost of addressing the climate crisis, arrives at a curious moment in the history of this country and this government. It has awoken us all to how much we’ll need to spend to get back to where we need to be, let alone to respond to the climate crisis. Perhaps Gabrielle might mean that our finance ministers are finally able to admit it too. – Duncan Grieve

There’s a big disconnect happening at the moment between government and locals in the Hawkes Bay area over what’s really going on. 

The Police Commissioner and the PM were both on Mike’s show yesterday saying the reports of looting are just not true, that it’s all the stuff of rumour and gossip, and that it’s unsubstantiated.

But then you have the locals. They’re irate, arguably more irate after hearing the denial of it from government, and saying it is very real, it is definitely happening and they’re traumatized by it.  – Kate Hawkesby 

I’d argue you have to believe the people at the coal face surely? Those on the ground, living it, feeling it, surely they’re the ones we have to take seriously not government officials who pop on some high vis and do a whistle stop tour through an area flanked by hangers on. Is that really a realistic picture of what’s actually happening?

Hipkins reckons the media rolling into town with all their cameras has hyped things up too. Insinuating that the media are looking for drama, there may be a bit much disaster porn going on yes, that’s probably fair, but, the truth also is that the media are capturing things the government would rather they weren’t. – Kate Hawkesby 

And what we do know of this government is that it likes to be the only narrative on any story. It likes to be the pulpit of truth and dish out the messaging, it probably doesn’t appreciate some independent journalism being done around the place. But this denial of any issue smacks of a Jacinda-type approach; rejecting the assertion of everything. 

That didn’t go so well for her, it became farcical, and so I wonder why Hipkins would go down the same track. Rejecting people’s truths as fiction is not a good look. If they’re experiencing it how can it not be true? 

Just because a bureaucrat in an office somewhere doesn’t have an official report of it on paper, does that mean it’s not real? No. It smacks of the PPE scandal all over again.. and the RAT tests.. and the flu jabs.. remember all that? – Kate Hawkesby 

So we have a trust issue here.

Do we believe the Government’s official line – that crime is down, there is no looting, as true? Or do we believe the increasingly frustrated locals?

And don’t forget the mixed messages we’re getting here too from government.

Police Minister Stuart Nash asking gangs to ‘pull their heads in’. Justice Minister Kiri Allan, calling on thieves to ‘get their act together’ all the while the PM and the Commissioner saying ‘nothing to see here, there is no crime.’

So which is it? – Kate Hawkesby 

Look, I really want to believe that 82 new truancy officers are going to turn around our falling attendance rates at schools.

But we live in the real world, so here are some real world facts:

We have 2500 schools and 815,000 students in this country.

That means each of those officers is going to have to cover 31 schools each. Each of those officers is responsible for 10,000 students each.

If the figures are to be believed and 54 percent were truant in term three last year, then each of those officers are supposed to chase up 5400 students regularly.

Obviously, there are already some existing truancy officers trying to do the job, but the trouble is; we don’t how many, because the Government doesn’t know how many. And it’s probably not a lot. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

But it’s only popular if it’s believable, if voters actually believe it’s going to make a difference. And on those numbers, it’s hard to believe that this is possible.

It’s also hard to believe that this is anything other than cynical vote winning tactic from this Government, because they’ve left it this late to deal with the truancy. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Chris Hipkins himself, as former Education Minister, would’ve seen the truancy numbers ticking up. And did nothing about it, until today.

Truancy is a massive issue in New Zealand. Our kids’ education should be top priority, not an easy headline bought with 82 truancy officers.

So I’m sorry to say this feels like one straight out of the Jacinda playbook.

Good headline, scratch beneath the surface just one layer- disappointing.  – Heather du Plessis-Allan

This Government has wasted a huge amount of money… because inflation’s so high, it’s raising a huge amount of extra tax already.

“You just know [the Government] will raise the tax and it will carry on doing dumb, pet ideological projects. – Christopher Luxon

I think we should borrow for it because we’re actually making an investment in that region and, when you borrow money to upgrade the roof on your house versus borrowing to pay for your groceries, there’s a difference there in terms of making an investment in a region – Christopher Luxon

Put the funding into schools and then the schools can use the funding to create a solution that suits their community – Graeme Norman

I have rewritten Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and deleted all of the problematic and offensive elements.

You’re welcome. pic.twitter.com/x05WG9DOjz

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) February 19, 2023

This is curious: The effect, anti-racism, grows ever stronger as the cause, real racism, grows ever weaker. But perhaps this should not altogether surprise us, for as Tocqueville noticed, oppressive regimes do not provoke protest or revolt when they are at their worst, but when they are trying to improve themselves. Thus, it is with the diminishment of real racism that anti-racist rage is expressed, becomes general, and reaches its height. Such rage has the additional virtue that it is an easy way to be virtuous, or to believe oneself such, and it makes no demands other than expression of the rage itself. Moreover, the expression of righteous, or self-righteous, rage is always a pleasure in itself. – Theodore Dalrymple

In everyday life, we often ascribe motives to people that they do not ascribe to themselves. We say that the real reasons that they do what they do are very different from the reasons that they themselves give for their conduct, and we do not necessarily assume that the difference between the reasons that we and they ascribe are because they are lying. On the contrary, we think that we know their reasons better than they know them themselves. To that extent, we are all psychoanalysts. – Theodore Dalrymple

However much I try to “understand” the mind of a mass killer such as Huu Canh Tran, by which I mean imagine myself in his place, I find that I cannot—just as well, you might say. When all the data are in, and however minutely examined the antecedents may be, there will remain a gap between the explanation and what is to be explained. It is a commonplace sentiment that there but for the grace of God go I, and in many cases this is no doubt a generous or inspiring thought, a corrective to censorious condemnation, that is to say condemnation that admits of no understanding or extenuation by circumstance. But there are some actions to which this commonplace sentiment cannot apply, and a mass shooting is one of them.

We are condemned by our very human nature perpetually to try to understand such actions, and we are condemned perpetually to failure in the endeavor. And I am glad that we are doomed to failure: Nothing would be more dangerous for mankind than complete self-understanding. – Theodore Dalrymple

We are constantly told that the culture war isn’t real, and that if it is it’s simply a hysterical reaction by the conservative Right to social change and progress: old white men uncomfortable with ethnic minorities, women and LGBT people finally being given a voice, or complaining about being “cancelled” from their huge media platforms. 

The truth is that the culture war is more like a culture surrender. It’s the one-way offensive of an increasingly extreme and anti-democratic “progressive” agenda, focused not on conservatives and reactionaries, but waged ruthlessly against the liberals of the previous generation – whether they’re second wave feminists, free speech advocates, gay people who don’t want to be dragooned into trans and “queer” agendas, or libertarians and classical liberals.

The latest episode is the disfigurement of Roald Dahl’s books, once lauded by liberal parents for their anarchic and child-centred approach, and now to be extensively amended by commisarial “sensitivity readers”. – https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/20/censoring-roald-dahl-proves-culture-war-total-surrender-right/

These were works that were supposed to belong to children rather than adults; that were intended to teach lessons of honesty, courage and independence. They were some of the most popular and ubiquitous works in our culture, and had nothing whatsoever to do with right wing politics and culture.

And yet these beloved and respected works of children’s literature were coldly and ruthlessly targeted by fanatics not in some obscure sociology faculty or modern art gallery, but at the heart of one the largest publishers in the world. This was no flight of fancy. Going “woke” is not only a matter of faith for many in the world of publishing, it’s also a perfect vehicle for dumbing down and softening Dahl to make him more palatable to American audiences and critics.

Like so many targets of the culture war Dahl’s legacy was not picked on because it was uniquely offensive, or a focus of right-wing affection, but because it has power. The culture war is straightforwardly a grab for influence and profit by a coalition of strident and opportunistic ideologues, who have discovered that if they use the right words (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, offence) they will be met with total capitulation.  – https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/20/censoring-roald-dahl-proves-culture-war-total-surrender-right/

The culture-war is a counter-insurgency and propaganda operation run by people who are already in the corridors of power, who have captured the flag and claimed the castle. We are increasingly governed by people who believe in (or have been bludgeoned into submission towards) a “woke” ideology whose simple intent is the dismantling of Western culture. They employ the language of fairness, equality and liberty, but mean by them something entirely different than how most of us use them. We have a culture war in which one side isn’t fighting back; a culture surrender. – Sebastian Milbank

Some good news for Islamist hotheads in Iran: The Great Satan might not be as Satanic as you thought. In fact, some of the inhabitants of the licentious hellhole of the United States of America are on your side, at least when it comes to shutting down scurrilous commentary about Islam. Behold the extraordinary explosion of religious censorship at Macalester College in Minnesota this month. Following complaints from students, officials at this prestigious liberal arts college threw a black curtain – literally – over the work of an Iranian-American artist that depicted women in niqabs revealing their knickers and women in burqas with huge breasts. Hiding blasphemous art behind black sheets lest it cause ‘deep pain’ to Muslim students? They did you proud, Iran. – Brendan O’Neill

There’s an irony here that would be funny if it were not so sickening: a female artist who challenges the forced draping of women in black cloth finds herself being likewise veiled, likewise draped in shame, likewise hidden from public view. A censorship veil thrown over an artist who dared to make fun of the modesty veils thrown over women in Iran.

There was pushback against this disgraceful act of misogynistic intolerance. spiked’s friends at FIRE – the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression – drew national attention to the ‘sinister’ censorship at Macalester. Eventually, the college administrators backtracked on their ayatollahism and removed the shame curtains from the exhibition. But their paternalistic authoritarianism remained intact. The entrance doors to the exhibition were taped up, so that no poor soul would unwittingly glimpse these painful paintings, and two signs were attached to the doors. One was a content warning, the other a student-made leaflet telling people not to attend the show. So the exhibition was reopened, but students were begged not to enter. What a demeaning way to treat an artist whose only ‘crime’ is to make fun of Islamic extremism. – Brendan O’Neill

On a liberal campus in 21st-century America, at an elite college that has a special ‘focus on internationalism’, the cry for freedom of brave Iranians was hidden behind a black curtain. It was shrouded from view. It remains, alongside Talepasand’s more provocative works, concealed behind a door smothered in construction tape with a plea to students not to enter this sinful sphere. This was more than just another act of petty tyranny carried out by ‘snowflakes’ and the college administrators who kowtow to them – it was a grotesque betrayal by elite students who enjoy every freedom you could imagine of people in Iran who enjoy so few.

Macalester was basically doing the ayatollahs’ dirty work for them. It did to Ms Talepasand what Iran would have done to her, though less violently of course: it censored her, branded her a social menace. It shoved this dangerous, hysterical woman behind a black curtain. Macalester aren’t the only ones doing the censorious bidding of the Iranian theocracy. Across the woke West, criticism of Islam is frequently condemned and in some cases punished. The Anglo-American world’s justification for crushing anti-Islamic ‘blasphemy’ might differ to Iran’s. We talk about protecting individual Muslims from the ‘pain’ of seeing their prophets and customs being questioned, while Iran focuses on the ‘pain’ caused to Islamic society, and to Allah himself, when people diss Islam. But the consequence is the same: punishment of blasphemy, diminution of freedom. – Brendan O’Neill

People have lost their jobs in the West for making fun of Islam. People have been murdered for ‘mocking’ Muhammad. Virtually every institution frowns upon ‘Islamophobia’, which often just means strong criticism of Islam, and even ‘hijabphobia’, which the Huffington Post describes as ‘unfounded hostility towards the hijab’. That is essentially what the Iranian tyranny is waging a vicious war on – the ‘hijabphobia’ of uppity women who are hostile to the idea that they should always be veiled in public.

The commonalities of wokeness and ayatollahism are chilling. Right-on Westerners have become willing, compliant footsoldiers of Iranian-style intolerance. They think they’re doing something nice and socially just: protecting Muslims from offence. But in truth they’re pushing unforgiving religious-style censorship and demeaning our Muslims citizens into the bargain. The idea that Muslims cannot handle difficult discussion and require educated activists to cover their frail eyes and ears is infinitely more racist than a painting of a woman hiking up her burqa. I’m starting to understand why there has been so little sustained solidarity with the revolt in Iran, which continues, by the way. It’s because so many over here have been inculcated with the belief that questioning Islam, mocking Muhammad and criticising the veil are bad things to do. This is the impossibility of solidarity with Iran’s rebels.

For students on a privileged campus in the US to speak of the ‘deep pain’ of being invited to view an Iranian-American’s rebellious art is actually quite repulsive. Pain? More than 300 protesters dead, scores lined up for execution, others severely injured by batons and bullets – that’s pain. And I have no doubt that your shrouding of their slogan and other pro-women artworks behind a black cloak of moral censure will have exacerbated that pain. – Brendan O’Neill

Journalism took a fatal wrong turn when it confused itself with activism and assumed the right to hector the public with ideological lectures, often tinged with an ugly spirit of authoritarianism. Journalists are not our moral guardians, and until they grasp that fact their credibility will continue to decline. – Karl du Fresne

Hipkins should think more about the victims and less about his political opponents in future responses. – Audrey Young

What people in Hawke's Bay are dealing with vs what the PM says from Wellington.

National is proposing doubling the sentences of those convicted of theft or burglary under a state of emergency.

It’s time to end Labour’s soft-on-crime approach. pic.twitter.com/BDuvFb9MGA

— Simeon Brown (@SimeonBrownMP) February 22, 2023

The warning came after an entertaining first Question Time in Parliament for the year, in which Chris Hipkins made a pretty fundamental error which revealed his lack of experience in matters budgetary and economic.

He insisted, in answer to a question by ACT’s David Seymour, that Government spending as a proportion of the economy was lower under Labour today than when they came to office.

It isn’t.

In 2017, it was 27.7% of the economy and in the Budget update figures in December it was 29.9%.

Making mistakes about or not knowing numbers happens – it isn’t a quiz show and politicians’ memories are fallible. But arguing you have shrunk the size of government when you’ve clearly made it bigger is a different and fundamental order of mistake. – Luke Malpass

It really is mind boggling that Hipkins could have got this so wrong, especially when increasing the govt share of the economy thru higher taxes has been a deliberate and conscious matter of policy for the govt he had been a senior minister of for 5 yrs. https://t.co/CQ8spzFg2G pic.twitter.com/YAo79kLwCl

— Michael Reddell (@MHReddell) February 22, 2023

When you start treating people like that by not processing applications or sitting on them for a while, you get a very bad reputation among migrants – especially those who have choices of places where they want to live,” says Crampton.

There’s a global race for talent. Places like Canada are sharply increasing migration and New Zealand now has a pretty stink reputation. Fixing that would be a good place to start. – Eric Crampton

Whenever you are in a downturn, people start seeing migrants as competitors for our jobs or wages. And if the housing market is broken, voters see migrants as coming in and stealing the house that they might have bought. That builds a toxic environment for the politics around migration so that whenever there’s the slightest pressure, the government is tempted to clamp down. – Eric Crampton

Most of the tax revenue benefits from migration go to central Government, while the costs are being left with local governments. Councils don’t know how to fund and finance the kit that they need to accommodate growth, while central Government will often tell them to please accommodate it. –

We need to start thinking about revenue-sharing mechanisms, so that when a city council or region does very well and contributes a lot more to central Government revenues, that they get a taste of that back. – Eric Crampton

Hold a referendum asking New Zealanders whether they want a name change for the nation. If more than half vote yes, a Commission will be established to receive public submissions on a new name and put the most popular three to a vote at the next election

NOTE: I’m on record over the years pointing out the historic silliness of our country’s name

But if it’s to be changed then it should be SOLEY FOR THE PUBLIC AND NOT ANONYMOUS PUBLIC SERVANTS AND THE MEDIA TO DECIDE. – Sir Bob Jones

In election years, make it compulsory for the public radio and television broadcasters to provide equal time for Oppositions to comment on issues with the same time provided for the government spokespersons. In the interest of sustaining freedom of thought, this would not apply to privately owned media. But neutrality must apply to the publicly owned media.  – Sir Bob Jones

At a time when literacy rates across the country are plummeting, and children who read for pleasure are as rare as a conservative in a humanities department, why, oh why, are we messing with the classics?!

While we can debate whether it’s appropriate or not to refer to someone as “fat” (with the holier-than-thou judgment coming down from Dahl’s publishing company noting it most certainly is not appropriate), we have got to the point that, in James and the Giant Peach, Miss Spider’s head is no longer “black” and the Earthworm has given up its “lovely pink” skin for “lovely smooth skin”. Last I checked, spiders are often black, if the ones that make a most unwelcome appearance in my home are anything to go by, and earthworms often appear pink in colour. Are the words “pink” and “black” to be [insert any colour but black or pink]-listed? – Dr Melissa Derby

The word “black” took another hit, having been removed from the description of the terrible tractors in Fantastic Mr. Fox. The machines are now simply “murderous, brutal-looking monsters”. What if, in Roald Dahl’ imagination, the tractors were black? A rather pertinent question to ask is ‘what was going through the censors’ heads if they felt the word ‘black’ was inappropriate here?’ I’m sure that question would make the so-called anti-racist zealots squirm.

Another change is presumably meant to empower women – in The Witches, the wording has shifted from “even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman” to “even if she is working as a top scientist or running a business”. As a girl who devoured Roald Dahl books over and over, I was never ‘limited’ by the original text. Rather, it was my parents who took responsibility for broadening my horizons, not Roald Dahl. – Dr Melissa Derby

I could list other egregious changes, but why bore us all with the nit-picking of the miserable, vocal few? Instead, I’ll continue to read my original copies of Dahl’s stories with my son so that he can enjoy them in their lively, edgy, wonderfully colourful glory, just as I did. – Dr Melissa Derby

Roald Dahl didn’t have much time for parents, which may go some way to explaining why children have so much time for Roald Dahl. Like all great children’s authors (a reliably odd, frequently unpleasant bunch), Dahl preferred the exciting state of orphanhood to the supposed comforts of the nuclear family. From Oliver Twist and Pip in Great Expectations via Alice in Wonderland and James Henry Trotter to Harry Potter himself, the heroes of juvenile fiction invariably face the trials and tribulations of this world alone.  – Allison Pearson

As a mum reading bedtime stories almost 20 years ago now, I confess I wasn’t sure that I much liked the morality of the anarchic, viciously unsentimental Dahl. But my enthralled, pyjamaed pair lapped him up. The more grotesque, the merrier. First, Dahl made my small people afraid, and then his words cast a spell that helped them master their fears.

Daughter and son became gleeful co-conspirators (and devout readers) of this remarkable writer, a World War II fighter pilot who once, having suffered a fractured skull in a crash, crawled away from the burning wreckage of his aircraft in a hail of machine-gun fire unleashed by the heat. After that, you could surely forgive Dahl a certain impatience with polite, adult society, and a mockingly macabre attitude to life, and death. – Allison Pearson

And who gets to decide what language can “continue to be enjoyed by all” or, indeed, whether all might not prefer the salty original? Not young readers who, for more than six decades, have positively relished Dahl’s arcane epithets and mad creations (Oops, sorry, “mad” is now banned; on mental health grounds, I think). Certainly not the author himself, who died in 1990 but must be rolling in his grave at one change made by some cloth-eared twit to The Witches. Dahl’s witches all wear wigs (because they’re bald) but, as he wrote, “You can’t go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet… Just you try it and see what happens.”

Puffin’s new, more “accessible”, less offensive version reads: “Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

What the Dickens? (They’ll be coming for him next, mark my words.) There’s the problem right there. Sensitivity readers are not sensitivity writers. Wokesters of impeccable social justice credentials but very tiny (oops, sorry, not allowed to use “tiny” any more. Sizeist!) brain, they clearly cannot hear what is wrong with that sentence. Dahl was incapable of writing anything so clunking. Or so dull. Had he lived to see the sanitised, sanctimonious, health and safety caveat they have attached to his mischievous hair-pulling of witches’ wigs, he would have flown his Hawker Hurricane into Puffin HQ, and with every justification.   –

It’s not funny. And Dahl is, above all, scabrously, uproariously, rudely funny. That’s why kids love him. But the new unsmiling arbiters of public morality – the leftist Virtue-osi – don’t want children to find politically incorrect, aka downright truthful, things about the human condition entertaining. Instead, they must be force-fed so-called “empathetic” books which “promote health and wellbeing”, “race equality”, “caring” and “emotional intelligence”. Dreary, pious tomes which teach them that their history stinks, white people are awful and biased (especially if that bias is unconscious), everyone has to Be Kind (except white men in history who were AWFUL and beyond the pale) and sticking with the sex you were born with is nether diverse nor inclusive.

We should be very worried. The same smug forces that want to castrate Dahl because he’s supposedly a malign influence on young readers are the ones who are indoctrinating children in our schools with a pernicious, highly political creed that would appal most parents, if they only knew. – Allison Pearson

James Esses, co-founder of Thoughtful Therapists, warns me, “There are primary schools teaching children that it is possible to be born in the wrong body, that the doctor took a guess at who they were when they were born and may have made a mistake. There are materials telling young girls that if they don’t want to play sport against a biological male, that is transphobia. There are resources suggesting to young people that to be ‘straight’ or ‘cis’ is to be stale and boring. This is indoctrination. It makes it increasingly less likely that children will become comfortable with their own bodies and sets them down a slippery slope to potential harm.”

Highly divisive critical race theory and an aggressive trans ideology are being embedded in the school curriculum, even dictating the content of books, yet the censors come for Dahl who, for all his failings, had children’s best interests at heart. He would have been outraged by these contemporary witches who steal the innocence of eight-year-olds and call it kindness. – Allison Pearson

As I was re-reading Matilda, I came upon the list of titles her creator said the little girl devoured within six months. They include: Oliver Twist, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and Animal Farm by George Orwell.

‘Mr Hemingway says a lot of things I don’t understand,’ Matilda said, ‘Especially about men and women. But I loved it all the same.’

‘A fine writer will always make you feel that, Mrs Phelps said. ‘And don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.’

What good advice. Trust a great author. Submit to the spell of their storytelling. Beware giant peaches and charging rhinoceroses. Words matter, so guard them well, especially the ones that have stood the test of time. Sensitivity readers be damned. – Allison Pearson

Despite being a country with one of the diverse Parliaments in the world, we have become a far less tolerant society since the pandemic.

Where previously, different views might have been shrugged off as just ill-informed or eccentric, there is now a growing feeling that such views are simply wrong, and therefore dangerous, and should not be promoted, or even held at all. – Peter Dunne 

Public debate, not community censorship, is the best antidote to views that appear quirky or extreme to the majority, and we should never shy away from that. The last thing we need is the mediocrity and uniformity of a “carbon copy” approach to the expression of public opinion. – Peter Dunne 

Making judgements about what should be believed and what should not, should never be based on the type of artificial absolute that applied during the extreme circumstances of the pandemic. Doing so poses a more dangerous threat to free speech than the expression of certain views themselves. We do not need to be told what views are acceptable in public discourse and which ones are not – that was exactly the problem the government ran up against in its early efforts to define what constituted hate speech.

Rather, we need to focus afresh on promoting informed debate based on thorough information. – Peter Dunne 

The irony is that over the years New Zealand has been more diligent than most in calling out threats to the freedom of expression and the rights of minorities in other countries. We have even gone to wars in the past on that clarion call.

We should uphold the principle once more at home. – Peter Dunne 

Rural people feel that their experience at times … doesn’t get understood or acknowledged by regulators and urban people more generally. Then we have these events which equalises us all. There is a hell of a lot more that unites us. – Todd Muller

In truth, I underestimated the Ukrainian people’s resilience, their courage, their love of country. And I was wrong, too, about the Western alliance. After more than a decade of drift and inaction, from the shameful failure to respond to the seizure of Crimea to the near-criminal indifference to the suffering in Syria, I doubted whether any major Western leader would make more than a token protest about the first full-scale European invasion since the Forties. I never expected to see Finland and Sweden jump off the fence and apply for Nato membership. Nor did I imagine that Joe Biden would be so unswerving in his commitment, or so generous with US military aid. Above all, I never anticipated that Kyiv would hold out, that Kharkiv would stand or that Kherson would be retaken. As I say, it’s nice to be wrong. – Dominic Sandbrook

How, then, does it end? If you agree with, say, the late Jeremy Corbyn, then the answer is obvious. Peace is better than war, so all that matters is to make it stop. Go cap in hand to Moscow, and keep offering them territory until Vladimir Putin raises a hand and says: “Enough!” If you want to feel good about yourself, you can dress it up as offering the Russian president an “off-ramp”. Or, if you’d prefer to be honest, you can just call it appeasement.

The alternative is at once emotionally unsatisfying and boringly straightforward. And sadly it involves lots of people dying, because that’s the nature of war. It is simply to keep giving the Ukrainians the aid, weapons and emotional and political support they need, until they have driven every last occupier from their land — or until they’ve had enough and are prepared to cut a deal. But that should be their decision, not ours. After 12 months of war and more than 100,000 casualties, they’ve earned the right to make it. After all, we would want the same, if we were in their shoes. And like them, we’d want our friends to do the right thing.

Good versus evil; right versus wrong. In a complicated world, sometimes it really is that simple. – Dominic Sandbrook

There was a time when it was widely accepted that it was a good thing to adapt nature for our own ends. Indeed, that’s the only way we humans can survive. Nature has dragons; left unprotected from them, and they will devour us.

And on our own, compared to nature’s power, we human beings are weak. Left exposed and naked and without the food, shelter and technology produced by our adaptation of nature, if we merely settled for adapting ourselves to nature’s dragons then ever single one of us would struggle for survival. But adapt nature to ourselves — make it more humane and set nature’s processes and nature’s bounty working for us rather than agin us– and then as a species we’re off to the races.

This path — adapting nature to ourselves — was the path of centuries of human civilisation and flourishing, starting all the way back in settlements around the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Nile where floods were tamed and used to produce abundant wealth from the enormously fertile soil.

This is not the view nowadays however. Not so much.

THE PREDOMINANT VIEW NOWADAYS is that protecting ourselves from nature is wrong. That “the environment” trumps human beings. That nature must take its course. That natural processes have rights, but human beings don’t. – Not PC

This is not a climate problem or an engineering problem. It’s an attitude problem. It’s an attitude borne of bad philosophy: of the ethics that says that Gaia comes first, and humans a far distant second.

We didn’t always think this way, or we would never have come so far as a species.

However it’s now a notion that’s philosophically entrenched in present generations, and in most government departments (central and local). It’s also legally entrenched in the RMA (which gives rights to the “intrinsic value of ecosystems,” but not to humans wishing to protect themselves from the often dangerous natural processes inflicted upon us by ecosystems). And don’t think David Parker’s various replacement bills for the RMA will improve things either — to read those legislative tributes to Gaia is to understand they will only make things harder all round.

Just imagine if this attitude was predominant around the Nile in the times of the pharoahs; if instead of taming the Nile and its regular floods to produce abundant crops, invent hydraulic engineering and to build a civilisation the Egyptians ran away instead. As a culture they’d now be deservedly lost to history. As would all the cultures and civilisations (i.e., ours) that built upon those first beginnings in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

And that goes for any culture that opts out of the ongoing battle against the dragons of nature — and it goes for us too. – Not PC

The PM’s tenure as Minister of Education has given NZ school students a racialised and unbalanced curriculum

Even if Chris Hipkins is no longer the Prime Minister after October’s election, his legacy will be locked in for some time. –  Graham Adams

Hipkins may, in fact, not even have been the principal architect of the stealthy revolution that has occurred on his watch but it will be seen as his legacy nevertheless because formal power over the education portfolio rested with him from 2017 until he became Prime Minister in January.

Over those years, Hipkins and his ministry have given the nation’s schoolchildren a radical (“decolonised”) history curriculum, which teachers throughout the country have begun implementing this term. “Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories” is now compulsory for schools from Years 1-10, with the subject optional in Years 11-13.

It can perhaps be best summed up as a one-eyed ideological exercise in demonising Pakeha as oppressive colonisers and valorising Maori as valiant resisters. – Graham Adams

Hipkins has been responsible for the disastrous centralisation of polytechnics and the first-year, fees-free university programme — which last week Times Higher Education pointed out had disproportionately benefited the wealthy — but the radical reshaping of school curriculums may be more enduring and difficult to unwind than these flawed programmes. – Graham Adams

And the radical policy prescriptions in education don’t stop with the history curriculum. That is just an early part of a “Curriculum Refresh” which will be implemented fully by 2026, with principals encouraged to begin sooner if they can. – Graham Adams

Professor Rata draws particular attention to the concept of “mauri” (life force) being included in the NCEA Chemistry & Biology syllabus. “Vitalism, the idea of an innate ‘life force’ present in all things, has surfaced in many cultural knowledge systems, including European, but has been soundly refuted and is not part of modern science.”

Some of the proposals in the draft are so preposterous that it is shocking they found their way into any official document. What are we meant to make, for instance, of the “Purpose Statement for Mathematics and Statistics in the New Zealand Curriculum”, which states: “Being numerate in Aotearoa New Zealand today relies upon understanding diverse cultural perspectives and privileging te ao Maori and Pacific world-views”? – Graham Adams

Since becoming Prime Minister, Hipkins has told us that the government has failed to explain co-governance adequately to the public, and a principal reason why the policy is so contentious is that it has been “misunderstood”.

Perhaps he could begin the new era of glasnost under his leadership by explaining exactly how partnership and co-governance work in the education portfolio he has just relinquished — and specifically in the makeover of the school curriculum.

The curriculum refresh makes it clear that what is taught will be decided in collaboration with local iwi. It recommends that, “Leading kaiako [teachers]… incorporate te reo Maori and matauranga Maori in the co-design of localised curriculum with whanau, hapu, and iwi.”

Co-designing a curriculum with Maori is, of course, an informal example of co-governance. Perhaps Hipkins could explain why “whanau, hapu, and iwi” should be involved — and especially what educational qualifications and experience they might be required to have to undertake such a prominent and important role. – Graham Adams

Public criticism of partnership and co-governance imposed through legislation and policy has so far mostly focused on Three Waters. But once parents get a better grasp on what their children are being taught at school, Hipkins can expect another ferocious battle on that front too. – Graham Adams

It won’t be long, however, before boys will be discouraged from their dinosaur stage by fears that such a stage is the manifestation of a colonialist mindset. After all, dinosaurs were first recognized and studied in an imperialist country; therefore, the study of dinosaurs must be imperialist. – Theodore Dalrymple

To be surprised that paleontology is a study pursued mainly in rich countries indicates a complete absence of common sense. I mean paleontology no disrespect—I fail to see how anybody with leisure and opportunity could fail to be at least mildly interested in it—but paleontology, fascinating as it is, would hardly be the first priority for poor countries, even among the natural sciences.

Paleontology is an expensive and, in some sense, a luxurious pursuit. It’s natural that it should be pursued predominantly by rich countries. Paleontologists have, I imagine, no particular thirst for martyrdom, and therefore it isn’t surprising that they tend to shun countries difficult and dangerous to access, when there are plenty of other countries to explore. – Theodore Dalrymple

As science develops it grows more expensive to pursue. But the economic order of the world changes, and countries formerly poor can and do become rich. They will then be enabled to pursue paleontology—if they so wish. They will need to develop a tradition, but it can be done quickly with the right frame of mind.

Thus there can be no need to “decolonialize” or “diversify” paleontology, and the easiest, indeed only, way to ensure that its practitioners are representative of the population of the world as a whole is to abandon it altogether.

It seems that some kind of prion, the minute particle that caused the fatal brain disease known as kuru among the Fore people of New Guinea, has entered the minds of the intelligentsia in the West. In the meantime, boys should enjoy their dinosaur stage while they’re still allowed to do so. – Theodore Dalrymple

IT IS ONLY SLOWLY DAWNING on climate change activists that the fight against global warming is lost. Locally, Cyclone Gabrielle has rendered their cause hopeless. By insisting that Gabrielle is slam-dunk proof that climate change is real, and demanding immediate action to mitigate its impact, the activists have, politically-speaking, over-sold their case. The idea of mitigating a weather event as destructive as Gabrielle will strike most people as nuts. If this is what global warming looks like, then most New Zealanders will want their government to help them adapt to it as soon as humanly possible. Increasingly, politicians and activists who bang-on about reducing emissions and modifying human behaviour will be laughed-off the political stage. It will be the parties that offer the most practical and responsibly-funded adaptation policies that win the elections of the future – including the one scheduled for October 14 2023

In retrospect the mitigators’ cause was always hopeless. So long as the effects of global warming were not going to be felt for many years, climate activists would never be able to force the changes necessary to prevent them. Tomorrow, as everybody knows, never comes – especially not in politics. Once heatwaves, wildfires, storms, floods and rising sea-levels start ruining people’s lives, however, their reactions will be different. “Okay, we believe you about climate change,” they will say. “So, now you have to show us how to adapt to this new normal?”- Chris Trotter

 Collectively, the human species is burning more coal, more oil, and more natural gas than ever before. So, how likely is it that New Zealand pulling on a metaphorical hair-shirt and crying “Follow our mitigation example!” is going to stop them? – Chris Trotter

But, just how receptive are the poorest peoples on Earth likely to be to a message delivered to them by their former colonial masters which boils down to: “Please don’t try to become as rich as we are – the planet can’t take it.” Are they likely to say: “Yes, Master, we are happy to remain poor – for the planet’s sake.” Or, will they not-so-politely suggest that if the peoples of the West really are so determined to save the planet, then how about they agree to spread their extraordinary wealth evenly across it? Will either side agree to mitigate climate change by making such huge sacrifices? Or, will both sides move as swiftly as  – Chris Trotter

Inevitably, as the world warms, nation states will become even more selfish. When cyclones as devastating as Gabrielle lay waste to forests, farms and orchards, and make plain the worst errors of urban planners, every available dollar is going to be spent on recovery and adaptation. Pleas for financial assistance from developing nations confronting similar challenges are likely to fall on deaf ears. Charity, the voters will insist, begins at home – and their political representatives will not dare to disagree.

It has not helped the mitigators’ cause that so many of them seem to be located on the left of the political spectrum, or that those not identifying as left are fervent advocates of indigenous rights. These climate activists characterise “Carbon, Capitalism and Colonisation” as the three evil giants that must be slain before climate change can be effectively mitigated. They are less forthcoming, however, when asked how this slaughter might be accomplished. This is understandable, given that the chances of destroying Carbon, Capitalism and Colonisation peacefully and democratically are rather slim.

Not that these difficulties are likely to bother the true revolutionaries, since for them global warming has always been the most wonderful excuse for imposing the sort of regime that nobody who believes in individual rights, private property, and the Rule of Law would ever willingly submit to. In the grim summation of George Orwell: “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” For far too many climate activists, mitigation has always been a Trojan Horse. – Chris Trotter

Eric Crampton and I appeared before the Committee last week to speak to the New Zealand Initiative’s submission on the Natural and Build Environment Bill and the Spatial Planning Bill.

The Initiative submitted that the government should withdraw both Bills. While the existing Resource Management Act is demonstrably bad both for the environment and development, in our view the government’s proposals will likely make matters worse. – Bryce Edwards

The first step in assessing the merits of any proposal is to determine whether it identifies the causes of the unsatisfactory effects. The second step is to develop options aimed directly at those causes. The third step is to assess which of those options best enhances the wellbeing of those affected.

The official analysis fails at each step. First it does not consider deep causes. Instead, it simply assumes that the remedy is to double up on prescriptive central government direction. Second, it fails to identify any options other than the government’s proposal. This means it cannot take the third step.

To claim net benefits relative to a failed RMA is not a test of how to best address the situation.

One cannot justify shooting oneself in one foot on a regular basis by asserting that it is better than shooting both feet on a regular basis. The option of not shooting either foot has to be considered.

The Ministry need to show instead that the preferred proposal beats the best alternative option. – Bryce Edwards

The Bills’ ‘solution’ to the above problems is more central government direction, gutting local government autonomy in the process. Conflicts of interest will abound in the decision-making bodies. Delays due to hold-out by partisan interests seem inevitable.

The Bills are basically a list of conflicting aspirations. They propose no methods for assessing how much weight to put on which aspiration. That makes purposeful decision-making impossible. A decision one way today could as easily be reversed by different personnel tomorrow.

People who own land will not be able to make long-term decisions about its use with any confidence. The rule of law is undermined when no property owner really knows what the law means, today or tomorrow.

At the Bills’ heart is the fiction that environmental bottom lines exist that can be achieved regardless of the cost to New Zealanders’ wellbeing. In reality, there are only trade-offs. Resources are scarce. More of one thing means less of something else. – Bryce Edwards

Thirty years later agreed bottom lines have yet to be revealed. They will not be revealed in the next 30 years because they do not exist. There are only contentious trade-offs.

The proposed pursuit of agreed bottom lines independently of costs is a perpetual motion machine for dispute and discontent. A cost is a negative benefit. People care about benefits.

These Bill essentially deny private property rights in land use. Your land use rights are blowing in the political wind. The Minister’s claims of net benefits have no merit. – Bryce Edwards

Dahl grew up in the repressed world of the British upper class in the 20th century, where his mother was happy to pack him off to boarding school and his country was happy to pack him off to war. His own feelings were unimportant. As a writer, he responded by focusing on the horrible and the uncanny, on revenge and revolution. You can see the BFG—bullied by the other, bigger giants in the book of the same name—as an analogue for the young Dahl at Repton School, small and picked on by the older boys. Miss Trunchbull, meanwhile, is a grotesque version of every teacher who gave Dahl the cane. She deserves everything she gets. – Helen Lewis

Many writers I know have reacted strongly to the news of the rewrites, probably because we know how powerful editors can be. Almost everyone who covers difficult, sensitive subjects can tell you about a time they received a “hostile edit” in which the process of publication felt like running uphill through sand. In such cases, the editors introduce so many caveats and concessions to other people’s perspectives that the work ceases to feel like yours. Those kinds of editors—whose highest goal is a piece that won’t cause any trouble—presumably approach a dead author’s work with an appropriately Dahl-esque glee. Finally, a writer who can’t fight back!

Also, let’s not be cute about it: Sensitivity readers, including those at the company that edited the Dahl books, are a newly created class of censors, a priesthood of offense diviners. – Helen Lewis

Given the zeal with which the American right is currently targeting books such as The Handmaid’s Tale, the cultural left should be extremely cautious about championing the censorship of literature, particularly when that censorship is driven by business prerogatives rather than idealism. The Dahl controversy will inevitably be presented as a debate about culture—a principled stand in favor of free speech versus a righteous attempt to combat prejudice and bigotry. But it’s really about money. I’ve written before about how some of the most inflammatory debates, over “cancel culture” and “wokeness,” are best seen as capital defending itself. The Dahl rewrites were surely designed to preserve the value of the “IP” as much as advance the cause of social justice.  – Helen Lewis

But Dahl staggers on, embarrassing the cultural gatekeepers by remaining popular despite being so thoroughly out of tune with the times. The work does so because of the dirty secret that children, and adults, like nastiness. They enjoy fat aunts and pranked teachers and the thrilling but illegal doping of pheasants. Today’s corporations want to have it all, though. They want the selling power of an author like Roald Dahl, shorn of the discomforting qualities that made him a best seller. They want things to be simple—a quality that we might call childlike, if Dahl hadn’t shown us that children can be so much more. – Helen Lewis

Adding in something quite alien when no one was expecting it risks upsetting things, especially those important conventions protecting our electoral infrastructure.

“It also risked transforming and concretising our ecosystem from a flexible and responsive political constitution to a more rigid hierarchical legal constitution and eroding our cherished principle of parliamentary sovereignty. – Dr Dean Knight

I’m open to change and evolution of constitutional arrangements, but if we are going to be taking steps towards the Geoffrey Palmer-Andrew Butler-style of constitution where we lock everything down that will have ramifications for the everyday politics and the constitutional ecosystem. – Dr Dean Knight

If particular political parties or activists want to expand the range of rights that are protected, they can make the case for that, try and find support for that, try and get a majority – have a discussion framing it as a constitutional issue and something that needs broad-spectrum buy-in.

I think generally entrenchment should be used sparingly … but I don’t have a monopoly on what is decided as constitutional and what’s not, with all due respect, members of the committee don’t have a monopoly on that, it’s really for us to discuss and decide as a nation – Nicola Willis 

Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr’s boost of the official cash rate on Wednesday was a thudding reminder to the Finance Minister and the rest of us of that other cloud looming over us: the cost of living crisis, which got shunted into the background for a bit as Cyclone Gabrielle entered the scene. – Claire Trevett

The easiest remedy for the cyclone crisis is to throw money at it in vast quantities – for the infrastructure, the clean-up and support for the people and businesses hit by it.

The remedy for the cost of living crisis (or at least one of them) is to try to cut spending to help dampen inflation – but Robertson had hoped to spend some of those savings on helping ease the pain for households struggling with their bills.

Then there are the mortgages. As Orr put it, if the Government cuts its spending and raises taxes, Orr might not have to raise interest rates so much.

So Robertson faces a choice of political poisons: people can either pay more in tax or pay even more in mortgages than they already are. – Claire Trevett

Add in the political palatability test to the various remedies and sub-remedies and things get even more complicated for Robertson.

Does he bring in a flood tax to help cover the cost of cyclone damage – and therefore take money out of people’s pockets during the cost of living crisis? Does he resort to doing it all on tick, making the books look worse? Does he rein back what he had hoped to do on the cost of living front?

All of this has added a pickle into PM Chris Hipkins’ “bread and butter” sandwich.

That bread and butter offering is looking increasingly like the home-brand white bread with a smear of margarine.

And that meagre fare may well prove to be the most politically palatable thing to do. There will be little appetite or expectation of election lollies now. – Claire Trevett

The flooding disasters are vast in area – from urban Auckland to rural East Coast and Hawke’s Bay.

It has had ramifications on people’s way of living and of making a living. It will hurt the economy and impact the export industry. As quick a rebuild as possible is needed.

And a tax targeted at top earners would possibly leave room to do more on the cost of living front for those on lower incomes.

That won’t stop National from pointing to any such levy as a breach of Robertson’s 2020 campaign promise not to introduce any new taxes this term beyond the new top tax rate of 39 per cent. – Claire Trevett

In the end, what matters is not necessarily whether or not you’ve broken a promise, but whether the voters think it was justified. Sometimes a u-turn on a problematic promise is actually rewarded.

In light of the increasing tendency for the unpredictable to happen, perhaps the lesson there is not to make such promises in the first place rather than whether to stick to them.

That, however, is easier said than done in the heat of an election campaign. – Claire Trevett

But what we have observed over the past fortnight simply puts New Zealand in the Third World category. It is questionable whether the damage from Cyclone Gabrielle — which was again exacerbated by the heavy downpours which took place overnight — wipes out any economic utility the industry has to New Zealand in that part of the country. That’s because the multi-billion-dollar damage suffered by the dairy and horticulture sectors due to the “runoff” of slash exacerbated the scale and impact of the flooding. – Fran O’Sullivan

Royal Commissions of Inquiry are reserved for the most serious matters of public importance. They are appointed by the Governor-General on the advice of the Executive Council. The 2011 inquiry looked into building failure caused by the Canterbury quake.

The part the foreign companies, their managers and contractors and the local councils have played in contributing to this disaster are best explored there — along with hearing from those affected. – Fran O’Sullivan

We are still in the response phase, but thoughts must turn quickly to what comes next. While lifelines are being sticky-taped back together for now, they must be made much more robust, and quickly. Whatever else happens in the next fortnight, winter is not far away.

Events like this remind us that, at least outside Auckland, we are a country of geographically isolated towns and villages linked together by ribbons of tarseal that are crucially important but too often taken for granted. – Steven Joyce

This rebuild is another huge job. But it has been done before and it will be done again. We need to lean into our resourcefulness, our practicality and our common sense, to get it happening fast.

That means using structures that harness everyone’s skills. The public sector, the private sector and all our communities. There is no place here for the Covid-era mistake that the Government must run everything. There is precious little chance that bureaucrats in Wellington understand how to rebuild, dare I say it, the Three Waters infrastructure of Napier or Waipawa.

There are five key elements for a successful infrastructure build: the funding envelope; a delivery mechanism for spending it quickly and wisely; the people to do the work; the ability to move quickly without excessive red tape; and a method of paying for it all. – Steven Joyce

The Government should take a flexible approach to dealing with each of the key lifeline utilities, recognising where the expertise lies. There is no time to needlessly set up new entities.

Transpower, the electricity lines companies and the telcos are experts in their fields. Their problem will be doing things that improve resilience but which customers don’t want to pay for. In the case of the electricity companies, they are prevented from doing so because the regulator won’t let them recover the cost.

These are sensible models in normal times but they won’t work here. The Government should borrow a leaf from the ultrafast broadband playbook and part-fund the needed investments to get them over the line.

The Three Waters rollout in Auckland, Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay should be immediately halted and those working on it redirected to fixing what’s there.

This reorganisation was a luxury in normal times and is a massive distraction now. We need the shortest path to success. – Steven Joyce

The highways are the job of NZTA, but there is a real question mark over whether it can re-focus quickly to do the work.

Urgent flood protection works must be accelerated. This has been on the government to-do list for years, and is the least developed in terms of thinking and delivery. The logical partners are regional councils, but significant funding will need to come from government.

If it was me, I’d re-purpose the broadband rollout company, Crown Infrastructure Partners, as the primary public funder. They are used to partnering with people, understand contracting, and have a good track record of getting things done. They may need some new personnel to come up to speed quickly, but they are the agency most ready to go.

Just spending the money is not enough. One agency needs to have the power to cut through the regulatory thicket of the RMA and all the other restrictive legislation and get things done.  – Steven Joyce

We don’t have time for long regulatory processes to agree on plans to protect the Esk Valley or Wairoa from more flooding, or to replace the slumped parts of copious highways. We need to get started and design as we go, as with the rebuild of State Highway One around Kaikōura. This will be a real test of a Government whose instincts on planning reform are more likely to slow things down.

Finding enough people to do the work will be challenging. Many decamped for Australia as roading work wound down. Contractors must see a clear pipeline of work over several years in front of them, so they have the confidence to scale up. The Government’s visa announcement made sense, but nothing will happen without that confidence.

As for how the recovery is paid for, that is a political choice. – Steven Joyce

Ministers seem to be limbering up to “not waste a good crisis” and use the floods to institute some good old left wing envy taxes, which sock it to the productive sector.

I suspect there will be little public patience for such politicking when the country’s economy will need to be running on all cylinders to pay for this investment.

Borrowing too much would also be inflationary, but it beggars belief that after spending increases in the tens of billions over the past few years, the Government couldn’t cut its cloth better to help pay for what’s needed. They could start by junking the preposterously expensive Auckland light rail.

There is much to do and no time to waste. Regional New Zealand will be watching closely. It hasn’t fared well under the current Government. The speed of the recovery in Northland, Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay will be seen as a measure of how much politicians care. – Steven Joyce

Time and again, in his writing for adults as well as children, Dahl championed the bullied against the bullies.

“Yet here we have a kind of cultural assertiveness that strong-arms readers into accepting without alternative – though, happily, not without demur – a new orthodoxy in which Dahl himself has played no part.

“This particular revisionism sits oddly with Dahl’s irrepressibly anarchic outlook, his distinctive combination of mischief and wonder, and, of course, ignores the fact that words, central to a writer’s armoury, are a matter of choice in order to manipulate meaning and conjure effect. – Matthew Dennison

It feels Orwellian that we are having the updated versions forced upon us and has made me weary of ebooks. – Clarissa Aykroyd

The problem with politicians is you usually know the answer yourself and you know what they should be saying, but they don’t say anything, and that’s the problem. Politicians I’ve found over the years are verbose to the extent that they talk themselves around a corner, and sometimes a door opens and they go in, and it’s too late to rescue themselves. – Barry Soper

I’ve had to explain to my older kids and apologise to them [as] when you have your first families, you tend to be pursuing your career, trying to make money, buying houses, so you don’t have the same time. Now, I’m an old geezer, far too old to be having kids, and he has been fantastic. He’s the joy of my life. He’s just wonderful. – Barry Soper

I take my hat off even more to what you once were as a solo mum. How on earth you cope as a solo mum, I’ll never know. That it’s so hard, emotionally, work-wise, and lonely. So I take my hat off generally to women that do it, and it’s sort of opened my eyes totally to child rearing. – Barry Soper

Taking the meme ‘Everyone I Don’t Like Is Hitler’ to dizzying new heights, now we’re being told it’s far right to want to drive your car. Motorist and fascist, peas in a pod. Protesters against Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and so-called 15-minute cities – policies being adopted in various regions of the UK that will severely limit where and how often a person can drive his car – have been damned as hard-right loons. Who but a modern-day Brownshirt would bristle at eco-measures designed to save Mother Earth from car toxins? One author attended this month’s colourful protest against Oxford City Council’s anti-driving policies and decreed that this motley crew of car-lovers are on ‘the road to fascism’. Only they’ll never get there, presumably, given the elites’ penchant for road restrictions.

The climate fanatics are getting desperate. Of course, they’ve long used the tool of demonisation to try to shame and silence their critics. ‘Denier’ is a favoured insult. Question any aspect of the climate-alarmist agenda, including the harebrained claim that billions will soon die in a fiery apocalypse of man’s making, and you’ll be branded with that D-word. It marks you out as unfit for public life.

Yet the hysterical denunciation of pro-car protesters as maniacs and conspiracy theorists who are one car journey away from becoming open fanboys of the Fourth Reich is a new low. It’s classic gaslighting. The elites are hell-bent on restricting car-use, and this will make life harder for people, especially working-class people. To brand as nuts those who make this correct observation feels like a species of psychological warfare.  – Brendan O’Neill 

The climate fanatics are coming for your car. It’s not a myth. It’s not a conspiracy theory. They’re open about it. In both the UK and the US, eco-thinkers continually talk about using urban planning to socially re-engineer the throng. Let’s remake American cities so that ‘walking, biking and public-transit use’ are prioritised over car-use, says Vox. Don’t call this anti-car, though. Don’t say the establishment longs to deprive us of the great 20th- and 21st-century freedom of getting in one’s vehicle and going wherever one pleases. You’ll be denounced as a crank.

Yes, some hard right-wingers have attached themselves to the uprising against the motorphobia of the new elites. But you’d think the Guardianista middle classes would understand that this is inevitable in a relatively free society. After all, these are the kind of people who attend anti-Israel demos at which you will frequently see the most vile expressions of anti-Semitic hatred and who went on those bitter anti-Brexit marches at which some banners mocked the intellectual inferiority of working-class Leave voters. If the appearance of a far-right twat at a pro-driving protest means that everyone who’s pro-driving is far right, then by the same token you all must have a very serious problem with Jews and working-class folk. That’s how this works, right? – Brendan O’Neill 

It is perfectly legitimate to describe top-down, eco-justified restrictions on people’s freedom to drive as a climate lockdown. No, it isn’t the handiwork of the WEF and it isn’t part of a global plot to imprison us in our homes. But erecting cameras to spy on car-users and fining those who drive to certain parts of their own city, all with the intention of pressuring us to walk instead, is a breed of lockdown. It is illiberal, anti-modern and further proof that our green-leaning elites care little for the freedom or the bank balances of working people. Protesting against this isn’t ‘far right’ – it’s sensible and good. – Brendan O’Neill 

If free speech does not include the right to make deeply offensive claims that are perhaps antiquated and even abhorrent to the average Kiwi, but that does not incite violence, then we no longer have free speech. And without free speech, we would never have had the Springbok tour protests, the Maori Land Marches, the Nuclear Free New Zealand movement, or many other examples of speech that stood up to prejudice, bigotry and hatred.

Free speech is not free. It certainly runs the risk of allowing incorrect, stupid, hateful, or wrong views to be expressed. But censorship is not free either and the cost is much higher. – Jonathan Ayling

THE NATIONAL PARTY stands at the beginning of an unsealed road which, if followed, might just carry it to victory. The question, now, is whether the party possesses the guts to set off down it. Sometimes politicians hit upon a winning strategy by accident, unaware that they have done so. National’s answer to the Government’s controversial Three Waters project may be a case in point. Wittingly, or unwittingly, National’s policy reflects the principle of subsidiarity – i.e. the idea that the best decisions are those made by the communities required to live most closely with their consequences. Set against Labour’s preference for large, centralised (and almost always unresponsive) bureaucracies, National’s preference for the local and the accountable has much to recommend it.

Labour, meanwhile, may find that its road to October has been closed. Rather than proceed with all speed down the path of repudiation and reprioritisation promised by Chris Hipkins when he became Prime Minister, the exigencies of dealing with the Auckland Anniversary Weekend Floods and Cyclone Gabrielle appear to have provided Hipkins’ caucus opponents with a chance to regroup and push back.

This was especially true of Three Waters. The period within which the unequivocal repudiation of the project remained politically feasible was always dangerously short. Indeed, the slightest delay threatened to make its abandonment impossible. Nor was the threat exclusively internal. The longer Hipkins put off Three Waters’ demise, the greater the risk that National would produce a viable and popular alternative. Which is exactly what it has done. – Chris Trotter

National’s decision to restore of local authorities’ property could hardly have come at a more opportune moment, given the very recent judicial observation that the asset base of the Three Waters’ “entities” had, indeed, been “expropriated”, from their local authority owners without the payment of fair and adequate compensation. It is a measure of the reckless radicalism of the Three Waters project that a New Zealand court could endorse such a claim. In no other context is it possible to imagine a Labour Cabinet signing-off on expropriation without compensation – a policy worthy of Lenin’s Bolsheviks. – Chris Trotter

If this is, indeed, what National is planning – and by what other means could citizens escape crippling rate increases and/or water charges? – then it is reasonable to predict a decisive shift in the relationship between New Zealand’s central and local government institutions. If the drift towards ever larger and more remote central bureaucracies is to be halted, then a radically new way of funding local infrastructure and the provision of local services will have to be devised. It is simply untenable for the present practice of central government offloading more and more responsibilities onto local authorities, while simultaneously withholding the funding needed to pay for them, to continue. There is a limit to how much can be borrowed affordably from private lenders, just as there is a democratic limit to the size and frequency of local government rate-hikes.

If National has, at long last, recognised this, then it can present itself as offering something new and progressive to the electorate. Subsidiarity is, after all, entirely congruent with the conservative (but not the neoliberal) view of politics. Conservatives are deeply suspicious of strong, centralised states which have no need to fear the displeasure of their citizens. Democracy, as a means of ensuring political accountability, similarly decreases in efficacy the further away the decisions affecting citizens’ daily lives are made. When the Americans say, “all politics is local”, they’re speaking the truth. – Chris Trotter

Making everything worse, are the public misgivings about the way Labour is handling the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle. Intended or not, accurate or not, Hipkins’ downplaying of claims of lawlessness in the stricken communities of Tairawhiti and Hawkes Bay reminded too many people of the Covid emergency’s infallible “Podium of Truth”. Compounding Labour’s difficulties is Forestry Minister Stuart Nash’s inability to fully articulate the locals’ white-hot rage at the forestry companies. The latter’s failure to do anything about the hugely destructive volumes of “slash” that repeated storms have sent crashing into bridges, fences, orchards and people’s homes, has outraged the whole country. If ever there was a moment for righteous ministerial wrath, then, surely, this is it. Action, not yet another expert inquiry, is what the situation demands. Action, and the colourful condemnatory language of a Bob Semple or a Jack Lee. Labour men who really did “move with speed” in a crisis.

For Chris Hipkins and Labour, the state highway to October has been rendered impassable by inaction and political slash. Christopher Luxon and National, meanwhile, have discovered an unsealed road without slips and fallen trees. It’s not their usual way of reaching the Treasury Benches, but, with a bit of luck, it just might get them where they want to go. – Chris Trotter

The London School of Economics has decided that it will not use dreadful words such as Christmas, Easter, Lent, and Michaelmas to designate its term times and holidays. Presumably, its management now congratulates itself that it has made a step toward true diversity, equity, and inclusion, the modern equivalent—irony of ironies—of faith, hope, and charity.

An article in The Daily Telegraph was headed “The LSE’s decision is not just drearily woke. It’s completely pointless.” Alas, if only this were true, if only the decision were merely pointless; but on the contrary, the decision was extremely pointed. It was part of a tendency—I won’t go so far as to say part of a conspiracy—to destroy all links of the present with tradition, particularly (but not only) with religious tradition.

Tradition and pride in institutions are obstacles to a managerial class who prefer people whom they manage to be birds of passage, or particles in Brownian motion in the ocean of time, who are completely fixated on the present moment. The managerial revolution, when it takes place, is very thorough, and nothing is too small to escape its destructive notice. – Theodore Dalrymple

That is why those who want to manage the whole of society love the kind of history that sees no grandeur, beauty, or achievement in it, but only a record of injustice and misery (which, of course, really existed, and all of which they, and only they, will put right). The real reason for the enthusiasm for pulling down statues is to destroy any idea of the past as having been anything other than a vast chamber of horrors, and since everyone has feet of clay, and the heroes of the past always had skeletons in their cupboard (to change the metaphor), reasons for destroying statues, even of the greatest men, can always be found. – Theodore Dalrymple

The Daily Telegraph said that it was insulting to Christians, but actually it was far more insulting to non-Christians, such as I, for it assumed that they are so sensitive and intolerant that they are offended by the slightest reference to the Christian religion or to any vestiges of the Christian past of the country in which they live, either permanently or temporarily. In other words, non-Christians are made of psychological eggshells and are so delicate constitutionally that they need the protection of the LSE apparatchik and nomenklatura class—which after all has to occupy itself with something (it held meetings to make this decision, no doubt under the mistaken impression that it was working, even working very hard).

No one wants to live under a theocracy, other, that is, than theocrats (and even they only want to live under a theocracy so long as they are the rulers), but the danger of that is vanishingly remote, at least until Islam becomes the majority religion. It is said that only a minority in Britain now claim to be Christian—about 44 percent—but the Christian past of the country can hardly be denied.  – Theodore Dalrymple

Perhaps one day, when decolonization is complete and Newton discovered to have been originally from Burkina Faso, attention will be turned to the triggering effects of so many Christian churches in countries such as Britain, edifices that so powerfully remind descendants of victims of Christian persecution of their ancestors’ traumatic experiences, which they are thereby forced to relive.

To this, of course, there is only one solution: pull them down, raze them to the ground. Likewise, cemeteries should be cleansed, crosses removed, religious inscriptions expunged.

Language, mon dieu, how it needs reforming! The place to start, of course, is schools, where the future of the nation is being developed. Any child who is heard exclaiming “God!” or anything like it should be told that he must in future use the good, solidly secular expletive “Fuck!” (this, of course, is happening spontaneously as well), under pain of punishment. The Bible should be made as illegal to bring into school as it is to bring it into Saudi Arabia, and expressions derived from that triggering work should be removed from common usage. Sufficient unto the day are the unjust social circumstances thereof. –

I am hesitant to write in a satirical vein because, as I and others have remarked, satire is prophecy. A number of current policies would have been regarded as satirical exaggeration only a few years ago. Who would have thought, say a decade ago, that a serious, or at any rate a prominent and powerful female politician (I refer here to the First Minister of Scotland), would argue that a man convicted of rape was actually, that is to say in reality, in fact, in every sense, a woman? Such propositions now elicit only irritation, not laughter; and irritation declines before long to resignation. Absurdity is first discussed, then adopted by a vanguard of intellectuals in search of a cause, and finally becomes an orthodoxy that it is socially unacceptable to question. Intelligent people give up opposition because it is boring to argue against what is not worth entertaining in the first place. – Theodore Dalrymple

Hipkins has tried to rebrand Three Waters by calling it an ‘investment in pipes and infrastructure’ and many other descriptions that are far better than the weird bureaucratic branding it received.

For most voters, it isn’t a vote-changing issue. But “Three Waters” as it has evolved over the past few years, does have a potent mix in it that’s potentially negative for Labour: Wellington-knows-best centralisation, thieving assets off councils and a bit of general secret Government agenda about it. – Luke Malpass 

Earlier this month, the White House announced a five-year plan for redressing racial inequality. It is essentially the Biden administration’s version of a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) plan, like those issued by nearly every major university, only at a vastly larger scale. The policy aims to “advance an ambitious, whole-of-government approach to racial equity and support for underserved communities” by embedding equity goals in every aspect of the government.

From the highest offices of the state down to the smallest local bureaucracies, DEI now pervades almost all levels of American society. And while it was once thought that the fringe racial theories that animate the DEI agenda could be confined to small liberal arts campuses, it is clear that is no longer the case. – John Sailer

To many in the universities and perhaps in the country at large, these values sound benign—merely an invitation to treat everyone fairly. In practice, however, DEI policies often promote a narrow set of ideological views that elevate race and gender to matters of supreme importance.

That ideology is exemplified by a research methodology called “public health critical race praxis” (PHCRP)—designed, as the name suggests, to apply critical race theory to the field of public health—which asserts that “the ubiquity of racism, not its absence, characterizes society’s normal state.” In practice, PHCRP involves embracing sweeping claims about the primacy of racialization, guided by statements like “socially constructed racial categories are the bases for ordering society.” – John Sailer

Shorn of any context, the principles of diversity and inclusion strike many people as unobjectionable, and even laudable. But in practice they are used as a shorthand for a set of divisive ideological dogmas and bureaucratic power grabs. Under the banner of DEI, medical institutions that are supposed to focus on protecting human life are being sacrificed on the altar of the racialist ideology.

Because of the ideological project associated with DEI initiatives, critics often highlight their effect on curriculum and teaching. But the more potent effect, in the long run, could end up being on scientific research and scholarship. – John Sailer

In other words, under the new ideological regime that has taken power both inside the federal bureaucracy and in institutions like UCSF, even medical research has become yet another front in a larger ideological battle. Tomorrow’s doctors and medical experts are being selected and trained on the basis of their willingness to “disrupt power imbalances between racialized and non-racialized people.” – John Sailer

Choose your Zelensky. He can be either saint or sinner. Either valiant repairer of the liberal international order or compliant puppet of the WEF. Either a one-man defender of liberal democracy or a stooge of nefarious globalists. These are the only two Zelenskys. There’s no in-between. He’s either a Guardian editorial made dashing flesh or the willing jester of Davos Man. Take your pick. – Brendan O’Neill

There’s a very important debate to be had about Russia, Ukraine, the West and war in the modern era. But what we’ve mostly had over the past year is the cheap exploitation of a serious global conflict to score points in petty wars at home. Chaise-lounge Churchills on one side, armchair Chamberlains on the other. And they’re all really talking about themselves, not Ukraine. Let’s change the record. Maybe Zelensky is neither saint nor sinner. Neither the world’s saviour nor its destroyer. Maybe he’s just a man doing what he thinks is best in the most horrifying and existential of circumstances. Call me a brainless dupe of Davos propaganda, but that’s what I’m going with. – Brendan O’Neill

My mum and dad have always taught us to have goals, and I realised quite early on that it didn’t matter what car you drive or what material things you have if you don’t have a safe, warm house to put them. – Steph George

Democratic accountability is why we now have elected Government, not Kings. – David Farrar

I pray that somewhere in the departments that waste so much of our money, someone, somewhere, has the spine to stand up and tell the rest of the plonkers that what they are doing doesn’t work. – Mike Hosking

Reminding people about speed and seatbelts and driving drunk is only applicable to the sort of idiot who isn’t susceptible to being told what to do.

Those who are, are already doing it. I am sure deep within the ad agencies they genuinely believe their latest piece of creative genius is the one to crack the code.

And to be honest, if the Government were writing the sort of cheques they are, what fool turns that down?

Which is why we need leadership. Someone at the highest level needs to break the ideology that spending other people’s money for the sake of it makes some sort of difference, when it can be shown it doesn’t. – Mike Hosking

If you rounded up the hundreds of millions, if not billions, that has been spent these past five years on nonsense, we wouldn’t be talking about a tax for the clean-up.

We are only short of money because we wasted it. – Mike Hosking

The puzzle of how we become what we are is insoluble. When I was young and callow and a hard-line determinist, I would simply say that we become what we are by the influence of heredity and environment, for what else could there be? Heredity and environment, and that was that. – Theodore Dalrymple

Is it true that we act as we do because of how we are? This seems to me either false, or unfalsifiable. To take the latter possibility first, we estimate the rather loose idea of ‘who we are’ by the way we behave, the preferences we have, the habits we develop, and so forth. But then we go on to say that what is to be explained is the explanation of itself. We behave as we do because of how we are, and we know how we are because of how we behave. I have seen this argued in court by psychiatrists trying to exculpate a murderer and once (but only once) saw it work. Poor lambs, the murderers could not help what they did because they had the type of character that inclined them to go round murdering people. – Theodore Dalrymple

In short, saying that we do what we do because of how we are is either true by definition or it is false. If the former, it is unilluminating, and if the latter—well, it is just false.

Then we come to the question of whether we cannot help how we are which, roughly speaking, is our character. Can one decide to have a character other than the one that one has?

It is a matter of common agreement that habit becomes character. For example, I used to have a very bad temper, but realising that it was a bad thing to have, I made a conscious effort to control it, and before long there was nothing, or at least much less, to control. – Theodore Dalrymple

I do not believe that anyone could live as if this were true, at least with regard to himself. Amongst other things, it would make consciousness redundant. Why have we developed powers of thought, which include those of considering alternatives and choosing between them, if those powers serve no purpose, by which I mean did not cause us to behave differently from how we would have done without it? We would all be what Descartes thought the lesser animals were, namely automata. We would have to believe that our own conscious thoughts were but epiphenomena and made no difference to anything, and I do not believe that anyone is capable of sincerely believing this. Not, of course, that by itself this would necessarily make it false: it is perfectly possible that, because of our very biological nature, we are incapable of believing something that is true. – Theodore Dalrymple

I do not have a full understanding of how people become themselves, or of how I became what I am myself. It is a mystery that passes my understanding, and I suspect (and hope) that it is a mystery that will always escape human beings: for if it ceased to be a mystery, it would cease only for some and not for others, and those for whom it ceased to be a mystery would almost certainly abuse their superior understanding to harm, exploit, or abuse the rest. Those who understood would be in the position of extra-terrestrials who landed on earth and, observing humans as entomologists observe ants, would be able to regard them as mere animated objects (not, as it happens, that we are very good at controlling ants, and if ever there is a final struggle between man and insect, it will be the insect that wins). But however much the extra-terrestrials thought they understood us, I do not think they would be able to understand themselves. They in turn would need beings who were alien to them to understand them fully; and those aliens in turn would not understand themselves. – Theodore Dalrymple

But if we abandon the idea that crazy and ignorant people also need to be represented in Parliament and start setting entry tests on this stuff, well, I have a few proposals.

First up, any MP that can’t pass intermediate micro isn’t qualified. Give a basic tax incidence question, see if they follow the consensus of economists. If they don’t, kick them out. Same if they think rent control is a good idea – there’s a very clear expert consensus on this one.

Next, rules on genetic modification. Clear scientific consensus that GM crops are safe. The rules against them do a lot of harm. We’d kick out most of the Green Party on this one, if any were left after the rent control question. And that could be fine. They’d be replaced by pro-science greens. Don’t you like science? It would be better, right?

How about any MP who thinks that stadium and film subsidies provide net benefits? Both are in clear violation of the scientific consensus. We can retrospectively kick John Key out of Parliament. He loved stadium subsidies.

Kick out of Parliament, and out of the bureaus, anyone who demonstrates through their policy advocacy that they really really do not understand how an ETS with a binding cap works.  – Eric Crampton,

There’s a strange, Year Zero quality to pronouncements like these. They are so freighted with ideological jargon that it can be almost impossible to work out what they actually mean in practical terms. But what they do reveal, vividly, is that council bureaucracies have become highly politicised and detached from the pressing everyday concerns of ratepayers.  – Karl du Fresne

https://twitter.com/NasimiShabnam/status/1630899966766903298

One of the justifications of great wealth and the inequality necessary for it to be possessed is that it can be used to adorn the world, to the benefit of everyone including future generations. This is something to which people at a more basic economic level cannot easily aspire.

The question, then, is: Why is it that in our age, everywhere in the world, the very rich are incapable of adorning the world, unless it be by preservation of the monuments of the past? The artists and architects who serve them cannot do it either. If beauty is one of the proper goals of life (the others being truth and goodness), humanity has lost its way—at least in this respect. – Theodore Dalrymple

So they promised 15% and delivered 1.5%.

If there was a gold medal for under-achievement, this Govt would win it. They don’t miss their targets by 2% or 5% oe even 10% but by 90%. They’re currently sitting at 1.6% of their Kiwibuild target! – David Farrar

New Zealand is currently living through another top-down revolution. Though far from complete, it has already captured control of the commanding heights of the public service, the schools and universities, the funding mechanisms of cultural production, and big chunks of the mainstream news media.

The ideology driving this revolution is not neoliberalism, it’s ethnonationalism. A potent amalgam of indigenous mysticism and neo-tribal capitalism has captured the imagination of the professional and managerial class and is relying on the latter’s administrative power and influence to drive through a revolutionary transformation of New Zealand society under the battle-flags of “indigenisation” and “decolonisation”. The glue which holds this alliance of Māori and Non-Māori elites together is Pakeha guilt. – Chris Trotter

Only one more strategic victory is required to complete the Māori nationalist revolution: Pakeha pride in their past and in their culture has to be undermined. The men and women once celebrated as nation-builders have to be recast as colonial oppressors. The country famed for being “the social laboratory of the world” has to be re-presented as just another sordid collection of white supremacist, treaty-breaking, killers and thieves.

Māori, too, are in need of a complete makeover: from slave-owning warrior-cannibals, to peace-loving caretakers of Te Ao Māori – a world to which they are bound by deep and mystical bonds. Inheritors of a culture that sanctioned genocidal conquest and environmental destruction, how can the Pakeha hope to lead Aotearoa towards a just future? As in the 1980s, the Twenty-First Century journey requires revolutionary Māori to lead, and guilty Pakeha to follow. And those guilty Pakeha in a position to make it happen appear only too happy to oblige.

Which is why, in March 2023, New Zealand has an educational curriculum dedicated to condemning colonisation and uplifting the indigenous Māori. Why Māori cultural traditions and ways of knowing are elevated above the achievements of Western culture and science. Why representatives of local iwi and hapu wield decisive influence over private and public development plans, as well as the credo and content of media reporting and university courses.

The Māori nationalist revolution is not yet complete – but it has, most certainly, begun. – Chris Trotter

Surely the large swathes of the media in these past five years are living proof that you can pretend to be neutral until the excitement over a late arrival from Mt Albert sees you swooning just a little bit embarrassingly.

So, instead of a job for life, what about the best person for the job for a public service appointment?

And as the job changes, as it always does with Governments, the same way it does as one chief executive leaves and a new one arrives, you appoint the people most aligned with the thinking, and therefore the greater desire to get it done.

‘Yes Minister’ and ‘Yes Prime Minister’ had the reality of the public service worked out – and that was 40 years ago.   – Mike Hosking

When Kelvin Davis addressed a conference of indigenous Australians yesterday it is doubtful whether the Minister for Maori Crown Relations intended to damage the credibility of his government’s Maori policies, but that’s what he did. If the New Zealand Herald is to be believed, first, he used an incorrect translation of the Treaty of Waitangi instead of the Sir Hugh Kawharu translation that the previous Labour government celebrated at the 150th anniversary of its signing in 1990. Davis claimed that Article Three of the Treaty guaranteed Maori “the same rights and privileges of British subjects”. In fact, Article Three guarantees Maori “the same rights and duties of citizenship”. Small difference in wording, I agree, but the mention of “duties” is significant when it comes to Maori rights. These days all too many Maori spokespeople prefer to interpret the Treaty as promising Maori an armchair ride to prosperity rather than something they have to work for, like other New Zealanders. – Michael Bassett

Davis is telling Maori that they can continue to produce babies outside stable family environments; have disproportionally high numbers of fetal-alcohol syndrome babies; fail to vaccinate them; make less use of free medical services for children; smoke more than Pakeha; have high “Did Not Show” statistics for specialist appointments at public hospitals; continue to tolerate a world where more than 50% of Maori children truant from school each day; and be over-represented amongst the ram-raiders and the Hawke’s Bay burglars; and still get ahead. Despite evidence of manifold failures to avail themselves of the opportunities available to them, Davis’ government will “focus on equity of outcomes, not just equality”. I suspect that Ngata, Buck and Pomare would swiftly tell him he was on a hiding to nowhere, and that Maori leaders like him who fail to stress the need for effort and hard work are guilty of gross dereliction of duty. And they’d be right. Kelvin Davis is deliberately misleading his people. In fact, life wasn’t meant to be easy; everyone needs to put in effort.

Where has Davis got the notion from that it is possible to guarantee any people “equity of outcomes” no matter what choices they personally make in life? No other country has such a policy for the very basic reason that it just can’t work. – Michael Bassett

Sadly, Davis is one of the blunter knives in this government’s drawer. By continuing to recite that unattainable mantra he also calls into question his ministry’s preoccupation with promoting co-governance. How can our country recover the ground lost in the pandemic and in the storms if significant numbers of the decision-makers’ only qualification to be in charge is their ethnic make-up? We know of course that many Maori have made an effort and have succeeded in life. Good. That means they can qualify for roles in governance on the grounds of their ability, not their ethnicity. Then in governing roles they are just as accountable to the wider public as non-Maori. Just what Article Three of the Treaty envisaged. – Michael Bassett

A stronger relationship between local and central government, as well as officials more willing to listen to outsiders, is needed if New Zealand is to live up to its claims of a “world-class” public sector, former public servants and politicians say. – Sam Sachdeva

The public sector has … a huge focus on planning, which is appropriate – it’s something we do need to do – but it all seems to fall to pieces when it comes to the delivery. – Anne Tolley

Those two are not even aligned so that when local government comes to do its 10-year plan, it knows what the three-year funding commitment from Waka Kotahi is – how on earth can you plan infrastructure? – Anne Tolley

There seems to be a lack of creative tension: people are so busy being polite to each other, they don’t argue much anymore, it seems, whereas the public service I remember was actually a pretty hard school. – Graham Scott

The conclusion we can draw from this is don’t look to the Courts to redress unfair laws – it’s just false hope and a waste of money.

This highlights a gaping problem with our democracy. The public has no legal protections against a Parliamentary majority that abuses the rights of others.

Thank you, Justice Mellon, for reminding us of that alarming reality and exposing the need for laws to protect the sovereignty of the individual against 61 members of Parliament. – Frank Newman

What Christopher Luxon got right in his state of the nation speech was severalfold.

You have to accept that Governments lose elections and the current Government will lose this election in October because of some of the stuff Luxon outlined yesterday.

It is hopeless at delivering stuff and the stuff it did deliver very few wanted, or even asked for.

It’s easy pickings for an opposition to outline a litany of failure and it will serve them well if they keep reminding voters just how bad it has gotten —from the MIQ debacle to the vaccine roll out, to the Kiwibuild shambles, to the light rail waste to the cycle bridge— and Luxon spent a decent amount of time on wastage, of which there is mountains. – Mike Hosking

But the bits that will really resonate is the message of hope and aspiration.

This country, not so long ago, was winning. It had a rock star economy and a spring in its step and was a can-do country.

In five and a half years it’s been trashed. Those who want better have been side-lined for those who don’t care or can’t be bothered.

It’s a very good example of how hard it is to do well but how easy it is to give up and let it all slip.

This is a country riddled with malaise, there has been an avalanche of working groups and committees that have twiddled and tinkered and thought-bubbled – and come up with next to nothing. –

In some respects the pressure is on National. Not only is the victory there for the taking, it’s just how large the thrashing is going to be.

But the trick is to keep reminding us what a mess it is and keep telling us how much better it used to be – and will be again. –  Mike Hosking

The economic stimulus during Covid from extra government spending and monetary policy was even greater as a proportion of the economy than elsewhere. The restrictions on the border were more disruptive to the labour market than in other countries, and the desire to crank nominal wages for political reasons more intense.

Since this Government came into office, the minimum wage has risen by a vast 44 per cent.

Ministers also hiked the effective minimum wage for migrants much higher, and both flowed through to increased labour costs. We were in a pro-inflationary environment long before the rest of the world.- Steven Joyce

Government spending these days is more than 40per cent of economic activity. Restraining it would help reduce inflationary pressure on the economy. Restrain it enough and it would be possible to provide some tax relief to struggling families as well.

But restraint is the key. If the Government just borrows more to increase public spending or to give handouts to families, that will push inflation up further.

The good new is that there is huge capacity to cut public spending. Government expenditure has increased by an unbelievable 65 per cent since 2017. Some of it was for the pandemic, but that should be winding out by now. Blind Freddie can see we have a bloated public sector which has gorged itself on free money.

People have made much this week of consultancy spending, but however big that is, it’s small beer. The real problem is a general looseness with the public purse, and the hare-brained schemes ministers have been spending all the money on. There has been virtually no fiscal discipline for five years. Every brain fart of an idea has been funded. – Steven Joyce

You can be sure what we see is the tip of the iceberg. As one who’s been there, I can confidently predict billions and billions will be able to be wrung out of the current Government’s spending and nobody outside the Wellington vortex would notice.

There could easily be enough money to both restrain government spending overall to help control inflation, and give the long-suffering taxpayer a much-needed downpayment on tax reduction. As a result of tax increases and bracket creep, New Zealanders are collectively paying more than $40b more tax this year than they did six years ago. No wonder they are feeling the pain.

The Government’s problem is that their mismanagement of core public services like health and education means that, if anything, the public and people working in those sectors will be wanting to spend even more money there.  – Steven Joyce

To meet the reasonable aspirations of New Zealanders, this year’s Budget will need to be crafted with the sort of surgical discipline that we haven’t yet seen from this Finance Minister. He will need to spend money in the right places, slaughter great herds of sacred cows, and provide something to alleviate cost-of-living pressures, all without increasing borrowing. He will also need to demand accountability from the public sector for performance.

If he took a zero-based look at the gargantuan increases in spending on his watch, then with a lot of hard work all that should mostly be possible. If he doesn’t, then I think we are in for a bumpy ride.

High inflation, high tax, squeezed family budgets, teacher strikes, people turned away from emergency departments and highly visible wasteful spending, could all add up to a looming winter of discontent. – Steven Joyce

On crime and the news that retail crime is now so bad we experience almost 300 incidents a day.

Quite rightly when we talk about crime, our focus should be on the victims mainly.

But spare a thought for the police as well, because they are clearly so frustrated by what’s happening. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Every police officer I’ve spoken to will tell you you’re seeing more crime because they aren’t allowed to chase criminals and because the courts aren’t punishing them hard enough.

So unfortunately, we probably have to get used to those crime numbers. Because unless Coster and the courts harden up, this is life in NZ. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Last week, documents came to light under the Official Information Act, showing that the Ministry of Education has been putting pressure on the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) to make new literacy and numeracy requirements for NCEA easier to attain.

It’s not hard to see why ministry officials are worried. In trials last year, just a third of candidates demonstrated a basic standard of adult proficiency in writing. Two thirds met the reading standard, and just over half, the numeracy standard.

These are appalling results.

As of 2024, students will have to meet these requirements to achieve any level of NCEA. If this policy is implemented as scheduled, achievements rates for qualifications will plummet. – Dr Michael Johnston

The ministry wants NZQA to reduce the sophistication of vocabulary required in the literacy tests. Still others amount to reducing their reliability. The ministry wants to reduce the number of questions students have to answer.

NZQA, to its credit, has pushed back. It has defended its processes for setting the assessments and disagreed that they’re too difficult.

In another recent Newsroom column, Professor Gavin Brown of Auckland University pointed out other data indicating that the poor results in the trials probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

The fact is, the ministry itself has known for years that we have a real problem with literacy and numeracy. – Dr Michael Johnston

The ministry, it seems, would rather prop up the data by making these assessments easier than take the action required to fix the underlying problem. That would mean abandoning the misguided teaching ideology that has underpinned two decades of falling literacy and numeracy attainment. It would mean overhauling the way teachers are trained to teach these key skills. But the ministry seems to prefer dumbing down the tests to taking the action required to improve learning.

This scandal is just the latest in a litany of incidents in which the ministry has been exposed. Mismanagement, ideological thinking and downright incompetence seem to be the hallmarks of its stewardship of our schooling system. – Dr Michael Johnston

The ministry should be solving the problems afflicting our education system rather than contributing to them. In addition to our very poor literacy and numeracy attainment, those problems include shocking truancy rates, low teacher morale and a threadbare curriculum.

The malaise in the Ministry of Education is just one instance of wider problems in our public service. – Dr Michael Johnston

The Ministry of Education will not improve its stewardship of schooling until that reform takes place. Meanwhile, every year, about 65,000 young New Zealanders leave school, many of them having been woefully under-served.

Schools and their teachers, by-and-large, do the very best they can for their students with the knowledge and resources at their disposal. But few teachers have been equipped with the best methods of teaching literacy. And schools are massively under-resourced to support students with learning disabilities such as dyslexia.

We cannot wait for the ministry to help. We need to find ways around it.

Communities must take more responsibility for supporting the work of their schools. – Dr Michael Johnston

There are many pressing issues for voters, including the cost of living, rising crime rates and a crisis in healthcare. It’s easy for slower-burning issues such as education to take a back seat to these more immediate concerns. But we can’t afford to keep going the way we are. This year, education must be front-and-centre in election debates.

The ministry isn’t going to help. It’s time for all New Zealanders to step up and take responsibility for saving our schools. – Dr Michael Johnston

Early childcare education (ECE) and aged residential care providers both rely on government subsidies to operate; businesses in both sectors say they are struggling to keep up with rising wage costs, given the funding they receive – and that’s impacting both quality of care and commercial viability. – Andrew Bevin

Since his elevation to the role of Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins’s spin doctors and the compliant MSM are energetically pushing the “Chippy” narrative. Portraying him as a regular down to earth, focusing on the “bread & butter” issues, Cossie Club, Joe Average New Zealander.

But we must not be fooled by the Joe Average persona nor by the choir boy looks. 

You don’t have to scratch the surface too deeply to unearth the same range of political ideologies that seek to achieve a skewed ethnic equality, the same “we know best” dogma and exactly the same innate ability to obfuscate and to equivocate as his predecessor. – John Porter

Further emulating his predecessor, Hipkins also has some serious failure marks on his report card.

His ineffectiveness and incompetence were there for all to see in his previous ministerial role.

We must not forget Hipkins, as Minister of Education from 2017 until he became Prime Minister in January, had oversight on the Ministry of Education.

This is the ministry, which on Hipkins’ watch, and ostensibly with his endorsement, has given the nation’s schoolchildren a radical, “decolonised” history curriculum.

New Zealand’s education system is already in a parlous state but we are busy installing the vision of a minority into the centre of our education system.

All conducted under Hipkins’s watch and all without formal approval from the public.

This can only be acknowledged as a radical and serious step with far-reaching and extreme long-term consequences.

A step too far in an effort to correct some perceived ethnic disadvantage or simply a minister not assuming responsibility? – John Porter

If you want to influence and change thoughts or actions, where do you start? Education and in particular, the most impressionable, the younger generation.

This curriculum refresh makes it clear that local iwi will collaborate on what is taught. Recommending that, “Leading kaiako [teachers]… incorporate te reo Maori and matauranga Maori in the co-design of localised curriculum with whanau, hapu, and iwi.”

Given New Zealand’s current mediocre ranking in international educational standards, how can involving “whanau, hapu, and iwi” while undertaking such a prominent and important role improve our children’s education?

Hipkins must believe it will help, otherwise why allow the refresh to be structured so? – John Porter

The sad saga of Hipkins’s (in)competence continues with him covering himself in failure by being responsible for the disastrous centralisation of polytechnics. So far this has cost the education sector around $200 million! – John Porter

Only in a Labour government would this level of ineptness be tolerated!

There was any number of experts warning Hipkins “that his centralised model wasn’t going to deliver better educational outcomes and be more financially viable” but the “we know best” philosophy kicked in and Hipkins pushed ahead with it anyway, leaving the polytech sector in total disarray! – John Porter

For five years, incompetence, failure and deceit have pervaded this Labour government and there is absolutely no reason to believe this will not continue under Hipkins’s leadership.

Do you want more of the same? Do you want our country to sink further into a mire of debt and skewed ethnic ideology? No? Then –

Don’t be fooled by the choir boy looks! – John Porter

After nearly six years in Government the only thing Labour has delivered is a cost-of-living crisis hurting New Zealanders – Christopher Luxon

After six long years of Labour’s tax and spend-a-thon, Kiwis deserve to keep more of their own hard-earned money. They also deserve a Government that can manage the wider economy to make sure every Kiwi can get ahead, not just have millions of dollars poured down the drain. – Christopher Luxon

Let’s be clear – Labour recklessly spending an extra $50 billion since 2017 has got New Zealand and Kiwis into the position we’re now in.

Today’s moves are no more than a rounding error – pocket change in Labour’s grand scheme to spend, spend, spend with nothing to show for it except Kiwis struggling to feed their families with food prices spiralling.

Labour has no real economic plan to tackle New Zealand’s skyrocketing inflation and help Kiwis get ahead. – Christopher Luxon

Having an inquiry asking why banks seek the safest most profitable investment is like asking why scorpions sting, it is what they do.Having an inquiry asking why banks seek the safest most profitable investment is like asking why scorpions sting, it is what they do. – Richard Prebble

To create a pre-election economic boom Robertson granted the Reserve Bank a taxpayer guarantee to continue printing a billion dollars a week. The result was near-zero interest rates, an economic stimulus, rocketing asset and house prices, an election win and today’s inflation. – Richard Prebble

At its heart banking is risky. It is borrowing short money from depositors that can be withdrawn at any time, and lending money out long, on loans like 20-year mortgages. Every bank fears that depositors might demand their money back.

The history of banking is the history of capitalism. The gathering of savings by banks and lending it to business funded the modern economy. It is also a history of banking collapses.

It was the failure of hundreds of banks in the US that triggered the Great Depression. The GFC was triggered by the failure of Lehman Brothers bank.

Bank failures have brought down whole countries.

The regulators’ solution is to require banks to have larger reserves. The safest reserves are government bonds that can readily be sold for cash. – Richard Prebble

Our Reserve Bank Governor knows what is far worse than banks making excessive profits, it is banks losing money. He points out the cost of the central bank’s policies is chump change compared to the cost of an economic collapse.

This column warned against money printing, zero interest rates, special loan facilities for banks and allowing banks to deposit money with the Reserve Bank at 4.75 per cent.

As we said at the time, if money printing is so risky that the Reserve Bank needs a taxpayer guarantee, then it is too risky for the country. The guarantee is now costing the Government billions of dollars, money not available for the cyclone recovery.

The best thing would have been never to have printed the money.

Now we must deal with the consequences. – Richard Prebble

While the Reserve Bank has now closed its special facility and stopped printing money, it has not withdrawn the surplus cash from the economy.

It is why the banks pay an interest rate less than inflation even for long-term deposits. Seeing the value of their retirement savings fall is not chump change for the elderly. It is encouraging retirees to make risky investments to preserve their savings.

We do not need a banking inquiry. We just need the Reserve Bank restore its balance sheet and stop subsidising the Aussie banks. – Richard Prebble

Not since 1989 have food prices risen this fast in New Zealand. Food prices have increased more in the past three years than they did in the entire nine years of the previous National Government,” says Ms Willis.

“Labour has failed to address the underlying drivers of inflation in our economy and Kiwis are facing the consequences every time they shop.

“Soaring food prices can’t just be blamed on international factors. New Zealand food producers have had it tough under Labour: new farming regulations, worker shortages and additional business costs are all showing up in the prices Kiwis now have to pay at the supermarket. – Nicola Willis

PIt is becoming increasingly difficult to see how the Greens can support another Labour-led government if they are able to do so after this year’s election. Already, co-leader James Shaw has warned Labour not to take it for granted that the Greens will automatically support Labour again (even though by ruling out ever working with National the Greens have left themselves nowhere else to go if they want to remain a party of government.) – Peter Dunne

But it is also a problem for Labour. Having so emphatically abandoned so many of the policies dearest to the Greens’ hearts as distractions and too expensive, Hipkins will have no credibility if he seeks to re-introduce some or all of them after the election as the price of a coalition or new confidence and supply agreement with the Greens. To do so, would be the ultimate act of duplicity, which voters would take a long time to forgive.

Yet, if Shaw’s comments are to be taken seriously, and not just treated as pre-election shadowboxing, Hipkins will have to offer some significant concessions to the Greens if he wishes to remain Prime Minister after the election.
Voters can therefore be rightfully suspicious that policies abandoned now as unaffordable, or undesirable, and a few more besides, will re-emerge after the election as the price of a deal with the Greens. – Peter Dunne

National’s Luxon makes the point that if the policy bonfire is a genuine scrapping of unpopular policies, then the Labour government is left with very little to show for the last five and a half years in office. He now needs to hammer home this point – that, by its own admission, Labour’s cupboard is bare, and therefore that the last five and a years have been largely a waste of time. National also needs to constantly harry Labour on what policies are gone forever and which ones will return after the election, as the price of doing a deal with the Greens.

In a nutshell, it comes down to this. Labour cannot stay in government without the support of the Greens, notwithstanding their current grumpiness and threats not to support Labour. Each knows the only outcome from that would be a National-led government, which would be political anathema to both. Therefore, some sort of deal will have to be done between them.

Consequently, voters will be rightfully wary about how credible, Hipkins’ self-proclaimed “bread and butter” policy reset is, or whether, as is looking increasingly likely, it is no more than a cynical stunt to save Labour’s electoral bacon.

The Greens may well know the answer already. – Peter Dunne

Academics have to have preserved for them that freedom of being able to express views that they have, and it’s absolutely inappropriate for them to be shut down by the chief executive. – Penny Simmonds 

A crucial role of academia is as critic and conscience of society, which means having (Shock! horror!) political opinions. Sheesh. Dude needs to pull his head in and get a grip. – Rebekah Graham

The culture wars are often viewed as an exclusively American phenomenon, but the reality is that they are becoming increasingly prominent in countries around the world, including New Zealand. Some may believe that they are immune to their influence, but the truth is that these battles have already entered New Zealand politics and are being enthusiastically fought by the Labour government and the political left. Instinctively, right-leaning parties in New Zealand have shied away from culture war issues, preferring instead to focus on their traditional core policies. But whether we like it or not, the game is afoot, and we are all players.

So, what exactly are the culture wars? In essence, they are political conflicts that revolve around social and cultural issues, such as gender, race, sexuality, religion, and identity.  –  Thomas Cranmer

 In recent years, the country has seen heated debates over topics such as transgender rights, hate speech laws, and the role of colonialism in shaping New Zealand’s history. These debates have been driven largely by the Labour government and the political left, who have taken a strong stance on issues of social justice and equity. While some may view these positions as admirable, many see them as a threat to traditional values and free speech. – Thomas Cranmer

These debates have, however, left those on the political right feeling excluded and marginalised. The National Party and the Act Party have been vocal in their opposition to the government’s policies, but they have struggled to gain traction in the face of a media and political establishment that is largely aligned with the left. This has led to accusations that the government and its supporters are trying to silence dissent and impose a narrow set of values on the country.

However, it is important to note that culture wars are not inherently bad. They can provide an opportunity for different groups to engage in meaningful dialogue and debate over important issues. They can also bring attention to marginalised communities and push for greater social justice and equity.

The problem arises when culture wars become polarised and divisive, with each side demonising the other and refusing to engage in productive dialogue. This is where New Zealand currently finds itself. The government and the political left have taken a strong stance on issues of social justice, but they have also been accused of being intolerant of dissent and imposing their views on the rest of the country. Meanwhile, those on the political right have been left feeling excluded and silenced, unable to engage in meaningful dialogue or shape the direction of the country. – Thomas Cranmer

While they may dominate the headlines and social media feeds, there are many other important issues facing our country, from health, education and economic matters to criminal justice. We need to ensure that we are not so consumed by culture wars that we lose sight of these other important issues.

In conclusion, the culture wars have already entered New Zealand politics, and if international experience is anything to go by, they will only broaden and intensify. New Zealand has a proud history of progressive reforms going back to the suffragette movement but this shouldn’t be a reason not to engage in good faith debate about the concerns surrounding the current culture wars.  Indeed these issues are so pervasive – going to family, religion and identity – that it will not be possible to avoid their reach forever. For conservatives, that means taking a first principles approach to the debate and objectively challenging progressive alternatives to the status quo. To paraphrase Trotsky, “you may not be interested in the culture wars, but the culture wars are interested in you”. – Thomas Cranmer

I’m reluctant to condemn people too harshly for doing whatever they have to do to save their jobs. They may have mouths to feed and mortgages to pay. I’m always conscious that as an independent blogger with a guaranteed income from national super, I’m in the very privileged position of not having to answer to a cowardly employer.

Nonetheless, it has to be said that if everyone cravenly backed down as Panapa and Davis did, freedom of speech would be even more imperilled than it is already. If you say something, you should be prepared to stand up for it.

As it is, the enemies of free speech have triumphed once again – game, set and match. The message is clear to anyone brave or reckless enough to speak their mind.  – Karl du Fresne

No, public wrath should be directed squarely at MediaWorks and the totalitarian zealots who have succeeded, despite representing only a tiny, demented fragment of the population, in so intimidating the corporate world that broadcasters are punished not even for expressing controversial opinions (although that should be their right), but for affirming incontrovertible biological facts, such as that only women can get pregnant. 

As recently as a few years ago, this entire scenario would have read like something from a futuristic, dystopian satire. Now it’s happening. The irony is that 99-point-something percent of TodayFM’s dwindling audience would have regarded the statements by Panapa and Davis as not only harmless but unremarkable. 

MediaWorks doesn’t deserve the privilege of operating in a free and open society. It enjoys the rights and benefits of freedom while at the same time insidiously subverting them. – Karl du Fresne

Perhaps the best possible outcome is that MediaWorks will continue on its present course and in the process, commit slow-motion hara-kiri. No one will miss it. – Karl du Fresne

Remarkably, having considered the breaking of protocol alongside the rebuke from the Attorney-General and the breach of the Cabinet manual in calling up the Police Commissioner, Hipkins had decided Nash deserved no further punishment at all.

While Hipkins might think being dropped to the bottom of the Cabinet rankings is an embarrassment and stain on Nash’s reputation, it means absolutely nothing to the public.

If, after two more serious errors of judgment are revealed, you still have a seat at the Cabinet table, then whether you’re ranked 11th or 20th doesn’t matter. – Jo Moir

It was already questionable judgment from Hipkins when Nash held onto his forestry, economic development and oceans and fisheries portfolios after the first strike on Wednesday given how much he’d doubled down on having not done anything wrong when first approached about his chat with the commissioner.

Some gave the Prime Minister credit for dealing with it in just a couple of hours and making it clear to Nash there were no more ‘get-out-of-jail-free-cards’.

Forty-eight hours later and Nash looks to have a whole deck of them. – Jo Moir

To see how destructive identity politics can be, how toxic and divisive, look no further than San Francisco’s crazy reparations idea. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors appointed a panel to consider whether reparations should be paid to the city’s black residents for the historic crimes of slavery and racism. The panel decreed that, yes, they should be. Every eligible black citizen of San Francisco should get $5million each, it said. They should also get $97,000 a year for the rest of their lives and be able to buy homes in the city for $1. Incredibly, the Board of Supervisors is seriously considering the recommendations rather than hurling them into the trashcan of crackpot ideas that deserve not a split second’s contemplation, which is where they should be. – Brendan O’Neill

The racial divisiveness of what San Francisco is seriously considering cannot be overstated. Splitting the city into victim races who deserve millions of dollars in love and care and culpable races who will have to stump up the cash for this mad plan is one of the most poisonous proposals I’ve heard in a long time. The far right can only dream of so expertly fracturing a city along racial lines. San Francisco’s reparations idea exposes the rotten hyper-racialist heart of woke politics. This fatalist ideology condemns whites to permanent culpability and blacks to permanent pain. It impresses the sins of the father on white folk and the agony of the ancestor on black people, condemning all to live in a forever purgatory of historically determined angst. What a dispiriting and anti-democratic way of life they aspire to impose on us.

That is the worst part of the slavery-reparations idea – its historical determinism. The idea that modern-day blacks are shaped and haunted by the crimes of yesteryear is deeply demeaning. – Brendan O’Neill

Such thinking presents black people as marionettes pulled this way and that by dead events over which they have no control. Their self-esteem, their opportunities (or lack thereof) – all are apparently moulded by the terrifying force of history. This is ahistorical, apolitical and patronising. It disavows the agency of living black communities. In the words of columnist Gregory Kane, the ‘Victimhood Sweepstakes’ of the reparations ideology actually ‘reinforces’ despondency in African-American circles, rather than challenging it.

Reparations are a con. Paying them might provide a moral thrill to wealthy whites, for whom they will become a kind of modern-day Indulgence, a payment of cash to absolve oneself of the moral stain of whiteness. But such narcissistic privilege-checking would come at the cost of social harmony. And claiming reparations might seem like a good idea to some African Americans, who would get to live more comfortably as a result of modern America’s depressing obsession with historic wrongs. But the financial perk of reparations would be completely outweighed by their sinister compromising of individual agency, of autonomy, of the idea that all of us, whatever our background, are responsible for our lives and our destinies. – Brendan O’Neill

No matter how good an idea, it takes time for the entire country to hear about it.

But that time has now come for localism. – Oliver Hartwich

New Zealanders do not want Wellington to run their lives, and they do not want to be governed by distant bureaucrats.

Instead, New Zealanders have expressed overwhelming support for localism. They want their communities to have a greater say in local development and reward them for their hard work in making their communities grow.

Localism has become a mainstream idea. That is encouraging, and we may expect political parties to incorporate localist policies into their election manifestos for this year’s election.

After a decade of promoting the idea, we at The New Zealand Initiative are proud to have moved the debate on localism forward.

It is a great idea whose time has come. – Oliver Hartwich

The Disinformation Project’s director, Kate Hannah, of Victoria University of Wellington, identifies “Māori, Pasifika diaspora communities, the Muslim community, Chinese diaspora communities, refugee and migrant communities, LGBTQIA+ communities — in particular, trans communities — and peoples living with the experience of disabilities” as victims.

This is important work, which could be expanded to consider disinformation targeted at the community as a whole, including press statements like Wood and Shaw’s and relentless scaremongering from environmental organisations including Greenpeace.

Two issues stand out over recent decades: the relentlessly false political narratives from the far-left about nuclear power and gene science. This disinformation has had monumental implications for New Zealand — far beyond the disruption, violence and idiocy of the Wellington occupiers — and has adversely affected New Zealand’s climate-change mitigation efforts, defence arrangements, productivity and natural environment, including polluted rivers and lakes.

Decades of scaremongering by the political left led to New Zealanders’ inaccurate attitude to nuclear power, which caused us to betray our allies on the cusp of the Cold War being won, and which has compromised our ability to defend New Zealand’s territorial integrity and offshore interests ever since.- Matthew Hootton

Disinformation on both nuclear power and biotechnology was not motivated by science, but by far-left activists’ opposition to the western defence network, capitalism and farming.

For decades, their nonsense was reported, usually unchallenged, even by the state broadcasters, RNZ and TVNZ. – Matthew Hootton

At the same time, New Zealand needs a serious discussion this election year about how to use gene science to reduce agricultural emissions and how to defend our territorial land and sea, and our wider interests, from totalitarian and belligerent states who are averse to our values.

To prevent that, extreme-left activists will seek to subvert any serious discussion with disinformation and false narratives, just as they did in previous decades. We would also be well served if the likes of Wood and Shaw were challenged for making implausible claims about the environmental impacts of their policies, which even their own Prime Minister has now called out.

In recent weeks, the Government has also released health statistics and crime briefings that have turned out to be misinformation, yet DPMC and the Disinformation Project have been curiously silent.

If they are genuinely committed to fighting disinformation that harms New Zealand’s interests, they may need to widen their scope. – Matthew Hootton

Controversy over many subjects remains vigorous among doctors, and in my own career, going back several decades, I have seen medical consensus on many things change. Differences of opinion are always possible, and while they may sometimes be attributable to personal antagonisms, vanity, pride, financial interest, and so forth, often they aren’t. People can disagree without any of them being ill-intentioned. – Theodore Dalrymple

What most alarmed me about the paper in AMA Ethics was that there was expressed in it no attachment to freedom of opinion as a good or desirable thing in itself, independent of its effects: in other words, that freedom is an end in itself, an extremely important value. Even if the CDC, the WHO, or the majority of expert medical opinion were invariably right, it would not be a reason for suppressing dissent by resort “to robust use of [licensing authorities’] powers to take appropriate disciplinary action” by, for example, depriving dissidents of their livelihood. The Soviet Union, it sometimes seems, won the Cold War. – Theodore Dalrymple

Tackling inflation requires a central bank to deliberately cause economic harm and this is not something that any central bank in a democratic state has the appetite to do.

The war with inflation is over. Inflation has won. – Damien Grant

One Minister proved himself to be a rooster this week and the Prime Minister turned out to be a chicken.

Stuart Nash may not be the rooster crowing quite so loudly, but he should be a feather duster. His continuous breaching of the Cabinet manual shows a lack of respect for the office he holds and he should have been sacked from Cabinet and stripped of all portfolios. – Paula Bennett

It is very clear what is acceptable and not when you become a Minister. This is not. If, like Nash, a Minister doesn’t read the Cabinet Manual, he still would know as you get a visit when you first become a Minister by very serious officials, most with a legal background, who talk you through it all.

We are now up to breach number four, that we know of. At this point the rooster should be plucked. No good for eating, he becomes a feather duster. But the Prime Minister has proved himself to be a chicken. By not removing him immediately from Cabinet he is sending a message that this behaviour is acceptable. In a position as privileged and powerful as a Cabinet Minister, it is not. Perhaps the Prime Minister needs to be the top rooster and crow from the rooftops about acceptable standards, but instead he just keeps his head down and pecks away. – Paula Bennett

As an antidote to the morning news. I wanted to be in the company of those who care enough about the common welfare to make a difference.
I wanted to be with those who don’t get mired in the hopelessness of “Ain’t it awful!” but get up and do something about the welfare of their corner of the world.

That’s as much a reality as the news of the disasters of the day.

They represent the truth that there is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don’t mind who gets the credit.
They know that if all you think of is what you want and need, there is never enough.
They know that if you also think of what other people need, there is always enough.

There are more things to admire in people than there are to despise.

I’m not an optimist – not a pessimist – I’m a realist.
There is more good going on in the world than bad – or else we could not have survived and prevailed this long.
Altruism is alive and well and at work.
That’s also the news of the day.
Don’t miss it. – Robert Fulghum

A particularly significant problem is that the concept of mauri, meaning life force, was inserted directly into the basic chemistry curriculum. Please google the phrase “Mauri is present in all matter. All particles have their own mauri” — this is the language that NCEA used in their pilot Chemistry standards in 2022.

Unfortunately, the concept of ‘life force’ is a well-known pseudoscience, known as vitalism. Vitalism was experimentally debunked by chemists in the 1800s. Having a government agency force it back into the chemistry curriculum by political fiat — while steamrolling the vehement and informed objections of science teachers — is a huge problem. Vitalism is a pseudoscientific error on the same level as asserting that the Earth is flat, or that the world is only 6,000 years old. If vitalism is right, then all of chemistry and biochemistry is wrong. – Nick Matzke

Clearly, all is not well at the Ministry of Education, if such radical shifts in claims about basic chemistry (which has been established for 100+ years, and is the same in all countries) are occurring.

And, despite the change, the “mauri is present in all matter” pseudoscience is still on the NCEA Chemistry/Biology website in numerous places, right now! – Nick Matzke

So, once again, in a Matt Hancock-type revelation we learn that during the Covid years the Government considered handing us all $5,000.

$5,000 for everyone. It’s like Oprah: “you get a car, you get a car, you get $5000”. – Mike Hosking

They thought the way to stave off a recession was to close the borders, and in doing so, strangle the economy but flood it with cash. Cash they never had anyway.

Another part of the plan was to do it Prezzy card style. The only thing that stopped them was they couldn’t get the plastic in from China quick enough. Think about that.

New Zealand, the eco-warriors in the middle of our nuclear moment, changing the world for the better through well thought-out climate policy, wanted to import tonnes of good old Chinese plastic to toss money we didn’t have at a country closed down. – Mike Hosking

All this came about because despite what the Reserve Bank was doing, printing money to the tune of $100 billion and handing it to banks to throw at us anyway they wanted, the fear was that wouldn’t be enough.

Once again, given the state of the economy we sit in this morning, can you imagine how much worse it would be today if these idiots had actually gone ahead with it?

What was needed, and this is perhaps the most important lesson out of Covid and general crisis management, was experience and expertise and, above all, great leadership. And they didn’t have it.

We have amateurs from unions and university and people who had barely any experience of Government. – Mike Hosking

The danger of buffoons running the place cannot be overstated.

We were a bad idea away from catastrophe – and the other bad ideas landed us in the current mess.

I suppose the ironic good news is it could have been worse.

But what a gobsmackingly horrifying thought that is. – Mike Hosking

Here’s a radical suggestion. Anti-Vietnam War protesters in the 1960s used the slogan “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came”. The same idea could be applied to speaking tours by people the woke Left dislike. They could just ignore them. But of course that would deny the woke Left a chance to parade their outrage in the front of the TV cameras. Publicity opportunities like that are just too good to pass up, especially when sympathetic media are always keen to frame the confrontations as a fight against the dark forces of the far Right.

From a broader perspective, the denial of a visa or speaking venues to Keen-Minshull would again signal to the enemies of free speech, as with Southern and Molyneux, that they can shut down people they don’t like simply by threatening disruption. What could be simpler than to orchestrate a confrontation with the other side and then blame them for any unpleasantness that eventuates? In the meantime, freedom of speech has taken another hit – which of course is the objective. – Karl du Fresne 

Now, one more radical idea. LGBTQIA+ activists bombard us constantly via the media with their breast-beating laments about how oppressed they are. They are endlessly inventive in creating new definitions of sexuality or minority status – QTBIPOC, MVPFAFF, BBIPOC – that no one previously knew existed. I have even read one activist complain – seriously – that there are not enough terms to capture all the variants of sexuality that queer people might identify with.

A tiny but very vocal minority have succeeded in capturing the institutions of power with their bullying diversity agenda. They have done this so effectively that they have co-opted mainstream society whether we want it or not.

But here’s the thing: I don’t think most New Zealanders give a toss about how their fellow citizens identify sexually. They rightly regard it as none of their business. – Karl du Fresne 

This, apparently, is not good enough for the activists. It’s not sufficient that the rest of us consider it their right to adopt whatever identity and lifestyle they choose and just get on with it – preferably quietly, as sexual minorities did in the past. They insist on being noticed.

Call it exhibitionism, attention-seeking, whatever. “Look at me – I’m different.” Ultimately, that’s what a lot of the activism over sexual identity seems to be about. – Karl du Fresne 

Culture is important; we would all agree I’m sure. I’m sure we’re all very proud of our own culture, whatever it is.

But surely a child’s safety and wellbeing is more important. I think we’re doing things wrong.

I’m very sad about this news. If this is what Section 7AA does to little kids, then putting it in there was a mistake and it needs to be removed from the law. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Too much of today’s debate is about worthy and, ultimately, pointless exercises – far reaching never-never sort of discussions that, in theory, are interesting or important or transformational but will, in reality, go nowhere.

The current Government bailing on the clunker car scheme is your classic example. When it was launched it was saving the planet and the importance could not be more profound.

By the time it was dumped last week it was too complicated to put in place and really wouldn’t have made much of a difference anyway.

Political discourse, locally and nationally, is filled with this sort of time-wasting nonsense. – Mike Hosking

This once-proud country seems to be at a crossroads of sorts.

With a Government majoring in minor things, we are starting to notice that the major things aren’t working anymore.

Just like the repair jobs on the roads, at the centre of our problems is a failure to maintain proper standards. When standards slip, expectations gradually diminish in parallel. We expect less of our schools, our health services and our public officials than we did previously. As expectations fall, so does service delivery. As a result, the services delivered by those organisations enter a period of continuous decline. It’s called a downward spiral. – Bruce Cotterill

These failures will see more people than ever relying on government to support their existence. Increased reliance on government services and government funds is a logical outcome of poor education, declining health services and increasing crime. And of course, as standards slip, so too does the performance of those government services that more and more people end up relying on. It’s downward spiral to nowhere.

Those of us who care to observe what is going on can foresee a collapse of monumental proportions. A decline in standards across basic functions that can, if not arrested, result in the failure of the State.

Meanwhile, the cost of running this little country has ballooned by one billion dollars a week. To make matters worse, we’re borrowing every cent. But what are we getting for it?

You can tell a lot about a country from the state of its roads. – Bruce Cotterill

Going by what little I know about him, Invercargill mayor Nobby Clark doesn’t strike me as a man likely to back down in a fight.

And neither should he. Meng Foon’s call on him to apologise for using the n-word should be brushed aside as the grandstanding it is. The Race Relations Commissioner should pull his head in.

It would be different if Clark had casually used the word in circumstances indicating he approved of it, but the reverse is true. He says he finds it abhorrent, would never use to refer to anyone and is offended when he hears it used in rap music.

His purpose in using it was to ask how far artistic licence should be allowed to go in tolerating words that cause offence. He cited other examples including the phrase “f*** you, Bitch”, which the poet Tusiata Avia uses in a poem that appears to relish the idea of exacting revenge on the descendants of white colonisers such as James Cook. – Karl du Fresne

The striking thing here is that it’s not Avia’s provocative and mostly incomprehensible poem that attracted the mainstream media’s attention, despite its references to shoving a knife between Captain Cook’s white ribs (aren’t everyone’s ribs white?) and a car full of brown girls driving around looking for his descendants, with the suggestion that a pig-hunting knife might be used. On the contrary, Stuff’s Sunday magazine carried a long article by Michelle Duff purring with approval. – Karl du Fresne

Fortunately, it’s true as a general rule that the further you get from the epicentre of the culture wars in Wellington, the more impervious people become to the posturing of people like Meng Foon.   – Karl du Fresne

In any case, Clark is not answerable to Meng Foon; he’s answerable to the laws of New Zealand (none of which he has broken) and to the people of Invercargill. If they don’t like the things he says, they can vote him out at the next election.

Sadly the same can’t be said of Meng Foon, safe in his highly paid (and unelected) sinecure. – Karl du Fresne

In its increasingly frenetic rush to distance itself from the least popular aspects of the Ardern government, the Hipkins administration is becoming more and more erratic and inconsistent.

The initial policy reset was reasonable, but the government’s actions subsequently have become abrupt and unpredictable. It is increasingly difficult to discern a clear sense of direction, and hard to escape the conclusion that electoral panic has become the government’s main driver. – Peter Dunne

The greater risk emerging from the government’s quixotic approach is that good people will become less inclined to accept appointments to government boards, because of the uncertainties created by its handling of these recent events. The talent pool of people competent and experienced enough to fill these roles is already a limited one, with the same names cropping up time and time again, mainly because of the small size of our country.

In the overall interests of sound governance, we cannot afford to lose the services of good people because of this uncertainty. Nor can we tolerate a government that treats previously accepted rules and standards of behaviour as its personal plaything, to be acknowledged, applied, or abandoned, only as and when it sees fit, but always to its political advantage. – Peter Dunne

What is characterised as hate speech is more often simply speech that upsets or offends someone. But there’s no human right not to be upset, or to be protected from having your values and beliefs questioned and criticised. So I think it would be helpful to get rid of that loaded term “hate speech” because it’s a misnomer. – Karl du Fresne

Free speech is important to the traditional Left because they know better than anyone what it means to suffer under authoritarian regimes that put you in jail for saying what you think.

You’ll note that I refer to the “traditional” Left. That’s because the opposition to free speech mainly comes from what you might call the new woke Left. I know a lot of people hate that term “woke”, but until someone comes up with a better word, it will have to do.

As a general rule the woke Left are younger and have come through the university system. They have a very limited understanding of history and apparently think they have a human right not to be exposed to opinions they dislike or which challenge their world view. Unfortunately they seem to be encouraged in this belief by their university lecturers. – Karl du Fresne

Universities used to be regarded as bulwarks of free thought and freedom of expression. That’s no longer the case. Universities throughout the western world – even august institutions such as Oxford and Harvard – frequently bring down the shutters on speakers who are deemed provocative or even merely controversial. – Karl du Fresne

There is no DNA evidence for discrete human races among our species, Homo sapiens, even when one compares isolated populations. Variations in genetic expressions across the globe do not reflect race. For example, populations differentiated by selection for lactose tolerance track the spread of cattle domestication from Southwest Asia into North Africa and Europe. This co-evolution enabled high levels of milk consumption across multiple “white” and “non-white” groups.

So, where did a popular essentialised race idea come from? Many of my students are surprised to learn that this notion is of relatively recent origin. Essentialist race was forged by early modern Europeans to justify the colonisation of Indigenous populations and the enslavement of African peoples. – Professor Ian Barber

Official race definitions today, when used, generally disavow assumptions of inferiority and channel a fluid ethnic group identity where ancestry is optional among shared attributes.

But the legacy of problematic and ambiguous race continues. – Professor Ian Barber

Stats NZ uses ethnicity for group identification and “a measure of cultural affiliation”, distinguished from “race, ancestry, nationality, or citizenship”. Ethnicity as defined covers people with “one or more elements of common culture that need not be specified, but may include religion, customs, or language”. Religious communities with strong group identification from unifying origin myths in Judaism, Islam and even Catholicism and the Latter-day Saints conceivably might become ethnic. But ethnicity has been criticised for its vagueness and potential misuse.

It has become a popular synonym for “other” minority groups and their traditions globally. The majority observer gaze may be silently normalised behind the designation multi-ethnic, and in the casual racism of a concomitant question to people of colour especially, “but where are you really from?”. – Professor Ian Barber

Ditching ethnicity in the census to ask “who are your people?” might pick up immigrant and other sub-national affiliations more equally in this world of change and fluidity. It would also acknowledge those who wish to affiliate as a national people only: “New Zealanders”.

A whakapapa of self-identified peoples at multiple scales and from different world views would be created back to the introduction of British-settler Pākehā in Te Tiriti, alongside tangata/takata whenua and tchakat henu as original peoples of the land. That strikes me as a more authentic New Zealand census approach as it references the nation’s founding document to respect and encourage diversity in unity. – Professor Ian Barber

Our goal is to show our son that reputation, hard work and determination can create a life that he deserves or any child deserves. – Toria Cummings

The most depressing aspect is that the whole wretched affair appears to be rooted in a particularly cruel and destructive form of racism – only not the type of racism we normally hear about, because that’s supposed to flow the other way.

And we, the taxpayers, are involuntarily complicit in this process, because the government department pulling the strings in the case is acting on our behalf. It’s not a day to feel a proud New Zealander. – Karl du Fresne

How is it that such a minuscule part of our biology that shapes the variation of our physical selves has been used to organise such huge social, political and cultural realities? Realities that, while at times enriching our cultural lives, have caused so much suffering and pain in the world?

There is nothing wrong with the social and cultural constructs of race. The rot begins when you believe and tout your race as being superior to others and use it to justify the exploitation of others. – K (Guru) Gurunathan

I have no objection to the co-governance or joint management of environmental features, whether it be a lake, a mountain or a national park – as we have seen through many Treaty settlements. But applying co-governance to core public services is a bridge too far, in my view.

Labour has disingenuously tried to deny the precedent at play here, but their Three Waters co-governance arrangements takes the application of Treaty principles into a whole new orbit, undermining democracy’s one person, one vote principle. With a 50-50 split in the regional representative groups, the model accords Māori considerably greater representation than non-Māori as a percentage of the population. – Mike Yardley

You may recall New Zealand’s sixteen former Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics (ITPs) being merged to form the mega-Polytech, Te Pūkenga.

But if you do, it is a false memory.

Repeat the following until you believe it:

Te Pūkenga has always been the only Polytech in Aotearoa.

In George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, events inconvenient to the totalitarian government are thrown down a ‘memory hole’ in the Ministry of Truth. Once committed to the memory hole, it is if the offending event had never occurred.

Te Pūkenga Chief Executive Peter Winder has built a memory hole of his own. In a new ‘style guide’, his staff are told that they should not refer to the merger. “We always refer to ourselves as Te Pūkenga”, they are admonished. – Dr Michael Johnston

It is very important to use the right words. And the right words at Te Pūkenga, are those dictated by the style guide.

The importance of using the right words actually has little to do with what those words mean. In fact, the right words and the wrong ones often mean exactly the same thing.

Orwell understood that controlling what people say is the best way to control what they think. In part that is because human thought is largely expressed in words. It is also because compelling people to use particular words establishes an attitude of supine obedience.

Winder assures us that there have been no complaints about the style guide. Citizens of Soviet Russia didn’t complain to Stalin about queuing to buy bread, either.

The recent spate of linguistic cleansing at Te Pūkenga follows another incident of censorship at the institution. Last week, Te Pūkenga staff – sorry, work friends – were told not to publicly express political views, because they are public servants.

Some wrong-thinking academics from other institutions have claimed that this pronouncement violates academic freedom. Clearly, these troublemakers are not keeping up with the programme.

At Te Pūkenga, academic freedom is just another old-fashioned idea that’s been thrown down the memory hole. – Dr Michael Johnston

The landscape of lobbying and political donations in New Zealand is the wild west, with politicians unwilling to clean it up. Surely the problem is now so extreme that politicians need to be forced to set up a Royal Commission into Vested Interests in Politics. – Bryce Edwards

Metaphorically, “whakaihu” refers to the university’s place as the country’s oldest university, as well as its Māori students often being the first to graduate from their whānau and communities. And it symbolically includes everyone on the “waka”. –Dominic O’Sullivan 

Universities are owned and principally funded by the Crown. But their obligation to independent scholarship means they can’t be part of the Crown in the same way as a government department. Universities don’t take direction from ministers in the same way, and their staff are not public servants. They are not part of the executive branch of government.

Together with their students and graduates, academics are the university – a community of scholars obliged to contribute to the discovery and sharing of knowledge, but not obliged to serve the government of the day. – Dominic O’Sullivan 

Parliament and the executive (government ministers) together decide what te Tiriti means to the Crown side of the relationship. Public servants offer advice, but ultimately take ministers’ instructions on giving effect to whatever is the Crown’s Tiriti policy.

Academics, however, can take a different view. They’re not bound by what the Crown side of the agreement thinks. And, as developments in te Tiriti policy show, academic independence makes a difference. – Dominic O’Sullivan 

If an institution represents one side of a partnership, that institution cannot be a “place for everyone”. A Māori student or staff member should be able to say, “I belong here as much as anybody else, with the same rights, opportunities and obligations to contribute to the institution’s culture, values and purpose.”

That includes the right to study and teach te Tiriti with an independence that is not available to public servants. – Dominic O’Sullivan 

Thoroughness and objectivity – but not political caution – guide academic contributions to policy debate. Such contributions are different in style and purpose from the kind of policy-making that it is the duty of the public service to undertake.

Universities are not the Crown in the same sense, and this is why they are not Tiriti partners. – Dominic O’Sullivan 

So I wonder, what genius decided that I and my fellow drivers needed to be escorted by a ute with flashing lights through routine (i.e. non-hazardous) road works that we were perfectly capable of navigating without assistance?

Incidentally, there was a man in a hi-vis vest sitting in the ute’s passenger seat. For what purpose, exactly? Perhaps he was there to ensure the driver didn’t take a wrong turn himself, or – far more likely, given the tedium of their duties – fall asleep.

In other words, two men doing two non-jobs – guiding other vehicles through road works that generations of New Zealand drivers have miraculously coped with in the past without risk to life and limb.

Here was one of the great cons of the 21st century, the cult of traffic management, carried to new levels of absurdity. Some inventive pooh-bah in Worksafe (sorry, Mahi Haumaru Aotearoa) had found yet another way to waste public money, needlessly inflate the cost of highway maintenance and pad out an already bloated and largely superfluous industry. – Karl du Fresne

Brown has shrewdly zeroed in on a 21st century phenomenon that causes millions of New Zealanders to burn with frustration and resentment. No one can drive anywhere and not be aware of the scale of the traffic management fetish.

It’s attested to by vast forests of road cones – frequently arranged in complex configurations that seem more likely to cause accidents than prevent them – and by patently absurd speed restrictions, often where no road works are in progress or have long since ceased. – Karl du Fresne

It’s astonishing to think that New Zealand’s highway network was built without any of this palaver. What changed to suddenly make it necessary? Did I miss a swathe of news stories about road workers being killed and maimed by careless motorists?

The emphasis on safety would be more tolerable if visible progress was being made on the projects that these elaborate precautions are supposed to facilitate, but the NZ Transport Agency has a woeful record for getting jobs done on time and within budget. – Karl du Fresne

The traffic management cult is itself an outgrowth of a longer-established cult, the cult of health and safety. Both proceed from the assumption that most New Zealanders are imbeciles who can’t be trusted to make sensible decisions for themselves and must therefore be protected by ever-proliferating rules and regulations, the economic costs of which are incalculable.

Both also reflect a mindset that has become embedded in the bureaucracy and largely goes unchallenged by the politicians who are nominally in charge. I’m referring to something called the precautionary principle, which holds that every theoretical risk – and I stress theoretical –must be mitigated by appropriate safeguards, often without regard for sensible cost vs. benefit assessments. – Karl du Fresne

The precautionary principle appeals to the bureaucratic psyche because it provides an excuse for every control freak’s dream: the perpetual expansion of an oppressive and intrusive state apparatus that’s constantly looking for new ways to exercise power over people’s daily lives. And for the most part we obligingly comply because we are essentially passive people, programmed to submit to authority. We may mutter with resentment and metaphorically shake our fists, but ultimately we fall into line. The bureaucrats know this, so are free to proceed with impunity. – Karl du Fresne

If we don’t watch out, we are going to end up in a situation, if we haven’t already, where we make the gap between getting the dole and getting paid for work become so small, that it again ends up being a smart move to just stay at home and collect free money rather than work for a living.

Right now, the Government is considering a change to Working for Families that will only exacerbate this problem. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

So it’ll be completely pointless if this Government now decides to give it to just anyone with kids. We’ll be right back at 2004 with people on the dole not wanting to work because they wouldn’t get that much more anyway.

This is already a significant and growing problem. Chris Hipkins already made this worse just over a week ago when he indexed benefits to inflation.

Which means as long as inflation stays at 7 percent, the dole will keep going up by 7 percent every year. Hands up, who else gets a 7 percent pay rise every single year? Nope. Just them. 

We already have more than 300,000 people on a benefit. That’s 1 in 10 of every one of us working age Kiwis, that’s too many people. 

And anything that makes that number grow should not even be considered, extending Working for Families to beneficiaries included. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Here is the simple truth. You cannot silence people because you disagree with them.

Yes, there will be protests. Yes, there will be rage and Lord knows who will turn up at these protests and attempt to platform off a high-profile situation. That is for the police to oversee. However, the right to protest is an act of a well-functioning democracy in the same way free speech is too. – Rachel Smalley

There are some contentious issues at stake here – transgender rights and women’s rights. In particular, there is a need for meaningful debate on the protection and safety of women in many areas of society. It will likely require regulation. It is inappropriate for members of the Government to be standing among protestors, opposing the Let Women Speak events. That is a clear and political statement from MPs that they don’t believe women should have a voice in this conversation. – Rachel Smalley

Let Women Speak want to discuss the implications of gender self-ID on women’s spaces. It is an entirely valid and necessary conversation. If you identify as a transgender woman, should you automatically be given access to all women’s spaces – prisons, women’s refugees, women’s sports, gyms, and aged-care facilities?

The Greens say yes. I say no – not until we have considered how to ensure all members of society feel safe. The Greens, incredulously, are insisting the needs of transgender women should be prioritised ahead of biological women. And somehow, in all of this, we have found ourselves in the extraordinary situation where men like Green MP Ricardo Menendez-March are telling women they cannot speak about concerns for their personal safety, or have a voice at this table. – Rachel Smalley

New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the vote. And today there are men trying to shut down the democratic right of women to speak.

The Greens are 100 percent right to stand in their truth and oppose the views of Posie Parker. But they are 100 percent wrong to try and block her travelling here because they disagree with her. They cannot control social discourse. They cannot deny women a voice. – Rachel Smalley

Let’s speak. Let’s talk. Let’s korero. Let’s find a way to support women and girls who say they feel concerned for their safety in some environments, and to enable transgender women to co-exist in a space where they also feel safe and validated too. There absolutely IS a conversation to be had.

You cannot silence people on the basis that you don’t agree with them. This is New Zealand – not Russia or Saudi Arabia. – Rachel Smalley

I have watched as brave women have raised their hand and questioned their safety, but what follows is awful – the abuse, the verbal violence, and the impact on their lives and careers has been severe. It is a viciousness that I have never seen before. It is wrong. It is entirely acceptable to raise these issues without fearing for your life, your career, your sanity and your livelihood.

I never thought, in my time, having spent years trying to elevate the voice of women, that we would see Labour and Green MPs advocating and politicking to silence the voices of women. Shame on you all.

I am not anti-trans and I am not pro-Posie Parker. But I will absolutely die in a ditch to protect Parker’s right to speak. I don’t ever want to see a time when the voice of women is silenced. Nor do I want to live in a New Zealand that bans people from these shores because their commentary is disagreeable or disruptive. That is not a democracy. It is a dictatorship. – Rachel Smalley

2/2 Censors seeking to review @theposieParker's entry into NZ only give her more prominence + legitimacy. Protest peacefully, yet, but don't shut her down. Tomorrow, we will fight to protect Kiwis' free speech (including the right to hear others' speech).

— 🗣 Free Speech Union ✊ (@NZFreeSpeech) March 23, 2023

Once again, we are hearing the argument, most recently from the Rainbow Greens, that a speaker with controversial views should be blocked from visiting and speaking in public places in New Zealand.

The objection commonly invokes a heckler’s (or thug’s) veto, arguing that other people’s reactions to whatever the speaker may say pose a risk or threat to public order or health and safety, so allowing the person to speak is not in the public interest.

As in debates about hate speech and censorship generally, the argument blurs and confuses important distinctions between words and weapons, disagreement and hate, and offence and harm. – Dr David Bromell

In a free and open society, and in accordance with international human rights law, we have a right to protection from violence and from speech that intends or is imminently likely to incite violence and acts of hostility or discrimination.

But we do not have a right to protection from disagreement, criticism, satire, offence or hurtful comments. – Dr David Bromell

Words are not weapons. Words are what we use instead of weapons, to express disagreement and assert our claims as we negotiate how to live together despite our differences, under the rule of law and without recourse to violence.

If we equate words with weapons, we risk weapons being seen as no worse than words. – Dr David Bromell

In a diverse society where people want and value different things, I cannot reasonably expect other people to like, agree with, approve of, or affirm my ideas, beliefs, attitudes, values or way of life.

And just because someone criticises or disagrees with me does not necessarily mean they hate me. They just don’t agree with me.

I have lived long enough to change my mind about a great number of things. Criticism and disagreement have played an important role in the evolution of what I think, feel and value. – Dr David Bromell

None of us can learn and grow unless we entertain the possibility that we might after all be wrong. It is self-limiting and socially impoverishing to lead our lives only in an echo chamber of like minds.

Besides, even if people who disagree with me do happen to dislike me, I do not have a right to be liked. As Mahatma Gandhi once explained, the state cannot legislate affection. – Dr David Bromell

Sometimes the best we can hope for is mutual toleration of what we disagree with and dislike (or even hate) in one another. Toleration does not sound like much, but in the history of human conflict, toleration is a significant achievement and certainly preferable to violence.

We may not achieve the best of all possible worlds, but we can avoid the worst. – Dr David Bromell

But states cannot justifiably prohibit communication that is insulting or causes offence or hurt feelings if it does not intend and is not imminently likely to incite violence or acts of hostility or discrimination.

The distinction to maintain here is between objective aspects of a person’s human dignity and their decent treatment in society, and subjective feelings of hurt, shock, offence and anger.

Government intervention to restrict the right to freedom of opinion and expression can justifiably protect the former but not the latter. – Dr David Bromell

Attempts to silence speech to prevent offence are more likely to provoke and amplify offensiveness than eliminate it.

The cure for social divisions and polarisation is not shutting out or shouting down disagreement and debate, with a too-ready labelling of opponents (racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, fascist, Nazi, and so on).

Cancelling, censorship and name-calling do not build social inclusion and social cohesion. That requires something much harder–curiosity, the contestation of ideas in reasoned argument, respect for difference, humility, good humour and letting one another be. – Dr David Bromell

Because it’s one thing to roll out another new face to lead the police portfolio, it’s quite another to have police actually able to get tough and make some headway, other than just pulling offenders aside for a quiet chat, and then letting them go. – Kate Hawkesby

There has been a coup. If you did not realise that the Government that we now have is not the one anybody voted for it is understandable. We switch off politics during national disasters.

The new Prime Minister has received wall-to-wall coverage of him in gumboots reassuring flood victims. The TV pictures distracted us from understanding that we don’t just have a new Prime Minister; we have a new government.

The policy re-set has become a total U-turn. Policies that we were assured last year were “critical” are now not needed.

Chris Hipkins’ Government has a completely different mission. – Richard Prebble

Jacinda Ardern’s resignation – which seemed inexplicable – is now understandable. Her transformational government has changed into Hipkins’ transactional government. It is almost as if the last five years never happened.

We do not have a presidential system. We have government by Cabinet answerable to caucus.

The decision to stage this legal coup must be the result of months of secret debate within the Labour Party. No wonder Ardern did not want to lead the dismantling of her policies. – Richard Prebble

The Government has not just U-turned, it has repudiated the policies it claimed were essential. We were told policies were “critical” less than 12 months ago. Now we are told, “there are actually better ways of achieving emissions reductions”.  – Richard Prebble

While Hipkins has no mandate for any of his changes, the government he has replaced never had a mandate for its policies. The country elected Jacinda Ardern, not Labour. The country voted for Ardern hoping she would keep New Zealand free of Covid. Few voters had any idea what was in the Labour Party’s manifesto. – Richard Prebble

What has not changed is Labour’s economic policy – borrow and spend. The savings Hipkins announced are not real. The PM has cancelled projects that have not yet started.

A focus on the cost of living is doomed to fail. The announced benefit increases will disappear into supermarket checkouts.

The cost of living is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is inflation. – Richard Prebble

Inflation is not coming down before the election. The teachers would not be striking if they thought inflation was under control.

The likelihood is by election day the country will have both a recession and inflation, stagflation. – Richard Prebble

The latest polls show that the electorate is very volatile.

Inflation is a government killer. From 1972 to 1984 we had governments that tried to address the cost of living not the cause. Nothing worked. If we had had MMP, then every three years there would have been a change in government.

Borrowing to compensate us for the cost of bread and butter is a policy bound to fail. – Richard Prebble

 

National knew – or should have, since its own research said so – that Christopher Luxon would beat Jacinda Ardern in a policy-free popularity contest.

By the time she quit, enough voters had worked out that, when it came to running a government rather than emoting, she was a complete flake. – Matthew Hooton

The good news is National has finally worked out that it can’t win a beauty contest between the two. Perhaps by necessity, it delivered yesterday what pundits and voters say we want, which is meaningful policy.

If a government ditching its prime minister and main policies is unorthodox, an opposition releasing serious policy is more so, especially so early in an election year. It hasn’t happened this century.

Luxon may be irritated with speculation that his education spokesperson Erica Stanford is a leadership contender, along with his deputy and finance spokesperson Nicola Willis. But New Zealand’s last two important prime ministers, Jim Bolger and Helen Clark, endured speculation throughout their times as opposition leader about Winston Peters, Ruth Richardson, Doug Graham, Michael Cullen and Phil Goff.

Luxon can take comfort that such talk at least suggests a deep bench. That’s not something National has been accused of since John Key, Bill English and Steven Joyce left. – Matthew Hooton

 Education doesn’t make the top issues concerning voters, according to National’s pollsters, Curia. It’s a lowly 11th in Ipsos’ New Zealand Issues Monitor.

Moreover, the policy itself is genuinely statesmanlike, being concerned with outcomes that will fully bear fruit only once Luxon, Willis and Stanford are retired. It doesn’t read as if it was bashed out on Wednesday night after some focus groups. It may even be, as claimed, the outcome of Luxon and Stanford’s personal research over the last year, including in Asia and Europe.

There are no handouts cynically targeted at the median voter, although taxpayers will bear the $10 million annual cost of teacher registration fees rather than teachers themselves. – Matthew Hooton

In a world where we hope each generation will be better than the one before, the data National has obtained reveals that the average 13-year-old in 2019 was actually worse at both maths and science than in 1995. Performance will continue deteriorating as Ardern’s and Hipkins’ Covid kids reach intermediate and secondary school.

But the policy doesn’t brainlessly promise vast billions to fix this. It recognises that far-left education theory, not money, is the problem. As Luxon points out, Grant Robertson has increased education spending by 46 per cent since 2017, from $11.1 billion to $16.2b. The extra $5.1b has had similar results to Robertson’s $1.9b more for mental health.

Nor is head office restructuring and rebranding promised, as Labour focuses on, or changes to school management or teacher payment methods, as right-wing economists might prefer. Instead, the policy is about the nuts and bolts of curriculum reform, initial and ongoing teacher training, new classroom materials and resources, and assessment. – Matthew Hooton

The policy can’t help but be popular with parents and ordinary teachers.

It is also detailed and substantial enough to deserve a serious response from Labour and the Greens, plus Te Pāti Māori, which polls currently identify as king-maker.

But, politically, Labour dare not steal National’s policy because its focus on measurability is anathema to the teacher union bosses and ultra-left education theorists who control the bureaucracy and university education departments, and who easily trump students, parents and regular teachers as the education stakeholders Labour most cares about. – Matthew Hooton

Just as National strategists initially had no idea how to respond to Labour’s unorthodox leadership change and policy bonfires, it can be assured no one in the Beehive has any idea what to do if an opposition suddenly starts taking policy seriously. At the very least, National’s bold strike yesterday promises to mix things up a bit – and hopefully avoid Te Pāti Māori deciding whether or not any of it will happen. – Matthew Hooton

The “culture wars” are set to be a defining issue in the 2023 election.

Just take a look at what has dominated headlines this week. It’s not been the cost of living, the Federal Reserve’s decision to hike interest rates amid banking turmoil, nor the confirmation by the Treasury and our Reserve Bank that New Zealand will tip into a technical recession this year (it will hurt nevertheless).

Incongruously, while scientists were delivering their final warning on the climate crisis, debate in New Zealand was instead focused on the danger presented by a pint-sized female Brit coming here on her “Let Women Speak” tour. – Fran O’Sullivan 

There is an argument that things have moved too far.

This was underlined by the decision by World Athletics that it will exclude from female competition male-to-female transgender athletes who have gone through male puberty.

World Athletics president Lord Coe said: “We have also taken decisive action to protect the female category in our sport, and to do so by restricting the participation of transgender and DSD [differences of sexual development] athletes.”

So we are entering a vexed time. – Fran O’Sullivan 

Just one piece of news in the last week was enough to give the impression that the Government’s great policy bonfire is really smoke and mirrors.

The gobsmacking announcement that the already gold-plated Lake Onslow electricity project has nearly quadrupled in cost yet the Government will forge ahead anyway, confirmed two things. This is the most economically reckless Government since Rob Muldoon, and it has no plans to rein in its own budget to something more appropriate for a country of our size and stage. – Steven Joyce

Burning coal for electricity is an embarrassing feature of this Government’s current energy policy. The decision to ban gas exploration back when climate change was this generation’s nuclear-free moment has made us more dependent on coal-fired electricity generation than we otherwise would be. Gas creates about half the emissions of burning coal, but no matter.

There are plenty of lower-cost, low-emissions solutions to the country’s electricity problems that energy companies would supply if the Government got out of the way and let them get on with it. There are proposed new geothermal schemes, new technologies providing sophisticated demand management tools for industrial users, smaller and cheaper run-of-river hydro schemes, the option of greater storage in existing hydro lakes, and carbon capture and storage technologies which would allow us to keep using natural gas while providing near-zero emissions.

Many of these options would be willingly funded by banks and investors if the Government wasn’t standing over them with a huge taxpayer chequebook threatening to spend $16b and more, and making their investments redundant. For full disclosure, I work with two companies which have technology options which could help bridge a shortfall in hydroelectricity, but there are dozens. In a genuine market of ideas, the best options would get funded but this is not a market of ideas, it’s all about the minister’s preference. – Steven Joyce

Even the proposer of the project, the well-meaning Earl Bardsley from the University of Waikato, admits the business case for it won’t stack up unless a “very wide view” is taken of the economic benefits of the scheme. That’s code for including lots of things that aren’t attributable directly to the scheme to make it look better.

Minister Woods is infamous in Wellington circles for her Muldoonist tendencies. Lake Onslow is her version of Muldoon’s “Think Big” energy schemes which almost sent the country broke in the early eighties. The minister likes to decide a preference very early and then defend it to the death despite any evidence to the contrary. Critics are all dismissed as “vested interests” and cost is no barrier to her preferred policy solution. – Steven Joyce

Those supporting Lake Onslow have no money at stake in their advocacy, while those against are clearly prepared to invest and put their money where their mouths are. We used to have a saying in Cabinet that if the only investor in a “commercial” project is the government, it isn’t a viable project.

It is also ironic that the environmentalists and Greenpeace supporting it are the same people who would have laid in front of the bulldozers protesting the scheme in times past.

Lake Onslow is just another of those white elephant ideas that have been kicking around Wellington for 20 years in search of a sponsor gullible enough to take it forward. Light rail is another, and a bike bridge across the Waitematā was yet another. This Government has probably been the most taken with unworkable populist ideas that we’ve seen for decades, which would be amusing except that we churn through hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars proving what was already obvious at a cursory glance. – Steven Joyce

And as for the PM, he missed a trick. A revelation that Minister Woods’ pet project had blown out in cost from $4b to $16b was an ideal time to add it to the “policy bonfire”. It would have shown the Government was perhaps serious about fiscal restraint and tackling the cost of living crisis. That he didn’t gives the impression the great policy re-set is a charade, and that some ministers are not for turning, by anybody. – Steven Joyce

What is “woke”? With origins in cultural Marxism, the general view is that it’s a movement that seeks social and political redress for wrongs derived from social injustice and discrimination.

Like the Black Lives Matter crusade in the United States, which attributed police violence to systemic racism, the woke movement embraces ‘Identity Politics’ with its focus on the so-called ‘oppressed’ groups in society including those centred on gender, race, and sexuality.

In their struggle for social justice these groups claim they have been the victims of systemic oppression, and they demand preferential treatment to address the wrongs.

What is particularly sinister is their propensity to attack and ‘cancel’ anyone with a dissenting voice. – Muriel Newman

The words of novelist JK Rowling, who opposes all forms of woke repression are particularly appropriate: “If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent simply on the grounds that they have offended you, you have crossed a line to stand alongside tyrants who imprison, torture and kill on exactly the same justifications.”

While a desire to address social injustice and discrimination is admirable, and something few would argue against, the problem arises when the cause of the “wrongs” is fabricated to suit the political interests of those driving the agenda.

And unfortunately, our politicians seem all too willing to promote such false narratives in order to ingratiate themselves with those activist groups. – Muriel Newman

In really simple terms this country and our education system is shocking. And we know it’s shocking because it didn’t used to be that way.

We have, and continue to, go backwards. Now, that shouldn’t be news to anyone, but when you book mark it the way he did it’s an eye opener

The teachers, largely, are not to blame. It is the way we teach, the work load they are expected to undertake, the lack of confidence they have in the first place and the expectation of a Government or ministry that has completely skewed what is important.

Essentially what National are advocating in their policy is nothing exceptional. It’s simply going back to what we once did, which is basic competency in basic subjects. – Mike Hosking

There is no magic. Just, sadly, an appalling hijacking of a system by wonks in Wellington that for some reason have been allowed to run rampant.

What we have by way of an education outcome for so many kids is inexcusable and indefensible.

If you watched Luxon prosecute that yesterday you’d see a bloke who gets it and, more importantly, wants to do something about it.

As more New Zealanders see more of that they will see why the election is nowhere near as close as the polls might suggest. – Mike Hosking

A final thought. Critics of trans peoples’ fantasies are labelled trans-phobic, typical of their ignorance re language. Phobic means fear. The critics are not fearful in the least of these sexually confused folk, rather, specially in the case of male trans for example, women don’t want them in their toilets or with their physical advantages, competing with them in sport. Otherwise it’s entirely their business if they believe they’re born in the wrong body and are really a zebra, Napoleon or the opposite sex – Sir Bob Jones

Ours is not an age of acute aesthetic judgment, except in the culinary field. Here there is no question that food (especially for the middle classes in the Anglo-Saxon world) has improved out of all recognition in the last decades. When I look back on my childhood, I recall food that was almost comically bad: it took skill and determination of a kind to render food so unappetising, at least from our current perspective, though we ate it because there was nothing else and perhaps because we knew no better. There was an almost puritanical vendetta by cooks (or rather, those who cooked) against flavour, one which was for the most part successful. I remember dry grey roast meat with vegetables reduced to a mush by overcooking, served carelessly with some of the water in which they had been cooked seemingly for hours, if not for days, as a kind of punishment for those who displayed the human weakness known as hunger. No doubt such crimes against the culinary art are still committed in places, but something better is now to be found even in the smallest towns.

On the other hand (there is always another hand), the fashion in restaurants in which the much better food than formerly is served also tells us something disquieting about modern forms of sociability. In many of the best places—best from the culinary point of view—it is not possible to have a quiet conversation. All sound-absorbing materials have been removed from the décor, and frequently one has to raise one’s voice, even shout, to make oneself heard to the person across the table. Talking thus becomes a physical effort, where it is not an actual impossibility, and is certainly not a pleasure; one leaves the restaurant both exhausted and exasperated. – Theodore Dalrymple

This is in accordance with a world of psychobabble, in which people talk endlessly about themselves while revealing nothing. In such a world, conversation becomes ersatz, at best a series of monologues whose end everyone awaits in order to proceed with his own, only tangentially related to what has gone before. Speech is audible tattooing. – Theodore Dalrymple

Human beings are both social creatures and blessed (or cursed) with individuality. They feel the need both to fit in and stand out. Advertisers, who are sincere in their cynicism, are fully aware of this seeming contradiction. They constantly suggest that people should stand out by buying exactly what they hope to sell to as large a number of people as possible. And what, after all, are graffiti of the kind that deface whole areas of cities nowadays but an attempt by young people both to conform and stand out, by imposing themselves on a townscape by doing precisely what so many others do?

Hideous though their efforts are, yet the perpetrators retain some aesthetic sense, if only unconsciously or subliminally.  – Theodore Dalrymple

Few things reveal a man more than his aesthetic judgments, which is why so much art and architectural criticism, at least of contemporary art and architecture, fails to make any. A whole vocabulary is employed to avoid them: they are as much to be avoided as rude remarks at a garden party. Which of the desiderata of truth, beauty and goodness remains standing after the postmodernist assault? – Theodore Dalrymple

Indeed, transgender rights has become a totemic issue for the left – an unassailable article of faith. This explains why some of the highest profile victims of the debate have been feminists themselves, the most notable being the writer J.K. Rowling who enraged the transgender community with her tweet in 2020, “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

Despite facing savage attacks, Rowling has remained steadfast and continues to be a prominent advocate for women. – Thomas Cranmer

Having the ability to present my maiden speech. Because what that did is give some insight into the drivers or the values, the tikanga in my life. It’s not that I got here because I did something. I got here with the support of hundreds of people and the values and protocols and principles they instilled in me are now brought to bear in the house… What a marvellous job! – Tama Potaka

Think back to this time last week. Had you ever heard of Posie Parker before?

No, me neither.

Yet here we are, a week later, and many of us now know too much about her.

Too much, because many of us don’t care about what she’s talking about. Not because we’re callous towards trans people or towards women wishing to defend their spaces, but because this isn’t much of a tension in New Zealand. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

So, this time last week, there was a very good chance Posie Parker would’ve come to the country, spoken to a small group of upset women and left. Most of us would’ve been none-the-wiser.

But then the critics piped up. The Green Party called for her ban.

They must’ve known the chances of a ban were incredibly slim. She is a British citizen. She doesn’t need permission to come here. Her travel is visa-free.

The Greens were surely performing for a crowd rather than expecting an actual ban. But they called for it anyway. And the media covered it. And the media amplified her message. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

And the media amplified her message.

And then other critics piled in. They publicly despaired Immigration NZ’s entirely expected decision not to ban Parker. And they accused her of pulling a Nazi OK symbol in her video challenging our PM. And the media covered it.

And then they promised to protest and launched a judicial review in court and attacked the Immigration Minister for not intervening when he could and – as expected – the media covered it. And in the end, all of Parker’s opponents made sure that she was in the news most of the week and that many of us knew exactly what she was saying about women’s rights and trans rights.

For a moment some of them stopped. They talked about whether they were making things worse. But they did it anyway.

They did more harm than good. They helped her spread her message. They played right into her hands. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

The Green Party, Auckland Pride, and RainbowYOUTH will probably tell themselves they’ve done the right thing by lending their solidarity to the trans community.

But there are other ways to express solidarity. A considered statement on a Facebook page. A tweet. An Instagram post. There are ways to say what needs to be said to the people who need to hear it without creating the exact kind of drama the media will rush to cover. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Again, these people are not stupid. They must know they just helped some Kiwis, who will like what they see, discover Posie Parker.

What an own goal. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

This weekend saw a showdown between two tribes of contemporary gender politics: those in favour of progressing transgender rights versus women wishing to defend their spaces. It’s a debate with huge passion, outrage and consequences. – Bryce Edwards

There was an element of pantomime on both sides over the last week. Posie Parker thrives on controversy. She might be complaining now about her treatment in New Zealand, but by holding her rally in a public place like Albert Park she was provoking opposition and stoking tensions, hoping to become something of a martyr.

She won. She made global news, fuelling publicity in the UK and US markets where she carries out her main fundraising. She will now be even better equipped to push her particularly toxic form of gender politics.

Likewise, those opposing Parker were rather opportunistic in arguing that she is a fascist and that her beliefs were such a danger to the public that she had to be banned from the country.

They must have known they were giving the previously-unknown visitor huge amounts of free publicity and therefore helping get her views out to a wider audience. – Bryce Edwards

The two parliamentary parties stoking the culture wars are Act and the Greens. Those parties will gain a much higher profile if cultural issues keep rising to the fore. The Greens will pick up middle class supporters whose main focus is on social justice issues, while Act might be able to pick up more anti-woke working class supporters in provincial New Zealand.

Squeezed in the middle are the major parties of Labour and National, who are desperate to stay out of it all, aware that middle New Zealand is less enamoured by such debates and concerns. – Bryce Edwards

There’s a whole new terminology that needs unpacking and defining in the new landscape of culture wars. We have been through versions associated with the “progressive” side of this debate such as political correctness, cancel culture, identity politics, and now “woke” politics. To what extent these terms are useful continues to be debated. Perhaps the better term for the milieu of more middle class progressive demands is “social justice politics”.

Much of it is associated with leftwing politics but, in reality, the left is divided over culture wars. The “cultural left” side tends to be connected with more elite, educated, and middle class activists. The more traditional, or working class orientated “old left”, is still focused on economic inequality and improving the lot of those economically disadvantaged as a whole, with a focus on universalism and civil rights. –

Saturday’s clash of cultures is a sign of where politics is heading in New Zealand – towards a fully-fledged culture war.  – Bryce Edwards

Democracy might also be harmed if the culture wars dominate this year’s election. An ugly fight over transgender politics, co-governance, or race relations would be one that alienates many voters, and reduces participation in politics. Some of the public will turn away in disgust, confusion, or fear about culture wars. The intolerance and outrage that often occurs in these debates can make ordinary voters feel unwelcome taking part in discussion and debate, or even in voting. – Bryce Edwards

The main problem in culture wars arise when there is no room for nuanced discussion, openness or a willingness to learn from others and opponents. Overall, there is a need for healthier debate and engagement in New Zealand politics. – Bryce Edwards

New Zealand is facing huge problems which require critical thinking and debate. We won’t be well served if such political debate and the upcoming election are highjacked by the hate and tribal opportunism we saw over the weekend. – Bryce Edwards

I believe in the freedom of speech and the need to have an open debate and consider everybody’s rights, and encourage good, strong, discourse.

I have also spent the best part of my life working in communication. Long enough to recognise that the route of all evil is when people feel they are not heard, or they are denied a voice.

If no one will listen to you, it fuels frustration and fear. If you’re talked at or drowned out, the effect is much the same. You become disenfranchised and disengaged.

I am pro-trans rights but I am also pro-women’s rights. I believe one shouldn’t come at the expense of the other, but I can’t say that easily. If I do, the abuse rolls in and I’m called a bigot and a transphobic and a Nazi. – Rachel Smalley

Last week, we saw some remarkable bias in mainstream media reporting. And when people like Kim Hill – the doyen of interviewing – spoke robustly to both sides of the debate, pro-Trans supporters immediately reported her to the Broadcasting Standards Authority for giving a voice to Posie Parker.

I don’t think we will see balanced reporting again this week. The mainstream media is, by default, quite young – too young to really understand how hard-fought women’s rights have been. They have been born and raised in a world that many of us fought hard to change in the years that have gone by. They’ve benefited from those changes, but they haven’t understood the struggle.  – Rachel Smalley

No female sports journalists will endure that today. Women have a voice. And unlike me, back in the 1990s, they know how to use it. It’s a different world. Thankfully.

But that’s also why events like what unfolded at the weekend really upset me. I feel like society is going backwards. Men yelling at women. Men intimidating women. But worst of all, women yelling abuse at other women – or sanctioning intimidating behaviour against them. It is my hope that across the mainstream media, you will find some very strong and brave analyses today that position this story right down the middle.

It is my hope that you get journalists calling this intimidating behaviour out, and reiterating that to enable the rights of the trans community, you also need to enable the voices of women because we are all different and we all have stories, and backstories, and some of us will be impacted by the elevation of the trans community, and we have a right to speak up about our concerns if women are losing our rights to feel safe and occupy women-only spaces.

I don’t know whether you will read, see and hear that today but in a well-functioning democracy, it’s what you should see from our media.

I feel a very lonely voice at the moment in the mainstream media.

New Zealand feels like it’s digressed decades in enabling women, and after what I witnessed at the weekend, and the crushing of women, I feel like I’m back in a sports newsroom in the 1990s. – Rachel Smalley

As a libertarian I believe people should do as they wish but never at the expense of others. – Sir Bob Jones

The folks over at Science-Based Medicine (SBM) have decided that the hill they’ll defend (if not die on) is that sex in humans is a continuous trait, though there might be modes at “male” and “female”. This of course flies in the face of biology, which argues that there are only two sexes in vertebrates: i.e., sex is binary). While there is a low percentage of people (and presumably animals) having “disorders of sex development”, these individuals are not “third sexes” or “new sexes”, but simply those in which the developmental system has gone awry, and they are either sterile or produce sperm or eggs (but not both in a functional way).

I believe the denial of the sex binary is motivated by ideology—to show people who don’t adhere to a “male” or “female” identity that that’s is okay because there are different sexes in nature, too. If you think about that argument, though, you’ll find that it’s not only fallacious but also pretty irrational. – Jerry Coyne

Once again in NZ we’re seeing our public discourse being taken over by the fringes, and no room left for anything in the middle. You’re with us or you’re against us.

I see both sides feeling threatened, but not a lot of empathy for each other. I see both sides talking past each other, and attributing sinister motives to the other side.

I also see a lot of common ground, common ground that isn’t being identified and agreed upon, and that isn’t being talked about in the media. Without common ground there really cannot be discussion – Paul  L

A resolution cannot be reached on this without discussion and debate. Simply codifying a right to self id, and therefore a right to access those spaces, without consulting those who feel unsafe is a problem. Simply classifying all trans women as men, and requiring them to use male bathrooms is also a problem. – Paul  L

What we saw over the last few days was a media and a public space that had no nuance, no discussion of the fact that there was a conflict of rights. We had (some) women’s rights campaigners focusing on the rights that women have to their own spaces without recognising that trans women also have a right to safety. We had (some) trans rights campaigners focusing on the rights that trans women have to safety without recognising that (some) women are very uncomfortable with people with penises in their spaces.

Unfortunately this is an area that it is hard to discuss without being labelled and without being abused. The extremists are shouting down the moderates, and there are extremists on both sides. – Paul  L

Our politicians similarly should have an obligation to articulate a position that illuminates rather than obscures. Even acknowledging that there is an underlying conflict of rights, and that the disagreement isn’t caused by one side or the other being unreasonable, would be a useful start. Better still would be finding the middle ground and advocating for it. However, politically speaking, it is much more beneficial to be unclear. Making a clear statement is unlikely to win you votes, but is quite likely to lead to one side or the other whipping up dissension and losing you votes. Only the Greens and Act can really afford to be clear – because they’re unlikely to drive any of their voters away.

If this is the way we’ll have debates in the future, then I fear we’ll become an increasingly divided society. I don’t understand what will bring us back together, what will help us to find common ground and common cause.

I fear that we’re further driving people away from traditional media, and they will in future get their information from non-traditional sources. Those sources can also be full of disinformation, and some people appear to have difficulty in telling the difference.  – Paul  L

For a brief moment last year, it looked as if the Ministry of Education was finally going to embrace methods of teaching literacy and numeracy supported by scientific evidence. They published a new literacy and numeracy strategy that made reference to structured teaching methods.

Structured literacy works because it takes account of the nature of human memory and attention, and its limitations. The Ministry has spent more than two decades ignoring mounting evidence in its favour.
To be sure, the new strategy was hardly a full-throated endorsement of structured teaching, nor an especially well-articulated one. Still, I was heartened by their stated intention to develop a Common Practice Model (CPM) incorporating a structured approach to teaching these key skills. As its name implies, a CPM is a guide to teaching methods to be followed by every teacher in the country. –  Michael Johnston :

The trouble is, the rest of the document constitutes a doubling down on the same failed, and sometimes ludicrous, methods the Ministry has championed for years. Under those methods, a generation of young New Zealanders has been badly let down. A third of our fifteen-year-olds cannot read at a basic adult standard. Two thirds cannot write at a similar standard and nearly half lack basic numeracy skills. –  Michael Johnston :

There isn’t the space here to describe all the ways in which these ‘pedagogies’ will harm, rather than foster, sound learning. I will confine myself to one highlight – that of ‘critical maths’.

The CPM asserts that “Ākonga [students] are encouraged to interrogate dominant discourses and assumptions, including that maths is benign, neutral, and culture-free”.

All this before they even know what mathematics is.

There is little enough time as it is during the school years for young people to develop basic mathematical proficiency. I would like to suggest to the Ministry that loading this kind of nonsense on top of that task guarantees further educational failure.

But, once again, the Ministry has shown that it simply isn’t listening. –  Michael Johnston

This is what it must have been like when women were marched to the stake. Yesterday in Auckland the British women’s rights campaigner Posie Parker found herself surrounded by a deranged, heaving mob. She had tomato soup and placards thrown in her face. She was doused with water. Huge men screamed insults and expletives in her face. The shoving of the crowd became so intense that Parker feared for her life. ‘I genuinely thought that if I fell to the floor I would never get up again’, she said. ‘My children would lose their mother and my husband would lose his wife.’

It was a truly chilling spectacle. The mobs’ faces were twisted into masks of feral hatred. They ranted in frenzy as the diminutive Parker, her bottle-blonde hair stained orange from the soup that had been dumped on her, desperately tried to make her way to the safety of a police car. It was a ritualistic shaming of a witch, a violent purging of a heretic.

Next time you’re reading a history book and find yourself wondering how Salem came to be consumed by such swirling hysteria, watch the clips of Posie’s persecution in New Zealand. This is how it happens. This is how the fear of witches can overrule reason and unleash the darkest, most punitive passions of the mob.

And what is Parker’s crime? What did this witch do? She said, ‘A woman is an adult human female’. That’s it. – Brendan O’Neill

She thinks a man never becomes a woman, no matter how many hormones he takes or surgeries he undergoes. She thinks if you were born male, you will die male, and in the time in between you have no right whatsoever to enter any women-only space.

This is heresy. Dissenting from the gospel of gender ideology is to the 21st century what dissenting from the actual gospels was to the 15th. And so Parker must be punished. It was a modern-day stoning, so mercifully they only threw soup and water and planks of cardboard at the blasphemer. – Brendan O’Neill

She knows these gatherings of women who merely want to give voice to their profane belief that sex can never be changed will draw out crowds of intolerant trans activists and their allies. She knows the ‘Be Kind’ mob will do everything in its power to stop women from speaking. And she knows it will all brilliantly illustrate her core belief: that trans activism is misogyny in disguise, misogyny in drag, if you like, and that it has devoted itself to silencing women who believe in biology.

Australia and New Zealand played their parts brilliantly in Parker’s clever scheme. From Melbourne to Canberra, Hobart to Auckland, huge crowds of the right-on turned up to drown out the voices of the pesky women who dare to call men ‘men’. ‘Let women speak’, Parker says. ‘No’, says the mob. She incites them to confess their misogyny and intolerance in full public view. And they do. 

Auckland was the worst. At Albert park in the centre of the city yesterday, the mob could not hide its vengeful loathing of the uppity women who disagree with its ideologies. Parker is a new kind of witch, one who willingly submits herself to a witch-trial, so that the rest of us might see just how dogmatic and unforgiving the new witch-hunters are.  – Brendan O’Neill

The events in Auckland should be a wake-up call for liberals everywhere. We glimpsed the iron fist of authoritarianism that lurks in the velvet glove of ‘Be Kind’. The misogynistic streak in trans extremism is undeniable now. Watch enraged men kicking down metal barriers so that they might get closer to the witch Posie and tell me this isn’t sexism masquerading as radicalism. Witness the crowing of men who are delighted that the mob made the ‘coward TERF’ run away and tell me this isn’t chauvinism on steroids. Behold the use of megaphones and expletive-laden chants and physical menace to silence a woman and tell me this isn’t a sexist, censorious crusade against women’s freedom of speech.

That mob in Auckland did not emerge out of thin air. No, it was a brutish manifestation of a regressive idea that has been taking hold for some years. Namely, that it should be forbidden to dissent from gender ideology. That it is bigotry to state biological facts. That it ought to be a punishable offence – whether that punishment is being No Platformed or sacked or having objects thrown in your face – to say men are men and women are women.

To see where censorship ends up, just look at those grimacing agitators in Auckland, hatred spreading like a current through their number, as they fight with every fibre of their being to prevent the expression of a critical idea. Censorship begets bigotry. It begets violence itself. For the more we tell people that certain words will hurt them, the more we witlessly incite people to hurt those who dare to utter certain words.

That mob was drunk on sanctimony. This is what happens when we tell people their identity is the most important thing in the world and that anything that so much as grazes their self-esteem is an outrage that must be crushed. We nurture a generation of navel-gazing Torquemadas. Posie has exposed them, yet again, and for that she deserves our thanks. This time round, the witches might just win.  – Brendan O’Neill

Sport, so focused on winning and losing, on rules and competition, can bring a reductive clarity to the complexities of life. Perhaps that is why the judgement this week of the World Athletics Council was so momentous. Put simply, council president Sebastian Coe had to choose between conflicting “rights” and he decided that the right of those born women to compete fairly trumps the desire to be included in elite sport of those who have gone through male puberty but run or jump as women. “We felt,” he said, “that having transgender athletes competing at elite level would actually compromise the integrity of female competition.”

It can seem that there is no more sensitive an issue than trans rights. But sport, with that same reductive clarity, is not so concerned with sensitivities. It is concerned with the irrefutable reality of the stopwatch and winner’s podium. And they starkly reveal the distortions that testosterone and its consequences for muscle, stature, strength and speed wreak on the track and field. Indeed, so stark and inescapable is the judgement of Lord Coe and his organisation that it de-barbs what elsewhere remains one of society’s thorniest issues. All it took was leadership to act.  – Harry de Quetteville

 For the transgender rights fissure that opened up in sport echoes that in politics and society more widely. There, faced with increasing public concern, other leaders are increasingly being forced to choose as well. Equivocation is no longer enough. It was oddly fitting, for example, that Lord Coe’s decision in athletics came on the very same day that SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon left office – a titanic, once unassailable figure finally, if not exclusively, propelled into the political void by her support for the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. A leader of long standing who had always seemed so in touch with public sentiment found herself jettisoned, more tone-deaf than deft. – Harry de Quetteville

That decision did not come in isolation. In fact, it came hard on the heels of the devastating Cass Review which led to the closure of the controversial Tavistock clinic, where children found themselves referred for assessment for puberty-blocking drugs and life-changing surgery without adequate safeguards. And the decision at the end of last year by the charities regulator to launch a statutory inquiry into Mermaids, the transgender campaign group found to be offering harmful breast-binders to girls as young as 13 without their parents’ knowledge. And the announcement a month ago, in the same week that Sturgeon revealed she was stepping down, that the Sandyford clinic – known as “Scotland’s Tavistock” – would be closing its doors to new patients.

For activists on either side of the debate, each of these has represented an ideological battle. Together, however, their outcomes point in one direction. That’s why, in years to come, there is every reason to believe that historians will look back on this week as one in which the battle lines of the trans rights war were redrawn. – Harry de Quetteville

Just 19 per cent of those polled, for example, disagree with Lord Coe and think that transgender women should be allowed to compete in women-only sporting events. Fewer than half agree that “a trans man is a man and a trans woman is a woman”. On high streets, retailers are being forced to react too. Primark, for example, has had to repeal “gender-neutral” changing areas after female customers said they felt unsafe sharing changing areas with men. The Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith this week found its “all-gender” loos – in which a woman heading to a cubicle would need to walk past five urinals – lambasted for making women feel “incredibly uncomfortable”.

Meanwhile, a school on the Isle of Man was forced to suspend sex education lessons for 11-year-olds after it turned out they were being conducted by a drag queen who allegedly told pupils that there are 73 genders, and excluded one “upset” child who responded that “there are only two”. Children of the same age were also taught about sex-change operations and oral and anal sex. – Harry de Quetteville

Today, then, it seems that public opinion, the law, and politics are beginning to coalesce coherently around this issue; that viewpoints for so long kept soft by uncertainty and a desire for tolerance are beginning to firm. Minds are being made up. It was only a matter of time. For there was always going to come a moment when, from the safety of posterity, we would look back on the transgender rights activism of the past few years either as a righteous movement which opened society’s eyes to obvious injustice – or an astonishing aberration when, gripped by some delusion, we came en masse to view gender not as objective reality but as a subjective spectrum.

One day, we would have – like Lord Coe – to choose. Or more likely, through a series of decisions, legal, political and incremental, a path would emerge and society would proceed along it, leaving the other path untravelled. This week, it seems we are taking our first steps down one path and not the other.

If so, it signals a momentous potential juncture in a culture war that became a political war. Not an end to that conflict, as Britain’s wartime leader might have said, or even the beginning of the end, but an end of the beginning.

Such marshal language may seem inappropriate, but anyone following the transgender fight online can testify to how bitterly and viciously contested it has been.  – Harry de Quetteville

In the face of such an onslaught, it can seem that the events of the past months are not so much a victory as a course correction, after a period in which fear of being labelled discriminatory silenced many in positions of power and beyond. Now, though, it apparently turns out that the view that society cannot be ruled by social media’s cancel culture mob is widely held.

Certainly, those who have dared speak up now feel that momentum is on their side – “common sense at last” in the words of former runner Liz McColgan. The consequences of this week’s turn then, may be far-reaching. Logically, it means that never again are we likely to dish out puberty blockers to confused children, or carry out irreversible surgery to remove the breasts of young women in an environment that – as the Cass Review into the Tavistock Centre discovered – merely confirmed rather than challenged their desire to proceed with such life-altering measures.   –

Perhaps even more importantly, this may be a turning point that will cause us to consider the very nature of democracy, where defence and support of the minority by the majority is absolutely central. How far does society bend to accommodate the needs of the few? How extreme does that accommodation have to be, and how tiny the numbers of the minority, before society can rightly refuse to bend, or yield only a little?

It turns out that such questions have been plaguing us since the dawn of political philosophy.  – Harry de Quetteville

The 20th century’s appalling toll of racism, sectarianism, misogyny and homophobia have all accustomed us to the idea that moral justice is wedded to the defence of those fighting for improved rights. Now, uncomfortably, we may have to get used to the idea that in some cases, the majority can sometimes be right, with understanding and tolerance, to push back. – Harry de Quetteville

I wanted to interview one of the Green Party leaders this morning.

Both declined. James Shaw and Marama Davidson said no. They’ve been vocal for days on their own social channels, but they won’t be challenged or face questions from media who don’t agree with them. – Rachel Smalley

Remember this date – Saturday, 25th of March. It’s the day the Greens stepped up and publicly applauded the intimidation and silencing of women.  –

50 percent of our population is women. 50 percent of the voter base is women. And the Greens say our voice doesn’t matter. Worse, they applauded the men who raised fists, called women c-words, and backed the men who pushed through security fences to intimidate and mob Posie Parker.

Hate has no place in society, they say. Hate against who?

The Greens are the party that Chris Hipkins has no option but to go into coalition with. And if this is the devastation the Greens can inflict on our freedom of speech and on social cohesion when they are in essence outside of Government, imagine what they can do from within it? Labour’s tripping over itself at the moment trying to find its official position on what’s just happened to our society this weekend… but they are largely mumbling something about supporting trans rights and opposing hate.

And don’t we all? Don’t we all support trans and oppose hate? But how can politicians justify the hate that has been unleashed on women? I feel like I am living in some sort of parallel universe. How can it be that it’s okay to silence women about issues that affect them, and physically intimidate them into silence? – Rachel Smalley

Women, if they raise their hands to speak, they are silenced and abused. Since I wrote my editorial on Thursday, I have been called many things. A Nazi. A Terf. A supporter of hate. Anti-trans. A bigot. A bitch. And far worse.

I am none of those things. But I am a woman and I’ve been around these traps for a while. And I do believe that we should all be afforded a voice and an opportunity to speak to issues that impact the world that we live in. That impact our world. – Rachel Smalley

Four of the Greens’ senior women were utterly fervent in their opposition to women at the weekend, calling on the public to rise up against the Let Women Speak group, and then applauding the abuse and intimidation that rained down on them.

How on earth did the Greens become so anti-women? – Rachel Smalley

The Greens won’t accept that you can be pro-trans rights AND pro-women rights. You don’t have to pick a side, but the Greens did. And they opposed women’s rights. In 2023, they opposed women’s rights.

And for me… well, the hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Earlier this year, I interviewed Greens MP Golriz Ghahraman on the issue unfolding in Iran. She said New Zealand must stand up, and stop the misogyny and the hate and the violence that was raining down on the women of Iran. And then on Saturday, I watched her dog-whistle misogyny and violent behaviour against the women of New Zealand. In the moments before the protest, she posted a picture of herself smiling on Twitter holding a sign where she labelled women’s rights campaigners as Terfs and she wrote “Ready to the fight the Nazis!”

That’s me, Golriz. The same woman who stood with you and called for Iran’s women to be given a voice… that same woman is me. And now when I ask for women to be given a voice in a situation that significantly impacts women’s rights, you call me a Nazi and a Terf.  – Rachel Smalley

Marama reminded us that she is the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence Minister. She reminded us of that as she walked away from a protest that used fear and intimidation to silence women. And she said it’s straight white men who are responsible for violence. White men inflict violence on the world. 

How does that sit with the Prime Minister? How does Chris Hipkins view that statement from a Minister in his Government? That’s a big question for him today. – Rachel Smalley

Four Green Party women. Four women at the coalface of silencing women. Four women who believe women cannot have a say in decisions that will impact their lives and their rights.

These are the same women who are behind the forced change in the way the Government now speaks about women in documentation. No woman has been consulted on this.

But I am no longer called a woman by the Government. Girls are called menstruator. Or a person who bleeds. Or a person with a womb. I’m called a chest-feeder or a baby carrier. I, like every New Zealand woman, have been told that I have to accept how this Government is choosing to refer to me in its correspondence. And if I don’t accept it, I am a bigot or transphobic.

What a mess.

Why should Labour and Chris Hipkins be worried about what played out at the weekend? Because the only way Labour can form a Government in October is with the support of the Greens. If Labour gets into power, they will bring the Greens with them. They will have to, to get the numbers. And they’ll have to work with Marama Davidson who shut down the voice of women, and said white men are behind all of the violence in the world. – Rachel Smalley

If this is the level of damage the Greens can inflict on society and on women’s rights when they’re officially in Government, imagine how much destruction they can do if they are entrenched fully within a Labour government?

For the first time in my life, I am fearful of a political party. I really am. I am fearful of how the Greens mobilised their MPs and their followers to shut down women. Marama Davidson is something of a lost cause now. How do we believe or trust in her as a politician? And James Shaw? As co-leader, you’ve lost control of your party. And your political credibility has taken a major hit.

I’ll say this one last time for all of the haters out there, and there are many.

Trans rights are human rights. I 100 percent agree. But I also believe women’s rights are human rights. And one should not come at the expense of another. – Rachel Smalley

I wasn’t surprised by the turnout. And I wasn’t surprised by the noise. I wasn’t even surprised that neither Kellie Jay Keen-Minshull nor any other woman was able to speak at an event billed as Let Women Speak (ironic much).

An unrelenting vomit of media misinformation aided by politician’s slurs the previous week had pretty much ensured that there would be a huge turnout of rainbow youth, Green’s supporters, empathetic women (their niceness weaponised against natal women in favour of men), woman-face drag queens and – Gotverdomme – even a cluster of Dutch dykes on bikes at Albert Park to greet the British women’s rights advocate.

So no, no surprises there.  – Yvonne Van Dongen

But what did surprise me was the complete lack of police presence. Call me naive but I thought one of the roles of the police was to enforce order and ensure people could exercise their right to freedom of speech. As the four of us walked up to Albert Park surrounded by young people and placards, we foolishly comforted ourselves with the knowledge that no matter what happened, we would be protected by those men and women in blue.  

Instead – nothing. I didn’t see a single officer the whole time I was there although a friend swears she saw two cops standing in the background, looking bemused. Sorry Julie but I don’t believe you. I suspect they were just two people wearing hi-vis vests and caps and you just want to make me feel better. But thanks anyway.  – Yvonne Van Dongen

Science says there are only two sexes, woman is adult human female, people can’t change sex and it is impossible to be born in the wrong body. Show me the third gamete. You can call her a woman’s right’s campaigner which is true but at its most fundamental she is staking a claim for sanity.

But sanity was a bit like the police. Missing in action. A call to 111 assured me they were there. Honestly sometimes I feel like I’m being forced to live in the world of alternative facts. Where the fook are they I shouted into the phone. – Yvonne Van Dongen

My photos show placards bearing such inspiring messages as “Suck My Dick” and “Get Off Our Land Cunt.” This, despite KJK being co-hosted by Mana Wāhine Kōrero, a group of Māori women who describe transactivism as the second colonization. By which they mean the way women’s language and spaces are being colonized by men who say they are women.  

In what now seems an ironic directive an Auckland council spokesperson was quoted as saying the organisers of the event had the responsibility to not incite violence. 

Frankly that goes for the media and politicians. By linking her inaccurately to neo-Nazis (neither the Australian nor the Australian Jewish Association believes that is true) and white supremacists, they fanned the flames of this intimidation and silencing. Guilt by inaccurate association is hardly an argument. Silencing free speech is a victory only for bullies and ultimately a blow for democracy. – Yvonne Van Dongen

There are grifters everywhere, on every loud and voluble side. Making a living by making themselves live clickbait.

This is all very exciting to the protagonists, I’m sure and to the newscasters who need them, because it fills up their news broadcasts and column inches with colourful but undemanding fare. Because it’s issues played out simply for live clickbait. Activism theatre. “Activists” observing an issue out there, and discovering how to make clickbait out of it.

There’s a certain genius to this kind of activism. To make an important stand and to discuss the issues in order to come to a reasonable and rational conclusion about them? No, not at all: in order to attract more followers. And more clicks.

So instead of discussing the issues, on Saturday we saw lots of people shouting and throwing fists, but nobody listening. Lots of heat, but no light. ‘Cos mostly what they were all shouting anyway, effectively, was not much more than just: “Click on Me!”

Cancel Culture meets Clickbait Culture. Everyone’s a Winner!

These people all need each other. They are part of a mutually reliant ecosystem. Without each of them shouting out their bumpersticker slogans, none of them would be making any kind of living at all. But without any of them, we might be able to have a decent chat about the issues they all say they stand for (or against). – Not PC

Men forcibly stopping women from speaking in public. Men chanting that women who dare disagree with them should shut up and kill themselves. Men punching women in the face. There’s a word for all this: misogyny. Unbridled, violent misogyny, at that. And yet this vile behaviour has been indulged in once again in recent days by those who think they are the foot soldiers in a new civil-rights movement, by those who besmirch the mantle of anti-fascism by claiming it for themselves, by those who somehow still manage to call themselves ‘progressives’.– Tom Slater

These women were demanding only the right to speak in public, about the erosion of their freedom of speech and sex-based rights at the behest of extreme gender ideology. And even that was not afforded to them. The protesters drowned them out. This wasn’t counter-speech – it was the heckler’s veto in action. Even that feels like a bit of a tame way to describe the tactics of this mob. Heckles are often funny. There’s nothing funny about calling women old enough to be your mother fascists and telling them to top themselves.- Tom Slater

Enough. We need to call this behaviour out for the violent misogyny that it is. We also need to call out the various cretins who have put a target on these women’s backs, from New Zealand TV station Newshub, which deployed absurd tactics to smear Keen as ‘far right’ ahead of the Auckland rally, to Australian senator Nick McKim, who called Keen and her supporters ‘cunts’ in Aussie rhyming slang, to our own woke bros like Owen Jones and Billy Bragg, who continue to say that gender-critical women, rather than the black-clad men threatening to beat them up, are the fascist-aligned side in this battle. Finally, not least given the fact that police are refusing to do their job, anyone who believes in freedom of speech and women’s rights really needs to stand in solidarity with these courageous women – physically, in public, at a gender-critical event near you.

They must be supported – and the reactionaries posing as progressives must be opposed. See you at Speakers’ Corner. – Tom Slater

The sub-set of Woke-Fascism that is Transgender-Fascism may have overplayed its iron fist.

Woke-Fascists, including terrorist groups Only Black Lives Matter and PROFA, are the modern-day version of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mao’s Red Guards.

In New Zealand they have mostly managed to camouflage their putrid pedigree under the Orwellian guise of Jackboot Jacinda’s “kindness.”

Now, the whole world has seen through the facade … and the whole world is talking about it. – Lindsay Perigo

The country that has been able proudly to boast that it was the first to give women the vote is now known to be the first country outside of Islam in which women are shut down just for being women.

A Woke-Fascist cabinet minister underscored this cosmic atrocity by proclaiming that violence is committed only by “cis white men.”– Lindsay Perigo

New Zealand’s Woke-Fascists are as murderously evil as Woke-Fascists elsewhere.

Now, all the world knows it: – Lindsay Perigo

Marama is the Minister for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence and says she wants us to have these “hard and uncomfortable conversations” (which is reminiscent of what Metiria Turei fatefully wanted when she publicly confessed to ripping off the benefit system.)

But back to Marama. Forget for a moment the offence intended and taken, is her revised statement true?

If Police, Corrections or Oranga Tamariki stats are put up as evidence, the court would find in her favour. More men are in prison for family violence convictions than women; police arrest more men than women for family violence and more men commit physical abuse against children than women (though not “overwhelmingly”. If other forms of abuse are considered women outdo men. Take for instance a quote from MSD gang research which revealed, “The alleged perpetrator of abuse or neglect of gang member’s children was more often recorded as the child’s mother than the gang member father.”) – Lindsay Mitchell

Women were the greater perpetrators of physical partner violence which included choking, hitting, shoving, throwing objects, threatening with a knife, kicking, biting, shaking, etc.  – Lindsay Mitchell

Then again, with ministers like Marama Davidson it’s unlikely to be used to further our understanding of the real world. The last four days have shown that her negative view of men is fixed and she won’t be searching for any evidence to the contrary.

Excitable dogma may be an asset in an activist but not in a minister. She should go. – Lindsay Mitchell

As crime looks to be a hot election issue this year I worry about two things, well more than two things, but let’s start with these two. 

One – the lack of arrests being made and two – the top-down obsession from the police hierarchy with supporting offenders, not victims.   – Kate Hawkesby

The other thing I worry about is the obsession with the offenders, their backgrounds, and their families.

The new Police Minister said at the weekend that she promises ‘wrap-around support for families of youth offenders’. And as lovely as that sounds, it’s not really the first priority the community is looking at for a new Police minister. Certainly not during a time of the increased crime. – Kate Hawkesby

The balance has tilted so wildly in favour of those creating the havoc and doing the crimes, that if you’re the victim of it, as these people were the other night in Auckland’s CBD, they rightly say, why even bother reporting it? – Kate Hawkesby

Kate Hawkesby

But what’s increasingly common from politicians these days, as the bar has gotten lower and lower, is they say ‘it’s complex’ or they don’t have the stats right in front of them right now, or they need to look into that, or they’ll have to come back to you. 

Fewer and fewer of them have any answers or information at their fingertips, fewer and fewer of them know anything about their portfolios, fewer and fewer of them have watched the news, read the paper, gotten across news stories at all.

And if you get to the very bottom of that lowered bar you get Marama Davidson, who just makes it up on the hoof and says what she likes, bugger the facts or the accuracy.  – Kate Hawkesby

Maybe I’m old school in expecting politicians to be interested and informed, maybe the reason the polls are so wacky at the moment reflects the mood and malaise of not just the politicians but the public too. Maybe none of us care anymore? Maybe we’re all just sleepwalking around the place oblivious and unbothered?

I don’t know what it is, but it feels like we’re sinking into an abyss of low bars, and low expectations, and I just hope for the sake of this country, that we all snap out of it, at least by October. – Kate Hawkesby

Chris Hipkins, who must be by now regretting ever agreeing to step into the job in place of the hapless Jacinda Ardern in that gerrymandered deal late last year, claims that although the information on Nash was known by the Prime Minister’s office, because of an official information process, somehow the Prime Minister or those close to her were never told.

Really?

A cabinet minister breaking rules, rules that Chris Hipkins very clearly stated was a reason and a reason all on its own for a sacking, was known by the office of Jacinda Ardern and no one who knew thought that telling someone else in that office was a good idea?

Why would they not do that? Are they thick?

Are they thick beyond words?

Or are they so Machiavellian that they owned it all by themselves and thought if they said nothing and the Prime Minister remained untouched and unscathed, they could save her? – Mike Hosking

What we know for a fact is that Nash’s activities with donors via email;

1) Breached cabinet rules,

2) Was known by the office of the Prime Minister and,

3) Cost him his job, because the breach all by itself is a sackable offence.

If it was sackable this week, why wasn’t it sackable then?

You’ll note the theme of this. There seem many questions but very few answers.

Dare I raise the issue of the most honest, open and transparent Government at this stage?

Or is the hole so deep they’ve dug for themselves that it’s become such a farce that it’s not even worth the reminder? – Mike Hosking

There is not a dairy on that road that hasn’t been at the barrel of a gun or the tipping point of a knife in the last three months. There will only be one dairy left on that road very shortly … they’ve all shut down.

Aggravated crime is up in our location despite what people say, and it’s quite in your face. – Tama Potaka 

Look at the median Māori income, it’s significantly lower than the average general income. The cost of living is really jamming the lives of Māori, iwi, whānau, and it’s really hurting and making life difficult.

Maybe 25 percent of Māori own their own homes, that’s a shocking statistic, plus you’ve got rental challenges and people in social housing – it’s really tough out there. – Tama Potaka 

We’ve been very firm and clear about what we believe in, but you’ll find if you listen to debates in the House, there’s an absolute fever within the Labour Government to drive co-governance arrangements through lots of different things, and we’ve had to respond to that. – Tama Potaka 

A question — if the only people allowed to play trans characters are trans folk, then are we also suggesting the only people trans folk can play are trans characters? Surely that will limit your career as an actor? Isn’t the point of an actor to be able play anyone outside your own world? – Guy Pearce *

* This was a tweet which has now been deleted with the following explanation:

I posted a tweet yesterday that I shouldn’t have, which to prevent upsetting anyone else I have now deleted. A fuller apology and explanation of the point I was raising is attached xx Guy pic.twitter.com/bu1vLQcPFm

— Guy Pearce (@TheGuyPearce) March 28, 2023

 

The Stuart Nash scandal took a disturbing turn on Thursday when further revelations about the email that got Nash sacked were published by the Prime Minister’s Office.

Now reduced to its atomic level, the scandal can be distilled to that most fundamental of political questions: Cock up or, as the National Party alleges, “conspiracy”?

Labour argues for the former, National the latter – using the cloak of parliamentary privilege to allege “conspiracy” in Question Time (to the umbrage of Labour).

Unless further evidence emerges – and that isn’t likely – it will be difficult to prove one way or the other. But at first blush it’s very hard to believe that not one of the multiple staff who saw and handled the damning email on multiple occasions ever once understood that it needed to be released, and that it contained a breach of the Cabinet Manual so flagrant it would get Nash sacked.  – Thomas Coughlan

The National version of events alleges the email was picked up, its contents understood, and a decision made not to release it, or even to speak of it, to ensure plausible deniability if anyone ever came asking.

That’s a staggering allegation, but the only other explanation is an equally staggering chain of incompetence from Nash’s office to Ardern’s (a side note to that is that this scandal has now tarred the reputation of Ardern’s office just days out from what is meant to be a triumphal valedictory speech to Parliament).

Either explanation leaves the Government facing unsettling questions about probity: How many information requests have seen information withheld that should have been released? And worse still: Whether this was by accident or whether the Government has a broader culture problem around the release of official information. – Thomas Coughlan

The perpetually offended have endowed words with quasi-magical properties.

Today, many people suffer from the delusion that language creates reality and that, consequently, you can change reality by changing the language we use.

This has been most obvious recently when it comes to transgender politics. At its most extreme, trans ideology holds that you can change your gender, and even your actual sex, by mere say-so. Seemingly, you can ‘self-identify’ differently, simply by decreeing it. No surgical intervention is necessarily required. A performative utterance will now suffice. – Patrick West

The guidelines describe women as ‘breastfeeding people’ and ‘people who menstruate’, and refer to ‘sex assigned at birth’ instead of ‘sex’. The phrase ‘sex assigned at birth’ is revealing. It is indicative of a philosophy that believes it is words and utterances, not biology, that create our sexed reality. The current belief in the magical power of words also explains why some people get so angry and upset at being ‘misgendered’. – Patrick West

We are inescapably determined by language – that is the essence of today’s thinking. – Patrick West

This belief in the magical power of words has been with us for decades. It’s behind ideas like ‘trigger warnings’, ‘hate speech’ and ‘microaggressions’. Indeed, it is a key driver behind our entire culture of offence-taking. We saw this development in gestation in the 1990s, when political correctness made certain words profoundly taboo. Which words are considered polite euphemisms, and which are deemed beyond the pale, is evolving all of the time. Witness how older white people who use the word ‘coloured’, believing it to be a more courteous word for ‘black’, are now upbraided for such a transgression.

If wokery has its origins in critical theory, and before it postmodernism, this belief in the magical power of words also has its origins in 20th-century academia and philosophy. At the beginning of the 20th century, academics became obsessed with language and the role it supposedly plays in creating knowledge and thought. – Patrick West

As well as focussing on language, 20th-century academics also started to view culture as key to understanding the human condition. Today, it is culture and language, not reason, that are still regarded as crucial to determining our perception of reality. This has been the consensus for decades.

Today, we ascribe words with supernatural, awesome powers. It’s no wonder the woke are so determined to have our ‘problematic’ speech silenced. In doing so, they are seeking to alter reality itself. – Patrick West

For years now, boys have been warned about the dangers of ‘toxic masculinity’. In general, toxic masculinity is presented less as an aberration than as the norm for men and boys. Masculinity and male behaviour are treated as problems in and of themselves – as if they are intrinsically pathological. No wonder boys resort to dysfunctional and disruptive behaviour, and are attracted to such vile types as Tate – those are the only types who sound like they are listening to them. Our fear of ‘toxic masculinity’ has become self-perpetuating. – Patrick West

Chris Hipkins’ initial success as Labour’s fresh Messiah after Jacinda Ardern’s resignation in January has largely rested on the promise that his party’s focus henceforth would be on “bread-and-butter” issues such as the cost of living. – Graham Adams

This recasting of a prominent member of Ardern’s close-knit kitchen Cabinet as a working-class hero (“I’m just Chippy from the Hutt”) was snappily summarised by the mainstream media as a shift from “woke” to “bloke”. But why journalists would promote that view is hard to understand given that even a cursory review of Hipkins’ role as Education minister makes it clear that Hipkins is an ideologue, of the intensely woke variety. – Graham Adams

Of course, Hipkins’ attempt to rebrand himself as anti-woke could never have lasted very long. He has always been a progressive ideologue and his reflexes are woke. It was only ever going to be a question of time before his attempt to restyle the incompetent Ardern government as a fresh, down-to-earth, pragmatic administration fell apart. And it has.

His nemesis has been the British female-rights activist Posie Parker (real name: Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull), who campaigns for sex-based rights that she believes are being erased by transgender activists. She is firm in her view that it is impossible to change sex. – Graham Adams

If Hipkins’ instincts had really been those of the working-class “boy from the Hutt” as he likes to portray himself, he might have been more aware that the vast majority of New Zealanders outside the civil service, universities and the media would find the proposition that a biologically intact male is actually a woman completely preposterous. They would be surprised that anyone asked them to take the notion seriously. – Graham Adams

Identity politics is at the core of what is popularly (and pejoratively) known as wokeness. The state of being woke can be usefully — if roughly — defined as anyone who subscribes to the view that society is enmeshed in a hierarchy of oppression based on identity. This mostly centres on racial, religious, gender and sexual identity with the priests of woke using a mysterious calculation to assess where any group lies on the list. Generally, being brown and transgender will elevate someone above most others on the ladder of oppression. Hence the many media interviews giving trans activist Shaneel Lal the opportunity to condemn Parker’s visit. – Graham Adams

The government seems to have not yet entirely realised how badly they have played this issue — or its likely electoral ramifications. It’s not a case so much of Hipkins and his ministers having blotted their copybook but, rather, of disastrously revealing the progressive hand they were trying to hide. – Graham Adams

Just as he likes to pretend he wasn’t part of Ardern’s government, he is now pretending that his own statements before Parker’s visit and those by his ministers didn’t set the tone for the media pile-on that followed and the subsequent polarisation. – Graham Adams

The run-up to the violence in Albert Park and its fall-out have laid bare just how shockingly detached from reality Labour’s allies in the Green Party are — not to mention unforgivably careless of the truth, offensively racist, and hostile to the rights of women (that is, those “old-fashioned ones” who have wombs and not penises, as Ricky Gervais put it). – Graham Adams

In short, Hipkins will be a hostage to the Greens. Voters can see clearly that Hipkins will have to indulge them, simply because he will need them. And what will be just as damaging will be the public’s growing awareness that many of his political instincts and policy positions are close to theirs. That includes such contentious topics as hate-speech laws and Māori nationalism, including continuing to insert Treaty obligations into all legislation and policy.

Despite Hipkins’ fervent wish that October’s election will be fought on the cost of living, Posie Parker’s brief visit has ensured it will also be fought on cultural ideology. And with Hipkins’ own record in education sitting there to be used against him — and with the Greens as his political allies — he’s highly vulnerable to Opposition attacks.

And they know it. – Graham Adams

However, it all changed this week, through the way Hipkins dealt with crises surrounding two of his Ministers, Stuart Nash and Marama Davidson. In both instances, he looked panicked, hesitant, and uncertain, and no longer in control of events. – Peter Dunne

But, in reality, Hipkins’ decision looked far less that of a Prime Minister in control, and much more a “mea culpa” for not having dismissed Nash when allegations first arose against him a couple of weeks ago. – Peter Dunne

While Hipkins’ decision this week may have got rid of Nash, it has not got rid of the problem. Investigations are already underway into what other inappropriate actions Nash may have taken as a Minister over the last five years. At the same time, and more worryingly for the Prime Minister, investigations have also begun into the role of the Prime Minister’s Office and what officials there knew about what Nash was up to, and why they chose not to inform both the Prime Minister and his predecessor about what they knew.

The net effect is that the Prime Minister has lost control of the Nash issue. Hipkins does not know what other inappropriate actions by Nash the current investigations may find, or how damaging they may be. And because of the involvement of the Prime Minister’s Office during his predecessor’s time, he now faces accusations of a cover-up by his officials over the matter. In the meantime, the Nash issue looks likely to rumble on for some time to come, disrupting Hipkins’ momentum as it does so. Had Hipkins acted more decisively earlier, and dismissed Nash then, instead of just issuing a series of final warnings, it is likely the matter would have blown over by now. However, now, his initial indecision could up by derailing his government altogether. – Peter Dunne

As with Nash, Davidson’s responses this week suggest it is very likely she has not learned from the incident, and there is no consequent guarantee she will not make similar outbursts in the future, to the frustration of the Prime Minister. At the very least, Hipkins should have stood Davidson down from her role as Minister for Family Violence Prevention, and he should have had an urgent discussion with her co-leader about whether she should be replaced as a Minister altogether. By not acting decisively, Hipkins looks as though he is hoping the Nash affair will let Davidson’s transgressions slide by almost unnoticed.

What is surprising is that Hipkins has not learned from the early stages of the Nash affair and seems set to repeat the same mistakes all over again. As he did with Nash, the Prime Minister is just keeping his fingers crossed Davidson will not transgress again. All of which leaves him looking weak and no longer in control of the government’s narrative.

In just a week, Hipkins’ positive, cheery approach and the confidence it was inspiring, has taken a mighty hit. He no longer looks like a Prime Minister in firm and decisive control of his government and its agenda. His indecision and timidity have left him looking distracted, to the detriment of the government’s agenda. – Peter Dunne

The last thing the Prime Minister needs is to be distracted from the big tasks requiring his attention in that time, by having to put out persistent fires in his own ranks. Yet his initial failures to act decisively in the Nash case, and now potentially the Davidson situation as well, have left him exactly in that situation. Against the backdrop of likely more embarrassing revelations about Nash, and more divisive and explosive comments from Davidson (not to mention any other Ministers yet to go rogue!) the Prime Minister now faces an almighty challenge in trying to recapture the control of the political agenda he and his government were enjoying barely a week ago. – Peter Dunne

Ever feel ignored? Just one of the crowd, crammed in at the back, stuck in the rain with a single row of portaloos and a hotdog van. Cordoned off from the standard covered seating area and the eclectic food stalls. That’s what being part of the vast majority is like these days.

It used to mean getting most of what you wanted and having governments that concentrated on meeting your needs. Not anymore. You pay your taxes, which are just as high, but your rights are diminished and you get less and less back in public services, but are thankful as long as you don’t get abused in the process.

In our modern, woke progressive era minorities have become the new majority. They’re loud and very demanding, and even when you agree with them they still bad-mouth you. The media, our academics and politicians adore them and can’t do enough for them. This encourages even more outlandish claims, some bordering on the ridiculous. – Derek Mackie

Traditional men have been out of fashion for decades but it seems even women are becoming yesterday’s news. The fairer sex is now being targeted for expecting some privacy in public toilets and changing rooms from men who “identify” as women but still have all their boy bits under the dress.

Desperate to be considered female in all respects, they also want to be swaddled in a blanket of inclusivity when it comes to having kids. And not as Dad, who likes bottle-feeding Baby dressed up as Mum, but the full “Call the Midwife” experience.

To the extent that breast-feeding has been declared an elitist activity and renamed “chest-feeding”. Oh yeah, and women no longer become pregnant – “people” do.

This is the woke brigade’s latest charm-less offensive (in both senses of the word) to allow anyone delusional enough, to pretend they can give birth, regardless whether the baby has a way out or not.

Some of the most vociferous supporters of this anti-women campaign and biological balls-up are women, usually in positions of power, who previously made a name for themselves standing up for their own sex. The Green Party and Labour Party are littered with them.
Many have kids so should know exactly how things work down there but that hasn’t stopped them from denying the obvious.   – Derek Mackie

Who are the greatest victims of climate change? People flooded out of their homes? Subsistence farmers affected by drought? I would suggest an alternative group: the 56 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds who, according to a 2021 poll, think humanity is doomed by a changing climate. You can see it in tearful schoolchildren boycotting lessons, in Just Stop Oil activists earnestly telling us that billions of people are going to starve, in those who say they will never have children because, in the words of one 27-year-old woman quoted in The Guardian, “I feel I can’t in all conscience bring a child into this world and force them to try and survive what may be apocalyptic conditions”.

Having been a child for the second half of the Cold War I know all about growing up with the threat of doom hanging over us. But I don’t recall my contemporaries traumatised by the prospect of nuclear war. We indulged in black humour, and some went on CND marches and shouted things, but I never saw anyone reduced to a gibbering wreck, as some seem to be over climate change.

The young who feel doomed are not direct victims of climate change, of course, but the hysteria surrounding it. They have been fed daily predictions of doom by people they feel they can trust. – Ross Clark

The reality, though, is that we are not doomed. We should reduce, and as much as technology allows us, try to eliminate carbon emissions. But we are not going to drown, starve or die of thirst because of climate change. Rather, the most immediate danger lies in exaggerating the threats and rendering an entire generation incapacitated by fear. –Ross Clark

The All Blacks and farming define New Zealand. The All Blacks unite and inspire. Farmers provide food and the export economy

They also do their best to improve the environment where research shows that actions will make a difference – whether or not people are watching. – Jacqueline Rowarth

If the children had randomly guessed, their success rate should have been around 25 per cent.

That means we’ve introduced something into the NZ education system that is so bad, our Kiwi kids would have been better off guessing – Dr Audrey Tan

The collectivist Net Zero political project is starting to come apart before our very eyes. Making everyone poor, cold, hungry and confined to small living territories was always a tall political ask, but decades of green virtue-signalling, backed by a ‘settled’ version of science that cannot be debated in polite society, has kept the show on the road. – Chris Morrison

Elections are always tricky when attempting mass collectivisation projects like Net Zero. The science can be settled and admirable ecological objectives can be hijacked, but when the electorate twigs that it is their holiday, their car and their beef steak that is under threat, they can cut up rough. – Chris Morrison

The German online publication Pleiteticker noted that members of the upper middle classes had declared war on the lower middle classes with their destructive climate measures. For years, these groups have been spreading their ideas “in a self-righteous, arrogant and sometimes aggressive manner”. It suggested that outside the Berlin political bubble and other urban feel-good oases, there is not much support for these causes.

Certainly there doesn’t seem to be much support for giving up food. – Chris Morrison

Guardian activist George Monbiot recently called for an end to animal farming. It is difficult to know when this madness will end. The academic economist Ralph Schoellhammer recently noted in an article in Newsweek that climate activism isn’t about the planet – it’s about the boredom of the bourgeoisie. It might be argued that pampered and indulged elites have had it easy for so long that they have lost all track of understanding how food, warmth, shelter and security from the ravages of nature are both produced and secured. – Chris Morrison

It is the perfect farm animal. A pig, covered in fur, that lays eggs and can be milked. The Germans call it the ‘Eierlegende Wollmilchsau’, or an ‘egg-laying wool-milk-sow’. It provides everything you want and tastes great.

It doesn’t exist.

According to its cheerleaders, the Lake Onslow pumped hydro-electricity project will mean we don’t run out of electricity in winter, bring down power prices, and make our electricity system 100% renewable. An ‘Eierlegende Wollmilchsau’. – Josie Pagani

The titanic IOU makes this the most important decision the country will make in this year’s election. We should ask if there is a cheaper way. – Josie Pagani

Energy shortages have consequences. The thinking behind Onslow goes, we need a way to store energy – a battery. When we have excess wind or so much rain that the hydro lakes are spilling water, we would use the energy to push water uphill to fill Lake Onslow. Then, when we are short, we would generate from the stored water.

But if Onslow provides back-up energy when the wind doesn’t blow, which is every couple of days, then it is not going to be full when we have a dry winter. Or, if the water is held back for dry winters, every five years or so, then we can’t also use the same energy to generate on calm evenings. – Josie Pagani

Advocates say Onslow will buy energy when it is cheap, and sell it when it is expensive. Genius. But if the lake must be full and on stand-by, then you have to buy energy when you need to fill it, then sell when the country needs the energy. If prices rise when energy is short, then the market is already pricing shortages. So why isn’t a hydro lake already being kept back for dry years?

The answer is that it costs money to hold fuel for tomorrow that you could use today. Imagine if you bought all the petrol your car needs for the next five years and stored it in a tank, using it over the next five years. You have to pay for the tank. The money to buy that petrol could be used to pay down your mortgage or invest. Forgoing those gains is the cost of storage. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to hold energy in storage.

It is not believable to add so many costs and expect consumer prices to fall. – Josie Pagani

There are better, lower-cost alternatives to get the same outcome – and sooner. New Zealand has wind, geothermal, solar and potentially biomass and carbon capture use and storage (CCUS) options that can produce electricity at competitive prices today and in the future.

If we choose lower cost options, instead of building Onslow, the government would then have another $15.7 billion-plus, to build much more environmentally valuable projects like passenger trains or insulating homes.

Christopher Luxon should not answer a single question about ‘’where the money is coming from’’ until the Government has an answer for where the money is coming from for Lake Onslow. – Josie Pagani

I wholly support immigration from religiously and ethnically diverse countries, with the one proviso that it needs to be carefully managed so as to avoid destabilising the host society. Europe has shown us what can happen when large groups of disaffected migrants congregate in ghettoes.

This doesn’t mean we should want immigrants to assimilate to the point where they become submerged, as was expected of non-British migrants (including my own forebears) until well into the 20th century. Most New Zealanders welcome and applaud the cultural diversity introduced by the liberal immigration policies of the past few decades.

But it’s not too much to expect that immigrants respect the values and institutions of the country that has adopted them, as most do. Those values include, but are not restricted to, freedom of speech and the rule of law (we’re looking at you, Eliana Rubashkyn), equal rights for all and no special treatment on the basis of race, religion or sexual identity (which is what Shaneel Lal and his/her fellow cultists seem to be agitating for, as far as one can tell).

That’s the way we do things here. It’s why this country is seen as a sanctuary by people fleeing despotic regimes. To paraphrase the headline on my 2021 blog post, why move to a new and infinitely better country if your first instinct is to change it? – Karl du Fresne 

Free speech guarantees the right to both express perspectives and views, and also to hear others’ perspectives and views. The Police have failed in their duty to protect these foundational rights.

Kiwis expect the police to ensure that they can exercise their rights without being intimidated or attacked. If you allow the Thug’s Veto to take free speech off the table, contested opinions and beliefs don’t simply go away. However, the ability to express them peacefully is undone.

This leaves only far more extreme forms of expression on the table. We are concerned for the tenor of public debate, and the potential for this to produce violence. Free speech is an antidote for this, but it must be protected by the police. – Jonathan Ayling

Christopher Luxon’s suggestion of a “cover-up” on the ninth floor of the Beehive suddenly seem more than quotidian politicking. At minimum, the saga leaves us asking: just how often are OIA requests unscrupulously denied, stonewalled, ruled out of scope, for sheer, naked, political expediency? How often is official information withheld in defiance of the law, in affront to public scrutiny?  – Toby Manhire

Hipkins has been focused in his first months as prime minister on pruning the work programme, but this is something that surely needs to be added to the in-tray. What often looks like an esoteric subject of interest to few has suddenly emerged as emblematic of something much bigger, going to the heart of the probity, integrity and basic honesty of government.  – Toby Manhire

The rise of cancel culture, which involves public shaming and boycotting individuals or organizations for perceived harmful or offensive behaviour, is a threat to free speech, tolerance and civility. – Bryce Wilkinson

The current, and I fear increasing, polarisation of New Zealanders over the politics of gender and race is not a domestic phenomenon. Its origins are international.

British author and political commentator Douglas Murray’s 2019 book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, examines the ideological origins of this polarisation.

Murray’s key insight is simple. Instead of respecting individuals, the proponents of cancel culture judge them through the lens of an assigned group identity. What counts is not your individual character or what you have to say, but the group others put you in. This is group tribalism.

The next step is to declare one group ‘victims’, and others ‘oppressors’. Religion, skin colour, gender, politics, place of birth, and much else can be used to classify and demean individuals and, thereby, divide society. – Bryce Wilkinson

The point of telling individuals that they are victims because of their group membership is to make them feel resentful. Resent breeds a desire for vengeance. Those emotions foster hostility and intolerance. Marx was fostering revolution.

The ‘virtuous’ term for vengeance is ‘social justice’. Social justice is necessarily different from ‘blind’ justice where all individuals have equal standing. Group justice risks mob “justice”. – Bryce Wilkinson

Neo-Marxists may see individuals with white skin as oppressors, and claim that men oppress women. Similarly, heterosexual individuals are perceived as oppressing non-heterosexual groups, such as gay, lesbian and transgender individuals. These perspectives frame each ‘victim’ group as being oppressed by at least one other demographic group.

Individuality is thereby diminished. Those who opposed Posie Parker but valued free speech likely feel affronted by the intolerant members of ‘their’ supposed tribe. – Bryce Wilkinson

The debate over gender classification has been ongoing for centuries, with men and women traditionally differentiated based on biological factors. However, more recently, the argument has shifted towards self-identification as a determining factor.

There is room for civil discussion on these topics, but that was not what we saw last Saturday.

The events in the Auckland Domain show that the norms of civil society, such as tolerance of different viewpoints and respect for the dignity of the individual, are at risk. The risk was heightened by a member of parliament using the occasion to denigrate all white men as the main progenitors of violence. – Bryce Wilkinson

Scruton bleakly concluded that some simply wished to dismantle capitalism, without offering any viable alternative. Revolution without responsibility seemed to be the goal.

Fortunately, there is a silver lining. The events of last Saturday have induced people who value tolerance and mutual respect to speak up. Those values are worth fighting for.

Hopefully, one day universities in the West will, once again, lead the way in defending those values, rather than leading the charge against them. – Bryce Wilkinson

The Nash scandal is now far wider than the ex-minister, and there are fundamental questions about the role of the Government in allegedly covering up the misuse of public office for vested interests. Labour politicians are calling the suppression of official information a “stuff up” due to “human error” in the PM’s Office, while the National Opposition is calling it a “conspiracy”, and demanding an inquiry into what looks like “corruption”. – Bryce Edwards

In order to believe that Ardern’s Deputy Chief of Staff didn’t understand the problematic nature of the Nash email and the ramifications of releasing it to a journalist investigating political donations, you would have to believe that she was incompetent. If she decided not to elevate the email to her boss, then she would have been in clear dereliction of her duty.

Of course, it is possible that Donald did in fact elevate the issue to either Ardern or the Chief of Staff, and the public isn’t being told of this. Alternatively, Donald was fully aware of the need to keep the Nash email from her superiors, so that there was plausible deniability for the Government. – Bryce Edwards

In dealing with the burgeoning scandal, the Labour Government’s new strategy is to blame everything on Stuart Nash. He certainly deserves blame for his involvement in it all. But he’s also now being used as a convenient fall guy for what seems like unethical behaviour in other parts of the Beehive. – Bryce Edwards

Increasingly political commentators and journalists are using words like “stench” and “rottenness” in regard to the Government’s Nash email scandal. Hipkins will be forced to take the issue much more seriously than he has been if he’s to avoid his reputation being tarnished and his government associated with the smell of corruption. – Bryce Edwards

New Zealand is very proud of our reputation as a country that is consistently ranked as one of the least corrupt in the world. The international transparency index puts us at number two because of our perceived levels of lack of public sector corruption, and we must guard that very carefully. What we have experienced in recent days with a series of revelations reminds us that there is a grey area that Governments can stray into too easily that could put that reputation at risk. The grey bits matter.

I want to step through for the House what has actually gone on here, because this is not a matter about one man, Stuart Nash. This is not a matter about one decision. This is about Ministers in a Government being part of a culture that thinks that if you don’t want the public to know, you work out how to cover it up.

We have witnessed an egregious breach of Cabinet confidentiality in which a Minister shared information with his personal donors for reasons that have not been explained, but reasons that leave us all wondering. We have one group of privileged New Zealanders accessing information that is never available to everyday people. We now know for sure that it wasn’t just Minister Nash and his staff who knew about this; the Prime Minister’s office knew all about it too. They knew about it last year. They were actively consulted about how it should be managed, and they were complicit in the decision to cover it up. – Nicola Willis 

 The Nash email omission really serves to highlight the role of the Prime Minister’s Office in managing difficult and sensitive OIA requests and Written Parliamentary Questions across ministries. Whilst it is being portrayed as a one-off innocent mistake by two hardworking and trustworthy civil servants, in truth it reveals a small glimpse of the Machiavellian machinations of government. – Thomas Cranmer

“Why me?” is a question that people who have been careful of their health, in particular those who have followed the latest dietary advice (and moreover imbibed often heroic quantities of turmeric, blueberries, fish oil, nuts, broccoli, vitamin C, etc.), ask when struck down, seemingly at random, by some fatal disease. They have always lived healthily and yet are unjustly attacked by fatal disease! The only answer that can truly be given in the present state of knowledge to the question of “Why me?” is “Why not?” – Theodore Dalrymple

Acceptance of what must be borne is as important as not to accept as mere fate an avoidable evil. The difficulty is in distinguishing the avoidable from the unavoidable, to do which requires both knowledge and wisdom, which are not always found together. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is difficult—impossible would probably be a more accurate way of putting it—to be always counting one’s blessings, however great they might be. Nevertheless, it is important to try to do so at least intermittently, or else one would lose sight of them altogether and give in to self-pity, one of the few emotions that can, and often does, last a lifetime. – Theodore Dalrymple

Conspiracy theories are, in every sense, for losers. When your side is losing in ways that you find inexplicable, extraordinary explanations become appealing. The centrists and the sensibles who hold high-status opinions went a long time without losing, but in the past decade have suffered several major defeats. At the same time, conspiratorial thinking has entered the mainstream like never before. Is this a coincidence? A conspiracy theorist would say that there is no such thing as a coincidence and, in this instance, they would be right. – Christopher J. Snowdon

There is no logic to a $100 million dollar hospital build budget cut when the same Government is proposing tens of billions of dollars of spending on light rail and Harbour Bridges.

There is no logic when the same agency is spending $600 million finding efficiencies that may result in 1600 redundancies. There is no doubt in my mind that the money spent now will be recouped many fold in the future.

If this is a government that is getting back to basics, there is nothing more basic than building legacy hospitals. It’s doesn’t happen nearly often enough so heed the people of Dunedin and their mayor.

Do it once and do it right. – Andrew Dickens

 just think she was extraordinarily uncomfortable with the media. Even though she appeared to be relaxed she was very uncomfortable with the media. And the more time we had, the less she trusted the media and the media became more sceptical of her and what she had to say. And from her part, it came across as condescending and patronising.

Initially, we had a good relationship. I liked the idea of a young, 37-year-old liberal democrat in the Prime Minister’s chair. I thought this is great for a young country like New Zealand, but it didn’t take long, for me anyway, to realise that it wasn’t quite what it seemed. And she was just ill-equipped to be the prime minister. And, in fact, she had said herself she never wanted to be the prime minister. – Barry Soper

The media didn’t understand Ardern. And she didn’t try to understand the media. – Barry Soper

Those disruptive Posie Parker protesters who opposed her presence in Aotearoa, and who have been congratulating themselves over their raucous, aggressive, bullying behaviour, ought to navel gaze a little and look up the definition of hypocrisy.

Don’t preach love, tolerance and respect, then brazenly do the opposite. It’s not a one-way street. Dignity and self-control, whatever the circumstances, matters.

Issues such as gender identification, queer expression, restroom access, puberty blockers and the like are not simple ones. Pretending they are ignores the complex interplay and influence of cultural perspective, philosophy, theology, gender identification and human biology and physiology.

They’re issues with a wide range of views and opinions across the spectrum. They’ve ignited debates of all sorts of hues across cultures, countries, communities, and social strata. – Sam Clements

Too readily those opposed to, or who question, trans demands, are accused of “hate speech”. The term is grossly overused, often misused and loaded. It’s often employed by individuals or groups who appear blissfully ignorant of the concepts of irony, paradox, cliché, and hypocrisy. – Sam Clements

Listening, learning, exploring, debating, and ultimately respecting difference of opinion, is important, even if we passionately and angrily disagree.

If opinion advocates violence clearly, unambiguously, and implicitly, we have laws that will result in prosecution of those individuals. Attempting to shut down strong opinions, however unpalatable we might find them, including through attempting to enact repressive laws, is not in the interests of a healthy democracy.

People may never reach consensus, but at least they’ll never be accused of lacking decency. And maintaining decency, particularly in the face of indecency, matters. – Sam Clements

We’re all human. But it matters that we never tire in our endeavours to find common ground, however tenuous and fragile that ground may be, or to forget the human.

Such endeavours can produce great long-term good. That is something all passionate believers in liberty should surely agree upon. – Sam Clements

I have loved being part of the mainstream because I love being part of the conversation on issues that concern the bulk of New Zealanders. I know that I am not apart from the great unwashed. I am as ordinary, unremarkable, and mainstream as anyone in the country. If I have any skill as a journalist, it is knowing what concerns the average Jo/Joe.

And yet for the past three years, I have struggled to get stories published – not polemic, but evidence-based stories – on an issue I know concerns many of these people and that is the impact of gender ideology on women and young people.

After the visit of Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull this weekend and the debacle that ensued, I realise that the New Zealand mainstream media no longer exists. – Yvonne Van Dongen 

Apart from one writer who wrote in favour of free speech, the media here universally panned Keen, repeating the slurs of her critics and the contents of a rubbish Wiki entry, which call her a an anti-trans, white supremacist, Nazi simply because of the presence of some LARPing louts doing a Sieg Heil salute at an Australian gathering of women. Their gatecrashing action was dismissed by both the Australian Jewish Association and New Zealand Jewish Council as nothing to do with Keen and publicly denounced by Keen herself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the writers and commentators in the media were male.

So RIP New Zealand mainstream media. They have joined the ranks of the political and public service urban elite pushing a state-sponsored religion – gender ideology. Gender ideology is an unverifiable belief system. There is no such thing as gender. In my view it is a construct and has no business being taken seriously, least of all by the media, politicians, academia, and the public service (as is currently the case). Not to mention with the groups who should be protecting women, such as the National Council of Women, the Midwives Council, and Girl Guides. I know from speaking to friends in many of these groups, certainly those in the public service, that they are too scared to speak out against this ideology, fearing for their jobs. – Yvonne Van Dongen 

New Zealand police, presumably desperate to keep their reputation as diverse and inclusive, adopted a hands-off approach while a small group of women were mobbed by a much larger angry crowd. It pains me to say it but the police have clearly been politicised by this government. – Yvonne Van Dongen 

Reporting on this debacle, one in the media had the gall to report the event as a ‘soundscape of resistance thick with joy’ while Green MP Chloe Swarbrick said on Twitter that thousands of New Zealanders knew what they experienced yesterday and ‘overwhelmingly that was love and affirmation’.

Women at the event were scared. An older woman was punched in the face by an activist while a pregnant marshal feared for her safety and unborn child as the protesters surrounded the rotunda where she was stationed. She had to be helped out of the melee by a male photographer. – Yvonne Van Dongen 

It’s not just gender ideology that is not examined fairly in the media, there are other issues New Zealanders know are being suppressed, such as differing viewpoints and information on the curriculum refresh, the teaching of science in schools and universities, co-governance, Three Waters and anything to do with Māori politics. The fear is that such stories will fuel racism just as an examination of gender ideology and trans activism is believed to fuel transphobia. Perversely, the suppression of debate on issues like this is dividing the nation like never before. – Yvonne Van Dongen 

What happened on Saturday was avoidable. It was fomented by politicians and mainstream media. They could not have done more to fan the flames of opposition and fear of a small British woman wanting to provide a space where she and other women could talk about what is happening to women and girls. Then the inevitable was allowed to unfold by hands-off police.

Before she arrived here, Keen said New Zealand was ‘insane’. Sadly, this proved to be prophetic. – Yvonne Van Dongen 

We have indeed contributed to the global debate about transgender rights – but only by showcasing how intolerant this group is, and how violently they react to ideas that challenge the perceived orthodoxy in our South Pacific hermit kingdom. It has cast a spotlight not only on the violent undertones that exist within parts of the transgender movement; but also on New Zealand’s own appalling record of violence, particularly with regard to domestic violence.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Yes, there is free speech in New Zealand, but there is very little robust debate about difficult or controversial topics. Discussion is routinely closed down by slurs, stigmatizing language and official complaints. Local media often avoids politically or socially sensitive topics. – Thomas Cranmer

Ask Dawkins or Keen about free speech in New Zealand. Ask them how intellectually curious we are. Now, thanks to an unruly mob in Albert Park, many millions of people around the globe have seen how tolerant New Zealand is when it comes to engaging in public discussion.

At the very least, if politicians and leaders of institutions don’t want to pick sides in social issues, they should provide the space in which proper debate can be had by those willing to discuss these issues – whether in a lecture theater or a park. – Thomas Cranmer

The reason we’re getting so much street activity is that politicians have opted out.

There’s a whole set of debates where ordinary New Zealanders are simply not seeing their views represented in politics. – Stephen Franks

Unless someone’s inciting violence, I’m all for free speech it doesn’t matter what they’re saying. I want to hear from people I detest. – Stephen Franks

I think it left us better informed that this is an extremely divisive issue.

Will they be better acquainted with the arguments on either side? No, probably not – Juliet Moses

There are people who come here and speak…who I profoundly disagree with, people who indulge in antisemitism…. but my view is that it is generally better to let people have their say, as uncomfortable as that might be, than not let them in.

My concern is that if we can’t have these discussions, civil or even uncivil dialogue, it plays into the hands of extremists on both sides and I really don’t think that is a healthy place for us to be as a society. – Juliet Moses

New Zealand is a lost cause insofar as science education is concerned, for the government and educational establishment is doing all it can to make local indigenous “ways of knowing” (mātauranga Māori, or MM) coequal with modern science, and taught as coequal. This will, in the end, severely damage science education in New Zealand, and drive local science teachers (and graduate students) to other countries. It won’t help the indigenous Māori people, either, as it will not only give them misconceptions about what is empirically “true” versus what is fable, legend, or religion, but also make them less competitive in world science—both in jobs and publishing.

Now, I would be the first to admit that indigenous knowledge is not completely devoid of empirical knowledge.  Indigenous people have a stock of knowledge acquired by observation as well as trial and error. This includes, of course, a knowledge of the indigenous plants and their medical and nutritional uses, when the best time is to catch fish or pick berries, and, in perhaps its most sophisticated version, the ability the Polynesians to navigate huge expanses of water. (That, of course, was also done by trial and error, and must have involved the demise of those who didn’t do it right—something that’s never mentioned.)

Is observational knowledge like this “science”?  In one sense, yes, for you can construe “science” as simply “verified empirical knowledge”.  But modern science is more than that: it’s also its own “way of knowing”—a toolkit of methods, itself assembled by trial and error, for obtaining provisional truth. – Jerry Coyne

Because modern science comprises not just facts but a method codified via experience, indigenous knowledge generally fails the second part, for it lacks a method for advancing knowledge beyond experience and verification. Indeed, I know of no indigenous science that has a standard methodology for ascertaining truth. Yes, various plants can be tested for their efficacy in relieving ailments, but this is done by trial and error—in contrast to the double-blind tests used to assess the effects of new drugs and medicines.

Still, indigenous knowledge can contribute to modern science. This can involve bringing attention to phenomena that, when tested scientifically, can be folded into the domain of empirical fact.  Quinine and aspirin were developed in this way. And, of course, local ecological knowledge of indigenous people can be valuable in helping guide modern science and calling attention to phenomena that might have otherwise been overlooked. Nevertheless, what we have is experiential knowledge on one hand—a species of knowledge that rarely leads to testable hypotheses—and modern science on the other, which is designed to lead to progress by raising new testable hypotheses.

The concept of “indigenous science”, then, baffles me, especially if, as in New Zealand, it’s seen as coequal to science. It’s not, though, for it lacks a methodology beyond trial and error for determining what’s true. But because of what philosopher Molly McGrath called “the authority of the sacred victim.”, indigenous “ways of knowing” are given special authority because they’re held by people regarded as oppressed. This leads their “ways of knowing” to be overrated as competitors to modern science. Indeed, MM is a pastiche of real empirical knowledge, but also of religion, theology, ideology, morality, rules for living, authority, and tradition. This kind of mixture characterizes many indigenous “ways of knowing”, making it necessary, when teaching them as science, to not only distinguish “fact” from “method,” but to winnow the empirical wheat from the ideological and spiritual chaff. – Jerry Coyne

Now I’m not sure what’s included in “ethnomathematics”. If it’s just approaching teaching math but using examples familiar to indigenous folk, then it’s not an alternative form of mathematics but a method of teaching. If it really adds stuff to the knowledge of mathematics, I’d like to know what. (Be always wary when you see the term “holistic approach” applied to education. And the notion that ethnomathematics has something to do with “social justice” scares the bejeezus out of me.) Perhaps ethnomathematics is mathematics + ideology, in which case it’s not an eye that sees, but a hand that propagandizes. – Jerry Coyne

Stuart Nash getting in trouble – again – has reminded the public that changing the General doesn’t change the troops. And if you didn’t like them before, you probably won’t like them now.

Hipkins must take some responsibility for the Nash saga getting to this stage. He should’ve sacked Nash two weeks ago. Nash was always going to cause more trouble. It was so predictable that this column actually predicted it a fortnight ago. The only surprising element was how quickly it proved true.

Hipkins is trying desperately to paint this latest indiscretion – the email to donors – as Nash’s most egregious yet. He’s hoping to make it sound completely different to the other indiscretions, to excuse his previous lack of discipline.

But in truth, it wasn’t Nash’s biggest mistake. Yes, an email full of secrets sent to men who donate money is a massive error of judgment. But line that up next to the fact that Crown Law considered prosecuting him for contempt of court and it’s not close. And yet Nash survived.– Heather du Plessis-Allan

But the Marama Davidson drama is probably more damaging to Labour, even though she isn’t a Labour MP.

Her “white cis men” comments created huge amounts of anger. Far more anger than the Nash affair.

There were calls for an apology. Hipkins could’ve demanded one. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Hipkins could’ve – if he wanted to – forced an apology out of her. He is the PM. She is one of his ministers.

But he didn’t. He said those were words he wouldn’t have used. Bringing race into it was “not particularly helpful”. Early on, that was enough. But when Davidson started doubling down and refusing to apologise, Hipkins’ action was not enough anymore. Because she was so publicly defiant and because she is a minister, his inaction looked at the very least like a lack of concern, at worst like private agreement.

There are a fair few white men and their wives pretty upset at those comments. Hipkins will need white men and their wives to win the election. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Again, that was probably not the smartest distraction. Not this week anyway. It was just another reminder that Hipkins is dealing with the same old crew, with the same old tired tricks that Jacinda Ardern had to deal with. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

The reality is that most of the high-profile initiatives she had either went backwards or Chris Hipkins has essentially ripped them up. – Sir John Key

It is not the Opposition that has absolutely taken the knife to her policies, it’s her successor. – Jim Bolger

All disasters. It has just been a shambles. It’s sad but true.

“I lifted the pension from 60 to 65 and it certainly wasn’t welcome but you can manage these things – I was re-elected the next time as well. – Jim Bolger

If you look at the broader issue of race relations, and primarily because of how she mishandled the introduction of co-governance, she has left New Zealand’s race relations in a much worse position.

Her policy failure, her inability to explain what she meant with co-governance, has meant we are going to be more divided on race than we have been for years and years and years.

That is evident everywhere now. People are anxious, concerned, worried, uncertain …and that’s frankly just a failure of leadership in a vital area of society. And Jacinda didn’t provide it. – Jim Bolger

We are now quite divided on racial issues and that is tragic. And it is going to take quite a while to build back. – Jim Bolger

One of the peculiarities of our age is the ferocity with which intellectuals and politicians defend propositions that they do not—because they cannot—believe to be true, so outrageous are they, such violence do they do to the most obvious and evident truth. – Theodore Dalrymple

Among the propositions defended with such suspect ferocity is that men can change straightforwardly and unambiguously into women, and vice versa. Now everyone accepts that they can change into something different from ordinary men and women, and can live as if they were of the opposite of their birth sex; moreover, there is no reason to abuse or otherwise maltreat them if they do, and kindness and human decency require that we do not humiliate them or make their lives more difficult than they are. But this is not at all the same as claiming that those who take hormones and have operations actually are the sex that they choose, or that it is right to enshrine untruth in law and thereby force people to assent to what they know to be false. That way totalitarianism lies.

To propound and defend ideas that you know are false is intellectually and morally frivolous, but it lacks the usual enjoyment that frivolity is supposed to supply. It is combined with earnestness but not with seriousness: one thinks of the Austrian saying under the Habsburgs, “the situation is catastrophic but not serious.” – Theodore Dalrymple

If we try to look on this episode with the eye of a future social historian, on the assumption (by no means certain) that western societies will someday come to their senses and that their social historians will be at least moderately sensible, what will we hypothesise? How to explain that societies that prided themselves on having overthrown superstition and on basing themselves to an unprecedented extent upon scientific enquiry, and that had a higher percentage of educated people than ever before in human history, nevertheless believed in the grossest absurdities? What could have possessed them? – Theodore Dalrymple

Pity and compassion, formerly Christian virtues, are the virtues that run wild in the modern social liberal’s mind. Indeed, one might almost say that he has become addicted to them, for they are what give meaning and purpose to his life. He is ever on the lookout for new worlds not to conquer, but to pity. In his mind, pity and compassion require that he adopts without demur the point of view of the person he pities, for otherwise, he might upset him; he must not criticise, therefore. In short, if need be, he must lie, and he frequently ends up deceiving himself as well as others. And if he has power, he will turn lies into policy. – Theodore Dalrymple

From our cities to our remote rural areas, cones have become a fixture of the New Zealand landscape, clogging up footpaths, roads and even beaches.

The cone-quest of our islands has become a national phenomenon. It would not be an exaggeration to say that New Zealand is starting to look like a giant VLC media player.

Effectively, road cones are New Zealand’s new national flower. Sadly, they have also begun competing with native kiwi birds and other local fauna. –  Dr Oliver Hartwich

Where we previously advertised our country to the world as “100% pure”, we should adopt a new marketing slogan: “New Zealand: Come for the scenery, stay for the cone-versations!” – Oliver Hartwich

As they say on Karangahape Road: “Why did the orange cone cross the road? To annoy the other side!”

The invasion of road cones calls for urgent action. It will take imagination and courage to drive them back, and we are glad to see Mayor Brown on the case. Politicians like him really think outside the cone. – Oliver Hartwich

To address the cone-undrum, the government should recruit an elite army of Cone Collectors. Dressed in bright orange uniforms, they will blend right in as they do their dangerous work of removing cones from our roads.

The cone harvest can be used to build new tourist attractions. Conehenge anyone? Or a Cone of Liberty? Maybe even a Millennium Cone? And Cone-tiki tours between them?

As New Zealanders take back cone-trol of their cities from their orange overlords, they will know who to thank. 

His name is not orange but Brown. Wayne Brown. – Oliver Hartwich

We need a real conversation. One informed by reliable research. One in which people with strongly differing viewpoints listen to one another with respect. One in which no one has decided the outcome from the very start.

That is how we do things in a democracy – even if some of our public servants seem to have forgotten it. And there’s nothing more important to democracy than a sound education system. –  Michael Johnston

Recent trials of new standards for NCEA show that two thirds of our 15- and 16-year-olds cannot write at a basic adult standard. One third cannot read at such a standard, and nearly half lack basic numeracy skills.

In large part, the reason for these shocking results is that we have been using teaching methods skills that fly in the face of scientific evidence on how people learn. In recent decades the Ministry has dictated an approach based on ideology rather than evidence.

The solution is clear. We must urgently start following the best evidence on teaching literacy and numeracy. These skills need to be taught in a structured way, taking careful account of the limitations of human memory and attention. – Michael Johnston

We need a new curriculum that specifies, in some detail, the knowledge that children need, in order to learn to think independently and develop their ideas in a sound way. A high-quality curriculum would also structure the order in which knowledge is taught and learned much more effectively than our current one. – Michael Johnston

We might expect that teachers-in-training would acquire an understanding of the scientific evidence on how children learn. Unfortunately, most training providers do not equip them with this knowledge.

The criteria for teachers to register with the Teaching Council are the right pressure point to change this. To be granted a teaching certificate, new teachers should have to demonstrate such knowledge, as well as their ability to apply it in the classroom. Teacher training institutions would have to ensure that their graduates hold, and can apply, this knowledge. – Michael Johnston

We’re having a free-speech moment. It isn’t going well. – Damien Grant

We no longer engage in debate but in a tit-for-tat escalation of tactical moves to deny those we disagree with the opportunity to be heard or to punish them if they speak out of turn. – Damien Grant

We have graduated to a cultural landscape where commercial intimidation and even physical violence is permissible against people if their views are deemed unacceptable by the cultural, political and media leadership.

Those in positions of responsibility may wish to reflect on this, rather than stoking further escalation. – Damien Grant

It may have looked ok on a whiteboard but in practice it looked like the half-baked cake it was.

If there was any kind of consumer guarantee in the contracts for advice from the consultants involved, you would be calling on it. – Rob Campbell

The same people in the same or essentially similar roles leading change showed an inadequate appreciation of the scale and depth of change required,. – Rob Campbell

The last thing we need is another winter of discontent, but that is exactly what’s coming. A complete change of focus is required and Te Whatu Ora needs to make keeping the nurses it has as its first priority – and that means showing them respect and paying them adequately.

Next we have got to put massive resources into recruiting more nursing staff into training now, and removing the financial and logistical barriers that stop many nursing students graduating.

Then we’ve got to sort out long-standing pay problems like Pay Equity for Te Whatu Ora nurses, and Pay Parity right across the health sector. We cannot afford not to do this or there won’t be any nurses left, and we’ll have no one ready to replace those who have already moved on. –  Paul Goulter

New Zealand has “Zombie Educationalists” who deserve nothing like the same level of respect. As soon as someone – other than Labour – releases an education policy they stir into action thrust limbs upwards through the dank earth to make proclamations that make me feel as despondent for them, and the people they may influence, as Solomon was in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes.

“All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

The background to the reanimation of two such EdZombies was National having the temerity to acknowledge that our education system (i.e. bureaucracy, schools, teachers) are currently failing to lift ability and outcomes for students – with huge personal and societal consequences. – Alwyn Poole

What he fails to see is that he is outright bagging the quality and competence of every primary school teacher in NZ. He is telling us that they cannot make teaching the basics and then, thoroughly, expanding upwards, exciting and worthwhile. Frankly – he is calling the primary teacher work-force a bunch of unimaginative dullards. He claims the position of Professor of some form of the Arts but cannot see the excitement of reading and writing.

What he also fails to see is that in many areas of learning – music, tennis and all sports, Maths, driving, … the list is endless – that a huge amount of significant, purposeful, practice is required. – Alwyn Poole

Why was our education system comparatively strong in the 1970s – 80s? Largely because our family and social institutions were strong, and our schooling system (with some notable exceptions) has not pivoted to the societal changes/decline. Both parenting and education can, and must, become world class in NZ. – Alwyn Poole

The curriculum is a blueprint for what we teach in our schools. It should provide a framework for teachers to guide young people through the school system.

It should provide detailed indicators, so teachers can clearly identify who is on track, and who needs additional assistance.

It should also ensure the domain of knowledge that we expect all of our schools to teach is adequately covered.

New Zealand’s curriculum hardly qualifies as such a framework. It’s threadbare. There is very little detail to help teachers guide students. – Michael Johnston

The lack of specificity in the curriculum means that teachers must spend more time developing content than they should have to.

Even more seriously, the actual content taught varies widely across schools. Regrettably, there is nothing national about the New Zealand Curriculum. – Michael Johnston

Instead of clear guidance for each school year, the curriculum is divided into three-year bands. That makes it difficult for teachers, let alone parents, to tell whether or not a student is on track.

Another problem is that the curriculum includes a distraction, called the “key competencies”. These are things like “managing self” and “relating to others”. They don’t need to be in the curriculum because they don’t need to be taught directly.

Personal responsibility and social skills are acquired through interacting with others in a community. Schools should be set up to foster this kind of knowledge. An orderly and respectful school environment fosters interpersonal skills.

But trying to teach this kind of knowledge directly isn’t effective. – Michael Johnston

Our curriculum over-emphasises knowledge that doesn’t need to be taught and underspecifies knowledge that does.

It’s hopelessly vague when it comes to signposts for students’ progress. Not all professors of education agree that the curriculum needs reform, though. – Michael Johnston

In response to O’Connor, I say that there’s nothing duller and more narrowing for a child than being at school and not learning. He seems to have overlooked that far too many of our young people, especially those from poorer communities, are leaving school without basic adult levels of literacy and numeracy.

If children don’t learn sufficient numeracy at primary level, the path to success in mathematics and science at secondary school is closed off. Not learning to read and write closes off the path to almost everything.

Far from “narrowing” the curriculum, a focus on “the basics” at primary school, is what opens the curriculum up later on. Besides, National’s policy for two hours per day to be spent teaching literacy and numeracy still leaves about three hours for art, music, P.E., science and more.

As for Cooke’s argument that yearly progress markers assume all children will learn at the same rate, yearly curriculum expectations provide a mechanism to identify students who are falling behind, so that they can receive the additional teaching and support they need. – Michael Johnston

What schools need is a curriculum that focuses on the core knowledge that is every New Zealander’s birthright.

It must be specified in enough detail for teachers to be able to take a reasonably consistent approach across the country.

It must include enough information about what is expected every year for schools to be able to identify students who are falling behind and help them to catch up. – Michael Johnston

This approach has been called “tired”, “cliched”, “right-wing” and ‘ideological’. But it’s hard to see why wanting every child in New Zealand to have an equal chance to succeed at school is any of these things.

Any assertion that such a curriculum would be dull and narrow confuses curriculum with teaching.

The curriculum simply specifies the knowledge that is to be learned. It’s our teachers who bring it to life.

A high-quality curriculum would be an enormous support to teachers, especially those early in their careers. It would free their time to explore ways to teach engagingly and effectively, and provide clear indications of which students need more help. – Michael Johnston

More than two-thirds of New Zealanders actively avoid news coverage and more than one in ten do so regularly. – Gavin Ellis

Biased and unbalanced reporting is cited as the strongest reason by those who express distrust in the news (82 per cent), followed by the political leaning of the newsroom (80 per cent). However, both these results must be treated with caution as they may reflect the respondents’ own biases and political leanings: If the media do not reflect my world view, there must be something wrong with them.

Less subjective, however, is the belief that the news is too opinionated and lacks factual information, a view held by almost three-quarters of those who do not have a lot of trust in news. Almost half believed the range of voices in the news was too narrow and represented society’s elites.

There is widespread – and growing – concern over standards of journalism. “Poor journalism” was defined as making factual mistakes; dumbed-down stories and misleading headlines/clickbait. More than 90 per cent of those surveyed were concerned about “stories where facts are spun or twisted to push a particular agenda”, and almost that number were concerned about “stories that are completely made up for political or commercial reasons that look like news stories but turn out to be advertisements”.

Add in lack of transparency and the perception that government funding subverts journalists (views held by more than 60 per cent of the ‘untrusting’) and it is easy to see why only 41 per cent of people believe the media hold the Government to account. And a slightly larger proportion disagreed that the media are free from undue political or government influence. A mere six per cent strongly agreed with the proposition that we have independent media. – Gavin Ellis

Oases of good journalism undoubtedly remain but it is high time news organisations came together to reclaim the desert. The JM&D report sends clear signals to them that they need to return to the tenets of good journalism if they are to restore public trust. That means putting public interest news values ahead of analytics, clearly separating fact from opinion, taking the initiative over disinformation, and provide fair forums for legitimate debate.

Above all, it means reflecting a more balanced view of the world in which we live. Too often the selection and treatment of news leaves the impression of a world filled with nothing but crime, conflict, calamity, and a contest of wills. All of that exists, but not to the exclusion of the other things that sit on the spectrum of life. – Gavin Ellis

The aim of adding criminal offences to the OIA is not really to prosecute those involved in improperly withholding information or improperly pressuring others to withhold information (although if they do, we should), but adding criminal penalties gives public servants involved in these decisions something stronger than the public sector code of conduct to point to when pushing back against pressure to withhold.

Any criminal offence would not cover simple errors, or even incompetence. That can continue to be dealt with through ombudsman criticism. Only those who deliberately and knowingly breach their OIA should face the risk of prosecution and conviction. But those who do should fear more than being mildly criticised by the ombudsman. – Graeme Edgeler

The idea that Stuart Nash’s emails to donors in his electorate is something he was sending as an MP isn’t laughable. Ministers don’t run for election, candidates do, and they’re running to become MPs. Constituent work and contact with donors is something people don’t do as ministers. When political parties auction off things like morning tea with the prime minister, they tend to auction off morning tea with Chris Hipkins, leader of the Labour Party. The ombudsman may still find the decision was correct, but there are at least strong indications the information related to Nash’s emails that he is aware of as a minister – the information he released about confidential cabinet discussions is something he is only aware of because he attended cabinet. This was not information that the prime minister then announced at a media conference after the decision was made.

I suspect what happened here would not qualify (though that may depend on what the ombudsman uncovers), but the existence of repeated questions in this area suggests more teeth are needed when dealing with deliberately recalcitrant ministers. – Graeme Edgeler

Shaneel is dividing the community and is an opportunistic narcissist, – Jacquie Grant

. . .meaningful dialogue has always seemed to be the right way to go. But for Shaneel to make statements like white trans have downtrodden people of colour trans is downright offensive and just so wrong.

We all mixed and work together. We just never saw any difference in the colour of our skin. – Jacquie Grant

Back in those days we didn’t see the colour of anyone’s skin being any sort of barrier and to state as Shaneel has that white queens stood over people of colour is a figment of a very vivid imagination. – Jacquie Grant

Keir Starmer is taking women for fools. He imagines he’s solved the contentious question of how to protect women’s rights while meeting the demands of gender dysphoric men and trans rights activists with his ingenious formulation: 99.9 per cent of women don’t have a penis. That, he thinks, will reassure anxious floating voters and get his new target, Stevenage Woman, on side. Of course, he tells us, incredulous that anyone should suppose a sensible person like him would believe anything else, being a woman is biological. Well, mostly. Until it isn’t. There is the little matter of that 0.1 per cent.

And with that declaration Sir Keir abandons all safeguarding and flings the door of women’s spaces, sports, showers, jails, awards and intimate care needs wide open to every male who fancies walking through it. If some women have a penis, and any man can self-identify as a woman, which is Labour’s policy, then women lose all privacy, rights and protections. Some 48,000 men identify as trans women. It is impossible for women to distinguish between the genuinely dysphoric men who just wish to live peacefully as women, and men with bad intent. There is no marker. Voyeurs, exhibitionists, sexual fetishists, predators and men who enjoy making women uneasy and humiliated have the right to enter any female space once sex segregation has been abandoned. – 

There’s no “somehow” or “could” about the rolling back of women’s rights. It’s already a reality, one that huge numbers of women are frightened and furious about. – Jenni Russell

Schools are forcing girls to use unisex loos where boys photograph them under the partitions, break open the doors or harass them by listening for the crackle of sanitary products, leaving girls too scared to use lavatories during the day. Women are being described by the NHS as “menstruators” and “uterus-havers”. A handful of rapists and male murderers have been placed in women’s jails. So many male sex offenders are claiming to be female that ministry of justice figures show trans women appear five times as likely to commit these crimes as men.

Mediocre male sportsmen are identifying as women and seizing women’s top titles as swimmers, weightlifters, cyclists and runners. Trans women, even those who identify as women on some days of the week such as Credit Suisse’s Pips Bunce, are being listed among Women of the Year and given women’s prizes. Women who protest are mercilessly abused online, forced to move home after threats, driven out of jobs, dropped by publishers and producers, reported to the police for tweets saying biology exists. Women’s groups who meet to discuss women’s needs are targeted, assaulted and shut down by masked trans rights activists howling “punch a terf, kill a Nazi” or “suck my lady dick”. Venues that take them get their windows smashed and reviews trashed.

This is not what most MPs envisaged when the Gender Recognition Act was passed in 2004. It was conceived of as a polite legal fiction that would only ever apply to a very small group, fewer than 6,000 people, who were genuinely troubled by the mismatch between their bodies and their identities. Instead its abandonment of biological sex divisions has become a Trojan horse, attacking women’s achievements and protections by confusing the reality of sex with the social roles associated with it — gender. – Jenni Russell

Many women are astounded by men’s insouciance about the removal of women’s single-sex spaces. I’ve realised why. Good men don’t know why they matter, and predatory men are eager to erode them. Decent men don’t realise how constantly wary women have to be of the small percentage of men who would assault them if they could. They have no idea how vigiliantly women have to move through the world, alert to flashers, stalkers, gropers, men who track behind them as they run, block their path on winter evenings, drug their drinks, stick hands up their skirts in crowded concerts. It is only in single-sex spaces that women are free from the exhausting necessity of being on guard.

This is why sex cannot be fudged as Starmer imagines. Legal fictions have been a disaster for women. Trans women should be accepted as trans women, with their own spaces and awards. – Jenni Russell

Diversity enforcers have become speech enforcers on many college campuses, but a few schools are starting to articulate some limits. The latest is Cornell University, which has refused to adopt a student resolution that would have required “trigger warnings” anytime an upsetting subject is mentioned in the classroom.

Under the proposal, professors would have been required to warn students in advance about “traumatic” content that touched on topics like self-harm, domestic, racial or transphobic violence and homophobic harassment. – Wall Street Journal

The entire idea of a trigger warning for speech is antithetical to the idea of a university, and in a previous age no one would have taken it seriously. But this is era of woke censorship, so it’s news when campus leaders push back, as they have at Cornell. – Wall Street Journal

 Research has shown that trigger warnings aren’t effective at helping people manage their anxiety, and including such warnings in an academic environment encourages emotional fragility and intellectual cowardice. It also teaches students and faculty to self-censor.

Cornell’s position is good news, but these bad ideas will recur as long as the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy governs academia, pushing the notion that honest speech and debate are traumatic. If universities want to reclaim real intellectual openness on campus, they have to help students get comfortable with being uncomfortable. – Wall Street Journal

The lobbying business is often described as the wild west because we don’t have the specific regulation that Washington and Australia have. So what. Where is the specific Government regulation of print journalists, the clergy, academics and farmers? We have occupational regulation of say carpenters for good reasons, but I wonder how you regulate good behaviour for lobbyists. What I do know is shonky operators will be found out quickly and will not be successful. Like every Kiwi, lobbyists have to comply with the laws of the land and the Speakers rules for Parliament.

The problem with any new law is the risk of perverse consequences and unnecessary costs. For instance a register of official lobbyists might end up creating barriers to entry for say a PR firm that might wish to lobby only once every five years. – Barrie Saunders

The Parliamentary press gallery has a remarkably modest understanding of lobbying. They don’t seem to appreciate that much lobbying takes place outside Parliament. It’s often more cost effective to influence the government official who drafts the first discussion document that ultimately leads to a Bill, than make a learned submission on the Bill itself. Much Government policy is not found in legislation but in regulations, standards and decisions made by Government officials. Helping shape these is the work of skilled lobbyists who have the trust and confidence of Government officials, whose only motivation is to produce good policy that works.

I was quite frankly astonished when PM Jacinda Ardern got consultant lobbyist GJ Thompson to set up her office after the 2017 election and was Chief of Staff for a while before returning to his firm. Even more astonishing was the media’s relatively passive acceptance of this amazing decision. Only Victoria University’s Dr Bryce Edwards, complained loudly about it.

I am equally astonished by the way the media uses consultant lobbyists as political commentators. With the exception of Matthew Hooton, most of these lobbyist commentators run fairly predictable party lines, with the left of centre being very consistent. I do not believe lobbyists should be used in this way because they will have many agendas which go beyond the narrow interests of specific clients.

RNZ likes to think it operates on a higher moral plane because its advertising free and its statutory requirements. To me its use of lobbyists as political commentators is a disgrace. There are plenty of journalists and others who could be used to comment on politics and it’s much better the pool is widened so we don’t get the same old running the same old lines.

Will Government act? The decision to ask the Speaker to end issuing swipe cards for consultants etc is almost meaningless. – Barrie Saunders

What’s not discussed by commentators is the positive role lobbyists play whether industry based or consultants. They can iron out dopey ideas clients often have. They also aggregate views of their members or clients and ensure decision makers are presented with coherent policy packages. These lower transaction costs for the Government and help improve the policy making process. It’s part of the consultation process and great for democracy. – Barrie Saunders

The Government’s plan to impose a UK-wide ban on the sale of new, pure petrol cars in just six years and nine months’ time is insanely detached from reality. The country and the technology are nowhere near ready for a full roll-out. Sticking with this preposterous timetable will impoverish and inconvenience millions and trigger a seismic, anti-green popular revolt. – Alister Heath

Until now, the costs of decarbonising society have been disparate or borne by industry – one reason why voters remain supportive. Fuel duty has been frozen. Home energy bills have gone up, but other factors have had a far greater impact on the cost of living. Taxes on long-haul flights have been hiked, hurting British-Asian and African communities, but the general public hasn’t really noticed. Voters have accepted the shift to reusable bags and paper straws and are happy to recycle. But those were easy – in some cases, costless – tweaks that haven’t required massive behavioural change and they fooled our elites into believing that voters will put up with endless misery to go green. They won’t.

Given enough time, a seamless transition to zero-emissions cars that don’t impact a person’s quality of life or their pocket is eminently possible. The same cannot be said of the proposed shift to heat pumps, or decarbonised air travel, or low-carbon construction, or reduced meat diets. These are likely to end up being explosively expensive and unpopular. We will eventually crack a new way of powering planes, but not a commercially viable one by 2050. The public will go wild if every home is forced to stump up a five-figure sum to retrofit a heating system that doesn’t even work properly when it gets really cold, or if foreign holidays are effectively banned.

The growing civil disobedience and furious rejection of low-traffic neighbourhoods and other anti-car diktats is a harbinger of things to come, as is the anti-Ulez movement which is galvanising many outer London and Home Counties demographics. – Alister Heath

There are two kinds of environmentalism. The first is the one exemplified by conservationists, nature lovers, green technologists, free-market environmentalists, Elon Musk, Boris Johnson before No 10, or my colleague Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. They love human civilisation as well as the natural world. They believe that new technologies – hydrogen, nuclear fusion, geoengineering, carbon capture, electric cars or cultured meat – are the solutions to environmental degradation. They dream of near-free, abundant clean energy and high-yielding agriculture; they seek new ways of enhancing our quality of life, feeding the world and growing our economy while not disrupting the environment. They support democracy, reason, choice, international travel, rising living standards and the universalisation of consumer goods.

The second kind of environmentalist are control freaks who have hijacked and warped a great cause. They don’t want to save the planet so much as to control its inhabitants. They love net zero – an extreme vision incapable of nuance, trade-offs or cost-benefit analysis – because it is a form of central planning. They are eternally disappointed by real-life human beings and their individualism.

Many have adopted a woke, quasi-religious worldview: we have sinned by damaging Gaia, we must repent, we must self-flagellate. They believe in “degrowth” and a weird form of autarkic feudalism. They dislike freedom and don’t want us to choose where to live, shop, eat or send our children to school. They want to reduce mobility. – Alister Heath

The public backs the first approach, not the latter. The net zero fanatics have already overreached. Our politicians must break with these extremists, or they will unleash a popular revolt that will make Brexit look like a gathering of Davos technocrats. – Alister Heath

You should be marrying your best friend. – Donald Carter

You stay home, you have the orchard, the vege garden, the chooks and you eat what you grow and you survive, –  Joy Carter

If you’ve got someone to confide in it makes the journey a lot lighter. . . Through it all the man upstairs never lets you down. – Donald Carter

So far in 2023, National has been releasing a new policy every couple of weeks and Labour has been having a Cabinet Minister break the rules every couple of days.  – David Farrar

The Reserve Bank’s surprise – probably erroneous – decision to throw a 50 basis point official cash rate increase on to the cost-of-living fire has made the job of the finance minister that much harder, as he tucks his next Budget into bed.

The decision will make jobs more precarious, depress house prices even more and potentially create a higher summit for mortgage rates … just as the peak appeared to be in view. – Vernon Small

Alongside the recovery from the recent floods and cyclones, the cost of living crisis is the hungriest beast in the Cabinet room and Adrian Orr and his team have made it harder to feed.

There is only so much that half-priced public transport fares and petrol excise cuts can do. – Vernon Small

Someone must be very proud of the slogan “See it, say it, sorted”, for it is relayed countless times — ad nauseam, in fact — over public address systems in British trains and stations.

The slogan has the effect that a squeaky piece of chalk had on me as a child — it sent shivers down my spine and made me clench my jaw and grind my teeth. It is preceded by “If you see anything that doesn’t look right, call the British Transport Police …” Recently, however, it was changed on at least one train to “If you see anything unusual, call the British Transport Police …”

Something unusual — like a well-dressed person, for example? You can go a long way on British trains before you see a well-dressed person, probably longer than you can see someone being aggressive. – Theodore Dalrymple

See it, say it, sorted: what does “sorted” mean in the context of the British police? If the experience of countless millions is anything to go by, it means “sorted” as far as the police are concerned, that is to say an incident is given, often somewhat reluctantly, a crime number.

I say reluctantly because a crime number for a crime that the police have no intention of investigating, let alone solving, messes up the statistics with which to deceive the public.

Sorted, indeed! One would have thought that the police were as efficient as a modern diesel car. The slogan is not only vulgar, but an implicit lie.  – Theodore Dalrymple

National’s policy to strengthen the curriculum would bring much greater consistency. It would provide a common framework for education, to be followed by all schools. – Michael Johnston

National’s testing policy is explicitly designed to identify children struggling with literacy learning as early as possible. Children making insufficient progress can be given further diagnostic tests to see whether they have dyslexia. – Michael Johnston

A preponderance of research evidence shows that structured teaching of literacy provides the best assistance to dyslexic students.

Pope-Mayall recognised that. He called structured literacy “a dyslexia friendly approach”. In fact, structured literacy is not only dyslexia-friendly, but also the most effective way to teach literacy to all children. And structured literacy is just what National wants to introduce. – Michael Johnston

And again, National’s policy platform would help, by emphasising structured learning in teacher training and professional development. This, in my view, is the most important of National’s policy announcements.

A strong curriculum and plenty of data would provide important support for teachers. But training teachers in structured literacy is the best way to ensure that children, especially those with dyslexia, learn to read and write. – Michael Johnston

Politics in the age of social media is often an ugly beast. Just look around over the last fortnight. The Posie Parker visit, the martyrdom or otherwise of Donald Trump, the opposing views on the legacy of Jacinda Ardern, the hardening of attitudes against China. We can be a virulent lot — at least those who choose to express themselves online.

And every now and then the hate and vitriol spills into real life. The scenes at the planned speaking event at Auckland’s Albert Park didn’t reflect well on anyone, and especially on those who stoked the anger. – Steven Joyce

If the pre-internet days were suffocating and stifling of new ideas, and they often were, then today is the exact opposite. Social media gives a megaphone and a platform to everyone who wants one, and the resulting cacophony can be deafening. The end game is wild polarisation of public opinion. – Steven Joyce

Social media thrives on strong views and stronger emotions. Platform owners learnt quickly that indignation and anger drives online activity much better than happiness and agreeability. You only have to observe the difference between the Twitter feed you built for yourself versus the one generated by the algorithm, to know the algorithm writers are trying to find content that literally pushes your buttons.

And nobody attracts many likes or shares by being reasonable. You attract retweets and shares by being quirky and outrageous and standing out from the crowd. The more extreme and polarising your view, the better. – Steven Joyce

It always has been an option for an unscrupulous politician to whip up the mob. You don’t even have to be experienced. It’s a base skill of populists to divide the world into us and them, and ruthlessly attack them. Social media just makes it easier. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that we have entered into what appears to be a political age of mindless populism at the same time social media companies have become dominant in the competition for our attention. – Steven Joyce

Politicians don’t have to lean into social media, of course. It is still possible for them to transcend the mob mentality and appeal to our better natures. To seek to unite us, rather than divide us. It’s just more difficult in the age of online mobs with megaphones and pile-ons.

Ardern managed it in response to the Christchurch terror attack. She united us all, of every ethnicity, origin and creed in the face of unspeakable and divisive evil. She rose to the occasion and the country benefited. As has been said elsewhere, it was her finest hour and became one of ours.

She was less successful in the response to Covid. She started out okay, but then let the mob off the leash to criticise the vaccine-hesitant, those who sought to cross the border, those who didn’t follow the mob’s rules. People who argued were vilified, and some were made scapegoats by her or her ministers.

We have seen the same divisiveness in the trans debate. Lesser politicians than the Ardern of 2019 aggressively attacked people whose world view they disagreed with, and intentionally or inadvertently licensed the mob to do the same. How much better would the outcome have been if a leader had risen above the partisanship of this culture war and encouraged civility and the ability to tolerate opposing views? It is not too hard to imagine a different, more unifying outcome if that had happened. – Steven Joyce

If only we’d accepted the vaccine-hesitant rather than firing them from their jobs, or found a more compassionate way to look after those found on the wrong side of the border. Or managed not to call those protesting the strictures a river of filth.

That is surely the political challenge of our internet age. To overcome the hyper-partisanship of the public square by demonstrating civility and generosity.

Showing the ability to swim against the tide of aggressiveness and populism and provide truly inclusive leadership which encourages thoughtfulness and tolerance of different views.

It’s not an easy task. Our current leadership seems to find it easier to just agree with the currently ascendant mob rather than lead for everyone. But surely that makes it more important than ever. – Steven Joyce

It would be simply frustrating if, when trying to ask the question about renewable energy – “ why are we not using a natural resource which is shamefully underused when we face an energy crisis that doesn’t need to happen?”, the ideologically driven zealots were forced to justify their repeated rejection of the idea.

The facts are that we could be 100% renewable so easily in a cost efficient way that would make most countries so envious.

Yet every time someone who appears to know what they are talking about suggests we build dams in areas where the energy can be used at source, they are told to f… off and leave it to the experts who are environmentally literate. We are told that anyone with an ounce of nous would understand that dams are a relic of a bygone era and as such, are being replaced by less efficient monstrosities that look like the alien towers coming over the hill in the “War of the Worlds”.

When pushed to explain further this outrageous con the engineers, who have the ear of the ministers who matter, limply say that we are doing this In order to prevent the destruction to the environment that would occur if common sense had its way. – Clive Bibby

How come, when the most valuable by product of building dams is the fresh water that has multi uses and has relatively little negative impact on the place where they are built. Or what about building a much larger dam at Waikaremoana out flow to replace the relatively tiny Tuai where the water, after power generation is lost to the sea. The cost of piping the water from that new facility to either HB or Poverty Bay would no doubt be much more acceptable than leaving it untapped.

And of course, when you add the recreational facilities, the benefits far out-way any environmental damage. – Clive Bibby

Most people, even those who are wind power junkies, admit that these wind towers are in direct conflict with the local bi-laws that control skyline construction.

How is it allowed ? I can’t think of a more damaging effect to to our natural environment.

It is also hard to understand why dams that have the capacity to do all three things mentioned above are not coming off the drawing boards like there is no tomorrow.

Why are we even contemplating spending $15.7 billion on the Onslow pump hydro power scheme that may as well be on another planet because of its distance from the end users, when we could build another series of reservoirs in the Hunua ranges that would provide the same amount of multi use water and power at a fraction of the cost. – Clive Bibby

Body odour could soon be making a comeback. Why? Because the UK government is looking to impose stringent reductions on home water usage. The media have suggested that this might mean the end of power showers, but the limits being mooted in Whitehall will bear down on water use as a whole. This will affect showering, taking baths, hand washing, cleaning clothes, and more.

The plan is spelled out in a new 81-page report put out this week by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Titled Our Integrated Plan for Delivering Clean and Plentiful Water (or Our Plan for Water, for short), the document details how the government intends to plug what it believes will be a shortage of four billion litres per day in the public water supply by 2050. In part, this will be done, under the Environment Act 2021, by cutting household water use from an average of 144 litres per person per day to 122 per person per day in 2038, and then to just 110 litres per person per day by 2050.

Make no mistake, this is a positively draconian policy. Worst of all, it places most of the blame and responsibility for water management on to the consumer – letting the water companies, regulators and the government itself off the hook. – James Woudhuysen

The problem with the government’s plan is that it is far keener on social engineering – in creating parsimonious, ecologically conscious citizens – than it is on the actual engineering of leak detection, leak repair, pipe replacement and all the rest. – James Woudhuysen

As far as eco-evangelists are concerned, what matters most is reducing ‘demand’ – whether that be for water, energy or travel. Building the infrastructure we need to meet demand always seems to be off the table.

It is worth reminding ourselves that there is no reason whatsoever for a developed, rainy country such as Britain ever to run out of water. No water is leaving the planet (even the very modest escape from the Earth of water’s constituent, hydrogen, is limited by a number of physical phenomena). Water scarcity is entirely a problem of mismanagement and bad government. 

Calls for demand management and behaviour change are simply codewords for austerity and rationing. The government wants us to accept the blame for the shocking state of our water infrastructure ourselves, and to endure poor personal and home hygiene as a consequence.

Rest assured, the rich will not be giving up water sprinklers on their estates, nor spas in their basements. These water cutbacks will only be demanded of us commoners. It’s time we caused a stink about it. – James Woudhuysen

What is sad about this is that the question of how transgender people can participate in sport is going to become an increasingly important question over time given the huge rise in transitioning, so we need to have a discussion about it NOW, before these problems become quite frequent.  The discussion needs to involve science (what criteria do we use to determine eligibility?), philosophy, and ethics (how do you balance fairness towards transgender athletes with fairness towards women?) Cisgender men are involved as well, but to a lesser extent.

It’s a shame that nobody can discuss this civilly—at least nobody calling for bans or caution—without being slurred as a “transphobe” or even without being physically attacked.

Women like Gaines who have to swim against biological men who identify as women have a special right to express their views and to be heard, as they are the ones who feel the unfairness on the “cis” side. But no, that’s not in the card: people like Gaines, Martina Navratilova, and J. K. Rowling are the ones deemed most reprehensible. – Jerry Coyne

The Minister of Transport, rather like a desperate gambler having a bad night at the casino, is reportedly ‘doubling down’ on the Government’s ill-starred light rail project. He now wants to extend light rail to the North Shore. The problem is five years on, the Government has yet to build anything to extend it from, not a millimetre of track. And embarrassingly, has been unable to produce a business case. Nevertheless, Treasury last year costed the present scheme (city to airport) at $14.6 billion up to $29.2 billion. Fortunately for the minister (but unfortunately for the New Zealand taxpayer) it’s not his money at stake here. And if one thing is certain about this project, it’s that we, the taxpayers, are most likely to lose our shirts. – Mike Lee

Despite five years of head-scratching by bureaucrats and consultants (the latter costing $60m at last count with a lot more to come), there is a fundamental contradiction lying at the heart of this plan. The light rail scheme is trying to deal with two separate public transport problems at the same time, serving Auckland Airport, whose passenger throughput is predicted to grow in the post-pandemic world to reach estimates of 40 million in 10 years, and reducing congestion by providing better public transport (in one corridor) on an intensified isthmus.

Attempts to achieve these two objectives with a single solution are suboptimal for both. They are, in effect, contradictory. The faster and more convenient the airport service (the fewer stops, currently 18, the better), the more inferior the public transport service along the corridor – and vice versa. It is this strategic confusion that no amount of determined attempts to hammer a square peg into a round hole can solve. This stubborn contradiction will be a key part of the explanation for the failure to produce a business case, especially the benefit/cost analysis usually mandatory for taxpayer-funded transport projects. – Mike Lee

The over-reliance on consultants, the hallmark of the Auckland light rail project, is undoubtedly due to a deficit of technical knowledge. This has always struck me as peculiar given that ample know-how and experience exist only three hours’ flight away in Australia. A key indicator of this knowledge deficit is the constant, vacuous assertions of officialdom that light rail is ‘rapid transit’. However, as the builder and manager of the successful, 20km with 19 stations, G-Link light rail on Australia’s Gold Coast, Phil Mumford told an Auckland Transport delegation I was a part of in 2015 – “Important thing to remember guys light rail is NOT rapid transit – it’s mass transit”.

Unlike our bureaucrats and consultants, Mumford knew what he was talking about. The popular G-Link, competently built and operated since 2014, moves thousands of people per day (‘mass transit’) in comfort and with zero emissions, but its average speed (30km per hour) is still slower over comparable distances than buses and trains. That said, it is considerably faster than Sydney’s newest light rail service. While light rail has many city-building benefits, ‘rapid transit’ is not one of them. To proceed on the basis of this misunderstanding is a fundamental error. – Mike Lee

History will record Jacinda Ardern as one of the country’s greatest prime ministers.

It doesn’t mean she actually was one of the greatest. In fact, I could mount a strong argument for why she was one of the worst.

But history doesn’t record the truth. History records a version of it. And that version, in all likelihood, will wax lyrical about her greatness.

Mostly, it will record her as Jacinda the Great, because she was Jacinda the Global Superstar. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Some of Jacinda’s global stardom was earned. Having a baby in office was a special and unusual thing, evidenced by the fact she is only the second female PM in the world to have done that. Embracing the Muslim community after the mosque shootings deserved praise too. Any other Kiwi leader might have also done it had they been in office, but she did it well. It played to her empathetic strength. –

Some of her stardom, though, was just the coincidence of timing. She just happened to be the PM at the very moment something happened that hadn’t happened for more than 100 years. A new virus swept the planet. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Of course, right now that’s hard for some to see. Some still carry a lot of anger towards Jacinda whether for vaccine mandates or Auckland’s too-long lockdowns or a litany of other stupid ideas she needs to own. The ill-timed immigration clampdown that’s strangling businesses. The wild spending that helped drive up inflation. The lending rules that drove down house prices. The economy’s in a parlous state because of decisions her government took.

Cunningly, Jacinda left the job before she could be punished at the ballot booth for what she did. She left even before the recession her government helped cause was confirmed. She’s left behind no achievements worth mentioning.

But time will move on. We will slowly pick up the pieces. And we will forget this anger.

And future generations who fete her will not understand why their parents and grandparents might scoff at her name. Because the left writes history and history will be kind to her, and their parents will just be old-fashioned grouches.

The list of the greats is littered with Labour leaders you could argue don’t deserve the spot.

David Lange, fondly remembered as a great, but for what? For a good debate, a jolly nature and a clever turn of phrase. But his government wasn’t a good one. To some, his government went too far with the pain it inflicted. To others, it lost its nerve at the last minute and didn’t finish the job.

Norm Kirk. Most famous for dying in office.

Mickey Savage. The man who started the welfare system, which is a helpful net to some but to others has become the biggest failure in New Zealand: an intergenerational trap of misery.

Prime Ministers don’t have to be great to be remeembered as one of the Greats. They just have to be remembered. Jacinda will be. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

The party that Key did a deal with back in 2008 was a party that believed in what we called localism and devolution… This is a party that now believes in two separate systems and that is something we cannot support. – National Party

This party, the Green Party in New Zealand, has changed as well. It is a more socialist party now rather than an environmental party, if we’re honest about it.

James Shaw and Eugenie Sage​, they genuinely care about the environment – but the other eight MPs actually are all interested in a whole bunch of other random stuff. That makes it really difficult. – Christopher Luxon

One of the last things Jacinda asked of us in her valedictory speech yesterday was that we “take the politics out of climate change”

I hope the MPs in that debating chamber completely ignore that.

Because think about what that means.

What Jacinda asked our MPs to do was to ignore what we the voters want, and just ram through whatever they consider necessary for climate change.

Because that’s what politics is, the contest of the different things that different voters want. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

The Government would start charging farmers for their emissions from tomorrow. That would mean up to a quarter of sheep and beef farms could shut down.

It would put the fuel tax back on petrol, so you would pay another 25c per litre effective tomorrow.  

It would drive the price of carbon up to $120 per unit as recommended, pushing your electricity bills up 5 percent, your gas bills up 7 percent, your diesel cost up 8 percent and your petrol up another 5 percent. 

There is a good reason none of that’s happening, because it would hurt us, it would make you and I poorer than we already are.

You can’t take the politics out of something like that, because voters should have a say on whether they want their lives that deeply affected. A governing party can’t just do that to people without their consent.

It’s remarkably hypocritical that she says that on her last day in Parliament, when she didn’t take the politics out of climate change herself.

She could’ve forced the climate levy on farmers when she first announced it, using a hay bale as a podium six months ago- she didn’t. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

It’s a bit rich to not do something and then try to shame the people you leave behind into doing it.

Jacinda’s not naïve, she would’ve known no one’s going to heed that call. But it looks good in the media, doesn’t it?

Especially for someone off to a position on the board of Prince William’s Earthshot Prize.

So no, let’s not take the politics out of climate change, and let’s see this request for what it is.

It’s a play to get good international headlines, and a bad idea that we should all ignore. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

In fact, she could be described as an ‘accidental’ PM – thanks to the ‘kingmaker’ Winston Peters in 2017 choosing not to form a government with National – the party that won the most votes – but with Labour instead. 

And just as Labour was not ready to be in government back then, nor was Jacinda Ardern ready to be PM – her inexperience and arrogance clearly on display through her “Captain’s Calls”, which were made  without public consultation, official advice, or sometimes even Cabinet approval.

That was certainly the case when, just a few months into her administration, she banned new offshore oil and gas exploration on the eve of an overseas meeting of world leaders. And while the decision gave her bragging rights on the world stage and helped her build her international profile, at home it was described as “economic vandalism” and a “kick in the guts” for the region, that not only put at risk 11,000 jobs and a $2.5 billion industry, but led to the tripling of imports of ‘dirty’ Indonesian coal, as New Zealand’s reserves of clean burning natural gas continue to decline.  – Muriel Newman

Conflating weather events with climate change and dramatising the effects enabled Jacinda Ardern to not only introduce the most stringent carbon restrictions of any country on earth, but to boast about it on the world stage.

It didn’t seem to matter to her that the policies she was introducing would destroy the backbone of our economy – the farming sector – nor that New Zealand’s enormous sacrifice would make absolutely no discernible difference to  global emissions. – Muriel Newman

Unsurprisingly, Jacinda Ardern did not mention Labour’s toxic He Puapua blueprint to replace democracy with tribal rule, that underpinned so much of their Maori agenda. She didn’t explain that she had deliberately kept it hidden from her Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters and from voters during the 2020 election campaign – presumably to avoid “the hilly bits”, like public opinion. 

Nor did Jacinda mention that ‘co-governance’, which has become code for ‘Maori control’, was a central component of the failing reforms she introduced for the polytechs, the health system, and Three Waters.

The polytech centralisation has turned into a disaster with cost blowouts, declining enrolments, and falling standards. 

The health system centralisation is now in danger of catastrophic failure through a chronic shortage of thousands of nurses, doctors, and medical specialists. Furthermore, health care has now been transformed into an apartheid system based on race instead of clinical need, with Maori prioritised over everyone else.

Three Waters, remains a disaster-in-waiting – a system designed to give control of water to Maori. With the architect of the reforms Nanaia Mahuta no longer in the picture, Prime Minister Hipkins is hoping some window-dressing will enable him to rush the remaining law changes through before the election – and before the majority of voters wake up to the dangerous implications of tribal control of freshwater. – Muriel Newman

In the end it was Jacinda Ardern with her absurd claim that her Government was the ‘single source of truth’, that became a major source of misinformation. Ignoring Ministry of Health advice, she imposed one of the world’s harshest lockdowns onto the country – her Orwellian call for ‘kindness’ disguising the cruelty and heartbreak caused when basic human rights were denied and businesses destroyed. – Muriel Newman

But her most glaring disaster will be the way she has left the country so deeply divided and far less cohesive than it was when she first became Prime Minister. 

In this regard alone, her legacy is one of immense damage and shame.

Having embraced identity politics throughout her administration, New Zealand is now a country divided by race, by gender, by sexuality, as well as by vaccination status. And anyone who disagrees with Jacinda Ardern’s view of the world is accused of living in a ‘rabbit hole’ of disinformation.

The situation has been exacerbated by a media that sold its integrity to become an echo chamber for her administration – instead of acting as a public watchdog and holding the government to account. – Muriel Newman

Hearing the words “Free speech is a right this House is united in defending” from a leader who attempted to introduce the most draconian new hate speech regulations in our history – that would have outlawed criticism of groups defined by gender, sexual orientation, race, age, disability, employment status, family status, religion, or political opinion – was simply bizarre.

While a fierce public backlash forced her to back down from her planned crackdown on New Zealanders’ right to free speech, she continues to claim her critics are conspiracy theorists. – Muriel Newman

The problem is that her call for censorship of the internet has gone too far. Try posting up articles on Facebook criticising the Armageddon claims of climate fanatics, and not only is your post likely to be taken down, but your site threatened with closure.

Try sharing the latest research questioning the safety of the mRNA Covid vaccines from the most reputable sources, and you risk being blacklisted.

Thanks to our Prime Minister, the internet is no longer the free frontier it once was for those who oppose the woke conspiracy. One can only hope that the big internet operators see the danger and follow the lead of Twitter’s Elon Musk to greater freedom not less.

Jacinda Ardern has left our Parliament but still wonders why she is no longer universally loved in her home country. The fact that she has not figured this out for herself is in itself enlightening, and it is that lack of realistic self-reflection that was her undoing.

A kind interpretation of Jacinda Ardern’s tenure is that she was naive and impressionable, and those weaknesses were manipulated, especially by the Maori caucus to advance their agenda for Maori rule.  Other interpretations are much less kind. – Muriel Newman

To paraphrase the late, great Billy T James: “Hey Billy, someone is stealing your gate bro! Aren’t you going to stop him?” “Nah. He might take a fence!”

These days the “takers of a fence” are crawling out of the woodwork, primed and cocked, ready to “take a fence” at any and every utterance made in their direction. Every minority group, every pressure group perceive themselves to be belittled, bullied, subjugated and repressed by one faction or another of the majority. – John Porter

The ever-growing numbers of “takers of a fence” are able to be described most appropriately as “thin-skinned”. If you’re thin-skinned, you take criticism, rejection, disappointment, and failure very hard. Being left out of anything could be perceived as a major insult.

But in truth things do not give offence; people do, by their words or actions. While it is quite common to recognise pictures, cartoons, and language as offensive, what is really offensive is that someone has represented them in such a way as to give offence. – John Porter

Contemporary issues such as abortion, homosexuality, transgender rights, multiculturalism and racism have become the battle grounds for cultural conflicts. The cultural warriors of these minorities, often ultra-minority groups, brook no criticism or denigration nor allow any exploration or investigation of their views from the outside.

Expressions and outbursts of entitlement and privilege have become an identifying feature of current times. Almost every leader in every sector is now dealing with angry stakeholders and minority groups. – John Porter

Many people feel pessimistic about their future, that there is a systemic bias in the opportunities available to their particular minority. Many are being drawn toward ideologies that legitimise themselves and create an us-versus-the-majority outlook. Many, also, feel, rightly or wrongly, that the game has been rigged against them, that they are disadvantaged in life and society is marshalled against them.

None are more so “takers of a fence” than the extremely visible and vocal transgender minority. Any attempt to debate this issue quickly becomes toxic and anyone asking any question gets immediately denounced as transphobic.

The transgender lobby and their LGB, intersex and asexual supporters are actually attacking the foundations of a democratic society by suppressing free speech, with bizarre concepts such as “trans women are women,” “gender-neutral pronouns,” or “there are more than two genders”.

There is a certain irony in that these “protectors of public enlightenment” are guilty of the very behaviour that phrase derides. We may dismiss the transgender lobby as just an extremist fringe movement, but the views, claims, rights and recognition they demand and we accept are actually infecting and affecting our politics and our culture. – John Porter

Surely the most effective way to deal with these most virulent “takers of a fence” is to ignore them. How they choose to live their lives is up to them.

More often these days, we see the trans community saying they, as a people, are disadvantaged, at risk and have fewer opportunities in life.

Seemingly, when marginalised groups such as the transgender lobby, ask for (or is it demand) recognition or understanding, it’s an attempt to make their own lives safer and more fulfilled.

Alas, they seem to have a strong desire not to allow us to ignore them. They toil diligently to keep the fires of vitriol and conspiratorial discourse aflame.

And who provides oxygen for those fires? The Main Stream Media! The MSM have a vested interest in promoting the dissent and argument as it is a creator of great headlines. – John Porter

The indisputable fact is that warfare is mankind’s greatest failure, invariably caused by dictatorial leaders with expansion ambitions. The passion to lead people is a continuing puzzle to me, I shall write about soon. – Sir Bob Jones

Still, there is a limit to the usefulness of branding within the public sector, which Three Waters and KiwiBuild chillingly illustrate. Three Waters came from from a universally acknowledged issue, in that our drinking water is literally killing people, and our sewage is flowing in the streets. Likewise, KiwiBuild arose out of rampant house price inflation which left working people unable to afford to buy or rent an adequate home, and our most vulnerable living in cars.

There is no political constituency attempting to defend the status quo here. Where Labour has got itself into trouble is in wrapping a brand around its intention to fix something, as opposed to the finished product. The problems exist because they are very hard to fix, thus it was near-inevitable that the fix would not go smoothly. Opponents would say that they compounded this by over-promising to a near fantastical degree in KiwiBuild’s case, or over-complicating in Three Waters’. But regardless, the work was made far harder precisely because there was the convenient hook of a brand around which to hold the conversation. – Duncan Grieve

Much of this only happened because the political decision was made to brand the reforms, rather than allow them to plod through as a meat-and-two-veg policy programme. Were that to have happened, they might still have got into trouble, but it would be that routine background noise typified by the RMA reforms, rather than the hurricane strength conspiracy-creating vortex that has enveloped Three Waters.  – Duncan Grieve

It tends to suggest that this government’s reliance on highly engineered communications as needing to be baked into all facets of its work has run too far, and should be deployed much more judiciously in future. Hipkins’ rebranding of Three Waters as a yawn-inducing infrastructure reform programme could be seen as the start of a new campaign to make the public service boring again. Counterintuitively, becoming more invisible might be one thing which actually restores faith in the whole institution. – Duncan Grieve

I have seen too many people’s careers and their mental health ruined by spurious allegations of transphobia… there is real fear in the arts. – Denise Fahmy

The tragedy is transgender rights, celebration of transgender humanity and its mainstream acceptance may always be tainted by the violent, self-congratulatory extremism on display in Auckland’s Albert Park.

The very intolerance that protest movements object to can be mirrored in their own protest if it becomes extremist or violent. It is implausible to play the victim and then be the bully, trampling on the civil rights of others. Free speech can die if it is not even allowed to turn into hate speech, let alone corrective debate. The bullied become the bully. Any righteous claim of vulnerability gets destroyed in the venal power of mob rule. – Alistair Boyce

The NZ public has no appetite for violent and disruptive protest following the occupation protest which effectively shut down the Wellington city CBD. There will now be a probable hardening wedge between mainstream society and the reactionary protest movement. Parents are simply not going to want their children exposed to the violent, paranoid, self-righteous victim culture that was on active and prominent display. The movement’s public manifestation is now one of violent intolerance and it seems to be spreading with supportive rallies in Christchurch and Wellington. In fact families could now prefer protection from, rather than exposure to, any contact in civil society with protest participants and their wider community. This was the manifestation during and after the parliamentary occupation protest. A protest can produce more societal division than the words that were never spoken, the lies that were never told.

The counter protest can enable the opposite agenda oxygen and a moral high ground. Intolerant bigotry may never be exposed. The vast majority of New Zealanders want a peaceful existence where they can enjoy the fruits of their labour through participation in a tolerant liberal democracy. Posie Parker never mattered to most of us but her forced exit does. The images of violence will be etched into public memory just like the final day of the parliamentary protest. Actions speak louder than words, especially when graphically displayed in mainstream media and to the world.

The Ghandi version of peaceful protest carries sincere weight and longevity of re-inclusive peace. The power to educate and forgive. This would be a far more powerful and effective form of protest than the violence and hateful rhetoric New Zealanders have been witness to. – Alistair Boyce

Elected senior Labour and Greens politicians need to look in the mirror. Hipkins, Wood, Davidson, Whanau et al, all either tacitly approved of the counter protest or were participating and even driving it. Division and differences on the back of identity politics, picking socio-economic winners and promoting ideological agendas are driving a restless sea of division in this country.

The legacy of the 6^th Labour government is fast including one of ongoing civil unrest and societal disaffection and division.

I believe the violent furore and controversy of the last few days surrounding the Posie Parker speaking tour will harden latent bigotry bringing only a ‘pot of tears’ to the transgender rainbow and the wider politics of equity, inclusion, minority rights and diversity. – Alistair Boyce

In one respect, French law is greatly superior to British or American: It doesn’t allow publishers to alter a text once its author has died. For good or evil, a written work remains the author’s unchanging legacy forever, and if a publisher doesn’t like or is offended by it, that’s tough. The publisher either prints what the writer wrote or refrains from publishing it at all.

This precludes the absurd, but also sinister, retrospective editing of books such as those that Roald Dahl wrote for children, and now Agatha Christie’s detective stories—all in the name of sensitivity to people’s feelings, but in reality to exercise power and control over the population’s thoughts in the best Stalinist manner. – Theodore Dalrymple 

Now Agatha Christie is to be “corrected” by such readers. That she’s the author whose books have sold more than any other in history, in almost every written language, doesn’t suggest to them that perhaps she doesn’t stand in need of correction, or that readers have been able to take any supposedly “offensive” language in their stride. Even where her characters utter sentiments not completely in accord with current sensibilities, no one could mistake her books for “Mein Kampf.” – Theodore Dalrymple 

In the pre-modern world positions in society were largely inherited. Some people were born with saddles on their backs and others booted and spurred to ride them – ‘The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate / God made them high or lowly / And ordered their estate’, in the words of the Victorian hymn. The meritocratic idea was the dynamite which blew up this view of the world and provided the materials for the modern era. But its reign is threatened as never before.

The 1960s and 1970s brought a wave of attacks on the meritocracy, starting with criticisms of the workings of the 11-plus exam and then broadening into denunciations of social hierarchy and social mobility. Egalitarians argued that meritocracy replaced a proper socialist idea – equality of results – with equality of opportunity. Radical activists argued in favour of collective rights (based on of opportunity. Radical activists argued in favour of collective rights (based on gender or skin colour) rather than equal opportunity for all based on ability. – Adrian Wooldridge

The radical left is now presenting a critique of meritocracy that is far more extreme than anything that has gone before it, but which also wields far more cultural heft: a woke assault on meritocracy. It starts by repeating standard leftish complaints about meritocracy: that it protects social inequality by dressing it up as cognitive inequality, thereby adding to the already intolerable pressure of modern life. Then it throws the explosive question of race into the heart of the debate. This rests on the demeaning claim that the best way to promote members of ethnic minorities is through ‘equity’ rather than ‘excellence’. It also makes it far more difficult for ordinary people to discuss the subject dispassionately and far easier for radicals to engage in demagoguery and polarisation. Even more importantly, it creates a new hierarchy of virtue at the heart of society. We are thus moving to a more ambitious stage in the left’s long social revolution: from simply dismantling meritocracy to creating a new social order based on virtue, rather than ability. – Adrian Wooldridge

The woke revolution does not simply aim to remedy past injustice. ‘The only remedy to racist discrimination,’ writes Kendi, ‘is antiracist discrimination.’ The idea is some groups by virtue of their history of marginalisation and exploitation are wiser and more moral than others. The belief that racism is not confined to intentional acts of discrimination but woven into the DNA of society implies white people are automatically guilty of harbouring racist thoughts and seeing the world through racist eyes. Racial minorities inevitably enjoy a higher moral status than whites but they also enjoy something equally important – greater access to understanding and moral wisdom. This is why the woke habitually invoke ‘lived experience’ and ‘my truth’. Conversely, white people are guilty of original sin until they do what the kulaks were supposed to do and abolish themselves as a class. ‘Abolish whiteness!’ says Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal. ‘White lives don’t matter. As white lives.’

These race-based arguments bring with them the exhumation of the pre-modern habit of judging people based on group characteristics rather than individual achievement. History is repeating itself as both tragedy and farce at the same time.

Rather than progressing towards a post-discriminatory future, we have a pyramid structure once again, but this time it’s inverted. Rather than the upper classes sitting at the top and the lower classes as the bottom, the former outcasts occupy the commanding heights. Under the new hierarchy, the more oppressed groups that you belong to, the more moral virtue you possess. Similarly, the more privileged characteristics you hold, the lower you are on the moral scale and the more you have to do to make amends for the past.

Being born into an oppressed group is not enough in itself. Indeed, minorities who don’t share woke beliefs are treated with particular disdain (as black conservatives have long known and gender-critical feminists are painfully discovering). You must have faith. That means more than just subscribing to a set of beliefs. It means having a heart that has been awakened through a process of conversion and ceaseless struggle. An aristocracy of faith is superimposed upon an aristocracy of caste: struggle can change your place in the caste system, though people who are born into a privileged caste will obviously have to struggle much harder than those who have the privilege of being born unprivileged.  – Adrian Wooldridge

This aristocracy of faith is hypervigilant and hyperactive – forever discovering signs of racism in even the smallest things  and forever organising demonstrations and cancellations. At the same time, it’s also extremely patient. The woke aristocracy’s march through the institutions is an exercise in long-term social change that should put short-term conservatives to shame.

The old notion of IQ is being replaced with WQ – a woke quotient. – Adrian Wooldridge

The global business elite is also screening people for their WQ not just by using ‘diversity’ as a criterion for selection but by soaking everything it does in woke ideology. Business schools devote far more effort to teaching about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) than about maximising shareholder value. – Adrian Wooldridge

Human resources departments are expanding their role in corporations from old-fashioned bread-and-butter questions – making sure that everyone is on PAYE, for example – to shaping the workforce. These diversity champions find it just as natural to employ a woke framework in making appointments as the old gatekeepers found it natural to employ an academic or professional framework. ‘Do our latest hires help us to hit our diversity targets? What can we do to eliminate the ever-present danger of discrimination? Are we being inclusive enough? What if our older employees harbour all sorts of unconscious biases?’ The assumption is always the same: that members of ethnic minorities will not be able to make it on the basis of their own merits, but need a helping hand from a virtuous bureaucracy.

The public and charitable sectors are even more prone to such thinking. The NHS employs ‘lived experience’ tsars on £115,000 a year despite the health service’s dire financial state. Oxfam recently found the resources to publish an inclusive language guide that included convoluted arguments about when you can use the term ‘womxn’ and when you can’t. (‘Some trans people object to the phrase on the basis that trans women are women and the use of “womxn” might suggest otherwise.’)

All this is not only changing the criteria whereby people are selected for elite positions; it is changing the people who are doing the selecting. This is not merely a struggle between the educated elite and regular people for control of the culture. It is a struggle within the educated class, with a new class of woke bureaucrats seizing power from the traditional gatekeepers of professional society, taking advantage of a combination of moral power (nobody wants to be accused of being a racist) and the growing self-absorption of professionals (many academics are more interested in publishing research than taking part in time-consuming admissions processes).

The return of inverted-pyramid thinking is replacing the concept of ‘inclusion’ with something more sinister.–

The morality of all this is up for debate. (Though I personally find the return of race-based rights deeply worrying, I realise that many profoundly moral young people disagree with me equally strongly.) But the morality of replacing the old aristocracy of talent with an aristocracy of woke also needs to be weighed against two practical consequences. The first is that it will reduce economic efficiency, as we stuff more square pegs in round holes. Meritocratic societies and institutions are much more productive than non-meritocratic ones. Singapore is a more productive society than Sri Lanka (the two had roughly the same GDPs in 1960 before Lee Kuan Yew pioneered Singapore’s meritocratic revolution). The Nordic countries are more productive than Greece and Portugal. Public companies are more productive than family companies (unless family companies bring in professional managers or subject the younger generation to a vigorous weeding-out process).

The brain drain only flows in one direction: from the non-meritocratic to the meritocratic world. This process will be self-reinforcing. One of the most reliable laws of social affairs is Rowse’s law (named after the great historian A.L. Rowse), that without first-rate people to pull in the right direction, second-raters will always appoint third-raters and fourth-raters and so on in an accelerating avalanche of mediocrity.

Reducing your economic efficiency is a foolish thing to do at the best of times, because it condemns our children to a lower standard of living than we have enjoyed. It is suicidal at a time when an increasingly belligerent China is rediscovering the virtues of meritocracy, but this time by producing scientists and technologists, not Confucian scholars.

The second is that it politicises the distribution of opportunities and jobs. One of the virtues of meritocracy is that it takes some of the heat out of job allocation: people with power try their hardest to give jobs to those who deserve them and people who are disappointed can take comfort from the fact that the system tried to be objective. But once you say there is nothing to the distribution of jobs and opportunities but the raw exercise of power, you encourage a free-for-all. And once you start deliberately privileging some groups over others on the basis of race, you reinforce ethnic enmity and reward ethnic power politics.

The new woke elite, if it continues to gain strength, is destined to rule over an increasingly divided and embittered society as people advance their interests through collective agitation rather than individual effort, and as economic growth becomes a thing of the past. Perhaps we should think a little harder about replacing the aristocracy of talent with the aristocracy of woke. – Adrian Wooldridge

Conservatives are so few at American universities that the battle to restore respect for free and open debate will have to be led by what used to be known as traditional liberals. Well, maybe there’s hope. On Wednesday Harvard University said it’s forming a new faculty-led Council on Academic Freedom dedicated to the free exchange of ideas as a cornerstone of “reason and rational discourse.”

In an op-ed for the Boston Globe, Harvard professors Steven Pinker and Bertha Madras write that “an academic establishment that stifles debate betrays the privileges that the nation grants it.” Free speech, they write, is also essential to human progress. Intellectual orthodoxy “is bound to provide erroneous guidance on vital issues like pandemics, violence, gender, and inequality.” – Wall Street Journal

After all the promises of a refocus on Three Waters, a rebrand and more entities fail to hide the fact that the Government’s water reforms remain an asset and power grab.

Increasing the number of entities quite simply misses the point. Forcibly removing assets from councils undermines the property rights of the ratepayers who have funded them over many decades. There is nothing wrong with sharing water services to drive efficiencies and reduce costs, but shotgun marriages of councils and creating additional tiers of management and bureaucracy simply won’t deliver any savings.

Three Waters 2.0 is still undemocratic, still unaccountable and still expensive. These changes simply pay lip service to the concerns raised by ratepayers and councils across the country while continuing to push ahead with these ideological reforms using their parliamentary majority. – Callum Purves

Labour’s desperate attempt to rebrand their toxic Three Waters reforms won’t fool Kiwis and won’t fix New Zealand’s water infrastructure.

The message from Kiwis is very clear – they want local water assets in local hands, and with no divisive co-governance structures imposed on them.

Today’s rebrand from the tired and incompetent Labour Government shows they just don’t get it. These are the same broken reforms, just with a new coat of paint. – Simon Watts

Yet the wheels of the Hipkins’ government are steadily loosening. Voters are already ranking it behind National on all the key issues. Moreover, the shoddy performance of some ministers in recent weeks and the tardy and inconsistent way in which the Prime Minister has dealt them, has reminded voters once more that this is one of the least talented Cabinets in a long time.

The same troubles that bedevilled Ardern and her attempts to achieve a transformational agenda are now striking at Hipkins’ attempts to restore “bread and butter” politics: ministers who simply are not up to the job.

Nor do the recent shenanigans within the Green Party over list rankings and family violence inspire any confidence that the election of more Green MPs would improve Labour’s performance in government.- Peter Dunne 

Good water services are the lifeblood of our economy and this reform still strips it out of the hands of the communities that had built it.

While we may be guaranteed a seat on the regional representation group, it will be one of nearly thirty others two steps separated from any real influence.

We had hoped the reset was the opportunity for community led water reform, but one again it’s just a case of Wellington thinking it knows what’s best for South Canterbury. –  Nigel Bowen

The number of entities have increased and the Better Off Funding for communities – a total of $1.5 billion – has been taken off the table.

The changes do not address the way in which the reform agenda has been driven from Wellington, placing Council teams under pressure with no clear certainty for water staff about their future.

It does not address the excessive amount of resources expended in driving this agenda at pace.

The real issues remain – ongoing improvement in infrastructure stymied due to funding constraints, assets being expropriated without compensation and no real property rights over these assets.

The real solution should be locally led and locally informed. – Anne Munro

Inexplicably, throughout the pandemic response the government consistently ignored or overlooked overseas advice or experience in reaching decisions, preferring instead to re-invent the wheel for itself.– Peter Dunne

New Zealand retained lockdowns long after most other countries abandoned them as too socially disruptive and ineffective against new variants like Delta and Omicron. We clung to the notion that somehow we could do what no other country had done and beat the virus, without any negative social costs.

This week’s decision smacks of the same arrogant “New Zealand is different, and we know best” approach of earlier times. According to Health Minister Verrall, more work needs to be done on whether testing to return to work earlier than the seven days for people who are not symptomatic or are mild cases, could be a safe and effective approach.

Yet, Te Punaha Matatini principal investigator, and disease modelling expert, Professor Michael Plank says the “direction of travel” internationally has been to drop isolation requirements and treat Covid19 “alongside all the other important public health issues that we have to deal with.” Britain abandoned mandatory isolation a year ago, and Australia did so late last year. – Peter Dunne

Plank’s modelling and what is happening internationally shows there is no compelling evidence for keeping isolation requirements in place in New Zealand insofar as Covid19 is concerned. Nor is doing so likely to be a popular move politically, with most sectors of the community keen to move on from the Covid19 era. Verrall’s excuse for not doing so now looks very weak, unless, of course, the government has another agenda in mind that it does not yet want to acknowledge, but for which continuing Covid19 restrictions is a convenient cover.

With the public perception of a public health service in crisis, and a reform programme that looks incoherent and disorganised, the last thing the government would want in the lead-up to the election, is the health service overrun by, and unable to cope with all the usual winter ailments. Far better, therefore, and certainly more cynical politics, to follow Baker’s suggestion and keep the Covid19 restrictions on for a little longer in the hope of keeping a lid on the spread of this year’s annual winter bugs.

Three years on, the government still seems determined to milk every political advantage it can from Covid19. – Peter Dunne

The things that make you feel good in politics don’t necessary do good. But boy, are they morally satisfying.

Legislating to stop hate speech. Using a “hecklers’ veto” to run Posie Parker out of town. Victories against hate. Job done. – Josie Pagani

Shutting down people who are hateful feels right. But counter-intuitively, banning hateful words is not the best way to stop the hate.

Nadine Strossen is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. She hates Nazis.

She hates them more than she loves free speech. Over coffee, she told me her mission is to get rid of the hate, not the speech.

She has spent decades looking at hate speech through history, and found no evidence that banning it reduces hate.  – Josie Pagani

New Zealand’s draft hate speech legislation has been put in the freezer, for now. Extending the Human Rights Act to cover hate speech against religion and politics was a well-intentioned response to the Christchurch shooting. But it is bad law.

The first red flag was the Government’s inability to define hate speech. ”You know it when you see it,” the former prime minister said.

You don’t know it when you see it. One person’s hate speech is another’s just cause. Words cannot define precisely enough what is a subjective concept. “Hate is an emotion after all,” says Strossen. “No two thinking people can possibly agree on what is hateful and what is not.”

Every argument today to justify censoring white supremacist speech was made by defenders of slavery to ban abolitionist speakers. – Josie Pagani

It is impossible to write anti-speech codes that cannot be twisted.

Worse still, hate speech legislation distracts from more effective ways of countering hate. A swastika sprayed on a Jewish school is vandalism. Burning a cross on someone’s front lawn is an illegal threat. Planning mass murder in Christchurch was already illegal in 2019, if only our secret services had been paying attention. – Josie Pagani

There are better ways to counter offensive speech than running the likes of Posie Parker out of the country. – Josie Pagani

Posie Parker is not a Nazi. She has a right to speak. The trans community also have a right to protest. It is hard to describe the line between where protest ends and the “hecklers’ veto” begins.

This matters. Because we need to keep talking.

If she had turned up to speak against same-sex marriage, she would have been ignored. Gay marriage has mainstream support. The issue is settled. The talking done. But when people are unresolved, for example, about how to love trans people without erasing the definition of a woman, the talk must continue until it is settled. – Josie Pagani

Feeling good and doing good do not have to be exclusive, as long as you know your history.

Look beyond the things you want to ban and imagine where the same legal principles could be turned against speech that should not be banned. – Josie Pagani

So the question today is “are we being ripped-off big time by the Government’s latest version of its water reforms?”

That’s the question. And my answer is a resounding “yes”. – John MacDonald

If Chris Hipkins thinks rebranding Three Waters by calling it “Affordable Water Reforms” is going to win us all over, then he obviously thinks we’re stupid.

At the end of the day, the only serious change I can see here is switching from four monstrous and unwieldy administrations to 10 monstrous and unwieldy administrations.

We’re told this means every council gets a seat at the table. But despite the Prime Minister’s insistence co-governance is long gone from Three Waters, it’s not.

Māori will still have unelected representation on these ‘regional representative groups’, with their job being to exercise and offer “strategic oversight and direction”.

However, they try to spin it, these changes are still a theft of ratepayer assets. – Tim Dower

No one’s arguing with the basic facts that drinking water isn’t up to scratch in some communities.

Wastewater and stormwater are probably much bigger problems, especially given that they’re getting mixed together all too often.

We’re told we need to spend $180 billion to bring things into the 21st century. That’s around $35,000 for every man, woman and child in the country.

Does the Government really think New Zealanders can’t work out that if this money isn’t coming from their rates, it’s coming from somewhere else?

That somewhere else is taxes. There is no magic money tap. If it’s being funded by central Government, it’s being funded by debt. Debt you and I will have to pay back. – Tim Dower

To be fair to Hipkins, he inherited a sow’s ear in Three Waters. Fat chance of making a silk purse from that. – Tim Dower

Labour is being disingenuous with New Zealanders claiming their Three Waters 2.0 policy doesn’t include co-governance, will save households thousands of dollars and will keep assets in local control and ownership.

Nothing has changed. This is the same broken Three Waters policy which forces councils into co-governed entities. – Simon Watts

In terms of savings, Labour’s own modelling showed eight entities would mean New Zealanders would pay more for water – now Labour is creating ten entities so how will Kiwis now be paying less? – Simon Watts

It is also disingenuous to state that councils will maintain control and ownership over their assets when the governance structure of the entities hasn’t changed.

The reality is you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear – Three Waters 2.0 shows Labour hasn’t listened to the concerns of New Zealanders up and down the country who have made it clear they want local control of assets and don’t want the divisive co-governance structure imposed on them.

Kiwis face a clear choice this election, Labour’s broken Three Waters, or National’s Local Water Done Well. – Simon Watts

 In 2006 Sea World executives, fearful of a backlash from the gay community, decided to change the name of the Phillip Island fairy penguin to little penguin, an act which the community itself described as ridiculous and unnecessary.

That same characterisation could be applied to the lamentably renamed Affordable Water Reforms, aka Three Waters, whose very name has become a controversially partisan clarion call. Lamentable, laughable even, because the water reforms are now less affordable in their new 10-entity formation, a victim of decreased economies of scale.

If Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ policy bonfire two months ago was telling the electorate that he had his eye on the economic ball, then this week’s tweaks, and that’s all they are, shows that Three Waters is clearly the policy hill they’re prepared to die on.

In simply changing the water entities from four to 10, but still denying local government full ownership of their assets, while retaining the 50-50 co-governance of representative groups, and denying councils a promised $1.5 billion, Labour has defined Three Waters as an election issue with a bullseye on its back.

In another word salad this week, Hipkins denied that the 50-50 model is co-governance “as it’s traditionally understood”, a statement which denies the facts and history. – Janet Wilson

But semantics aside, if Three Waters reforms come to pass on July 1, 2026 – and the odds right now are even stevens if you consider the polls – then increased water bills are a certainty. Because no matter who carves the numbers up – and many have – the costs are astronomical. – Janet Wilson

But whatever Three Waters – sorry, Affordable Water Reform – achieves in terms of providing clean drinking water for larger councils, for smaller ones losing one of their most valuable assets has the potential to be life-threatening.

Water assets represent a council’s biggest expenditure, making up 40% of an average council’s capex between 2025 and 2029, with that extending to more than 50% for some councils. That’s according to the draft report of the Review into the Future for Local Government. – Janet Wilson

Yes, councils around the country have brought this calamity on themselves by kicking the infrastructure can down the road, using the three-year electoral cycle as to why they hide from their responsibilities. But that doesn’t justify less democracy for local government, it simply creates the necessity for a more rigorous framework to ensure it’s achieved.

The need for change is indisputable; this week’s Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ report, Our Freshwater 2023, which tracks Aotearoa’s freshwater every three years, proved that when it revealed monitored lakes had worsened by 45% between 2011 and 2020.

Now voters have clearly differentiated choices on who to vote for in seeking that change. You can either choose a locally-owned model with no co-management provisions, or a centrally-based model with co-management.

But one thing is incontrovertible; however the water is managed, whoever owns it, it will be you and me paying for it in some form, either as a taxpayer, a ratepayer or as a consumer.

It’s how those costs will be distributed that’s the devil in that detail. – Janet Wilson

It sounds lovely to say ‘listen to kids’. And no one wants to say that ‘children should be seen and not heard’. (Of course not – it’s gender-critical women, the people who want single-sex spaces and single-sex sports, who should be seen and not heard, silly!) But there’s a reason that children don’t have the same rights as adults – why they can’t get a tattoo, have sex, get married, buy alcohol, fight / die for their country or drive a car. It’s because they don’t know who they are or what they’re doing yet. – Julie Burchill

There’s a reason that we writers are more likely to be witch-hunted than other professions. We love words. We know that being forced to repeat lies is how every evil regime in the world flexes its power. There’s a reason the torture of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four is followed quickly by O’Brien finally forcing him to lie about how many fingers the torturer holds up. Today, the lie about four fingers being five has been replaced by those who hold up a penis and force onlookers to say that it’s female. – Julie Burchill

Trans-rights activists hate our side because they’ve failed to force us to lie. The words they expect us to use are designed to spread untruths. ‘Genderfluid’ sounds lovely, for instance. It’s what my teenage idol David Bowie was being when he shagged around like a sailor on shore leave one day, and wore a dress the next. When I used to dance to my favourite song of his – ‘Rebel Rebel’ – I was always full of glee at the line that never got old: ‘Got your mother in a whirl / She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.’ We old people don’t look down on today’s trans antics because we’re uptight fuddy-duddies – we do so because we’re still reprobates. We find the idea of needing external validation for one’s identity pathetic. We didn’t need it from our parents; we certainly wouldn’t have wanted it from building societies to beer brands, as the softies do today. And as for the poor old whirling mum (trying her best!), today she’d be marched off to the Pronoun Police for not immediately identifying which one of the 72 BBC-approved genders her indecisive offspring was on that particular day. Boy or girl? How dare you limit my potential – today I’m otherkin!

If you go and get sterilised before you can vote, you’re not going to be genderfluid, which sounds like being a mermaid cavorting atop a unicorn. If you’re a young woman having your primary- and secondary-sex characteristics eviscerated, you’re not going to have much in the way of fluids at all – you will be scarred and desiccated instead. If you’re going the other way, you will most likely keep hold of your precious male genitalia (less than five per cent of transwomen actually have the chop). Perhaps you’ll become a big bully in too much blusher yelling at lesbians to suck your lady-dick. The first option is sad and the second is bad, but they both often have roots in mental ill-health. – Julie Burchill

One of the handy effects of wokeism is that it conveniently ignores class as a form of privilege. So if you went to a fee-paying school, but then identify as ‘queer’ or an ‘ally’, you can then behave as if you had a tougher start than, say, JK Rowling. As a child, Rowling was told that, due to her social class, the nearest she could ever get to her dream of being a writer was being a teacher. During the years she spent struggling to become a writer, she was a single parent, on benefits, escaping a violent husband. She has gone from being a billionaire to a multimillionaire through the sheer amount of money she has given away. So she doesn’t need to ponce about #BeingKind to prove she’s one of the good guys.

Meritocracy itself is now ‘racist’ and ‘the antithesis of fair’, according to one Alison Collins, a former commissioner of education in San Francisco. And in the acting racket, it certainly seems almost impossible for bright working-class kids to take work away from the privately educated pricks and princesses currently ruling the roost. Still, I do feel hopeful on reading that a new Harry Potter television series has been commissioned by streaming service Max. Let’s hope that the next lot of kids JK Rowling makes stars of aren’t such a bunch of prissy, privileged little tossers as the last lot. – Julie Burchill

Societies across the world have long recognised that we all belong to one human race, that we can best live together in harmony when there is a general belief in equality, all belonging in a united county, as one people, equals.  That principle has been steadily undermined in New Zealand since 1975, and is now gone: this is a divided nation moving from separation and partnership to co-governance, and towards two unequal race-based parliaments.

There is a choice to be made between tribal rule and equality.  We must face the issue, make a decision for ourselves, of what sort of society we want for ourselves now and for the future.  It cannot be dodged; to continue as we are is to accept racial separation. – John Robinson

This is the stark choice facing New Zealand in 2023 – to continue down the path of racial separation and division to tribal rule, or to turn back to equality so we can all proudly say ‘we are one people’, that this is our land, a proud sovereign nation where we all belong. – John Robinson

“Rishi Sunak says no women have penises…” Even a few years ago that would have been a baffling headline to read. Just as baffling as if the Tory prime minister had declared that 2 + 2 does indeed equal 4. But given the Orwellian mess we’re in on gender ideology, the prime minister’s gentle statement of biological fact – uttered in an interview with the Conservative Home website – qualifies as a bold and welcome intervention.

Indeed, whether or not sex is real has become a key dividing line in British political life. Labour leader Keir Starmer still doesn’t have a good answer to this question. A few weeks back, he said that 99.9 per cent of women do not have a penis. For him, this represented a daring shift in position, given that as recently as 2021 he was suggesting men could have a cervix. But even now, Starmer prefers to utter absurdities than risk upsetting the trans lobby: as various wags have pointed out, his 99.9 per cent claim, if true, would mean that as many as one in a thousand women have a penis. Which is still an awful lot of penises.

Starmer is going to need a better answer. Voters are sick of politicians putting gender ideology above truth and women’s rights.  – Tom Slater

All around us, the gender cult is colliding with common sense. A Scottish GP has just made headlines after being turned away from a blood-donation centre, all because he refused to answer whether or not he was pregnant. World Athletics and other sporting bodies are finally having to admit that allowing biological males to compete against biological females is as good as junking women’s sports altogether. The British people are deeply tolerant. Trans people deserve all the rights and dignity afforded any other citizen. But there is nothing “inclusive” about warping language and dispensing with women’s rights, and many members of the public are unwilling to go along with this nonsense any longer.

There’s a tendency on the left to dismiss the gender issue as a “culture war”, confected by bored right-wing commentators and Tory leaders keen to distract from their myriad failures. But this stuff really matters. Biological sex is real. And without accepting this simple, observable fact, there can be no sex-based rights – crucial protections fought for by generations of courageous women to secure their place as free and equal citizens. The grotesque spectacle of male rapists being put in women’s prisons is the logical end point of giving in to the notion that “trans women are women”, the deranged mantra of our age.

Extreme gender ideology even makes meeting the needs of trans people all but impossible. Take the the 2021 Census. At the behest of LGBT lobby groups, the Office for National Statistics introduced a puzzling question on gender identity: “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?” This esoteric activist language flew right over the heads of many Brits, particularly those for whom English is not their first language, rendering the results meaningless. Going by responses to the census question, as academic Michael Biggs has revealed, trans people are apparently wildly overrepresented in areas with fewer native English speakers. Worse still, this question has now “become the default for taxpayer-funded surveys in England and Wales”. How can we allocate resources and assistance to those struggling with gender dysphoria if we have no idea where they tend to live?

Is the tide finally turning on the gender extremists? There are certainly some encouraging signs. The government is mulling over changes to the Equality Act, to clearly define sex as biological sex and so bolster sex-based rights. – Tom Slater

 Gender-critical feminists and gay-rights campaigners have successfully fought for their voice to be heard, setting up organisations, refusing to be cowed, and making clear that concern about trans ideology is not confined to the Tory right. Politicians are slowly realising this stuff is electoral cyanide.

But the fight is far over. So many of our institutions remain captured by gender ideology. The Tory Party isn’t even particularly united, clear-eyed or ballsy on these issues. (Rishi Sunak was still dodging “the woman question” as of a year ago.) Now is no time to be complacent. We need to push back this deeply regressive movement once and for all. Saying women don’t have penises is – or rather should be – the easy bit.  – Tom Slater

Quite why this Government is so keen on a slow mode of mass transport eludes most people. Since it loves railways, callers asked, why doesn’t it concentrate on the one we have? Mayor Wayne Brown is saying the same. – John Roughan

The trouble with politicians who offer what they call “vision” is that their visions don’t last very long. No sooner was central Auckland being dug up for the CRL than Phil Twyford, then Transport Minister, wanted light rail to the northwest because the CRL would not make the existing western line much quicker.

Now Twyford’s replacement, Michael Wood, is proposing another tunnel out of the city centre for light rail to Māngere, tunnelling near the western line as far as Morningside. Even light rail enthusiasts think this is nuts. Cyclists said the same about his bike bridge.

Every time I see this young minister in the news I wonder how his career has survived the bike bridge. In 60 years of following New Zealand politics, I can’t remember a decision as silly. Yet here he still is, his credibility in the Labour Party and even within the Press Gallery apparently undiminished. He was touted as a leadership contender when Jacinda Ardern resigned.

He is very left wing and he holds three important economic portfolios, transport, immigration and employment. He has given trade unions power to dictate industry pay minimums, retains close control of work visas in the face of labour shortages and, on the evidence of the bike bridge, has no sense of the value of public money.

That project was to be financed with unspent money in the Covid Relief Fund, which didn’t really exist. It was just a name given to a Budget estimate for getting through the pandemic. But as the economy recovered from lockdowns quicker than expected, the money left in the “fund” caused the Government to lose its fiscal head. – John Roughan

When the decision was met with general scorn, the Government said it would instead build another vehicular crossing a decade earlier than scheduled. It was a face-saver.

Big investment decisions such as this are best left to the NZ Transport Agency, which schedules them objectively against other calls on petrol tax revenue. In the meantime, we can probably ignore visions a previous Herald editor with fine instinct called “things we’ll never see”.

But it is no joke that a minister who has shown abysmal investment judgment is now wasting our money to plan and design another mirage. – John Roughan

When Putin started his illegitimate war in Ukraine nearly 14 months ago, he claimed it was for its “demilitarisation and denazification”. Almost all security analysts, however, rejected this ridiculous suggestion. One of the real motivating factors, along with reclaiming territory Russia once controlled, was to reduce NATO influence in the region.

On Tuesday, he got the exact opposite.

Finland’s decision to join NATO reverses decades of military non-alignment. Since the end of the Second World War, Finland has sought to align itself with the West in trade and political terms – it has been a member of the EU since 1995. On security matters, though, it has maintained a neutral stance.

By invading Ukraine, Putin has pushed Finland to abandon this policy and run into NATO’s embrace. – Benjamin Macintyre

NATO does not force anyone to join. Prospective members must be democracies (although Turkey is a stretch in that regard). Whilst, in theory, NATO invites potential members, in practice, they ask to be invited first.

All this is to say that countries do not join NATO for no reason at all. It is almost always a reaction to increased insecurity. And which state has been the most destabilising on the periphery of Europe? No prizes for guessing.

Russia wanted less NATO influence. It got more. Hopefully, this will show Putin that he cannot bully his way to a compliant Eastern Bloc – though this lesson will likely go unheeded. – Benjamin Macintyre

I remember Primary School maths as being about learning to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Once we had learned those things, we took on fractions and decimals.

There was geometry too, of course. By the Intermediate years we were tackling algebra and trigonometry.

But a brave new era is dawning in mathematics education. We no longer need all that so-called ‘objective’ arithmetic. And who says a triangle must have three sides?

The way ahead, according to the Ministry of Education, is to “use maths to develop critical awareness about wider social, environmental, political, ideological, and economic issues.”

According to the Ministry’s new Common Practice Model (CPM), what will help children learn this new kind of mathematical thinking, is something called ‘critical maths pedagogy’. The CPM tells us that children should be “encouraged to interrogate dominant discourses, including that maths is benign, neutral and culture-free”.

Teachers must no longer take for granted that arithmetic works the same for everyone. For example, whether two plus two equals four depends on a student’s cultural background. According to Jason To, President of the Ontario Mathematics Coordinators Association, if you insist that the statement, ‘two plus two equals four’ is an objective fact, you are guilty of “covert white supremacy.”

Mr To is right to call out mathematics for its racism. The Arab mathematicians who gave us the concept of algorithms were heinous white supremacists. And the Indian mathematician Aryabhatta, who came up with the number zero, is known to have had a penchant for white hoods and burning crosses.

As always, the Ministry is right too. Critical pedagogy will make mathematics much easier for children to learn. If there are no ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ solutions to mathematical problems, it follows that any solution is as good as any other.

Even better, when young people leave school, getting into careers that require mathematical skills will be straightforward. Gone will be all the heavy mathematical lifting currently required to become an economist or engineer.

Having dispensed with the, frankly racist, idea that mathematical problems have ‘correct’ answers, designing a bridge will be a doddle. If mathematics is subjective, then so, by extension, are the so-called ‘laws’ of physics. And critical maths will come as a huge relief to those struggling to pay their mortgages in these days of rising interest rates.

All we need now is for reality to get with the new ‘critical maths’ programme. – Michael Johnston

How can any New Zealand prison be near capacity when the prison population has been actively reduced by well over twenty percent since Labour became government?

The possibility arises that one singular prison might still be “nearing capacity” but on reading that the prison in question is Rimutaka, that is also suspect.  – Lindsay Mitchell

There are some fundamental questions that arise out of a directive to police to make other provision for detainees because Rimutaka is “nearing capacity” that haven’t been asked.

Or if they were, they haven’t been answered.

Despite Correction’s high-profile recruitment campaign, I suspect the directive is based on the safety of corrections officers if staff/prisoner ratios get too high. And that is a valid concern.

But to have come to this dangerous impasse is more evidence of a government failing and flailing with its lack of consistent, coherent policy and planning.- Lindsay Mitchell

After the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, markets became concerned about Greece’s ability to repay its debts.

Until the crisis hit, rating agencies were relaxed about Greece’s solvency. Fitch rated the country as ‘A’ in October 2008, Standard & Poor’s gave it an ‘A-’ in January 2009, and Moody’s gave it an ‘A1’ in February 2009.

But by 2011, all three agencies had downgraded Greek debt to junk status.

Ratings may seem fine and markets relaxed, but sentiment can change quickly.

The three agencies currently rate New Zealand as AA+, Aaa and A+, respectively. But these high-grade ratings should not give us a false sense of security. There are reasons to be concerned about New Zealand’s economic prospects.

Our current account deficit last month was the largest in over three decades. Given rising price levels, that is not surprising, but the deficit was also the highest relative to GDP, at 8.9 percent.

The result is that every 11^th dollar New Zealand spends is a dollar it must borrow abroad. – Oliver Hartwich

New Zealand’s price inflation remains uncomfortably high. The Reserve Bank expressed concern about the economy showing signs of overheating and the labour market being too tight. Both are results of the enormous amount of money created during Covid.

Because of our own policy choices, New Zealand has become a less attractive destination for migration and investment.

A decade ago, New Zealand’s government was much smaller than it is today. Erratic policy making has also created a perception of greater political risk.

Once international markets become alarmed, their worries can become self-fulfilling, as we have seen internationally.

In the event of a credit downgrade, interest rates would likely rise. The impact on household consumption and investment would be significant.- Oliver Hartwich

New Zealand’s economic circumstances have deteriorated so much over the past few years that a credit rating downgrade would be a lagging indicator of our economic troubles.

This scenario may noy be imminent. But it is something to watch out for. – Oliver Hartwich

Half of it [inflation] can be explained through oil prices, the Ukraine war, Covid supply chain shortages that will go up and down, [and] will sort itself out over time. But half of it is purely domestic, purely domestic, because we’ve had a government spending a billion dollars extra … each and every week. – Christopher Luxon 

We’re six months to the day from October’s election and the latest economic forecast from Infometrics paints a bleak picture for Labour’s strategists. 

Infometrics is forecasting high inflation will persist, stuck at 6.6% at the end of this year with a return to a one-to-three percent target not forecast until mid-2025. – Jack Tame 

The curious thing about the Infometrics forecast is that it underscores a growing sense that New Zealand’s inflation battle is diverging from comparable countries.

CPI data in the U.S this week has a year-on-year rate of 5%, way down from the post-Covid high of 9.1%. The Eurozone went from 8.5% in February to 6.9% in March. And the head economist of Australia’s biggest bank is flirting with the possibility of mortgage rate cuts later this year.

Meanwhile, Infometrics is forecasting New Zealand’s inflation will remain stubbornly high, and the cash rate could be raised another 50 basis points in the next few months. What’s more, the speed with which mortgage rates have risen will not be matched by the speed of cuts when we do reach the other side.   – Jack Tame 

We’re hardly the only developed democracy with a cost-of-living crisis. But if New Zealand lags behind comparable countries in bringing inflation down, voters’ patience with that argument will deteriorate quickly.  

The government knows this. There is a reason Three Waters is now called the Affordable Water Reforms, even though it delivers fewer savings and is less affordable from a ratepayer perspective than the previous model. There’s a reason we’ll hear “bread-and-butter” over and over again. But slogans and branding will only help so much, and for now Grant Robertson is still planning a significant operating allowance in the budget next month.  

The Infometrics forecast make it crystal clear. Forget co-governance or education, climate change, mental health, or the All Blacks prospects at the World Cup, six months today the 2023 general election will be decided by voters with an intense focus on their back pockets. And if New Zealand isn’t making meaningful progress on taming inflation and other countries are, it’ll be that much tougher for Labour to win a third term.  – Jack Tame 

The question for our esteemed Finance Minister Grant Robertson is, how long can he keep saying with a straight face that “we are well placed” to deal with what is an increasingly obvious economic calamity.

The 50 basis point official case rate increase from Adrian Orr last week pretty much blew whatever credibility was left out of the water. New Zealand is now into outlier territory.- Mike Hosking

It also seems pretty much certain we are in a recession or, if per chance we aren’t, we are about to be. There is too much economic evidence piling up for us to avoid the so-called “hard landing”. The Government’s tax take is coming in now under budget. The cost of the government’s debt is rising. The size of that debt as a percentage of GDP is going up. The ratings agencies are now publicly commenting on it and talking of possible downgrades.

The trade deficit is at record levels, we are not selling enough to the world to offset what we are bringing in. The main foreign exchange earners of tourism and dairy are now problems for the economy. Tourism is back at 50 per cent of what it was, and the speed of the resurgence post the borders opening is now slowing. When it’s slowing and you are still only at 50 per cent you have issues.

Dairy has demand issues, and the auction numbers of late look increasingly worrying.

While all that is going on, the Government continues to spend beyond its means. The previous Saturday 1.4 million of us got more money, not because we did anything to earn it, but simply because the cost of everything was rising.

Think about that, the Government borrowed yet more money to hand out to people who need yet more money to pay for things, because the cost of everything is going up. That is called a wage/price spiral: one feeds the other.

The fact no one made anything to earn that money is the red flag; the Government didn’t have the money either, it borrowed it.  – Mike Hosking

That is the one bright part of the economy. Everyone has work.

But they have work because we haven’t let enough people into the country to avoid the wage-price spiral that’s been engineered.

I say engineered because there can be no other reason for keeping the immigration settings the way they have been, other than to drive prices and wages up in an artificial fashion. – Mike Hosking

So along with Australia, we can now almost certainly add Britain, most of Europe and indeed the US, to the list of countries that appear to be avoiding recession. They appear to be managing a soft landing to their economic circumstances.

And while we know why we aren’t able to achieve the same feat, the real question is how come? How is it we have got this so spectacularly wrong? Benefit of hindsight is always useful but the mistakes seem increasingly obvious.

Too much printed money. Too much of that money spent on things that had nothing to do with Covid. Not enough questions and rigour around where the money was spent and what value, if any, it was adding. A funding for lending programme for banks that had no rules around it. An immigration setting that fuelled wage spikes. An immigration setting that because of delays, led people to choose other countries. And an increasingly frustrated Reserve Bank governor who asked the government to rein it in, as well as telling the public to cool their jets. Both parties ignored him, because the Government loves debt, and we all had pay rises.

Like a slow-moving train wreck, this is all coming back to haunt us. The tragedy of it all is we are increasingly seeing places where it isn’t as bad.

Grant Robertson likes to say it’s not a game of comparisons: actually, it is. And we lose. – Mike Hosking

A big education announcement from the Government- they’re reducing class sizes for primary and intermediate schools.

Classes will drop from 29 to 28. You cannot make this stuff up. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Let’s be realistic about what that’s going to do, it’s going to give the 28 remaining kids in the class an extra 6 seconds an hour with the teacher.

No parent believes that’s enough to, as the Education Minister reckons, turn around our decline in reading writing and maths. 

Really the saddest thing about today’s announcement, apart from the lack of ambition is that this is a recycled promise from Labour. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

This is not even an announcement worth making. You have to question the political wisdom of hauling the PM out to announce this.

This just opens Labour up to ridicule for thinking it’s worth announcing class size reduction of one student, and it reminds voters that previous promises were more ambitious- and never delivered on.

Few should be impressed by this and few should expect it to happen.  – Heather du Plessis-Allan

The  problems  don’t end in the households in the cities. Farmers on  whom  the country depends  for  most of the countries’ export income have been hard hit by  inflation, as  well as  by the climate warriors who are calling on the government to cut herd  numbers (and methane emissions)  just  when  the nation  needs every cent  it can earn from export receipts.

So  the  issues are piling up on the government.  And  even if  Hipkins can solve them  all, will the average punter think  he deserves  another term, as government debts pile up to be paid at a later date? – Point of Order

Well, I’ve got some good news for those at the upper end of income earning who may have been wondering when the tax axe was about to fall, forcing them to haemorrhage more.

It turns out, our tax system is pretty fair and equitable after all.

A new study completed for tax consultancy firm  OliverShaw concludes that the wealthy in New Zealand pay most of the tax collected.  OliverShaw is headed by the former deputy commissioner at IRD, Robin Oliver.

Oliver says that the higher their income, the more they pay. Those earning lower incomes end up paying less tax because of the various tax credits, and other payments they’re eligible to receive.   – Roman Travers

By the way, there are no plans for tax reform before the election.

The big concern I have is that this government is spending money as if it grows on trees, but their expenditure is now too high compared to the taxation system we currently use.  

The outcome of the study, maybe reassuring for those with salubrious incomes, but it still leaves one big question unanswered: where do we go to get the money required to lift New Zealand out of the quagmire? 

Even though the outcome of the study is quite clear, do you really trust any government not to tinker with the taxation dials once the election is won?  – Roman Travers

Labour’s water reform process has become such a confused and garbled mess it may turn voters away from even trying to understand what’s going on.

Certainly, Labour hopes that’s what happens. Razzle dazzle the country with alarming facts on water and supply and quality issues, then confuse everyone by harping on about a term some consultant handpicked – called ‘spreadsheet’ balance – then announce more entities, saying this will fix it then back it up with some nonsense forecast that claims future savings are massive if we go this way.

Great stuff – a perfect smoke screen in which to hide the real reason and the remaining reason why people are still outraged over this trainwreck change.

Co-governance. More on that soon. But, in the meantime, more cheap talk.

Cheap talk can work to defuse and delay and confuse in the meantime, especially when your own Māori caucus has boxed you in, got you by the gonads, and won’t budge on this thing called co-governance. – Duncan Garner

In politics, talk is cheap but mostly that’s what politicians do. They relaunch, reheat, they fill gaps; their brains aren’t always attached to their mouths and they say things they think people want to hear.

Like, for instance, much bigger savings in the years ahead – but only if we keep this current Government in power and let them push through their new Affordable Water Reforms.

How on earth do you save money on future costs that are yet be finalised when you haven’t spent the money yet?

And, anyway, when did a recent New Zealand infrastructure project of this magnitude come out cheaper? Who trusts this public service and this Government to announce they’ve come in under budget on anything? – Duncan Garner

Labour’s Māori caucus has insisted Māori have influence on the boards governing water in New Zealand. (While each entity will be run by a professional board, strategic oversight and direction would be provided by local representative groups with every local council in the country, as well as mana whenua, getting a seat at the table.)

Ardern barely addressed the issue while she was in power and, on the way out, couldn’t explain why it was necessary.

Now, equally, PM Hipkins looks like he’s been in three rounds of boxing tag with various Māori MPs from within the Labour Party.

Every time someone gets tired, a new Māori MP joins the fray; problem is, Hipkins is the punching bag every time and he’s failed to rein in or convince his Māori MPs how unpopular the concept is. – Duncan Garner

This is all not much more than lipsticking the pig, really.

The savings being talked about are pie in the sky and quite irrelevant to the issue.

First, do we need to secure our water systems and make them better and healthier and more sustainable?

Yes we do, because people have died and continue to die because our water systems are old, unreliable, and can’t be trusted.

But, in the process of cleaning up our water supplies, Labour allowed Māori to fundamentally rewrite our approach to co-governance and how we view the Treaty of Waitangi itself.

And that just got left untouched by Hipkins who didn’t want an election-year fight with his own MPs. Last time this happened, the Māori Party was formed by outgoing Labour MP Tariana Turia.

Hipkins just got rolled. Make no mistake.

So, who is running the country? Willie Jackson and Nanaia Mahuta?

Surely not… – Duncan Garner

For many, youth and old age are mere facts of life that one must confront. But at the University of Exeter, they merit a trigger warning. – Ewan Somerville

Youth and old age are as unproblematic as the moon and the sun, or trees and grass, so where do you stop?

“What we have now are trigger warning obsessives in search of a never-ending mission. – Professor Frank Furedi

What does politics produce when mixed with violence and intimidation?

Sadly nothing constructive, plus a humungous helping of anger, division, recrimination, spleen and confusion. Oh, and headlines. Lots of headlines. – Tim Wilson

First, we must acknowledge the genuine human anguish in these exchanges. Some charge that Posie Parker deliberately created the melee by holding an outdoor meeting. However, it’s difficult to feel genuine joy at the sight of a diminutive woman being escorted by security through a baying mob. Moreover, the activist who threw the tomato juice has a tortured history of being shamed and disparaged for their gender journey. Wounded people wound.

Next, beware the ideology cartoon. Jargon like “anti-women” and “TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist)” hinders rather than helps. Such vocabulary exacerbates division. Political movements throughout history have used words to drain the humanity from their opponents. Let’s syphon the cortisol from the lingo.

(It is not to the media’s credit that it accepts and repeats these crude summaries in the service of an equally dangerous idol: The Clickbait-Inducing Headline.)

Free speech expert Jacob Mchangama contends that free speech has historically assisted the vulnerable, for example during the American Civil Rights battle.

Another reflection: Majorities aren’t always right and don’t always support free speech. More than 2000 protestors were against Posie Parker, wanting to stop her from speaking; her own group was significantly smaller. Yet free speech expert Jacob Mchangama contends that free speech has historically assisted the vulnerable, for example during the American Civil Rights battle.

Moreover, context is essential. Given the vehemence in and around the issue of trans rights and how they may impinge on the rights of others, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we have a problem with trans people here. Not so; apparently, we’re world leaders in respecting transgender rights.

Lastly, hate (no matter how self-righteously obtained) cannot extinguish injustice. – Tim Wilson

These days, everybody—by which I mean every person who considers himself intelligent and educated—must have an opinion about everything. It would be socially irresponsible, even antisocial, not to be able to opine on each of the thousand burning questions of the day. The natural result is that opinion comes before its own justification, and most intellectual activity consists of finding reasons for what one already thinks. Perhaps it was ever thus. – Theodore Dalrymple 

But self-interest is not always on the side of the devil, and though I have not studied the question deeply—nor even shallowly—I suspect that the move to electric cars is based upon a giant confidence trick, foisted on corrupt governments all too willing to be duped by smiling entrepreneurs. (One may smile, and smile, and be a villain, as Hamlet said.)

The questions about the electrification of vehicles are many and obvious. How is the electricity necessary for the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of such vehicles to be generated and distributed? How are enough minerals for the batteries to be mined? How are the extinct batteries to be disposed of? Is not pollution merely being transferred from one area of the globe to another in what one might call blatant imperialist fashion?

The answers to these questions are technical and are no doubt additionally complicated by the prospect of technological advance—which, however, cannot be predicted with certainty. Curiously enough, however, the questions do not seem to be discussed very often, or even raised. – Theodore Dalrymple 

I have not the time, nor the patience, nor the technical engineering capacity, to answer the questions properly, and so I stick firmly to my belief, which I am prepared to argue for in any bar or over any dinner table, that electric cars are a giant fraud perpetrated on the public by the corporatist state, in the process punishing the poor who will have to pay dearly if they want to go anywhere—which, of course, the Duke of Wellington, reacting to trains as a cheap means of transport for the multitudes back in the early part of the 19th century, thought they shouldn’t anyway. – Theodore Dalrymple 

We live in a world where a man who masquerades as a sportswoman is showered with praise and money while an actual sportswoman is branded a ‘stupid fucking bitch’ and punched in the face. A world where a bloke can be paid thousands of dollars to prance around in a sports bra in a grotesque parody of a female athlete while a real female athlete is set upon by a seething mob and told to ‘go the fuck home’. A world where a man in leggings doing a sub-Dick Emery satire on womanhood is held up as a role model while a young woman who trained her whole life to be an elite athlete is damned as a bigot and – direct quote – a ‘transphobic bitch’. – Brendan O’Neill

 A man in women’s sportsgear is fawned over by the right-on while a woman who wants to protect women’s sports is monstered by them. A man does a sardonic take on women’s ‘girly’ workouts and progressives cry, ‘Go, girl’. A woman stands up for the right of women to have their own sports and progressives shout, ‘Shut up, bitch’. The confluence of these two stories is perfect. It captures what a devastating impact the trans ideology has had not only on women’s rights, but also on the entire category of womanhood. That the elites feel more comfortable with a man’s frivolous performance of womanhood than they do with a woman’s passionate, reasoned defence of womanhood confirms that the trans ideology has laid waste to truth, science and sexual equality. All that is left in the wake of this deeply misogynistic ideology is the skin of womanhood, the accoutrements of it, the mask and the drag and the lippy. That’s why, in certain circles, Dylan Mulvaney is a more respected ‘woman’ than Riley Gaines – because he performs the caricature so much better than she does. – Brendan O’Neill

Gross parody of my sex’ – those words ring in my ears whenever I see Dylan Mulvaney. And many of the other ‘transwomen’ we’re meant to treat as actual women. ‘Trans women are women’, as the mantra goes, a mantra that was bellowed with medieval ferocity in the face of the witch, Riley Gaines. Today, though, there’s more than ‘kneejerk etiquette’ demanding that we recognise these fellas with stubble and hirsute fingers as women. An entire new machinery of authoritarianism has been fashioned to pressure us to believe that transwomen are women and to punish those, like Gaines, who dare to demur. Public shaming, blacklisting and even violence are now used to force all to acquiesce to the idea that someone like Dylan Mulvaney is a girl.

Mulvaney’s schtick is incredibly sexist. His diary of ‘girlhood’ gives the impression that femaleness is an act. You thought womanhood was biological, cultural, historical and relational, a thing of real substance and meaning? Think again. It’s drag, basically. It’s eyeshadow and hair extensions.  – Brendan O’Neill

Let’s be clear about this: the idea that a man becomes a woman simply by having a facelift and popping a few pills and maybe having his knob removed is profoundly misogynistic. In Greer’s words from 1989, it promotes the idea ‘that the female is no more than a castrated male’. These days a bloke doesn’t even have to be castrated to become a woman. The demeaning of women as castrated males has been replaced by the even more repugnant demeaning of them as dolled-up males. Fellas, if you have access to mascara, wigs and tucking tape to hide your cock, you too can become a woman. Put on your leggings, do a couple of high kicks, open your mouths to make yourselves look dim and vacuous, and hey presto, you’re a lady. Anyone can do it.

The trans ideology has rendered womanhood meaningless. It has emptied it of its truths and reduced it to mere costume, one that anyone can don. As Greer has argued, the trans ideology is entirely counter-feminist, in that it treats ‘femininity’ as the core truth of womanhood. Femininity is a ‘role you play’, says Greer, ‘and for that to become the given identity of women is a profoundly disabling notion’. It really has become the given identity of women. Mulvaney is a celebrated ‘woman’ precisely because he performs femininity so enthusiastically, while Gaines is a demonised woman because she has the audacity to push back against the idea that womanhood is a performance and argues that, actually, it’s real. Biologically, culturally real. That Mulvaney’s gross parody of womanhood enjoys greater validation than Gaines’ sincere defence of women’s rights speaks to the misogyny that has been unleashed by the trans cult.

The problem isn’t Dylan Mulvaney himself. It’s the fact that the chattering classes, the White House and big businesses like Nike Women and Bud Light are all falling at his feet and saying: ‘Yes, Dylan, you are a girl.’ In doing so, they don’t only flatter one bloke’s delusions – they also give official sanction to the sexist idea that womanhood is nothing more than cosplay. And if women aren’t real, what’s the need for women’s rights? It’s a short step from treating womanhood as a joke to treating women as jokes. – Brendan O’Neill

Of all the open invitations to fraud ever issued, the concept of mental health must have been among the most successful. In the past, there was the idea of mental hygiene, which conjured up images of experts pouring disinfectant into people’s minds and giving them a good clear-out, but it was never as popular an idea as that of mental health, which allows people such as Prince Harry to present themselves as unwell and therefore worthy of pity, especially of self-pity.

No doubt the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, which is produced more or less on the same principles as those of a carpet salesman haggling over the price of a carpet in a Moroccan souk, will one day turn self-pity into an illness, after which the self-pitying will be able to pity themselves for being so self-pitying, meta-self-pity as it were. Indeed, they will be able to take time off work to struggle with, as the phrase goes, their self-pity: a struggle that is doomed to failure, as was the attempt to kill the hydra by decapitating it. – Theodore Dalrymple

Where mental health is the cynosure of every person seeking time off work or early retirement on medical grounds at the expense of others, it is not surprising that supposed fragility should be deemed both desired and desirable. Self-sufficiency in such circumstances seems almost callous and unfeeling. Mental fragility, besides, is a source of employment for all those who want to turn their compassion into cash—who are not a few, and growing more numerous by the year, if not by even shorter intervals.

A population trained up to fragility is therefore highly desirable from a certain point of view. Such a population will be the helping professions’ milch cow, the goose that lays its golden egg. If I believed in conspiracies, I would say that those who indoctrinate children about the imminent end of the world because of climate change are in the pay of the monstrous regiment of mental health workers, who require a timid, shallow, anxiety-ridden population in order to guarantee their future income by promising to restore it to that mirage-like entity, mental health. – Theodore Dalrymple

If Mrs. Goodenough’s child, who probably started worrying about these matters from the age of 10 or 11 at the latest, is a typical child, as the newspaper implies, it is perfectly obvious that those who teach children about climate change at such an age are, in effect, child abusers. They have no idea of childhood as an age of innocence or carefreeness. In their view, children ought to be inducted into the most pressing of abstract concerns almost as soon as they are able to speak. (I do not enter into the question of how far these concerns are actually realistic or justified.)

A psychologist to whom the newspaper spoke suggested that there was only one real solution for the children’s anxiety, and this was for them to become activists—millions of Greta Thunbergs, I suppose. The climate should be to children what Hitler was to the Hitler Youth or communism to the Young Pioneers. That it was possible that children were not in a position, and did not know enough, to pronounce on how the world should be organized, did not cross the mind of the authors of the article. For them, childhood was not an age of innocence but of knowledge and wisdom.

Concern for the environment is not the same as dragooning children into fascistic regiments of humorless automata. The problems are undoubtedly huge, but they are also complex. Moreover, no age has been without its threats and dangers, and in many respects young people today are immensely privileged by comparison with their forebears, though they are too ignorant to know it and their teachers are too ignorant to teach it. – Theodore Dalrymple

“No one died from a lack of empathy,” was how Brown responded to Jack Tame’s persistent baiting on another of Bush’s findings, that the residents of the Super City were ill-served by the mayor’s less than emotive response to the rapidly deteriorating weather that overwhelmed the city. And Brown is right.

I appreciate we live in a post-modern world where intentions matter more than outcomes, but really, just fix the culverts so I don’t have to judge if the depth of the water covering the road is higher than the air intake of my engine.

I don’t want empathy. I want drains that work and reliable weather forecasts. – Damien Grant

Brown is confronted with a $295 million gap between revenue and spending, and is proposing to do something no other political leader in the last 40 years has seriously attempted: a reduction in spending.

Even more remarkably, he is outlining in advance the services he wishes to cut and asking those who live within his jurisdiction to comment on the proposals. – Damien Grant

The point is that Auckland has a mayor who is doing what he said he would do, or at least he is attempting to do so. His authority is restricted by the cumbersome structures he must work within.

You may not agree with his proposals or style, but he is being honest about the problems and canvassing the hard decisions a responsible political leader should be discussing with their electors.

If you look beyond his undiplomatic demeanour and contempt for those he feels are contemptible, we see a political leader more interested in outcomes than optics; and given his sartorial selections, he clearly isn’t worried about optics.

Meanwhile, the extent of the economic and institutional malaise in the capital is an order of magnitude larger than that facing the Super City. Regardless of your political perspective, Brown is providing a model for how democratic leaders can confront the serious challenges that lie before us.

Perhaps our national politicians should trust the electorate and the electorate may surprise them with a willingness to accept that hard decisions need to be made. – Damien Grant

The political hyenas that reside in The Beehive are rounding on the Greens. There’s a whiff of fresh blood in the air. This week, the party has been in self-sabotage mode, feeding information to the media about Tai Rāwhiti-based Green MP, Dr Elizabeth Kerekere.

The writing is on the wall. It’s tickets for Dr Kerekere. Her political career is all but over.

Her crime was to call the party darling, Chlöe Swarbrick, a “crybaby” in a misfired WhatsApp message to the wrong group of Green MPs and staff. The media didn’t need to know about it. In terms of political errors, it was hardly the worst crime in the world. So why did the Greens leak this information to journalists?

It’s simple. The Greens need a reset. Some Green MPs have been running riot in our democracy over the past few weeks, using reckless language, fuelling polarisation in our communities, and acting like hapless student protestors. Dr Kerekere has, quite by accident, put her name forward to be the sacrificial lamb, and has given the Greens the perfect opportunity to look principled and rein in some of their rogue MPs who shoot first, and think later.   – Rachel Smalley

 You could be forgiven for assuming ‘labelling’ is a Green Party policy – if you have criticised a Green policy and you weren’t labelled a Boomer, a Terf, privileged, a climate change-denier, a Nazi, a transphobe, or a pale, stale, male, can you truly claim to have even lived? 

Marama Davidson leads from the front on this issue. The Greens co-leader is proof the fish always rots from the head, most recently labelling “white cis men” the cause of all the violence in the world. And Davidson robustly refuses to apologise.  – Rachel Smalley

There were shades of David Cunliffe in Shaw’s reply. Who could forget the former Labour Party leader apologising for being a man in 2014? Shaw’s retort suggests one of two things: that Davidson is actually in full control of the party, or Shaw concurs with Davidson’s “white cis men” assertion. Either way, Shaw has lost credibility among all but the party’s staunch base.

The most concerned by all of this will be the Prime Minister. If he’s to form a government in October, Chris Hipkins will need the Greens and he finds himself in an interesting conundrum. Hipkins has moved his party so far to the right that he could probably find more common ground with National. He’ll be feeling vulnerable right now. The Greens are unpredictable and increasingly fanatical; and, given the proximity of the election, they pose the biggest risk to Labour’s hopes of re-election – and it’s a risk Labour will struggle to mitigate.  – Rachel Smalley

If the Greens are capable of true self-analysis, they should recognise the need to reset the party’s communication strategy. And if they’re smart, they’ll use the opportunity to reposition themselves as authoritative, disciplined, and virtuous – three key attributes the Greens do not possess, and they’ve proven as much in the past month. Their reckless use of language and their bullying behaviour was on display throughout the tortuous Posie Parker affair. 

The Greens’ inflammatory, and at times frenzied, commentary on social media most certainly played a key role in fuelling the rage, unrest, and entitlement on both sides of the argument at last month’s Albert Park anti-trans rights protest. And it should not be lost on Davidson that it was two cis-gendered white men that stepped in to add some nuance to the situation.  

Former chief science adviser to the Prime Minister, Sir Peter Gluckman, was the first to speak up on an issue that is important to trans and cis-gendered women. And he was followed by chief human rights commissioner Paul Hunt. Both men were concerned for the social cohesion of our country – and our national unity. 

Sir Peter said: “We’ve seen the weaponisation of narrative, particularly through social media, and these things polarise people, make people scared, which in turn reinforced the ability for people to be more polarised.” – Rachel Smalley

Commissioner Hunt said as much too. He said if women are concerned about an erosion of their rights, particularly in women-only spaces, they should be able to speak to those concerns. The message was clear: it’s okay to talk. Constructive conversation in a calm and reasoned space is 100% the right way forward.

But that’s not how the Greens see it.

In our rapidly changing society, the Greens resort to what they know best – student activism. They become emboldened and battle-ready. Forget Posie Parker. She was the canary in the coal mine. It’s clear the Greens will continue on their mission to silence fair-minded New Zealand women who want a seat at the table, and to contribute to the Government’s changing political language around women, and access to women-only spaces.

The Greens won’t move on this issue. Women will be described as people who bleed, chest-feeders, and parenting people. If you suggest there might be a better way, you’re called a transphobe and you’re cancelled. It’s the Greens way, or the cycle way.

There is no way to sweeten this message. Given the Greens’ recent behaviour, the prospect of a Labour-Greens coalition in October is troubling. Diplomacy will take a backseat to activism, and when you consider the Green’s sizeable digital audience and a willing and waiting media that feeds on outrage, the Greens present a very real risk to social cohesion and the stability of our democracy.  – Rachel Smalley

It’s only a matter of time before the election mantras start circulating. I’d wager a bet that, before too long, National, Act, and New Zealand First will roll out something along the lines of: “Vote Labour, and we’ll throw in the Greens too.” 

And, if the Greens continue their reckless rhetoric, it might be the only line the Right needs. – Rachel Smalley

Stop and Go signs are now emerging in Maori – has New Zealand reached peak stupid?

Labour would be better off improving child vaccination rates to keep our babies safe. – Wendy Geus

All decision-making by the NZ Transport Agency should be based on safety first, not ideology. Motorists need to be able to react quickly and confidently. How can they do that when the language is different and a moment’s pause or panic reaction to the change might result in an accident?

We need a government that can use common sense, logic and reason when making decisions: not dogma or pure bloody-mindedness even when it’s clear they are wrong. – Wendy Geus

Pragmatic and practical decision-making with the public’s best interest and safety in mind should be the mantra for government public servants who are paid by the public they serve.

However, I have full confidence that we are not fully ‘there yet’ and more examples of this Labour Government’s ideological lunacy will arise.

This is at a time when Maori babies have the lowest vaccination rates in six years, dropping to 67% (from 90% in 2017), and risk catching measles, whooping cough, and meningococcal disease. Three babies have died already this year from whooping cough.

Retaining public service targets that National adopted would have done more for Māori health and well-being than wasted millions spent on plastering Māori words over every spare surface, sign, and public document and ramming the language down our throats through the media (tokenism, according to Kiri Allen). – Wendy Geus

Accountability is scary and requires hard work rather than just announcements and haemorrhaging of money never to be accounted for. Where were the journalists questioning this dangerous move? It is only now I see articles decrying this treacherous Government’s removal of accountability. – Wendy Geus

Six years ago Maori childhood vaccination rates were not much lower than other ethnic groups, hovering around 90%; so our current Labour government cannot put their gross failures down to poor housing and poverty or their favourite: they are a ‘vulnerable’ group of people.

National, having inherited much lower rates from the Clark government, achieved much better results over nine years with sheer hard slog by the health workers and government ministers actually doing their job on the ground and not directing things from their offices while hoping for the best. – Wendy Geus

Regarding the ‘vulnerable’ label, it is part of the ‘culture of excuses’ to which Chris Luxon referred. It is a gross insult to label these groups, ‘vulnerable’ as with the right help from a government prepared to roll their sleeves up and put in the work, these people could be in a much better position today. – Wendy Geus

It is a toss-up between Jan Tinetti or our former education minister, our current PM, as to who has been the most useless.

Chris Hipkins, who presided over the introduction of the contentious cancel culture (history) curriculum and had Shaneen Lal (the individual who helped incite the Albert Park riot and then miraculously was named Young New Zealander of the Year) as an advisor on Gender Studies, probably tops the bill.

Concentrating on promoting their radical agenda, using our children as guinea pigs could be one reason why the reading and maths results are so atrocious.

As a former teacher, never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined we would come to this. And, thanks to our media’s blind devotion to our corrupt Labour Government, many New Zealanders are still completely oblivious as to what is going on, as the media endorse it. – Wendy Geus

How have we got to the point where our lowest-waged workers are now paying tax rates that were set up to sock it to those on higher incomes?

If you’re a minimum wage earner who works more than 40 hours a week, you’re now in the middle $48,000 tax bracket, paying 30% on any additional earnings.

Inflation has dragged you into a higher tax bracket.

To make things worse, the higher bracket at such a modest income level is a tax on ambition that risks killing the incentive to upskill, gun for promotion or take on a side gig.

The idea that drives progressive taxation is that as people become better off, they should pay higher taxes. We need to rethink this logic. The trouble is that our so-called progressive rates have become regressive, hitting minimum-wage workers.

Far from abiding by the old adage that there should be no taxation without representation, meaning only Parliament should set the tax brackets and rates, inflation moves earners into higher brackets by stealth. – Ruth Richardson

The place to start is not with tax levels, but with spending demands. Tax and borrowing levels are designed to cover spending demands and as we have now (re)discovered to our cost, undisciplined spending drives unsustainable inflation. – Ruth Richardson

My 1994 Fiscal Responsibility Act set out five principles of responsible fiscal management: reducing public debt to prudent levels, requiring an operating balance to be maintained on average over a reasonable time, maintaining a buffer level of public net worth, managing fiscal risks, and maintaining predictable and stable rates of taxation.

The breach of these principles on the spending side has imperilled not just the quest for stable rates of tax but price stability itself, a monetary policy imperative. –

Any government is free to hike taxes if they dare, but this should be done transparently and with scrutiny. That means collecting advice from the Treasury on how the tax hike will affect New Zealanders and overall productivity.

It means presenting any proposal to Parliament and fielding questions from MPs. It means setting out a clear rationale for your tax hike and the cost/benefit analysis so voters can cast judgement come election day.

Without this due process, Jane Average’s extra $2000 tax bill is a dishonest, undemocratic money grab. Taxpayers could be justified in invoicing Grant Robertson for their money back.

Any promise of tax relief that does not involve ongoing indexation should be protested as a sleight-of-hand: A partial refund of stolen wages attached to a promise to keep on stealing. – Ruth Richardson

These obvious tax injustices demand remedies.

The first port of call is to tackle tax rates. A government could decide to adopt a flat tax, which would avoid both the disincentive to progress and the scourge of fiscal drag. Or the steep five-step bracket regime could be collapsed into two, with the top bracket kicking in at, say, twice the minimum wage.

Second, the stealth tax needs to be slayed forever by legislating for an automatic annual inflation adjustment to the chosen tax brackets. After all, that has become standard practice on the other side of the ledger as benefits and minimum wages are now inflation adjusted.

We expect our finance ministers to rein in inflation by limiting the splurge of taxed and borrowed money into an overheated economy. But here’s where perverse incentives kick in: How can finance ministers be trusted to fight inflation when, thanks to bracket creep, they profit from it?  – Ruth Richardson

The belief that distant descent confers psychological characteristics and moral qualities is one with a rather unfortunate history—besides being merely false, of course. But it’s a tool in the hands of politicians for whom all is good that conduces to power. – 

All four of my grandparents were refugees, my mother was a refugee, and her sister was a refugee twice by the age of 42. I, however, have never been victimized or persecuted, except by my own foolishness, and therefore I have no special moral standing, nor do I deserve consideration from others because of my descent. – Theodore Dalrymple

We are still far from judging people by the content of their character rather than their membership of this or that demographic group.

While this is so, it will always be tempting for politicians in an electoral system to appeal to groups by means of their own descent, and it’s easier to make such an appeal if you believe yourself to be a member of such a group, and furthermore that such membership is morally, psychologically, and politically important or relevant. And it’s only natural for politicians to claim the descent that they think will give them the most votes. – Theodore Dalrymple

 It’s usually the third term before the rot sets in.

Labour is displaying early symptoms of third term-itis, a kind of arrogance and complacency that can be fatal to future electoral success.

The longer they spend in office, the more a government start to look a little grubby. And there is nothing dirtier than money in politics. – Andrea Vance

To draw heat out of the scandal, PM Chris Hipkins changed the narrative by pretending to fix a problem that was never really there.

With Trumpian-level gaslighting, he promised “transparency and vigilance” around lobbyists and their relationships with politicians. – Andrea Vance

I can promise you – ministers are much more likely to pick up the phone to a donor, than scratch the back of a colleague-turned-shill begging a favour.

But sure. Take away the swipe cards that allow a handful of professional schmoozers to sip burnt coffee in Parliament’s cafe. That’ll fix it.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know “a review” is code for “make it go away until the public forget about it.”

Still, once government starts to go off, the smell lingers in the nostrils. – Andrea Vance

Foon’s position is now probably untenable. As a former politician he should have identified that his donations were inappropriate while he held a supposedly apolitical role, charged with holding the Government to account.

MPs should not be taking money from state servants, and Allan should never have accepted the donation. It must immediately be repaid.

It compromises the neutrality of the public service in the eyes of the public. But that will worry Labour less than the damage it does to its own image.

This drip feed of mini-scandals have common threads. They paint a picture of a cosy elite bound by mutual back-scratching, most of which happens within the limits of the law, but that don’t quite pass the voters’ sniff test.

Power eventually corrupts. And once that happens, it’s really hard to get the stink out. – Andrea Vance

To this government, and to those who pull its strings, co-governance means control, if not outright, then by veto. Control of water would be the first skittle to fall. Once precedent has been established, beaches will follow, air waves will be next, conservation land soon-after, and so on … with the ticket being clipped at every point along the way, and in perpetuity.

And all this based on distorted interpretations of the treaty, lies about the past, manipulation of dubious legal rulings, and simple self-interest.

It would be difficult to think of more far-reaching constitutional changes than some of the co-governance scenarios being promoted by the Greens, the Maori Party and Labour’s left. The implications of these changes would be far-reaching, and while some outcomes would be predictable, because we can see examples now, others would be unanticipated. Sometimes you don’t get a true picture of whether change was worth it until you are picking up the pieces, it cannot easily be wound back, and once the damage has been done … it has been done. –  Caleb Anderson

The reason we should look more closely at where co-governance is not going well, is that the downsides, and not the upsides of change, are always the things that impact most. At the end of the day, no-one will care if co-governance is working well in 70% of cases (which is unlikely), if it is a disaster in 30% of cases. The downsides will quickly negate any upsides in the mind of the public.

When we are assessing how reforms have worked, on balance, costs always trump benefits in the public mind, because these are the bits that bite.

So what do existing efforts at co-governance tell us more broadly? How are they unfolding at the local level, and at the level where most people transact life? – Caleb Anderson

Some parks returned to Maori are now derelict, the public has been banned from beaches in some areas of New Zealand, some mountain walks, enjoyed by generations of New Zealanders, are now off-limits, and gates have been erected on public roads, moved only when council paid to have these re-opened. Our education system is in disarray, and we are being told that the health system is on the brink of collapse, both tainted by the darkening shadow of co-governance. – Caleb Anderson

The point is not whether these are majority or minority instances, and none of this should undermine the critical, and often selfless, work being done by some iwi. The point is, what might this tell us about where co-governance could end up? What does it tell us about what happens when an embedded sense of victimhood is coupled with political muscle?

The separation of powers inherent within the Westminster system of government, protection of property rights, the right to a fair trial, application of common law principles, and the sovereign rights of individuals, are things we take for granted, and yet these are historically the exception. – Caleb Anderson

The concept that every individual has rights total and indivisible is a radical idea, it is not an accident of history, it is the product of a thousand years of common law, and of bloodshed on many a battlefield. The sovereign rights (not tribal rights) of each individual make these individuals accountable for their actions, and the state accountable for its actions. The whole concept of human rights is derivative of the very system that some of our politicians seem hell-bent on dismantling.

Democracy requires that even the most powerful people are accountable, that issues are debated openly in the public domain, that we can rid ourselves of our politicians when we want to, and that no person’s vote should be worth more or less than another’s. Human nature is constant, people are often self-interested, and nepotism and corruption are not the exclusive domain of any one group, Maori included … we need safeguards. Maori themselves need safeguards.

The Maori party has called democracy a tyranny. Well if democracy is the tyranny of the majority, just wait for the tyranny of the minority which may just be around the corner. – Caleb Anderson

Comments by Kieran McAnulty, and others within Labour’s caucus, that it is safe to play around at the edges of democracy are dangerous in the extreme and stunningly ignorant. Co-government and democracy cannot co-exist. Co-governance is antithetical to democracy.

While differentials in power, status, wealth, intelligence, health, propensity for political engagement (etc) will always exist, democracy remains a beacon to the inalienable right of the weakest among us to stand no higher or lower than others, and to hold to account those who seek to rule over us and to rid ourselves of them when we choose.

This beacon has shone brightly in our past but it flickered over the weekend, a reminder to us of just how much is at stake.  – Caleb Anderson

Ultimately in a democracy if there is also a conflict between elected representative and officials, so in this case we have a conflict between the mayor and the chief executive, that we are strongly of the view that the elected representative is the one that stays if there is a choice. – Callum Purves

That’s completely unacceptable – this government has a history of spraying large amounts of money around, but unfortunately they have a very poor history of accountability for that spending. –  Chris Bishop

We should have had independent reports from Treasury about the quality of the spending about the benefits that may have may or may not have been realised as a result of that spending. – Chris Bishop

Accountability and transparency are core tenets of an effective investment management system. Independent reports on the performance of those projects, all high risk projects, would tell us how the projects did against their budgets, their schedules, and the benefits they promised in their business cases.

These types of projects are known to be poor performers globally. This is why this type of reporting is directed to happen by a Cabinet circular, but it hasn’t been happening. If Cabinet had the reports they would learn critical lessons for future projects, and have a tool for driving better project performance through transparency of accountabilities. – Grant Avery

We seem intent on destroying one of the world oldest democracies as fast as we can by creating two classes of citizenship based on ethnicity – absolutely nuts, and if the present Government wins the next election that destruction may prove irreversible short of serious civil strife. But Australia too, though some decades behind us in that respect, also seems determined to create a constitutionally preferred status for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

But with growth in productivity (output per hour work) continuing to be persistently higher in Australia than in New Zealand, the gap in living standards continues to grow. –  Don Brash

In my own view, there are four policy areas which need major reform.

First, our education system is failing, and failing more seriously as every year passes. Truancy rates are far too high and basic literacy and numeracy are far too low. Too many teenagers emerge from taxpayer-funded schools barely able to read, write or do basic arithmetic – and therefore essentially almost unemployable.

Second, our planning laws are a nightmare, something recognized by successive governments almost since the Resource Management Act was passed in 1991. Governments have been tinkering with that law in an attempt to improve it ever since. The current Government, to their credit, recognized that a complete rewrite of the RMA was required, but alas the three laws they have proposed in its place promise to make the situation much worse while giving effective veto power to those with some Maori ancestry.

Third, our tax system, while admirably simple in many respects, does much to encourage speculation in real estate and little to encourage investment in productivity-enhancing capital.

Fourth, we have a legal and regulatory regime which goes out of its way to discourage foreign investment in New Zealand. Indeed, the OECD judges that our policy towards inwards foreign investment is one of the most hostile among all developed countries. For a country which loves spending but doesn’t have much of a taste for saving – so that we have a persistent tendency to spend more than we earn, resulting in balance of payments deficits in every year since 1974 – a policy which discourages inward foreign investment is a policy we can ill afford.

Of course, none of these policy changes will be achieved unless we have a government which takes reducing the gap with Australia seriously. Clearly, the current Government does not take that goal seriously.

Unless we soon do have such a government, New Zealand is at serious risk of drifting off in the direction of irrelevance, perhaps a nice place to retire to (though even that is not a given), where our children and grandchildren come to visit during school holidays. – Don Brash

The Human Rights Commission, for which Meng Foon works as the Race Relations Conciliator, is already under considerable scrutiny for being perceived as increasingly political and biased. This latest scandal will only erode public trust in the government entity. After all, the Commission is supposed to be independent of the Government, holding it to account as a watchdog. But when one of its most senior staff is found to be giving significant funding to politicians, this brings its independence into question. – Bryce Edwards 

The fact that Foon also gave money – a much lesser amount – to a National Party candidate takes nothing away from the seriousness of the problem. If anything, when wealthy individuals give money to both sides, it raises public suspicions that they are trying to cover their bets, to gain influence with both possible winners. And the fact that such benefactors do not fund other parties shows that it’s not a case of being even-handed.

Foon has been asked if it’s appropriate for someone in his role to donate to politicians, to which he responded: “It didn’t cross my mind. It’s just a thing that we do automatically.” Such flippancy should raise questions about Foon’s judgement, especially since he is unable to see the problems of wealthy and senior public servants intervening in the electoral process. – Bryce Edwards 

How much confidence can the public have that ministers declare their conflicts of interest when they occur? The Foon-Allan donations case shows that the Beehive simply doesn’t have adequate procedures in place to make sure conflicts of interest are identified and managed. – Bryce Edwards 

The stench of this latest episode isn’t something that will hang around for too long. Attention will move on, and there will be more scandals involving different politicians, from other parties too. But this latest episode shows how money in politics is still a major problem in New Zealand. Although the current Government claim to be cleaning up political donation laws, it’s a worry when the person in charge of that tidy-up has such a poor grasp of the issues. – Bryce Edwards 

A final investment thought for readers to ponder. On my lifelong observation, everybody wants to get rich. But everybody isn’t rich, ergo don’t do what everybody does. – Sir Bob Jones

But it’s not all about the money. New Zealand is home. Connections run deep. It’s a huge wrench to upsticks and go and make a new life in a new land. 

But to stay here you have to feel like you belong here. That you have a place here. That you have a future here. Is that how you feel? I haven’t heard so much I’m off to Australia chat since – well, since those years between 2004 and 2013. That might be just so much letting off steam. 

It will be interesting to see the figures next year. But really the question might be not why would you leave for Australia. But why would you stay in New Zealand. – Kerre Woodham

The prime minister’s announcement that the revised government proposal was to be called the ‘affordable water reform’ has fallen like a dead balloon. Everyone still calls it ‘three waters’, a shorter and more accurate description. Curiously, the underlying concern driving the changes – sustainability – is not a part of the brand. Too often this government has seen branding as a substitute for policy substance. Sausages are not bought for the sizzle. – Brian Easton

The new proposal seems to imply a greater role for local government. (How the folk of Tasman were to be involved in the governance of East Cape defeats understanding, unless there was going to be no local input.)

The PM has also announced that the new water entities will be governed by a ‘skills-based board’. That would be a welcome development from the current practice of appointing a mixture of generic managers and self-important political know-nothings.

Even so, the representation is to be way out of line with population numbers. Perhaps the sponsoring Ministry of Local Government could be renamed the ‘Ministry against Local Government’. – Brian Easton

What is intended is unclear. The whole area is a muddle, with a lack of clarity distinguishing ‘co-governance’, ‘co-management’ and ‘self-government’. (Iwi may be less enthusiastic for ‘co-governance’ when they realise that it may undermine ‘self-governance’.) I leave you to ponder on how co-governance relates to skills-based government.

The Minister of Maori Affairs has announced that there would be no statement on the meaning of co-governance until 2024. The government cannot think that by leaving co-governance until after the election it has killed popular discussion. To the contrary, the most likely outcome is that people will vote upon their worse fears. – Brian Easton

The ‘affordable’ in the new branding is a weasel word. Sustainabilty is not cheap, especially when there has been years of unsustainability. – Brian Easton

First, the promise is hiding that water charges are going to rise under the new regime, as they must once the infrastructure rundown ceases and a regime of maintenance and replacement is introduced. (The catchup is substantial.)

Second, any promises to reduce local body rates in total mean that water charges are being imposed (or increased). The water must still be paid for.

Third, almost half of this year’s voters will be dead in 2054. They are unlikely to be moved by the long-term promise of cost savings; the other half will probably treat the promise as meaningless anyway. – Brian Easton

In a bill before Parliament, the government proposes that the borrowing be secured on local body rates, that is if something goes financially wrong, ratepayers will pay; without some such security the loans will not be forthcoming. That is the practical reason why the water entities should be accountable to local authorities. The notion of no taxation without representation is a central part of our political arrangements. (Which, not incidentally, makes the previous co-governance proposal peculiar unless the iwi appointing to the governing boards were to be responsible for half the debt.)

It appears that the ‘cheaper-to-run’ urban centres are expected to cross-subsidise the expensive rural ones. That appears to be one of the reasons for the muddled representation proposals. Almost certainly, there needs to be central government equity funding to support areas of  low population density.

Reflection

Explaining how the government has got itself into such a muddle requires another column. It will tell us much about deep structural failures in the government.  – Brian Easton

The policy will now be called “Affordable Water Reform”, despite the fact that it is less affordable than its predecessor. The PM however, is no doubt hoping to imprint in the mind of voters that the only thing that matters is that their policy will deliver cheaper water in the future – conveniently downplaying the tribal rule aspects.

But the fact is, the modelling purporting to produce affordable water, has been roundly discredited. Quite simply, the projected savings in thirty years’ time are imaginary.

No sane analysts would claim any degree of certainty when projecting 30 years into the future, and few would be bold enough to suggest the projections justify a major upheaval of New Zealand’s entire water management system.

What has also been conveniently supressed by Labour – and indeed by the mainstream media – is the fact that instead of carrying the financial risk of its own dodgy scheme, the Labour Government, through legislation that is now in front of Parliament, is forcing ratepayers to underwrite the massive borrowing that the water entities will undertake, even though they will have no control over them. – Muriel Newman

 They alleged the country had such poor quality water that 34,000 New Zealanders a year were getting sick.

And even though the Ministry of Health’s annual water quality audits showed excellent results – as did the regular surveillance reports from the ESR – no journalists held the Prime Minister and Local Government Minister to account for their misleading claims.

Back then, the lies were about water quality. Now they are about affordability.

In reality, Three Waters was always a trojan horse used by Jacinda Ardern to hide the fact that Labour was passing control of water to Maori.

Since Chris Hipkins’ Affordable Water Reform does not change that, Maori control of freshwater is set to become a major election issue.

And the choice is now clear: if you don’t support Maori being given the power to control water in New Zealand – through what will become the greatest transfer of wealth to iwi ever – don’t vote for Labour, the Greens, or the Maori Party in October! – Muriel Newman

This is an entirely economic move by Australia, designed to hold on to the hard-working New Zealanders it’s until now grudgingly tolerated.

Australia knows our people are more likely than their own people to have a job —any job— maybe partly because for the past 20 years they haven’t been able to get welfare.

The Australian government also knows its health system and so much else in its economy relies on ex-pat New Zealand workers.

And now, in the midst of a global skills shortage, it’s reluctantly taking steps to keep those it’s already got and make itself more attractive to others it wants to poach from here. – Tim Dower

We need to ask ourselves why, on a GDP per person basis, Australians are one-third wealthier than we are. And we need to fix that.

Otherwise this deal will take new Zealand back 20 years to the days when we were a clearing house for people ultimately wanting to live across the ditch. – Tim Dower

The numbers are apparently down in the past few months, but the Aussies are keeping the character test in their citizenship process.

That’s what they use to chuck out New Zealanders they don’t want and there’s no change there.

Australia will cherry pick the best and carry on sending back the riff-raff.

Can’t see one good thing in this for us. – Tim Dower

In recent years there has been a concerted effort by activists to debunk the longstanding scientific consensus that the categories male and female represent real and discrete biological categories in humans. The Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan, for instance, rejects the notion that biological sex is “natural,” “pre-political,” or “objective,” claiming instead that it is “a cultural thing posing as a natural one.” UC Riverside’s Gender and Sexualities Chair, Brandon Andrew Robinson, claims that we “should stop teaching that sex is biological” because we “assign meaning to certain things…because of dominant gender ideologies.” In this view, categorizing people as male or female is not only biologically incorrect but also harmful and oppressive.

For a long time these ideas festered away in humanities departments without serious inroads with the hard sciences. But as Queer Theory and social constructivism became entangled with notions of “Social Justice” and Left-wing politics, and as political discourse has become increasingly polarized, many activist scientists have been attempting to provide an imprimatur of legitimacy to these anti-scientific beliefs. – Colin Wright

Because the sex binary has been deemed “oppressive” and invalidating of transgender identities and experiences—cardinal sins of our age—this has started an arms race among activist scientists to come up with a model of sex that is the least binary thing imaginable. Since the “bimodal spectrum” concept still entails two of something, this must be abandoned as it may be seen as problematically implying a fundamentally binary underlying property that’s producing the bimodal distribution of sex-related traits—and they’d be right! – Colin Wright

The arguments presented throughout the paper are not just poor, but are rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the universal defining property of all males and all females across all taxa—having the function of producing sperm or ova, respectively. That any individual scientist, lab, or “survey team” could claim to be expanding the boundary of our knowledge on a topic that they do not understand at its core is embarrassing. – Colin Wright

A common tactic activists scientists use to bolster their new models of biological sex is to construct a scientific opponent who simply does not exist. When attempting to debunk the binary nature of sex, this is typically done by misconstruing and over-applying the fundamental binarity of sex relating to gametes (i.e., sperm versus ova) to sex differences generally. For instance, they might point out that while there are only two types of gametes (sperm and ova), height differences between males and females are nevertheless not binary. Thus, what they often portray as being exceptions to the rule of binary sex categories are actually just gross conflations of two very distinct concepts—sex itself (i.e., the state of being male, female, or both) versus any and all measurable sex-related differences. But not all sex differences are differences of sex.

To my knowledge, no biologist has ever claimed that males and females differ discretely and absolutely in every conceivable way. And if a biologist were to claim such a thing, they would be immediately laughed out of the room as it is so obviously untrue.

This is the strawman the authors begin constructing in their introduction when they claim that “the common assumption is that there are two sexes, strictly classified as female or male” that’s rooted in gamete size. – Colin Wright

The sex binary, however, does not require that the two sexes exist in separate bodies. The authors are simply conflating the sex binary with a phenomenon called gonochorism or dioecy, which is “the condition of individual organisms within a species existing as one of two possible sexes, specifically male or female.” The existence of hermaphroditic and gonochoric species just represent different ways a species can utilize male and female reproductive strategies. Regardless of whether an organism is only male, only female, or both male and female, there are still only two fundamental functions—the production of sperm and/or ova. – Colin Wright

Because they believe “binary language” is fueling “legislation targeting [transgender and gender nonconforming] people,” all binary language must be abandoned. As scientists, the authors say we are “best situated to communicate how nature is a rich tapestry of diversity that affirms, rather than invalidates, human experience.”

As biologists we should not be engaged in erasing, invalidating, or affirming people’s identities or experiences. Our job is simple: describe and explain the natural world as accurately as possible.

This paper may be an attempt to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into their research program. Many scientists are now required to state explicitly when applying to faculty positions how their research relates to DEI. It should come as no surprise that forcing scientists to inject political initiatives into their research to remain eligible and competitive for grants and promotions comes at the cost of scientific rigor. – Colin Wright

Good academic reputations are built over decades and even centuries, but they can be destroyed in an instant. – Colin Wright

When we get people walking up the drive, legitimately offering their time and labour to help clean up the massive damage and mess that the cyclone left behind, it brings with it such a huge boost to our morale – that someone cares.  It lifts our spirits so much. – Rob Wilson

Academia is now hostile to free thought – especially when it comes to the trans debate. – Lauren Smith

Academic freedom is under serious threat. Instead of standing by their academics and defending their right to pursue the truth, universities are caving into trans ideologues at every turn. They have become nakedly ideological institutions, where intolerance is given free rein. We need more academics to speak out against this shameful behaviour. – Lauren Smith

For years, I have been watching left-wing twentysomethings, who claim to be protecting the little guy, scream, destroy property and attack anyone who even slightly disagrees with them. These are not so much political activists as wannabe tyrants. Also last week, for example, a mob at the State University of New York at Albany attacked an event hosting a conservative speaker, hurling obscenities at him and destroying a Bible in the process. The speaker was there to discuss free speech on campus.

Yes, these young people are the aggressors, and they should face consequences for whatever violence they commit. And yes, their authoritarianism is unhinged and terrifying. But they are also, in part, products of the failures of older generations, including my own. Adults have abdicated their responsibility for socialising these young people in sane, commonsense ways. Instead, these young people’s incivility, threatening behaviour and neo-Maoist dogmatism has been tacitly encouraged or blithely ignored.  – Jenny Holland

We have seen again over the last week that this Government possesses an unshakeable belief in the power of its own rhetoric. On both Three Waters and the economy, ministers are clearly of the opinion that if they repeat anything often enough and with enough conviction, the voters will in turn believe it to be true.

They are likely to be wrong.

Whoever thought up the idea of re-labelling the unpalatable Three Waters reforms as “affordable water reform” should hang their heads in shame. And so should the ministers who had sufficient contempt for the public that they thought simply re-badging something this contentious would achieve a positive reappraisal of the reforms. To say nothing of the Prime Minister denying Three Waters even included co-governance “as it is traditionally understood” at the announcement of the grand relabelling.

It had been assumed by many that the Government’s willingness to argue that black is white had been quietly shelved with the departure of former Prime Minister Ardern, but we have now been treated to a masterclass in sophistry courtesy of new Prime Minister Chris Hipkins. – Steven Joyce

The water assets will still be confiscated from local councils and placed in organisations over which they will have only a figleaf of influence. The water organisations will still be co-governed, with an unelected Mana Whenua Group given 50 per cent control, and veto power over the appointment of directors for each entity. Iwi and the Mana Whenua groups will still be able to issue guiding statements to the water companies which they “must respond to”, and the denuded councils will still not be able to do the same. Local government will be further weakened by the reforms, which continue an ongoing power grab by central government that stretches across health, the polytechs and local government.

The much-heralded savings from the reforms are as unlikely as before, albeit apparently reduced as a result of the increased number of water organisations.

Let’s be clear. The investments in new infrastructure will be paid for by ratepayers and consumers, no matter who builds them. You can pay through your rates, through your taxes or through water levies. But you will pay.

Also, the idea that the new entities will be able to borrow more cheaply is also largely bunkum.   – Steven Joyce

The current reforms are a recipe for discord and disharmony. When more people work out that their access to water is effectively controlled by one part of society who have the right whakapapa, then the proverbial will truly hit the fan. Also, nobody knows how a water services organisation will be required to respond when the first mana whenua group declares, for example, that Auckland should take no more water from the Waikato River. That ambiguity allows people to assume the worst.

All this could easily have been avoided. It would be entirely possible to recognise the rights and interests of Māori in water without excluding the rights of all others, if it was done carefully and with respect towards everyone affected. However, I fear that opportunity has been lost as the debate becomes increasingly polarised.

Just like the previous Labour Government with its flip-flopping from one extreme to the other on the foreshore and seabed, this one has recklessly put the interests of Māori on a collision course with those of everyone else, and unnecessarily inflamed race relations in this country. – Steven Joyce

Of course, it’s not just the water reforms where the Government is continually trying to pull the wool over voters’ eyes. Ministers are fond of declaring all the inflation-fuelling expenditure they have overseen in the last six years is completely justified. They even defend the money spent on failed restructurings and, somewhat ironically, the explosion of government spin doctors.

Chris Hipkins and Grant Robertson can’t see anything they would do differently with the economy despite food inflation running at 12 per cent, CPI inflation stubbornly staying up around 7 per cent, an eye-watering current account deficit and an emerging international consensus that New Zealand is becoming one of the worst economic performers in the OECD. Instead, they are rumoured to be planning to fire up a debate on tax in the Budget to distract everyone from their economic record.

After what seemed to be a positive start to the new regime, it will now be dawning on the public that even with a tiggerish new Prime Minister, the overall Government policy direction and its attitude to voters remains unchanged. In that respect, the re-badging of the Government may turn out to be as unsuccessful as the re-branding of Three Waters.

New Zealanders who want a genuinely new approach to the economy, inflation, Three Waters and race relations are starting to realise they will have to vote for it rather than relying on this lot changing their tune. The current lot are prepared to pretend to change, but then carry on regardless. – Steven Joyce

It’s all a little too little, too late, frankly. This is a government that over the last five-and-a-half years has become the second-biggest-spending government in the developed world, it was the fourth-biggest government in printing cash, and it restricted and shut down our economy like nowhere else.

Again, four months out from an election, Chris Hipkins has all of a sudden discovered that actually controlling and being disciplined spending of taxpayer money is actually important. Well, it’s always been important. – Christopher Luxon 

It was horribly confusing. I mean you had David Parker come out yesterday and give a speech, and the two reports launched. He’s had two years at it and spent $3.5 million and yet again it looked like the Labour Party and the Labour government were shaping for a capital gains tax, a wealth tax, an inheritance tax, a death tax, whatever.

Then Chris Hipkins coming out this morning saying ‘no, no it won’t be happening’ but then leaving it open for the next term of government … that causes huge instability and uncertainty.

It’s a massive distraction because the real issue is the middle income people I’m talking with that actually are struggling to pay their mortgages, this doesn’t help them one little bit.

He should be like every other prime minister – including Jacinda Ardern – and said ‘look, we’re ruling it out while I’m prime minister’, and that’s what I haven’t heard from him today. Let’s be clear about why they are having to look at a bigger tax grab, they have to raise more taxes because they are spending like we have never spent in this country before. –  Christopher Luxon 

The Prime Minister promised to be clearer about the detail and the reasoning behind co-governance. Again, many believed that Hipkins was back-peddling on the hectic rush since the 2020 election to Maorify everything in sight from departmental titles, to geographical names, to road speed limits, to tried and tested methods of governance. There was an air of expectation.

However, we now know that that optimism was misplaced. Maorification continues and every aspect of the policy survives. – Michael Bassett

Chinese New Zealanders, Indians, even Pacific Islanders with traditionally overlarge families, and other newer immigrants, manage to benefit from the services made available to them on the same basis as to Maori. Why? All of them value family responsibility more than Maori appear to do. As things stand now, those other ethnicities can’t understand Maori demands for special treatment. What those others also notice is that the more the government does for Maori, the more that Maori bite the hand that feeds them. The people the Police deal with every day are three times more likely to be Maori than non-Maori.

The idea that society will improve if more cash is poured over Maori obviously isn’t working, and hasn’t ever since the Domestic Purposes Benefit was introduced in 1974. Labour’s out-of-date answers to today’s problems are having the opposite effect to that intended. If Hipkins could empanel a group of experienced Maori along with a few other ethnicities to come up with proposals for streamlining access to welfare, while examining why so many current policies are failing Maori, there could be some cautious optimism. But first of all, Hipkins needs to acknowledge there is a problem that current policies are only making worse. The news that he has nothing new to offer is depressing in the extreme. – Michael Bassett

Still puzzled by the existence of child poverty some years after PM Ardern decided to abolish it?  You might be interested to know that the question was addressed at the same time by a couple of Brits.  More transparently; and – one imagines – with much the same success.

In fact, they went a bit further in ensuring the experiment would tangibly impact on the decision-makers themselves.  They made a bet of it.

In the red corner, Jonathan Portes wagered £1000 that withdrawal of state benefits would propel the UK’s child poverty rate from a dreadful 31% to an appalling 41%.  It doesn’t work that way, said Christopher Snowdon from the blue corner, accepting the bet.

Five years later, the measured UK child poverty rate was 29%. Snowdon had won.   – Point of Order

Another quirk of relative poverty rates is that – paradoxically – the rate can go up in good times as median incomes rise, then decline in hard times, because of slower growth in higher incomes.

But perhaps the most insidious problem with using a sweeping relative poverty measure in a rich welfare state is its obfuscation and cheapening of the language.  Misuse of the word poverty, coupled with overuse, will detract from more meaningful and therefore more powerful terms like indigence, want, and destitution.

For sure, the currently limited use made of these terms is a welcome reflection of the enormous progress made in the reduction of their occurrence in our societies.

But their greater deployment by politicians today might just reflect a genuine focus on tackling stubborn pockets of misery and the tremendous challenge of family dysfunction so often associated with them.

More attention to language would surely have helped protect Ardern’s legacy from criticisms of ignorance and hypocrisy.  It might even – although this may be stretching it a bit – have led to some meaningful policy. –  Point of Order

There has been much handwringing in the press lately over the progressive rewriting of Roald Dahl’s books, as though this were a bad thing. If I had my way, every copy of every book by every straight white male would be incinerated. Burning books that we don’t approve of is the only way to stop fascism.

Dahl’s books are compendiums of violence masquerading as “fiction”. For instance, he describes the character of Augustus Gloop as “fat”, which is extremely offensive to People of Girth. Thankfully, the sensitivity readers at Puffin Books have replaced the word “fat” with “enormous”. This is much more empowering. I’m forever congratulating my friend Janine on her enormous hips. –  Titania McGrath

Ultimately, the problem isn’t Dahl — it’s the English language. I genuinely believe that writing or speaking English is an act of colonial terrorism.

So instead of simply tinkering with children’s literature, why not just stop teaching children how to speak in the first place? Dangerous language normalises hate and wrong opinions. To live in a truly free society, there must be limits on individual forms of verbal expression. So, if we never talk to children, or provide them with books, they will simply grow up without the capacity to express hateful ideas.

I can’t believe no one else has thought of this. – Titania McGrath

The contract was signed, the deposit was sent. But then something happened: The venue—which bills itself as “inclusive”—got critical comments on social media, and suddenly called it off.

“I stand by my words.”

My immediate offense was a tweet criticizing child gender-reassignment surgery, an irreversible act that can permanently sterilize the patient. My criticism was strongly worded, because some things deserve to be strenuously opposed. Children who undergo gender-reassignment surgery are legally unable to consent to sex. They aren’t allowed to purchase cigarettes or alcohol. And yet in gender reassignment, their sexual organs are removed, and they are prescribed powerful hormones. I described the people who engage in these operations as “butchers,” and I stand by my words.

But the venue’s objection went beyond any one tweet. It was about a broader discomfort with my insistence on the inescapable reality and political importance of the physical differences between men and women. The fact that I, a little-known British mum and writer, am considered out of bounds at a New York cultural venue is a sign that the city is losing its intellectual robustness—that New Yorkers are exchanging free debate for stifling orthodoxy.

I am far from the first woman to be targeted for saying these things. Many British women have been deplatformed, censored, unfriended, and fired because they spoke out against transgenderism. Americans aren’t yet fully acquainted with these tactics, but they soon will be.  – Mary Harrington 

For there is a difference between a commitment to ideas and a commitment to ideology. Pursuing the truth isn’t the same as refusing to notice anything that doesn’t fit your vision. Sometimes ideas and ideology are hard to tell apart, however. I have tremendous sympathy for the young people duped by gender ideology into self-mutilation. I dare say those who now seek to silence the quiet reminder, from a middle-aged mother, that biology still exists, sincerely believe they are making the world a better place.

But just because you find a viewpoint sympathetic doesn’t mean it’s true. Humans still can’t change sex. Even in New York City, embodied sex still matters. Deep down, fast-talking, freewheeling, street-smart, and book-smart New York still knows this. The show will go on. Somehow, somewhere we will hold the book launch. In the face of powerful resistance, we will defend reality. –  Mary Harrington 

I believe there’s a growing trend of recklessness in so-called “gender-affirming care,” and I think my experience with it exemplifies that trend. I have filed my suit against eight healthcare professionals, including doctors, psychologists, and therapists to have that belief tested by the justice system. Distress related to my gender was treated to the exclusion of other serious mental health issues which went undiagnosed for years. Blind affirmation of my stated identity closed the door to alternative treatment options. 

What happened to me should never happen again. I was prescribed testosterone hormone therapy in 2010 after three appointments. My doctors did not do a fulsome screening of me for other mental health diagnoses or developmental disabilities. In 2012, with my doctor’s recommendation, I paid to have my breasts removed. 

But the drugs and surgeries didn’t address my mental health needs; the parts of my life that I expected to change never did; and I stopped taking testosterone in 2016. – Michelle Zacchigna

Now even the Women’s Institute (WI) is ‘willy inclusive’. The UK’s largest voluntary women’s group has this week confirmed that trans-identified males are permitted to join. –

Some actual women members are not happy about this. A group called the Women’s Institute Declaration (WID) recently published a petition asking for WI members to be able to debate and hold a vote on whether to include transwomen.

The declaration calls for a moratorium on membership applications from trans-identified males and asks the WI to ‘focus on women as a biological-sex class, rather than as an individual expression of gender’. It also condemns the rolling back of women’s sex-based rights in the name of gender ideology. And it calls on the WI to respect women’s right to self-organise. Some might be tempted to sneer at this as just a spat between the ladies of Middle England, or as ‘handbags at dawn’, but the points raised by the declaration are valid and important. –

This partisan, woke agenda does the WI a disservice. Founded a decade before women had the vote, the WI has a proud history of mobilising its formidable members to good causes. In recent years, it has campaigned against human trafficking and for better research into autism in girls.

Until recently, it had also refused to take sides in contentious political or social issues. Back in 2000, then prime minister Tony Blair came unstuck in front of a WI audience. When he tried to use a speech to the WI for political point-scoring, he faced jeers, boos and slow hand-clapping. He later admitted it was ‘the most terrifying audience I have seen’.  –

The Women’s Institute ought to be what it says on the tin – an institute for women. It may be unfashionable to say it, but transwomen are men. WI members have every right to have a single-sex space. – Jo Barstosch

A credit downgrade is a finance minister’s nightmare. The financial impact is severe. It is an international vote of no confidence in the government’s fiscal policies.

NZ has a rating of AA+. Our rating has always been a confidence act. No one who spends more than they earn would have a good credit rating yet NZ every year spends more on imports than we earn from our exports. Our AA+ rating is because we have stable politics, have never defaulted and successive governments have been fiscally prudent.  – Richard Prebble

NZ does not get a lot of scrutiny. There are cities with a larger economy. The rating agencies are notorious for being too slow. Lehman Brothers had an A rating until one day before it collapsed.

The minister must hope the May Budget is not scrutinised closely and he can get to October before any rating downgrade.

A rating downgrade would mean higher interest rates on everything from government bonds to mortgages to car loans. The Kiwi is a floating currency. A rating downgrade would have an immediate effect on the currency. Everything we import would cost more. Maybe a lot more. – Richard Prebble

How do you make Three Waters fit to drink?
Easy – rename it Affordable Waters!
Honestly, it’s as simple as that.

At least, it is in Chris’ world, where co-governance, racial discrimination and wealth transfer to iwi is the covert end-game of this He Puapua inspired policy, sloppily dressed up as a fix for essential water infrastructure improvements.

He must think the average Joe Bloggs voter – known as Dick Head in Labour circles – is a complete noddy to swallow that load of old effluent. – Derek Mackie

All the terrible features of Three Waters are still “affordable” and have been retained:-

•  50% unelected iwi representation at all levels,
•  effective Maori veto over every decision,
• and likely future royalty payouts to Maori.

Worst of all, Te Mana O Te Wai edicts can still be issued at any time, but only by Maori and these must be complied with.

This is predicated on the fantastical notion that our part-natives possess something akin to a built-in divining rod, which endows them with a greater cultural bond to water than every other human.
Judging by our plummeting achievement standards in science, coupled with decades long top-of-the-table truancy rates among our Maori school kids, many would struggle to define the chemical formula for water, let alone know how to bond with it. – Derek Mackie

Now, after keeping us on tenterhooks for months to find out the fate of Three Waters, he’s confirmed what we knew deep down – that extremist Left-wing leopards never change their spots, they just wear a different fur coat.

Some independent media commentators who were heralding Chippy as the new messiah, ready to lead the Labour faithful from the woke wasteland back to their working class roots, may well be wishing they’d thrown their premature tales of redemption into the giant cesspit our PM is expertly digging for us. And if there’s one thing he specialises in it’s excrement.  – Derek Mackie

Hipkins is a dyed-in-the-wool neo-Marxist who fully supports He Puapua in all its anti-democratic forms. If he wasn’t he would have cast Three Waters into the fires of Mt Doom when he had the chance, along with the one ring forged by the Maori Caucus to control all of Middle Earth.

A more unpopular policy you’d be hard pushed to find, outside of the Cabinet Room, yet he clings to “the precious” like Gollum, even though it may very well destroy his political career. At least Gollum had a conscience and attempted to debate right and wrong with his dual personality.  – Derek Mackie

What I can’t figure out is what our ginger ninja and his other Pakeha Labourites expect to get from all this co-governance malarkey when they lack even a smidgen of the right DNA for gold-card status. I mean, aside from being totally anti-democratic and racist, and being purely selfish, why would you promote a form of governance that disadvantages you personally?

Is it some bizarre form of political natural selection which weeds out woke, virtue signalling specimens? If so, we can expect to see parliament decimated in 2040, if all goes to plan, He Puapua wise.

Now it’s time for the NZ public – the ones that can be bothered voting, at least – to decide whether they want more of the same race-riddled agenda, disdain for the majority and excruciating minority adulation and entitlement, which has dragged NZ down to record lows of national cohesion and confidence…… or something less extreme. – Derek Mackie

All the opinion polls are suggesting it’s going to come right down to the wire but some writers reckon the pollsters are wrong and the actual election result will be a decisive win for the centre-right, or what passes for it these days. I certainly hope so, because I dread to think what another three years of Labour rule will do to our society, rights and freedoms….let alone our water! – Derek Mackie

We believe fundamentally in moving money out of the bureaucracy and out of the centre and getting it out to the front line to community organisations… this is the way in which we can solve many of our big challenges. – Christopher Luxon

Despite announcing $1.9 billion funding in 2019, Labour has failed to deliver the improvement in mental health services and outcomes New Zealanders urgently need.

“Kiwis have made good progress breaking down the stigma around asking for help with mental health, but when people do ask for help, they often find a mental health system that is too hard to access. – Christopher Luxon

Elon Musk has finally confessed his prejudice. He has aired his bias for all to see. He has admitted that he is in thrall to an ‘ism’. Only it isn’t racism or sexism or any of the other phobias that the woke left is always trying to pin on the controversial Twitter boss. It’s speciesism. ‘I’m a speciesist’, he said in his chat with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. ‘I’m fully a speciesist’, he stressed. That is, he believes in the moral superiority of the human species. He sees humanity as a unique lifeform, possessed of a capacity for consciousness that no beast or machine is ever likely to experience. What a bigot.

Seriously, though, it was sweet relief to see someone as influential as Musk come out as a speciesist.  –  Brendan O’Neill 

. In the face of such extraordinary moral disarray, such anti-civilisational self-loathing, where believing in the specialness of humankind has been rechristened a vile bigotry, it was great to see Musk celebrate speciesism. From one speciesist to another – thank you, Elon. – Brendan O’Neill 

‘Why would anyone not be a speciesist?’ – this is one of the great questions of our age. The answer is because we’re living through a colossal crisis of faith in the human project. ‘Speciesism’ is the name our gloom-ridden societies give to any claim that humankind enjoys a higher moral status than other beings. What used to be known as humanism – the celebration and centering of human consciousness and experience – is now called speciesism. Peter Singer describes speciesism as prejudice ‘towards the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of other species’. Why should human beings get to decide the ‘boundaries of morality’, asked AC Grayling in his attack on speciesism. Perhaps, he said, it is not such a huge step ‘from pulling wings off flies to committing crimes against humanity’. Good Lord.

The accusation of speciesism is most often made in relation to nature and the environment. Anyone who issues the old-style Enlightenment cry that humankind should enjoy dominion over nature – so that we might better understand it and exploit its bounty for the good of society – runs the risk of being damned a speciesist. Yet according to Musk, this s-word is being thrown around in Big Tech circles, too. This isn’t surprising. For it might not be a short step from killing a fly to killing a human – get a grip, everyone – but it is a short step from believing human beings are no better than animals to believing we’re no better than computers.  – Brendan O’Neill 

The elites’ erasure of the moral boundary between man and beast is now replicated in the scrubbing away of any distinction between man and machine. Animals should be our equals, machines will one day be our superiors – that’s the dual rallying cry of a cultural establishment that has completely lost faith in the human species; which sees us as a swarm to be managed, at best, and a plague on the planet at worst. The bourgeois turn against the Christian-cum-modern belief in human uniqueness lends itself very well to new forms of authoritarian control. So the eco-fatalists introduce ever-more stringent social measures designed to limit our polluting impact on our surroundings, while tech fatalists deploy ‘nudge’ techniques, algorithmic manipulation and outright censorship – Musk revisited that issue, too – to limit the toxic influence of our bestial passions and beliefs.

This is the dire end result of the evacuation of moral status from humankind, the reduction of us to ‘just another species’. We come to be seen either as units of pollution whose behaviour must be curbed by the benevolent gods of the eco-elite or as units of prejudice whose online activity must be directed and controlled by the ‘digital gods’ of Google. As emitters of carbon or emitters of hate. No better than animals, inferior to machines. There is no need to panic about AI, of course. – Brendan O’Neill 

But we should worry about the war on ‘speciesism’. Which is really a war on the making of any moral distinction between mankind on one side and animals and computers on the other. Let us remind all of them that there is no beast or appliance on Earth that will ever know the consciousness, self-awareness, capacity for joy and pain, and the ability to love and appreciate beauty for its own sake that human beings enjoy. And there never will be. – Brendan O’Neill 

It would not be true to say that the education system hasn’t changed over the years, but much of that change has not been for the better.

I’m sorry if I keep harping on about education, but it’s difficult not to when you consider that an entire generation, at least, of kids in this country is being robbed of opportunities their parents and grandparents took for granted. – Peter Jackson

Anyway, the news is that the Government is going to cut Year 4-8 teacher/student ratios, from 1:29 to 1:28. Yep, you read that correctly. This, we are told, will take some pressure off teachers, and allow them to spend more one-on-one time with students, focusing on what they do best, namely teaching young people the basics well. This is something that they are demonstrably not doing now.

The Prime Minister, meanwhile, seems to be pinning his hopes on a declining birth rate to reduce teacher/pupil ratios. Neither he nor Tinetti made any attempt to explain why the teacher/pupil ratio in kura kaupapa Mā ori years 2-8 is 1:18.

Frankly, I don’t believe class sizes have much to do with the reported fact that kids in Year 4 do better in three Rs testing than those in Year 8. In other words, achievement rates fall away as the kids get older. – Peter Jackson

And how many of these kids are actually fronting? If 60 per cent of children are attending school regularly, as we are told they are, 1:29 actually equates to 1:17.4. A reduction of one equates to 1:16.8. And what happens if the Government’s puerile efforts to get more kids in schools actually work? Thankfully, they won’t, but what if they did? Perhaps we can reassure ourselves that the Government is apparently doing nothing at all to make room for these missing thousands, as it obviously isn’t expecting them to start turning up any time soon. – Peter Jackson

It would not be true to say that the education system hasn’t changed over the years, but much of that change has not been for the better. The curriculum has expanded enormously, a fact that some in Parliament finally seem to have wised up to, and what was once a world-leading education system isn’t any more. Class sizes might be a factor in that, but I would bet it’s a small one. If it is a factor, and Ms Tinetti wants to fix it, she will have to do a great deal more than reduce class sizes by one. In fact I suspect she has about as much of an idea about the correct answer as I did in that language lab in 1971. – Peter Jackson

I’m not convinced that the radical path of social transformation that the Academics, Activists and Political Elites wish to force us all down has any relevance, interest or benefit to the good people of that night.

I’m not convinced that they support the amalgamation of our Health Boards into some mega entity based in Wellington with a name few of us can pronounce or spell. I think they just want to be able to see a doctor if they get sick.

I’m not convinced that they want Co-Governance of their sewer pipes or drinking water delivery.

I’m pretty sure they don’t support John Tamihere’s argument that people of Maori descent own the water in this country, and even if they did, it would only be to the benefit of the Tribal Elite. Not one coin would make its way down to the lady buying a spring roll and half a scoop of chips for her Saturday night meal.

I’m not sure these folk want to fund a Restructure of TVNZ because Willie Jackson thinks New Zealand is more than Country Calendar.

I don’t think Marama Davidson announcing inside that shop that Men of European descent were responsible for family violence would have been met with agreement.

Whether a man who wants to identify as a woman is free to use a woman’s toilet or play woman’s sport wouldn’t be on their list of concerns in life I reckon.

It is my belief that the Academics, Activists and Political Elites in this country are driving a social revolution that is completely isolated from the needs and concerns of our people.

Those people in the shop are just pawns in the game.

For those people in the shop, life was hard, it was a grind, there isn’t a lot to look forward to.

As I walked back to my life, I wondered, where has our education system failed? Where have our training institutions and Apprenticeship schemes gone? Where have the manufacturers who provided rewarding employment gone? Why do we make it hard for our businesses to prosper? How did our political system get hijacked by the radicals? – David Clark 

The latest IMF Current Account Ratings forecasts that our current account deficit will be proportionally the largest of the world’s 40 most advanced economies.

Specifically, the IMF said it would be worse than notorious cot cases such as Greece and ranks us the 3^rd worst performer in its recent years decline among advanced economies.

This is a direct consequence of the appalling financial mismanagement over the last 3 years.

Thanks to our floating exchange rate it will eventually sort itself out, albeit initially at a considerable standard of living cost. – Sir Bob Jones

It all augurs badly for the next few years. All of these dire consequences are a direct result  of a truly appalling government, driven by ideology and an irresponsible approach to expenditure.

Perhaps, worse of all, is the creation of a racist society which will take years to mend, if ever. – Sir Bob Jones

Compare and contrast. Our government and media have brazenly condoned the abuse of UK women’s rights activist Posie Parker by transgender protesters. But UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has ramped up his support for women’s rights, speaking out against the trans extremism movement where words like ‘pregnant woman’ and ‘mother’ are being censored, replaced by ‘pregnant people’. – Wendy Geus

Journalist Jenna Lynch may swallow transgender bullsh*t labels such as “white cis men” (quote: Marama Davidson, painstakingly giving us a forensic definition during her propaganda slot on a Newshub bulletin).

I do not.

As more than 99.9% of people in the world born male or female identify in adulthood as a man or a woman, we do not have to adopt new labels when talking about a man or a woman. We know who we are. If when talking amongst themselves, transgender people wish to use their own labels: fine, but don’t force them on us. However, the media, working in sync, are happy to oblige them.

I don’t know how Simeon Brown managed to keep a straight face on the Breakfast couch beside Labour MP Arena Williams when she looked down the camera and said, with a straight face: “A man transgendering to a woman, is a woman”.

And there are fairies at the bottom of my garden, Arena. – Wendy Geus

Chloe Swarbrick comes across as eloquent and presentable. However, it seems cynicism and political expediency is never far from the surface when she can describe the Albert Park riot as an experience of ‘love and affirmation’, thereby condoning an elderly woman being bashed in the face; the guest speaker shut down, covered with tomato soup and run out of the park; and the police refusing to protect her until after the assault.

Anarchy was the word she was looking for.

Auckland Central folk need to give much consideration to whom they elect this year. Their current MP may call herself green but, like a watermelon, she is red on the inside, just like her more radical roommates. – Wendy Geus

It’s proof that free speech is very limited in New Zealand and tyranny introduced during Ardern’s ‘transformational’ government is alive and well. Like Stephen Joyce said, we now have to say ‘black is white’.

I recently saw an advertisement on TV for a medical product with small print warning against certain people taking it, including ‘pregnant people’. Another example of the ideological lunacy that is being forced upon us and taking over our country. – Wendy Geus

With all this tax the rich talk and naysayers wanting punitive measures dished out to anyone showing signs of success or ambition, I just wonder if we’re shooting ourselves in the foot here.

Are we not at peak tall poppy syndrome now?

Because where does all this “it’s not fair, woe is me” whining actually get us? So far all I can see is that it sends our best and brightest off elsewhere. We have the 5000 nurses who’ve registered to work in Australia, the net migration loss of more than 8000 Kiwis to Australia just last year, we have those who’ve discovered cost of living is actually cheaper overseas. – Kate Hawkesby

I think we have to adjust this complacent mentality we have that we’re the best little country in the world and we’re invincible.  –

A head in the sand approach to what is going on around us is not going to help. We need to recognise what’s on in order to be able to act. –

How bad are we going to let things get? And how much do we want to give our country up to the lowest common denominator? We have to admit that we need to flip it – we need to shift the focus to productive aspects of the economy.

We need less David Parker driven ideological tax attacks on those who are productive, employ people, and get this economy going. Because guess what? They’ll just leave top.

You can’t keep propping up the bottom end, reducing penalties for crime, and ignoring all the stats going against us.

Because by ignoring it, we run the risk of waking up when it’s all too late. – Kate Hawkesby

In recent years, the overused word ‘sustainability’ has fostered a narrative in which human needs and aspirations have taken a back seat to the green austerity of Net Zero and ‘degrowth’. The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years. Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies and live like Renaissance potentates.

In Enemies of Progress, author Austin Williams suggests that ‘the mantra of sustainability’ starts with the assumption that humanity is ‘the biggest problem of the planet’, rather than the ‘creators of a better future’. Indeed, many climate scientists and green activists see having fewer people on the planet as a key priority. Their programme calls not only for fewer people and fewer families, but also for lower consumption among the masses. They expect us to live in ever smaller dwelling units, to have less mobility, and to endure more costly home heating and air-conditioning. These priorities are reflected in a regulatory bureaucracy that, if it does not claim justification from God, acts as the right hand of Gaia and of sanctified science.

The question we need to ask is: sustainability for whom? – Joel Kotkin

Under the new sustainability regime, the ultra-rich profit, but the rest of us not so much. The most egregious example may be the forced take-up of electric vehicles (EVs), which has already helped to make Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, the world’s second-richest man. Although improvements are being made to low-emissions vehicles, consumers are essentially being frogmarched into adopting a technology that has clear technical problems, remains far more expensive than the internal-combustion engine and depends primarily on an electric grid already on the brink of blackouts. Green activists, it turns out, do not expect EVs to replace the cars of hoi polloi. No, ordinary people will be dragooned to use public transport, or to walk or bike to get around.

The shift to electric cars is certainly no win for the West’s working and middle classes. But it is an enormous boon to China, which enjoys a huge lead in the production of batteries and rare-earth elements needed to make EVs, and which also figure prominently in wind turbines and solar panels.  – Joel Kotkin

Building cars from primarily Chinese components will have consequences for autoworkers across the West. Germany was once a car-manufacturing giant, but it is expected to lose an estimated 400,000 car-factory jobs by 2030. According to McKinsey, the US’s manufacturing workforce could be cut by up to 30 per cent. After all, when the key components are made elsewhere, far less labour is needed from US and European workers. It’s no surprise that some European politicians, worried about a popular backlash, have moved to slow down the EV juggernaut.

This dynamic is found across the entire sustainability agenda. The soaring energy costs in the West have helped China expand its market share in manufactured exports to roughly equal that of the US, Germany and Japan combined. American manufacturing has dropped recently to its lowest point since the pandemic. The West’s crusade against carbon emissions makes it likely that jobs, ‘green’ or otherwise, will move to China, which already emits more greenhouse gases than the rest of the high-income world. Meanwhile, the Chinese leadership is looking to adapt to changes in the climate, instead of undermining economic growth by chasing implausible Net Zero targets. – Joel Kotkin

California’s regulators recently admitted that the state’s strict climate laws aid the affluent, but hurt the poor. These laws also have a disproportionate impact on ethnic-minority citizens, creating what attorney Jennifer Hernandez has labelled the ‘green Jim Crow’. As China’s increasingly sophisticated tech and industrial growth is being joyously funded by US venture capitalists and Wall Street, living standards among the Western middle class are in decline. Europe has endured a decade of stagnation, while Americans’ life expectancy has recently fallen for the first time in peacetime. Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heymann suggests that the only way to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2050 is by squelching all future growth, which could have catastrophic effects on working-class and middle-class living standards.

Rather than the upward mobility most have come to expect, much of the West’s workforce now faces the prospect of either living on the dole or working at low wages. – Joel Kotkin

Over recent decades, many jobs that might have once supported whole families have disappeared. According to one UK account, self-employment and gig work do not provide sustenance for anything like a comfortable lifestyle. Rates of poverty and food shortages are already on the rise. As a result, most parents in the US and elsewhere doubt their children will do better than their generation, while trust in our institutions is at historic lows.

The fabulists at places like the New York Times have convinced themselves that climate change is the biggest threat to prosperity. But many ordinary folk are far more worried about the immediate effects of climate policy than the prospect of an overheated planet in the medium or long term.  – Joel Kotkin

This is class warfare obscured by green rhetoric. It pits elites in finance, tech and the nonprofit world against a more numerous, but less connected, group of ordinary citizens. Many of these folk make their living from producing food and basic necessities, or from hauling these things around. Factory workers, truck drivers and farmers, all slated for massive green regulatory onslaughts, see sustainability very differently than the urban corporate elites and their woke employees. As the French gilets jaunes protesters put it bluntly: ‘The elites worry about the end of the world. We worry about the end of the month.’ – Joel Kotkin

These Western concerns are nothing compared to how the sustainability agenda could impact the developing world. Developing countries are home to roughly 3.5 billion people with no reliable access to electricity. They are far more vulnerable to high energy and food prices than we are. For places like Sub-Saharan Africa, green admonitions against new agricultural technologies, fossil fuels and nuclear power undermine any hope of creating desperately needed new wealth and jobs. It’s no wonder that these countries increasingly ignore the West and are looking to China instead, which is helping the developing world to build new fossil-fuel plants, as well as hydroelectric and nuclear facilities. All of this is anathema to many Western greens. To make matters worse, the EU is already considering carbon taxes on imports, which could cut the developing world off from what remains of global markets.

More critical still could be the impact of the sustainability mantra on food production, particularly for Sub-Saharan Africa, which will be home to most of the world’s population growth over the next three decades, according to United Nations projections. These countries need more food production, either domestically or from rich countries like the US, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and France. And they are acutely aware of what happened when Sri Lanka adopted the sustainability agenda. This led to the breakdown of Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector and, eventually, to the violent overthrow of its government.

We need to rethink the sustainability agenda. Protecting the environment cannot come at the cost of jobs and growth. We should also assist developing countries in achieving a more prosperous future. This means financing workable technologies – gas, nuclear, hydro – that can provide the reliable energy so critical for economic development. It does no good to suggest a programme that will keep the poor impoverished.

Unless people’s concerns about the green agenda are addressed, they will almost certainly seek to disrupt the best-laid plans of our supposedly enlightened elites. In the end, as Protagoras said, human beings are still the ultimate ‘measure’ of what happens in the world – whether the cognoscenti like it or not. – Joel Kotkin

Patrick West

The striking thing about all this is that if the commenters are to be believed, and I have no reason to doubt them, freedom of speech in New Zealand is far more precarious than most of us imagined. When people are afraid to speak their minds for fear of adverse consequences, we are effectively no better than Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China. You could be excused for wondering how long it will be before people start circulating New Zealand-style samizdats – the clandestine newsletters published by dissenters in the Soviet Union.

Things may not be so bad here that people risk arrest or imprisonment for speaking out, but the chilling effect is no less real. The threat of ostracism, career derailment or denunciation on social media can be almost as powerful as the fear of a knock on the door from the secret police in the middle of the night.

In fact in some ways it’s more insidious because it’s not declared or overt. Limitations on free speech are imposed not by statute or government edict, but by unwritten rules policed by vindictive zealots determined to make an example of anyone who challenges the dominant ideological consensus.

This is something new. Even during the prime ministership of Robert Muldoon, which is generally considered the high-water mark of authoritarian government in modern New Zealand history, people didn’t feel this intimidated. You have to go back to the Public Safety Conservation Act, which was used to criminalise pro-wharfie comment during the 1951 waterfront dispute, to find a more oppressively censorious political environment – and that legislation was invoked on that occasion in response to a singular and relatively short-lived event. This time it’s open-ended. There’s no fixed time frame beyond which we can assume free speech will be permitted to flourish again. – Karl du Fresne

I still lament that many people hide behind pseudonyms for no better reason than they lack the courage to stand up for opinions they are legally entitled to hold. I also deplore the tendency for anonymity to result in commenters engaging in cheap shots and puerile slanging matches – a fate that has befallen other blogs (though not this one), and which wouldn’t happen if commenters had to be named. Accordingly, people who identify themselves are far more likely to get their comments published here. Opinions carry far more weight when there’s a name to them.

But what’s even more lamentable than people sheltering behind pseudonyms for reasons of timidity is that many commenters are genuinely fearful of repercussions if they identify themselves. Freedom of expression is not served by denying them a voice – and ultimately, freedom of expression must take precedence over secondary concerns. –Karl du Fresne

As a parent, do you have confidence the education system is delivering?

Do employers understand what all the different levels of NCEA mean and what the results tell us about a job candidate?

Would it be better to maybe toss a real-work document in front of someone during the interview, and see if they understand it.

If it really matters to the role that the person can read and write and do simple numerical reasoning, you might be better off paying for a private test.  – Tim Dower

Are we at the point where NCEA has lost its credibility? Not that it’s ever had much of that.

Is it time to just give up on NCEA, and go back to using recognised qualifications like GCSE – the advantage of those being they’re portable – and that matters in a global employment market.

Bottom line, as the Herald recently found, New Zealand students have been going backward against their overseas peers for the past 20 years.

NCEA was introduced in 2002.

Point made? –  Tim Dower

He is wrong in his opinion that the Courts have decided that Māori have a legal right to the co-governance of naturally flowing freshwater.

He is also wrong, in my opinion, when he asserts that New Zealanders are cavalier about the destruction of their democracy by stealth which he has conceded is what is happening under the Affordable Water Reforms.

He is contemptuous of the intelligence of New Zealanders that they can be duped by the promise that in 30 years’ time they will save $2,000 dollars per annuum on their rates bill.

His claim to be a prophet is a shallow and insincere political stunt which will not go unnoticed by an astute electorate come election day.  – Graeme Reeves 

So now we know the difference between the woke West and theocratic Iran. Between our own cultural elites that are in the grip of the religion of ‘social justice’ and Iran’s religious elites that believe they’re doing Allah’s bidding. It’s a difference in liquids. Over here, women who step out of line are doused in tomato soup; over there, they’re doused in yoghurt. Here, their hair is turned orange as they are ritualistically humiliated with soup by fuming sexist mobs. There, their hair is turned white as they are punished with yoghurt by angry men for the crime of being unveiled in public. – Brendan O’Neill

The look of the men might differ – Iran’s yoghurt-thrower was conservatively dressed, Auckland’s soup-thrower was in a dress. The religion might differ, too – the misogynist in Iran was motivated by the Islamist ideology where the misogynists in New Zealand were fuelled by the trans ideology. But a strikingly similar zeal and bigotry unites these two acts of public witch-shaming. In both instances, either by yoghurt or soup, women were violently reprimanded for deviating from an ideology invented by men for the benefit of men: the unveiled women for refusing to be modest, as per the rules of Islam; Parker for refusing to check her white cishet female privilege, as per the rules of the gender cult.

There’s one striking difference between the Shandiz and Auckland witch-shamings, though. In the former, men took action against the misogynist. The shop owner and another citizen angrily rebuked the yoghurt-thrower. In the latter there was far less male solidarity with the women under attack. In fact, mobs of men howled in glee at the sight of the souped witch. And they’ve been cackling ever since, for example by tweeting images of tins of tomato soup. I wonder if religious zealots in Iran are likewise sharing images of tubs of yoghurt as an underhand warning to any bitch who’s getting ideas above her station? That there was more male support for the women in Shandiz than there was for the women in Auckland is a searing indictment of the moral disarray of the woke West. – Brendan O’Neill

One murder by cops in the US moved them more than hundreds of murders by cops in Iran.

How do we explain this dearth of agitation with Iran? Those two sexist drenchings, in Shandiz and Auckland, give us a clue. It’s because, disturbingly, the woke West increasingly resembles theocratic Iran. No, women in the West do not face anything like the tyrannies endured by Iranian women. But in both vibe and belief, our cultural elites mimic Iran’s religious elites. Both are agitated by women who think and speak freely, Iran’s ayatollahs viewing them as a menace to the Islamic order, our woke ayatollahs viewing them as usurpers of the new gender order. Both bristle at any demeaning of Islam, though where Iran calls it ‘blasphemy’, the woke call it ‘Islamophobia’. Witness the suspension of a schoolkid in Yorkshire for scuffing a page in the Koran or the hounding into hiding of that Batley Grammar schoolteacher for showing his pupils an image of Muhammad – acts of intolerance Iran would be proud of. And both believe it’s wrong to oppose the hijab. Iran says it’s a sin punishable by arrest to be anti-hijab; right-on Westerners brand criticism of the veil ‘hijabophobia’, yet another expression of ‘racist’ hatred for Islam, apparently.

It’s hard to escape the sense that in both Iran and the West right now, men in dresses are persecuting women. Islamists in the thobe harass unveiled women. Trans activists in women’s clothing punish women who talk about sex and gender. Nothing better captures the moral corrosion of Western society than the fact that radical activists here now spend more time defending the right of men to define themselves as women than they do standing up for women in Iran whose liberty is being violently crushed by men. In Iran, young people fight for the right of women to be treated as human beings; in the West they fight for the right of men to be treated as women. Religious hysteria is addling minds everywhere. – Brendan O’Neill

Inflation is not under control, and the OCR is not doing what it is supposed to do. In the 1990s, the RBNZ introduced the revolutionary idea of inflation targeting – later adopted by many central banks across the globe – in response to the destabilising impact of high inflation during the 1980s. It seems the RBNZ has forgotten its history. – Christoph Schumacher

Social-justice ideology is having a growing and pernicious influence on our educational institutions.

For example, many UK schools are being encouraged to become ‘actively anti-racist’, which would mean adhering to the precepts of critical race theory. A significant number are promoting the contested concepts of gender ideology, and some are keeping children’s gender identities hidden from their parents. So prevalent is trans ideology, in fact, that one girl was recently hounded out of her school for arguing that biological sex is more important than gender identity. Even nurseries are busy ‘decolonising’ the minds of staff, and ‘decolonising the play spaces’. – Alka Sehgal Cuthbert

To a greater extent than ever before, it seems that schools, nurseries and other educational institutions are now being used for directly political ends. The cumulative result is not education, but indoctrination.

Teaching seems to have lost its purpose. It is no longer about disseminating knowledge to the young. It’s about instructing them in correct thought, versing them in the political orthodoxies of the age. – Alka Sehgal Cuthbert

To resist this woke instrumentalisation of education, we need to return education to its foundational ethos. Schools should be places for the passing on of knowledge to the young. They should expose eager minds to the best which has been thought and said – not force them to recite questionable identitarian orthodoxies. – Alka Sehgal Cuthbert

Identitarian indoctrination should have no place in the classroom. – Alka Sehgal Cuthbert

We’ve just found out today that up to 10 police officers are now dedicated to dealing with these protestors.

Up to 10 police, between 7am and 9am daily, waiting to find out where the protest is, then responding quickly to get them off the road and get traffic flowing again.

Those are ten police officers who are now unable to do their actual jobs, which is to deal with crime.

Harsh at it sounds, I’ll say it again, these people should be put in jail so that this stops.  – Heather du Plessis-Allan 

Labour’s industry transformation plans are proving transformational only to the consultancy industry – Michael Woodhouse

Almost four years on, only two of the eight plans have been completed. The ITPs are vague or in some cases non-existent. Only seven reports have been completed or released in draft form, meaning the process has so far cost more than $72,000 per page.

With an eye-watering $140 million budgeted to write and implement the plans, we can expect millions more will end up in the pockets of consultants or wastefully taking up endless time of officials.

Rather than being transformational, the plans have been described as tentative, half-hearted and telling us what we already know. Given the huge budget, taxpayers deserve better.

Industries know what they need, which is for the Government to set a nimble regulatory framework that allows large and small businesses compete and grow, then get out of the way. We do not need to line the pockets of consultants to learn this. – Michael Woodhouse

Labour has repeatedly taken credit for funding extra nurses. However, they have refused to admit how many nurses have left – and now it is clear why.

“New data shows that almost 19,000 nurses have left over the last five years under Labour.

“What’s worse is that the number of nurses leaving has been steadily increase each year, jumping from 2,963 nurses in 2017 to 4,752 in 2022 – a 60 per cent increase. – Shane Reti

The health sector is in crisis and has been crying out for more workforce support, but the Labour Government took too long to act and refused to put overseas nurses on the straight -to-residency pathway, even when they had this worrying data showing how many nurses were leaving the profession.

At a time when there is a global war for talent, New Zealand should be doing everything it can to be an attractive destination for essential workers. While countries like Australia and Canada were offering health workers easier immigration access, Labour refused to act.

The Labour Government has failed the health sector and refused to take accountability for inaction. Sick and injured New Zealanders are going to be paying the price this winter. – Shane Reti

New Zealand’s once world-leading school education system is in a state of deep malaise. Objective international measures show an ongoing decline in key achievement areas, including literacy, numeracy and science. Too many students are leaving school ill-prepared for tertiary study, work and life. –  Dr Michael Johnston

The reports compare apples and pears. They compare actual income of middle-income earners to unrealised hypothetical capital gains of wealthy New Zealanders. Presumably this means the Government is planning to try again with a Capital Gains Tax, but not just on realised gains but on unrealised gains – which would be I think unique in the world.

The research also ignores the effect of inflation on assets. So if an asset increased by 7% and inflation is 7% it is worth no more in real terms, but Parker seems to think it should be taxed. – David Farrar

One thing the research did so, was highly progressive our tax system really is. If you take into account income tax, GST and transfers, the net effective tax rate for each income decile is:

• • Decile 1: -52%
  • Decile 2: -55%
  • Decile 3: -36%
  • Decile 4: -2%
  • Decile 5: 6%
  • Decile 6: 18%
  • Decile 7: 21%
  • Decile 8: 23%
  • Decile 9: 26%
  • Decile 10: 29%

So the bottom 40% of income earners receive more in transfers than they pay in tax. Even those in the 5th decile only pay an effective tax rate of 6%, because the vast vast bulk of tax is paid by those in the top deciles. – David Farrar

Hipkins’ sausage roll scoffing small town social democracy is one many New Zealanders increasingly want to leave behind, figuratively, societally and increasingly, literally.

Those who choose to stay in this country for Hipkins’ reasons probably lower the 1Q of New Zealand – while we lose the best and brightest, the entrepreneurial, the innovators, the trained and talented, the ambitious, to Australia.

To put it another way, if this is Hipkins’ vision of New Zealand then the old tourist cliche of ‘Welcome to New Zealand, put your watches back 20 years’ is sadly true, or rather, actually now out of date. It’s ‘put your watches- and your expectations and ambition back 50 years.’

Working in the New Zealand tertiary system I can tell Hipkins that his vision of New Zealand and his idea of what will make people stay in this country has no resonance with the bright, ambitious, educated young people it is a privilege to teach. All such rhetoric and attitudes do is increase the sense that our universities are just ‘adding value for export’. – Mike Grimshaw

I think that it’s really important for children to read books and have some sense of when the books were written. You just cannot go on rewriting Dickens and rewriting Shakespeare to suit people. – Sir Michael Morpurgo

“Rich people”. The term conjures up a variety of thoughts. Many will run to the immediate vision of the “Trumpesque” character — brash, arrogant, sometimes even obnoxious.

While that description may apply to a few, the great majority of our wealthy people are considerate and respectful of others. Most are bright and some can be quite charming. That’s how they became successful.

In New Zealand, we don’t have a great attitude towards wealth and wealthy people. But then, we don’t have a great attitude towards success either. In fact, our collective distaste for tall poppies is a longstanding and negative part of the Kiwi culture. – Bruce Cotterill

In the 1980s, our business high-flyers flew visibly. We had Bob Jones, Tony Gibbs, the Fletchers, Fay, Richwhite, Myers and the like. But with the exception of Jones, we wore them down and ultimately they and their successors retreated to the shadows. As a result, our wealthy people tend to hide away or leave our shores.

But where would we be without them? You see, the great majority of our very wealthy people get to where they are because they do something extraordinary. Simply put, they do things the rest of us don’t do. They take risks we won’t take, think of things we don’t (or can’t) think of, and build things we cannot conceive.

They are variously productive, creative, constructive and accumulative. Mostly their success comes as a result of doing things very well over a long time. They make their money from the land and from the movies, from our construction sites and from technology. They sell us our cars, jewellery and sports equipment, the packaging that wraps around it, and the transport that moves it all around.

Those who operate on the spectrum of envy and jealousy don’t like them much. Many of our politicians fall into this category.  – Bruce Cotterill

But we underestimate them at our peril. Elected officials don’t build our cities, property developers do. Can you imagine our cities without the developers who visualise something better, who borrow millions and build our urban landscapes and heavenly skylines? Every time the economic cycle dips, a few of them go broke. They take thousands of people and millions of dollars down with them. There’s a reason this happens. The risks they take are huge. But if they pull it off, the rewards are huge too. And that’s okay. And whether they succeed or fail, they usually leave the city behind them looking better than it did before they arrived.

Then there are the technology entrepreneurs who make our book-keeping easier, our purchases more streamlined, or even our sports viewing more engaging. The brilliance of the creative minds whose work entertains us on the big screen and those who conceive and make the toys our kids play with. They are people who change our lives for the better and they make plenty of money in the process. And that’s okay too.

They’re also the people who keep our charities running. If you think that building and running hospitals is the government’s job, consider the following.

Starship Children’s Hospital would not exist or operate without the contributions from our wealthy. These are the same people whose contributions make sure that our swimming pools get built and our universities get their new buildings.

Many of our young athletes, golfers, motor racers or cyclists would not have made it to the world stage without the generous contributions of our wealthiest people. Surf life saving clubs wouldn’t have inflatable rescue boats and communities would be without their netball courts or basketball gyms. – Bruce Cotterill

I’d like us to be better at celebrating all of our successful people, including those who are our wealthiest. But sadly, the aforementioned politics of envy has been on display this week and seems set to continue. In a week when the Aussies made it easier for us to join their economy, I’m puzzled that our Government, led by Revenue Minister David Parker, has chosen to declare war on that small portion of our population who are deemed “wealthy”.

Parker’s tax review, supposedly of New Zealand’s 350 wealthiest people (although only 311 participated), presents a major signal that we should all be concerned about. The most staggering aspect of the review was that they chose to include “unrealised gains” in their assessment of income.

Since Wednesday’s announcement, I’ve been asked what “unrealised gains” means in this context. Simply put, it means the increased value of an asset that you own, but have not yet sold. Such assets may include property, shares, a business or a farm. To this writer’s knowledge, there is not a country in the world that seeks to regard unrealised capital gains as assessable income for the purposes of calculating tax. Doing so would mean that a taxpayer has to find or borrow money from another source in order to pay the tax on the increased value of an asset which they continue to own.

Imagine you buy a few shares. In my view, the intent of Parker’s analysis and his subsequent interview comments suggests, despite the fact that you may choose to hold onto those shares for the long term, you may be asked to pay tax on any gains made in a 12-month period, even though you haven’t sold them. Most people would have to sell a few shares to pay the annual tax bill. The end result would be that your little nest-egg disappears over time. This is the opposite of encouraging savings. It discourages savings. In fact, it discourages anyone who wants to do better.

Of course there is a flip side that this Government doesn’t seem to be talking about. What if we make unrealised losses on our investments? Is the government going to allow us to claim a tax deduction on unrealised losses? – Bruce Cotterill

 It compared tax paid by our wealthy few, on all income, including that which is unrealised, to come up with a percentage of tax paid against assessed income. The result was 9.4 per cent. This was the headline number that the Government and many media commentators jumped on. However, if unrealised income was excluded, the result was 30 per cent.

They then compared that to the tax paid by an average person earning $80,000 per year. That proportion was 22 per cent. They did include the GST that middle-income earner paid, although it’s not clear whether they included GST in the tax contribution of the higher-spending, wealthy person. Their analysis didn’t appear to include an assessment of whether the $80,000 earner had a few shares, an old sports car that had gone up in value, or heaven forbid, their own home which might have appreciated as well.

In other words, so desperate are they to demonstrate that the wealthy aren’t paying their way, that they have analysed the figures on one basis for the wealthy — including unrealised gains — and a different calculation for everyone else. The result is a misleading deception which in my view is designed to move public opinion further against our tall poppies. – Bruce Cotterill

They’re not going to come up with a new tax for the 300-odd uber-wealthy survey participants. They’re likely to use this study to come up with a new tax for the top 10 per cent of Kiwis, those who already pay just under half of the country’s personal tax bill. And they’ll base that tax on what they think the top 300 should be paying. And you know who will carry the can.

The great shame here is that New Zealand’s tax policy is already well-regarded internationally. We sit in the middle of the OECD’s tax-to-GDP analysis. And the Tax Foundation’s “International Tax Competitiveness Index”, which measures the extent to which a country’s tax system is competitive and neutral, suggests that we have things about right.

Competitive means that marginal rates are kept low, to attract capital rather than pushing capital elsewhere. That’s important for a small country.

Neutral means that our system doesn’t favour consumption over saving, as happens with investment taxes and wealth taxes.

In 2022, New Zealand ranked third in the world for tax competitiveness.  – Bruce Cotterill

The moves being considered would represent a major and aggressive change to our tax policy. And despite the minister’s protests to the contrary, they don’t do press conferences like the ones they did this week, if they are not considering such revisions.

The Tax Foundation suggests that uncompetitive tax structures will drive people and their capital away. At a time when our productive young people are leaving for brighter pastures, the risk our Government is taking is that we will also lose many of our wealth creators, and with them, the contributions to the communities they serve. I’m sure many of our wealthiest people will happily pay a bit more tax. But we should be cautious. If we continue to abuse those people with lopsided commentary and poorly structured debate, they too will leave our shores. And they will take their money, their ambition and their generosity with them. – Bruce Cotterill

Everyone who contributes to traffic congestion already pays for it in about the worst way possible: through their time, and through excess wear and tear on – and emissions from – vehicles idling in stop-and-go traffic.

Shifting to congestion charging would help ensure freer-flowing traffic. It would make buses run more reliably, unhindered by peak-time congestion. Achieving net-zero climate goals would be less costly with fewer congestion-related emissions.

And by shifting some travel to times when the roads are otherwise less used, it would encourage better use of existing road capacity. The roading system could handle more trips, overall, with less need to add new lanes. If a movie theatre is full at peak times when ticket prices are zero, it makes a lot more sense to start charging for tickets than to build more screens. – Eric Crampton 

A congestion dividend could rebate collected revenues back to those road users scaled to their use of the roads, but without regard to time of use. Drivers who only drove at peak times would receive a dividend, but one that would be small relative to the congestion charges that they had paid. Those driving at off-peak times would receive a dividend while paying little in congestion charges. And households with Community Services Cards could receive a higher dividend.

That kind of system could not be a revenue grab. The congestion dividend would offset cost-of-living pressures. And it might help strengthen continued political support for the charging system overall.  – Eric Crampton 

We definitely live in strange times when it comes to democracy and capitalism. Everything has been turned on its head. Democrats and even self-styled radicals cosy up to big business, imploring it to put its money where its mouth is and Do Something about social injustice. Meanwhile, ostensibly pro-market right-wingers behave like student agitators of yesteryear, condemning the capitalist elite for its political overreach and threatening to boycott its wares.  – Brendan O’Neill

We definitely live in strange times when it comes to democracy and capitalism. Everything has been turned on its head. Democrats and even self-styled radicals cosy up to big business, imploring it to put its money where its mouth is and Do Something about social injustice. Meanwhile, ostensibly pro-market right-wingers behave like student agitators of yesteryear, condemning the capitalist elite for its political overreach and threatening to boycott its wares.  –

 Many parents agree that under-10s should not be told there are 72 genders. DeSantis won a landslide victory in the midterms in November, securing the votes of many Latinos and working-class whites: the kind of people who are deeply opposed to the ideological capture of education by the purple-haired ideologues of the new elite. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe the views of these voters should hold more weight than the views of Disney’s clique of aloof bosses.

The second reason we should support DeSantis against Disney is because this clash might just be the start of a much-needed fightback against the woke corporate assault on democracy.  –

This is an oligarchical onslaught against the workings of democracy. It is an attack on citizens’ fundamental rights to raise money for political campaigns, to freely associate with one another, to express their political views, and to expect that their voice will count for as much as the voice of richer people who run big businesses like Disney. GOP members who cry ‘But what about the rights of private companies?’ have failed to clock the existential nature of the battle at hand, which is between an unaccountable elite on one side and reason, democracy and the common sense of the electorate on the other. I know which side I’m on. Cry more, Disney. – Brendan O’Neill

We didn’t spin off out of a university or Crown research institute. We only had what money I’d saved. It was very difficult. We’re a materials company, we needed chemicals. I was ordering chemicals from overseas to my residential address – they didn’t want to give me any chemicals without being a proper laboratory.

We started as a medical devices company because I wanted to help my dad walk. He has polio. I’ve always wanted to help my dad walk since I was young. His name’s Dennis, and we’ve named the company after him.

But it now goes far beyond assisting people out of wheelchairs. The material benefits robotics as a whole. We have a lot of interested organisations in medical robotics, aerospace, military and industrial robotics, and we’re building them prototypes. – Anvil Bañez

Science, for me, is the latest evidence base of what works and what doesn’t work and what we can do better in the future. – Rachel Barker

There is a lot of focus on scientific research, but not necessarily enough focus on the integration of that scientific research into society. We publish a lot of stuff. But the number of science-based startups, for instance, is much lower than you would expect for the kind of research output that we have. I think the commercialisation of that research needs a lot more funding and attention than it currently has. – Imche Veiga

Upholding freedom of expression and academic freedom, and facilitating an environment where students and staff can discuss and debate challenging topics is at the heart of our purpose as a university.

We refuse to be intimidated by the unreasonable behaviour of those who sought to prevent lawful discussion of challenging topics on our campus.

We have already stated publicly that ensuring respectful dialogue about controversial topics is critical to our raison d’être as a university. – Sir Peter Mathieson

A question that has gripped this country these past five years is how former Prime Minister Ardern, who touted kindness as her brand, became so divisive.

The explanation may be simple. Political rulers with strong moral viewpoints have long created discord. Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke explained the dangers of governments exercising authority in the realm of individual conscience. Leaders who claimed to represent the moral high ground created the impetus for the separation of Church and State in Europe.

Yet Jacinda Ardern put matters of conscience right back into the heart of affairs of State. – Robert MacCulloch

Ardern became more like a charismatic leader of a spiritual movement, promoting passionate conviction, than a traditional party boss. She converted many National Party supporters from her pulpit. They joined her congregation, better known as a “team”, singing her praises, at least for a time.

She even won over the hard-nosed Harvard University academics and graduating students. They gave her a standing ovation. However, a stunned silence would have likely greeted our former Prime Minister had she argued that the world’s economic challenges, in addition to its culture wars, could be solved by kindness.

Yet that is what she did three years before in an article in Britain’s Financial Times newspaper, which the Beehive called “the economics of kindness”.

It caused a problem. No-one had heard of kindness economics. No-one knew what it meant, including our own Treasury. Is it kind to reward effort? If so, is it kind to force hard workers to pay back their extra reward in taxes to support lazy ones? During the pandemic, was it kind to pay the wage subsidy to big firms? Was the Reserve Bank kind when it flooded financial markets with liquidity, causing inflation? Is it kind to now hike interest rates?

The meaninglessness of these questions reveals a lot about “kindness economics”. It was a brand-name for a product that was never built. – 

This article is not debating the importance of kindness as a personal virtue in our dealings with others.

It is arguing that the non-existence of kindness economics meant Arden had no framework to leverage the stand-out success she helped deliver during the pandemic’s first year into an enduring economic prosperity for the nation. – Robert MacCulloch

The International Monetary Fund has now confirmed our GDP growth rate this year is below the average and our current account deficit the worst in the developed world. It never had to be that way, since we had been the world’s stand-out success in 2020. The billions subsequently thrown away could have been used for health-care, infrastructure and an education system of which we could all be proud.

Incredibly, we now face recession when most of the nations that did far poorer than us during the pandemic do not.

Meanwhile, Ardern’s Minister of Finance and Governor, who bear direct responsibility for our economic mess, stay on. Both defend themselves against accusations of error by saying others are also doing badly. When you copy folks worse than you, that’s what you get.

The Kiwi story these past years is one of our leaders snatching an extraordinary economic defeat from the jaws of the people’s amazing Covid victory. It reminds us that competency is important, not just kindness.  – Robert MacCulloch

 David Parker’s envy report, digging into the wealth of 311 talented individuals who didn’t squander their productive years in politics, journalism or worse, the insolvency profession, revealed something interesting.

Net worth in the land of the long-white cloud is heavily concentrated in the elderly.  – Damien Grant

In the last 50 years, according to the published report, of the 311 wealthy families, only 62 enjoyed an inheritance in the last 50 years, and the total that was transferred was just $411 million, a fraction of the net worth of these individuals. Most received little or nothing at the start of their commercial lives.

The majority of those with serious capital in New Zealand today made their wealth in a free market by providing goods and services on an industrial scale that others were willing to pay for.

This is something that should be celebrated. These are Kiwis who have enriched our lives, who built the homes in which we live, the logistics companies that deliver food to our supermarkets and, indeed, built the supermarkets that provide the calories without which we’d be all be a lot thinner.

None of this matters to a political class seeking cheap political points and the report is replete with ugly undertones: “Our tradies, nurses, school teachers, hospitality workers, hairdressers, cleaners, engineers and small business owners all pay much higher effective tax rates than their wealthier fellow Kiwis.”

Not only is this statement wilfully inflammatory, it is untrue. The wealthy do not pay a lower percentage of tax than nurses.  – Damien Grant

If you own a farm and the market value of that farm goes up, then this is treated as “economic income”. Haig-Simons does not measure the post-sale value, only the estimated rise in the value of an asset.

If your day job was as an accountant, and you paid tax on that income but not on the increased value of your farm, then your rate of “effective tax” is lower because the income of the rising value of the farm was tax-free.

This type of analysis is so flawed, its only practical use is to demonstrate how degraded and actively political the Treasury has become.

To compound the perception of unfairness, the report explicitly ignores the effect of inflation on their analysis, despite this data being readily available and easy to factor in; which makes the report’s conclusions little better than junk. It seems probable that the conclusion was written before the analysis was undertaken.

The research, and I am being generous in calling it that, also suffers from “survivor bias”, because it excludes past families who had been extremely wealthy but whose riches has been lost, squandered, or dissipated. – Damien Grant

In a moment of lucidity, the report states an awkward fact: “Further, when considering the tax and transfer system jointly, many individuals in low-income deciles receive more in the form of government cash transfers than they pay in tax.

“If such transfers are netted off tax paid, these individuals will have very low or negative effective tax rates.”

A large percentage of the population receive more from the state in goods and services than they pay in tax. The state spends about $120 billion, or $24,000 per resident. You need to be earning $100,000 a year to cover this and if your household has five people in it, the household needs to be bringing in half a million. – Damien Grant

 The number of citizens who pay more than their “fair share”, if we consider that to be sharing the tax burden equally amongst all of us, is low. There is a small number who do most of the heavy lifting, who pay a huge percentage of the tax burden.

Despite the hysterics of the report, the 311 maligned families paid, according to a graph included in it, roughly $1 billion in tax in the 2021 financial year.

So 311 families paid 1% of all state revenue. This was higher than in past years, where the average has been 0.5%.

We have the analysis back-to-front. These small number of citizens are the engine of our economy. They are the superstars both in terms of fuelling New Zealand by their innovation, risk-taking and the contribution to employment and commercial life. And on top, they massively subsidise the rest of us with an outsized contribution to the Crown’s reserves.

The fatal conceit of the tax report and those who have been salivating at the prospect of a bit of asset-stripping is to assume that we would be a better society if we took capital away from the most productive and creative members of our community and gave it to the likes of David Parker to manage. – Damien Grant

The real failure has been the decision to engage in this sort of disgraceful and dishonest analysis.

Politicians who seek to gain short-term advantage by pandering to the baser instincts of the electorate deserve the strongest condemnation.

New Zealand deserves better from our elected representatives, the bureaucracy and from those commentators who either don’t understand the economics or, worse, who do but cannot resist luxuriating in the warmth of the flames they are helping to stoke. – Damien Grant

In effect, Three Waters delivers much of what the iwi is seeking through the Courts, especially as the territory of the Southern Water Entity was drawn along Ngai Tahu boundaries, and tribal control of freshwater will be delivered through co-governance and Te Mana o te Wai Statements.

Furthermore, in order to better influence water allocation decisions, Ngai Tahu persuaded the Labour Government to legislate two permanent seats on the regulator – the Canterbury Regional Council – in addition to two existing Council advisory positions. In their oral submission on the Canterbury Regional Council (Ngai Tahu Representation) Bill, they admitted that the two seats were just a first step towards securing greater influence in the future. – Muriel Newman

Let’s make no mistake – Three Waters will deliver control of freshwater to Maori if Labour is returned to power in October.

But that will not be the end of the matter for Maori.

Tuku Morgan and John Tamihere have made it very clear that if the Maori Party is the kingmaker after the election, they will not settle for anything less than full ownership of New Zealand’s freshwater. – Muriel Newman

In 1363 Edward the Third an ancestor of the present King Charles decreed that henceforth all court proceedings must be in English. Prior to that they had been written in Norman French (a change that the French have never really got over.) For the past six hundred and sixty years this has been the norm throughout the common law world and it has been so in New Zealand since 1840 when the tribes accepted British sovereignty and enjoyed all of the benefits of citizenship and the Common Law.  But it is no longer so in New Zealand. Increasingly Maori tribes are bringing  cases in the courts seeking common law remedies relying on  proceedings which are written partly in English and partly in Maori and often using words to express ideas which are not only ambiguous but are used to describe things which did not exist in Maori society pre-1840. – Anthony Willy

Overwhelmingly the people bringing these proceedings have assimilated into our multi-cultural society and are indistinguishable from other New Zealanders either by appearance or the way in which they live. They understand that our country in 2023 is so distant and different from that which existed here in 1840 as to be unrecognisable. We all now live in a democratic prosperous settled society governed by one law for all enjoying the benefits of a thriving market economy which is a far cry from the violent tribal society which existed here when Captain Hobson arrived. True some of those world class privileges have been under serious threat over the past five years but with a change of government, which there surely will be most if not all of the damage can be promptly repaired. One of the existential threats which notwithstanding much back peddling by Ardern’s successor government is a concerted effort on a number of fronts for a small group of persons claiming some Maori blood to secure ownership of our fresh water. Increasingly this spurious claim is based on a fictional reinvention of the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi and after a brief flirtation with the United Nations convention on Human rights those seeking in effect to own our economy now rely on rights, they say were guaranteed to them in 1840. This is patent nonsense, and leaving aside that, any constitutional status the document might have once had has been fully performed. That said it is being increasingly relied on by a small group of greedy tribalists to secure ownership of assets which are crucial to the survival of our democracy, our market economy, and the Rule of Law. – Anthony Willy

Cases such as this highlight how the law which since 1840 has been common to all New Zealanders and has been conducted using the English language with the emphasis on precision and clarity is becoming subverted by introducing words which are understood by a vanishingly small proportion of the public and which have no fixed, precise meaning. It is as if Alice in Wonderland has come to town and like the Red Queen Maori litigants feel they are free to contend that words mean what they say they mean on the day but tomorrow they may have a different and more advantageous meaning. We have seen this in the foreshore and sea bed litigation where the meaning of the  word “Tikanga” was crucial to the outcome of the case but the judge (encouraged by a Supreme Court Judge, Williams J. in his extra judicial writings) refused to give the word any defined meaning to the word, leaving it open to later litigants to claim some meaning or usage different from that which attracted Churchman J. in the case at hand. In the result the Judge felt able to hold  that the word was capable of meaning “shared exclusivity.” Which is an outstanding oxymoron in any language.

It doesn’t stop there. Increasingly statute law is becoming larded with elastic language invented to suit modern circumstances. The three waters legislation is a unique example of what one can only suppose is deliberate obfuscation. Something called “Te Mana O Te Wai statements” confer on all Maori tribes and subtribes the right to dictate how freshwater is allocated and used in New Zealand. My research into what these words mean (one translation is simply “water”) has proved fruitless involving as it does perusal of the Water Services Entities Act and a number of National Policy Statements. Yet these directions are binding on all New Zealanders and must be complied with by all relevant local authorities within two years. – Anthony Willy

That said Maori is an “official language” and no doubt it will be contended that a Maori litigant, or perhaps any litigant should be free to bring court proceedings using the language. But then sign language is an “official language” and it has not yet been suggested that it be used to bring and conduct court proceedings. The simple answer is that if a litigant does not speak English, then it has long been common practice for them to use the services of an interpreter to render the pleadings into English, in conducting the case in Court then it is routine for the Court to appoint an interpreter to ensure that a litigant or witness is able to convey  their case to the judge or jury. It is also commonplace for a court to be called on to decide as a matter of fact, not law what is English language meaning of some claimed custom in a dispute between parties contending for different outcomes. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council has become expert at it in cases drawn from across the Empire and later Commonwealth. But at the end of the day these customs do not become part of the law they remain solely questions of fact.

And the lesson to be drawn from these mendacious attempts to subvert the judicial and legislative process and ensure that the law is no longer common to all is simple; bring back Edward the Third’s edict (shared as it is by Winston), and for the Court Rules of procedure and Parliament to require that all court proceedings shall be solely in English while preserving the right to the use of interpreters and translators for those who speak only 1840s Maori. – Anthony Willy

It is perhaps ironic that government attempts to impose its will on the citizens of this country, aided and abetted by a compliant or even sycophantic media, will be the main reason for its downfall.

Hopefully, if that happens, we will be able to return to an environment where individuals can respond to measures that are in fact human rights abuses without worrying if their families will suffer the consequences.

I’m too old to worry about that happening to me and will carry on making my small contribution to the common cause as long as l am cognitively able to do so but l am concerned that too many of my colleagues will be intimidated out of the business if continuing under duress becomes too hard.

We must not allow that to happen. – Clive Bibby 

Still, there is one election year constant: the Greens are in a self-sabotaging mess.

The peacenik party loves a good civil war. If its members aren’t trying to depose a co-leader, then they are cheering on the gruesome jousting tournament that ranks their MPs. –    Andrea Vance

The musterers (they don’t like whips, not very “co-operative”) are investigating, in a very messy, public inquiry that will drag negative headlines out for weeks, before culminating in more messy headlines.

Green, mean and drama queens. To quote Succession’s Logan Roy: these aren’t serious people.

Which is a shame, because this is the year they really should be serious. For the first time in their history, they are within grasp of serious influence. – Andrea Vance

The prime minister will always sacrifice the Greens to tame the public mood. Hipkins threw Shaw under the bus during the 2017 Green Schools debacle (where $11m of taxpayer funds went to a private Taranaki school), and did not hesitate to humiliate Marama Davidson over her comments about white men.

There must be a truce between the competing power blocs within the party: the caucus and grassroots activists. They need to resolve ideological conflict around the fundamental direction of the party, including uncertainty about their position within government. And, once and for all, end personality divisions in the caucus, which percolate down to the grassroots.

As Chris Hipkins’ Labour is intent in camping in the middle ground, that leaves its traditional radical base looking for an alternative.

The Greens could be it: if they start fighting for it, and not each other – Andrea Vance

Last week Radio New Zealand promoted an activist demand by the Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa (PATHA) that the government should invest more in transgender “healthcare” – that’s sterilisation and genital mutilation to the rest of us. Radio New Zealand knows very well the harm that is being done. It actively chooses not only to ignore it, but to whitewash it. (This is the same media that tells us daily that our health system is on its knees. Actual women – the old fashioned sort – sit on long waiting lists for operations for endometriosis, breast reductions for chronic back pain, and all those silly ailments of the female embodied. Read the room guys?)

PATHA is a group whose membership appears to contain not a single medical professional, in fact very few professionals of any kind, yet the Ministry of Health uses its guidelines as standards of care for vulnerable, confused kids who are questioning their gender because that’s what kids do these days – they’re taught to at school. PATHA is just one of many activist groups funded by the public service to shape policy and deliver community services for which they appear to be entirely unqualified, apart from having very firm opinions and “lived experience”. PATHA, Gender Minorities Aotearoa, Rainbow Youth etc. etc. – it’s almost as if the government wants to outsource everything difficult or potentially problematic so that it can dodge accountability. But it is spending our money on these extremists and it is to blame for this mess. We need proper, rigorous standards in healthcare and across government, from leaders who take our wellbeing seriously. Some voices are marginalised for a reason – they are unqualified, unwell, untethered, and certainly not representative of any sensible section of society. We need to be protected from their misguided influence, they are not positive role models. When will our public service leaders locate their discernment and common sense?

As for Labour, no wonder it has had to dump so much of its mandated work programme. It’s been too busy implementing the one we didn’t vote for and by that measure it has been wildly successful. – Citizen Science

While world governments and financial institutions go Woke and Broke, we are left to try and make some sense out of what is left.

Are we heading for a world-wide recession that is a result of incompetent management by those in whom we have placed our trust? It would seem that the likelihood is real.

Who then can we turn to in a crisis where the bulk of the world population are innocent bystanders but will be amongst the first casualties of the pursuit of policies that wouldn’t be tolerated in a kindergarten seeking the advice of four-year-olds? – Clive Bibby

I had an enjoyable experience yesterday here on our farm that is struggling to get back to normal after the devastating Cyclone Gabriel floods.

I had asked a local trucking firm to deliver some posts and fertiliser we will use in the rehabilitation process that is taking place to a greater or lesser degree on virtually every farm in the local Uawa district.

My Maori neighbours are facing a clean-up bill of at least $1 million dollars on just one property and my guess is that most of the repair funds will have to come from their own financial resources.

Most properties have been offered a max of $10,000 by way of government assistance. At that rate, it will take the hardest hit ones years to get back to operating as usual.

For many it will be “walk off” time. – Clive Bibby

The driver arrived with a truck fitted out with attachment mechanical extras – including a “hi-ab” that would allow it to complete our job in conditions that would normally cause a basic unit to fail.

As soon as he jumped out of the cab and surveyed the site looking for hazards that would limit his ability to dispatch his load, l knew that this (relatively speaking) young man had skills to burn when operating his machine.

When he finished, l was moved to discuss his employment situation with him given that he appeared to be satisfied with the terms and conditions offered by the company he worked for.

Having used his family-owned trucking company on countless times during our 43 years running our farming business here on the East Coast, l wasn’t surprised to hear his comments about why he remained loyal to his employer.

It comes down to the things l have tried to identify as the factors that, if implemented on a nation-wide scale, would transform our failing economies into something that could lead us to the promised land.

They are the simple things that would make a real difference to the work force and as an extension, the nation’s coffers as well. – Clive Bibby

Basic things like:

1. 1.  recognition of skills even at the most basic level of employment;
   2.  recognition through salary increases for loyalty and years of service;
   3.  an acknowledgement and awareness that there are limits to what should be expected from people being asked to go the extra mile during daily operations – perhaps incentives that would make the difference as to whether the job is done well or finished with the bare minimum of effort;
   4. a recognition that each employee is a human being with family considerations that need to be addressed by management in a way that makes employees feel they are valued.

Those are just a few that are basic to the successful operation of any business. – Clive Bibby

Our future will depend as much as anything on whether we consult and listen to those who are being asked to drag us out of the mire once more.

If we don’t do that history will mark us down as another failed generation who were unable to recognise the power of working together towards a common goal.

The current “Them and Us” mentality is limiting our growth towards future prosperity for all. It has to go! – Clive Bibby

Unpopular governments are often tempted to find an enemy they can unite the country against. For Putin, it is Ukraine. For Labour, it is the nameless 311 richest families that Revenue Minister David Parker accuses of not paying their fair share.  – Richard Prebble

Those who advocate fairness as the goal of the tax system need to remember that the only truly equal society is a monastery, where every monk has nothing. – Richard Prebble

The IRD study was designed to show the rich do not pay their fair share. Under urgency, the minister changed the law so bureaucrats can demand to know everything we own. A scientific study would have looked at a cross-section of taxpayers, but that would have alarmed middle New Zealand. The minister picked the enemy – the richest families. Then the result was rigged by saying changes in the prices of assets are income.

Using the same methodology, the minister could scapegoat the poorest 311 families by saying government services are income.

He could say the poorest families are benefit-led, with many children. That there are 311 families which receive more than $2000 a week in benefits, accommodation allowance and special payments. Then there is the cost of education, whether the children attend school or not. Such families are often known to social agencies, police and courts, and some are guests of His Majesty. The big cost is health. Being poor is bad for your health. Many of our poorest families suffer from third-world illnesses. Frequent hospitalisation means there are at least 311 families that receive more than $1 million of taxpayer services a year.

If we follow the minister’s logic that anything of value is income, then those families owe – in income tax and ACC levies – $372,113 a year.

This is absurd. Services are not income.  – Richard Prebble

Assets are not income either. Even the richest families could not pay, from their income, an annual capital gains tax on the increase in the price of their assets caused by inflation.

Extreme cases make bad law. The richest and poorest families are not the norm.

The second tax report was from Sapere Research. It found that less than 2 per cent of all taxpayers pay 9.3 per cent of all income tax. The 21.2 per cent of taxpayers earning over $70,000 a year pay 68.5 per cent of income tax.

Most of the 311 richest families that the minister wants us to believe are freeloading pay many times their share of income tax. They are no cost to welfare. They often pay for their own health insurance and for their children’s education.

The third tax report was from Treasury and found that a third of all households receive more in tax credits and benefits than they pay in tax.

If the minister has his way, the new norm will be that everyone’s KiwiSaver will be reduced by capital gains taxes.

We will be taxed twice: once on our income and then on the price inflation of any asset that was purchased with that tax-paid income. – Richard Prebble

New taxes, like acorns, start small and grow into mighty oak trees. Income tax started in 1799 as a temporary measure to fund the Napoleonic wars, at 2 pence in the pound. Despite campaign promises, GST is now 15 per cent.

The Greens demand the capital gains tax rate be 39 per cent. The minister says it would not be on the family home. What is fair about a $20 million mansion being tax-free but the family bach being taxed? First, the mansions will be taxed, then our homes will be taxed. Labour is unleashing the politics of envy. They could consume us all.

Labour is also desperate for more revenue to feed its addiction to spending. It is irresponsible to feed an addict’s addiction.

The only fair tax is a flat tax. – Richard Prebble

Equal opportunity in sport should mean exactly that. Sex matters to performance as every single Olympics shows us that. Compare elite with elite not average males with elite females. Even a pretty unintelligent person can work that out…surely? Even cycling, triathlon & rowing! pic.twitter.com/2n2wyTINfc

— Sharron Davies MBE (@sharrond62) May 2, 2023

But in the long run, liberalism is giving way to progressivism in elite spaces. The new cultural liberalism in the media reflects the views of senior staff members, and is opposed by affinity groups and young employees. That’s important, because surveys consistently find that “woke” values are twice as prevalent among younger Leftists than among older Leftists. Over 8 in 10 undergraduates at 150 leading US colleges say speakers who say BLM is a hate group or transgenderism is a mental disorder should not be permitted to speak on campus. What’s more, 7 in 10 think a professor who says something that students find offensive should be reported to their university. Young academics are twice as censorious as those over 50. These are the editorial teams and professoriate of tomorrow.

Source: Eric Kaufmann, ‘The Politics of the Culture Wars in Contemporary America’, Manhattan Institute 2022

The steady erosion of free speech values is generational. Today’s young people are far more censorious than the young people of 1980 or even 2000, and they won’t grow out of it. While Zoomers are scared of being cancelled, figure 2 shows that they accept this risk as part of their political ideology.

Administrations’ occasional rebukes of student activists or adoption of high-minded academic freedom resolutions will make little difference to this speech climate. The situation in universities increasingly reflects a transformational current of illiberalism, guided by the generations who will one day form our elite.  – Eric Kaufmann

68% of business owners believe the current state of the New Zealand economy is either poor or very poor. Over half (54.5%) expect the economy to decline over the next 12 months, with only 14% expecting an improvement. An indication that the tough times are set to continue for the foreseeable future, – Simon Bridges 

Meanwhile, businesses are grappling with a range of challenges, including a shortage of skilled workers, increasing supply chain costs, and the impacts of recent weather events. 50% of respondents are experiencing a shortage of skilled workers, while 72% expect to be negatively impacted by changes in interest rates and inflation. – Simon Bridges 

The results of this survey show New Zealand businesses continue to struggle with significant challenges amidst the current economic climate. Confidence is on the decline, and raising costs are exerting mounting pressure. It’s crucial for political parties in this election year to propose concrete policies that promote growth, instil certainty, and restore confidence – Simon Bridges 

Humans cannot change sex. That’s not to say we can’t all co-exist in safety & dignity no matter how anyone wants to identify but let’s stop telling lies about actual biology it does no one any favours & as we see disadvantages & increases risk for women

— Sharron Davies MBE (@sharrond62) May 3, 2023

Of course, that’s not how things are at all. For the vast majority of people, losing a job — even piecework, one show, one publishing deal, one temporary contract — is an enormous deal. In my own life, I know women with multiple dependents, sick relatives, no safety nets, who’ve had their livelihoods threatened for expressing such controversial views as “biological sex is politically salient” and “rape crisis centres should offer female-only counselling”. I know brilliant women, with amazing reputations, who found themselves ghosted, losing contract after contract, having wondered out loud whether lesbians ought to be threatened with violence. Nobody cares about these women because they’re not famous (and are unwilling to put themselves through the additional exposure and trauma of fighting back, as Maya Forstater so bravely did). No one thinks their lost jobs matter because to a certain mindset, if they’re not silencing the big fish — the JK Rowlings of this world — the little fish barely count (which doesn’t mean they won’t go for them anyway).

This is not to say that Rowling’s own experience has not been harmful enough. As Özkirimli notes, the author “may continue to sell books, but this does not mean she is unaffected by the death or rape threats she has been receiving on a daily basis“. It is beyond the scope of Cancelled itself, but there is much more to say about the human cost of cancellation as a form of psychological abuse, taking place in plain sight and rubber-stamped by people in positions of authority. Some women find it reminds them of abusive childhoods, school bullying or being in a controlling relationship. For many – and I would include myself among them – it destroys trust in others that has been hard-won. It reminds us just how many people, friends, colleagues, family members, can end up persuading themselves that yes, you must just be some crazy bitch who deserves it, otherwise he wouldn’t do it.  – Victoria Smith

In her book Hagitude, Sharon Blackie describes women’s growing fear “of being ‘cancelled’, or publicly excoriated” for their views on sex and gender in terms of the “witch wound”, a legacy of centuries of witch trials, leaving behind a “deeply ingrained and often very visceral fear of the consequences of holding unpopular beliefs, or challenging the cultural orthodoxy“.

For the rest of our lives, many of us will know we’re only ever one statement of fact away from abuse and ostracism from people we thought were on our side. Yet I fear there will be no point in telling them this; they’ll only think it shows they were right.    – Victoria Smith

Men who identify as women are riding roughshod over women’s sports.  The latest example of this came at the weekend, in the result of the Tour of the Gila, an elite women’s cycling race in New Mexico, US. The winner was Austin Killips, a biological male who identifies as a ‘transgender woman’. – James Esses

Killips’ win at the Tour of the Gila tells us all we need to know about the question of trans inclusion in women’s sport. Here we have someone well into his twenties, who only took up cycling four years ago, and yet is now winning elite competitions by a considerable margin. Had Killips competed in the male event, as he should have, there is no doubt that the result would have been vastly different. – James Esses

Clearly, this is an ideology that does not care about fairness for women, and is dismissive of those who do.

If we want to make women’s sport fair again, we must keep male athletes out of it. – James Esses

The integrity of family life is a fundamental human right. Yet officers seem to have decided that Jones was entitled to try to have Creasy’s children taken away simply because he disagreed with her views — and the police quoted the European Convention on Human Rights at her for good measure.

Why have the police gone through the looking glass like this? Creasy believes such tactics are a way of pushing women out of public life and raise further concerns about how the police deal with crimes against women in general. Other women have suffered similar attacks.  – Melanie Phillips

However, the problem is surely broader and deeper. Hate crime, which developed in the 1980s as part of the emergence of group identity politics, made certain views illegitimate and turned those opinions into thought crimes. For example, Christians preaching the words of the Bible against homosexuality had their collars felt by the police; on at least one occasion when a crowd of objectors assaulted such a street preacher, he was arrested while they were not.

The offence was no longer an action but an opinion. The attackers weren’t seen as the problem. The person who expressed the opinion that had enraged his attackers was viewed as the problem instead, for provoking the attack upon himself.

In today’s victim culture, this dividing line between victims and attackers is drawn up by approved groups who declare themselves oppressed by the majority and whose claim to victim status can’t be challenged. Subjective feelings trump fairness and facts. – Melanie Phillips

In recent months there has been a tsunami of evidence that the police have lost their way. There’s a widespread culture in the ranks of bullying, intimidation, cruelty, prejudice and corruption. Officers acquiesce to disrupters such as Black Lives Matter or climate protesters, either from ideological conviction or a wish to ingratiate themselves with the dominant culture of coerced opinion.

The police have lost their way because society has lost its way. When moral boundaries dissolve and informal social policing collapses, the actual police implode. First, opinion became crime. Now crime has become opinion. The culture itself is being trolled and anarchy is the result. – Melanie Phillips

What a sordid, sloppy mess, eh?

Meka Whaitiri is off, we still don’t know why and, somehow, she escapes the party hopping laws, so gets to stay on as an MP.

Does that, or does that not, sum up the malaise and general mess with which this country is currently run? – Mike Hosking

How can you have a senior player in your party and have literally no idea they are bailing and, when they do bail, no idea why?

It speaks very poorly of Whaitiri. Not telling anyone is the height of rudeness.

The fact Kiri Allen was dispatched to try and get some details, and failed, tells you that must have been one spectacularly dysfunctional relationship.

What does it say about Chris Hipkins leadership that he didn’t have a clue?

What does it say about Whaitiri’s mindset that she didn’t think it necessary to offer any explanation to anyone? – Mike Hosking

Then we have the so-called party hopping laws. I thought we had dealt with this? I thought Winston Peters had railed endlessly about the shabby way some MP’s treat the system?

And yet all these years after Turia and Alamein Kopu, here we are still watching them watch their back, feather their nests, protect their interests and collect the taxpayer’s money.

From a broader point of view this is a Government in its death throes.

The economy is shot, the previous leader has run for the hills, the imagery around their promises and delivery is laughable and now another minister has up and scarpered.

In a way, they must be secretly longing for October 14 to be put out of their misery. – Mike Hosking

In a free and open democracy politicians people feel are subpar end up on toilet seats and the like. I had an extremely unflattering Piggy Muldoon Piggy Bank as a kid. The real story here, which it will be left for me to write, is why are so many wanker journalists want to protect society’s most powerful by enforcing appropriate etiquette towards them from ordinary citizens?

One of the superpowers of the West is our freedom to tease and ridicule those in power. I’m talking political cartoons, the comedy of McPhail and Gadsby, impersonators, online memes, and, yes, cardboard masks being attached to toilet seats. Such ridicule worked a treat on organised religion, loosening its shackles on power and forcing many groups to progress, though some in society seem intent to walk that back now. The exact same deeply conservative impulse drives outrage over this toilet seat. – Dane Giraud

When a politician is considered saintly, to the point their image can’t be tarnished by satire or even the lowest forms of comedy, this says people are caught up in a brand and not the leader’s substance. You could argue Ardern’s protectors are the ones dehumanising her, as well as straying into misogynistic attitudes around the need for greater decorum towards female leaders. – Dane Giraud

The mask on the toilet seat scandal is an example of the wealth class trying to impose its sectarian imperatives on the general population. The goal is to make the parameters of how people criticise their preferred leaders so narrow, that it becomes near impossible to make meaningful attacks. But politicians need criticism – ferocious criticism – and to be ridiculed, otherwise, they have no reason to do the right thing.

Why a responsible media would seek to protect the powerful from low-level offense is beyond me. But this co-president announcing an investigation makes him a massive, if not the key part of this problem. And what would this ‘investigation’ look like, anyway? Will he be calling in Hercules Poiret??

I’d flush this silly co-president pronto because he’s thrown his club under the bus. My official statement (if the thunderous wind didn’t suffice) would’ve been “There’s not a politician, living or dead, whose face doesn’t belong on a toilet seat”. And then I’d commission a run of framed embroideries displaying the same maxim, which I’d gift to every media outlet to hang in their newsrooms. – Dane Giraud

Everyone who contributes to traffic congestion already pays for it in about the worst way possible: through their time, and through excess wear and tear on – and emissions from – vehicles idling in stop-and-go traffic.

Shifting to congestion charging would help ensure freer-flowing traffic. It would make buses run more reliably, unhindered by peak-time congestion. Achieving net-zero climate goals would be less costly with fewer congestion-related emissions.

And by shifting some travel to times when the roads are otherwise less used, it would encourage better use of existing road capacity. The roading system could handle more trips, overall, with less need to add new lanes. If a movie theatre is full at peak times when ticket prices are zero, it makes a lot more sense to start charging for tickets than to build more screens. – Eric Crampton

I speak English, not American. To me, a republican is someone who wants to abolish the monarchy, not a supporter of a transatlantic political party. As for ‘neoliberal’, I’m blowed if I can see how something can be both itself and its opposite at the same time (neolib/neocons presumably being opposite). What I do know is that I am a man of the Enlightenment who believes in silly things like freedom of speech – a classical liberal, which is a conservative position today; but in Amurrican quasi-English, liberal is the antithesis of conservative, meaning, amongst other things, support for PC totalitarianism in which conservatives have no freedom of speech. – Barend Vlaardingerbroek

We are still left with a quandary: it is perfectly possible to be a conservative and a liberal (in British English) at the same time. Indeed as I have noted above, this is the position of the classical liberal today. A mistake we should not make is confusing conservatism with stick-in-the-mud-ism. I have always remembered something Margaret Thatcher said to a radio reporter in 1985: “A modern conservative is someone who looks at what we have from the past and holds on to what is good” (a paraphrase as I cannot find the quote on the web). Conservatives can be sticks in the mud (as can so-called radicals) but they can also be progressive, looking for better ways of going about governance. But they do not believe in change for change’s sake. – Barend Vlaardingerbroek

The meanings of terms such as ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ have been changing over the past few decades. Their definitions have not quite settled down, although I fear that the American language pandemic is doing the redefining other than for true-blue stalwarts like yours truly who will always be true to the real thing (they can’t even get the colours right – blue being Democrat!). In the meantime, when you come across these words in print or speech, it does pay to enquire as to exactly what the writer or speaker means. It might also pay to ask yourself exactly what you mean by them – you may be surprised at the answer. – Barend Vlaardingerbroek

What to make of the Bud Light boycott? What was a few weeks ago dismissed as a conservative tantrum that would go nowhere and soon calm down has turned out to be the most successful consumer boycott of recent years. And in our culture-warring era, in which even booze and ice-cream brands feel compelled to lecture the rest of us about how to think and live, that really is saying something. – Tom Slater

On 1 April, America’s formerly beloved watery beer brand unveiled a new ambassador: transgender TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney. As part of a ‘March Madness’ promotion, Mulvaney was given a ton of money and a personalised Bud Light can in exchange for a short promotional social-media video, sporting his trademark ditsy shtick.

The backlash was swift. Prominent anti-wokesters called for a boycott as reports began to surface of punters snubbing Bud Light en masse. Naturally, the great and good dismissed all this as a big, fat nothingburger. Until now.

According to trade figures, Bud Light’s sales outside of hospitality venues fell by a whopping 26 per cent in the week ending 22 April, compared with the same week last year. – Tom Slater

Inevitably, this has all been chalked up to the alleged transphobic bigotry of beer drinkers. ‘They [are] upset because Mulvaney is transgender’, is the oh-so-nuanced take from Vox.

But to suggest that people have stopped drinking Bud Light because Mulvaney is trans is like suggesting liberal rich people who stopped vacationing at Mar-a-Lago post-2016 did so because Donald Trump is white. The point is not how Dylan Mulvaney identifies, but what he says and represents.

Mulvaney has essentially become America’s most prominent trans activist – proclaiming to the teeming masses of TikTok that women can have penises, and going to see President Biden to ensure he’s fully onboard with subjecting gender-confused teens to irreversible and discredited medical interventions. – Tom Slater

What people object to about Mulvaney’s sudden ubiquity – his celebration in the media and his portfolio of lucrative endorsement deals – is not Mulvaney per se, but the creep of this secular, sexist, biology-denying religion. A religion which they resent being pushed on them and their family. Especially when they’re just trying to relax, watch the game and have a beer. – Tom Slater

The left-liberals currently mocking this sudden politicisation of consumer brands should remember that the boycotters are not the ones who started this. For years now, corporates have taken it upon themselves to lecture their customers about social and political issues. A pushback of one kind or another was inevitable. – Tom Slater

Now, as various commentators have pointed out, consumer boycotts rarely work and even fewer last. There’s every reason to believe this one will peter out, too. Not least because most people have bigger things to worry about. The Very Online right-wingers hailing the Bud Light boycott like it’s the new Boston Tea Party really need to get out more.

But there’s something undoubtedly positive about this quiet revolt against woke capitalism; against the creep of identitarian activism into every sphere of life; against all the imperious corporations that want to impose their values on everyone else. Long may the pushback continue. – Tom Slater

It took a lot of hard work for Key’s National government to drag our immunisation stats up from the woeful depths they reached under the Clark administration, to levels expected of a Developed Nation – or First World Nation if you prefer.

And now look at it. Look when the drop started, 2017. – Tom Hunter 

As one survey respondent remarked: “I can’t afford to work – If I work 40 hrs a week, after paying childcare I only earn $100 more than on a benefit, that’s $2.50 per hour.”

It’s worth exploring that comment. If their household budget required $100 more, surely the beneficiary couldn’t afford not to work? What the respondent seems to be saying is the marginal difference is so small they can’t afford to put in 40 hours effort at just $2.50 per hour. Someone else can put in the effort and pay the tax required to furnish their income.

Another respondent says, “We don’t just want a job, we want a career and opportunities to study/work that fit our lives as sole carers for our tamariki.”

So, people doing the ‘jobs’ should provide you with ‘careers and study opportunities’?  You do know where the money for your benefit comes from, right?   – Lindsay Mitchell

 Another said, “MSD treat me like I’m a desperate Māori trying to milk them – You would think you were asking for money from their personal bank account.”

Well, hello. Your case manager toils to pay taxes. It feels exactly like their personal bank account. – Lindsay Mitchell

Despite the continuing elevated poverty and poorer health experienced by lone parents and their children, we are exhorted to “celebrate” this family form by embarking on a “nationwide media, marketing and communications campaign … to change behaviours; mobilise communities; and address social attitudes that stigmatise single parents.”

Single parenthood is stigmatised by society because of the hardship, loneliness and vulnerability it entails for mother and child. The moral disapproval exists because many (though certainly not all) single parents expect to live at the expense of others. This societal displeasure is only exacerbated by the increasing ease with which to avoid pregnancy or find work to support a family. – Lindsay Mitchell

 This latest advocacy project is yet another bad idea from the poverty activism industry which creates lucrative employment/funding opportunities for those with an eye for riding the gravy train. It’s cynical and relies on perpetuating victimhood. We are trapped in a culture of faux kindness and silly celebration. It is sacrilege to suggest to anyone they made a mistake, or a poor choice. They don’t have to own it because we all ‘own it’ – we are all made responsible for the consequences of decisions of others we have no control over. This is the inevitable upshot of compulsory collectivism.

There is another option, but I’d be laughed out of the room for suggesting it. Avoidance and prevention just might be a better approach. 

Which makes more sense? – Lindsay Mitchell

In an election year you expect political spin and deflection, but the Health Minister’s claim at the weekend that patients and people advocating for access to modern medicines are ‘on the take’ by pharma is a botched and brutal attempt to muddy the waters and deflect criticism away from Pharmac’s shoddy tactics and poor performance. – Rachel Smalley

There is an irony here – just before Ayesha Verrall became a minister, she resigned from a 4.5 year paid role with Pharmac – she worked under CEO Sarah Fitt and Chair Steve Maharey, two people she now says she has full confidence in.

To this day, neither Fitt nor Maharey have commented on the significant failings in leadership and governance that were highlighted in the Pharmac Review. And, worse, OIA’s have revealed communications advice telling them to “look hurried” as they leave select committees to avoid the waiting media, and to “look coy” if they are questioned about the medicines budget.

How is that for ‘transparent government’?

Right now, there are significant failings in the screening, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer. In 25 years, we haven’t funded a bowel cancer drug. Kiwis with MS have to ‘prove’ their health has declined in order to get medicines that would have STOPPED their decline, and I recently reported on a pharma company which has packed up and left New Zealand after trying for 13 years to get a meeting with Pharmac – their drug to treat pancreatic cancer is funded in every other western nation on earth. – Rachel Smalley

However, what is most concerning right now is the attitude and commentary of the Health Minister – Labour’s fifth Health Minister in 6 years. Minister Verrall, you made the conscious decision to avoid addressing New Zealand’s position at the bottom of the OECD for access to medicines, and instead attempted to muddy the waters around who’s paying patients who are sick or dying with cancer, rare disorders and chronic disease.

Labour, you came into power in 2017 on the mantra of “Be Kind” – what a sham that was. New Zealanders suffering from cancer and disease have enough on their plate without being accused by their Minister of trying to capitalise on their disease by earning a few bucks off pharma. – Rachel Smalley

The Human Rights Commission (HRC) is charged with upholding all New Zealanders’ human rights.  Fundamental rights include free speech, non-discrimination, and equality before the law.

However, the HRC has declined to take action against racist acts hostile to non-Māori.  It did not defend effectively Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s free speech rights in New Zealand.  Rather than focusing on its core legal obligations the HRC has now set as a strategic priority the elimination of racism from New Zealand. It believes this will require race-based constitutional change.  –  Peter Winsley

He Puapua denies that the Treaty of Waitangi/Tiriti o Waitangi transferred sovereignty/kāwanatanga to the Crown.  In a footnote (p.28) it states incorrectly that “tino rangatiratanga” means “sovereignty”. In fact, tino rangatiratanga means chieftainship or ownership of properties, and this sits within a higher-level Crown sovereignty framework. 

The HRC has restructured itself along He Puapua lines.  This involves a CEO as ‘kāwanatanga leader, and the appointment of Dr Claire Charters, a He Puapua working group leader to a new role as an indigenous rights governance partner.

In recent publications the HRC has diagnosed racism as a white problem with Māori victims.  It indicts white people for racism and argues that Māori can hold negative beliefs about others, however this is not racism because Māori lack power.  The argument is that “prejudice without power is not racism.”  There may be merit in this argument, however in absolute numbers there are likely to be more impoverished and powerless white people in New Zealand than there are Māori.  – Peter Winsley

The Treaty/Tiriti was the starting point not the end point for New Zealand’s constitutional development.  The1986 NZ Constitution Act confirmed the democratically elected Parliament’s authority and made clear that the Crown has only a symbolic and procedural role.

Sadly, the Crown violated Te Tiriti’s property right guarantees, leading to conflict and land loss. Rightly this required restitution through the Waitangi Tribunal and through direct settlements negotiated between government and Māori.  Of course, Māori also violated Te Tiriti, however two wrongs do not make a right.  Treaty settlements are about upholding the integrity of our government system and about showing respect to Māori and restoring mana.

Confusion in today’s Te Tiriti discourse largely arises from activists ignoring the 1840 document and substituting their own interpretations and wishes. For example, in 1840 taonga meant real property such as a tool or a waka, not intangible “property” such as broadcasting spectrum, language or water.

Te Tiriti is not a constitutional partnership between Pakeha and Māori or the Crown and Māori. Māori are subjects of the Crown, not partners with it.  There are no principles stated in Te Tiriti.  There is no “Aotearoa”; Māori are citizens of Nu Tirani (New Zealand).  They are not referred to as indigenous nor as tangata whenua. – Peter Winsley

To demonstrate balance, the HRC could prepare a report on the impact of the Musket Wars on Māori in New Zealand, as documented by Ron Crosby, a distinguished historian and Waitangi Tribunal member.  The death toll from these “Māori on Māori” wars likely exceeded that from all other conflicts New Zealand has been involved in combined.  White supremacists slavishly following the dictates of 15^th century Papal Bulls can hardly be blamed for this violence and devastation.

The HRC shows little understanding of the psychology underlying phenomena such as conflict between and within groups.  The human mind has evolved modules for coalition recognition and formation.  These coalitions can include nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, avocational and sporting affiliations, social class as well as race.  Tribal affiliation not race was the major source of violence in pre-European New Zealand.  Religious hatred more so than racism led to the mass murder of Muslims in Christchurch in 2019.  Despite these complexities the HRC focuses on eliminating what it labels as white racism by promoting race-based constitutional change!

History shows that race-based societies fail.  No tribally based society has ever succeeded in the modern world.  And yet New Zealand is rapidly racializing and tribalizing its system of central and local government and other institutions. 

It is time for the HRC to return to its core statutory obligations.  In doing so, can we be spared from future “education” about the relevance of 15^th century Papal Bulls and doctrines of discovery to the real problems New Zealand faces, such as low productivity, housing affordability, child poverty, mediocre education and decaying  social cohesion? – Peter Winsley

What happened to the art of disagreement? In 2017, I addressed this very question in my stand-up show, Thought Crimes, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. My main topic was the aftermath of the Brexit vote and how so many of my friends had developed a strange new determination to reduce all political disputes to a matter of good vs evil, with those who voted to leave the EU falling firmly in the latter camp. I felt there was something inherently amusing about this sudden surge of mass infantilism.

I performed the show every evening during the fringe at The Stand comedy club, and I very much enjoyed working with such a pleasant and professional team. I remember, on one occasion, chatting to a member of staff who completely disagreed with my political views. The conversation was stimulating and, above all, amiable. Had I suggested at the time that, just a few years later, a show at this same venue would be cancelled because members of staff found the opinions of those involved offensive, she would have laughed. I’m confident that nobody at The Stand, either performers or staff, would have considered this a remote possibility. Surely it would be absurd for a comedy club, of all places, to reject the principle of free speech?

Yet this is precisely what happened this week when The Stand cancelled the booking of SNP politician Joanna Cherry, who had been scheduled to appear as part of the club’s ‘In Conversation With’ series. Cherry is a lesbian who campaigned against Section 28, and has recently been vocal about the threat to women’s rights and single-sex spaces posed by the rise of gender-identity ideology. – Andrew Doyle

 Novels by Roald Dahl, PG Wodehouse and Agatha Christie have since been rewritten by ‘sensitivity readers’ (newspeak for ‘censors’). The Irish government is currently passing new hate-speech laws that are similarly draconian to those passed by the Scottish government in 2021. Prestigious scientific journals are publishing pseudoscience in order to uphold this new ideology, too. Only this week the Scientific American ran a piece entitled ‘Here’s why human sex is not binary’, illustrated with an image of the male and female gametes that prove that it is.

It’s difficult to keep up with these baffling developments. Most of us have noticed the rise of this new ideology that is now dominant in all of our major cultural, educational, political and corporate institutions. We can see that its impact is divisive, regressive and illiberal, and yet it describes itself using progressive-sounding terminology, such as ‘social justice’, ‘anti-racism’ and ‘equity’. When language becomes unmoored from meaning, we are all at risk of mistaking change for progress.

We have seen that the disciples of this new religion are pushing for more and more censorship, whether that be through the cancellation of comedians, the deletion of potentially offensive scenes in old television shows, or stronger ‘hate speech’ laws. We have seen women physically assaulted for standing up for their sex-based rights. We have seen how anyone who questions the new orthodoxies jeopardises their career prospects and risks being publicly shamed. The existence of what we now call ‘cancel culture’ is often denied by those who indulge in it the most, but its list of casualties expands by the day. – Andrew Doyle

Who cares if a few zealots are demanding that we attend ‘unconscious bias’ training sessions? Who cares if civil servants and teachers and staff at the BBC are being encouraged to announce their pronouns in emails and at the beginning of meetings? Who cares if the Ministry of Defence is holding LGBTQIA+ coffee mornings to discuss pansexuality? If we let them get on with it, the logic goes, all of this will just go away.

But this is very wrong. If we ignore these developments, the culture warriors won’t fade away – they’ll win. These activists are promoting an authoritarian creed, and are doing untold damage to our world, while believing they are making it better. If your toddler starts smashing up the crockery, you don’t just politely wait for it to finish. Sometimes you have to intervene in order to prevent further damage.

I wrote The New Puritans in the hope that the book would become obsolete. Judging from recent events, this won’t be happening any time soon. – Andrew Doyle

For months the country has felt as if it’s under a state of siege – not from a hostile foreign power, but from extreme weather.

This week, the north of the country has been pummelled again by torrential rain, gale-force winds and high seas. RNZ reported this morning that more heavy rain warnings had been issued for the west coast of the North Island and the top of the South.

But please, whatever you do, don’t mention Hunga Tonga. – Karl du Fresne

We’ve become familiar with scary colour codes denoting storms of varying severity. Meteorologists whom no one had previously heard of have been thrust into national prominence in the same way that epidemiologists became household names – celebrities, almost – during the Covid crisis.

But the experts don’t say anything about Hunga Tonga, and quite rightly. We wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea. – Karl du Fresne

The statistics tell the story. In January, 182mm of rain fell at Masterton Airport compared with the historical average of 83mm. In February we got 159mm compared with the average of 25mm. And when it wasn’t raining, it was threatening to rain. It was a summer of gloom. NIWA figures show that Masterton had 536 hours of bright sunshine during summer compared with the average of 649. That may not sound like a huge difference, but ask any family camping on the coast how much fun they had this summer. Not bloody much, they’ll tell you. But Hunga Tonga? Nah.

By now you’re probably muttering, “Hunga what?” and wondering what the hell I’m on about. Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai is the underwater volcano that erupted near Tonga in January last year. I wrote about it here.

To recap a couple of key points from that blog post, Hunga Tonga was the most powerful eruption so far this century. According to NIWA, it was the biggest atmospheric explosion recorded in more than 100 years, measuring nearly 6 on the volcanic explosivity index – roughly equivalent to that of Krakatoa. The eruption created a volcanic plume that reached 58km into the mesosphere. 

An article in the scientific journal Communications Earth and Environment – one of many devoted to the event – noted that major volcanic eruptions are well-known drivers of climate change and said the magnitude of the Hunga Tonga explosion ranked it among the most remarkable climatic events in the modern observation era. Researchers calculated that it resulted in a 13% increase in global stratospheric water mass and a fivefold increase in stratospheric aerosol load – the highest in three decades.

One study estimated the amount of water displaced as 58,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, or about 10 percent of the entire water content of the stratosphere. That’s a helluva lot of water and it has to go somewhere. – Karl du Fresne

It seems reasonable to conclude that an eruption of that scale might at the very least be a factor in the freakish weather patterns of the past few months. Yet I can’t help suspecting that the eruption of Hunga Tonga is the climate event none of the New Zealand experts want to talk about, possibly because it cuts across the official narrative that the extreme weather of the past few months is all due to climate change.

In a New Zealand Herald article published two months ago, New Zealand meteorologists seemed to go out of their way to play down the Hunga Tonga factor. While acknowledging that eruptions can have climatic impacts, they attributed our wayward summer weather (and now autumn as well) to other causes.  – Karl du Fresne

Obviously I can’t contradict them. They’re experts and I’m not. But can we rely on the likes of Renwick and Salinger being rigorously objective? I’d like to say yes, but both have nailed their colours to the climate change mast and the subject is so politicised that we can be excused for having doubts. Science is not immune to ideological contamination, as we learned from the shameful gang-up that followed the Listener letter about matauranga Maori.

Setting aside all the arguments about whether climate change is human-induced, and to what extent (if at all) we can mitigate it by riding bikes, buying Teslas, planting trees and punishing farmers, I think most people can accept that the climate is changing. Even my own amateur observations suggest it’s happening. One admittedly crude measurement is the frequency with which the Remutaka Hill road is closed by slips. When we moved from Wellington in 2003, such events were infrequent. Now they happen regularly. That can only be the result of the ground being saturated and destabilised by constant heavy rain. The frosts, too, are fewer and less severe.

But what’s happened lately feels different. Gabrielle was New Zealand’s worst weather event this century. – Karl du Fresne

Climate change is surely a gradually evolving trend, and that doesn’t gel with what New Zealand has experienced this year. The recent extreme weather events have been freakishly violent and abrupt. They feel like outliers – striking departures from the norm – rather than the predictable continuation of a long-term pattern. If I’m wrong, such events are the new normal and we face an unimaginably dismal future.
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Just by suggesting this, I probably risk being labelled as a conspiracy theorist from the alt-Right and put on the watch list of the Disinformation Project (which, incidentally, has so far failed to respond to my requests for information about who funds it – a novel approach for activists who like to promote themselves as champions of transparency). But where climate change is concerned, as in all issues where ideology intrudes, I’m inclined to follow the advice of my late colleague Frank Haden: doubt everything with gusto. – Karl du Fresne

Microsoft’s software allows users a degree of utility that is incomprehensible, incalculable and immeasurable.

Obviously if Gates hadn’t done it, we’d be using a similar product, but that is to miss the point; successful entrepreneurs sell you something for a price that is lower than what you believe it is worth.

Word, Excel, Exchange and similar products have allowed office workers to do in hours what formerly took days. These innovations have made every person who uses them more productive. The difference between the cost of what you are buying and the value you receive is vast. –  Damien Grant 

Microsoft is valued at over US$2 trillion and this is perhaps less than 1% of the value it has provided to mankind.

The advances in productivity made possible by the sorts of products sold by Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and so many others have allowed billions of us to live lives of such comfort and excess that obesity is now a greater problem than hunger in many nations.

Gates has, nobly, committed himself and his vast capital to making the world a better place, and his achievements in this area are outstanding.

Millions of lives have been saved thanks to his efforts against measles and malaria. And yet Gates can devote a dozen lifetimes towards philanthropic endeavours and these achievements shall be as dust to the sand dunes of utility Microsoft has gifted to humanity. Further, Microsoft is merely one of thousands of companies and entrepreneurs that drive our civilisation forward.

We celebrate, and we should, those who use their capital for good works, but we should not be blinded to the real value of these remarkable individuals.

This week Wellington property developer and philanthropist Mark Dunajtschik has announced he is giving his fortune, estimated at $450 million, to charity, with a focus on serving those living in the Wellington region with a disability.

This is, self-evidently, a fantastic thing to do and is more evidence of that this remarkable New Zealander is deserving of the knighthood wisely bestowed on him earlier this year; and yet he received his award for services for philanthropy, and not his efforts that allowed his to be philanthropic.

It is my perspective that his enduring value to our beloved capital is the buildings he has built, refurbished and developed; for each is remarkable, its real value obscured because such achievements are now so commonplace.

We take as given so much of the accomplishments of those such as Dunajtschik that we fail to really comprehend their value to our society.

An apartment complex, an office building, even something as mundane as a domestic house requires hundreds of businesspeople covering a wide range of skills and resources, to design, construct and maintain.

That we look at such marvels without wonder and awe is itself testament to the achievements of past generations of entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, we honour those whose accomplishments amount to little more than the outstanding quality of their character while failing to comprehend the contributions made by those whose business skills, willingness to risk and to fail, have produced a magnificent bounty.

We are too quick to acknowledge the politician, the activist and the worthy citizen who toils for the benefit of others, and too slow to acknowledge those whose contributions provide more tangible and enduring results.

A dozen of the most gifted social workers cannot match the contribution made to a community by a thriving retail store or a McDonald’s. Such outfits offer employment, they offer things of value people wish to acquire.

They create the opportunity for individuals to build their own lives rather than having one designed for them by someone whose only knowledge of true hardship has been acquired in a lecture room.

Charitable works never achieve as much good as honest traders do when, in pursuit of their own profit, they seek to sell to others goods and services at a price lower than that which their customers value their wares. – Damien Grant 

Sowing the winds of racial tension in New Zealand began decades ago under careless governments. Now we are starting to reap the whirlwind. Maori aristocrats have built up such a sense of entitlement, with a cornucopia of fabrications and grievances, that they are starting to fall out over how rapidly they can clap on the pace of the gravy train. Meka Whaitiri’s desertion of the Labour Party is the latest sign that radicals are at sixes and sevens over pushing even harder for a Maori take-over of New Zealand. –  Michael Bassett

All of a sudden, in October 2020, New Zealand started incorrectly being referred to as Aotearoa. Radically revised versions of the Treaty of Waitangi were circulated, the authors inventing new principles as they went along. The four main cities that were all colonial creations because Maori didn’t live in towns suddenly had Maori titles forced upon them. Government departments sprouted newly-invented Maori names. On radio and TV it became mandatory for announcers to spout Te Reo that few listeners understood. Because of Jacinda’s new policy the daily papers started cozying up to ministers and suppressing anything that could be deemed critical of Maori. Their failing circulation figures necessitated access to the government’s Public Interest Journalism Fund. The word “racist” was now bandied about by genuine racists supporting Mahuta’s racially divisive policies like her Three Waters programme. It aims to give the tribal aristocracies control over water, leading to private Maori ownership. And the full shape of a new health system emerged with its twin sectors, one Pakeha, the other Maori, with Maori who constitute 17% of the population having veto rights over everything. Teaching of Te Reo in schools stepped up; a new history curriculum that is grotesquely skewed against 83% of New Zealand’s non-Maori population began being taught in schools. 

Underpinning the whole Maorification programme is a prize piece of mischief called “He Puapua”. Hatched in secret by Mahuta, it aims at giving Maori effective control of New Zealand by 2040. It is the work of several radical Maori academics who believe they are doing their bit to further the interests of New Zealand’s “Indigenous” people. No matter that almost alone around the world, New Zealand never had indigenous people. We are a land of relatively recent arrivals. – Michael Bassett

Ardern gave Maori radicals free range from late 2020. She was woefully ignorant of her country’s history and was conned into the notion that it was “fair” that Maori should be given paramount status in our country, and that the whole process was certain to improve Maori lives, and solve any disadvantages they suffered. Not only was this never going to occur: it was woke nonsense of a high order. Instead, as more ministers talked up Maori policy, it stoked the notion amongst them that all national resources belonged to them as of right, and that their MPs could provide easy solutions to anything they happened to want. No exertion was required of them other than to board the gravy train’

Once it started moving, a rag-tail fringe of second raters began shouting “faster”. Before long bits started flying off. – Michael Bassett

Meantime that bizarre collection of misfits, the Maori Party, under the influence of its president, John Tamihere, was cooking up plans to decouple the Maori seats from Labour and attach them to the tattooed twins, Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer. For personal reasons that Meka Whaitiri doesn’t wish to reveal, she decided to leap aboard the accelerating Maori Party gravy train. It is now conspiring to force King Charles to come up with free “reparatory justice” for “centuries of racism, oppression, colonialism and slavery, now…recognized by the UN as Crimes Against Humanity”. Coming from a party whose own paramount chief, Te Rauparaha, slaughtered a slave as the centerpiece of a feast only a year before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, this sets a record for chutzpah!

Increasingly, it looks as though Chris Hipkins is unable to free himself from Jacinda’s unfortunate post 2020 policies. But the Maori Party’s efforts are even crazier, and it is still possible that others in Labour’s Maori caucus might fly off in search of even greater extremism. The new Prime Minister might yet be hit by a flying object. On its recent form, KiwiRail could easily oblige….

Whatever, surely it should be clear to every Kiwi that if a racially more harmonious New Zealand is something you want, defeating Labour in October is an urgent necessity. – Michael Bassett

Here’s a small observation from travel to major cities over the last few weeks – cops work.

Visible police on the street, work.

I never felt unsafe in London and I never felt unsafe in New York.

New York has the most crazies, they have a lot of homeless and they make a lot of noise and come across as aggressive at times.

But there is a cop on every corner.

There is a patrol car, a series of patrol cars, seemingly permanently parked wherever you are.

They wander the street, they arrive in minutes and their sirens are too loud and too permanent. But you can’t argue they don’t make you feel safe.   – Mike Hosking

I can’t remember the last time I saw a police officer on the streets of this country, plus their cars are hard enough to spot.

Somewhere along the line someone decided walking the beat wasn’t good policing any more. They talk of community policing but I just don’t see it.

Further, I am convinced of the power of imagery. Get a cop with a stab-proof vest and an arsenal of weaponry, whether it be a baton, handcuffs, pepper spray or a gun, and you send a message. As I’ve told you before, the flash shops in San Francisco have guards with guns and dogs.

God forbid we ever end up there. But I’m still reading about the ram raids and the daylight attacks here. I didn’t read about them in New York or London and I didn’t, I suspect, because a cop was never far away.

At some point, someone has to add up the cost of all the crime and insurance and repair work and fear we have these days, versus the cost of actually getting some more police on the street.

The model is there to be seen. Visibility works.

I wouldn’t have thought it was that hard. B – Mike Hosking

With only a few exceptions, nothing has the capacity to leave us with a lasting feeling of warmth and gratitude for having had the privilege of being there when it happened.

That is why I find the writing and performance of music is one of those rare human qualities that will have a lasting influence on how we adjust to the pressures of daily living.

It is the solace that can, even fleetingly, take us out of ourselves to a place where we feel no pain.

Without that opportunity and, given the state of the world, we might as well all go mad.   – Clive Bibby

The EV subsidies going to brand-new Teslas alone total $80 million. Every dollar subsidising the world’s richest toddler, Bubba Musk, is a dollar that hasn’t been spent on, say, hiring more bus drivers and paying them well. Or buying a train track inspection.

Reporters this week established that the recipients of EV subsidies live almost exclusively in leafy suburbs. People who live in struggle street do not buy brand new $80,000 motors, or even relatively affordable brand new Toyotas.

And it is not just an $8000 handout to buy a new Tesla. They also get an ongoing $2000 a year top-up bonus of unpaid road user taxes. EVs still use the roads, don’t they?  – Josie Pagani 

The commission does a good job of setting carbon budgets and holding government to account on whether it’s reaching them.

Then we get to its menu of ideas for how to reduce emissions, which are a bit zany.

Its manifesto reads like it’s been put together by people who spend their mornings glueing themselves to motorways: Bans, subsidies, nothing measured to find the most efficient.

It instructs that ‘mindsets’ and the “values of businesses and consumers” must be ‘redefined’. I have been around the far left for much of my life, and I have previously seen the movie that tries to persuade us we are living in false consciousness. I won’t spoil the ending for you. – Josie Pagani 

The commission encourages us towards ‘active transport’, formerly known as ‘walking’. Not popular among voters who live 20 kilometres from work and do night shifts. They should buy new Teslas. – Josie Pagani 

Greenpeace suggests the Climate Change Commission should run the ETS. But the commission wants something more revolutionary than the ETS, and we prefer elections when deciding how to run our economy.

I would take its policy advice role away: It should stick to setting budgets and pronouncements on whether we are meeting them.

You will never get the majority of people to support a clean energy transition that makes them pay more for less. Better to spend the EV subsidy on working out how to make electric vehicles cheaper than petrol cars. Only then will most of us switch.

It is hard to have a debate about which climate policies work best without being called a ‘climate delayer’, as if doing the wrong thing quickly is better than doing the right thing more carefully. But let’s at least have a debate about who pays.

If donating to the rich to save the planet works, I only ask that Teslas give way to me at intersections. – Josie Pagani 

The most amusing language abuse by these lefty types is “activist” usually applied to protesters lying about in groups, holding signs complaining about this or that. Their major characteristic is inactivity.

The current fashionable ludicrously dishonest term these losers use to smother their now unfashionable “socialism” is “progressive”. Nothing could be more inaccurate. Collectivists are literally the very opposite of progressive; rather they’re ultra regressive, seeking to resurrect tried and failed big government statist policies of yesteryear.   – Bob Jones

If I could wave a wand and solve just one of these problems, it would be teacher training. High-quality teaching is the most important determinant of learning – and high-quality teaching depends on high-quality training.

Most teachers do the best they can with the training they had. They are not to blame for their inadequate preparation. It is the fault of a system that gives universities an effective monopoly on teacher training. – Michael Johnson

I recently visited one of very few non-university providers of initial teacher education, New Zealand Graduate School of Education (NZGSE). I saw there an exemplary model of how we should prepare new teachers for the profession.

Teachers-in-training at NZGSE spend the bulk of their time in classrooms, gaining practice at being teachers. NZGSE teacher educators observe them frequently, provide coaching and feedback, and assess them against a long list of things that competent teachers can do. When teachers-in-training can do all of those things to the required standard, fluently and consistently, they can graduate.

But providers like NZGSE have a problem. Postgraduate qualifications are desirable to prospective teachers. And it is difficult for non-university providers to have these qualifications approved. It is expected that postgraduate qualifications will be taught by research-active academics.

It does not take academics to train teachers. What it does take, are people who know how children learn, and can impart that knowledge to teachers-in-training.  – Michael Johnson

We should relieve university lecturers involved in teacher training from any expectation to be ‘research-active’. That would make it easier for institutions that don’t have research-active staff to have postgraduate teaching qualifications approved.

To improve the quality of teacher training, we must break the universities’ near-monopoly on initial teacher education and open the door to competition from providers like NZGSE. – Michael Johnson

Sex education has changed. Long gone are the days when an embarrassed teacher fumbled his way through a couple of lessons on the facts of life. As recent reports have highlighted, puberty, periods and pregnancy barely warrant a mention nowadays. Instead, anal sex, fisting, rough sex and polyamory are the order of the day. Classes involve children ‘stepping away from heteronormative and monogamy-based assumptions’ in order to appreciate that ‘there are a variety of sexual preferences and practices’. On top of this, many children are also being taught that they have a gender identity that may be different from their biological sex. – Joanna Williams

The assumption that even the youngest children have a sexuality leads UNESCO to claim they have ‘sexual rights’. The SSAUK review spells out what this means: ‘The child is considered to have a right to sexual “pleasure” and the same sexual knowledge as adults.’ Here UNESCO is eroding the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. This has the potential to expose children to serious harm.

For sexuality education to be considered fully ‘comprehensive’, it must cover gender identity. The SSAUK review explains that UNESCO and the WHO promote ‘the social construct of gender identity over and above the physical reality of biological sex and propose the medicalisation of children as a necessary response’. Clearly, UNESCO and the WHO are engaged in political activism masquerading as scholarship. No thought is given to the damage transitioning can do to children.

The SSAUK review argues that comprehensive sexuality education has sexualised children and undermined child safeguarding. The counter-argument repeated time and again by the WHO and UNESCO is that sexuality education empowers children. They claim that giving children a vocabulary to describe bodies and sexual behaviours enables them to speak out about sexual abuse. But, as the SSAUK authors point out, this shifts the burden of responsibility away from adult abusers and on to child victims. The onus is placed on children to say no. This shift in emphasis is compounded by UNESCO’s framing of age-of-consent laws as ‘restrictive’.

Comprehensive sexuality education teaches that consent is key to all decisions around sex. In the context of lessons normalising a wide range of sexual practices, this implies that the young can consent to behaviours far beyond their comprehension. Children are similarly trusted to declare their own gender identities, even though it is impossible for them to comprehend the long-term repercussions of this. As the SSAUK review notes, adult judgements and responsibilities are being pushed on to children.

SSAUK shows the extent to which the policies shaping sex education in UK schools are intended to undermine parental authority. According to UNESCO and the WHO, parents are not just lacking in knowledge – they also pose a threat to their own children. The WHO asserts that shame associated with sexual activity is often the result of ‘family background’ and ‘moral development’. Rather than leaving childrearing to parents, these global organisations want to shape the personality and behaviour of every child.

Safe Schools Alliance is absolutely right to describe comprehensive sexuality education as ‘an exercise in global social engineering… that pays no regard to child safeguarding’. We need to kick these pernicious lessons out of schools. – Joanna Williams

No one, neither king nor pauper, should surrender to the jealous god of identity politics. – Brendan O’Neill

There are a fair few things I’d like to see King Charles apologise for. Those meddlesome ‘spidery letters’ he wrote to government ministers. His green doom and gloom. Prince Harry. But slavery? The British Empire? No. Never. Charles should utter not one word of contrition for those historical events. For if even he, the literal king, were to cave to the woke insistence that ‘the privileged’ must self-flagellate for the crimes of their forefathers, it would set a terrible precedent. It would represent the final victory of that jealous god of identity politics, with disastrous consequences for democracy. – Brendan O’Neill

The first weird thing about the recent explosion of angst over Charles’ shady ancestors is how surprised everyone sounds. Magazines publish breathless pieces on how Charles ‘descends from rulers who waged wars, built empires and extracted wealth from colonies’. Yes, we know – he’s the king. Kings and queens were bastards. They chopped off heads, imprisoned princes, taxed people to within an inch of their lives, conquered countries, put down rebellions. That Charles’s family tree is pock-marked with iffy people is literally the least startling thing about him.

But he still shouldn’t apologise for any of that stuff. For one simple reason: he didn’t do it. Charles has never owned a slave, sent ships in search of booty, put a wife on the chopping block. It is nearly 3,000 years since Ezekiel said, ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father’. Now the noisy identitarians of the 21st century want to reverse all that. They far prefer God’s implacable rage in the Book of Exodus, in which He seethed: ‘[I] am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me.’ That the woke are so infused with Old Testament fury, with such a severe urge to punish even the descendants of wrongdoers, confirms what a menacing and regressive movement theirs is. – Brendan O’Neill

The identitarians don’t seem to realise that the thing they want – the king weeping for old wrongs – would be a new form of colonialism. Emotional colonialism. Where once monarchs sought to deliver foreigners from ignorance, now they’d deliver them from PTSD.

Elite empowerment is a key part of the showy penitence of the modern era. This is why so many political actors, from Tony Blair to the Vatican, enthusiastically seize every opportunity to let their lip wobble. Blair expressed remorse for the Irish Famine. Pope Francis begged for forgiveness for ‘the offences of the church’ in the colonial era. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was essentially institutionalised contrition. Australia holds an annual National Sorry Day in which everyone’s expected to quietly atone for the mistreatment of Aboriginal peoples. All of these things are best understood not as genuine expressions of sorrow, but as arrogant displays of emotional literacy; as declarations that one has ascended to the plane of therapeutic correctness, and is thus fit to rule in the era of emotion.

Yet while the cult of contrition might be helpful to elites looking for new ways to justify their rule, it’s a disaster for the rest of us. It is divisive and anti-democratic. The woke rehabilitation of God’s jealous visitation of the crimes of the father on to the son is utterly destructive of public life. It is a form of racial collective guilt – and racial collective pain. All whites come to be seen as the morally stained sons and daughters of ancient crime, and all black, brown and Indigenous people are reduced to the morally scarred sons and daughters of those crimes. This depressing, deterministic creed turns us from equal citizens into either ‘the privileged’ or ‘the oppressed’, where the former must forever repent to the latter. – Brendan O’Neill

Such a debased spectacle would not be a challenge to monarchy at all. On the contrary, it would represent a kind of Battle of the Bloodlines, where two different versions of historically determined authority would be fighting it out for control of society – the historically determined divine right of King Charles vs the historically determined divine pain of the woke. My turn to apologise: sorry, but I prefer equality and democracy to the rule of any given identity. – Brendan O’Neill

Male athlete Austin Killips has won the “Tour of Gila’”women’s road cycling race in New Mexico. After an overwhelming reaction by the public and female athletes alike, the UCI (International Cycling Union) is reconsidering its policy of allowing trans-identified men to compete in women’s cycling competitions. It says it will undertake further consultation and reach a decision in August. What consultation could possibly be necessary to understand that men competing against women in road cycling, or any other sport, is unfair to those women? It is cruel to female athletes, and every sporting body representing women should call an immediate halt. It is the ultimate act of patriarchal entitlement to steal something from a woman, just because you can.  – Jean Hatchet

 Adult men have secured advantages over women in their muscle development, lung capacity, bone density, the Q angle of the hips, and the ratio of fat to muscle, to name but a few areas. When Killips uttered the magic words “I am a woman”, he was not able to hand back these advantages in exchange for a packet of female hormones. They are banked, baked in, going nowhere. As he marches with the women’s prize money to the bank, female competitors feel the searing injustice. 

Startlingly, the outcry this time has included many commentators suggesting women themselves should boycott their own sports teams to prevent men who identify as women from competing in them. This is an unsuitable suggestion for many reasons, not least because some of the people suggesting such a tactic seem to have little understanding of the incredible work being done by campaigners on this issue such as the Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies and the tennis legend Martina Navratilova. These women have sacrificed their reputations and faced incredible backlash, including being smeared as bigots and “transphobes”, in order to speak out on behalf of younger female athletes who simply want the right to fair competition. 

If the women themselves speak out, they risk even worse. – Jean Hatchet

Asking women to leave the sporting field so that men have women’s competitions to themselves is grossly unfair. Many elite sportswomen began their sporting career as young girls. They have faced and overcome numerous barriers to compete at the higher levels of their chosen sport, including the financial risk which comes with prioritising sport over a more typical career path. Many elite sportswomen must find employment to fit alongside their rigorous training routines to ensure they can afford to compete. Lucrative sponsorship deals, available to elite sportsmen by contrast, ensure that their male counterparts are not required to do the same.

When cycling competitions are available to women, the attention they receive is often minimal, races not televised and prize money often significantly lower. The Tour of Britain, a men’s road cycling race, is covered live by ITV4, Eurosport and GCN. It achieves an International audience. Its partner race for women, “Women’s Tour” has just been cancelled due to lack of commercial support, despite a fundraising appeal to “rescue” it. Women can’t walk away from events that don’t even take place. By asking women to boycott the sports events they work hard to compete in and establish, you’re asking women themselves to ensure that there will be no more sporting events for them to compete in.  – Jean Hatchet

When women first began to cycle in the late 19th century, men raised concerns that there might be health risks including exhaustion but also, quite ludicrously, dysentery. Men were outraged that women might experience sexual arousal, and so bicycles for women featured cut out saddles but also pedals which ensured that women rode side saddle. No woman would ever have been able to climb mountains in a race like the “Tour De France Femmes” with these ridiculous impediments to free cycling. Women have come a long way since those days, and modern men know it, just as certainly as the men who hung an effigy of a woman on a bike out of a window at Oxford University in 1900 in order to object to the “new woman” gaining a full degree. – Jean Hatchet

Women made space for themselves in the world with their demands and their feminist activism. They gained the right to vote, the right to own property and the right to divorce men. They forced laws that prevented men they were married to from raping them. They created refuges to escape men who were hurting them. They managed to secure public toilets they could use, which freed them from the urinary leash of their time allowed out in public. Time and women marched on, and some women’s rights were taken for granted. Sporting women made some obvious achievements, women circumventing the imposed stereotypes of femininity by becoming more physically powerful and competing with each other.  – Jean Hatchet

If Dworkin was right, a few men see these advancements as a threat. Being told that there are some areas of women’s lives that men cannot access, being told no, is an affront to these men. When men are able to declare they are women, they can reverse some of these annoying exclusions they face. These men found a solution to pesky feminism. As a result, all too frequently, women are being forced into spaces with these men, who can now enter women’s domestic abuse refuges, become the CEO of a rape crisis centre for women, rape women and still demand to be placed in prison with women. Men can enter women’s toilets and changing rooms and force women to go home again to change or urinate. Men can enter women’s sporting competitions and win them. They can take the prize money and demolish women’s boundaries. 

Outrageously, at the same time, these men will demand public sympathy. – Jean Hatchet

How do you win when you aren’t good enough to win as a man? Go and beat the women, take the money and cry victim when called a cheat. How do you erase feminist gains for women? Say you are one.

Too few elite sportsmen have stood up for the women being cheated out of fair competition. Imagine what would happen if male cyclists refused to get on their bikes for just one stage of the Tour De France this year? What would happen if just for one Saturday, men refused to play Premiership Football? Imagine if the men playing in America’s Superbowl walked off the field for just ten minutes? There would be outrage from sponsors and fans alike, and the financial toll would be too much to bear. It would take just one day or ten minutes. The power to give women back their sport is at the fingertips of sporting men, and they should use it swiftly before it is too late.

No, women will not get off our bikes, out of the pool or off the pitch. Sport is a form of freedom and independence for us. We will not return to our homes or to the past. We will play on.  – Jean Hatchet

First a minister decided she would leave, giving scant reason. Clearly the new PM didn’t command enough respect (from Whaitiri at least) to be given any sort of warning.

It also makes Labour looks like a party and Government fraying at the edges. The sheen provided by the Hipkins ascendancy is quickly wearing off as politics roars on into the election. There is no doubt that the intensity of the past few years has left Labour looking like a Government that has held the treasury benches for significantly longer than its six years. – Luke Malpass

The other question left open is the extent to which National or ACT thinks about framing up its election campaign as: a vote for Labour is a vote for the Greens, a vote for Labour is a vote for the Greens and Te Pāti Māori.

Leaning on the idea that the tail might wag the dog (as it certainly has in every government Peters has been a part of) can be a powerful message for voters unsure which way to fall, perhaps liking National but unsure about Christopher Luxon. – Luke Malpass

It’s been a while since National had been handed such an opportunity. Under former PM Jacinda Ardern, Labour had mostly resisted taking potshots at National when it was in strife – apart from Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s occasional speeches in Parliament.

If Labour had thought that would earn it some reciprocation, it can think again.

It’s an election year. It’s Hipkins instead of Ardern and Hipkins has taken no vow of kindness.

The polls are even – and as far as National is concerned, that clearly means the gloves are off. The Act Party never had them on.

For Hipkins, the job now is to try not to give them any more ammo. He will be hoping Labour’s patch of turbulence was just that – a patch, rather than the first few rocks before a landslide. – Claire Trevett

Many governments in the Western world have committed to “net zero” emissions of carbon in the near future. The US and UK both say they will deliver by 2050. It’s widely believed that wind and solar power can achieve this. This belief has led the US and British governments, among others, to promote and heavily subsidise wind and solar.
These plans have a single, fatal flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some affordable way to store surplus electricity at scale.

In the real world a wind farm’s output often drops below 10 per cent of its rated “capacity” for days at a time. Solar power disappears completely every night and drops by 50 per cent or more during cloudy days. “Capacity” being a largely meaningless figure for a wind or solar plant, about 3000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar capacity is needed to replace a 1000 MW conventional power station in terms of energy over time: and in fact, as we shall see, the conventional power station or something very like it will still be needed frequently once the wind and solar are online.
The governments of countries with a considerable amount of wind and solar generation have developed an expectation that they can simply continue to build more until net zero is achieved. The reality is that many of them have kept the lights on only by using existing fossil fired stations as backup for periods of low wind and sun. This brings with it a new operating regime where stations that were designed to operate continuously have to follow unpredictable fluctuations in wind and solar power. As a result operating and maintenance costs have increased and many stations have had to be shut down. – Bryan Leyland

Under net-zero plans, all nations will need to generate many times more electricity than they now can, as the large majority of our energy use today is delivered by burning fossil fuels directly. Neighbouring regions will be unable to provide the backup power needed; emissions from open cycle gas turbines (or new coal powerplants, as in the case of Germany at the moment) will become unacceptable; more existing base load stations will be forced to shut down by surges in renewables; more and more wind and solar power will have to be expensively dumped when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.
Power prices will soar, making more or less everything more expensive, and there will be frequent blackouts.

None of this is difficult to work out. Building even more renewables capacity will not help: even ten or 100 times the nominally-necessary “capacity” could never do the job on a cold, windless evening.
Only one thing can save the day for the renewables plan. Reasonable cost, large scale energy storage, sufficient to keep the lights on for several days at a minimum, would solve the problem. – Bryan Leyland

The conclusion is simple. Barring some sort of miracle, there is no possibility that a suitable storage technology will be developed in the needed time frame. The present policies of just forcing wind and solar into the market and hoping for a miracle have been memorably and correctly likened to “jumping out of an aeroplane without a parachute and hoping that the parachute will be invented, delivered and strapped on in mid air in time to save you before you hit the ground.”

Wind and solar need to be backed up, close to 100 per cent, by some other means of power generation. If that backup is provided by open-cycle gas or worse, coal, net zero will never be achieved: nor anything very close to it.
There is one technology that can provide a cheap and reliable supply of low-emissions electricity: nuclear power. Interest in nuclear power is increasing as more and more people realise that it is safe and reliable. If regulators and the public could be persuaded that modern stations are inherently safe and that low levels of nuclear radiation are not dangerous, nuclear power could provide all the low cost, low emissions electricity the world needs for hundreds or thousands of years.

But if we had 100 per cent nuclear backup for solar and wind, we wouldn’t need the wind and solar plants at all.
Wind and solar are, in fact, completely pointless. – Bryan Leyland

The carbon market has come back to bite the Government in the bum.

As part of their fiscal update this week we’ve seen that the last carbon auction produced nothing and cost the Government $1.2 billion, which simply adds to their ever-growing deficit.

I asked at the time whether this was bad news. They told us it was the market working as markets do.

The trouble with the answer was, although technically that is true, it was in fact a direct reaction, or reflection, of the lack of faith in the Government’s climate change polices. – Mike Hosking

You have a number of competing  factors here. On one hand the commission wants to send us all broke because they are obsessed with carbon emissions. You have a Government that can’t live with their zealousness because they actually want to get re-elected.

But, you also have a Government that has made climate their nuclear moment and are now being caught out as being fraudulent when it comes to delivery on the rhetoric.

Somewhere in the middle is the carbon market, which is an invented rort, designed to raise money from polluters who are forced to offset their emissions by buying credits, with the money raised goes to climate positive projects.

Trouble is when the auction is held. The question is asked – why would I spend money on something I don’t believe is going to come to pass?

So they don’t.

Hence the auction fails, nothing is sold and all those credits get shifted to the next auction. So that means double supply, but how much demand? – Mike Hosking

The carbon market is a mess because the Government are a mess. The Climate Commission look increasingly out of touch and radical, offering up theories no one is taking up

And slowly but surely, the reality of crazy ideas invented to address issues that don’t have full buy in are exposed for all to see.

A failed auction, a court case and over a billion dollar not realised.

What a shambles. – Mike Hosking

When you can find the courage to condemn a tie as a symbol of past colonisation, but lack it to condemn Russia for abducting children and ethnic cleansing, I suggest it is time to reset your moral compass.

Putin’s war is an old-fashioned colonial grab, and as the world waits for the Ukrainian counter-offensive to begin, we should be clear what side we are on, not just in the past, but in the present. – Josie Pagani 

Victories for freedom of speech are rare and therefore worth acknowledging. Cherry is keen to see the event proceed, which is good news too. There are two opportunities created by this episode that, if taken with good will and an open mind, could be very beneficial. The first is the setting of an example for other organisations. Bowing to the clamour for cancellation and censorship may seem like the fastest route to an easy life but it is more likely to open you up to legal problems. You can’t discriminate against a woman for knowing what a woman is and being willing to say so out loud. 

Political debate is sometimes uncomfortable. That’s the way of it in a free country. The way to deal with it is not to shut down discussion but to have more and better discussion. Ideas, values, disagreements: these are not threats to a liberal society, they are its very lifeblood. 

The other opportunity that arises from this is one for Joanna Cherry’s critics. There is a demographic out there that has convinced itself that Cherry is a froth-flecked, beyond-the-pale bigot, a conclusion most of them seem to have reached without ever hearing a word she has said. We can be sure of this because however hard you strain to hear the worst in Cherry’s contribution to the women’s rights and gender identity debate, you will pick up nothing more than an old-fashioned feminist of the liberal-left. 

But Cherry, like so many other women who hold her views, has been Rowlinged: an entire vocabulary of hatred has been put in her mouth that she has never spoken. Ask one of her detractors to quote a single example of her expressing or encouraging hatred, as those terms are generally understood, and you will be met with suspicion, then frustration and finally inarticulate rage. Cherry is vilified not for anything she has said but because of what her critics say about her. A postmodern ideology of feels and vibes cannot withstand the demanding precision of reasoned debate. – Stephen Daisley

It’s comforting to caricature and dismiss your opponents, to protect yourself from the seeds of doubt they threaten to sow in your thoughts. Approach them instead with an open mind, a tolerant ear and a graceful heart and they might just surprise you.  – Stephen Daisley

Being serious about this (if I have to): I don't think the issue is whether colouring books work as stress relief or not. I expect they do for some. I think it's about the semiotics of promoting them to students: i.e. "you are vulnerable, cosseted, infantilised". https://t.co/RHDMjzUn75

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) May 12, 2023

Ten years ago, John Humphrys made a documentary about the welfare state for BBC2. When he was growing up in Cardiff, he said, hardly anyone was on benefits. Now, vast numbers are. Why? What had gone wrong? A good question – but, as he found out, a suicidally dangerous one for any BBC journalist to ask. He was hauled in front of a BBC star chamber, accused of supporting Tory policy, then found guilty of breaching guidelines on impartiality and accuracy. I spoke to him about it afterwards: his lesson, he said, was never to do something like that again.

He had run up against a new trend of our time: political correction. If you engage in frank discussions about certain topics – climate change, jihadi finance, immigration, transgenderism – then you can expect the equivalent of a lawsuit. A breed of investigators or self-appointed fact-checkers will swoop, posing as judges of the truth – even if they often get it wrong. What was intended as a test of objectivity, a remedy to “fake news”, has ended up becoming a new form of bias. – Fraser Nelson

The BBC’s own team of truth-deciders, modestly called “Reality Check”, are rather selective in the realities they check. When David Attenborough’s excellent Wild Isles documentary claimed that “60 per cent of our flying insects have vanished”, it was a starting claim – but one the fact-checkers let slide. It can be tracked down to an amateur study asking motorists to count splats on their number plates. Had Attenborough said that more people die each year from cold than from heat, he’d face outcry and a full Nigel Lawson-style inquisition. The former chancellor faced a three-month investigation by a press regulator for making precisely this claim.

Some facts are seen to be too exciting to check. When the French economist Thomas Piketty claimed that inequality was certain to rise because of his formula r>g (ie: that the return on assets exceeded the rate of economic growth), it was hailed worldwide as a breakthrough. Time to tax the rich! But when the IMF produced a study showing Piketty’s claim to be nonsense, this seemed to generate no interest at all. – Fraser Nelson

The rise of fact-checking is powerful and helpful in many ways, but is most needed in areas where there is a fashionable and unchallenged consensus. Whenever all parties agree (as they did on lockdown, and still do on net zero and international aid), the biggest policy errors are most likely to creep in. So it’s more important than ever that the major claims are held up to scrutiny. When fact-checkers instead target those who go against the grain, it serves to enforce groupthink.

The Swedes have a word for it: the “opinion corridor”. If you step outside it, you can expect investigation, harassment or to be flattened. The digital era has put rocket boosters on all this as offending articles are more easily shared by activists. There are now professional campaigners who spend all day referring opponents to fact-checkers, regulators or university authorities. And not just for facts. It can be for hate speech or an offence against hazily defined “community standards”. In this way, the political correction phenomenon can multiply, ending up embedded into algorithms. –

The most controversial questions defy black-or-white answers. The vaccines were good for stopping the spread of earlier variants, but not later ones. Channel Four fact-checkers ask if university tuition fees are “progressive” which is, of course, a matter of opinion. Much of this seems to stem from a technocratic view of the world: that it’s possible to burrow away, find facts and come up with an objective answer. But such questions are almost always a matter for debate: hence, politics.

The Online Safety Bill, now going through the Lords, will make all this far worse by threatening huge fines for Silicon Valley firms that publish anything deemed to be “harmful” and visible to children. What does this mean? It’s unclear: so the censorship bots will work overdrive just to be safe.  – Fraser Nelson

A decade after John Humphrys documentary, the question still hangs unanswered: what went so wrong with welfare? But given what happened to him, it may be quite a while before anyone makes a television documentary asking the question again. It would be tragic if, as the digital world opens ever-more possibilities, the opinion corridor ends up narrower than ever. – Fraser Nelson

How does a Prime Minister not know what the Government is spending? He’s been in the job for yonks… he’s two days out from a Budget and he can’t tell you it’s $129 billion and it’s up about $1 billion a week.

I thought that was just a total disrespect for taxpayers and just says that he’s treating them like a bottomless ATM. – Christopher Luxon

Trans students would have no reason not to feel welcome in my feminism class..

“There is one lecture where we tackle head-on the question of the relative priority that should be given to sex versus gender identity, which essentially is whether sex ever matters. – Holly Lawford-Smith

How easy it would be if transgender ideology really was the benign force it claims to be – if trans activists really were campaigning for more love and kindness, and that those who stand in their way were merely hate-filled extremists. – Nick Carter

What is certain, however, is that the activists will not be appeased. Transgenderism as a political cause still seemed like an absurdity until relatively recently. Who knows what absurdity the identitarians will attempt to mainstream next – and who is going to stop them.  – Nick Carter

If your neighbour tosses that polystyrene cup or dirty peanut butter jar into the rubbish, don’t tell him he’s going to NonRecycling hell. Just smile, assume he is an economist who argues that recycling usually wastes resources, and toss your own IKEA polystyrene peanuts mixed with broken wooden slats into the blue bin. Just don’t think about how much labour it will take to pick them out of the recycling conveyor belt to be tossed into the landfill. – Bruce Rottman

When it comes, to money, the inevitable response by the “fundamentalists” and alarmists is “this time it’s different”. But history shows us that’s always wrong. It’s never different, as at root it’s about unchanging human behaviour. – Sir Bob Jones

The freedom to publish, of course, is also the freedom to read, the freedom to write what you want, to be able to choose what you want to read and not have it decided for you externally, and the freedom to publish books that ought to be published and sometimes are difficult to publish because of pressure from this or that group.

It’s very important, I think, that such pressures should be resisted. And we live in a moment, I think, at which freedom of expression, freedom to publish, has not in my lifetime been under such threat in the countries of the West.

Obviously there are parts of the world where censorship has been prevalent for a long time: Russia, China, in some ways India as well. But in the countries of the West, until recently, there was a fair measure of freedom in the area of publishing.

Now, sitting here in the United States, I have to look at the extraordinary attack on libraries and books for children in schools, the attack on the idea of libraries themselves. It’s quite remarkably alarming and we need to be very aware of it and to fight against it very hard. –

I have to say it has also been alarming to see publishers looking to – how can I put this – bowdlerise the work of such people as Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming.

I have to say the idea that James Bond could be made politically correct is almost comical. I think that has to be resisted. Books have to come to us from their time and be of their time and, if that’s difficult to take, don’t read them. Read another book, but don’t try and remake yesterday’s work in the light of today’s attitudes. – Sir Salman Rushdie

In America, as I’m sure you know, property belongs to the owner of it: third parties cannot just demand it be given to them, as perhaps kings can do.

Perhaps you should sit down with your client and advise them that his English rules of royal prerogative to demand that the citizenry hand over their property to the crown were rejected by this country long ago.

We stand by our founding fathers. – Backgrid

Sobering to realise net govt debt was $5.4bn in Jun 2019 & is set to be $95bn by Jun 2025. How much of the difference was legit not-very-controversial Covid spending? Perhaps $25-30bn at most?
(Net debt was "only" $62bn in Jun 22 by when direct Covid spending had mostly ended)

— Michael Reddell (@MHReddell) May 18, 2023

We ended up sliding closer to third world electricity supply because we forced this to happen.

Look, it’s abundantly clear that the climate luvvies are going to chase decarbonisation come hell or high water.

But couldn’t they have got the replacement batteries ready before they started forcing things off, so we could at least have guaranteed electricity supply on cold days? – Heather du Plessis-Allan 

Be wary of anyone wanting to make tax “fairer” because the bottom-line is that they just think that they (or people they support) are better placed to spend your money than you are.  Oh and the spin-merchants of so-called “wealthy” people who say they “want” to pay more tax (but wont actually do it unless others are forced to) are a bizarre breed who actually think politicians and bureaucrats can spend their money better than they can, for benevolent purposes.   – Liberty Scott 

Women have a well understood need – which we learn from childhood – to protect ourselves when vulnerable such as when in states of undress; hospital wards; toilets and so on.

Any man transgressing this norm raises a red flag for us.

It doesn’t matter whether or not a man is innocently seeking to use women’s spaces or services or whether he has an ulterior motive.

Women want the norms of privacy, dignity and our need for safety to be respected by Government.

It’s not “hatred” for women to assert this. – Women’s Space Ireland 

And finally, the magnitude of criminal activity will hopefully stop people judging the victim’s decisions. To make a difference we need to continue the prevention ‘keep-yourself-safe’ messages for women; but equally, we need to amplify the same messages to men around alcohol, drugs, women and respect.

The abuser is always at fault, but realistically we all need to take responsibility to stay safe.  – Francesca Rudkin

We don’t necessarily have to agree with each other on our opinions but you are entitled to have one.

You can’t be punished for the rest of your life for having an opinion that most of us disagree with.

I’ve always believed that you can’t help somebody change by leaving them on the outside. – Steve Hanson

The flag is being brought to the attention of people, and the awareness of why it is there is to support the people that are judged and treated poorly because of who they are.

They deserve to be loved and cared for as much as anybody else. If we all did that it’d be a happy place, wouldn’t it?

The big lesson there is just treat everyone with kindness and love. – Steve Hanson

NZ Post told me ‘We do not give refunds’. I know of no other enterprise that gets away with taking customers’ money, then refusing both service and refund. It is surely a breach of New Zealand law? – Richard Green

We should never allow politics to divide our relationships.

I would like to think that, despite the political divide, I think you can build really strong trust in relationships. – Tariana Turia

We’re making history with the Freedom of Speech Act, ensuring that fear does not undermine the rights of students and academics to debate controversial ideas and securing the right to an open exchange of ideas in universities.”

Getting this balance right is not always straightforward or easy, but by working collaboratively we can protect the important role that universities play in the pursuit of truth and free exchange of ideas. – Claire Coutinho

I wouldn’t want to be starting out today. I would worry, if I was starting out, that the story I was picking was going to offend people. But it shouldn’t. You should be able to write about anything you want… I would say to people, if you believe in what you’re writing, at least when you’re writing it, don’t worry about it. – Sir Tim Rice

Some of the people complaining about things today, I’d be absolutely delighted to offend. – Sir Tim Rice

People aren’t allowed to… speak or give lectures before they’ve even said anything. That cannot be right. It’s censorship. – Sir Tim Rice

Personal, nasty, grubby – Labour’s attack on National leader Christopher Luxon over women’s access to contraception tells you everything you need to know about the ground on which the election campaign will be fought.

Stupidly, I was hoping that with so many big issues for us to grapple with this election the campaign would be a fair fight on real issues – the economy, immigration policy (suddenly at never-before-seen record levels), infrastructure, education, hospital and cancer waiting lists to name a few.

But in just two social media posts, Labour blew me out of the water. – Tracy Watkins

New Zealand must hold some sort of world record for the time required to clear roads after serious accidents. Before we even got to Stratford, we found ourselves stuck in a tailback stretching several kilometres following a crash involving a logging truck and an ambulance. The accident happened at 5.20am. We joined the queue at 9.10am. Nothing was happening. It wasn’t until 10 o’clock that a mobile crane headed past us to the crash scene, presumably to move the logging truck. Why the delay? This is a major state highway; re-opening it after a crash should be treated as a matter of urgency. Meanwhile, Waka Kotahi’s website was advising travellers to delay their journey or go the long way around Mt Taranaki on the Surf Highway – not very helpful when we were already committed to our journey and didn’t want to risk taking a two-hour detour around the mountain only to then learn the road had been cleared five minutes after we left, which Sod’s Law suggests was bound to happen. At 10.30, more than five hours after the accident, a traffic control truck moved slowly along the line of waiting vehicles with the news that we still faced an indeterminate delay. No explanation why. The guy in the truck was sympathetic but didn’t appear to know any more than we did. At that point, everyone turned around and dispersed. Most headed back toward New Plymouth, but we found a way around the crash site using rural backroads and took less than 15 minutes to get back on track. We’d probably still be stuck there if it wasn’t for Google Maps. The incident not only confirmed my sceptical view of Waka Kotahi’s traffic management expertise, but also raised questions in my mind about the role of the police serious crash unit. There was a time when the main priority after a crash – that is, once ambulances and firefighters had done their vital work – was to get traffic flowing again. Now accident scenes seem to be frozen until the serious crash unit arrives (however long that takes) and completes whatever it is that serious crash units do. In the meantime traffic backs up, people miss vital appointments and tempers get frayed. The Wairarapa Times-Age this morning reports a similar incident yesterday: SH2 over the Remutaka Hill was closed from 7am till 11.45 am – the peak morning period for commuters to Wellington – while police investigated a fatal crash scene. Waka Kotahi lamely suggested motorists take the Saddle road via Woodville, a journey of an extra three hours. Is this another example of the cult of box-ticking, form-filling managerialism that the police seem to have succumbed to, and which prioritises protocols and process over people? I suspect it is. There must be a point at which any benefit derived from time-consuming crash investigations is outweighed by the disruption and inconvenience these investigations cause to thousands of people. –  Karl du Fresne

Overall impressions: New Zealand may be going to the pack in multiple ways. Its infrastructure is collapsing, the economy is sick, the education system has been ruinously contaminated by extremist ideology (even maths is now apparently treated as an expression of white privilege) and the deranged culture wars are raging to the point where democracy itself is at risk. But physically it’s still a beautiful country – no one can change that – and the people are friendly and good-hearted. They deserve far better from those who purport to represent them. – Karl du Fresne

Offence number five (which should possibly be number one): The truancy data.

The Ministry of Education’s data shows in term three last year just 46 per cent of students attended class regularly. The fact that more than half of our kids are not attending school regularly is the main offence and one that this generation will feel the effects of for their lifetime. – Paula Bennett

Teachers are being bullied not to question trans-affirming policies when evidence shows that the actual result of the approach is to put the welfare of children at serious risk. – a teacher sacked for not using 8 year-olds trans pronouns

If we are going to feed children in NZ schools it must have three features:

• The effects need to be monitored with regards to attendance and achievement.
• The time period much be limited. We should never have go to this situation in a rich nation in 2023.
• It must be deeply understood and communicated daily to students, families and staff that “We are feeding you today – so that you can get a good education and then feed, clothe and house your own children.

Anything less than that is simply not acceptable. If I had not taken all that my parents did for me – and not found my own way – it would have been a disgrace. – Alwyn Poole

If you can’t run your own affairs properly, then how do you run your portfolio? Or the country?

I think, in that, lies the real truth. The reason this lot are so hopeless is because that’s simply what they are. They’re hopeless, in life, as in politics.

The Government are a bewildered mess that can barely get through the day. They are shabby, hence the country is shabby.

You lead – or fail from the top. – Mike Hosking

The problem for Hipkins here is he’s in a constant state of mopping up ministerial muck ups from Stuart Nash, to Kiri Allan, to Jan Tinetti and now Wood who was supposed to be one of Hipkins’ safest pairs of hands.  

The series of small scandals distracting from the bread and butter is becoming a pattern – National’s laser focussed on casting the left as a coalition of chaos.

The risk of all these – in the scheme of it relatively minor indiscretions – is the cumulative effect of them.

The Government will be worried that the sheen of shambles sticks – that is nowhere near what they want four months from election day. – Jenna Lynch

Michael Wood has:

1) lied to the PMs office saying had sold the shares
2) lied to Newsroom over the shares
3) filed multiple false returns of pecuniary interests
4) fobbed off the Cabinet Office 12 times over 30 months over the shares

What more does he need to do to be sacked?

— David Farrar (@dpfdpf) June 8, 2023

At the turn of the century there was a great deal of speculative journalism making predictions about the new century ahead. I recall my surprise when many of the forecasts picked Turkey as destined to be one of the great 21st Century growth nations, for reasons I can no longer recall.

But assuming there was validity to their prophecies, then the Erdogan disaster shows how a single dominant personality leader can stuff a country up, as we’ve witnessed throughout history and today in numerous nations. – Sir Bob Jones 

We need people. Here is the deal – New Zealand stopped replacing itself in 2016. I encourage all of you to go out there and have more babies if you wish, that would be helpful. – Christopher Luxon 

But it’s disingenuous to totally miscontextualise comments from a political leader for the sake of playing into unease over his personal values. There are MPs across the house who personally oppose abortion and none have been subjected to anything like the same treatment.

Few who saw headlines about Luxon ‘urging’ New Zealanders to have babies would have appreciated the context of his comments. Election campaigns are nasty affairs, but voters still deserve the truth. – Jack Tame

The greatest value of democracy and election years is ultimately the public is always right.

Even if you ever gave them the benefit of the doubt, that what they were trying to do had any merit or maybe even had a chance of working, that’s all up in smoke.

This is a country full of people who are afraid, afraid of crime, of violence, of being a victim.

No government survives that. – Mike Hosking

Mr Orwell couldn’t have designed a more labyrinth system that robs a population of their greatest power, the ability to express themselves, and impose bureaucratically sanctioned Newspeak as a way of expunging thought-crime (illegal thoughts) and individuality.

There’s no denying that online content causes the proliferation of harmful hate. But rather than suppressing such speech, the answer lies in more speech – the cleansing disinfectant of counter-speech.  – Janet Wilson

Femininity & masculinity are society’s interpretations not biological descriptions of the reality of either sex. For decades we’ve fought, especially women, to remove narrow restrictive stereotypes. What we are doing presently is regressive, dangerous & misogynistic

— Sharron Davies MBE (@sharrond62) June 6, 2023

We’ve got to get our mojo back… a lot more ambition and aspiration. – Christopher Luxon

I think New Zealand is a country of endless potential, it’s the best country on planet Earth, we’ve got amazing people, we’re in an exciting part of the world in the Asia-Pacific region. . . 

We want to be a government that’s going to turn it around and get some ambition and some aspiration and some positivity and optimism in the country going forward. – Christopher Luxon 

A recession is when your neighbour loses their job. A recovery is when Chris Hipkins loses his. – David Seymour

While the impacts of the severe weather events earlier in this year will have damaged primary production, the Government needs to shoulder much of the blame for this economic contraction. Its spending addiction has driven inflation to record levels and forced the Reserve Bank to hike the Official Cash Rate repeatedly, which has undoubtedly hampered economic activity.

“New Zealand might have only just entered a technical recession, but without drastic and urgent action from the Government to rein in its spending, this situation may well persist for some time to come. – Callum Purves

Undoubtedly there are people struggling. But a policy of ever-increasing income redistribution via the tax system has been in play in New Zealand for generations.

Shouldn’t such a good idea have worked by now? Or will it continue to be ramped up to the point where there are too few productive, independent people left to fuel it all?

Then … I hope and pray that voters do. – Lindsay Mitchell

Ahmed and Cook have both stated they don’t want to engage in the “culture war”. Both of these professors need to acknowledge that the battle against aggressive trans activism isn’t a war over culture; it is a defence of women’s rights according to UK law. Women aren’t a “culture” — we are a sex. Our rights are not “cultural”; they are essential to our safety, privacy and dignity as female people. – Jean Hatchet

Taxpayers work long and hard to earn the income that is taxed. They go without worthwhile things to pay their taxes.

All governments should hold themselves responsible for ensuring that their spending provides commensurate value for taxpayers. Taxpayers are not geese to be plucked with a minimum amount of hissing.

Taxpayers are already paying vastly more in taxes than Labour told them to expect back in 2017. Under its electioneering fiscal plan, it proclaimed that its policies would only increase Total Crown tax revenue for the five years ended June 2022 by $10.2 billion. We now know the actual increase. It is $29.3 billion.

The full cost is much greater. That is because Labour’s planned five-year spending increase of $11.7 billion was much greater at $65.3 billion. The extra borrowing represents deferred taxation.

Take a bow Mr Hipkins.

Everyone is demeaned when governments hand out money as if it is free. – Bryce Wilkinson 

It is now the time to ask – if it wasn’t before – whether there is something a bit rotten in the political system where falling short of the highest levels of probity are treated with a shrug.

Or, where they are treated seriously, those who fall foul of the rules don’t see what is wrong.

None of these things are crimes of the century and there’s no evidence of any graft, but the accretion of them just gives the whole government – and some of those it appoints – an entitled, arrogant and slightly smelly vibe.

It’s another bit of bad news for Labour. – Luke Malpass

Work hard, do your job properly, turn up to select committee well prepared, get off your phones. – Jacqui Dean

And I’ve come to the conclusion that we can change as many rules as we like, but I think we as Members of Parliament have to remember why we’re here and act honourably and respectfully towards each other. And I think that might be helpful. – Jacqui Dean

We should be less concerned as to how we elect parliament and how well it represents the demographic makeup of the electorate, and concentrate instead on how much absolute authority it now possesses and how it elects to apply, or abuse, that power. – Damien Grant

Sports women are not a testosterone level they are a sex.

— Sharron Davies MBE (@sharrond62) June 16, 2023

While there has been historical inequity that has disadvantaged Māori and Pasifika people, the idea that any government would deliberately rank ethnicities for priority for surgery is offensive, wrong and should halt immediately.

The way to improve Māori and Pasifika health is through better housing, education and addressing the cost of living, not by disadvantaging others. – Shane Reti

The only possible effect of racial discrimination is to make sure a person in greater need waits longer for an operation and may die on a waiting list because they had the wrong ancestors.

A person who is in great clinical need, has waited a long time, lives far from major medical facilities, and is poor could be Māori, European, Pacific, Indian or Chinese, and they should all be treated equally. – David Seymour

Voters are generally prepared to go along with policies to protect the climate. But there comes a point at which it is no longer enough only to have the right goals. That point is certainly reached when economists and climate change researchers agree there is a more cost-effective way of achieving emissions reduction targets. – Oliver Hartwich

Somehow Australia managed to have a grown-up conversation about pensions that we still haven’t managed. I know we don’t like admitting this as Kiwis, but maybe it’s time we agreed that Australia is beating us hands down on this one. – Tracy Watkins

It is an increasingly inward-focused economy, where policy (such as it is) is only tending to reinforce such developments. It doesn’t have the feel of the foundations for a prosperous and highly productive economy for New Zealanders – this generations, or our children and grandchildren. – Michael Reddell

Because, while politicians now strut and preen on the national stage in campaign mode, it’s how they behave between elections that’s of most concern. Where real debate is squashed in favour of the side-show of Question Time, where consultation occurs once a decision has been made and is only weeks long, where select committees rubber-stamp policy rather than challenge it.

To create that cohesiveness in our political system we need more intelligent debate and compromise without rancour instead of what we’re getting now – less democratic, more petty, scrappy politics. – Janet Wilson

 People are allowed to express cranky ideas provided they don’t harm anyone. It’s called freedom of expression.

In a free society, you’re allowed to get things wrong. In a free society, people can assess ideas for themselves and decide which ones make sense and which don’t. But that freedom is exactly what alarms the woke elite. Freedom to make up your own mind is dangerous. The far-Left elite, of which Daubs is an exemplar, don’t trust people to make their own decisions. They claim a monopoly on “factually correct information” and would prefer that the proles take their cue from the academic priesthood. –  Karl du Fresne

We cannot duck the issue by hiding behind the (misplaced) shield of parental consent: if socially transitioning children does not meet accepted ethical standards then it should not be done. To many this may sound harsh; it is certainly firm. I have been accused of being “unloving”. But the root cause of this tragedy is that, as a society, we have lost sight of what it really means to love a child. Giving a child whatever they think they want is not love. Love is wanting what is best for a child and telling them the truth even if it’s hard to hear. Love is setting boundaries that keep children safe, and then patiently and kindly enforcing them. Love is defending children against ideologies that mean them harm, even when as adults we may pay a price for doing so.   – Miriam Cates

If you feel anxious while you wait for the total at the supermarket checkout, if you dread the two days before pay day because there’s so little money left in your account, if you’ve had to give up on your plan to buy a home, then know this: you are not alone.

Even Kiwis who are doing everything right, who are working hard and being incredibly careful are struggling. You are struggling because the economy is failing you. – Nicola Willis

In the months ahead, hundreds of thousands of mortgage holders will have to move off a home loan with a 2 or 3 per cent interest rate to a loan with 6 or 7 per cent interest. Many homeowners will be left scrambling for the hundreds of extra dollars they will need to make their mortgage payments each fortnight.

When that mortgage bomb goes off, the whole economy will shudder.  – Nicola Willis

Other parties might like to tell you they can fix New Zealand’s problems by robbing Peter to pay Paul. That they will drag the bottom up by tearing the top down. Or that we’ll all feel better if they punish the wealthy hard enough.

The truth is those reckless tactics would only further weaken our fragile economy, scare our best and brightest away and divide us one against the other. – Nicola Willis

We know that success is good for the country, it’s good for the Government and it’s good for every New Zealander. 

This election the choice is clear. 

New Zealanders can vote for Parties that use tax as punishment and that seek to load more and more cost on fewer and fewer shoulders or they can vote for a National-led Government that will always strive to let you keep more of what you earn, that will value work and celebrate effort. 

You can vote for careful investment that grows stronger families and communities or you can vote for more growth of Government agencies and the red tape they create.

You can vote for policies that will push more and more of our kids to become citizens in Australia or for a National Party that will fight to ensure this is a country our kids can live their dreams in.

New Zealanders can stick with what we have today: a damaged economy that is failing its people, or you can vote National for a stronger economy that delivers for you and your family.

Faced with these choices I have faith that New Zealanders will choose a better way.  They will vote to change the direction of this country and elect a National Government that will fix our economy and put New Zealand back on track. – Nicola Willis

I don’t want the biggest suburbs of young Kiwi families to be in Brisbane.

I don’t want older New Zealanders aching to hug their grandchildren, that they talk to on Zoom, but who are growing up in Australia because their parents were forced overseas. And I certainly don’t want more New Zealanders becoming victims of brazen offenders riding a crime wave across our country. – Christopher Luxon

During Covid, Labour’s printing of money was the fifth highest in the world. Their spending was the second highest, per capita, among developed countries. The pandemic is over, but the spending has not stopped.

Labour’s spending is 80 per cent higher than National’s six years ago. That explosion equates to an additional $28,000 per household a year.  But nothing, absolutely nothing, has improved by 80 per cent. In fact, most things have gone backwards.

To pay for all that spending, Labour’s taxing more, and borrowing more.

The Government is collecting an additional $100 million a day in tax. But even that’s not enough. Debt has exploded from $5 billion in 2019 to $71 billion today. This is credit card economics.

We’re now spending more on the interest on our debt than we’re spending on primary schools or police. Servicing debt is this Government’s fourth highest expense. – Christopher Luxon

Farmers and growers are the backbone of our economy – but Labour’s obsession with new rules and regulations has put them under siege.

A National Government I lead will get Wellington out of farming. We have set out 19 actions to make life easier for farmers.

And we’ll put hard limits on forestry conversions of prime agricultural land – that are devastating rural communities and driving young Kiwis out of farming.

But above all – we will bring respect back to the relationship with farmers and growers that has evaporated from Wellington.

Because if you’re working every hour of the day feeding New Zealand and the world, your business matters, your voice matters, and your community matters. – Christopher Luxon

It makes sense that if you have people locked up, you should do what you can to turn their lives around. That’s ultimately better for them, and better for all of us. The more offenders who change their ways, the safer our communities will be.

But not all rehab programmes are available to all prisoners. Remand prisoners – the ones who are awaiting trial or sentencing but are locked up because they are deemed a risk to society – can’t access all rehab programmes.

With nearly one in two prisoners on remand, that means a significant proportion of prisoners are missing out on the opportunity for proper rehabilitation, or are starting it too late.

Therefore, I’m announcing today that under National, all prisoners will be eligible for all rehabilitation programmes.

If you want to try to turn your life around, we’ll help you do that. But if you re-offend, be warned. Under National, you’ll face tough consequences. – Christopher Luxon

It turns out the "river of filth" was the flow of undisclosed conflicts of interests that Michael Wood flooded the Cabinet with.
Arrogant disregard for important rules that are there to ensure trust & confidence in the Govt.

— Ani O'Brien (@aniobrien) June 21, 2023

We don’t just live in Māori things, we suffer the same health stuff as everybody else, we go to the same schools as everybody else.

What electoral roll I’m on didn’t change my Māori blood, didn’t change my Māori genealogy, didn’t change my Māori language, didn’t change my Māori family. None of that changed. What’s changed is my ability to choose more widely who I can potentially vote for. – TeRata Hikairo

New Zealand farmers are in a better position to be able to identify the combination required than anybody in the central city. Allowing them to be innovative to achieve the required outcomes will bring back a sense of worth. And maybe then the next generation of agribusiness professionals and food producers will appear. – Jacqueline Rowarth

We must inject some common sense back into the classroom and society more generally. The classroom is a place where fact should be taught as fact and opinion as opinion. Children should be able to indulge their imagination in the playground, especially when they’re little, but it goes without saying that absolutely no child should be forced to affirm a classmate’s identity as an animal or inanimate object. – Gillian Keegan

pic.twitter.com/yUUBFpsKkk

— Marie Magdalen (@femalemagic) June 24, 2023

Against National’s weekly churn of new policy, we’ve seen basically nothing big from Hipkins since the Budget. At best, Labour has been invisible. At worst, it’s been making headlines for ministerial conflict of interest scandals.

Labour will need to seize back the narrative soon, if it wants to bolster its chances going into campaign season. Otherwise Luxon, armed with his array of policies on all of the key issues, starts to look like the Prime-Minister-in-waiting. – Marc Daalder

There’s absolutely no doubt that Labour has reduced the numbers of people in prison. The prison population has fallen by 20%. And they’re saying it’s going to be really expensive to put more people back in prison. But the cost of crime on society is expensive. I mean, just look at the numbers of security guards having to be employed by just about every retail store.

And criminals have to be punished, otherwise we lose faith in the justice system, and we lose faith in our authorities, and we lose faith in each other. If you do wrong, you have to be seen to be being punished. But at the same time, criminals must be rehabilitated as best they can be. Otherwise, it’s just an expensive money-go-round and a complete and utter waste of human potential. – Kerre Woodham 

A $8000 rebate, as prescribed by Government policy, is a story of rank hypocrisy.

But two planes, one empty, to transport 45 people is somehow not news?

I just can’t work out how it is the media has ended up with such a questionable reputation.

Go figure.- Mike Hosking 

Banks have had a big target on their backs because they make big profits, and banks should be making big profits because they’re really big entities. – Cameron Bagrie 

You look at credit card charges… those numbers are pretty eye-watering – up around 20 percent – but, if you want to make a really big difference to what happens across retail banking, one of the big steps we should be pursuing is actually improving financial literacy.

Where the banks make a lot of money out of credit charges is because people don’t know how to manage their credit cards from month to month. – Cameron Bagrie 

Free speech is not the tool of the elite but the marginalised, who have not money nor power to set the agenda, but simply their voice. – Adam Young

EVs are as good as the grid they are charged on…

"The results show that under the current grid mix composition in China, the carbon emissions of electric vehicles of the same vehicle weight class are 24% to 31% higher than that of fuel vehicles." https://t.co/mv1cwINBGE

— 𝐆𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐅𝐚𝐫𝐪𝐮𝐡𝐚𝐫 (@grant_farquhar) June 25, 2023

If you’re an academic and your college or university has issued a ringing statement in favor of political, ideological or moral positions, that might make you feel good. But in the long run it’s bad, for taking institutional positions (as opposed to personal ones) acts to chill the speech of others. – Jerry Coyne

We all need to join together, and push back against it. My own experience galvanises me, and my resolve in maintaining a system of sex-based rights.

We are united] in the face of a society that is captured by a movement that is determined to erase [biological women] as a legal class. – Katherine Deves

Our society is legislating away the reality of biological sex, redefining women to include biological men; encoding legal fictions into law.’ It is also punishing those who refuse to comply.

‘The moment we favour gender identity rights over sex-based rights, is the moment we deny the basis of human existence. Sex-based rights must have primacy. – Katherine Deves

Not one police officer, judge, politician, journalist, or medical practitioner can ever prove a male has become a female. All they can do is appropriate stereotypes and use brute force, threats, or intimidation to try and force us to accept the lie. Regardless of how captured anyone else is, I will not bow down [before this] altar of lies. Truth matters. Sex is binary – male and female. – Kirralie Smith

In Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four there were four Ministries – Love, Peace, Plenty, and Truth – which respectively promulgated hate, war, scarcity and propaganda. Our Ministry of Education, which seems determined to promulgate ignorance, would be right at home amongst them. – Michael Johnston

Should schools teach children (through the RSE curriculum or by transitioning a child) that subjective identity is real and objective reality is false? If the answer is yes, we can expect many more confused children who can’t distinguish between feelings and reality, with many more different genders, nationalities and species proliferating in schools. – Stephanie Davies-Arai 

I call attention to this because I love New Zealand and its people, but deplore what they’re doing to themselves. Further, this decline is an object lesson for the U.S., as ideology is increasingly creeping into our academics, now seen as a branch of Social Justice activism. “It can’t happen to us,” you say? I’m not so sure.

I’m sad to say this, but I don’t think the academic problems of New Zealand will be fixed.  They are circling the drain, but the politicians and academics don’t seem to care (except for those who dare not speak of the problem). – Jerry Coyne

Remember when the government advised us to have short showers to combat rising costs? What are the chances before long that the police will put out an advisory to be careful what colours we wear to avoid provoking gang attacks?

— Liam Hehir (@PronouncedHare) July 1, 2023

My theory is if you give them enough chores to do in the morning they will make the most of their free time ’cause they know I can find them more if they say they’re bored! – Tofiga Fepulea’i 

Parenting is always going to be a lot harder because generally if you’re a nice parent, your kids know you’re going to love them regardless, so you will often actually get the worst version of them at home. – Karen O’Leary

 Cancel culture is relentless and cruel – and it is chilling free expression. It has nothing to do with holding the powerful to account. It is a weapon deployed by an intolerant minority to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. All this is obvious to almost anyone at this point. But the world of arts and culture has been particularly slow to catch up. – Fraser Myers

All of these women — a journalist, a psychiatrist, an artist, a politician, and a philosophy professor — have expressed the once normal and now rapidly taboo view that a woman is an adult human female and that children’s psychological and bodily integrity (and future fertility) should be protected.  That these views have become ‘incendiary’ speaks to the draconian absurdity of our present cultural moment.

For too long the spurious notion of ‘inclusivity’ has obfuscated the conflict of interest between trans rights and women’s rights, with horrible repercussions for the latter. Unfortunately, it would now appear that ‘inclusivity’ has become the language of cancellation. – Petra Bueskens

The anti-free speech movement has become openly Orwellian in claiming to protect freedom by limiting freedom.  It also employs using terms like disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation to obscure their effort to silence those with opposing views. Rather than use “censorship,” they refer to “content moderation.” – Jonathan Turley

Why did this incident involving Tory Whanau attract scrutiny? Because Kiwis are utterly fed up with the arrogant and entitled behaviour of elected officials and public servants. If you want to be Mayor, act like one. If you want to be a Minister, understand that words, behaviour, actions and rules matter. If you want to be a public servant, then answer to the taxpayers who fund your career. If elected officials need some guidance, then perhaps look to some of the professional values that guide the private sector.

Kiwis deserve so much better than this. – Rachel Smalley

Can't believe anyone even needs to debate the idiocy of thinking price controls help the supply of the commodity under question

— Libertyscott 🇹🇼 🇺🇦 🇰🇷 (@libertyscott) July 3, 2023

I vividly remember every election since 1949 and unhesitantly say the current government is the most incompetent and damaging in the country’s history. In a little over 3 months time they will be wiped out, to such an extent they may never recover. – Sir Bob Jones 

Unlike cultural change, restructuring doesn’t solve crises.

Consequently, we have a new health system largely devised by business consultants. This is akin to panel-beaters designing a roundabout. The main beneficiaries are business consultants or panel-beaters…surprise, surprise. – Ian Powell 

The tragedy of the ‘health reforms’ is not just that they threw the baby out with the bathwater. They also threw the bath out. If our hospitals are to be protected and enhanced, the bath, baby and some of the bathwater need to be retrieved. – Ian Powell 

No, the world is not looking to Indigenous knowledge to solve modern-day issues (I’ll name two of these issues: development of vaccines and global warming). Indigenous knowledge, if relevant, can surely be folded into the science mix to solve problems, but it’s usually more tradition-based than forward looking. And the mention of Mātauranga Māori (MM), or Māori “ways of knowing” is a bit disturbing, for MM that’s more than just empirical, trial-and-error based knowledge that can be taken as part of science. MM includes, as I keep saying, religion, ethics, morality, tradition, and superstition. It is not a “way of knowing” but a “Māori way of living.” – Jerry Coyne 

We understand both charities hold opposing views, but when engaging in public debate and campaigning, they should do so with respect and tolerance. Demonising and undermining those who think differently is not acceptable behaviour from any charity on our register. – UK Charity Commission

When competing views, opinions and policies are publicly debated and exposed to public scrutiny, the good will over time drive out the bad and the true will prevail over the false – UK Charity Commission

The cultural impact assessment will have noted the corrupting influence of having worked in the public sector, where nobody ever expects accountability for anything.
How could they possibly know right from wrong, given that upbringing?
The poor things. https://t.co/gPwjDAkaZL

— Eric Crampton (@EricCrampton) July 7, 2023

When someone very close to you is going through that and living with such a diagnosis, and you don’t quite know how it will pan out, it does make you think, actually. Certainly made me consider my own mortality.

“Maybe it brings those things into sharper relief because you focus then on what’s important and you try to sift out the things that aren’t, and you then perhaps focus on the things that make you happiest.

“Because happiness of course is elusive, it can be slippery, mercurial, how do we pin it down? I think a lot of times people don’t quite know what it is. – Bill Bailey 

When I was in office I had something called the ‘front page test’: if you were doing something you wouldn’t want on the front page of the newspaper you really shouldn’t be doing it.  – John Key 

pic.twitter.com/nxi8HRKvkP

— Martina Navratilova (@Martina) July 7, 2023

In true science there are no facts – only theories that have not been disproven yet. This is often hard for people to understand as we are often coerced into seeing conclusions as “facts” or “settled science” and scientists as deeply reliable people. The truth is that if a “scientist” is calling his/her finding factual they are out of line with their disciplines.

Human beliefs/faiths are important and there has been much controversy over the years when people have asserted that there is a conflict between belief systems and science. They are two different things and many great scientists have been, for instance, Christians, who understood that. For something to be “scientific” it MUST be open to being refuted.

There is also a significant difference between a scientist and an activist. A person can do both, but they should clearly understand, and communicate, which role they are playing at any time. – Alwyn Poole

So, we are spending more while earning less and pretending, if you listen to Grant, we are in a good position to do so. Which, of course, we are not.

The only other good news, apart from our collapsing currency, might be the fact that the Reserve Bank looks at this mess and decides not to bump interest rates this week.

All in all, it’s ugly.

The mismanagement is shocking and the report cards don’t lie. You simply can’t run your household, far less an economy, this way.

We are sinking and the tragedy is, once the clowns who got us in this mess are gone, we are the ones picking up the pieces and paying off the bills. – Mike Hosking

The bigger issue, frankly, rather than the language, is actually people being able to get the public services they need, and understanding their government and being able to navigate it. – Christopher Luxon 

Only individual human beings have a physical presence within a community. Only individuals may consult or be consulted. Only individuals may represent others. They may do so as a group, with one or more spokespersons, with whom others agree, but they nevertheless speak and agree, as individuals. There is no such thing as a collective mind. Such a thing does not exist.

That, at root, is why racism is irrational and evil. It pretends that a category of people distinguished in some way by the nature of their ancestry are a collective mass with collective ideas, behaviour, etc. It proceeds as if there were one mind doing the thinking for all persons with that ancestry, dictating the ideas and actions of them all. A moment’s thought reveals this to be a ridiculous proposition. – Gary Judd 

The only valid entitlement to anything is an individual entitlement. In a rational and just society, that entitlement must be earned by achievement.

No one can claim an entitlement derived from something done by someone else. The exploration of the Pacific and the discovery of New Zealand some 800 years ago by those great Polynesian navigators and explorers were monumental achievements. They are entitled to admiration and honour. They earned it.

Their achievements are not the achievements of their progeny, even of their children. No one living today is entitled to anything by reason of that achievement. – Gary Judd 

It is one of the ironies of this election campaign that Chris Luxon is being painted as a religious zealot who will allegedly force Christian beliefs on the nation even as Chris Hipkins is actually introducing mātauranga Māori into education — and most controversially into science. – Graham Adams

Have you ever in your life encountered a genuine woman who would stand up before a crowd and incite them to punch people "in the fucking face"? No, I thought not.https://t.co/mFpbZTNjdI

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 12, 2023

Public servants report ministers are setting demands as if they will not return. Two-term governments are not unusual but Labour is far from confident it can fight off National and Act. Or, importantly, confident it has anything left to wow voters with to get them over the line. News this week that the deficit is $2 billion worse than forecast leaves little in the election kitty for the Government to play election games with.

Labour’s record, just in this year, is difficult to campaign on. Even the less controversial measures in the Prime Minister’s statement from the first sitting are struggling to be delivered. Funding for school attendance officers, meant to correct the wave of rising school truancy, has only delivered a third of the number of officers it promised. The Consumer Data Framework was just released as an exposure draft, despite the Government stating it would introduce it this year. – Brigitte Morten

Paul Keating famously described greens as “opportunists and Trots”. Labour MPs loathe the Greens as the radical left masquerading as environmentalists. Labour’s Māori MPs, meanwhile, believe Te Pāti Māori MPs are reckless shock jocks, saying anything for a headline.

A Labour/Green/Te Pāti Māori coalition would mean the Deputy PM, Cabinet ministers, associate ministers, the assistant Speaker and committee chairs losing their jobs to accommodate MPs they despise.

Many Labour MPs would rather go into opposition than into a coalition with the Greens and Te Pāti Māori.

For every ministerial error of judgment that we know about, there will be three more we are yet to discover.

What is surprising is that there are not more Labour MPs taking mental health leave. – Richard Prebble 

“Labour campaigned on a promise not to introduce new taxes, but it turns out they were secretly designing new taxes for this year’s Budget. That’s totally inconsistent with the commitment they made to New Zealanders … What this shows is that, under pressure, Labour will always resort to more tax, even when they’ve promised not to. – Nicola Willis

This brave trans-species athlete just smashed Usain Bolt’s world record in the 100m.

So thrilled to see that the cheetah won. 👏🥳 pic.twitter.com/K9Mrrkj0bG

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) March 18, 2022

In more than 30 years working in and around politics, I thought I’d seen every extreme of incompetence, cynicism and indifference. It has left me deeply sceptical of governments’ tendency to achieve anything, tell the truth, or care about either.

KiwiBuild quickly won the Ardern Government the gold star as New Zealand’s most incompetent, but mostly, it was assumed to mean well.

Labour better hope the public accepts that abject incompetence alone explains its failure to stop dawn raids after its 2021 apology to the Pacific community. The alternative is that it also wins first prize for cynicism and indifference. –  Matthew Hooton

There are two upsides. Ardern and Faafoi are at least no longer in Parliament, and Wood will surely follow when Labour works out that his idiocy cost them a third term.

More importantly, the Pacific youth Ardern purported to address so humbly and sincerely have at least learned never to rely upon a politician’s promise. –  Matthew Hooton

We have a spending problem not a tax problem.

— NickMowbray (@NMowbray23) July 12, 2023

I certainly think New Zealand’s finest days are behind it. We’re not at our peak. You don’t feel the same vibe or energy any more.

New Zealand feels as if it is being pulled apart at the seams. I thought we were egalitarian and unified but some people who feel slightly disenfranchised use that to exacerbate rifts for political reasons.

There is the cost of living problem and it has become a heavy place – it’s not the New Zealand of five years ago to me.

I’m among the more fortuitous people… but you get twice the product at half the price in Europe. It’s incredible really – it should be the other way around.  – Marc Ellis

I didn’t want to just be a chilly breeze that swept occasionally through the familial home. I wanted to be a regular whirlwind of glitter, warmth and icing sugar. – Verity Johnson

I cannot quite believe that this actually needs saying but…

Upholding biological reality in society does not prevent ‘trans’ people from:

-Going to the toilet
-Playing sports
-Breathing oxygen

— James Esses (@JamesEsses) July 15, 2023

When the Labour Party  says “In it for you”, will  the  voter  say “no thanks”?

Already Labour’s slogan  has delighted those  with a  sense of  humour. As one fan re-worked it, shouldn’t it  be: “what’s in it for you?”  Answer: “Very little”.  – Point of Order

In the last half of the previous Labour-led Government, New Zealand lost an average of 30,000 people net per year. It took time to turn that around, but from 2014 to 2019 it was down to a net 3000.

Now it’s 13,000 and climbing again.

Voting with their feet, as this is characterised – another way of measuring the government’s popularity. – Point of Order

Well, Labour are a second-term Government looking like a third-term one. That is to say out of ideas, hostage to internal disarray, and so risk-averse they wouldn’t cross a road without focus-grouping the traffic. – John Campbell

I’m from South Africa … we left there not to have this. –  an unmaed construction worker

Doing good isn’t always about coming up with some new innovative thing. Sometimes it’s about taking the thing that you know works … and just making sure more people get to it.

There’s 2,500 people in Enabling Good Lives and I have to say after 10 years, that’s bloody disappointing. That wasn’t the original vision because, actually, it’s not that hard to do. – Sir Bill English

I think there’s a huge opportunity there for the people who service these 45,000 plus their families and carers to drive the policy process through much deeper knowledge of our customers and through adopting the kind of technology and data systems that will enable those choices, rather than waiting around for the government, any government, to come up with the answers, because I don’t think they will. – Sir Bill English

There’ll be more documents about strategy, there are strategies everywhere … so let’s get out of that kind of double public speak stuff because we just keep saying the same things, and come back next year and say there’s 2,500 in EGL now why can’t there be 10,000 in 12 months’ time? It’s just a matter of focusing on the right issues. – Sir Bill English

As the French gilets jaunes were fond of saying: ‘The elites worry about the end of the world. We worry about the end of the month.’ Our governing class has long thought it can get away with squeezing people’s living standards, taxing them off the roads and generally making life more miserable, so long as these measures are dressed in green garb. The drivers’ revolt in Uxbridge ought to shatter those illusions.  – Fraser Myers

Quite frankly, I think we are a bit over the cute tricks of “humanising” our politicians through sausage roll eating and I am happy for them to be serious about the job interview on who should run the country in October. – Paula Bennett

No party can reflect all of the beliefs and values of any individual.

Voting, like dating, is about making the optimal choice given the options available.  – Damien Grant

Telling children that the way to embrace who they are is to fundamentally change who they are, through the use of powerful hormones and irreversible surgery, is the cruelest lie of the modern era.

— James Esses (@JamesEsses) July 17, 2023

At least as relevant in 2023 as it was in 1872 and 1894 pic.twitter.com/CHFifeLtOG

— Navn Navnesen (@Chris_P_B_Acon) July 17, 2023

My worldview has been turned upside down in the last few years, and I clearly understand that no one is safe from being ‘cancelled’ if there are no brakes applied to it. It might be an organisation you disagree with now, but it could be any of us next week. And just a parting word of wisdom, because I flatter myself I have a few of those now as a b’older woman (😊) — sometimes we have to hear things we don’t like, in order to be clear in our hearts and minds about what we do like, what our own boundaries are, and why. – Katrina Briggs 

This is what those older politicians and commentators are really talking about when they gush over the youth in politics. They don’t mean that we should actually engage with the young people of Britain. After all, young people, like any other age group, have a diverse range of views, backgrounds and life experiences. What they actually want to hear more of are the views of mainly middle-class graduates – that is, those young people who share their own prejudices and preoccupations.

This elite pandering to ‘the youth’ does young people no favours. It pretends that everyone under 30 holds the exact same dreary views. Rather than taking the young seriously as individuals and citizens, it simply uses them to ventriloquise high-status opinion. It deploys them as a stage army in the culture war. It’s a tired, old act that we are all starting to see through. – Lauren Smith

They look like they are out of ideas; worse, they have no ideology, and their only quest is to stay in power. Labour has built themselves a little pedestal that they like to stand on and look down at National and its supporters.

They have tried to say they are the more principled party, I have always known it wasn’t true and this week they proved it. Their pedestal has toppled over. If they don’t know what they believe in and what they stand for then how can you? – Paula Bennett

The Prime Minister is continuing the mantra that we should overlook everything about the performance he and his team have delivered over the past six years, and instead have confidence in the fact that he is there for us. Really?

But we can’t overlook the past six years, Prime Minister. In fact, we must remember those years and their impact forever more. Our wallets will certainly be feeling the pain caused by those six years for a long, long time. – Bruce Cotterill 

As much as our recent health ministers — namely Hipkins, Little and now Verrall ― have refused to use the word “crisis”, there is no doubt that it is the right description for the current status of our health service.

Note the word “service”. Our politicians are prone to calling it a “health system”. It is, and should always be intended as a “health service”. Pedantic? Perhaps. But to me, a system represents flowcharts and diagrams. A service is about looking after people. Perhaps that would be a good place to start. – Bruce Cotterill 

During my executive career, I developed a specialty for what I called “fixing broken businesses”. One of the things I learned was that nothing ever improved because you complicated it. But things can improve a lot if you simplify them.

Centralisation means complication. Too many people end up doing business with each other, while that person at the coalface, the patient, gets lost and forgotten. – Bruce Cotterill 

We’re spending almost 10 per cent of our total GDP on healthcare services. That’s almost double the rate that Singapore spends on its world-class health service. – Bruce Cotterill 

Imagine having a Gov with this culture which is clearly broken with low level talent + the extremist Greens and Māori party. Can’t comprehend the state this country would be in 4 years time. We need to get NZ winning again.

— NickMowbray (@NMowbray23) July 24, 2023

National is the party of lower taxes.

Labour, Greens and Te Pāti Māori will always tax you more.

— NZ National Party (@NZNationalParty) July 24, 2023

This is a] government that is very unstable, meanwhile, Kiwis out there in New Zealand, up and down this country, one in two of us are worried about money on a daily basis.

This is the only country in a recession in the whole of the Asia-Pacific region. You’ve got crime out of control, you’ve got an education and healthcare system falling apart, that’s where the focus should be of the government, that’s where a National Party government focus will be. – Christopher Luxon

We are in a tough, tough place and as a result, we need a strong, stable government.

While there will be disagreements and while there will be things we don’t agree on, there will be a way in which we are able to get a stable government, and that’s what New Zealand desperately needs right now. – Christopher Luxon

Let us take a moment to consider that the police had no hesitation in arresting a senior minister. Of justice no less.

This is something we should be thankful for. That we live in such a nation.

God defend our freeland and best wishes to Kiri Allan.

— Damien Grant (@damienmgrant) July 24, 2023

 

These health reforms were supposed to end the post-code health lottery for rural areas like Reefton.

All we’ve seen so far is a loss of services and a decrease in well-being for our old people. – Moira Lockington

A quarter century back in the days of Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzgerald, Sue Bradford and Sue Kedgley, the Party commanded well-deserved public respect, albeit they were seen as overly idealistic at a time when there was a great deal less public concern on global warming and the like. Now they trade on their Green name although notably, their recent manifesto announcement was confined solely to the politics of envy rather than green issues. – Sir Bob Jones

You end up with a slippery slope and before you know it GST, which is currently a very regular, very stable, very forecastable collection of revenue for the government is suddenly not collecting what you need and you turn around and the cupboard is bare. – Allan Bullot,

When Allan was defending herself in response to allegations of inappropriate behaviour, she explained that she was “definitely not a Wellington politician. That is something I am not. I am from the regions.” Which was a little too cute: Allan was a former staffer in Helen Clark’s office, a former lawyer with Chen Palmer, the quintessential boutique Wellington law firm co-founded by a former prime minister.

But her statement draws attention to the high rate of attrition suffered by politicians from Allan’s region. So far this year the East Coast has lost Kiri Allan, Meka Whaitiri and Stuart Nash from Cabinet. Nash resigned after leaking confidential Cabinet information to donors, while Whaitiri defected to the Maori Party. And the Ikaroa-Rāwhiti based Green Party MP Elizabeth Kerekere resigned from her party’s list process after allegations of bullying. A troubled and damaged region of the country has lost most of its political representation, due to the failures and self-destructive antics of its politicians. – Danyl Mclauchlan

A target to halve driving is Stalinist and bad policy. It also will never ever happen by 2030, unless they start shooting motorists (as Bob Jones suggested in the 1980s, as an alternative policy to carless days). – David Farrar 

Not only do I not know if the business is going to be here next year, I don’t know if I’m going to be. – Maz Kumar 

You believe now you’re not wanted to run a business by this government. I don’t want to raise my kids in this country any more. – Maz Kumar 

There is a focus on the offenders and their tough upbringings but a the end of the day, when are we going to take into account the harm that comes to the victims? It is simply not happening. – Brett Wilson

You can sense the pain, because you’ve gone through it. It just brings elements of it back, because certainly in my case – and I can only ever talk about my case – mental health recovery is a journey. It’s not like flicking a switch. You don’t fall over then have a pill or two, or go for a walk and do some yoga, and the switch gets flicked up again. It’s a long process of self-reflection and building resilience, and having days which are not as good as other days, and realising actually that’s okay, it’s just being human. – Todd Muller 

Don’t take it too seriously at one level. The job is important but you’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself. The other thing is, be really interested in other people and build relationships, because we’re all here trying to do a job, and actually understanding the story behind the public face is fascinating. – Todd Muller 

I think that, in general, it's not a good idea to allow people with no sense of humour to determine what may be enjoyed by people with a sense of humour

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) July 22, 2023

Those who are shifting the focus away from the basics of education pay no price for being wrong. Rather, that price is paid by those children who rely on a good education to improve their lot in life. In other words, the price is paid by those who can least afford to pay it. For that reason alone, we owe it to New Zealand children to be firm about the purpose of education, and that’s to provide, at the most basic level, children with strong literacy and numeracy skills, and the ability to actually think.  – Melissa Derby 

A designer was also quoted at the weekend moving with her husband and 4 children to Australia – again for better opportunities and a better way of life. we also got reports of the ex-pat who came back with his family only to discover how backward the NZ school system is, and in disgust, moved back to Europe for better education.

There will be people who say ‘good riddance’ to this, and you know what, that’s everything that’s wrong with where we’re at right now. Because what is happening when all these people take their business and their brains out of NZ? They take it elsewhere. Our loss.

Ben Cook’s “looking to expand in Australia” it was reported, the designer’s taking her business to Australia, brains and investments are leaving this country.

So a big loss to us, a loss of productivity, jobs, development, drive, intelligence, and money. How many people like that are we prepared to lose, and what does that leave us with? And is that the sort of future you want for your kids here? – Kate Hawkesby

Nothing can be allowed to grow faster or slower than the Ministry of Education projected.

And even though transport emissions are fully covered in the ETS so residents of car-dependent places will have to pay for their own emissions, NZTA doesn’t want to let it happen.

What a mess. – Eric Crampton

Having been handed the reins of government by Winston Peters in 2017, the party that Helen Clark and Michael Cullen had carried for nine years, almost entirely on the strength of their own prodigious political competence, took less than five years to demonstrate a heartbreaking degree of political ineptitude. Not even an unprecedented (under MMP) parliamentary majority, delivered in recognition of Labour’s initial success in handling the Covid-19 crisis, could help it get whatever “this” was, done.

If this Labour Government really is in the business of government for us, then we can be forgiven for wondering just how much worse-off we might be if they were actually in it for somebody else! –  Chris Trotter

As far as I’m concerned, we need the roads, so build them. I don’t care what it costs. We will never regret it.

And how to pay for it seems pretty simple to me:

Cancel the Light Rail stupidity. Just getting rid of the Auckland project saves $28 billion, and I’m not even counting the cost from the Wellington project.

I don’t about you, but I’ve had absolutely enough of dropping speed limits, of being told to walk, of dodging potholes and of driving windy backroads when we should be and could be on world class highways.

This is ambitious and it’s building New Zealand for future generations. –  Heather du Plessis-Allan

Labour are in no position to talk about infrastructure or spending. Ask them how much they have spent on light rail in Auckland and what they have to show for that.

Ask them how much they have spent in Wellington on getting Wellington moving, which isn’t moving at all. Billions have been wasted going exactly nowhere.

It’s a joke.

As for where National get the money; well the aforementioned examples double here as well.

There’s $7 billion+ for Wellington and hundreds of millions for light rail. This Government has spent more than any Government, it’s taxed more than any Government and there is no shortage of billions to be redirected.

This is the Government of the $300,000 speed hump. Three of those are a million bucks!

It’s a treasure trove of money just waiting to be used for productive reasons, on economy growing ideas.

For National, campaigning on things like infrastructure has never been easier, for a party that has an opponent with the record as bad as it is. – Mike Hosking

There are various theories about what went wrong with Labour over the past year. One of the more plausible is that their previous lists didn’t bring enough talent into the caucus. They had a tidal wave of new MPs in 2020, but most of them weren’t any good, and most will wash back out again this year. This meant that capable ministers were given impossible workloads, while the handful of promising new MPs were promoted too quickly, without any mentoring because no one had time for hand-holding.

You can see them trying to fix that here: they’re shuffling out underperformers – at least as far as they can without upsetting the party’s different factions – and they’re bringing promising MPs forward and injecting new blood. Trying to build a party that can help its leadership run the country. Or, if that tidal wave runs out too fast, take over as leaders when they’re swept out to opposition. – Danyl Mclauchlan

The Government’s Three Waters reforms are failing its own litmus test – reducing costs and delivering services more efficiently. There is no efficiency or transparency in Government officials trying to keep secret what they are spending on CEOs for organizations that don’t yet exist.

“This is precisely what the Taxpayers’ Union warned about. By taking control away from local communities, faceless bureaucrats in their ivory tower head offices tend to snub transparency and accountability. – Callum Purves

This election’s important. We need a change of Government to stop the tide of people packing up and leaving.

But we also need the next Government to truly change the country’s fortunes. National, if they get in, cannot tinker. They cannot fool themselves that a bit of change is enough and they can otherwise hold the status quo.

If they do that, voters will see through it and the number of people leaving will pick up again. – Heather du Plessis-Allan 

The Blog was largely a consequence of lock-down. Its aftermath and particularly the mindblowing nonsensical Jacindamania phenomenon made me embarrassed to be a New Zealander so I joined the exodus, at least part of my time to avoid the nation’s pervading gloom, a consequence of the worst government ever inflicted on our country. History will not treat it kindly, not only for its staggering incompetence, but mostly its divisive race policies which will take a long time to correct. –  Sir Bob Jones

As, Tyson points out earlier in the interview (see link above), that you can with substantial accuracy identify someone’s biological sex from the “gender role” (earrings, makeup, clothes, etc.).

Where he’s right here is that nobody cares, or should care, whether someone conforms to the expected behavior and appearance of members of their biological sex. (People do care, of course about children being treated medically with hormones and surgery so their secondary sex characteristics conform to their own view of their gender.) And, in fact, do people really care that much? I thought most of the kerfuffle was about transgender people and not genderfluid people.  –  Jerry Coyne

Tyson is correct in pointing out that a person’s sex doesn’t inevitably dictate how they might choose to express themselves through clothing or makeup; but this is banal and rarely, if ever, contested point. From the context, it’s evident that Tyson is using the term “gender” to describe the ways in which people express themselves through grooming, attire, and makeup choices. Given this, it’s ludicrous to imply that people are “assigning” others a “gender.” No one is campaigning or attempting to enforce binary dress codes for males and females across society. So who is the “you” to which Tyson believes he is responding?

Tyson’s take appears to be the result of a successful Left-wing fear mongering campaign to dismiss and downplay legitimate concerns over gender ideology. Progressive gender activists wants to portray their critics as ignorant, backward bigots who retch at the mere thought of a man wearing nail polish. But this depiction strays far from reality.  –  Jerry Coyne

As far as I’m concerned, we need the roads, so build them. I don’t care what it costs. We will never regret it.

And how to pay for it seems pretty simple to me:

Cancel the Light Rail stupidity. Just getting rid of the Auckland project saves $28 billion, and I’m not even counting the cost from the Wellington project.

I don’t about you, but I’ve had absolutely enough of dropping speed limits, of being told to walk, of dodging potholes and of driving windy backroads when we should be and could be on world class highways.

This is ambitious and it’s building New Zealand for future generations. – Heather du Plessis-Allan 

Effective, efficient roads are the arteries of this country.

You simply cannot clog them.

You cannot neglect them.

You cannot let them wither and die or the economy itself will die.  – Kerre Woodham

Book reading is highly addictive and it saddens me that so many young folk these days have never experienced it. – Sir Bob Jones

Much like Bill English in 2017, Hipkins will roar around the country on the campaign trail hungry to win, scrapping it out for every last vote.

Luxon has four weeks left to prepare for that fight and Hipkins has the same amount of time to patch the punctured tyre that is his party. – Jo Moir

What can’t be quantified, but most definitely felt, is the malaise that has swept the country, the abject disillusionment of so many who have seen the place they loved, shafted, in six short years.

It’s that anger, disappointment and sense of overdue revenge that will see Labour swept from power.

One of the many advantages of having been around a while is I have seen the tide go out on governments and I know what it looks and feels like.

I saw it in 1990 after David Lange, I saw it in 2008 with Helen Clark.

The difference this time is it’s worse.

Kieran and his $1.87? The easiest money I’ll make all year. My odds would be there can’t even be a book, because Labour are unbackable.  – Mike Hosking

Let’s Get Wellington Moving has as much credibility as “affordable housing”. Its only notable achievement is a pedestrian crossing on the way to the airport that literally stops us moving.

Making us travel on a 1920s roading system, or worse, use buses and cycling to travel regionally, is a subtle way of shutting working class kids out of the choices middle class kids have: freedom of movement.

If you have a cleaning job where you finish at 2am, or work in a bakery with a 4am start, you can’t take the bus.

If you live in regional New Zealand you more than likely can’t take the bus.

You take your life in your hands cycling on a country two-lane road. – Josie Pagani 

Roads are crucial to the strength of our regions. Development depends on connections and the ability to move products and ideas around fluidly.

If we want to reduce commuting times and emissions, and take the pressure off land prices, we should build more motorways to open up regional cities instead of more trams across Auckland.

We don’t live in New Zealand to live like a European capital. We live here for the grass and the space to run around. – Josie Pagani 

Anti-car people don’t get this. Worse, they don’t respect it. They want to crowd us into dense urban precincts where we can walk and subway to the library, craft brewery and transport policy discussion group.

These are the people who tell us we need to subsidise EVs and then tell us the roads to drive them on are bad. What they really don’t like is cars.

The solution to congestion is not banning cars or roads. It’s being clever. – Josie Pagani 

The thought of Winston being able to choose or influence the next Government actually terrifies me.

I don’t care how many times and in how many ways he tells me- like he did on air on Tuesday- that he will not support a Labour Government into power. I do not believe him, as far as I’m concerned, Winston Peters cannot be trusted. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

This country is headed in completely the wrong direction. We need some serious change, but  Winston’s not a change guy. Winston’s a handbrake guy.

He’s spent the last 35+ years complaining about the reforms of the 1980s which saved this country’s bacon. We need reforms again, to save us once again, can you imagine him allowing that to  happen? 

Plus, we are broke. We are out of cash. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Winston’s a spending guy. He’s the guy who forced Labour to give him $3 billion in provincial growth fund money, which his party splashed around the provinces trying to win votes. And which the auditor general looked into and found was so sloppy officials weren’t keeping proper notes

So no, I’m with David Seymour. I don’t mind a bit of Winston in Parliament to spice things up, but I’d prefer if he stayed the hell away from Government.

Especially now, when we do not have the time or the money for his game playing and expensive pet projects. –  Heather du Plessis-Allan

1. chris hipkins is, by a significant margin, the worst performing Minister of Education I have ever seen in 30 years in the sector.
2. Jan Tinetti could well be worse but jumped into the slide well after Hipkins started the flow and may not have time to catch up.
3. The long term consequences for the young people, their families, and NZ as a whole will be catastrophic.
4. Change from the new government cannot be tinkering. – Alwyn Poole

It’s time for New Zealand’s scientists, both Māori and non-Māori, to stop this nonsense. Indigenous knowledge has its place, but it’s not equivalent to modern science. And the taxpayers of New Zealand continue to throw millions of dollars away on worthless studies funded only to propitiate the indigenous culture. Is that worth destroying science in New Zealand? After all, this $2.7 million could have gone for real science or medical research instead of trying to prop up a confirmation bias based on spirituality and tradition. –  Jerry Coyne

Why would anyone with get-up-and-go choose to stay in what is increasingly becoming an inward-looking, narrow-minded and petty economic backwater where success is treated as a sign of dishonesty and merit treated with suspicion?

The great challenge of our age is not to change the government and, briefly, move our economic and social policy settings to a more rational basis.

The real ambition must be to re-engineer the way this country thinks about how we can generate wealth, and away from the current obsession with redistributing it. – Damien Grant

It’s hard to know who to blame for the unhappiness in Labour. Is it Jacinda Ardern for running such a loose ship that ministers had the freedom to dream up and implement virtually any crazy policy they wanted to? Or is it Hipkins for trying too hard to win the election by putting not only crazy ideas on the policy bonfire, but also Labour’s heart and soul?

Or is it the ministers and MPs themselves? Those, like Allan, who don’t know how to do what it takes to win? Or those like Parker who don’t want to do what it takes to win? – Heather du Plessis-Allan 

We don’t need a capital gains tax. We need freedom from crazy council rules. – Don Brash 

Nice, well-intentioned, rainbow coloured, academically justified, politically popular, celebrity endorsed authoritarianism is still authoritarianism.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) August 3, 2023

I had never imagined that one word is so powerful – forgiveness. Forgiveness is the result of just common sense. If we just question ourselves, what is going to benefit me in the future? Anger or forgiveness? – Farid Ahmed

We have two options. Be broken down, be miserable, or be resilient and move forward. Which path should we take? – Farid Ahmed

Life without her is … not full. I could take the path of depression because I miss her, but I remember her and her memory is inspiring me to contribute. Definitely I am optimistic. Life is still beautiful. The world is beautiful, the sun is shining. There are a lot of things to be thankful about. – Farid Ahmed

In theory, in an MMP environment, a so-called centre party like New Zealand First should be an ongoing prospect for both sides. But by behaving the way they have over several Governments they have wrecked the theory and now look more trouble than they are worth.

That is of course if they make it, which if you are a regular, you will know I don’t think they will.

But for a party like National who have now worked themselves into a position of being a Government in waiting, the last thing they want to do is muddy the waters, to offer a reason to a swing voter not to vote for them, because they are equivocal on such an important matter.

I am actually surprised they have not worked this out. It’s not hard. – Mike Hosking 

It would be interesting to see evidence that the biology of pregnancy and childbirth is different for those who imagine they are men, but there is none. – Citizen Science

Kerekere has done it again in a Bill she introduced into Parliament last week (3 August) to amend the Human Rights Act “to uphold Te Tiriti o Waitangi by taking steps towards ending discrimination against takatāpui and rainbow (LGBTQ+) people.” Setting aside the forced teaming for a minute – is this Bill a back door to breaking down single sex spaces for women? Is anyone planning on taking it up when Kerekere leaves Parliament? Will any journalist ever do their job and find out? – Citizen Science

Pregnancy, childbirth and the care of infants are the most biologically determined experiences of womanhood. To prioritise trans men – a group of women who reject this material reality even as they experience it – over the enormous unmet needs of all others, is just laughable. – Citizen Science

Today in New Zealand, nearly 60% of those employed feel they are working hard but struggling to get ahead. Tomorrow, they’ll want a new path forward. Longer-term political shifts will probably be uncovered if the nation is forced to run an ultramarathon across a bruising economic landscape.

When it comes to social and economic inequality, there’s a bleak outlook – things are getting worse, not better, in the minds of most. – Peter Stahel

As a nation, we were sold the importance of co-governance as being THE solution for resolving inequity.

Friday’s MHA report demonstrates everything we have criticised in co-governance – added cost, increased bureaucracy, lack of accountability – and NO IMPROVEMENT IN OUTCOME.

For better outcomes, and for New Zealand, we must end co-governance.- Don Brash 

 What can be said with certainty is that a union of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori will readily agree on one topic: further embedding co-governance in law and policy, which will push New Zealand irrevocably along the path to an ethno-state. – Graham Adams

Good, sustainable, and efficient transport infrastructure is not some “nice to have” optional extra. It is a critical part of our national fabric, enabling, and helping all aspects of our society and economy to function properly.  – Peter Dunne

There is only one strand of mainstream grassroots activism today that threatens intimidation and violence against its political opponents. While Just Stop Oil and other eco-activists are willing to break the law by blockading roads and disrupting cultural events, only the trans mob poses a violent threat. Needless to say, this is a threat aimed almost exclusively at women. – Robert Jessel 

So what’s driving all this? It may have something to do with the fact that, over the past year or so, trans activists have suffered a succession of defeats. Sporting bodies are increasingly putting a stop to males’ participation in women’s sports. Gender self-identification – the trans activists’ No1 demand – now appears to be dead in the water in the UK. It seems the more that ordinary people get exposed to the trans movement, the more they dislike it.  – Robert Jessel 

The downside is that these defeats for the trans movement only seem to have ratcheted up the danger women face. Like a wounded animal, the trans lobby is most dangerous when it is cornered. Tragically, until its full defeat, and maybe for some time thereafter, knife arches and metal-detecting wands could well be a fixture at events where women meet to discuss their rights.– Robert Jessel 

We have to stand up to the smears. The truth is that Rowling has never said anything untoward about trans people. She has been critical of the behaviour of some trans fanatics. She has been vocal in her support for single-sex spaces for women and girls. And yes, she has vociferously defended herself against hourly abuse. As she damn well has a right to do. But she is not the bigot she has been made out to be.

It’s time we all speak up for what is right. It’s time to break the cycle of fear. It’s time we called out this public assault on JK Rowling – and on all the other gender-critical feminists who’ve been similarly maligned. We need to put a stop to this authoritarian movement. – James Dreyfus

If it had been prepared to learn: words pregnant with meaning. Is there any of us who could not utter those words about ourselves?  Theodore Dalrymple

If you’re a socialist, you’re someone who believes that collectivism and centralisation is the best way to run economies as this Labour government has shown – they’ve centralised the polytechs, they’ve centralised the health system, they’ve centralised the management of water.

They’re just natural centralists. They don’t believe people are better at making decisions on their own behalf. The government needs to look after them, government needs to tell them what to do. That’s what socialists do; and these are pretty serious socialist-type people. – David Kirk 

I think economies need entrepreneurialism. They need people to risk their own capital. If you want innovation, growth and productivity, that’s the most important thing. . . 

You need to give people the opportunity to make mistakes and lose money, build businesses, actually be free to lead … and that goes on the social side, be free to lead their own lives, not to be weighed under by too much red tape and bureaucracy.

All of that said, for a cohesive society, there needs to be protection for people who are out of work, people who are hungry. – David Kirk 

We want to sell but no one wants to buy this shop right now. Yep we are stuck.

This is the hell place. – Jay Patel

We are helpless. We pay the tax, we are working hard and still – look – we are in the jail … it’s unfair. – Jay Patel

For a long while I hedged my bets. I never had any intention of going back, but I tried not to be too emphatic. But I’m at the point now where the answer is ‘oh my god, no’.

But anyway it’s somebody else’s turn. It’s the ultimate conceit to believe you can settle the political arguments. – Steven Joyce

I’ve met a number of politicians who say that the price gets higher the longer you stay, and at some point the price is too high. And so you either lose touch with your kids and your family or you actually rearrange things and prioritise your family over politics. – Steven Joyce

I think we did a pretty competent job in hindsight; it wasn’t perfect, but it was as my old friend Wayne Eagleson [former National Party chief of staff] says: ‘politics is not a game of perfection. . .

I remember listening to that as a kid and thinking ‘gosh, what a lack of aspiration’. I would say the aim is to leave New Zealand in a better place than you found it, and I think we did. – Steven Joyce

It’s not my business if you’re a man who wants to identify as a woman.

It is my business when you force this identification on me, on my kids, on my private and public sector services, on science, on language, on logic, on sport, and on my entire culture.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) August 6, 2023

National would cut out the middle-man – instead of passing tax cuts through the local Pak’nSave, we would put the relief direct into people’s bank accounts with income tax reduction. – Nicola Willis 

The best thing about our GST system is its simplicity.

When Labour lose this election that simplicity will remain. – Peter Williams

The last thing he needs is a lawyer letter. He probably needs a cup of tea and a lie down. – Nicola Willis

 A certain type of activist has a level of paranoid hypersensitivity that almost literally warps their hearing. You can say ,“I disagree with you for the following reasons.” But all they actually hear is “Hate hate hate!” So instead of putting a counter-argument (which I would be interested to hear), they resort to censorship. All too often it goes further, and they boil over in virulent abuse: “Transphobe! TERF!”– Richard Dawkins

I just said “a reasonable speaker of the English language”, and maybe here lies the key: language. If we want a fruitful argument, we’d better speak the same language. In today’s overheated sparring over sex and gender, both sides may appear to be speaking English, but is it the same English? Does “hate” mean to you what “hate” means to everyone else?

Or there’s “violence”. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the deliberate exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc”, and that is certainly the meaning I understand. Advocates of free speech often invoke, as a sensible exception, “incitement to violence”, where physical force is normally implied. But that sensible exception would mean something very different if you redefine “violence” to include the non-physical. – Richard Dawkins

But shouldn’t we just indulge the harmless whims of an oppressed minority? Maybe, were it not for a strain of aggressive bossiness which insists, not so very harmlessly and not sounding very oppressed, that the rest of us must humour those whims and join in. This compulsion even has the force of law in some states. And alas, we often zip our lips in abject self-censorship because we aren’t as brave as JK Rowling, and don’t fancy becoming a target of Twittermob vitriol. No, we don’t fear Big Brother or the Stasi. We fear each other.  – Richard Dawkins

The Labour strategy is to come after me personally each and every week.

And we’ve known that for a long time.

We know that that’s part of their campaign strategy, and they’re doing that because, let’s be clear, they don’t have a record to run on, and frankly, they don’t have the ideas to take the country forward.

It doesn’t impact me personally because I’m focused on what we’ve got to do, which is get this country turned around, sorted and back on track. – Christopher Luxon

Don’t redistribute cake slices; create more cakes.

Don’t be a socialist; be a capitalist.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) August 15, 2023

In two polls last week, Labour fell below the hugely psychologically important 30 per cent level. Labour has lost economic credibility.

The party is now like a hapless whale being attacked by sharks. The sharks are the Greens and New Zealand First, who are ripping voters off Labour.

Chris Hipkins has only himself to blame. – Richard Prebble

And Luxon must always remind us that if Peters can install Jacinda Ardern as PM, he can also install Chris Hipkins. – Richard Prebble

If these so-called ‘experts’ and tax purists, as Chris Hipkins puts it, are so wealthy, so comfortable, their answers and advice so irrelevant, then why for the love of a fresh banana would you spend $2 million commissioning a report and $1000 a day per expert to ask them anything in the way of questions at all? – Ryan Bridge

 What could possibly be worse than having your flagship cost of living policy leaked and announced by the opposition?

Finally announcing your leaked and already announced flagship cost of living policy but buggering up the cost.

C’mon Labour! The Finance Minister pitched his election year budget as ‘getting the basics right’.

Someone hand that man a calculator. Just a basic one mind, let’s not confuse things with all those extra buttons on a scientific calculator.  – Tova O’Brien

If Labour a) can’t get its numbers right plus b) doesn’t tell us when they have, it adds up to diminished trust.

It’s very simple political math. No calculator required. – Tova O’Brien

 I’m often accused of being rude to trans-rights activists. But JK Rowling proves that there is no tone polite enough for these zealots. On the gender-critical side of the debate, we used to always preface our statements by saying that we believed trans people should be free of discrimination. After a while though, it became clear it didn’t matter whether we said that or not. The trans activists didn’t want to hear it. Of course, they are never able to show any statements we’ve made that are supposedly so offensive. And these are the same people who send death and rape threats to women and who support the mutilation of children. They then try to destroy people’s livelihoods by getting them cancelled for causing offence.

I feel very differently about trans people and detransitioners who have undergone medical gender-reassignment than I do about the trans movement. The problem comes when the word ‘trans’ also includes fully intact people. Despite having no intention of receiving surgery themselves, these people are telling their followers that it’s vitally important for children to have these surgeries. It’s the most cynical and grotesque movement. And it puts children in harm’s way. Look at the human wreckage that’s left behind. You hear testimonies from detransitioners about how perfectly healthy young women are getting hysterectomies and cutting off their breasts in their twenties. They are going into men’s gay clubs because they’ve been told that male homosexuals will accept them as men. They don’t understand why the lies they’ve been told haven’t turned out to be true. The human cost of all this is going to be immeasurable. – Graham Linehan

What was particularly galling though was the way the Prime Minister tried to brush off the tough times so many New Zealanders had endured over the last three and a half years. As Covid19 Minister he was the one who presided over the concentration camp system that MIQ became. He was the one that kept families divided, unable to be with dying loved ones or attend family funerals. He was the Minister who suggested that Aucklanders might require permits and have designated times to leave town for their summer holidays at the end of the long 2021 Auckland lockdown. And who will ever forget his shameful treatment of mothers-to-be like journalist Charlotte Bellis, to whom he was obliged to subsequently publicly apologise, when she wanted to return home to have her baby? – Peter Dunne

Hipkins knows that the pandemic and Labour’s handling of it is no longer the election winner it was in 2020. Rather than invoking it at every opportunity as was the case then, Labour today barely mentions it. Getting rid of the last Covid19 restrictions this week was therefore about consigning the pandemic to the past, so Labour can focus unencumbered on the future as the election nears, without the reminders of the dark years.

But whether all those whose lives and businesses were disrupted or ruined by MIQ, the lockdowns, and border closures regard this week’s decision as just an anticlimax as the Prime Minister does, remains to be seen. Their answer may come on election day. – Peter Dunne

So I think we can safely say that the GST thing’s been a real cluster for Labour this week.

But then, it takes the cluster next level with this announcement that it wants us to pay more tax on our petrol and diesel.

Taking the GST off fruit and veges and then adding more tax on fuel is utter nutbar behaviour. – John MacDonald 

It’s almost like Labour has decided that yeah, it was really cool winning that huge majority last election, so let’s see how far we can go in the opposite direction this election.

Because that’s what it’s going to do with this plan to rob Peter to pay Paul. The stupidity of it all blows me away. – John MacDonald 

Edinburgh’s principles are the values of an open and liberal society. But free expression and artistic liberty requires those virtues to be protected against those who would menace them. In a depressing number of instances this year, those values are threatened by a puritanism that, while in keeping with Edinburgh’s Calvinist past, is wholly at odds with the festivals’ founding credo. – The Times 

The sum of these controversies is greater than their parts. A rising tide of intolerance risks curbing the frank and free exchange of ideas upon which the arts depend for their vitality. The expression of wholly legal speech now too often comes with significant jeopardy attached. Those who deny the existence of so-called “cancel culture” are also those most likely to seek other people’s cancellation.

If debates cannot be had in a spirit of free and frank inquiry in Edinburgh in August then where, and in what circumstances, might they be had? – The Times 

These days the clamour for silencing contrary views more often emanates from self-styled “progressives”. But they, too, betray the spirit of the Festival.

The lesson is that liberalism cannot be assumed and must always be defended. Edinburgh in August cannot be a city for scolds and puritans, while those who seek to silence others should be reminded that they betray the founding principles of the greatest show on earth. – The Times 

At a time when this country is in desperate need of genuine leadership, of thought-provoking transformative redirection, of experience, of maturity, of a fairly major reset, we have the vacuous thought bubbles of attention seekers and desperados.

One of them – in my view – is a gnarled old hack who has ravaged the political landscape for far too long, and the other is the Prime Minister.

Ah, democracy. They say every election is the most important ever, I have never personally said that or indeed believed it, until this one. – Mike Hosking

In light of recent comments about milk payout, here is your reminder that

1/ Food producers do NOT set the price of food in NZ, our supermarket duopoly does

2/ Food producers pay the same prices for their families groceries as everyone else

— ᖇOᗪ ᗰᑌᒪᒪIᑎ 🌱🐄🥛🥩 (@RodMullin) August 16, 2023

You don’t fix roads, or for that matter schools and crime and hospitals, by continuing to tax those who can’t or won’t pay. In fact, you don’t fix anything unless you create an economy that can pay the bills. Hence the old quote from that Bill Clinton aide who said: “It’s the economy, stupid”.

A government will deserve the money it raises when its policies ensure the country is successful. That will be when the people, their businesses and corporate New Zealand are all making money and paying tax. Increased success means increased tax. – Bruce Cotterill 

In other words, the incumbent Labour Government does not look like a group of people who desperately want to make a major difference to the country’s outlook. Rather, they appear to be an unqualified, shoddy and desperate group, grasping for power with nothing but their own interests in mind.

We have eight weeks to see something different. I’m not holding my breath. – Bruce Cotterill 

pic.twitter.com/xxXPrT40gx

— 🗣 Free Speech Union ✊ (@NZFreeSpeech) August 20, 2023

But government is currently spending more than three percentage points of GDP more than the Labour coalition had forecast in 2019.

It’s a very substantial increase in the government’s share of the economy.

Even getting back to what Labour had promised the path would be gets portrayed as terrible cuts. Was the 2019 path really that draconian?  – Eric Crampton

Many powerful media organisations today regard LGBT+ and some other issues, such as climate change and aspects of race, as matters about which the normal idea of impartiality is suspended. There can only be one right approach, they believe. This is clearly the attitude of Openly, which may well provide a useful service to people interested in these matters, but is emphatically not impartial, invariably following the line of LGBT+ lobbies. 

So long as such organisations think this way – and that is how Nick Robinson’s own BBC thinks – projects like “Verify” will be more like vigilantism against rivals than the disinterested pursuit of truth. What they see as “disinformation” will often be little more than their preferred word for attitudes they dislike or stories they wish to suppress.  – Charles Moore

In one sense, the framing of this election is now looking like competence versus diversity. It isn’t explicit, and it isn’t a campaign slogan, but it is happening. Both from National and ACT – it isn’t that diversity is a bad thing or that it doesn’t matter, but that perceived competence matters more. – Luke Malpass

I suppose we should never be too mad at the wrong people doing the right thing for the wrong reason. – The Blue Review 

There are so many competing priorities for our tax dollars right now, and over the next few years, that we simply cannot afford to throw good money after bad. I want to know if these projects are working. If they’re not, we get rid of them, we try something else.

But are there any pitfalls in requiring the public service to perform professionally.  – Kerre Woodham

Voters have gone, and I don’t know what they can announce that will make voters come back.

The GST policy was supposed to be that big announcement, they genuinely thought it was going to be huge. But this poll captured voters’ reaction, and it wasn’t good- it drove Labour under that 30 percent mark.

So brace yourself, because Labour might be about to take a historic – or close to historic – spanking.  – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Personally, I’d rather pay a maximum of $100 a year on my prescriptions than have to sell the house or, heaven forbid, set up and Give-a-little page to keep a loved one alive. – Kerre Woodham

Work hard, read your papers, put your phone down and remember why you are here.  – Jacqui Dean

You know, once I was on the India Today Conclave.

They said, “Can you give us the three secrets of happiness?” I said: “First, there’s no secret. Second, there’s not just three points. Third, it takes a whole life, but it is the most worthy thing you can do.” I’m happy to feel I am on the right track. I cannot imagine feeling hate or wanting someone to suffer. – Matthieu Ricard 

One thing I’ve learned (though I still let it control my emotions sometimes) is that anger is a toxic and generally useless emotion, which can stand in the way of fixing either personal or societal problems. Another is that if you want to cooperate with others, and have them do what you think is best, treat them with respect and never, ever call them names.  Also, never accuse someone directly of bad behavior: simply tell them how their behavior makes you feel. – Jerry Coyne

This is our future. But it’s also been our past. This is not new to the world, it’s not new to built up communities.

Our ancestors, dating back to the day dot have had to deal with precisely this. The floods, the pestilence, the fire, the natural disasters.

As communities, we’ve learned to live with nature and those that survive have evolved with nature. The danger is thinking that things can stay the same. – Kerre Woodham

Nothing wrong with thinking about things like climate change, maybe even worrying a bit about climate change. 

Just this week we have seen the Auckland flood damage buyout deal, on the back of the Hawkes Bay buyout deal. Disruption is real, storms are real and change and an element of upheaval for some seems an increasing reality. 

But setting off the alarms screaming “fire” 40 years in advance and taking in no real estimates of scientific advancement strikes me as being ever-so slightly premature, if not immature.  – Mike Hosking

Perception is going to be a big part of Labour’s problem. When a party in government drops into the 20s just weeks out from voting, the psychological effect can be huge. It will affect both voters and politicians. Increasingly, the public will not believe that Labour can win this election. Such a mood will risk becoming a self-fulfilling factor in the campaign. – Bryce Edwards

However, even if Labour manages to fight back with bolder and more inspiring policies over the next few weeks, it might just be too late. After six years of being in government, Labour has developed a reputation for not being able to deliver, even to its own supporters. Hence, more promises on the campaign trail aren’t exactly going to be fully believed and embraced, even by those on the progressive side of politics. – Bryce Edwards

Chris Hipkins is talking today about turning the tide around over the next few weeks and beating National. Few will be convinced that he can do this. In fact, there’s every chance it will only get worse. Labour might well struggle to mobilise and motivate its activists and voters.

A low voter turnout at the election is therefore Labour’s nightmare. Supporters are probably starting to tune out. – Bryce Edwards

At the last election, the bookies gave National very long odds – paying about $5 for every $1 bet on National winning, whereas they were only offering Labour bets $1.16. This time around, bets on National winning the election and forming a government are paying out $1.25 for a $1 bet, while the TAB is offering $3.75 for a Labour win.

It’s hard to disagree with those odds. Although the Australian TAB is promising a big payout to anyone successfully backing a Labour win, it’s unlikely that you’d find many in Labour willing to take that gambling bet. – Bryce Edwards

What’s easy for political parties to do is spout promises and get headlines and make stuff sound appealing in a generic sense. What’s harder though, is cutting through the spin, and making it a reality. Making it part of the landscape.

I can tell you, having spoken many students who’ve looked to go into the education sphere at a tertiary level, that the key message they’re given by school, is that in order to be part of the education sector in any way, the most crucial thing they can do is learn Te Reo.

It’s not just students who say that, it’s teachers, careers advisors inside schools, and it’s Universities too.

The message current students who want to teach future students are getting, is that the most important thing they can learn, is Te Reo.

To have fundamentals and basics taught well, and to get the sort of cut through the Labour party now allegedly wants in education, means they have to look long and hard at where they misdirected that focus the past six years. How they aim to turn that around, is the key question. – Kate Hawkesby

What matters most and what swings votes is credibility.

Whether that is credibility through your record, through your ideology or through your consistency of message and policy.

Making stuff up and hoping no one will notice isn’t credible.

In election campaigns, too many people are watching. – Mike Hosking 

It’s an extraordinary decision but it’s the truth, and the truth doesn’t keel over like a lie. – Alexandra Purucker

We cannot repair the wrongs of yesterday by creating fresh grievances. That is not a path towards reconciliation nor towards partnership.

New Zealand has made many mistakes, but we have an exceptional record in confronting the failures and sins of past administrations and have instituted a regime of addressing these wrongs.

The Waitangi Tribunal is imperfect but given the complexities of our past, the mixed genealogy of our population and the willingness of people of good-will on all sides to find a resolution for the past and to forge a common future; it has been a powerful instrument for progress. – Damien Grant 

Te Pati Māori’s policy and agenda deserve more sunlight; and when they tell us what they believe in, and what they stand for, we should believe them. – Damien Grant 

Have you heard about the latest injustice in women’s sport? No, I don’t mean the disparity in pay or prize monies in comparison to men’s professional teams, or the relative lack of access to high-quality facilities. There’s something even worse going on. Women are being banned from competition — banned, I tell you — simply because of the way their bodies look. Specifically — and I don’t know how to break this to you — some sporting authorities are trying to exclude all the women with penises. I know. I can’t believe it either.

Such is the tear-jerking tale presented to us by the cyclist and trans woman — that is, biologically male — Emily Bridges in this month’s edition of Vogue, objecting to British Cycling’s recent move to make the elite female category actually do what it says on the tin. – Kathleen Stock

Had Peters not ignored the voters’ clearly expressed preference in 2017, we would have been spared the most harmful government in living memory.

To put it another way, Peters, by going with Labour, is ultimately responsible for everything that has happened in the past three disastrous, chaotic years. Voters have notoriously short memories, so need to be constantly reminded of that.

He now has the effrontery to present himself as Mr Fixit. But putting Peters back in government, in any capacity, would be like calling back the same builder whose dodgy workmanship caused your house to collapse the last time you employed him. – Karl du Fresne 

By way of contrast, the defining feature of the Maori Party is that all its candidates are (and presumably are required to be) Maori. But can you really exclude 84 percent of the population and present yourself as a unifying force? I suspect that when Ngarewa-Packer affirms the value of unity, she means unity on her terms. If there was an award for cant of the day, she would be runner-up to Peters. – Karl du Fresne

My impression is that most RNZ reporters do a conscientious job, but as an institution it leans sharply to the left, like all public broadcasters, and ideology inevitably seeps into its news bulletins. This is more likely to happen when there’s a skeleton staff on (I’m told RNZ newsrooms are scarily empty at weekends) and editorial checks and balances are probably not applied as rigorously as they might be during the week.

As a publicly funded news outlet, RNZ has a unique obligation to ensure fairness, accuracy and balance. This becomes even more important at a time when public trust in the media is dangerously frayed.

It’s also worth noting that RNZ recently went through an expensive, high-profile inquiry that resulted in an embarrassing mea culpa for illicit editorial tampering by a rogue journalist who has since been dismissed. Has the organisation learned nothing, or do different standards apply when the influence exerted by biased journalists is deemed to be ideologically acceptable? – Karl du Fresne

If Labour was serious about cutting back on consultancy spend – they would cancel Auckland Light Rail which has spent over $55m on consultants in the first half of this year.

That is over $2m per week! pic.twitter.com/xHdYFkOxe0

— Simeon Brown (@SimeonBrownMP) August 28, 2023

If there is anything to learn from 2017, it is that voters seeking to vote ‘strategically’ rarely engineer the outcome they want. They are much better off just voting for the party they support. Then the press gallery’s obsession with ruling parties in and out doesn’t actually matter. – Brigitte Morten

The PM on RNZ repeatedly claiming the budget has to be balanced. But that is exactly what they haven’t done, even in the years when the economy has been fully employed and inflation rampant. At this point, talk of balanced budgets is just electoral vapourware.

— Michael Reddell (@MHReddell) August 28, 2023

Richard Harman's newsletter today compares Robertson to Muldoon in 1972 boasting that he'd "spent it all", not leaving anything much for the Oppn.
A difference worth noting is that in 72/73 the budget was in (tiny) surplus, something there is no prospect of in 23/24.

— Michael Reddell (@MHReddell) August 28, 2023

And that is the danger of polls – who do you believe? How much do they affect the narrative and are they actually accurate, or just a vehicle for spin?– Mike Hosking

The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.
Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists. In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis. There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science. – Dr. John F. Clauser

Asking people if they support an idea in principle is quite different to asking if they support the trade-offs necessary to make that idea work in practice. –  Josh Van Veen

That’s been our view and our position [that we would repeal Māori wards],” Luxon said.

“Our position is that we are one country, we have a democracy where it’s one person, one vote, so we’ve opposed that through the course of the last Parliament. We don’t believe that that’s fair or democratic. – Christopher Luxon

There’ll be no change to any of our abortion laws, funding or access – I’ve been really clear about that. That is not our focus. 

In Government, we need to be focused on rebuilding this economy, we need to make sure we restore law and order, deliver better health and education. – Christopher Luxon

This is why I am so vocal about the gender identity issues that we have. Because I know that these are issues that need addressing with mental health care and not puberty blockers.  – Corina Shields 

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Those who prevent history from being taught intend to repeat it.

— Jens Notroff (@jens2go) August 24, 2023

Why ditch Labour now when they are 2/3 of the way towards being warmed up for 2026, The Year of Delivery

— Ben Thomas (@BenThomasNZ) September 2, 2023

That’s how bad it has got. Desperation from a broke Government, mad ramblings from a geriatric, fringe player, yelling and screaming from conspiratorialists and revengeful sideliners.  – Mike Hosking 

Chris Hipkins has made it clear he is out of touch, out of ideas and is set to take Labour into its most negative campaign in history. – Chris Bishop 

There was also a big policy announcement: free dental care for under-30s by 2026, which the Labour leader said was the first step to universal dental care. The $390 million costing for the policy looks implausibly low, and the labour force too small and too difficult to grow for the timeline given. – Luke Malpass

In a free country, journalists and the media in general need to be trusted to “speak truth to power” on their readers’ and viewers’ behalf. Prostrating themselves before Mammon, in the form of the Public Interest Journalism Fund, should be beneath them. Television and radio editors and communicators have considerable influence. They should use that power honestly. When interviewing, it isn’t necessary always to find fault with the interviewee. Teasing out a policy, its origin and its possible effect can be revealing. Constant negativity is the way our media succeed in blighting all politicians, giving the triennial election process in our lives a bad name. Why not leave trolling to social media? – Michael Bassett

You deserve better. Party Vote National to get our country back on track. pic.twitter.com/RlB2ED4p2v

— NZ National Party (@NZNationalParty) September 4, 2023

We feel quite abandoned actually. I think that schools have been left to their own devices and there’s really been a complete vacuum in leadership from the Ministry of Education or from the minister.

We’ve got a curriculum refresh that’s not a curriculum refresh at all, it’s a complete curriculum rewrite that masquerades as a refresh. Schools just feel like they’ve been let down. There’s been little to no support for kids with additional needs, while the Ministry of Education staffing is just ballooning. – Lorraine Taylor

Now you might think that doctors earn quite enough. Well, quite frankly, when I’m lying unconscious on an operating table while skilled surgeons have spent 15 to 20 years honing their skills to do their best to improve my quality of life, or even save my life, they can earn what they like.  

Cabinet ministers get more than our senior surgeons and I know who gives a better return on my taxpayer dollar.    – Kerre Woodham

A two term Government with a record that too many will have decided is not for them; whether it’s crime and ram raids or health and ED’s you can’t get to or clinics that are closed because of lack of staff or they’re on strike or the recession we have been in, and perhaps the second one we are about to battle through, – that’s what drives votes.

Policy is a distant second to the mood. Specifics are well down the list to the emotion of how you are feeling.

It’s why we don’t read the fine print. – Mike Hosking 

Luxon looks like a Prime Minister – and perhaps more importantly – he’s feeling like one. –  Amelia Wade 

To my mind, what we need from this election is a clear decision, one way or the other.

There’s a lot at stake. It’s not a game. – Tim Dower 

We’re not voting for Chris Hipkins, simply because his Government will forever be our disappointing ex. The one who promised us everything, delivered nothing, and feels like they’ve just been ignoring our broken relationship for the last few years. – Verity Johnson

The Government is clearly worried. It has attempted to influence the numbers with its pantomime announcement of some expenditure cuts just 12 days ago, right before the Prefu numbers were finalised. Those were timed to be included in the report so as to improve the outlook, but they are about as real as any other attempt by Grant Robertson to curtail government expenditure. This Finance Minister has a track record of always talking a good game about cost control next year, while spending up large this year. – Steven Joyce 

 We used to have a rule in government that if you needed extra work done in a department, you had to find the capacity for that work already in the department, if necessary by stopping other work. That discipline is needed again. – Steven Joyce 

With his back to the wall as Labour’s fortunes plummet in the polls, it seems very likely Hipkins will show yet again that his principles will always be subordinate to possible political gain. But if he thinks that encouraging — tacitly or explicitly — a repeat of the shameful silencing of Parker and her supporters on March 25 is a wise career move he should really think again.

The Prime Minister seems to have little idea of how much of the trust that many held in the government, the mainstream media and the police was destroyed that day. Or how much simmering fury it unleashed among voters — female and male — who simply want the right and opportunity to hear women speak. – Graham Adams 

Sure, some voters will hear the fibs and not hear the corrections and will be freaked out enough to flip away from the centre-right and back to Labour.

But there are plenty of other voters who will see the desperation and nastiness for what it is and find it sad and ugly. It’s especially bad for Labour because it’s so off-brand. They’ve just pushed the “Be Kind” schtick for five years. It’s whiplash-inducing to go from Jacinda hugging everyone to Chris’ troops spreading misinformation on Facebook with a brazenness that would make the anti-vaxxers blush.

If Labour’s going to lose, it’s probably better to lose with dignity than to lose dirty. – Heather du Plessis-Allan 

We live in such an infantile world it is only a matter of time before the people who sell you milk will have to ensure you are not lactose intolerant least you sue them for the ensuing gastro turbulence. – Damien Grant 

Rating agencies are not good at predicting events, more recording when market sentiment has soured, and for the moment they remain either confident or oblivious to the unravelling fiscal and economic reality of Aotearoa.

This benign neglect may not end on Tuesday, but it will end.  – Damien Grant 

Never before have so many people who have never farmed or have any practical knowledge of farming,made their living from trying to tell farmers how they should farm. When farmers eventually get tired of nonsense legislation and diminishing profits. Ye are going to be very hungry

— Ger Hogan (@GerHogg) September 6, 2023

There’s no simpler way to put it- when you set a target, you have a requirement to hold yourself accountable, you hold providers accountable, you hold the system accountable. At the end of the day, that’s what politicians should be doing – Shane Reti 

Labour and the Greens have instituted irrational and extremely damaging economic and social policies that have torn the very fabric of our once cohesive society apart and that I fear will take years to repair. – Gilda Kirkpatrick 

Fresh from winning 50 per cent of the vote in 2020, becoming the most popular party in the MMP era, Labour looks set to follow that record with a rather more ignominious one, the lowest polling of a major party after a stint in Government. – Thomas Coughlan 

Hipkins, while appearing like a competent and normal human in more traditional political settings like Parliament and broadcast interviews, appears stilted and awkward when pretending to be normal in public. The campaign, alas for Hipkins, is showing up his flaws and Luxon’s strengths. – Thomas Coughlan 

I’ve been very careful throughout my campaign to speak well of my opponent. I think that we can disagree agreeably and be civil towards each other. – Nicola Willis

There are other positives to a National win. Their MPs who will hold key ministerial portfolios are of a much higher calibre than the current dispirited and unimpressive lot. Six years of ‘all talk and no trousers’ has got us where we are today, second to last in the OECD for projected growth, and having the world’s worst current account deficit – approaching ten per cent of GDP. National knows what needs to be done to turn things around. They have the people needed to carry out the tasks. – JC  

Even though the National Party has  been  effective in Opposition, to the point where it is shaping up as the next government, the  news media  is  not  yet  accepting  it as the ministry-in-waiting, and  instead  treats its leader  more harshly  than it  does his opponent. Chris Hipkins gets praised  for what he has achieved, despite having presided over a  string of disastrous decisions and failed  policies, including co-governance,  huge deficits, and  what in previous eras would have been regarded as a  balance-of-payments crisis. – Point of Order 

This is what happens when people keep voting for councilors who take money that should be going into maintenance, and flipping it into flashy convention centres, library rebuilds that cost a hundred million dollars more than they should, do-ups of every minor ‘heritage’ public building. People of Wellington, the enemy is us. Stop voting for councilors and mayors who promise anything other than fixing the pipes.  – Eric Crampton

There is simply no hiding what has happened to our education system under this Government.

It has been Maorified, kids don’t turn up, results are shocking, standards have slipped and international testing shows the parlous state we are in. – Mike Hosking

Let me tell you this for nothing – a lot of the media have been kind to Labour and even kinder to “Chippy from the Hutt”. 

That has turned. They see what we see. 

They see a bloke from the private sector, a success story who at last is delivering with confidence and detail and aspiration. And they see a political lifer, out of puff with a record in tatters.  – Mike Hosking

The government and its surrogates continue to spin the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update hard. The government is to be congratulated on making a mess of the economy but not completely destroying it. – Liam Hehir

It used to be considered an iron-rule of elections that undecided voters would usually break for the challenger. The theory was that it is harder for incumbents to win back wavering support. As the election draws near and the incumbent still hasn’t been able to secure their vote, these undecided voters are more likely to take a chance on the challenger, hoping for change. The challenger represents a new possibility, a potential for improvement over what’s currently in place.

The extent of this effect has been cast into doubt from time to time. In this context of this election, however, it may well be a factor. It’s hard to see many people with doubts about the government deciding from this point on that they like the government after all. – Liam Hehir

We country folk are also the ones having to live with the reality of wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines ripping up the landscape, and replacing bush and production farmlands with acres of silicon, fibreglass and concrete. – Lushington D, Brady

The instant they built a wind farm in front of the harbourside mansions, carpeted Fitzroy and Brunswick in solar panels, or bulldozed a massive new transmission line through the middle of Canberra, “Net Zero” would be dumped like the toxic potato it is.

Instead, it’s country folk who have to wear the consequences of the urban green-left’s deranged obsessions.

And they’ve had enough. – Lushington D, Brady

 

There's quite a lesson for Labour, and it isn't to be more radical (otherwise the Greens and TPM would be gaining the difference), it's to be a steady hand trusted with competence, fiscal discipline and transparency

— Libertyscott 🇹🇼 🇺🇦 🇰🇷 (@libertyscott) September 11, 2023

Buried within the Prefu came a stark warning: although there’s money set aside to cover the critical cost pressures of government, that’s about it – so any future decisions around additional spending will need to be made in the context of raising more revenue or spending cuts elsewhere. That means there’s enough to keep the lights on, but maybe not enough to buy a new lamp. – Brad Olsen

Treasury also, said, diplomatically, that “in recent times, government’s final allocations have exceeded the signalled Budget allowance. If this trend was to continue and there was no corresponding offset from either an increase in revenue or a reduction in expenses, there would be an adverse impact on the fiscal outlook.” In other words, governments often spend more than they had anticipated or signalled, and unless there’s A) more revenue coming in, or B) something else not being funded, then C) it’s got to be funded by debt.

Which means that although there’s always more money spent each year, it will become increasingly difficult to announce new policies without removing old policies, generating more revenue, or further adding to debt. None of these options stand out as an obvious appropriate or “right” choice – hence the warning of “significant trade-offs”. – Brad Olsen

Are we willing to increase government revenue somehow to pay for our spending? Are we willing to adjust our expectations of what the government provides, and doesn’t provide, to citizens? Or do we just keep kicking the can down the road, funding new investments through debt to be paid for by someone else in the future?

Because that’s what we’re doing. Essentially, Prefu 2023 showed that future Kiwis face a higher debt burden to keep the lights on today. The operating allowance is sufficient for funding the rising cost of current public services, but there is little headroom for any new spending going forward. There are no easy options, apart from the easiest but worst option of them all – worry about it later. The longer we delay making the difficult choices, the more painful that adjustment will be. Treasury has clearly signalled that changes are becoming increasingly necessary. – Brad Olsen

Based on the polls, attacking Luxon is needed because there’s not much else Hipkins has going for him: he hasn’t got much money to bribe the electorate with, he’s not that much more popular on headline preferred PM figures than Luxon – although swing voters are more interested – and on current polls he’s heading to comfortably be out of government. – Glenn McConnell and Luke Malpass

So why did the current Labour government go so wildly off the rails?

Blame the public for that, specifically a phenomenon that saw the nation lose its head; the only time I was embarrassed to be a New Zealander. I refer to the ludicrous Jacindamania phenomenon which induced in Labour a thousand year Reich, faith in their longevity and a corresponding dictatorial mentality resulting in sheer totalitarian insanity in so many ways. – Sir Bob Jones 

But in summation, you can see poor, old Hipkins looking more and more deflated and Luxon looking more and more bullish. Seymour overplayed his hand a bit on the confidence thing, James Shaw called an Act MP a “clown show”, Winston Peters refuted the polls, again, and I think one of the Maori leaders went surfing. – Mike Hosking 

But there are times when radical measures are required, such as the appalling mess the current government has left us with. Normally this is a job left to the occasional Labour governments so it’s ironic that this time it’s the reverse. That’s a direct consequence of Winston putting them in office when they simply weren’t ready. It was like handing the keys to a bus to a 10 year old to drive. – Sir Bob Jones

If I had to guess at the, or an, underlying cause of the inability to manage anything, I should suggest the spread of fatuous tertiary education, which has dulled the practical intelligence of millions and returned them nothing of value either intellectually or spiritually. – Theodore Dalrymple

National understands that innovation and growth doesn’t come from government per se it comes from the hard work, the innovation, the risk taking, from the entrepreneurs in the private sector. – Christopher Luxon

The media are exercised by the Nats tax cut plan. They’re exercised by it largely I assume because the Labour party are exercised about it. And the Labour party are exercised about it because they hate it because it’s popular. It’s seen poll surges for National, and they’ll do anything to try to stem that tide.  

Problem is, as the feedback I’ve received this week would attest, and as the polls would suggest too, it is popular. And people seemingly do not care how it’s costed, or what a handful of economists say about it, or how much Grant Robertson bangs on about it being flawed.   – Kate Hawkesby

Facts can’t be racist or homophobic or transphobic.

That’s why the Left hates facts and denies their existence.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) September 14, 2023

If a white New Zealander said that “colonialist genetics were stronger than Māori genetics”, it would be all over the Kiwi news as an arrant example of racism, which it would be. So it’s telling that when a big-time Māori politicians says something equivalent, it’s ignored by the press, the government, and the public.  That is what is known as “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” and all decent Kiwis, whether Māori or “colonialists”, should be demanding retractions and apologies.

Don’t hold your breath. It would be considered racist to call anything said by a Māori “racist.”  That’s how far the fear has spread in New Zealand. – Jerry Coyne 

It’s a vicious environment for Labour to campaign in.

It’s all happening under Labour’s watch and people are over it. On 14 October they’re very likely to show they’re over Labour as well. – Peter Wilson 

This goes to the heart of the country’s current economic problems, as identified by the PREFU. Rather than use the additional post-pandemic borrowing to improve the country’s health and physical infrastructure, the government undertook too much unproductive expenditure that has shown no long-term return to the country, while still incurring debt that must be repaid. As in earlier times, initial relief that people were being spared the immediate impact of the worst of circumstances, quickly evaporated when it was realised that the debt incurred not only lives on long after the crisis has passed, but also limits the scope of future government actions. Belatedly, both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance seem to be acknowledging the public frustration their approach has bought about.

This is Labour’s dilemma. The poor quality of much of its additional spending is becoming clear, leading it to announce billions of dollars of spending cuts to reduce the debt it has run up. And proposals, like this week’s announcement to train more doctors, simply invite the criticism of why these were not priorities when the first pandemic recovery borrowing occurred three years ago. Despite the Prime Minister’s lament to the contrary, the public’s yearning for something better is perfectly understandable. – Peter Dunne

Why, you may wonder, is it necessary for someone who wishes to teach maths to teenagers to hold a politically correct interpretation of a document signed in 1840? The ideological capture of the profession is not limited to this most important of the six principles. – Damien Grant 

Treasury’s latest pre-election economic and fiscal update this week forecast cumulative fiscal deficits of $17 billion for the four years ended June 2027.

These forecasts are far too optimistic.  – Bryce Wilkinson 

Most government spending provides a private benefit to the recipient.

Why not just let them spend more of their own money?

Too often, there is no clarity about what the answer is to this question. That impairs accountability.

Poor accountability guarantees waste. People know their own needs best.

Claims that tax cuts cannot be responsible treat all existing and planned spending as sacrosanct.  There is no basis for such an assumption. Read the Auditor-General’s scathing assessments. – Bryce Wilkinson 

That particular answer was historic. It’s a rare thing for a multi-millionaire to beat a Labourite on the issue of tax fairness. – Thomas Coughlan

Labour’s 2017 election spending promise was exceeded by $16b.

Robertson did it again in the 2020 election. In the pre-election forecast, government spending was forecast to be $116b in the year to June 2024. Last week, that spending estimate was revised upward to $139b.

In other words, the 2020 election spending forecast was exceeded by $23b. 

On the Finance Minister’s record, the latest spending forecasts will be massively exceeded. The promised return to a balanced budget in 2027 is a fantasy. – Richard Prebble 

The Howard League has a programme that assists prisoners to get driving, forklift and heavy vehicle licences. Over 90 per cent get employment. Reoffending is minimal. If it is possible to get convicts back into the workforce, how hard can it be to reintroduce beneficiaries to work?

We know mass immigration does not work. Why not try something that we know does work? Doing the work ourselves. – Richard Prebble 

In the last decade or so, we’ve reduced carbon emissions, we’ve increased the output from renewables, and we are seen as a world leader. But it’s also right that we put economic growth and household budgets and the cost of living ahead. And fundamentally, we’re not going to save the planet by bankrupting the British people. – Suella Braverman

Then why not just say “Women are women”?

Oh, that’s right, you can’t, because the “trans” part means they’re something other than women.

Your statement is self-referentially incoherent.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) September 17, 2023

These days there is an awful lot of dismissing. It ranges from ignoring news that does not fit a particular world view to ruining the careers of gifted academics who believed it was their role to speak out.

I’ve written before about being dismissed on a variety of charges, most of them beyond my control (Old white man guilty on three of four counts).

Dismissing, in its varying stages of severity and consequence, is another way of saying we have forgotten how to tolerate our fellow human beings. – Gavin Ellis 

‘Co-governance’ – incompetently articulated by the Labour-led government – should have been a matter for free and open discussion in which the myths and realities could be explained and debated. Instead, any opinion that does not cede significant control to tangata whenua is slammed as ‘racist’. 

Even group discussions on the forthcoming general election have become more measured, hesitant, noncommittal, or non-existent. It has become much safer to shut up and keep to yourself any thoughts that might be marginalised.

And I detect in our news media the same reticence, a ‘better-left-alone’ zone in which to park topics that might prompt adverse public reactions. Better to stick with the current ‘orthodoxy’. – Gavin Ellis 

Zero tolerance is a misguided belief that the potential to take offence must not be tested. It takes long-overdue protection of stigmatised groups to illogical ends. It presumes an inability to respectfully dissent or disagree, and in so doing privileges one group in society over another. – Gavin Ellis 

We need to start discussing our differences and our differences of opinion and our approaches to life. There is no better place to start that dialogue than in our news media. However, media  will need to disabuse themselves of the notion that their own staff should have a greater footprint in the public sphere than those within society itself. – Gavin Ellis 

Commentators said Christopher Luxon needed to look Prime Ministerial. He did. What commentators forgot was it was also important for Chris Hipkins to look Prime Ministerial. At times he looked like a boy in a man’s job.

Psychologists say we are not who we think we are. We are the riders on an elephant. It is our subconscious that really makes our decisions. We the riders just rationalize our subconscious decisions.

Our subconscious minds were asking “who looks the most Prime Ministerial?” – Richard Prebble 

There’s a whole series of young deaths in the family and I suspect that probably all of them had the issue that I’m confronting now.

And like me, they didn’t go for a test because they are males and they thought ‘it’s okay – I’m just a bit short of breath, I’ll get over this’.

I think men tend to do that more often than not. I think the lesson out of all of this is, listen to your body, read your body, but more importantly, listen to your wife. – Barry Soper 

Not a single economist supports Labour’s GST policy. This is a flimsy band-aid that won’t even take fruit and vegetable prices back to where they were a year ago.

The Government’s own tax working group also found that only 30 per cent of GST reductions are passed on to consumers – meaning per cent of the $2.2 billion policy becomes a subsidy to producers and supermarkets. – Nicola Willis 

If this is what success looks like, then the current government is lending new meaning to the tyranny of low expectations. – Steven Joyce 

To fire up our economy again, we need to spend much less time on grand visions, and much more time on releasing the animal spirits that drives the risk-takers. – Steven Joyce 

We’ve tried the government-led, over-regulated, anti-foreign investment, closed shop and it hasn’t worked. If we don’t change something our economic melancholy will clearly get worse. It’s time to embrace the world and let our risk-takers loose on it. Let them find their own niche and stop holding them back. After all, who dreamed we’d be sending rockets into space before we did. – Steven Joyce 

This obstruction and wokery cannot continue: it is designed, quite simply, to stop democracy working. – Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg

Labour’s biggest problem right now is that nobody is talking about them as a potential government at all.

Instead all the focus has been on what shape a National-led government might take.

That has left Labour trying to fight the ghost of a foregone conclusion. – Claire Trevett 

Genders are what people have now instead of a personality and a character.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) September 22, 2023

I am not a climate change denier, but the system is unfairly skewed in favour of those who have more power and money than farmers.

We shouldn’t follow like sheep, trusting that the cherry-picked information provided to us will have our best interests at heart. We are being manipulated into changing what we do, so everyone else can carry on as normal.

Net zero will happen a lot quicker if the general population changes its behaviour and, until there is a massive reduction in flights and car journeys, no-one will convince me that cows are the problem. – Cath Morley

Self-serving bureaucracies are seeking to silence those who would question their provenance and purpose. Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of the rarefied class.

Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth. –  Rupert Murdoch 

This election, like all elections, is about finding the balance between taxing the productive to buy the votes of the poor, but not overtaxing them so that the flow of output is degraded.- Damien Grant 

You’ll not get a job if you turn up in your pyjamas and that’s what I heard from an employer last week, – Louise Upston 

Perhaps governments are loth to acknowledge their past failures. But incoming governments should welcome opportunities to wipe out their predecessors’ errors. – Eric Crampton 

Bits of regulation that have failed to achieve their purpose and continue to impose cost can remain in place for years after they have been shown to be obviously futile. – Eric Crampton 

Politicians are leaders of your government, not of your country, and definitely not of your life.

So stop expecting them to solve all your problems.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) September 25, 2023

Peters cites his experience. But he is like the man who killed his parents and then cites his experience as an orphan. Peters’ experience is that he created this Government he now rails against.

Peters claims he could not pick National in 2017 because Bill English told him in confidence that he was about to be rolled by Judith Collins. Sir Bill says the claim is a “fabrication” and that it indicates Peters “could find a reason to go with Labour again”.

Only those who believed Billy Te Kahika’s conspiracy theories will believe Peters.  – Richard Prebble 

When government programmes unabashedly distinguish “Maori” from “public” components of the community, it is hard to see how social unity is among the Hipkins Cabinet’s considerations. – Point of Order

It is strange to watch from where we watch it, because it is like the New Zealand electorate goes one circuit around the goldfish bowl and then utterly forgets where they were. ‘Oh, this guy was great. Look at his smile’. – Guyon Espiner

The problem  for  Hipkins is  that  voters are  all too familiar  with his and Labour’s record  in government. He has had key portfolios, Education, State Services, Covid and Police, among others, hardly distinguishing himself in any of them. – Point of Order 

Government debt  – which in 2017 stood at $112bn – has doubled to $224bn. That is a  load which in servicing alone will be a  heavy burden for the next government:  yet there is  precious little to show for it. – Point of Order 

The tone of Labour’s overall campaign – more attacks on National than promotion of what it has been doing in government – confirms Labour’s focus is increasingly on being a viable Opposition than remaining in government. That makes sense, given doubts now emerging among even its own MPs that Labour can win the election. This approach will intensify over the next couple of weeks. – Peter Dunne 

National’s biggest risk now is complacency – the sense among its supporters that the election result is a foregone conclusion, so voting is not the priority it should otherwise be. That is why Luxon is spending so much time warning voters that all MMP elections are close, and that the prospect of a Labour/Greens/Te Pāti Māori government is still a live one, unless people proactively vote for change. – Peter Dunne 

For all parties, the next three weeks will be the grimmest of the campaign, but for different reasons. The common challenge facing all of them, though, will be how they continue to swim strongly upstream when most people have probably voted already and therefore switched off listening to what any of the parties have to say, let alone promise. – Peter Dunne 

What I want you to do to for me, is I’ve been talking to my customers as well, and I want the wasteful spending to stop. We’ve had a gutsful.  – Glenys Hoskins Hill

Alas, the mainstream media are subsidised by the state on terms which require them to endorse the government’s interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi and policies which flow from this, spreading “partnership” and “co-governance”.

Thus they are egregiously selective when headlining claims and counter-claims that involve racism, and seem to be turning their spotlight only on anything inflammatory involving ACT,  National or New Zealand First candidates, or which those parties have not condemned to the satisfaction of left-wing politicians and their media champions. – Point of Order

How about some honesty and integrity?  How about focusing on the most recent science that tells us our ruminant methane emissions are not a problem?  How about checking that science carefully – not some science that is now seven years old.  How about putting a much greater effort into what is happening with sequestration?  Farmers deserve better. –  Owen Jennings

No words can ever actually bring comfort in this situation. – Simon Barnett

It’s one foot in front of the other. It’s learning how to breathe again but every day is walking with a limp.

I miss being able to run and unconsciously laugh and that’s what I fear: Will I ever laugh again?

Like a belly laugh that isn’t tainted or tarnished through this filter of real worry and pain.  – Simon Barnett

So many people have said you’ve just got a genuine love story.

Unfortunately, it’s just got such a tragic end and I never saw it. I just never saw this.

But as the Bible says, love never gives up, love never loses faith, love is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. –

To those shouting “cis comes from Latin”:

I don’t care whether it comes from Italian, Arabic or Japanese.

Language has been manipulated to undermine reality. The term ‘cis’ is used as a slur, to shut down dissent, to compel adherence to ideology and to force people into boxes.

— James Esses (@JamesEsses) September 26, 2023

People seem to think, ‘You’re a Christian, so you must be a fundamentalist, raving Christian.’

My Christianity is pretty simple. It’s just, ‘Love God, love people.’ It’s that simple. – Chris Luxon

It’s just basically about a set of values about how you treat people and how you help people. – Chris Luxon

If I couldn’t do that, if you can’t lead yourself and you can’t lead the party, why the hell would people trust you to lead the country – Chris Luxon

Those who oppose phone bans raise a number of objections. Smartphones can be useful teaching tools, for instance, and may make it easier for some teachers to create engaging lesson plans. That’s true, but any increase in engagement during a lesson may be offset by students getting distracted during the same lesson. When we add in the costs to all other teachers and the loss of social connection between classes, it’s hard to see how the marginal benefit of a phone-based lesson outweighs the costs of a phone-focused student body. – Jonathan Haidt

Wokeness is the belief that you can fight censorship with good censorship, racism with good racism, and ultimately, fascism with good fascism.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) October 1, 2023

All children deserve schools that will help them learn, cultivate deep friendships, and develop into mentally healthy young adults. All children deserve phone-free schools. –  Jonathan Haidt

Believing you can ‘send a message’, or ‘take out some insurance’ or ‘punish’ a party, is deluded.  

To vote ‘tactically’ against a party you traditionally support or to counter the perceived threat of another minor party, means you’re at the same time ignoring a raft of potentially crazy economic and social policies, to tick a box which you mistakenly believe will ‘hold the new government to account.’  – Kate Hawkesby

Based on latest polling, a coalition of Labour, Greens and Te Pati Maori  gets 45 percent of the seats in Parliament, even though 66 percent of voters think the country is going in the wrong direction.

Head scratch.

A coalition of National and Act, which would arguably change the direction of this country which two thirds of voters think is heading in the wrong direction, on latest polling has only 50.8 percent of the seats.

This makes no sense.   – Kate Hawkesby

Any government involving NZ First will go in no direction, it will stall as Winston looks to negotiate, grandstand and play games – hauling on the handbrake of progress in any and all directions.    – Kate Hawkesby

The stakes for New Zealand have never been higher, we are at a cross-road – and we cannot afford to stall now in the middle of the intersection. – Kate Hawkesby

When it comes to political bias, the results are definitive – journalists overwhelmingly identify as left wing: “There are very few strongly right-wing journalists, but a substantial number of moderately or strongly left-wingers.”

The survey reveals 5 percent describe themselves as “extreme left” and 15 percent as “hard left”. Of the rest, 22 percent say they are “left”, 20 percent are “mild left”, and 23 percent are “middle left”, while 6 percent identify as “middle right”, 4 percent “mild right”, and only around 1 percent all up say they are “right”, “hard right” or “extreme right”.

In other words, nine out of ten New Zealand journalists are socialists, with one in three hard-core. Only one in ten journalists claim to have no socialist inclinations.  – Muriel Newman 

While the public wants journalists to report the news in an unbiased manner, presenting both sides of the argument on contentious issues so they can make up their own minds, that’s no longer how most journalists see it.

They regard ‘educating the audience’ as their most important role, followed by ‘countering disinformation’. But in some cases, this has led to a concerning development: hard-core left-wing journalists describing information they disagree with as “fake news” or “disinformation” in order to discredit those with alternative views. – Muriel Newman 

The role that rose the most sharply, albeit from a low level, was ‘supporting government policy’.

In other words, the gulf that has opened up between what the public has traditionally expected from the media and what the media themselves believe their role to be, is no doubt responsible for the decline in public interest in the mainstream news.

Making things worse is the fact that journalists overwhelmingly believe the Treaty of Waitangi should be a key part of their reporting. – Muriel Newman 

With journalists now advocating politics rather than merely reporting it, it’s little wonder that they are now being berated with the same contempt the public has for politicians.

While thankfully the media lovefest with Jacinda Ardern began to wane before she actually left Parliament, the impact of her incompetent leadership on our society has been devastating.

More than anything, what Labour’s time in office has taught us is that for our democracy to function properly, we need balanced journalism. – Muriel Newman 

The Ardern legacy is about to come to an end and a new government will need to set about correcting a multitude of wrongs. But the media should also reflect on the status of its industry and what it needs to do to restore public trust. The damage done is such that restoring their reputation will be no small task.

Predominantly journalists need to go back to their role as neutral observers and reporters of the news. And with regards to contentious issues, they need to return to providing a balance of perspectives so that their audience has reliable information on which to make up their own mind.

In particular, they need to recognise the dreadful division within our country that Labour has created – with their assistance – and they need to help rebuild our society and heal the harm.

In summary, we don’t need the media to advocate political agendas  – we have politicians for that. But what we do need is balance and truth in the news. –  Muriel Newman 

I’ve had heaps of challenges over the past 40 years, no money, low product returns, the risk of going broke for about 10 or 15 of those years.

But I was young, it was a challenge, and I had the opportunity. It was either work hard and get better at farming or go broke. – Steve Wyn-Harris 

That’s their challenge. We’ve had a good few years with a long period of good returns, so I’ve warned him there’s inevitably going to be a drop. But it’s not a bad thing to start off tough.”

“We are producing quality products and just want to carry on feeding 35 million well off people with good quality products. We not going to try and feed everyone. – Steve Wyn-Harris 

I actually love voting. I love exercising our right to democracy, I love that we can, I never take it for granted. Every time I’m in the polling station I think of all the places where they can’t do this or can’t do it with any freedom or integrity anyway. I mean it might not always go your way, and you might not like the system, but at least you have the right to do it. Nothing’s stopping you from doing it.  – Kate Hawkesby

If you can’t run on your record, you have to fake it. – Not PC

If Labour do lose this election then only one of five Labour Governments since WWII will have done three terms.

By contrast all five National Governments have done three or four terms.

There is a reason for this.

— David Farrar (@dpfdpf) October 5, 2023

As we reflect on the —let’s be frank— end of this government’s tenure, I can’t help thinking about all the stuff they dropped the ball on, that I wonder if they regret.

Mental health, the $1.9 billion none of us know where it is. Light rail. Child poverty. Kiwibuild, a tangible disaster. Not taking the country with them when they had a majority, an unheard of opportunity to take us with them, and they blew it.

The MIQ shenanigans, the shutting of the borders for so long, the crime levels, the co-governance, three waters, they had so much promise, and they just dropped the ball on it all. Too many consultants, too many reviews, too many ministers with scandals and issues that saw them off one by one, just too much chaos.   – Kate Hawkesby

Politics is downstream of culture, and I do not expect political leaders to create currently non-existent demand for a more traditional culture.

So, anyone wanting a stoutly conservative leader is going to be disappointed by prime minister Luxon. You don’t be a successful chief executive at firms like Unilever Canada and Air New Zealand by putting culture wars at the heart of your mission. The opposite, actually. – Liam Hehir

I have met Luxon several times and my views were changed pretty much straight away. He really did seem to take a methodical approach to his diagnosis of our national problems and how to turn them around. There is a middle ground between being “relaxed” and being a micromanager too obsessed with detail to get much actually done.

Luxon struck me as somebody with a good understanding of the balance between autonomy and accountability – Liam Hehir

We seem to be afflicted with a distinct “New Zealand disease” characterised by an inability to improve outcomes no matter how much public money is gobbled up in the process.

We’ve fed Wellington well, but generated flab instead of muscle. The capacity that were there have been atrophied to the point that even basic policy can no longer be conceived and implemented without the intervention of consultants. They have become the orderlies of public affairs, supporting a paralysed bureaucracy to do no more than move around to prevent bed sores. – Liam Hehir

What we need now isn’t necessarily a roadmap, but a leader. We need someone who can delegate responsibilities while insisting on accountability and productivity. These are traits that successful corporate leaders have. Luxon has a better history of that than any other leader on offer. – Liam Hehir

How you vote depends on what we believe our country truly needs at this juncture. If you believe that the status quo is serving us well and that more of the same is the path to prosperity, then by all means, cast your vote for a party that promises continuity. If you think New Zealand is fundamentally rotten and needs to be made into something radically different, there are plenty of options on offer.

However, if you, like me, believe that what our country desperately needs is repair and revitalisation, then you should probably vote for a government led by Christopher Luxon. – Liam Hehir

With all the conflict and negativity of this election campaign, we shouldn’t forget the extent to which Kiwis still agree on a few simple things – family, sport, BBQs and the beach.

It’s important to celebrate our shared values and the things that unite us as a nation.

A great example of the broad political consensus that still exists in this country, is the enduring unpopularity of New Zealand First and its leader Winston Peters.

Statistically speaking, Peters unites Kiwis like almost no one else. – Liam Dann

Peters dislikes having his style compared to populist US politician Donald Trump, which is fair enough. Peters might be populist but he isn’t actually popular.

Trump won the US Presidency in 2016 and still polls in territory that could see him win it again.

For the past 30 years, despite having the strongest personal brand in New Zealand politics, Peters has never come close to winning an election. – Liam Dann

That degree of political consensus around Peters should be heartening. But, unfortunately, we’ve got a political system that seems almost purpose-built for him.

MMP isn’t necessarily a terrible idea but Peters has found the glitch in it, which he continues to cash in on as if it was a dodgy pokie machine down the back of a quiet RSA.

Around 3 or 4 per cent of New Zealanders seem to be consistently sold on his 1950s school-master schtick and the “pull your socks up” policies he promotes.

To get beyond that, Peters has proved a master of tapping into disaffected voters every three years, whoever and wherever they might be. – Liam Dann

The answer to the bigger question of how we deal with a political system that keeps throwing the balance of power to this one unpopular political figure is more complex.

Hoping that Peters might quietly retire has proved futile. He looks more than capable of sticking around until the technology allows us all to upload our brains to the internet. So it is safest to assume that some version of Peters is built into the system for the foreseeable future. – Liam Dann

Peters was, is and always will be, good copy for a journalist.

But it is a great shame for the overwhelming majority of Kiwi voters who’ll once again cast their votes for candidates who are not Winston Peters. – Liam Dann 

Can there be a more poetic end to this government than its Prime Minister, confined to his hotel room, the last soldier of a forgotten war stranded on an isolated island while the rest of his people prepare to vote his party back to the Stone Age?

Hipkins was central to many of the worst aspects of the lockdowns, mandates, failed procurement processes and state-overreach of the Covid era. To see him grounded, a prisoner not of Covid but of his own past, while the nation looks forward to whatever regime will assume power next month, is somewhat ironic. – Damien Grant

Covid revealed something ugly about ourselves. About how easily we will comply with the most absurd directions and how few of us are willing to take even the mildest stand for our, or our neighbours’, liberty.

We dressed up this compliance as a necessary commitment to save the vulnerable. But was it, really? Or did we just enjoy, for a moment, being part of a mob. – Damien Grant

When those pushed to the margins finally revolted, erupting onto the lawns of parliament, our media were not even willing to get close to what, in the public mind, was a leper colony, in every interpretation of that phrase.

Here were those, many already on the margins economically and mentally, driven to a public act of desperation and self-destruction and all we could do was wait until the truncheons were finally deployed to drag them from the parliamentary lawn and our consciousness.

And we have paid a terrible price. Closing schools has coincided with a spike in truancy that has remained stubbornly resistant to resolution.

A generation has been locked out of the property market thanks to the asset-shock caused by quantitative easing. The explosion of government debt that will never be re-paid because neither major party has the stomach to bring the finances back to surplus will blight our sovereign accounts for generations.

And so we come back to Chris Hipkins, languishing in his hotel room, face pressed metaphorically against the glass, as the nation moved on without him and shortly without his party. It is the perfect farewell to his administration, to the Covid-era, and away from any reconciliation for what occurred and our individual part in it. – Damien Grant

Four times out of the last ten elections it looks as if an ancient throwback to former times, with ideas no more substantial than can be committed to the back of a postage stamp, is likely to decide the future of our country. –  Michael Bassett

If only we could get a new government led by ACT and National we would have a good chance of restoring New Zealand’s reputation as a country of achievers. Let’s all do our best in the days that remain before the polls close. – Michael Bassett

That’s how rural New Zealand works. You’re better off to get on. There’s not many people I can’t get on with. – Suze Redmayne

It’s pretty simple, really, this government is doing irreparable damage to rural and provincial New Zealand – and it’s got to stop,” – Suze Redmayne

 

We need to grow the economy. Not the government.

— New Zealand Taxpayers' Union (@TaxpayersUnion) October 11, 2023

As an Aucklander who felt like they got locked down for way too long I can tell you from where I sit, I’d have liked to think he would have felt they could have handled that better. He didn’t mention any regrets around slow procurement of PPE or RAT tests or locking Kiwis out of their own country for so long, or having the borders shut seemingly forever, but he did think they could’ve managed the costs owed for MIQ better. He still doesn’t know how much money is owed from that, interestingly. But he does back his government’s approach to crime, co-governance, and management of the economy.

He puts a lot of the criticism of his government’s performance down to international headwinds or global pressures, doesn’t take much responsibility for what their part in it all has been. But when asked if he backed his Foreign Minister, Nanaia Mahuta, he said he did. Now her appointment was odd from the get-go.  – Kate Hawkesby

She also yesterday put her foot in it when she didn’t condemn the attacks on Israel. While other international leaders condemned them, she described it as ‘an outbreak of violence between Israel and Gaza…’ and called for ‘an immediate end to all violence.’  

Now alongside being so embarrassing that the PM and leader of the opposition had to jump in immediately and correct that statement, it also got picked up by overseas media. Sky News Australia reported that she failed to condemn the attack. . . 

But here’s the weird thing, she didn’t even run that statement past him, they didn’t even talk before it went out. Hence he had to put out another one straight after it. But he backs her on the international stage, said he has absolute confidence in her. Which I think helps explain why his party is so often accused of not reading the room.  

If you think that’s an acceptable offering from your foreign minister, and you don’t even want to pick up a phone to each other beforehand, then you’re probably not aware of how low the bar has sunk. – Kate Hawkesby

The trouble with MMP, apart from its potentially bizarre outcomes, is it is too complicated. The sheer amount of communication I have received from people this year clearly confused about the value of their electorate vote as opposed to their party vote, is frightening.

And 99.9% of us would not have even known about the dead person rule. And there is nothing wrong with a dead person rule if the dead person rule isn’t complete and utter insanity, which it is.

Which makes it not only confusing but stupid as well.

Yet an entire country could be run as the outworking of that one new entirely invented seat we don’t actually need.

Go figure  – Mike Hosking

Kiwis aren’t just voting at the ballot box, they’re voting with their feet. And while New Zealanders are fleeing high taxes, a weak economy, and decaying public services, Labour continue to blame everything on global factors.

“It’s only with a strong economy that we can deliver the opportunities that allow everyone to get ahead. That’s why National will rebuild the economy so New Zealanders and their families can build a life here rather than in Brisbane and Sydney. – Nicola Willis 

Are the Business Editors at Newshub, Stuff & NZ Herald going to call the PM to account for his false claim on Newstalk ZB that our GDP growth put us ahead of “every country other than Japan”? It was misinformation on steroids. Hipkins is the guy who went berserk about misinformation about the Covid vaccine, yet I cannot conceive of a greater piece of misinformation than telling 5 million Kiwis a few days before a General Election our country is ranked top of the world on GDP growth figures when we’re ranked almost bottom.

How is he getting away with it? – Robert MacCulloch 

The existence of the seven Maori seats in parliament is an element of inequality in our constitution which the next government should remove. 

Both Maori Party (Te Pāti Māori) MPs have recently shown their contempt for democracy: Rawiri Waititi describes it as “a tyranny of the majority”. An obvious reason for their attitude is that if the separate Maori electorates were abolished, their Party would win no seats in parliament. – Roger Childs

The misinformation and negative campaigning is part of modern life, I suppose, and part of the final days of election campaigning. But it is a bit dispiriting. You roll your eyes, and you think surely people know that that is not strictly true. You only have to go to any of the parties’ websites and see their policies for yourself, it’s really not difficult to find.

But people don’t do it. They’d rather take the snackable bites that come through the media as advertising and believe them to be true. Even though mistrust in the media is huge, according to polls, doesn’t matter, people will believe what they want to hear. If they perhaps are biased against Labour or biased against National, they will hear what they want to hear. They will stop all deductive reasoning and critical thinking.

If you still haven’t voted yet, just have a long hard think about why are you going to vote? How you want the country to look? What direction you want it to go?  And don’t listen to the ads. Because that’s all they are, they’re ads that are, at the very best, gussying up information to try and appeal to you. To try to frighten you into voting.

It’s a bit of a shame, really, it it’d be better to go for the positives. This is what will happen. This is what we can do and to represent it truthfully. But I guess that is too much to hope for in 2023, Anyway, only three days to go. – Kerre Woodham

Whatever happens this Saturday, despite the warnings of the political class, it’s unlikely the public will see chaos.

Parliament can be a chaotic place at the best of times, and part of the skill of government is appearing publicly like a swan gliding gracefully over the surface of the water, regardless of whether underneath it is paddling furiously or an eel is in the process of biting its foot.

What will also be left, however the parties arrange themselves, is two fundamental problems for a new government to deal with, both of which involve the public’s experience of spending more and getting less in return. – Ben Thomas 

Despite significant government spending increases (only some of which represented one-off Covid response funding) there is a widespread understanding that public services are on the brink.

A new term, “ramping”, has been coined for patients left waiting at ambulance bays because there is no capacity for them in hospitals; educational achievement is bad and deteriorating; Covid absenteeism, fed by left-behind learners, persists.

Mental health services face worse challenges than ever despite record investment. When the immigration tap was turned back on to feed skill-starved business, scammers brought in houses full of exploited migrants for non-existent jobs. – Ben Thomas

While National’s social investment approach has barely been mentioned during the campaign, it could ultimately transform the public service. Social investment is an iterative approach striking a balance between using data for policy and experimenting with innovative programmes which can be ditched, tweaked or scaled up after proper evaluation.

The swollen public expenditure since 2017 has demonstrated that more money is only ever a part, even if a necessary part, of repairing deteriorating services. Both parties also share an aspiration for setting concrete targets for the public service based on outcomes (in the shopping analogy, lunches for the week), rather than inputs (spending whatever amount of money you have), or outputs (two lettuces!).

On the other hand, there are numerous mathematical possibilities that will mean not even the possibility of significant change in this area after Saturday. In that case a bigger worry for voters is not sensational short-term chaos, but slow decline. – Ben Thomas

What a miserable state of affairs.

By all means criticise and critique politicians for their policies — and there’s always room for light-hearted questions to politicians — but that undertone shows that some think grasping at rumour and innuendo is a reasonable response to poor polling.

New Zealand deserves better. – Felix Desmarais

 

Playgrounds have been a part of my life, and part of my children’s lives. There is something about me that has never grown up and I fit a playground beautifully.

The child in me will never die. – Joy Crowley

They never really did anything for us ordinary New Zealanders. They were so busy being kind and giving things to Maori and poor people they forgot about the rest of us. – Kevin Hunter 

As they plod toward today’s general election, New Zealanders have become dispirited and fearful, facing a cost of living crisis with rising food costs, rents and interest rates, an apparently out of control crime wave (a 720 per cent increase in retail crime since 2016) and a crumbling health system.

Kiwis who can’t get to a doctor or pay their rent and mortgage can’t see any way out of the crises building around them and don’t trust the Labour government to help them. – Anne Barrowclough and Cameron Stewart

They promised the moon, and delivered a flashlight. – Chris Trotter

People liked Ardern’s intentions, what they never saw from her was delivery. Ultimately, you can make all the promises in the world but if people don’t see a change happening in their own lives, then eventually they grow tired of the slogan.  Nicola Willis 

Ardern was the worst prime minister in New Zealand’s history. She talked a big talk and did nothing, she was the cause of the biggest problems we’ve got. This country is in a bloody mess as a result, we have serious financial problems, crime is soaring and she bought in co-governance (a decision-making model which gives equal rights to Maoris and non-Maoris) which is anti-democratic. The country suffered because of her radical left ideology and Hipkins was one of her disciples, so he is just Jacinda-lite. – Ewen Richie 

You can’t really be the prime minister of excuses. You’ve got to be the prime minister of delivery – Nicola Willis 

The Labour government has pushed a cultural ethnic agenda quite strongly in lieu of making more substantive transformational decisions.

Standards in health, education, housing, the Maori standard of living, their place in life has not been improved by this government. It has used more easy wins – (the Maori language), co-governance – that are easy to deliver rather than building more houses or making other, tougher decisions that would deliver. – Bryce Edwards 

Taken together, the departure of five ministers (including Jacinda Ardern) in the same number of months, gave the impression of a government in crisis. – Bryce Edwards 

There will be some temptation to put the blame on Covid or ill economic winds. Those factors are part of the story of Labour’s decline, but if Labour doesn’t look at some of the more difficult factors in their fall from favour, they could face a very long road back to power. – Bryce Edwards 

Thank you so much and thank you New Zealand … you have reached for hope and you have voted for change. – Christopher Luxon

My pledge to you is that our government will deliver for every New Zealander. – Christopher Luxon

New Zealand is a high-cost place to live, work and do business and one which now clearly does not generate enough wealth to continue to fund first-world services at current levels of taxation. – Luke Malpass

Judging by the last few days on here, Western “progressives” are more pro-Hamas than Arab/Palestinian citizens of Israel. Maybe it’s something about not having your life under threat and having your loved ones killed. In other words, it’s a luxury belief. https://t.co/M1EHxBwhLe

— Juliet Moses (@JulietMosesNZ) October 14, 2023

So who does Labour represent today? A few middle class academics and beneficiaries?

In opposition, how does Labour win back young progressives from the Greens? Do they outflank them?

How do they win back Māori seats from TPM, who will always be more uncompromising than Labour.

Given a choice between the working class and the woke class, they will always go for the woke class.

For Labour to have a real chance of becoming a party that polls out of the 20s, they need to wrestle with an identity crisis – who do they actually represent, as opposed to who they claim they represent. – David Farrar 

This is why people turned against Labour, because they could see all of this ineptitude. Not because they’re racist, or anti trans, or venal money grubbing capitalists who want to squeeze more out of the oppressed working men or women.

Basically, it’s because Labour were completely and utterly hopeless at delivering all the myriad promises they made to New Zealanders. And when it came down to it, they simply could not deliver what New Zealanders needed and wanted.  – Kerre Woodham

I vacillate between being mildly surprised and hoha that so many ‘Kiwis’ just don’t realise or don’t want to accept that Māoridom is a broad church. Many times, over the years, I’ve been asked, ‘why can’t you Maoris just get along with each other?’ The inference being we should always agree on everything, usually because that would be convenient for someone.

I always reply; you bring me all the denominations of the Christian church – you know, Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, agreeing on everything in the Bible, and I’ll bring you on a silver platter Māoridom agreeing on everything. – Chris Wikaira

Even when it ended, the moment felt like it just passed unremarked. There was no grand statement of gratitude to the city for its national service when the lockdown ceased. It just stopped. In conversations that summer with people from out of town, you would frequently hear surprise expressed at the length of the lockdown. Which is natural – if you didn’t go through it, you wouldn’t really recall it.

Those who lived through won’t ever forget it, though. Many people are still carrying some level of scar tissue from the myriad downstream impacts. Ultimately, while casting about for specific blame for electoral defeats is invariably inexact, the cause of the wipeout in Auckland feels traceable to those anguished months two years ago. When the city ached, and felt like Wellington barely knew. At least, until Saturday. – Duncan Grieve

Labour deserved to lose. Not because there are bad people in Labour. I’m sad at some of the talented Labour MPs and candidates who have lost, for they are good people. But Labour deserved to lose on the simple basis of incompetence. They failed to deliver on numerous iconic promises, and managed to increase taxation and spending by $60 billion a year yet produce worse outcomes across the board in health and education. While Bill English managed to produce zero spending increase budgets which saw improved outcomes in health and education. Labour’s first and worst mistake was abandoning the Better Public Services targets in 2017. –  David Farrar 

If that land class is better suited to growing pineapples in the future by all means I’ll grow pineapples.” He pauses. “I’d love to grow pineapples. – Rhys Roberts

I guess we feel a bit like we’re getting told that we need to pay for a prevention of a disease we already have, whilst also trying to prove that we could be the cure. – Rhys Roberts

I don’t think we have a rural divide in New Zealand, I really don’t.  

We have a divide in the way that we interpret our challenges, and at the end of the day, that’s quite common.

In a highly functional community, you’re going to have difference of opinion. If you don’t have difference of opinion, there’s going to be issues. – Rhys Roberts

It’s really hard for people to understand what farmers do and don’t do – both good and bad. – Carl Davidson

People in Christchurch are much more aware how much we depend on the rural sector: I think the earthquakes taught us that; the Covid recovery taught us that.

“The reason we’ve done OK is because we’ve got a really strong rural base. – Carl Davidson

We quickly learned as a sector that we don’t know how to tell our story, because our story is quite complex and technical and scientific, and distilling down into bite-size messaging is really hard. And so since since the 2017 election to now, we still haven’t worked out how to do that effectively, in my mind. – Sarah Perriam-Lampp

You learn a lot about the reasons why the media have been that way to date. They simply don’t know what they don’t know, and that’s not their fault. –Sarah Perriam-Lampp

The rural media has a huge amount to play in that rural-urban divide rhetoric. And I am really vocal to my colleagues in rural media about how much they contribute to a narrative that may actually be not true.

You talk to any farmers across the country, I would hand-on-heart say about 90 percent of them think they are hated, and that there is a rural-urban divide. That hasn’t been a constant message in mainstream media, that’s been a constant message in rural media.

I want to hold them to account for the detriment that they’re doing to mental health of our farmers by reiterating a rhetoric that serves them really well – the them and us. –Sarah Perriam-Lampp

When the identity of the farmer is under attack, they feel under attack. – Sarah Perriam-Lampp

These terrorists want to scare us into silence and obedience. But that won’t happen. They hate our free societies. We must protect our open democratic society. We are not the ones to adapt to terrorists … We must face the threat with more openness and democracy. – Ulf Kristersson

I should point out that Jewish people are indigenous to Jerusalem having lived there since at least 1200 BC so they were living there 2,500 years before Māori arrived in Aotearoa. https://t.co/EPL0Nc3zKh

— David Farrar (@dpfdpf) October 18, 2023

Chippie do the math’s ,the smaller the country’s population the smaller the total number of Covid deaths will be ,so stop Wowserising about how good New Zealand’s Covid response was.
 
As for having kept NZ moving and protecting those that need more help the facts don’t support your political propaganda.
 
In comparison Luxton and Seymore seem passionate about making measurable improvements that will benefit “all” New Zealanders and to misquote Sir Winston Churchill “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the failure that is the Labour Party and the beginning of a new future full of promise.” –  Sir Ray Avery 

Hey tweeters. Breathe. It’s ok. Our great country will keep being great. Some are hurt. Some are tired & hurt. I’ve been there. But it’s gonna be ok. The nasty sh$t is just nasty and unnecessary. Let’s play the next couple of weeks out with a bit of dignity. I include you media.

— Paula Bennett (@paulalbennett) October 18, 2023

Here are a few lessons for the new National-led government: set clear policy objectives and communicate them well; be consistent and principled; prioritise and sequence the desired reform agenda; keep a close eye on emerging and creeping policy problems; expect multiple ‘black swan’ events and be willing to change tack; demonstrate high ethical integrity; respect legitimate protest; and avoid short-term tactical decisions that undermine vital long-term goals. – Jonathan Boston

Over the other side, Jacinda was ready to sell her grandmother – and she did. – Ron Mark

Jacinda was prepared to sell her grandmother”.. read the headline yesterday.

A statement made by Ron Mark when interviewed about how coalition negotiations have gone in the past with NZ First. Unfortunately, he went on to say in the article that not only was she ready to sell her grandmother, but she did.

Ouch.

What an indictment on an already unpopular leader. But it should serve as a warning to Luxon and co as they head into the rocky, murky waters, that is the negotiation of coalition deals. Hopefully they don’t feel they need to sell the grandparents. – Kate Hawkesby 

For the 28th month in a row, the Reserve Bank has failed to hold inflation to within the target range. With inflation still sitting at an unsustainably high 5.6%, hardworking Kiwis struggling to make ends meet will be hurting most from this news and the only question that will matter today is for how long they will keep being punished for flagrant and wasteful Government spending?

“Whilst other nations are nearing a return to the 3% target range, Kiwis are still seeing food and fuel prices spiral out of control. Any incoming Government must hold the Reserve Bank and its leadership accountable for their failure to meet their targets. Moreso, this is simply proof that Labour’s introduction of a dual mandate for RBNZ has not worked and the Reserve Bank must return to its single focus on inflation. – James Ross

With most of the English-language global media dominated by progressives, it can be hard to get the straight story when voters reject the left’s priorities. But the votes in the Antipodes on Saturday represent victories for common sense over ideology. –  Wall Street Journal 

Given that the Right already commands the loyalty of New Zealand’s farmers and businesspersons, the electoral defection of skilled working-class Pakeha, along with New Zealanders of Indian and Chinese descent, threatens to be decisive. Statistics New Zealand calculates the European plus Asian share of the New Zealand population at 85 percent, adding for good measure that nearly 30 percent of New Zealanders were born somewhere else. While the Right clearly does not command the entirety of those demographics, the Left’s hold on what remains: essentially, the Professional-Managerial Class, Pasefika and Māori; is unequal to the task of reclaiming the power it has lost.

What the Right has won it is unlikely to lose any time soon. – Chris Trotter

If the only discourse allowed is between fellow travellers who nod heads in agreement, then it will never be robust, it will never challenge, it will never change things and you certainly won’t get the chance to argue your case or defend your corner.

Rounded out, human beings relish the debate, and I would hope that would be one of the basic criteria for any public representative; that you relish debate and you are rounded out. – Mike Hosking

We have hard times ahead to heal our country when much will be asked of us, I suspect, and we will need to do a lot more than make up our minds about our nation’s direction based on a single image and a knee-jerk reaction. – Penn Raine

I had bought my tickets in a matter of minutes without having to leave my desk. This will no doubt seem perfectly ordinary to people who do not remember what a performance buying airline tickets once was. On the other hand, when I arrived at the airport terminal all the doors except one, on the other side of the building and far away, were closed, for “technical” reasons.

Is this not a metaphor for modern life: tickets to go to the far end of the world in a matter of minutes and doors that won’t open? – Theodore Dalrymple 

In a world possibly untethered from its moorings, we retain the ability to derive joy from those events that remain within our control and to cherish milestones, large or small, or our own lives. – Damien Grant

Listening to the Maori Party leader on RNZ now what a relief it is that these apologists for terror and evil aren’t going to be part of the next NZ govt.

— Michael Reddell (@MHReddell) October 19, 2023

Fortunately, our democracy is strong. We have frequent elections that are administered independently by the Electoral Commission with clear rules and regulations.

There are always winners and losers in elections and that is determined by the public via the ballot box. We accept the result and get on with our lives, safe in the knowledge that there will be another election in three years.

On Saturday, Kiwis stood up and said enough of the division and lack of delivery, what an incredible result.

We have a democracy we can all be proud of. Our goal for the next Parliament and beyond is to unite New Zealanders and ensure we grow and develop as a nation. –  Stuart Smith

Before the Herald argues our democracy is failing and the election was bought, with no analysis of the total sums spent by all Labour-aligned compared to National-aligned institutions, the paper should refrain from undermining trust in our nation’s integrity. My impression is that overwhelmingly more money & power was brought to bear by Labour, using its affiliate organizations in the unions, media & educational “establishments” than National to try to swing the election. Even with it, the people were not fooled. – Robert MacCulloch

The rugby they play in Heaven was played by the All Blacks against the Pumas.

The rugby they play in Purgatory was played by the Springboks against England.

The rugby they play in Hell was played by England against the Springboks. –  Spiro Zavos 

Well no disrespect but that’s what happens for the rest of the country, New Zealanders…work up till Christmas, they take Christmas break and then they get back into it in the new year. It’s very similar here I think. . . 

New Zealanders voted for change, we’ve got a lot to get through, if we start earlier and have to finish later, so be it. – Christopher Luxon 

Along with the pursuit and retention of power, the essence of politics is also about the art of the possible, that is, recognising current reality and adapting to it. The awkward truth for Wellington is that while it shifted left at the recent election, the rest of the country shifted right. Wellington is now a political outlier and no amount of virtuous clinging to previously held positions is going to change that. Wellington’s leaders need to quickly come to grips with the new political realities and develop the pragmatism required to achieve at least some of what they want. Simply shouting from the sidelines about what “should” be rather than acknowledging what now “will” be, will leave them looking impotent and irrelevant. – Peter Dunne 

Wellington will only get moving once it has a coherent and financially robust plan to put before central government. This will require much more realistic leadership than holding cosy little meetings between the Mayor and the city’s local non-government MPs to mourn the loss of LGWM as they want it.

It is the reality of who holds political power and who does not, and Wellington now looks set to learn that the hard way. – Peter Dunne 

Democracy should not be rushed, and caretaker governments can do no harm, even if they can do no good. – Brent Edwards

You could call it decentralisation, meaning Wellington should no longer be in the driver’s seat for everything.

You could also call it localism, which means the same but stresses the role of local communities.

Call it subsidiarity if you want to show off your command of Latin. That means that issues should be dealt with as close to the people affected as possible.

That latter term, especially, sounds a bit academic. But really, it is just common sense. If the rubbish collection can be organised locally, there is no need for a national minister for rubbish collection. Just keep it local, thank you very much. – Oliver Hartwich

Instead of improving public services, Labour’s centralisation agenda has made matters much worse. It destroyed a few functional polytechs to create a dysfunctional mega bureaucracy. It has shifted resources from the frontline to feed an ever-burgeoning public service in Wellington. – Oliver Hartwich

If we have learned nothing else from the Election result, the following is true:

Overwhelmingly, Kiwis have made a choice that is an emphatic rejection of pretty much all the radical left plans for our future.

We and they should suck it up. – Clive Bibby 

https://twitter.com/damienmgrant/status/1717255927383183758

You’ve got to think there’s something very rotten in the state of the public service in this country that they’re carrying on —in some quarters where they know full well they’re getting cancelled— that they’re carrying on hiring people, working on projects, spending money, commissioning work.

Why? They’re not going anywhere. Three Waters, light rail, Let’s get Wellington Moving… why are people on these projects persevering when they must know it’s over? They’re gone, surely the spending stops. It’s reckless and wasteful, and smacks of a deluded sense of entitlement that they can carry on in the false belief —or maybe just arrogance— that wasting taxpayers’ money on contracts and outlay trumps the reality, which is they’re toast.

Give it up. Stop already. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on things that will be completely irrelevant and non-existent. There is a guy, as we know from yesterday, at Three Waters hiring people. What a waste of time and money.   – Kate Hawkesby

It just feels to me that while all the excuses and hot air is getting bandied about, yet more money’s being spent, or should I say wasted. And I think we as taxpayers deserve better.  

Hopefully a change in direction and a shift in priorities with this new government will refresh outdated attitudes within the public service, and this nose-in-the-trough-to-the-bitter-end mentality, will stop.  – Kate Hawkesby

On her website, she says

Gender expression can be quite fluid, and just because a child chooses to express themselves in one way now does not mean that they have to remain with that gender identity for the rest of their lives.

No – that’s not gender identity. That’s personality. That’s expressing your likes and dislikes. Girls can be more masculine-like. Boys can be more feminine-like. Girls can be doctors. Boys can be nurses. But that’s nothing to do with choosing your gender, chemicalising and castrating healthy bodies, and ignoring biology. – Bob McCoskrie

Hateful speech is not the problem. It is a symptom of a larger malaise and one that will require more than a simple legal remedy to overcome. – Damien Grant

"Every despotic regime that has ever arisen has done it through fear & fear is the great enemy of democracy. Fear will induce people voluntary to accept restrictions which in a more balanced frame of mind they would not accept"
Lord Jonathan Sumption 🎯https://t.co/QdhCFFppbF

— Ro Edge (@rosey_nz) October 29, 2023

The freedom that many people now cherish above all is the freedom from the consequences of their own actions, while other people are only too eager to take on the role of guardian and protector of the weak and supposedly incapacitated—which is to say, a large proportion of the population. Through taxation, I may be my brother’s keeper; but I am not even my own keeper. – Theodore Dalrymple

As with so many discussions these days, one feels a sense of gloom even as one enters into them. Propositions that even a few years before would have seemed so outré that no one would have thought them worth refuting become almost unchallengeable orthodoxies in a matter of a few years, if not of months; it requires courage to dispute them, at least if one has a position in an institution or organisation to protect. A subliminal fear—which sometimes is not even subliminal—stalks intellectual life. One does not so much disagree as pronounce heresies. For the moment, luckily, burning at the stake is only metaphorical. – Theodore Dalrymple

These days, one is obliged often to argue against evident absurdities. If you argue against them, however, you confer dignity upon them; but if you don’t, they go by default. I have more and more sympathy with Karl Kraus, the Viennese satirist who wrote millions of words, when he was asked what he thought of Hitler. When it comes to Hitler, he said, I can’t think of anything to say. Hitler was beneath criticism. – Theodore Dalrymple

Never let what you can’t do stop you from doing what you can do. – Jonathan Wallis, quoting his father Sir Tim.

Climate change should not be a left/right issue. But it is, and the fundamental reason for that is not, as the Left claim, that the Right is filled with “science deniers”, but because dealing with Climate Change offers the ultimate lefty wet dream of the State controlling our lives in at least as intimate detail as the old Soviets. – Tom Hunter 

These people, these Leftists, for all their crying about how much they care about humans and human society, are lying in the same way that they lied about caring about South Africa or now about Palestine or … well, pick any issue they’ve pushed over the last few decades. Agnes Walton is John Minto is Marama Davidson is Elizabeth Kerekere is…

They hate our society and wish to destroy it. That’s the real reason they’re hot on Climate Change. Science has nothing to do with it. – Tom Hunter 

Believe it or not, being exposed to opposing opinions is actually more healthy than harmful – as the good Lord noted, we appear to be “in for a period of growing authoritarianism and growing bullying of one sector of fellow citizens against another”, in part due to “a growing intolerance of dissent, a growing intolerance of opinions” that we don’t share”. – Nick Grant

My mum actually she said to me if it was my boy who’d been in [that] situation, how would you want him to feel and you wouldn’t want him to beat himself up.

Try not to be too hard on myself. I think it’s something I’m going to have live with forever, unfortunately. It’s going to hurt for a while. – Sam Cane

Look the headlines are disturbing, if you group them all together you’d just be living in a state of worry all the time.

And I know there are a lot of people getting great care with our wonderful health workforce, and deep down I still hope that the care will be there when I need it, but I’m certainly not counting on any longer in the way that I used to.   – Tim Beveridge

The new National-led coalition can only pay for the additional demands on healthcare and pensions coming from the ageing population if it gains far greater tax revenues from rapidly accelerating economic growth. – Robert MacCulloch

It’s a good thing to cut back all of the rules imposing costs on our society greater than the benefits. Labour has loved red tape, as much as lawyers have loved making money out of it. – Robert MacCulloch

Cleaning out the waste that came with the 15,000 additional bureaucrats hired under Labour will be endorsed by most of us who don’t live in Wellington. Labour enabled time-wasting and gave away power to legions of highly-paid, working-from-home, public sector managers who flourished under its lax governance.

National must do so since it has no other room to move on spending. – Robert MacCulloch

Three Waters is a business case lesson in how to take a problem and complicate it beyond recognition and leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

A problem that, badly mangled, is never that hard to actually sort – Mike Hosking 

The seeds of Labour’s election defeat were sown before the 2020 election. Labour’s extraordinary victory in 2020 on the back of its initial handling of the Covid-19 response masked the fact that the polls had been turning against it from the start of 2020. Failure to deliver on key 2017 election promises such as Kiwibuild and light rail in Auckland by 2020 had already marked the Government down as all talk, but little action. – Peter Dunne 

National comes to office at a difficult time, and with a policy agenda that will be hard to achieve. Labour’s defeat shows clearly that voters treat policy failure by governments harshly. They will be no different when it comes to assessing National’s performance at the next election. Alongside that, just holding the line will not be enough. National must not only deliver on its policy, but also substantially grow its party vote if it is to win again.

Christopher Luxon says he thrives on challenges. They do not come much bigger than the one he has just embarked on. – Peter Dunne 

For a decade or so I have trained the wisteria along one side of the house, rigging a stout wire for it to cling to and urging it on. It has responded to love as most of us do, to such an extent that it is now warping the purlins, sagging the soffit, fouling the spouting and other sins against home maintenance. And as long as I occupy this house it will continue to do so. For every October it pays its rent with a bloom-profusion, a lilac extravagance, a petal-profligacy that lifts the heart. – Joe Bennett

It is a cool morning and the bees working the wisteria are the best-named bees, the most beeish bees, bumble bees. They are chubby, hairy-bodied, bandy legged and they go to work in temperatures that leave honey bees still huddled in the hive. Some boffin once famously opined that, according to physics, bumble bees ought not to be able to fly. But that says more about physics than it does about the bees, who’ve been happily flying for 25 million years. – Joe Bennett

Bees are insects and we tend to look down on insects. We spray them and slay them. We call them bugs or creepy-crawlies or reasons not to visit Australia. But they rarely seem to resent us. And they specialise in profusion. – Joe Bennett

Insects are wisteria flowers by another name.

I watch the bees for a while, see how they crawl over the petals, mauling and fumbling, famously busy, monomaniac like all wild things, doing what they do and only what they do. Such clarity of being, such singleness of purpose in the mess of my own back yard. – Joe Bennett

Asked about caucus, Hipkins responded, “I think everybody will understand that it was pretty rough.” 

That would make a change from the typical Labour Party caucus meeting. Labour MPs recount in private that during the Ardern years, caucus was generally a time for genuflection and deference. Questions were routinely used by MPs and Ministers to praise and flatter the party leadership in a manner than one MP described as “North Korean”. On the rare occasion that MPs did try to raise concerns, they were brushed aside by Ardern amidst a chorus of “tsk tsk” and shaking heads.  – Philip Crump 

“You have to accept in a democracy… that sometimes you don’t get your way… [But] you go on campaigning for your point of view… This requires… a process of discourse in which you can discuss ideas and test them freely.” – Lord Sumption, yesterday on The Platform pic.twitter.com/md4J4zGVtE

— 🗣 Free Speech Union ✊ (@NZFreeSpeech) November 3, 2023

When things are really hard I remind myself what a privilege it is to be here and to be able to use my voice when so many women aren’t here to use theirs. They give me the strength to carry on. – Jane Ludemann

But one thing that’s certain is that as soon as we are relying on a government agency to provide all the answers, we’ve demonstrated that we’re failing as a society and as communities. When that government agency surely can only be as effective as the willingness within communities it serves to help them do their jobs.

Personally, I think the problems go a lot deeper. The ongoing narrative that people’s problems are always someone else’s fault – the lack of demanding personal responsibility, entrenched reliance on the welfare state, the list goes on. – Tim Beveridge 

Luxon has to be congratulated for consolidating everyone together in a way that seems clean and tight. Winston hasn’t been playing it out in public, Seymour has kept his cool, it all seems, so far, tickety boo.

If they can keep it that way, they’ll manage to prove all the naysayers wrong. Every person who said it would implode and that it’d be a cluster and they’d all be at war with each other… so far, so good. None of that.

The true test is if Luxon can keep it that way – if he can, he’ll be seen as a genius. I mean who’d want to wrangle Winston and David Seymour on a daily basis? Not me. Best case scenario, they don’t need Winston, and NZ First can just stay out of the fray altogether. Worst case, he’s in and he goes nuts wreaking havoc and making it all about himself and the whole thing implodes. That would be disastrous not just for Luxon, but also for our country. –  Kate Hawkesby

Great nations don’t force citizens to buy heavier cars with shorter ranges and bigger repair bills in order to stop bad weather one hundred years from now. – Jo Nova *

* Hat tip: Not PC

For a crucial fraction of the electorate – the fraction that gave Luxon victory – the election was about saving their country, about pulling it back from the brink of disintegration and disaster.

What those hundreds-of-thousands of New Zealanders are expecting from Luxon, in his first 100 days, is a full explanation for the changes and policies that so alarmed them. They want to know who made the decisions; when they were made; and why?

If Luxon wants to govern on his own terms, rather than the Woke Establishment’s, then, to borrow another Trumpian term, the “swamp” of Wellington will have to be drained. Let all the poisons in the bog come out.

Allow New Zealanders to gaze long and hard at all that was hidden from them in the capital’s dark and stagnant waters. – Chris Trotter

My impression of the health system is based on conversations with GPs struggling to keep up with patient demands, with the ED doctor who, after my son and I waited 5 hours to be seen, couldn’t stop himself telling us Auckland hospital is always at capacity for bed and waiting times, the PICU Starship nurse who felt demoralized by losing two of their PICU specialists to burnout and better options … the list goes on.

It’s those working in the system who are crying out to be heard. I’m all for taking a positive, solutions-based approach to solving problems, and yes let’s keep it in perspective, but ignoring the pleas of those working hard to provide care and services to us all is not going to boost morale. –  Francesca Rudkin

Was this an example of the precautionary principle that appears to have taken hold of the bureaucratic mind? The precautionary principle holds that all risk must be mitigated by appropriate safeguards – even, it seems, in emergencies where insistence on following the officially prescribed procedure can be the difference between life and death.

Thank God there are still situations where human initiative, courage and compassion kick in and the rulebook is set aside. Dean Brown was a shining example and so were the helicopter pilots who defied a bureaucratic edict by risking their lives rescuing survivors from Whakaari-White Island – another tragedy that showed by-the-book New Zealand officialdom in a very poor light. – Karl du Fresne

On the upside, we shouldn’t forget that Tarrant was arrested only 19 minutes after the shooting started by two courageous and quick-thinking country cops who happened to be in Christchurch for a training day. Their actions, which thwarted Tarrant’s intention to attack the Ashburton mosque, served as a reminder that for all the benefits of thorough planning and training, there’s sometimes no substitute for intuitive, decisive, on-the-spot action.

But in other respects the response appears to have been almost scandalously shambolic, which may shake New Zealanders’ confidence in the people we rely on to protect human life. – Karl du Fresne

The crucial part of the agreements will not be what is specifically agreed on, but how the parties handle things that are not specifically agreed on.

Labour’s mistake was assuming there was an implicit agreement that NZ First would support all of its policy programme, barring the things NZ First had negotiated away in coalition talks.

Big mistake. It learned very quickly that was not the case when the repeal of the three strikes law popped up. Little announced it would be repealed. NZ First announced it would not.

NZ First’s view was if an initiative was not specifically referenced in the agreement, then it had to be negotiated on separately. It meant three years of ongoing negotiations for Labour, watching its plans being scotched or watered down.

It would also pay for all three parties to remember the old “tail wagging the dog” metaphor for MMP: When small parties make demands or have an influence that goes well beyond the strength of their public support. – Claire Trevett 

Just as markets are elevating people from poverty, India’s telecom industry is eliminating the so-called digital divide.

The estimated 1 billion Indians with a smartphone have access to more information than the US President had in 1980. – Richard Prebble

A few days in India was long enough to realise that it is determined to become a developed nation. The world’s strategy of fighting climate change by restricting economic growth will fail. The answer to climate change must be technology. The world could start by assisting India to switch from coal to safe, carbon-free nuclear energy.

It is also obvious that trade with India is the way to reduce our dependence on China.  – Richard Prebble

India has 12 times more dairy cows than New Zealand. India’s farmers are a powerful voting group. We will not achieve a free trade agreement that covers milk, but our trade is more than dairy. An agreement that lowers India’s high tariffs must assist two-way trade. –

Personal relationships do matter. New Zealand has a lot of catching up to do before India becomes a core trade, economic and political partner. It will take time to achieve, so the sooner we start the better. – Richard Prebble

I don’t have any reason to think she [Willis] won’t be good. Robertson was pretty awful, and Cullen was deeply prejudiced against business, the rich, and tax cuts, and the like. She’d be less prejudiced than either of them –  Bryce Wilkinson

I don’t think it’s helpful to be honest and I don’t think it really reflects any kind of reality for any side.

I think there are other ways of expressing strong opinions about the humanitarian situation and the need for a solution to the crisis without anything that insinuates genocidal kind of consequences and that’s the way people are taking it unfortunately. –  Dr Leon Goldsmith

I think that our social cohesion is being severely tested at the moment and I really urge political leaders to demonstrate leadership and to keep in mind all communities,” Hunt said.

Of course they’ve got the right to protest, but without making others feel unsafe. . .

You can protest, you can make your views known, but without inflaming the situation, without generating fear amongst our neighbours, colleagues and constituents. People are protesting for peace, so let’s protest peacefully. – Paul Hunt

The responsible thing for politicians to be doing, is deescalating tensions in NZ. Whipping up already agitated mobs is just going to result in more arson attempts on Jewish property. Advocacy & solidarity from afar are great, but no need for violence & destruction in NZ

— Ani O'Brien (@aniobrien) November 7, 2023

People are clearly feeling strongly about this, and what they don’t need is a political leader in this country with a high profile jumping on stage and whipping up that anger or that fear.

That’s exactly what Chlöe did by using that phrase. She might argue she didn’t whip up any anger and we can’t argue against her because we can’t measure it- but I can tell you for certain that she whipped up fear.

The Jewish community, who heard what she said, had members saying that it made them feel scared. That is objectively the opposite of calming things down- which is what Chlöe should be using her position for.

Chlöe doesn’t need to apologise if she doesn’t want to, doesn’t have to back down if she doesn’t want to, she can defend the phrase and she can keep saying it- but if she cared about the New Zealand Jewish and Palestinian communities, she shouldn’t say it. –  Heather du Plessis Allan

Politicians are the oldest influencers in the world. TikTok is the place where influencers are thriving at the moment. You need to start taking pages out of TikTok influencers’ books to try and be an effective influencer in this day and age. – Sean Topham

It’s kind of funny to read some of the reckons. It’s actually quite good for my self-esteem and my ego. They make me sound a lot better than I think I am from time to time, in cahoots with Rupert Murdoch and everyone else, stringing the world together and, uh, pulling the strings. But that’s just not the case. – Sean Topham

 

Being a woman is entirely biological. That’s all it is. There is literally nothing more to it. It’s almost boring.

And if you think that being a woman is an identity not biology, all you’re doing is just completely redefining “woman” to suit the men who make an outrageous claim.

— Sall Grover (@salltweets) November 9, 2023

The Domestic Purposes Benefit has been variously described as a “disaster” (David McLoughlin 1995), an “economic lifeline” (Jane Kelsey 1995) and “an unfortunate experiment” (Muriel Newman 2009).

Its effect on family formation can never be definitively ascertained. But the growth of the sole parent family dependent on welfare has correlated with more poverty, more child abuse and more domestic violence. Each of these was intended to be reduced by the introduction of the DPB.  – Lindsay Mitchell

Police report that family violence is at record levels – single welfare dependent females are the most vulnerable to partner violence according to victim surveys.  The correlation between substantiated child abuse and appearing in the benefit system is incredibly strong.  – Lindsay Mitchell

While benefits became more generous, easier to access and stay on under Ardern’s regime of “kindness”, any remaining obligations to the taxpayer became passe. There is no sign whatsoever that a resumption of deserving and non-deserving considerations will make a comeback. In fact, morality is ever more remote. Widows who become sole providers through no fault of their own are no longer differentiated from gang women who produce children as meal tickets. No distinction is made between reasons for ‘need’ and the taxpayer is expected to like it or lump it, despite the fact that fifty years of trying to solve social problems with cash payments has only made them worse.  – Lindsay Mitchell

Go figure!?! pic.twitter.com/zViowU8z5w

— Marie Magdalen (@femalemagic) November 14, 2023

There are always people who say I’m not a proper Māori because I don’t go to a marae. The way I look at it, some people have a religious faith but don’t necessarily go to church every Sunday. And I don’t think it’s right to tell people they’re wrong about their identity because they don’t live it the same way that you do. I think we need to be a bit more accepting of people and a bit more accepting of difference.

I did notice that Māori, on average, are disadvantaged. But I’ll make a couple of points. One is that it’s not only Māori who are disadvantaged. There are also non-Māori who are disadvantaged economically and socially. And some people live with a disability that makes their life harder for them.

And the second is that not all Māori are disadvantaged. Growing up in Northland, I’d see Māori who were extremely successful and don’t face much disadvantage at all.

When people say Māori are disadvantaged, that does a disservice to non-Māori who face the same challenges. So, I don’t think we should be looking at disadvantage and categorising people according to race.

The number one thing that I’m opposed to is the thinking that there’s a Māori world or a Māori way of thinking. Well, for some people there might be, but it doesn’t make you any less Māori if you don’t subscribe to that world view.

And it’s not helpful if your true commitment is to address disadvantage for all people. Disadvantage and Māori are not one and the same. – David Seymour

New Zealand does need to have that debate, because the way the Treaty is currently interpreted is increasingly divisive – and I agree with Dame Anne Salmond, who says that the Treaty would never have required the public sector to be split down the middle and co-governed by two races.

That debate needs to occur, even though there are some people who don’t want it exposed to any sunlight. – David Seymour

There are a lot of vulnerable people in desperate need, and everything is just focused on someone’s ancestry. – Casey Costello

It is worth analysing the report as it reveals the overall health system performance is very poor and is getting worse. It records what is probably the most staggering decline in health system performance ever. – Michael Hundleby

 A Government’s legacy is defined by its accomplishments when it leaves office, not by what is written about it at the outset.

In history, good intentions count for nothing. It is achievements and results that matter.  – Oliver Hartwich

There is no point in incremental reform when, for example, half of our students do not attend school regularly and a similar proportion cannot read and write at an adult level. 

Incremental reform is not enough when hospitals have long waiting lists and people have difficulty registering with doctors. 

It is not enough to make incremental reforms when gangs and retail crime plague our inner cities. 

All these social and economic ills require more than small steps. They require root and branch reform. 

Future historians will judge the new Government by its results. The new government will only be deemed successful if it fundamentally turns this country around. – Oliver Hartwich

There is, invariably, a huge amount of pressure to close any corporate deal and with that, pressure to concede points or fudge issues.  Experienced dealmakers will, however, use every minute until closing to negotiate and re-negotiate the terms of their deal, often to the exasperation of their own advisors.  Knowing that they will need to live with those terms for years and that those terms will largely determine the success of the deal, they will often hold out longer than anyone expected to secure the best possible terms.

By contrast, negotiating a bad deal will get you fired from Unilever and any other top corporation. No-one cares if you did the deal quickly if the terms suck.  – Philip Crump

But to the larger question being posed at the moment: will Luxon be feeling ‘humiliated’ by the length of time that all this is taking? No, not at all. I doubt he cares a jot. 

Political opponents and some commentators are eager to hang that label around his neck but as soon as an agreement is reached – and all indications are that it is still a day or two away – the focus will shift very quickly to the terms of the deal and the business of government. And that is where the party leaders will be judged. 

Time spent now agreeing a fulsome coalition agreement will undoubtedly be time well spent.  – Philip Crump

The FMG Young Farmer of the Year rewarded me with so much more than a chainsaw.

So if you’re young enough, kind of a farmer, or just love beer and s*** yarns, sign up and see what you can learn.

One day in the future at a pub quiz you might have the winning answer to “What is the name of a baby mussel?” It’s spat.

Or – be able to assist in circulating blood around a body with compressions for seven or eight minutes and actually help someone else with living.

And, if you’re quick enough, your beer won’t even go flat. – Pete Fitz-Herbert

I’m as impatient as the next guy but can we cut Luxon some slack here? He’s dealing with Winston. He’s dealing with two parties, both deeply ambitious, principled and headstrong, and one of them has Winston at the helm.

That makes this entire negotiation of talks that he’s enduring.. all the more harder I reckon. I also don’t buy into the media’s timeline. This is not one of the longest negotiations on earth. Not by a long shot. And I don’t believe it started the day we counted votes either. That’s unfair to start the clock from there. – Kate Hawkesby

I just don’t trust Winston Peters when he says he’s working really hard and it’s constructive.. and he tries to look urgent about it. It feels like he’s just saying all that to put us off the scent .. to make us think it’s not him being the stick in the mud. It’s part of his chameleon character.. say one thing, do another, who knows.

I just know that when it comes to politics, David Seymour and Winston Peters are seasoned pros .. Seymour I believe would play with a straight bat, Peters not so much. But together they could really be forcing National to jump through some hoops. If that’s the case and the deal is shoddy then we can fairly criticize Luxon at that point, but this pasting he’s getting from the media now, just seems a bit premature. – Kate Hawkesby

All mainstream media ideally should strive to reflect the society they serve, but state-owned media especially. Stories that pander to the prejudices of the bullying metropolitan Left strike a jarring note now that the country has moved on.– Karl du Fresne 

In the 1990s, international agencies and legal experts finally began to see violence against women as a particular category of war crime. Organizations like UN Women exist to protect women from such crimes, while Israeli experts and activists have been involved in these international efforts. Thus, our second shock: The inconceivable and unforgiveable silence of these organizations when faced with the rape and murder of Israeli women.

It is not that condemnations of gender-based violence by Hamas have been weak or insufficient – there have been none at all. Statement after statement by organizations like UN Women, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) have failed to condemn these crimes. They failed us, and all women, at this critical moment. – Michal Herzog

Seriously, Fitch Group, I presume you’re not based in New Zealand.

I presume you haven’t been living here for a number of years because I don’t know about you, and I would really, really like to find out, but even without a government I feel the country is more stable and positive than when we had one that had been elected in a landslide. – Kerre Woodham 

I feel more positive than I have for many years. And I don’t know if that’s just because we don’t have to hear of yet more tales of ineptitude, that we don’t have to see money being squandered. The new government may well end up being inept and squander our money, as I say, they are as yet untested, but at least we don’t have to report on it on a daily basis, because that was grinding my gears.

Maybe it’s because we’re not talking about stuff ups and wanton wastefulness, having a break from talking politics, perhaps.

Maybe it is simply as banal as it changing from winter to spring and summer, but I certainly feel far more positive with no government than I did with one elected in a landslide.  – Kerre Woodham

Rather than punching above its weight, New Zealand has fallen into widespread mediocrity. It faces significant environmental challenges. The ‘friendly’ people part remains largely true, although New Zealand has many social issues. – Oliver Hartwich

The gulf between self-perception and reality makes New Zealand’s economic decline even more galling. New Zealanders like to think of themselves as free traders and innovators. However, they are only ranked 62^nd in international trade, 53^rd in international investment, and 53^rd in productivity and efficiency. – Oliver Hartwich

But perhaps the most significant chasm between Kiwi self-mythology and reality lies in the social sphere. Yes, New Zealanders are a friendly bunch, but they are no longer egalitarian.

As a nation, New Zealand is being pulled apart. One fault line runs between those who can still afford homes or have owned them for many years, and others for whom home ownership will always remain out of reach.

This is an entirely self-inflicted problem. Caused by restrictive planning laws that empower NIMBYism, made worse by lack of infrastructure funding, New Zealand has built too few homes for decades. This failure produced an entirely predictable housing shortage. Ours is one of the world’s most unaffordable housing market.

Even so, New Zealand’s failing education system is an even more pressing issue.

New Zealand once had a decent, even world-class, education system. It certainly does not today. In international rankings of student achievement, New Zealand has dropped dramatically. – Oliver Hartwich

Housing and education are two areas in which failed policies have created and exacerbated social divisions. Another is health, in which the state now provides some basic cover, but anyone who can buys private insurance on top. In each of these cases, only people on higher incomes can purchase better service whereas those cannot afford that are stuck with poor baseline offerings.

All of this belies New Zealand’s self-image as a relatively class-less society.

The new Government must reform New Zealand to catch up with its self-mythology. – Oliver Hartwich

With a bold reform agenda, the kiwi would grow wings. New Zealand can build an economy, society and environment that lives up to its lofty self-image.

Otherwise, New Zealand’s story about itself will be nothing more than an ancient myth. – Oliver Hartwich

Money for the unemployed doesn’t come from the government, it comes from the workers.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) November 22, 2023

Each party had a specific manifesto that the voters voted for and as part of the due diligence each party has to as far as possible deliver on the promises made to their constituents.

This will be a negotiation of unpreceded proportions to ensure that each party delivers as far as possible on the promises they made to their voters but this common sense perspective has eluded the Mainstream Woke Media who make a living out of muckraking.

Let’s give these parties the time they need to deliver on the promises they made to their voters.

I think it may deliver a better NZ.

What your media guys are doing is not helpful and frankly shows a significant lack of intelligence and perhaps malevolence, perhaps a residue of the Labour Governments media funding.
– Ray Avery 

You have to commend, firstly, Chris Luxon. The media gave him a ridiculous serve over his mergers and acquisition claims. Even if you suggest, and I probably do, that he shouldn’t have spruiked his credentials 20 days shows, details pending, he delivered.

But that is the Luxon story so far isn’t it?

The media, who have been shockingly exposed these past six years over their bias, decided Luxon was a clown, couldn’t connect, didn’t know politics and was set for a fall.

Yet, look at the proof. He fixed National, won the election and stitched together a three party deal in less than three weeks.

You also have to commend David Seymour and Winston Peters. There were no leaks, plenty of professionalism and Seymour, as I have said, gets extra kudos for being pretty available to tell us, within constraint, what was going on.

The potential here is huge.

MMP has been ropey. Too many deals have not been delivered, too many people have fallen out and too many parties have been punished, even vanished, as part of deals.

This one might end up the same. But my gut says it’s got a better-than-even chance of actually being a hit. – Mike Hosking

The coolest person in the room now though is Nicola Willis, isn’t she? Not interested in the baubles, more interested in the business of governing, she says she never wanted to be deputy PM, Seymour and Peters can scrap it out between them, she’s back to home to Wellington to see her 4 young kids who’re missing their Mum. I mean she’s all class and so far, looks like the most mature of the lot of them. I think in her saying what she said, she clearly showed the others up for what they are and removed herself from the fray. Good on her.

She’s keen to get on with governing, showing she’s truly about the good of the country, not the good of her ego. – Kate Hawkesby

Ethnic Cleansing 101 pic.twitter.com/MfmgJrwads

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) November 22, 2023

It is genuinely an awesome responsibility and so I think the ceremony is incredibly weighty that actually every minister understands the responsibility that they have.

As I said, it is a really special privilege to do public service, that’s why we genuinely leave what we’re doing and actually come to this place, to try and advance the lives of all Kiwis, and that’s what we’ve gotta do as a government. – Christopher Luxon

The problem with downward spirals is that they create a population fearful of change. Where people believe in an economy as a zero-sum game, or as a cake of fixed size whose slices can only be enlarged at the expense of other slices, they become desperate to preserve their slice, no matter how small it is because of the very policies that have made it so. Thus, they want the continuation of the policy that guarantees them a slice, even if that slice is ever smaller and cannot expand.  – Theodore Dalrymple

As the new ministry goes about improving our economic performance and legislating equal rights for all New Zealanders, those who favour special privileges for themselves and anyone with a Māori ancestor will try a variety of tactics from breaking parliamentary protocols to marching in the streets. There have already been threats of violence.

This will be the new ministry’s first test. Equal rights for all and special privileges for no one on the basis of ancestry. New Zealand’s once proud reputation for being a liberal democracy needs to be re-asserted. Chris Luxon, David Seymour and Winston Peters we are relying on you to stay strong in defence of the package you have put together. – Michael Bassett

Breaking ……5.5 million hostages held in small remote Pacific Island nation for 2,300 days liberated by “blue army” today.
Left wing hostage takers call for immediate truce so they can look for jobs ( just kidding )

— Leo Molloy (@LeoMolloyNZ) November 27, 2023

Given the hysterical media coverage over the weekend, it appears that the some in the media will be the de facto political opposition in the country until such time as Labour can recover from its shellacking.

But what the press gallery is yet to understand is that neither Luxon, nor his coalition partners, are in the least bit interested or concerned about school yard tittle tattle dressed up as political commentary. It was in fact a key reason why Luxon was able to so quickly establish unity within his caucus after taking over the leadership of the party.

The public will rightly judge the coalition on results. New Zealand cannot suffer another three years of incompetent or dysfunctional government. The country has voted for its team of rivals and it’s now up to the team to deliver for New Zealand. – Philip Crump

It really was quite a staggering feat of linguistic gymnastics to avoid the words ‘women’ and ‘mothers’ in information about maternity, which may be useful to …. er …women and mothers. And this in a country where a Plain Language bill got passed in 2022. . . 

So, why do we mangle women’s language, but not men’s? I’m guessing that’s because it’s women’s language, and not men’s. Men who say they’re women don’t like to be reminded that they’re not actually women by the use of language for women; and women who say they’re men don’t like to be reminded that they’re not actually men by use of the language for women. – Katrina Biggs

The transgenderism debate isn’t about whether we should help those with a very rare identity disorder.

Of course we should!

The transgenderism debate is about whether we should redefine all of biology, the family, sexuality and reality itself to help them.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) November 29, 2023

Anecdotally, I have seen tweets (Xs?) and Facebook posts from well-meaning white people sending “aroha” and even apologising to Māori for the incoming government. There is a bizarre virtue-signalling class who are in a downward spiral and haven’t worked out that a white person apologising to a Māori person about policies put forward by parties led by Māori people is a bit weird. – Ani O’Brien

Why are the perspectives of, for example, Te Pati Māori taken as somehow more valid than the Māori MPs in other parties. Apart from their choice of name, which conveys some kind of authoritative voice, they have no mandate from Māori nor New Zealanders in general to be the passers of judgment on behalf of all Māori. – Ani O’Brien

Is it really appropriate for media to convey that there is one “right” way to think and be Māori and bestow legitimacy on the voices of some Māori but not others?

We certainly don’t want to get into who looks the most Māori nor who has the most “Māori blood”. This takes us down a path of blood quantum, which is an inevitably hideous path to tread. Likewise, counting ancestors shouldn’t be used to rank Māoriness.

If we were to judge on such superficial grounds, people like Mihingarangi Forbes and Kelvin Davis, who are very connected to their Māori heritage, would be considered less Māori than someone with darker skin but equally as Māori as David Seymour. It is a fool’s errand to pursue these measures.

What the past few days have shown us is that there is no single way to be Māori and no single set of politics that should be attributed to Māori as a collective. – Ani O’Brien

The coalition agreements contain matters that relate to race relations in New Zealand, and we should be mature enough to have conversations that take us forward not backward. The media will be reporting on these issues, and it is crucial that, as in all matters, they don’t pick a side. It isn’t any newspaper’s or broadcaster’s role to tell readers “this is what good Māori think”.

Media will play a pivotal role in how far tensions are driven up and it is the responsibility of every journalist and platform to ensure neutrality. Whether they are too far gone down entrenched political positions remains to be seen. – Ani O’Brien

When people talk about media bias, they mean things like making a big thing about a leading politician inaccurately calling something the corrupt act of bribery, but not making a big thing about a different leading politician inaccurately calling something the crime of genocide. https://t.co/zFg88VNNmD

— Graeme Edgeler (@GraemeEdgeler) November 29, 2023

As power and privilege are never surrendered voluntarily, the bureaucracy and interest groups will fight to retain regulations. While the civil service goes on holiday, in January ministers should take the opportunity to make another list of damaging regulations and repeal them. Repealing red tape must be a top priority.

The new Government has inherited a mess. The economy is close to recession. Inflation is still raging. There are huge deficits in health, education and infrastructure. Too many able-bodied adults are on welfare. All those problems are easier to solve in a growing economy.

Cutting red tape is the only low-cost, immediate way to liberate the New Zealand economy’s entrepreneurial spirit.

There is another more important reason why we need a regulatory standards law: unaccountable bureaucrats passing arbitrary regulations make the citizen powerless while transferring privileges to the few. It is corrupting of society.

The power to make regulations has been abused to pander to populist calls that “there ought to be a law” and to grant favours to vested interests.

A Regulatory Standards Act will curb the state’s unbridled power.

The vast expansion of the administrative state is undermining liberty in all Western democracies. The Regulatory Standards Act will be New Zealand’s most significant contribution to democratic government since women’s suffrage. – Richard Prebble 

A broken education system leads to breakdowns in other areas of society. It produces young adults who are ill-prepared for working life and university. This results in a generation of workers who are less knowledgeable and skilled than their forebears and easily distracted by the things they have been coached to be confident on, such as grievances.

Even worse than an education system that fails to educate, is an education system that has become deeply politicised. Such a system prioritises producing young adults who think identically politically over teaching them skills and imparting information with which they can form their own opinions.

New Zealand finds itself in the unenviable position of failing to educate as well as being thoroughly politicised. This is the result of decades of internal activism.  – Ani O’Brien

Collaboration between Act and National on education will be necessary to achieve the change both parties claim to seek. Their success will depend on how firm Christopher Luxon and his Government are about political neutrality in the public service. Senior bureaucrats unwilling or unable to adjust to the directions of a National-led Government must go. Without emphatic demand for public servants to reform themselves and get on board with the new Government’s programmes, the tail will simply continue to wag the dog.

In this sense, the greatest challenge facing education in New Zealand is also the greatest challenge facing justice, health, transport, etcetera. – Ani O’Brien

We are witnessing a social tragedy in the making. Children are being divided into ethno-religious identity groups and turned against one another. Chanting slogans like ‘From the river to the sea’ makes it less likely that those kids in Bethnal Green will ever befriend a Jew, let alone beg their parents to visit a Jewish bakery after church or mosque. Children’s tender arteries are being turned into tributaries of hate.

What is happening in London cannot be laid solely at the feet of the anti-Israel protest movement. The poison of identitarianism must assume the bulk of the blame for the cultural dismemberment of society. We have a mayor who constantly preaches difference over unity. We have a Metropolitan Police so paralysed by fear of being called racist that they make endless excuses for anti-Semitic demonstrators. And we have a national broadcaster that refuses to call Hamas terrorists, while happily instructing non-white children that they are under the yoke of ‘white privilege’.

We are confronted with a choice right now. We can continue pushing children into silos of racial and religious hatred. Or we can start forging a society free of identity politics which aims to bring people of all backgrounds together. I know which path the London of my childhood would choose. – Ike Ijeh

For most legacy media the PIJF bribe was like your partner offering you money to sleep with them. Thanks for the money but I was pretty keen to let you have your way with me in the first place. #nzpol

— Sean Plunket (@SeanPlunket) November 30, 2023

 

We came back to mainstream and it was horrendous. Largely it’s a different environment working in the public sector.

It’s bureaucratic, the bureaucracy [is] amazing. The thing about partnership schools… it is one of the first times I have experienced what freedom felt like. You were given resources, you were told, ‘Here’s what you need to achieve, how you do that’s your business,’ and we overachieved. – Raewyn Tipene

Individual Maori make decisions every day about their own work and wellbeing. They’re perfectly capable people. Why do they need the patronisation of a government? Or aThere was nothing in Te Tiriti requiring that. Nothing requiring they be in government — even though many are, on their own merits. – Peter Cresswell

She’s conflating two people here. Individual Maori do have control over their own health. And always have, And did just as much before the creation of the separatist health organisation that has missed all its own agreed targets. (Waikato Tainui leader Parekawhi Maclean saying (very kindly): “its inability to put in place the necessary level of capability and capacity to progress its key functions had hampered performance.”)

What she means is that some Maori have control over other the health of other Maori. Why does shared ancestry make that necessary? How does that help an individual’s health outcomes?

I am hardly an advocate myself for a government health system of any kind. But a separatist system seems the worst of both worlds, particularly for individual Maori concerned with their own health, and forced into this system, for whom results have been less than stellar. Suggesting that prioritising kaupapa over medicine is perhaps not the best idea. – Peter Cresswell

She’s not calling for all New Zealanders to be equal as individuals — i.e., each of us enjoying equal individual rights and privileges under law per the third Treaty clause.  What she’s after instead — what she and others in her elite strata have worked so hard for, to achieve that momentum — is for Māori as a collective to be made equal in political power to the government. With a Māori elite distributing the spoils.

That, to her and to many others, is what “partnership” truly means. Political power. 

It’s a patronising collectivist vision that looks to government for power and largesse, and to individuals of every ancestry to be milch cows. It’s not one envisioned by either treaty.

One-hundred and eighty-three years ago, Te Tiriti emancipated Māori slaves, and put an end to the idea that the mass of men here had been born with saddles on their back, with a few rangatira booted and spurred to ride them. That was the effect of Te Tiriti: to free taurekareka. – Peter Cresswell

New Zealanders elected a government that will treat people equally, regardless of their race. The sooner the Māori Party comes to terms with that – and start providing solutions for Māori instead of divisive theatrics – the better.

— David Seymour (@dbseymour) December 4, 2023

The people have spoken, and the people want the country back on track.

The people, as I read it, wanted less divisive policy and a focus on reducing crime and tackling the cost of living. – Tim Dower

Alcoholism is no joke. It is a debilitating disorder and one that can take a mammoth toll on professional and personal lives. Overcoming such an addiction takes hard work and a lot of support. It is simply unfathomable to think that Whanau will be able to do so while in such a high-pressure role and under such intense scrutiny. It is not a fair expectation.

If we learn from Allan’s experience, we should be setting aside all politics to help Whanau take the action that is best for her. That includes the politics of those who benefit from her remaining in office. – Ani O’Brien

The key component in Whanau’s case is the repeated evidence that her struggles with alcohol are affecting her ability to carry out her duties. The right thing for all involved to do is to support the mayor to resign and focus on her wellbeing. It is right not only for her, but also for Wellington. The city is a shambles and desperately needs a mayor and council who aren’t distracted by scandals and pulling out of meetings. – Ani O’Brien

“Smokefree Aotearoa 2025″ is an aspirational goal like “Road to Zero”, to eliminate road deaths by 2050, “Predator Free 2050″ and the idea of a Covid-free New Zealand. Aspirational goals are dangerous. Politicians abuse the power of the state in a vain attempt to achieve the impossible. – Richard Prebble

The Minister of Health, Shane Reti, is correct. Reversing Smokefree 2025 will not stop the steady decline in smoking rates. Smoking is reducing because it is uncool. Even smokers think smoking is dumb. Only the state can make smoking cool again by making it illegal, so smoking becomes an act of rebellion. – Richard Prebble

Last week, critics suddenly discovered the existence of tobacco taxes and claimed these taxes would pay for National’s tax cuts. But the $2 billion in tobacco tax revenue is already in the Budget. Successive governments have used tobacco taxes as a transfer from the poor to pay for policies like tax relief for Hollywood studios and the like.

The most effective way to reduce child poverty would be a reduction in the tax on cigarettes, so they are not cheap, but not ruinously expensive either. – Richard Prebble

Tobacco taxes are a prime reason for child poverty and homelessness.

Poverty kills. A study on WebMD states that as many people in the US die of poverty as they do from Alzheimer’s. As well as counting the lives saved by cigarette taxes, we should count the lives lost through increasing poverty. – Richard Prebble

Smoking is a leading cause of death. The major cost falls on the smoker. The fact that smokers are likely to suffer premature death is not a justification for reducing them and their children to poverty.

Then there are the unintended consequences of Smokefree New Zealand. Do the critics think dairies are ram-raided for candy? – Richard Prebble

Tobacco taxes have caused a rise in crime.

The Ministry of Health is alarmed at the explosion in vaping.

Smokers tell me it is easier to buy P than tobacco. The P epidemic has coincided with the prohibitive price of cigarettes. – Richard Prebble

It is ironic that Te Pāti Māori, which blames all ills on colonialism, is demanding the Government impose smoking policies on Māori – a form of 21st-century colonialism.

Surely there will be a future Waitangi Tribunal claim that by levying so much tax on tobacco, governments knowingly reduced many Māori to poverty. – Richard Prebble

Hate crime laws that force you to call men “women” or woman “men” are doubly immoral because they are (1) compelling you (2) to lie.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) December 4, 2023

Perhaps to some I am a walking contradiction—you know, a part-Māori boy, raised in a State house by a single parent on the benefit, now a proud National Party MP in a deeply rural farming electorate in the middle of the South Island—but there is no contradiction there. Members opposite do not own Māori. Members opposite do not own the poor. Members opposite do not own the workers. No party and no ideology has a right to claim ownership over anything or anyone.

We, on this side of the House, are a broad church: town and country, liberal and conservative, old and young, and professionals and workers. What unites us is our fundamental belief that it’s the individual family unit that knows what’s best for their family—not the State, not the Government, and not us. It’s not the State that saved my family; it was my mum. She took responsibility for our situation. When we fall on hard times, as we all will at some stage, it’s our neighbours and our community that should rally around in support. Only after that does the State become our safety net, as the neighbour of last resort.

Our system should be one which helps pick us up when we fall but which then gets out of the way when we’re back on our feet and lets us lives our lives. The job of Government must be to create a system which makes it as easy as possible for good people to make the right decisions. But, instead, we have a system which creates broken families and turns good people into lost souls. It’s not right, and it must change.

I truly believe that social investment is that change. When we see people as having agency and dignity in their own right, rather than just as numbers on a spreadsheet, we will have a just society. When we look at spending as an investment rather than a cost, we can focus on outcomes that benefit not only the health and wellbeing of the individual but also the back pocket of the taxpayer. That’s what social investment does. – James Meager 

Good programmes should be enriched, and bad ones should be cast aside. We don’t need complicated audits and reporting mechanisms for community organisations to administer taxpayer-funded programmes. The Government has this information. It can do the work to measure those programmes against long-term individual outcomes in health and education, in reduced welfare-dependency and better housing, and in lower crime and lower drug and alcohol use. All we need is to be more reasonable, be more sensible, and be more savvy with the use of this data. – James Meager 

This is why we are all here: to debate freely; to have an open, robust contest of ideas; to challenge one another in an environment where disputes are resolved by the showing of hands and not by the throwing of fists. We are here to represent the people who put us here. And some of us are here to disrupt and to challenge the status quo, and I get that—no, I really do. But in doing so, we must respect this institution; we must respect its traditions, and, importantly, we must respect those who have come before us and who have cleared the way for our many voices to be heard. We are here to fight for what we believe in, each and every one of us, without fear or favour, laying aside all personal interests. – James Meager 

Unfortunately, the more involved a Government becomes in people’s business, and businesses, for that matter, the worse things seem to get. In life, I have seen how different Governments have impacted communities through business. I have seen years where small businesses have become untenable, mum and pop owners sell to corporates, corporates grow, employment relations break down, unions grow, and service diminishes, and at some point along the way, the wind changes and the sun comes out. Instead of playing political whack-a-mole, I strongly believe in Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand. The argument for limited Government is a strong one, which is one of the many reasons why I stand here on this side of the House. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but you can’t spend your way out of every problem, nor can you regulate your way out of it. All you get is debt and dependency. –  Katie Nimon 

New Zealand is under new management. We are here because people believe that we are the parties that can get things done; that’s why you elect parties on this side of the House. Just like there are laws of nature and there are laws of physics, there are laws of politics. Because if you want lower tax, you vote for us. If you want the Government books managed well, you vote for us. If you want to create more opportunities for everyone, you vote for us. New Zealanders get it, and New Zealanders want it, and that’s why they elected the parties in this coalition government. They know that we will get things done, and that those things will be the things that matter to them. New Zealanders want National, ACT, and New Zealand First to be the strong government that New Zealand needs. They want us to deliver, and I am telling you, we will. – Christopher Luxon

Now, on this side of the House, we all came to politics to make a positive change for the country that we love, that we are proud of, and that we see so much potential in. We are going to manage the economy well. Now that we’ve rescued it from Labour, we’ll nurse it back to health. We will ease the cost of living. In fact, we’ve already started. We will restore law and order. The coalition parties separately and together as a Government are absolutely committed to offenders facing real consequences for their crimes, and are committed to New Zealanders feeling safe in their homes and their businesses and in their communities. We are going to get public services working better, because when you care about people—and we care deeply about people—you don’t just wring your hands and look anguished and spout rhetoric. Looking anguished doesn’t take an hour off an emergency wait-list in an emergency department. You need to actually get stuck in, sort it out, and actually get things done to make the difference.

We are about attitudes on this side of the House, not platitudes. Our attitude to public money is to respect the people who actually earn it. We’re going to do that by letting the people who earn it keep more of it. That part of it that they hand over in tax, we will spend on helping New Zealanders get ahead, and on making this great country even better, with better education, more support for the stretched health workforce, better and faster roads, less red tape, more renewable energy, and more initiatives to increase New Zealand’s prosperity so that we can all get ahead. We’re about increasing incomes and outcomes. I have to say that I’ve had many impressive briefings already with very good senior public servants in the past few days. When they come in with their good ideas for actually achieving what the Government wants, I say to them, “That’s great, but how do we do it faster?” Because good execution matters, and that’s measured by results and it is measured by outcomes. – Christopher Luxon

 And make no mistake, Labour earned its loss. It worked hard for it. Labour wasted time, they squandered public money, and they made this great country and its people miss out on opportunities. MPs on that side of the House put Labour ideology and dogma ahead of New Zealand’s interests and New Zealand punished them for it. Let it be a reminder to all of us in this House that we are actually here to represent the people and their needs—that’s what we’re here to do. – Christopher Luxon

So, I have to say, there is hope. There is a Government that appreciates that businesses provide jobs and opportunities for other New Zealanders. Business owners and managers understand that their greatest resource is their team. It is by working together that the team grows the business, and it creates better wages and more opportunities and more jobs. That’s the National way of looking at it—it’s the aspirational way. We say it takes a lot of courage to start a small business and to employ people, and those who do it well should be extremely proud of what they do. – Christopher Luxon

All this took place against a backdrop of wall-to-wall weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth over the election of a government that the priestly media caste doesn’t approve of. I can’t recall any new government being confronted with such intense, naked hostility from people whom the public expect to be fair, neutral and balanced.  – Karl du Fresne

Note too the deafening media silence over incendiary statements from Maori politicians – among them, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer’s allegations of “systemic genocide” and “state-sponsored terrorism”, which bordered on unhinged, and Willie Jackson’s threats of “war” and civil unrest “five times worse” than the 1981 Springbok tour, which were tantamount to an incitement to violence.

These intemperate verbal eruptions pass unremarked by the media high priests, as did the circus at the swearing-in of MPs yesterday when the Maori Party wilfully made a mockery of parliamentary procedure. Those same Maori MPs would not take it well – and neither should they – if visitors to a marae refused to honour protocol and tradition. Why do they not show the same respect for the institution to which they have been elected? And why do media commentators appear united in their determination not to denounce the debasement of the House of Representatives that sits at the heart of New Zealand’s system of government? 

All this follows six years during which the mainstream media gave a free pass to probably the most extremist government in New Zealand history. Time and again under Ardern, dodgy law changes went unreported and issues that reflected badly on the government were either treated as invisible or played down until exposure by online platforms made them impossible to ignore. Now journalists have suddenly and miraculously rediscovered the critical scrutiny mechanism that inexplicably lay dormant for two terms under Labour. – Karl du Fresne

Ultimately, it all comes down to democracy and respect for the will of the people. For six years New Zealand had a government the media approved of. Voters emphatically signalled on October 14 that they wanted a change, but the priestly media caste is tone-deaf to the public mood and can’t bring itself to accept the decision. The petulant media campaign of resistance against the coalition government is, above all, a massive gesture of contempt for the voters. Or should I say the deplorables? – Karl du Fresne

Our recent pitiful leadership on law and order is the product of 5 generations of nearly unbroken civil peace. We’ve been electing contemptible diversity displays. They’ve no understanding of the need for courage and unwavering determination, to sustain tolerant respect for the equal rights of all.

Watching the Greens defend thuggery here as well as rape and murder overseas is helping to bring the necessary changes. –  Stephen Franks 

With her 2019 recommendations Kiro was instrumental in creating the conditions for the number of beneficiaries to increase.

In March 2018, when she began her welfare investigation, there were 273,387 beneficiaries. Now there are 367,152. What sat at 9.3 percent of working-age New Zealanders has risen to 11.5 percent; most worryingly 168,276 children in benefit-dependent families grew to 216,648.

What a rich irony to hear the architect of such  ill-advised reforms forced to describe their result, and advise their removal. One wonders if Ardern had considered this possibility when she appointed Cindy Kiro Governor General in 2021? It is doubtful. Foresight was never her strong point.

Dame Cindy Kiro will remain Governor General until 2026. But she has always been a friend and ally of left-wing governments. Perhaps she deserves kudos for professionally delivering a speech which must have personally rankled. At least she did it with dignity and grace. A lesson there-in for opposition MPs who have showed very little over the past two days.  – Lindsay Mitchell

So even if you speak, or understand te reo, are the names “gifted” to govt departments by poets and reified reo speakers understandable? Or unintentionally confusing? Or perhaps the confusion is intentional, to help immunise them against criticism. (Hard to criticise, say, Te Konihana Tauhokohoko, if you have no idea who they are what they do.)

Anyway, here below, to help you out, in no particular order, is a rough literaltranslation of the names of some common departments and ministries (based first on the Māori-English dictionaries of Williams (1844), and then Ryan (1983), and then Google Translate for more recent neologisms like Kaipāho, Manatū, Haumaru, Konihana etc). Many seem more about poetry — sometimes good poetry  — than they do about communicating well (“Memory Room” for archives sounds good, and who wouldn’t like the “Power of Distant Lightning”; whereas “Stranger Service” sounds like something that might be offered just off K Rd).

So, often, only those in the know would know… – Peter Creswell 

How much of the overall $21 billion that goes on education gets soaked up by ideologues at the Ministry or wasted on endless reviews and rehashings of the system is a mystery.

But you get what you pay for in life and education is no exception.

Maybe this is another area like infrastructure, health, and immigration, where we need less political meddling and to-ing and fro-ing with each change of government, and more of a long term, locked in plan.

Just think what we could achieve in productivity, creativity and quality of life, if every kid had the chance those at our best schools do now. – Tim Dower 

Almost every rich country preaches far more than it delivers. This is exemplified by the European Union, which has promised more than anyone else, yet — when forced by Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine to cut off gas imports — went looking in Africa for more oil, gas and coal. Meanwhile, almost every poor country understandably prioritizes prosperity, which means abundant, cheap and reliable energy — which still means fossil fuels.

Underpinning the climate summit farce is one big lie repeated over and over: that green energy is on the verge of replacing fossil fuels in every aspect of our lives. – Bjorn Lomborg

As the daughter of a solo mother on the DPB, I lived through the effects of benefit cuts of the 1990s. And I don’t think that miserly austerity works, but I equally detest wasteful Government spending and the blatant disrespect of taxpayers when money is spent carelessly. I believe that only a National Government with evidence-based, prudent spending and with a social investment approach can turn around the fortunes of our country and deliver the public services that we need. – Vanessa Weenink

It turned out there were a couple of values that were important to me that pulled me towards National. First: competitive enterprise and reward for achievement. As a business owner, I know the value of skin in the game and the risks taken for the benefit of a business and the people working for you. Without competition we have stagnation and limited innovation. The other thing is personal responsibility. This is about believing in the autonomy of individuals and their ability to do for themselves. Personal responsibility is not about victim blaming as some might believe; it is about empowerment. – Vanessa Weenink

I believe in less government, personal choice, and responsibility—a Government that sets up the right macro policy settings that enables success, and then gets out of the way. Of course, success means different things to different people.

Please don’t misunderstand me. For those that can’t fend for themselves, we absolutely need to provide the resources and supports to help them—assist them for as long as it takes. And we have a sacred duty to look after our most vulnerable and those that fall on hard times. But to those of us that can, we should; we must. What’s wrong is always available, but so is what’s right.

Ultimately, though, it still requires the individual to foster hope for a brighter future—a desire, even a mustard seed of faith, ambition, and desire for more or better—and they must be the ones that pursue it. They must push ahead. They must choose a different path. And I know some people don’t start at the start line, and I know some people aren’t born with the same opportunity. But if they have that desire, the coaches, the mentors, the community leaders, and the aunties and the uncles, the business community will emerge. If that person, regardless of their background, holds on to that hope within their soul, I do believe they can and will find a better way. A way forward. Because this is still a beautiful country with endless opportunity and support structures. To that end, with my ability, resources, and positions, I commit myself in service to helping those individuals rise. Because when one individual rises up and breaks through, it gives those around them permission and courage to do the same.  – Ryan Hamilton

Good is good.
Concentrate on goodness.
Go for the good. Look for the good.
Notice the good and praise it.
Try being as good as you can.
A lot of good things are going on this time of year.
Be part of that.
Don’t be a victim of the dark side of human craziness that also gets loose at this time of year.
That’s not all that’s going on. – Robert Fulghum

I mean; what better way to contemplate environmental concerns than bringing 84,000 people into a city built on petro-dollars that cannot function without round-the-clock air conditioning and migrant workers? – Damien Grant 

Shaw is not the co-leader of the Green Party because you cannot lead if others will not follow.

His party is no longer interested in environmental issues. They are engaged in performative theatre. Tearing down the only member of their party who is genuinely passionate about environmental issues over his failure to denounce Zionism, or whatever is the cultural touch-stone of the week, will generate the only thing his colleagues are passionate about: attention. – Damien Grant 

The Green Party has become a vehicle for minor celebrities indulging in the pantomime of radicalism. It is no place for someone of Shaw’s integrity and mana; which is why they will destroy him. His continued existence is a hand-brake on their excess.– Damien Grant 

The media, having not learned their lesson about being Labour Party apparatchiks, did their best to undo a Government that has barely started by banging on about ignoring Treasury advice over FPA’s, despite yesterday’s revelations about their beloved Labour Party making it a habit on things like uncosted infrastructure.

They also tried their best on Māori bonuses and went to town over smoking. The smoking had some merit given that was, to many, a surprise out of the coalition deal.

But the media, like a lot of the unions and lobby groups who have gnashed their teeth, seem to fail to grasp that a change of Government actually means things get done differently and the reason they are to be done differently is because we voted for it to be so.  – Mike Hosking

In the heavily Māori ceremony of swearing in Tama Potaka spoke for National, reminding us that the stereotype of a white male grouping is not remotely realistic in 2023. 

That was followed by Meager, who gave a wonderful reminder that too much of the Māori political story in this country is portrayed in a light of misery, deprivation and handouts, when in fact Meager is most probably closer to reality, being young, bright, determined and successful. – Mike Hosking

Perhaps I am more sensitive to them than I once was, but it seems to me that hectoring and badgering semi-political public messages (mostly paid for at public expense, of course) are much more prominent than they used to be. This is a West-wide phenomenon, originating from the United States—because all other Western countries are far too brain-dead to resist the ideological siren song, or songs, of the technologically most advanced country in the world, however deleterious those songs might be. We are to be hectored into virtue, virtue being principally a matter of the opinions that we hold.

One sometimes has the impression that one will not be left alone until one really does love Big Brother—though who exactly Big Brother is remains unclear. We seem to be undergoing, or at least are being subjected to, what the Chinese in the 1950s called thought reform.

If there is an ultimate purpose behind all this—how easily one becomes paranoid!—it is to render us dependent on an unseen power even for our own thoughts. First, we must be convinced that, left to ourselves, we are bad; second, that we are constantly in danger; and third, that there is a benevolent authority that will straighten out our mind and then keep us safe from all danger. – Theodore Dalrymple

We live in a world of precept rather than of example. Religious preachers have declined in number and influence, but they have been replaced by secular ones, often governmental. By badgering and hectoring us at a distance, they prove, or think that they prove, how much they care for us, who are their sheep. Once they have preached at us, they have discharged an important duty. In addition, they have established implicitly that they are in loco parentis to the population in a very dangerous world. – Theodore Dalrymple

It was Apirana Ngata six decades later who reminded Māori that

The Government placed in the hands of the Queen of England, the sovereignty and the authority to make laws. … it made the one law for the Maori and the Pakeha. If you think these things are wrong and bad then blame our ancestors who gave away their rights in the days when they were powerful.

Those ancestors were not stupid. They knew what they were about, and and had a pretty fair idea of what they were promised.

But perhaps they knew less about what they were agreeing to and signing than the geniuses who took power tools yesterday to Te Papa to make their argument. – Peter Cresswell 

Under the previous government offenders assaulted staff and broke out of facilities and fast food was given to bribe them to stop. If people within youth justice facilities cause trouble they should expect to see real consequences for their actions.

By restoring the value of right and wrong we will have better outcomes in youth justice facilities. This government is focussed on dealing with serious youth crime and young people must learn that bad and unlawful behaviour will not be tolerated.

No staff member should go to work and feel unsafe.  – Karen Chhour

The honeymoon new governments receive after an election is an important part of democracy. The honeymoon is an acknowledgement that the election is over, and the winner has a mandate to govern.

America demonstrates that when election results are not accepted there is a perpetual campaign.  The country becomes ungovernable.

Leading the news with lobbyist propaganda is TV One news denying that the coalition has a democratic mandate to implement its policies. – Richard Prebble 

According to the 2020 Democracy Index there are only 23 countries that are full democracies. New Zealand will not remain a full democracy if we pander to those who participate in elections but refuse to accept the result.

Democracy is damaged when the state media does not acknowledge that the coalition has a democratic mandate for their policies. The only justification for the state owning a broadcasting license is to be a source of unbiased news. – Richard Prebble 

Sedition is infectious. Elements in the civil service are refusing to accept the result of the election. When a minister, I do not recall a cabinet paper being leaked even before ministers had considered it. The leaking of the paper opposing the repeal of Fair Pay Agreements is sabotage.  The same department in 2021 recommended against Fair Pay Agreements saying the costs weighted any benefit. Now a treasury paper has been leaked. – Richard Prebble 

Ministers must set the narrative or others will do it for them. The government has an advantage. What ministers do is news, what critics say, even dressed up as a survey, is commentary. Reporters are news junkies. The media will always report news rather than views.

The government will win the 6 o’clock news when it is making the news. – Richard Prebble 

Leadership, vision, courage, and bold action is the way for the coalition to lead the news and re-claim their democratic mandate.  – Richard Prebble 

But history has no sides and evaluates nothing. We often hear of the “verdict of history,” but it is humans, not history, that bring in verdicts, and the verdicts that they bring in often change with time. The plus becomes a minus and then a plus again. As Chou En-Lai famously said in 1972 when asked about the effect of the French Revolution, “It is too early to tell.” It is not merely that moral evaluations change; so do evaluations of what actually happened and the causes of what actually happened. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is true that there are trends in history, but they do not reach inexorable logical conclusions. Projections are not predictions, and success in war, for example, is no proof that the victor is on the side of history and was therefore predestined to be victorious: nor can the victor be certain that his victory brings with it all that he desired or expected.

Our predictions may turn out to be mistaken. If we make enough predictions that are not absurd, some of them are bound to be vindicated by what happens, but we should not take this as evidence that our historical insight or reasoning must have been correct. – Theodore Dalrymple

Are we now to say that authoritarianism is on the right side of history, as recently liberal democracy was only thirty years ago, because so much of the world is ruled by it? 

Does it matter if we ascribe right and wrong sides to history? I think it could—I cannot be more categorical than that. On the one hand, it might make us complacent, liable to sit back and wait for History to do our work for us. Perhaps more importantly, History might excuse our worst actions, justifying grossly unethical behaviour as if we were acting as only automaton midwives of a foreordained denouement. But if history is a seamless robe, no denouement is final.

In short, we should cease using expressions such as “the judgment of history,” or “the wrong side of history.” They are, after all, on the wrong side of history. – Theodore Dalrymple

Is it just me or are the growing number of reports about the ineptitude of the last Government an ever-larger indictment on what might be the most useless collection of buffoons in the modern political age?  – Mike Hosking 

And so, we end up with yet another reminder of the great calling card of Labour – non-delivery. 

Say a lot, do nothing. Announce it, then do nothing. Trumpet it for the news, then watch the crickets chirp. 

It is all there. Billions upon billions of dollars, of ideas and disaster, of no planning and even less listening. 

Nicola Willis is right, and we will hear all about it next week. The shambles she has been left is almost criminal. 

Luxon is right as well, when he said the other day, this lot should not be let within a million miles of the cheque book ever again. 

Read the report. If we hadn’t lived through it, you wouldn’t believe it.  – Mike Hosking

It feels like at COP28 the delusions of Western greens finally crashed against the shores of reality. The luxuriant doom-mongering of privileged eco-warriors who insist the world will end if we don’t phase out fossil fuels was confronted by a truth no reasonable person can deny: that fossil fuels remain vital to human life. In the gleaming oasis of Dubai it became clear that oil, gas and even coal are not going away anytime soon, however much the Gretas of the West might want them to. Why? Because – brace yourselves – India, China, Brazil and other nations are not prepared to sacrifice their economic health at the altar of our deranged anti-modernism. –  Brendan O’Neill

Yet it pays to look at why the idea of a ‘phaseout’ was, well, phased out. It’s because winding down fossil-fuel use would be suicidal for the developing world. It’s all very well for Westerners whose Industrial Revolutions took place 150 years ago to dry heave at the sight of coal-fired power stations, but for billions of people such stations are the difference between life and death, light and dark, food and no food.  – Brendan O’Neill

Representatives of India dared to touch on one of the ugliest elements of the annual COP whingefest – the fact that it’s always well-off countries telling less well-off countries to stop being so bloody industrious. ‘Discussions on a phaseout of fossil fuels have been led by developed economies’ and this too often overlooks ‘the economic realities of developing countries like India’, said an official. A spokesperson for G77 – a coalition of 135 developing nations – made it clear that its members will not stop using coal. Why? Because we must ‘meet the energy needs and ensure a dignified life for our people’. Sounds good to me. In the stand-off between rich, bored Western youths who want to keep coal in the ground and a country like India that intends to carry on digging up coal so that its 1.4 billion citizens might enjoy energy and dignity, I know whose side I’m on. – Brendan O’Neill

Let’s be frank: phasing out fossil fuels is a demented dream. Fossil-fuel use has remained remarkably steady over the past 25 years, regardless of all the windbaggery at the annual COPs. In 2000, 84 per cent of the world’s energy came from fossil fuels – in 2022, it was 82 per cent. Developing nations’ use of coal has soared. As a consequence, humanity is now burning more of the black stuff than at any point in history. Coal consumption rose by 3.3 per cent in 2022, hitting 8.3 billion tonnes – a new record. This year, China, India and South East Asian countries accounted for three out of every four tonnes of coal consumed around the world. You think they’re going to stop because New York Times readers in Park Slope don’t like pollution? Get real. – Brendan O’Neill

It’s the ideology of environmentalism we should be phasing out. Its neocolonial arrogance, its indifference to the needs and rights of people in the developing world, stands starkly exposed. This luxuriant creed might flatter the pretensions of Westerners in search of some meaning in their lives, but it is the implacable foe of the billions in the industrialising world who only want what we already have. – Brendan O’Neill

We are in deep trouble.

Shock? It’s been a freight train of fiscal ineptitude coming down the track for the past two years. – Mike Hosking

Oh, it’s fiscally neutral. No, it’s not girl maths Grant. It’s really not. You’re not taking in enough to cover the running of the scheme. Who’s going to pay for it? Taxpayer. All those people buying the bloody utes were getting up at 5am in the morning and going to work. They’re the ones who are going to pay for it. So not only are they paying for the fee-bate so some lovely human has worked very hard and who has got the dosh, who’s got $70 odd thousand to spend on a brand-new car can get a rebate on it.

How does that even begin to make sense? Even with a rich prick capitalist government, how does it make sense? And yet, here you’ve got Labour champions of the poor, who are demanding the poor get in their utes that they’ve had to pay more for, get up at 5am in the morning, go to work to subsidise the scheme that allows rich pricks to buy new Teslas.

Good riddance to the Clean Car discount.  Long may it be gone. Fiscally neutral my Aunt Fanny. – Kerre Woodham

For the contemporary antisemite, drunk on anti-Jewish disinformation, I would argue, even for our community, better out than in. The Nurembergian flourishes are already visible, and the more they take their bile public, the more chance their movement will take the next fatal step. Because public protest is a game of Russian Roulette, people. Even a win on the day can start to fester over time and turn a cause gangrenous. – Dane Giraud 

The demise of the last Government’s Fair Pay Agreement legislation is a cautionary tale for policymakers. Death and taxes are sometimes called the only certainties.

But so, too, are the iron laws of economics. Governments ignore them at their peril.

As I wrote last year in this column, the FPA policy has always been a lemon. It was born of wishful thinking. Labour’s idea was that the government could improve the country’s productivity and prosperity by introducing compulsory collective bargaining to increase wages above market rates.

However, there is no economic evidence that regulating for higher wages will make a country more prosperous. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. – Roger Partridge 

Setting terms and conditions of employment across entire industries or occupations under a system of FPAs would reduce labour market flexibility. It would lock in practices that are unsuitable or inefficient for specific workplaces. It would also add cost and complexity. Productivity would suffer as a result.

It is little wonder that the OECD has cautioned that centralised bargaining systems like FPAs are associated with lower productivity growth if coverage is high. Rather than advancing the former government’s laudable vision of a high-wage, high-productivity economy, FPAs risked undermining it. – Roger Partridge

Some people don’t like democracy when it doesn’t go their way and instead of engaging they act like belligerent buffoons. They go looking for the wrong, they jump to conclusions and don’t bother understanding the detail – instead they believe the sensationalised headlines.

In 2017 they all wanted us to give the new Government a go. Even though some felt aggrieved that the party that got the most votes did not become Government, we were told “that’s MMP” and they were right.

So let’s give this Government a go. Why don’t you all take a breath, have a break, enjoy some sunshine (I hope!) and then let’s pull together next year instead of apart. – Paula Bennett 

It’s easy to forget during the brouhaha of this political theatre that only nine weeks ago Kiwis voted for this coalition government based on the very policies they campaigned on and are now executing. The temptation here to insert former Finance Minister Michael Cullen’s famous misquote, “We won, you lost, eat that!”, is great but has to be resisted.

Because if those beating drums of dissent signal that Parliament is more polarised than ever before, we all must fight the most virulent strain of this cancer, found in the US, called affective polarisation. That’s polarisation that goes beyond agreeing-to-disagree, which is so partisan that adherents demand you must agree with them on everything, otherwise you’re the enemy.

What does it look like politically ? Sean Westwood, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College in the US, describes it as activists on both sides who’ve reframed political conflict as a battle over moral truth rather than over issue positions: if you disagree, you’re not just wrong but amoral. – Janet Wilson 

And while Willis is laying the blame squarely at the feet of the previous Government, clearly various boards and management at KiwiRail over the past few years have questions to answer. There probably needs to be a short inquiry into how this occurred from start to finish – if only to serve as a guide of what not to do in future.

Nevertheless, it serves a valuable political purpose – albeit an unwanted one – for Nicola Willis and the wider Luxon Government. The entire state sector is now on notice that building programmes, projects, lurks and policies out of step with the new regime will be cancelled, changed, pared back. – Luke Malpass 

People are saying things like I am a race traitor or a class traitor or an Uncle Tom without even listening to the speech . . . I think that was the point of the speech, you can’t take for granted just because someone has a certain background or upbringing it’s what happened in my life that’s shaped me. – James Meager

It’s enough to make you cry. As someone who had the opportunity to help with building some significant infrastructure in broadband, roading and rail during the term of the Key/English Government, watching what has since happened in this country has been truly soul-destroying. Billions of dollars have been frittered away and so much time and opportunity have been wasted.

Our reputation for building things is in the toilet. We have gone from being a place that could procure some decent kit at a reasonable price to a story of churning plans, blown budgets, constant restructuring and an appalling lack of delivery. All in six years.

Surely the news of the past two weeks means any vestigial reputation for fiscal competence the sixth Labour Government had has been shredded, on its track record with infrastructure alone.  – Steven Joyce 

It’s hard to understand how they could be so profligate, yet also so ineffective. Other Labour Governments have had a reputation for big spending, but they haven’t been this bad.

I think it comes down to four things. First, Ardern and Co wanted to be transformative. They didn’t have well-developed plans but they knew they didn’t want to do ordinary things. – Steven Joyce 

Second, they believed they had a mandate to spend money, particularly as a result of the pandemic. During Covid-19, lots of Governments opened the spending spigots and these guys truly drank that Kool-Aid. Big Government was back. Interest rates were low, so you should borrow more and more. A bike bridge to Birkenhead, no worries. Light rail in Wellington, absolutely. Rainbows and unicorns for everyone.

Third, they had no idea how to execute, and no willingness to trust the private sector in any way to execute and make tradeoffs for them. Their deep suspicion of anyone who didn’t work for the public sector is now legendary across so many fields, but it particularly bit them in the backside on infrastructure, a field where most of the expertise the world over is in the private sector.

And fourth, they were obsessed with restructuring and centralising everything, often for no rhyme or reason beyond leaving their mark. They were obsessive about their legacy, rather than just doing things that worked for the people who put them into office. Ironically, as a result, their legacy will be tiny.

And so we have wasted so much time and so much money. Just think what roads, pipes and hospitals we could have built with the money that slipped through the Government’s fingers over that wasted six years. As I say, soul-destroying. – Steven Joyce 

The new Government won’t be perfect of course, no Government is. But already it seems to have a refreshing understanding of the value of a dollar, and a realisation that the money they get to play with comes from the hard-earned incomes of Kiwis across the country. Ministers are killing off some poorly thought-out infrastructure projects and poorly thought-out restructurings. And that’s good. Better that than throwing good money after bad.

None of it’s before time. This week’s anaemic GDP print shows us what happens if you stop focusing on the economy or investing wisely for growth. The infrastructure we build over the next few years needs to be clearly dedicated to helping the country grow faster and build our prosperity. That will require a laser focus on choosing the right projects, funding them and managing them carefully.

Six years of spraying money around on fanciful ideas needs to be put behind us. – Steven Joyce 

Possibly the most radical political positions you can take today are that 2+2=4, men are not women, and facts exist independently of our feelings.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) December 16, 2023

To me a lot of this is BS.

Are we going to affect our farmers’ livelihoods … right through the valley, just because someone drives up [SH83 or 8] for 10 minutes of their lifetime? We actually live there; we work there. – Guy Percival

In one sense whether sovereignty was ceded or not in 1840 is of second order importance.  The reality is that New Zealand has no future at all if some of us are, by the accident of birth, entitled to a superior constitutional status. – Don Brash

Let’s Get Wellington Moving was created and no one, not even the people running the show, knew what they were trying to achieve or why it existed.  – Joel MacManus

Let’s Get Wellington Moving was a giant waste of everyone’s time. It was expensive, slow and unaccountable. It was a sick joke at the expense of everyone who hoped that better things were possible in Wellington. What was the point? Why did we put ourselves through this?  – Joel MacManus

In the end, LGWM wasn’t ruined by its organisational structure, the bureaucratic inefficiency, or even the bad engagement. Those were all just symptoms of the same underlying problem: it didn’t know what it was.   – Joel MacManus

Has there ever been a more co-ordinated media attack on a new government in our history? It’s as if the mainstream media, with one or two very honourable exceptions, has just kept up a non-stop barrage of stories pushing back against government policy, policy that was campaigned on, voted for by a majority on October 14^th and then agreed between the coalition partners.

In the eyes of the political left this is not democracy. This is called the tyranny of the majority or a new word which has crept into the lexicon, majoritarianism. – Peter Williams

That the percentage of the population who are smokers has dropped from 29.6 at the turn of the century to just 6.8 percent now suggests that education about its harm,  combined with high taxes and its social uncoolness is working. That is real evidence.

Modelling is merely predictive and the precedents for other vices suggest what was planned would never have worked.

But you never get any sort of analysis of these matters from the media. All they have in their narrative is the pushback against the idea. Why not some deep thinking about the issue from the other side.

Hell no, we can’t have the government being seen in a possibly good light, can we? – Peter Williams

Nothing could better illustrate or be emblematic of the earnest suicidal frivolity of the West than the decision of the first female chief executive of the British insurance and pension company Aviva, which has assets of more than $420 billion under management, that the appointment to all senior positions of white men must “be signed off by her”: in other words that there must be a presumption against them—unless, I suppose, they can prove themselves to her to be thoroughly emasculated and in tune with her ideology.  – Theodore Dalrymnple

The chief executive’s command of English seems not to be quite consonant with her salary, for she said, in that mixture of Newspeak and langue de bois that we have now come to expect from the nomenklatura class, that she wanted to “make sure that the process followed for that recruitment has been diverse, has been properly done.” People who left school in 1925 at age 14 used to speak better English than this; what she meant is not that the process should have been diverse, but that the candidates chosen should have been diverse, in the technical sexist and racist meaning of the word.

She is too cloth-eared to realize the implications of the word “non-diverse,” with its condescending assumption that to be anything other than a white male must be vulnerable and therefore in need of a bureaucratic leg up, so to speak, from the likes of her. As to the “chief people officer” of whom she spoke, only someone ignorant of Orwell, or utterly without imagination, could use it without a shudder. Human resources is bad enough, as if people were to be mined like diamonds on the Transvaal Rand, but a chief people officer (no doubt abbreviated to a CPO) is one stage worse. – Theodore Dalrymnple

Of course, the demographic features to be taken into account have to be chosen for their supposed relevance, for human populations have an almost infinite number of possible demographic features—intelligence, for example. I presume that not even the chief executive of Aviva would want 15 percent of the directors of her company to have an IQ of 80 or below (though it might make life easier for her), or that 25 percent of the directors should have a criminal record or be obese, with of course the correct proportion of obese criminals, or that 1 percent of her staff should be aged over 90. Clearly, the chief people officer would have quite a lot of extra work to do if staff were to mimic the demographic features of the population in all possible ways; and the only way to ensure it would be to employ the entire population at the same salary. No one could then sue for discrimination. Borges’ story about a map of the world so accurate that it was the same size as the world comes here to mind.

Clearly, then, characteristics have to be chosen from among innumerable others, if any demographic pattern is to be imposed at all. Presumably they are to be chosen in the same way that the World Wildlife Fund chooses which species of animal to protect, namely the animals that are supposedly in some kind of danger of extinction. (The WWF has not yet, so far as I am aware, chosen to protect the brown rat, the cockroach, or the bluebottle fly, as being already adequately present in the world.)

The characteristics of human groups to be protected as endangered species are protected must be considered relevant in some way; and if you are a racist, as the chief executive of Aviva is a racist, no doubt without realizing it or wanting to be one, then race will be considered a relevant characteristic in choosing senior staff. Thus, anti-racism turns 180 degrees and becomes mirror-image racism, and the old joke, that the cop did not care what kind of communist the anti-communist protester was, becomes expressive of an important truth. Unless we are careful, we become what we oppose.

The suicidal frivolity of the West is demonstrated by the fact that no one would apply to a professional sports team the criteria that the head of a giant company (and certainly not she alone) thinks important. The reason for this is obvious: Professional sports teams are concerned only to find the best athletes so that they can win. The spectacle of sport is thus too important in our moral economy to be harmed by the imposition of quotas, but the pensions of 15 million people—of which Aviva has at least partial care—can justifiably be harmed by such quotas. So long as there is good quality sport for people to watch, the fate of their pensions does not matter. All they need is enough for junk food and a sofa from which to watch a giant screen.

It seems that there are all too many chief executives of companies and heads of other institutions and organizations (Harvard, for example) who would like to play the role of Rosa Parks, though with the satisfaction not only of helping to oppose injustice and bring about a more just society, but also to receive vast salaries and pensions for doing so. This is a mediocrities’ charter. – Theodore Dalrymnple

The influential report explained that livestock production should be intensified in nations with a record of efficient production, such as New Zealand and the Netherlands, to help feed the globe. Mr. Torero was concerned that cuts to production in developed nations would likely push production to other areas of the world where efficiency was poorer and emissions were likely to be greater per kilo. – John Sleigh

Whatever happened to “publish and be damned”?

I can’t pretend my inspiration to become a journalist was that 1952 movie, Deadline USA, starring Humphrey Bogart as the editor of a newspaper about to be sold from under him, and who is being threatened by gangsters, but publishes anyway.

But maybe a few of today’s editors and publishers, not to mention their advertising departments, ought to watch it to get a refresher about what journalism is supposed to be about.  – Jenny Ruth 

Effectively, NZME was telling a victim that, if NZME ran the ad, that victim had to pay to protect NZME from the very mob that was victimising Shalom NZ and other Jewish people living in NZ.

Conditioning in this manner the granting of a voice to the victims of actual mob violence ought to stick in the craw of any journalist.

How craven, cowardly and lacking any sense of morality NZME’s are actions toward both SUFW and Shalom NZ.

It’s actions ought to be anathema to any citizen who thinks NZ should be a peaceful and democratic society in which free speech and the right to be heard is a given.

The NZ Police should also be up in arms – obviously, NZME has no faith in the police force’s ability to keep the peace and guard private property, surely their reason to exist. – Jenny Ruth 

This following comment is hardly original to me, but it does look like: “me too, unless you’re a Jew.” – Jenny Ruth 

We are going to start a new chapter, we’re going to draw a line and across our Government there will be fiscal discipline. There will be a drive for value for money. There will be a stopping of wasteful programs.

I do want New Zealanders to go into Christmas with some some hope … I will demonstrate the reason why I am confident we can deliver tax reduction next year, which is first that we’ll outline a small collection – a mini collection – of decisions we’ve already made which provide a down payment for our tax plan. – Nicola Willis

They should be confidence-enhancing in that they demonstrate that with decisive action, we can create the room for tax reduction … we will then chart the path to put more money into people’s bank accounts next year. – Nicola Willis

I’m a big believer – in politics and leadership – you’ve got to take people with you.

You’ve got to treat people with the trust that people are smart. If you give them the information, if you help them understand the issues, then people will better understand the decisions you then make. I think transparency with what’s going on with our economy is really important. – Nicola Willis

But being an infrastructure-building government doesn’t mean throwing endless cheques at the wall and saying look how committed we are to infrastructure. It’s not about the spending you do. It’s about whether the investments you deliver that you make, deliver the infrastructure out the other end. –

We will only be a government able to restore fiscal discipline if every single minister is on the same page about that. – Nicola Willis

We can’t govern by press release. And my read of that Auditor General report was that the government had got things the wrong way around – It was far more driven by what the headline would be in the paper the next day than what the outcome for New Zealanders in three years would be – that is not how we want to be as a government.  – Nicola Willis

The Bland Leading The Bland: That Labour’s much reduced caucus voted unanimously to keep “Chippie” on as leader says it all. Because, if there’s no alternative in the caucus, then there is also no alternative that matters in the party. Over 15 years, the Clarkists transformed Labour into a neoliberal monoculture. There’s no point looking for red-hot chilli-peppers in a paddock planted with potatoes. –  Chris Trotter

In case you are in any doubt, the New Zealand Herald, with TV1 in hot pursuit, has taken over the role of being the Labour-inspired Opposition to the new government. Chippy and Toni can take a holiday until the low-level editorial team at the Herald come to their senses, or the paper collapses. – Michael Bassett

Quite why the new government has been given no leeway as it settles into office and comes up to speed hasn’t been explained by our mainstream media. TV ONE and Radio New Zealand are barely any better than the Herald with their comments, and are almost as quick to assume Chippy’s Opposition role. 

Far be it from me to be a defender of the new Coalition ministry. While they get a bare pass mark from me for what they have done so far, they have a long way to go to fulfil the election hopes of their supporters. But if ministers are to receive a constant battering from so-called news reporters then we are in for a dismal three years of “gotcha” journalism. The only bright spot will be that the struggling Herald might well collapse.  – Michael Bassett

I think it’s helpful to think about our constitution as an ecosystem. It’s in a delicate state of equilibrium, conditioned by a mix of laws, rules, convention and practice. Adding in something almost alien when nobody was quite expecting it risks upsetting things – especially those important conventions protecting our electoral infrastructure.  – Dean Knight

When we engage in matters of government and constitutional law, we necessarily bring some of our own ideological baggage—we have a vision of what the ideal state should be and that ideology in part shapes our sense of what good governance looks like,” he explains. “So I can’t be neutral. But I won’t be partisan. And, be assured, I will be one hundred percent robust. Those are my rules of engagement for entering the civic fray. – Dean Knight

She’ll be remembered as quitting early. She’ll be remembered, I would imagine, for her outpourings of grief on the mosque shootings, but she certainly won’t be remembered for policy.

I think there won’t be a lot of memory about Jacinda Ardern other than, she was a young woman that was appointed to the job of Prime Minister, a job she once claimed she never ever wanted to do. The second term was overwhelming for her. But really it just shows you, given the overwhelming support she had two years ago, how ill-equipped she was to do the job by quitting a year early. – Barry Soper 

The health reforms were proclaimed by previous ministers as providing better health results for all New Zealanders but under the previous government have so far spent more money, achieved more bureaucracy and delivered little more than longer waiting lists, dire workforce shortages and worse outcomes, – Shane Reti

There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.

I hope those historians will also be able to tell the story of how journalism found its footing again – how editors, reporters and readers, too, came to recognise that journalism needed to change to fulfil its potential in restoring the health of American politics. As Trump’s nomination and possible re-election loom, that work could not be more urgent. – James Bennet

.I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.

But Sulzberger seems to underestimate the struggle he is in, that all journalism and indeed America itself is in. In describing the essential qualities of independent journalism in his essay, he unspooled a list of admirable traits – empathy, humility, curiosity and so forth. These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias. I have no doubt Sulzberger believes in them. Years ago he demonstrated them himself as a reporter, covering the American Midwest as a real place full of three-dimensional people, and it would be nice if they were enough to deal with the challenge of this era, too. But, on their own, these qualities have no chance against the Times’s new, more dangerous problem, which is in crucial respects the opposite of the old one. 

The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage. – James Bennet

Most journalism obviously doesn’t require anything like the bravery expected of a soldier, police officer or protester. But far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage: not just the devil-may-care courage to choose a profession on the brink of the abyss; not just the bulldog courage to endlessly pick yourself up and embrace the ever-evolving technology; but also, in an era when polarisation and social media viciously enforce rigid orthodoxies, the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.

One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down. In the face of this, leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around. This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles. – James Bennet

Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered. – James Bennet

As the country became more polarised, the national media followed the money by serving partisan audiences the versions of reality they preferred. This relationship proved self-reinforcing. As Americans became freer to choose among alternative versions of reality, their polarisation intensified. When I was at the Times, the newsroom editors worked hardest to keep Washington coverage open and unbiased, no easy task in the Trump era. And there are still people, in the Washington bureau and across the Times, doing work as fine as can be found in American journalism. But as the top editors let bias creep into certain areas of coverage, such as culture, lifestyle and business, that made the core harder to defend and undermined the authority of even the best reporters. – James Bennet

For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole. It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe. The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact. It is equally hard to imagine how America’s diversity can continue to be a source of strength, rather than become a fatal flaw, if Americans are afraid or unwilling to listen to each other. I suppose it is also pretty grandiose to think you might help fix all that. But that hope, to me, is what makes journalism worth doing. – James Bennet

To spend time with the perpetrators and victims of violence in the Middle East, to listen hard to the reciprocal and reinforcing stories of new and ancient grievances, is to confront the tragic truth that there can be justice on more than one side of a conflict. More than ever, it seemed to me that a reporter gave up something in renouncing the taking of sides: possibly the moral high ground, certainly the psychological satisfaction of righteous anger.

But there was a compensating moral and psychological privilege that came with aspiring to journalistic neutrality and open-mindedness, despised as they might understandably be by partisans. Unlike the duelling politicians and advocates of all kinds, unlike the corporate chieftains and their critics, unlike even the sainted non-profit workers, you did not have to pretend things were simpler than they actually were. You did not have to go along with everything that any tribe said. You did not have to pretend that the good guys, much as you might have respected them, were right about everything, or that the bad guys, much as you might have disdained them, never had a point. You did not, in other words, ever have to lie.

This fundamental honesty was vital for readers, because it equipped them to make better, more informed judgments about the world. Sometimes it might shock or upset them by failing to conform to their picture of reality. But it also granted them the respect of acknowledging that they were able to work things out for themselves.  – James Bennet

A journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers, it seemed to me then, and seems even more so to me now, can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing.  – James Bennet

 When I first took the job, I felt some days as if I’d parachuted onto one of those Pacific islands still held by Japanese soldiers who didn’t know that the world beyond the waves had changed. Eventually, it sank in that my snotty joke was actually on me: I was the one ignorantly fighting a battle that was already lost. The old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters. – James Bennet

Our role, we knew, was to help readers understand such threats, and this required empathetic – not sympathetic – reporting. This is not an easy distinction but good reporters make it: they learn to understand and communicate the sources and nature of a toxic ideology without justifying it, much less advocating it.

Today’s newsroom turns that moral logic on its head, at least when it comes to fellow Americans. Unlike the views of Hamas, the views of many Americans have come to seem dangerous to engage in the absence of explicit condemnation. Focusing on potential perpetrators – “platforming” them by explaining rather than judging their views – is believed to empower them to do more harm.  – James Bennet

The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious. Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias. By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”. And sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left. – James Bennet

In my experience, reporters overwhelmingly support Democratic policies and candidates. They are generally also motivated by a desire for a more just world. Neither of those tendencies are new. But there has been a sea change over the past ten years in how journalists think about pursuing justice. The reporters’ creed used to have its foundation in liberalism, in the classic philosophical sense. The exercise of a reporter’s curiosity and empathy, given scope by the constitutional protections of free speech, would equip readers with the best information to form their own judgments. The best ideas and arguments would win out. The journalist’s role was to be a sworn witness; the readers’ role was to be judge and jury. In its idealised form, journalism was lonely, prickly, unpopular work, because it was only through unrelenting scepticism and questioning that society could advance. If everyone the reporter knew thought X, the reporter’s role was to ask: why X?

Illiberal journalists have a different philosophy, and they have their reasons for it. They are more concerned with group rights than individual rights, which they regard as a bulwark for the privileges of white men. They have seen the principle of free speech used to protect right-wing outfits like Project Veritas and Breitbart News and are uneasy with it. They had their suspicions of their fellow citizens’ judgment confirmed by Trump’s election, and do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts. They are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on. The term “objectivity” to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cosying up to power, as journalists often have done.

And they do not just want to be part of the cool crowd. They need to be. To be more valued by their peers and their contacts – and hold sway over their bosses – they need a lot of followers in social media. That means they must be seen to applaud the right sentiments of the right people in social media. The journalist from central casting used to be a loner, contrarian or a misfit. Now journalism is becoming another job for joiners, or, to borrow Twitter’s own parlance, “followers”, a term that mocks the essence of a journalist’s role. – James Bennet

The new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative – whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears – has the whip hand. What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind. – James Bennet

 But the basis of that old newsroom approach was idealistic: the notion that power ultimately lies in truth and ideas, and that the citizens of a pluralistic democracy, not leaders of any sort, must be trusted to judge both.

Our role in Times Opinion, I used to urge my colleagues, was not to tell people what to think, but to help them fulfil their desire to think for themselves. It seems to me that putting the pursuit of truth, rather than of justice, at the top of a publication’s hierarchy of values also better serves not just truth but justice, too: over the long term journalism that is not also sceptical of the advocates of any form of justice and the programmes they put forward, and that does not struggle honestly to understand and explain the sources of resistance, will not assure that those programmes will work, and it also has no legitimate claim to the trust of reasonable people who see the world very differently. Rather than advance understanding and durable change, it provokes backlash. – James Bennet

I share the bewilderment that so many people could back Trump, given the things he says and does, and that makes me want to understand why they do: the breadth and diversity of his support suggests not just racism is at work. Yet these elite, well-meaning Times staff cannot seem to stretch the empathy they are learning to extend to people with a different skin colour to include those, of whatever race, who have different politics. – James Bennet

Under the Ardern government, the overall rate dropped to 88.9 per cent but the Māori rate dropped to 78.4 per cent.

You might call that a slump.

Because of a widening of the disparities between Māori and non-Māori health measures, we were told a Māori Health Authority was essential.

Another possibility – of course – was that a change of government might do the trick. – Point of Order 

Willis rightly sees her role as reducing the size of the state, encouraging Seymour to limit regulation to that needed to promote competition, smash privilege and protect health and environmental values, and then collect tax from a thriving private sector to fund better schools and social investments, the law-and-order community and the military.- Matthew Hooton

And the majority will be imported from countries with poor animal welfare standards and en environmental outcomes.
Do goodiers have strangled the NZ pig industry 😞

— HotMummy Berry 🧢 (@HotMummyBerry) December 19, 2023

I walked out of that lecture feeling like our country needs a good dose of national pride. And it got me thinking. Why not us? Why aren’t we having those conversations about how we aspire to a better future for ourselves and the global community we’re part of? We don’t have to be the leader. In fact, we shouldn’t be. We’re too small. But we should participate. We’ve earned the right to do so.

As I reflect on 2023, I sense that we have plenty to be proud of. We’re just not very good at talking about it.

Instead, we’ve been focused on each other. Inward looking. Arguing over politics, race, climate and the like. Discussing the politicians we don’t like, the climate emissions or the electric car discounts offsetting taxes on the family ute. Bickering, internally, about ourselves. Meanwhile, the world moves forward. – Bruce Cotterill

Finally, we should be excited by the competence and confidence of our new Government. While the vocal minorities will continue to shout their displeasure, the direct, no-nonsense approach to the new 100-day plan, and the immediacy of the Cook Straight ferry decision shows that we have a no-nonsense Government that is serious about the economic and structural repair job that awaits them. The fear of what might have been, has been replaced by an atmosphere of hope for the year ahead.

And finally, there is us. The examples above don’t even scratch the surface. Because the biggest difference in the outlook for New Zealand will come as a result of the attitude that we bring to our challenges and opportunities alike. Across the broadest possible spectrum, we have a history to be proud of and a contribution to make to the world. Left and right. Māori and Pākeha. Local and immigrant. Educated leader and blue-collar worker. We all have a contribution to make. And we should be excited about what we can collectively achieve, and what we can offer a world in need.

After all, that’s how the world’s leaders think. – Bruce Cotterill

Government matters. Ideas matter. In time, Labour will return to the Treasury benches.

Currently, the agenda is being set by the extremists, by the Greens, Te Pāti Māori and a cohort of incoherent dilettantes who mistake social-media engagement for policy development.

Opposition can be a gift. It is in the nation’s interest that they use this time wisely and the success of Jordan Williams and Dr Hartwich are examples of what, with time and genuine engagement, can be achieved. – Damien Grant

What might be called the psychologization of life had two consequences. First, it encouraged people to examine their thoughts and emotions much as a hypochondriac takes his pulse or attends to the minor sensations in his abdomen, such that minor fluctuations took on major and often sinister significance; and second, that the difference between the major and the minor, the serious and the trivial, the banal and the significant in life was expunged.  – Theodore Dalrymple

Psychologization is different from the examination of the motions of a person’s own mind, as Doctor Johnson recommended. While not denying the influence of circumstance, and always allowing for the imperfections of human nature, Johnson never seeks to absolve humans from the inescapable responsibilities consequent upon the possession of free will.

From an early age, children now bathe in a sea of psychology that alienates them and undermines their sense of agency. No doubt, the availability of psychological assessment and treatment helps some children, particularly at the extreme end of any behavioral spectrum; but the overall effect of psychologization is to induct them early into the idea that their problems have a technical solution, and that they are vulnerable and may well have been the victim of something external that explains their difficulties—and thereby that either minimizes or excuses their own contribution to these difficulties. Parents are often too willing to accept this because they believe it of themselves: we are now several generations into the reign of psychology as explanatory sovereign.

Whether coincidentally or not, psychologization occurred at a time when religious belief declined and Western society lost faith in itself, to the point at which shame about, rather than pride in, the past became the default attitude, imparted to young minds by almost every possible means. This takes the form not of reasoned argument but of indoctrination about the past. – Theodore Dalrymple

A historiography of massacre, injustice, slavery, and so forth crowds out the idea of achievement, moral and physical. Either young people take the comfort and privileges that they enjoy for granted—as natural and immemorial instead of the result of prolonged human effort—and thus believe themselves entitled to their effortless continuation; or they come to feel guilty about enjoying these blessings because they are the historical fruit of exploitation, and they feel this all the more strongly, not being able, or even willing, to give them up.

One defense against privilege that is not only unearned but also felt to be the result of injustice is to become a victim yourself: for victimhood wards off reproach, as garlic flowers warded off Dracula. The conditions of human existence are such that everyone has suffered some kind of injustice and can therefore pose as a victim of something. Nothing is easier to let stew in the mind than an injustice suffered; it grows on the recollection, and, however trivial it may seem to others, it can assume enormous proportions for the sufferer. This surely is the explanation of Greta Thunberg’s outburst—“How dare you! How dare you!”—at the United Nations. A young person, who, by the standards of all previously existing humanity, was among the most fortunate of the fortunate, managed to turn herself into a victim, and believe her own performance. And thanks to the regnant sentimentality about the idealism (and fragility) of youth, no one confronted her about her grotesque claims to victimhood.  – Theodore Dalrymple

The ideology of climate crisis is calculated to turn the most safely situated people into anxiety- and guilt-ridden neurotics. Already primed by a historiography of slavery and genocide to believe themselves the heirs to a vale of tears, they now also believe that the world is about to end. Climate anxiety among the young, even among primary-school children, is well reported and appears to be rising. This is not a spontaneous phenomenon: no child of six or seven perceives or knows anything about greenhouse gases without indoctrination—but as the Jesuits once put it, give us a child for the first seven years of his life, and we will know the adult.

Thus, a child comes to believe that he or she lives during an unprecedented crisis, the failure of which to materialize in no way dents belief in its existence. – Theodore Dalrymple

With the psychologization of life, young people have ceased to become responsible for themselves; but in return, they have been made responsible for the state of the world.

When they throw a tantrum, it is not their fault, and we must seek the causes; but when they eat a banana, what a weight of responsibility falls on their shoulders! The banana has probably been cultivated by near-slave labor, and most of its sale price will go not to the workers but to the exploitative banana company or to the supermarket that displayed it. Unless the banana is organically grown, its production will also have entailed pollution. Worse, bananas do not grow where they are primarily consumed; they must be transported, at a huge environmental cost. Eating a banana is thus a guilty pleasure, unlike throwing a tantrum, which is morally neutral; and every act of consumption takes on this burden of responsibility for the imminent end of the world. Unself-conscious enjoyment, which we once might have wanted for children, is now a kind of crime. – Theodore Dalrymple

A magnificent, though unconscious, hypocrisy runs through all this. The young’s dependence on electronic screens never causes them to wonder about the environmental cost of their habit; and alas for the children, they increasingly cannot imagine a life without such screens, or even believe that life was ever possible without them. So important have the screens become that the virtual is often more real to them than the real: or rather, the virtual has become the real and the real virtual. It is not unusual to see young people (and even not-so-young people) sitting around a restaurant table, all communicating via smartphones to people not present. Real contact makes them anxious, which the screens relieve by rendering impossible—as does earsplitting noise.

The electronic means of communication not only enclose the young in an eternal present and inflate the significance of the most trivial occurrences in their lives, turning minor inconveniences or setbacks into catastrophes; they render them susceptible to the grossest manipulation, commercial and otherwise. – Theodore Dalrymple

The public response to the Covid pandemic not only enforced a regime of an entirely virtual social life but also conveyed the impression that any other life was fraught with peril, though this was never the case. Face-to-face contact became synonymous with danger, illness, and even death. “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases,” said the old public-health saw; now merely to breathe did so. Children were made vulnerable and responsible at the same time. – Theodore Dalrymple

And children are now not even supposed to accept without question what sex they were born into. Life for them has become a great existential supermarket, without criteria of judgment.

The young, then, are encouraged to believe by psychologization that they are not responsible for their own conduct, but that they are inheritors of monstrous injustice, of whose advantages they cannot rid themselves. Thus, they are inescapably guilty. The world, moreover, is about to end—unless, that is, they wear enough sackcloth and ashes. They live largely in virtuality, which discourages real human contact and gives no sense of proportion or perspective. Finally, their prospects are often not brilliant. They are expensively overtrained in nonsense; many will live worse than did their parents or grandparents. The assumption of improvement had been replaced by that of deterioration. Their lives are enough to depress those who observe them, let alone those who live them. – Theodore Dalrymple

Socialism is about keeping poor people poor by feeding their resentment.

Capitalism is about making poor people wealthy by feeding their ambition.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) December 25, 2023

Experts will claim any reduction in spending is a social calamity. Our Covid response should make us cautious of experts who have no knowledge of economics. – Richard Prebble

Health economists measure health outcomes by mortality rates. Death is a statistic that is hard to fiddle with. Sweden, which did not lockdown, had from January 2020 to June 2022 the lowest percentage increase in mortality in the OECD.

New Zealand, an island nation, had an increase in mortality twice the rate of Sweden.

Lockdowns reduced Covid cases, but being locked down in overcrowded South Auckland houses caused other adverse health outcomes.

Swedish children have suffered no educational disadvantage due to Covid. We have a generation of children who face a lifetime of disadvantage. – Richard Prebble

Do not fund what you do not want more of. Fund schools for only the number of pupils schools teach, not the number they enrol. Attendance and educational achievement will immediately improve. – Richard Prebble

Competing in the decathlon – at which I won the gold medal at the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games – I’ve seen performances by some inspirational women.

But the truth is, no matter how hard they trained, they could never have matched my times (other than the 1,500metre run, where some women could beat me).

My physique was too different – too male. It would have been grossly unfair for me to compete against them. My victory would have been a travesty.

So when I see trans women like American swimmer Lia Thomas or Canadian cyclist Veronica Ivy (formerly known as Rachel McKinnon) on the podium, I know they are biologically male and physical advantage has helped them to win.

All my sporting instincts rebel against that. For sport to mean anything, it must be fair.  – Daley Thompson

I, too, strongly oppose allowing trans women to take part in female sports. I don’t consider this controversial, nor political. It’s about fairness.

Trans athletes say they do everything possible to compete fairly, for instance by taking testosterone blockers.

Let us put aside the fact that I have strong reservations about the use of any hormone-altering drugs in sport.

But it seems patently obvious that no pill can wipe out the benefits that come from growing up biologically male in terms of muscular and skeletal strength.

These trans women have been through male puberty. They have longer limbs, broader shoulders, thicker bones, better power-to-weight ratios and larger heart and blood volumes.

Nothing they can do will change that: they are always going to outperform biological women. – Daley Thompson

My belief is that sport should have a women’s section and a new, open class where transgender women would be welcomed and could compete fairly.

There should be space for trans women in sport – but not at the expense of all women.

Like any decent human being, I fully support the right of everyone to present however they want, use the name and pronouns they feel reflect their true selves, and live their lives as they wish. – Daley Thompson

Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen the emergence of a more compassionate society – but unfairness to women is the unintended consequence.

And ridding ourselves of old-fashioned gender stereotypes should not result in potentially giving biologically male predators – who identify as female – access to women’s prisons or women’s domestic violence refuges.

Women have fought hard to achieve their safe spaces. They have to be respected. – Daley Thompson

How is any young girl going to feel inspired to take up sport if she knows she’ll be competing against – and losing to – biological males?

And how can any parent feel their daughter is safe in a changing room where biologically-intact male athletes are dressing and showering alongside?  – Daley Thompson

What I do know is that I’m not transphobic or a misogynist – two slurs that have been chucked at me on Twitter.

If we become afraid to tell the truth, we really are in trouble.

And if trans women are allowed to compete in female categories, then women’s sport isn’t just in trouble – it’s finished. – Daley Thompson

The Coalition’s most important reforms in 2024 will not concern tax, housing, resource management or even race relations. They will happen in schools. – Mathew Hooton

Criminals must be caught and locked up and welfare can’t be a lifestyle choice. But the systems need to care about their clients and genuinely support them to become free and independent of the state. – Mathew Hooton

At every place I’ve wanted to say ‘Ultimi barbarorum’. To call out both barbarism and its intellectual apologists. To express Spinoza-style disgust for these new enemies of Western civilisation. For make no mistake, that’s what they are. From Hamas to the radical Islamists in Europe who feel inspired by Hamas to the West’s own sons and daughters of privilege who make excuses for Hamas – all have proven themselves in 2023 to be the adversaries of truth, culture and reason. Surely no one will now deny that Western civilisation is under assault on two fronts: from without and within? – Brendan O’Neill

The apologism for Hamas in privileged circles has been mind-blowing. Hamas’s bestial violence against the Jews has been denied, downplayed or outright justified. A ‘day of celebration’ is how one privately educated pretend radical in Britain described the racist butchery of 7 October. This sympathy with barbarism, this receptiveness to acts of staggering dehumanisation, goes beyond Israelophobia. It speaks to more than the witless hate for Israel that’s been rampant in right-thinking circles for years.

It even touches on something deeper than the scourge of identity politics, though that politics no doubt shapes the infantile hot take that Jews are permanent oppressors and Palestinians are forever victims. No, the sympathy shown by woke Westerners for Hamas’s apocalyptic violence reveals a moral kinship between these two sections of global society. It exposes their shared contempt for Western civilisation, their shared indifference to human suffering, and their shared loathing of freedom. – Brendan O’Neill

The fallout from 7 October brought to the surface a crisis of Western civilisation that has been brewing for decades. It confirmed that when you socialise the young into a system of loathing for their own civilisation not only do you make them indifferent to the threats faced by that civilisation – you make them welcome such threats, to embrace them as necessary moral correctives to our own hubris and misplaced exceptionalism.

Having educated the young to view the West as a racist entity; to fear America and Britain as nations born in the sins of slavery and Empire; to ‘decolonise’ their own learning of those arrogant white men of Enlightenment; to eschew science as a Western conceit that negates more indigenous ways of knowing; and to doubt the existence of truth itself, we cannot now be shocked to find them so cavalier about a violent assault on this awful, unspeakable West. In this case, Hamas’s racist onslaught on the people of a state that is seen to embody Western values in the Middle East. For many today, ‘Western civilisation is synonymous with racism, oppression and exploitation’, as one academic puts it. So why not celebrate its violent humiliation? Why not revel in the degradation of those who enjoy its gains? – Brendan O’Neill

This must be a moral watershed for the West. In turning the young against civilisation, we’ve marched them into the arms of barbarism. We have lost them to Hamas.

The unholy marriage between wokeism and Islamism can no longer be denied. Both scorn the idea of Western civilisation. Both disavow Enlightenment as Western arrogance. Both dread the march of modernity, whether as a threat to Gaia or Sharia. And both hate Jews. One side views them as pigs and monkeys, the other as an oppressor class. Once again Jews have come to be seen as the embodiment of modernity, and therefore the enemies of modernity, whether that’s the civilisation sceptics of our own elite universities or the civilisation attackers of radical Islam, turn on them. Viciously. The woke dehumanise them as oppressors, Hamas dehumanises them with violence. Both are assaults not only on Jews but also on the civilisational conscience itself. – Brendan O’Neill

Today we face not merely a clash of civilisations, but, perhaps more importantly, a clash within Western civilisation. On one side, those who have abandoned reason, on the other those of us who wish to defend it. A movement in 2024 against the barbarorum of our times would be no bad thing. – Brendan O’Neill

 

Sunday’s soapbox

Sunday’s soapbox is yours to use as you will – within the bounds of decency and absence of defamation. You’re welcome to look back or forward, discuss issues of the moment, to pontificate, ponder or point us to something of interest, to educate, elucidate or entertain, amuse, bemuse or simply muse, but not abuse.

pic.twitter.com/SsWnMjTnNO

— 🗣 Free Speech Union ✊ (@NZFreeSpeech) July 20, 2023

Did you see the one about . . .

Misinformation is a word we use to shut you up – Daniel Klein :

The policing of “information” is the stuff of Naziism, Stalinism, Maoism, and similar anti-liberal regimes. To repress criticism of their dicta and diktats, anti-liberals label criticism “misinformation” or “disinformation.” Those labels are instruments to crush dissent. 

This paper offers an understanding of knowledge as involving three chief facets: information, interpretation, and judgment. Usually, what people argue fervently over is not information, but interpretation and judgment. 

What is being labeled and attacked as “misinformation” is not a matter of true or false information, but of true or false knowledge—meaning that disagreement more commonly arises over interpretations and judgments as to which interpretations to take stock in or believe. We make judgments, “good” and “bad,” “wise” and “foolish,” about interpretations, “true” and “false.” 

On that understanding, the paper explains that the projects and policies now afoot styled “anti-misinformation” and “anti-disinformation” are dishonest, as it should be obvious to all that those projects and policies would, if advanced honestly, be called something like “anti-falsehood” campaigns.

But to prosecute an “anti-falsehood” campaign would make obvious the true nature of what is afoot—an Orwellian boot to stomp on Wrongthink. To support governmental policing of “information” is to confess one’s anti-liberalism and illiberality. The essay offers a spiral diagram to show the three chief facets of knowledge (information, interpretation, and judgment) plus a fourth facet, fact, which also deserves distinct conceptualization, even though the spiral reminds us: Facts are theory-laden. . . 

The meaninglessness of moderation – Josephine Bartosch:

. . . Ultimately, how someone wishes to dress and describe themselves is up to them. It is not the job of the state to offer a legal prop for their identity, however. It also seems only fair to acknowledge that families can be left deeply traumatised when a loved one identifies as trans. Too often the experiences of children, parents, siblings and partners are dismissed as inconvenient, messy collateral damage. As Gender Wars shows, the message of the “reasonable transexual” is more appealing.

Acknowledgment of both reality and personal liberty must be the basis from which progress is made. In the eyes of the self-styled “moderates”, this makes me one of those dreadful extremists — bathing in the tears of trans kids, using pronouns and deadnames as weapons in the (non-existent) “trans genocide” — all because to me, there is no polite middle way between shared objective reality and a subjective delusion, no matter how articulately the argument is presented. It is hard not to see the reaction of many feminists to Went as revealing: a woman would never be praised for meeting such a low bar.

Something as basic as acknowledging sex has been presented as controversial, as a complex academic topic requiring reams of unpicking, and that is pure lady testicles. Go to any farmyard, and it is quite apparent that even beasts bred for human consumption know what biological sex is. It is welcome that a debate is finally happening, and Gender Wars was a fair start. Outside of the television script, though, the burden of proof should not be on “gender critical” people to explain why reality is real. A willingness to listen by trans activists should be taken as a bare minimum. Platitudes about “compromise” must not be allowed to become the end of the start — we deserve more.

Are the rest of the country as sick of political sideshows as I am? – Kate Hawkesby :

I think what we’ve seen this week is indicative of what we’re going to see for the rest of the election campaign from now until October.

And that is – sideshows. And that’s the real let down for us the voters. We are being done a disservice not only by the politicians themselves but also the media covering them.

What this country urgently needs is the basics. Roads fixed, hospitals functioning again, schools with students attending and passing, and crime sorted out. What we don’t need is the sideshow on bilingual road signs, who gets a free prescription and who doesn’t, who’s dog whistling and who isn’t.

We deserve better. We have also got to stop this collective attack on anyone who dare question anything to do with Maori culture or Te Reo, it is not racist to say you don’t think bilingual road signs are a priority right now. To question the Government’s desire for this and then be deemed racist and a dog whistler when you do, is pathetic.

This government has developed a modus operandi of lecturing us on how we should behave, how long we should spend in the shower, how we should read our road signs.

They’re good at telling us what we should do, because they know best and us mere mortals are just not as enlightened as them. These are fringe issues at a time where we as a country are facing far more serious ones. . .

If you were hoping for more or better or different between now and October, you’re probably going to be disappointed. They’ll announce stuff, they just won’t be able to do much about it. But the pettiness of politics in election year is such a turn off.

Doesn’t the name calling and the descending into side shows just put voters off?

Politicians looking to bait opponents, media looking for ‘gotcha’ moments – a lot of it is beltway and a lot of it is BS. It doesn’t serve us, and it certainly doesn’t move this country forward. . .

The toughness and stoicism of Tina Turner – Julie Burchill :

Reading about the astonishingly tough life of Tina Turner, who died last week aged 83, I was struck by the emptiness of the way we use words like ‘strong’ and ‘brave’ these days. ‘Survivor’ – that’s another one, frequently used about some Z-lister who ate too much, packed on the timber and went to a fat farm to sweat it off, or about a famous drunk who got off the booze and came third from last in a half-marathon. . . 

Tina Turner, born in 1939, never got the chance to fight in a war, but her strength and bravery – and her stoicism – were extraordinary. Born to a Tennessee share-cropper family, she picked cotton as a child. When she was 11, her mother left the family home in fear of her life due to her violent husband. At 16, Tina became a servant. Her remarkable voice attracted professional musician Ike Turner, who terrorised her during their marriage from 1962 to 1978. Their most famous song, ‘River Deep – Mountain High’, sounds so sinister now – domestic violence hiding in plain sight, as this magnificent woman sings about being a rag doll and a faithful puppy when she was actually her husband’s punchbag.

She left him with 36 cents in her pocket. For years she played dives and received food stamps. Warned by police that Ike had put a contract out on her life, she kept a gun in her handbag. She returned to cabaret singing before her colossal comeback in 1984, when the album Private Dancer sold 10million copies. It included her first No1 single, ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’, and helped her become one of the most successful and adored singers in the world. . . .

Not many of us are brave. But we can be tough – and that’s a pretty good option. I’d go so far as to say that if you want a good, productive, enjoyable life, toughness is a necessity. It will be more use to you in the long run than talent, beauty or any other gift. We are all far more resilient than we imagine. But, for obvious reasons, the ruling class is happier if we’re weak, or at least identify as such.

Let me spell it out. You’re not brave and strong if you’re ill – you’re unlucky. You’re not brave and strong if you climb a mountain – you’re daring. You’re brave if you endanger yourself on behalf of others and you’re strong if you don’t moan about your life. ‘People think my life has been tough, but I think it’s been a wonderful journey. The older you get, the more you realise it’s not what happened, it’s how you deal with it’, Tina Turner once said. Stoicism in a nutshell. So when we are tempted to use the words brave and strong cheaply, let us remember Tina Turner – and let us, at least, be tough.

Media regulation plan – a censor’s greatest dream – Jonathan Ayling :

. . . Like taxes and death, there are some dependables in life. I would suggest a government’s propensity to censorship and speech regulation is one of them. . .

On Thursday, we saw yet again that even in a liberal, democratic society with longstanding civil liberties, governments are always keen to reach for a bit more than they should. . .

Things won’t change too much for major media outlets, but for the first time ever, your tweets, comments on Facebook, and waxing-lyrical on LinkedIn will be subject to oversight by a government watchdog.

This raises (at least) two major flags in my mind.

Firstly, how can these new codes, which will have significant implications on individuals’ free speech, be drafted without the public having input into what the codes prohibit? There is no democratic accountability in this process, where Kiwi citizens get to have their voices heard, and if they’re not listened to, they can vote the politicians out.

This approach separates significant responsibility away from those who, first of all, are supposed to bear these responsibilities, but second, are accountable to voters.

That’s because at the heart of censorship is a great fear of the common Kiwi. We may romanticise them in a condescending way as inclusive, innovative, friendly, and reliable (all the things Kiwis are lauded for overseas), but don’t you dare actually trust them with the ability to talk amongst themselves freely; or at least not without a government regulator to make sure it’s ka pai.

The proposed structure of a regulator, with a code drafted away from Parliament and political accountability, is a censor’s greatest dream and will ultimately be weaponised to suppress unpopular or disliked perspectives and opinions.

Call this cynical, or call it a clear reading of history. Both are probably true.

These codes will apply to all platforms, whether or not they sign up – gone are voluntary opinions.

And remember, the speech and content that will be regulated is all legal. . . 

This is about “harmful” ideas that make individuals “feel unsafe”. This is about silencing certain perspectives, views or beliefs.

Secondly, why do we think this will work, and what will the unintended consequences be?

While the intention to address “safety” and online “harm” is arguably laudable, the cure is worse than the disease. This is an inelegant solution to the “lawful but awful” category of speech, which is best addressed through counter-speech.

Frameworks of this kind do nothing to increase mature discourse or community interconnectedness. On the contrary, they breed suspicion and division.

Undoubtedly, content online can cause hate and harm. Free speech is the solution to this, as we use our voices to speak up for tolerance, inclusion, and diversity.

Silencing Kiwis online does not promote social cohesion or build trust. Kiwis will see this work as nothing more than online hate speech laws, and will resist this overreach also.

Fact checking government claims – Oliver Hartwich :

. . . They say truth is the first casualty of war. It is also the first casualty of election campaigns. . . 

After every sentence, I wished someone had hit the pause button on Hipkins’ speech to fact-check his assertions. But this was live TV, and it would have been naïve to believe that any New Zealand journalist would bother to do so afterwards. It would have been worth it, though, because the discrepancy between Hipkins’ claims and our cold, hard reality could not have been starker. Take this gem from Hipkins’ speech: “We’ve lifted incomes for thousands of Kiwi families through increases to the minimum wage, boosts to benefits and student allowances, increases to superannuation, and through managing an economy that has seen the wages of Kiwi workers growing.” Yes, it is true that the minimum wage, benefits and student allowances have all gone up. But is that a good thing? Well, not quite. New Zealand now has a minimum wage that is among the world’s highest relative to average wages. That is something to be concerned about, not to celebrate. Increasing the minimum wage too close to the average wage can lead to both inflation and higher unemployment. Our benefits have also gone up, and the government no longer tries to wean people off welfare. So, unsurprisingly, we have high beneficiary numbers even as the labour market remains tight. That is hardly an achievement. It is also true that wages are growing, but they are struggling to keep up with cost-of-living increases. Most New Zealanders would not say they feel any better off under this government. After just a little digging, there is little left of Hipkins’ grandiose rhetoric. . .

The New Zealand history curriculum is a disaster. It teaches our children a highly selective (and biased) story of New Zealand. It appalled even the Royal Society. The public holiday for Matariki is wonderful, of course – except another public holiday is yet another cost for businesses to bear at a time when many can hardly afford the holidays we already have. And then there is the Zero Carbon Act, which establishes a grand central planning regime for carbon emissions, even though New Zealand already has an Emissions Trading Scheme that is way more efficient in reducing our carbon footprint. But, just as you thought Hipkins’ self-praise could not get more absurd, he said this: “We’ve put tackling climate change at the heart of our work, we’ve made tangible progress to tackle the burgeoning mental health challenge we face, and we’ve put more cops on the beat.” Oh well. Tackling climate change, see above. Mental health? Wasn’t that the $1.9 billion in the first ‘Wellbeing Budget’ which failed to create a single new mental health bed? And as for more police, try telling that to retailers who get ram-raided every 15 hours on average. At least the government is giving them fog cannons now. Hipkins continued: “We’ve got more work to do to make sure our young Kiwis are positively engaged in education and in our local communities. I’m simply not willing to write off some of our youngest and most vulnerable kids and resign them to a life in and out of the justice system when we know there is a better way.”

Positively engaged in education? If only. It was on Hipkins’ watch as education minister the school attendance rates went from bad to worse. And crime ballooned during Hipkins’ tenure as minister of police. . .

I am not writing about this to make a party-political point. Frankly, I could not care less what colours our political leaders wear. But I do care for good policy. And there simply wasn’t much of it in Hipkins speech – or indeed in the government of which he has been a prominent member for the past five years. However, I do agree with one thing Hipkins said: “New Zealanders deserve better than that. They deserve a government that works for everyone. A government committed to the value that the circumstances you were born into shouldn’t limit your opportunities in life. A government committed to the value that if you work hard, you should be able to get ahead and create a better life for you and your family.” It is just a pity that we haven’t had such a government for a long time.

Political and cultural corruption have wrecked New Zealand – Amy Brooke :

. . . New Zealand, for example, is now bottom of the OECD for access to modern medicines with cancer treatments unfunded that are widely available elsewhere. Doctors‘ waiting times are now fifth to bottom of the 38 OECD countries. Emergency Department wait times have further deteriorated, with more than one in five people waiting at least six hours even for urgent treatment. The number of patients waiting for specialists for over a year has gone up seventeen-fold since 2019, with lengthening surgery waiting lists. We have a desperate shortage of nurses – particularly so given the Ardern government’s refusal to grant them priority in assessment criteria for immigration. We have paid a devastating price, as reportedly nearly 5,000 New Zealand nurses have registered to work in Australia since last August, with only one nurse arriving from overseas. New Zealand, in 2023, has reportedly had 19,000 nurses leaving the profession in the last five years under this Labour government, a 60 per cent increase since 2017.

Government debt has more than doubled, and the IMF’s 2023 outlook forecasts we will have one of the lowest GDP growth rates in the Asia-Pacific region, with New Zealand’s current account balance reported as 8.6 per cent of GDP – worse than Greece. We have gone from one of the best GDP performing countries in the world to having the worst current account deficits.

One can well regard it as a great wickedness when a government determinedly creates two classes of citizens, although well aware that prioritising the rights of those from a particular ethnic background not only offends against the concept of fairness, but will of course provoke resentment. The inevitable ensuing backlash produces a virtual culture war resulting in the destabilising of a country – grist to the mill of neo-Marxists apparently long well-placed not only in ‘the long march’ throughout our institutions, but also within our political parties.

Labour’s appalling record is of contriving a decline in virtually every aspect of our national life since the Ardern government took office in 2017.Our public services and infrastructure are crumbling, and New Zealanders are increasingly aware that we need a major reset of priorities – and to value productivity – with separatist iwi consultations regarded as a black hole.

Public sector managers are growing at nearly twice the rate of frontline workers since the current government came to power, and spurious, reinvented requirements by the Treaty of Waitangi industry has ‘Treaty Training’ now mandatory for members of New Zealand professional bodies – providing a huge disincentive to skilled, prospective immigrants with no wish to learn today’s demonstrably inauthentic, reinvented Maori language.

The fact that our far-left government must be very well aware of this forces the question: what is its real agenda?

 

 

 

Did you see the one about . . .

I’m bordering on feeling sorry for Chris Hipkins – Kate Hawkesby

I’m bordering on feeling sorry for Chris Hipkins – and I’ll tell you why.

He’s single-handedly being the face of the entire Government day in day out and spinning so much BS that it must be giving him a headache.

I mean the level of ‘creative facts’ shall we call them, being espoused, is truly award winning. . . .

You can’t wreck a country to this degree over five years and keep blaming international trends or global patterns.

I think this Government would actually go a long way to rebuilding people’s faith in them if they actually stopped denying and deflecting and gaslighting, and just started admitting some stuff they’ve got wrong.

If they started telling it like it is. . . 

I think the Opposition do understand how over it voters are, but they’re just a bit caught up in trying to please the middle voter, so they’re sitting on the fence too much.

But I keep coming back to the old adage, despite what the polls say, oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them.

And if you look at the state of this country right now, and if those who choose to turn a blind eye to it all get really honest for a minute, then even Hipkins must know what we all know, that we can’t possibly continue the way we are.

The key to beating the crime wave: more police on the streets – Bruce Cotterill :

It hasn’t been a good couple of weeks for the Police Minister.

She’s been out on the circuit, putting out press releases and doing interviews. She’s been celebrating the additional 1800 recruits who have joined the police force, and in doing so congratulating herself and her Government colleagues for the fact that the people feel safer.

Except we don’t. There is plenty of spin from this Government. Some of it, they get away with. But this one won’t fly.

The reason? We don’t feel safer. In fact, it’s worse than that: some of us are downright scared. Scared to walk home from school. Scared to go to the supermarket. Scared to walk down the street or to catch a bus.

There’s one thing more important than anything else. More important than healthcare. More important than education. Even more important than the roading networks that frustrate our everyday lives.

What’s so important? We all want to feel safe. The purpose of law and order is to ensure that. And at the moment we don’t. . .

Despite the daily evidence in front of us, the minister suggested this week that crime was on its way down. She said the reason for more crime being reported was the fact that police had a new app that made crime easier to report. She went on to say that those 1800 police meant New Zealanders were feeling safer.

Perhaps she missed the stats showing that violent crime is up by 40 per cent and there are 25 per cent fewer people in prison. That doesn’t make us feel safer.

In any case, the PM, himself a failed former Police Minister, fronted with Mike Hosking on Newstalk ZB during the week and acknowledged the problem.

They say the first step to overcoming a problem is to acknowledge that you have one. So let’s call that a start.

But back to the 1800 new cops. Or for that matter the 9700 frontline police we now have. Where are they? They’re certainly not in the CBD on a Friday night. . .

In the past 12 years we’ve had 10 police ministers. Five from National and five from Labour. That includes the current Prime Minister. Two people have had the job twice – Judith Collins and Stuart Nash. You’d argue that Collins is the only one who seems to have hated crime enough to take the job seriously. She did the job for four years in total. That means the others averaged less than a year in the job. There’s a message in there somewhere. Longevity and experience gets better results. The current minister is the fourth in the past three years. . . 

One of the wonderful ironies about this debate is that while the Police Minister has been telling us how much safer we all feel, last week’s Budget included $14 million of additional expenditure across four years to enhance security at the homes and offices of MPs. That’s great for the MPs. What about the rest of us?

Did anyone else think of South Africa when they heard that? It was my immediate reaction. Perhaps the barbed wire is next.

Speaking of which, I get my hair cut by a young South African woman. She’s a wife and a mother and a delightful personality. She told me this recently: “My husband and I took five years to make the decision to come here. We thought it would be better. But the way this country is going, we are starting to think we made a mistake.” . .

Here’s the thing about the crime problem: it’s visible and it’s scary. The gang fights on the streets are videoed and appear in our daily news. We see people on the ground being kicked repeatedly. We wonder, why them? Could it be me? We see the video leaked out of prison of the gang haka. How did they get a camera into the prison? Why are we glamourising their antics behind bars?

We’re not feeling safer, minister, because the crime is more visible than ever before. The thugs are out on the streets beside us. They’re smashing into stores in broad daylight, in front of our eyes and our camera phones. We hear stories that the perpetrators aren’t charged. The courts are too clogged up to deal with them in a timely fashion. Sometimes a family conference is ordered instead.

That doesn’t appear to be working.

We can make excuses for people. We hear of poor upbringings, troubled childhoods and opportunities for rehabilitation. And yet many use their lifeline to re-offend.

So that doesn’t appear to be working either.

We know we have a problem when members of our police force resort to anonymously calling talkback radio to defend their actions or lack thereof. When they say we’re soft on crime, you’d better believe it. When they say they’re not supported, you need to believe it. . .

We have a massive problem and we need massive action to solve it. We need the Government, the Police Minister, the Police Commissioner, and for that matter every responsible New Zealander, to say the current system isn’t acceptable. We urgently need to get the situation back under control. We need those 1800 new police and their colleagues out on the street. And we need more, possibly another 1800. Visible. Accessible. Capable.

Once they’re out there, let’s give them authority to do the job that needs to be done. Some of the bad guys are scary. I get that and we need to ensure that the resources are available to ensure the cops can safely deal with escalating situations. But plenty of them are kids who need, as my grandfather would have said, a swift kick. Let’s put the excuse box to one side and support our police effort with on-the-scene permissions, rapid processing and a legal system that moves quickly to adapt to the crisis.

When nations start collapsing, escalating crime is often both an ingredient and an output. We need to stop the crime wave before the problem is irreversible.

At the risk of paraphrasing those Aussies. Hey coppers. Where the bloody hell are you? . . 

Academics don’t feel free to air controversial opinions according to survey – Jonathan Ayling :

The second annual survey on academic freedom by the Free Speech Union is an eye-opening read for those of us who value ideas and solutions being openly debated in Kiwi universities. . . 

Concerningly, this report shows that a majority of academics who responded at five of our eight universities disagreed that they were free to state controversial or unpopular opinions, even though this is one of the specific features of academic freedom as defined in the Education and Training Act 2020.

Across all eight universities, only 46% of academics agreed they felt free to question received wisdom and state controversial and unpopular opinions.

The rest disagreed. Men in particular, (59%), believed they were not free to voice these views.

Claims that those who were more senior (and therefore supposedly more secure) in roles, such as professors, were freer to speak on controversial subjects did not play out.

In fact, only 31% of professors agreed that they were free to state controversial or unpopular opinions. If those who have dedicated their careers to exploring specific subjects feel unfree to voice their views if they are unpopular or controversial, how can these conversations move forward?. .

Problematically, it is clear that the flow of political persuasion mapped almost directly onto whether academics felt free. About two-thirds (64%) of academics who identified as “very left” and 70% of those who identified as “left” felt free to state controversial or unpopular opinions.

It decreased from less than half (46%) of those who are “slightly left” to one-third (34%) of those who are “centrist” down to one-quarter (26%) of those who are “slightly right” to 18% for those who are “right”. No academic who responded as “very right wing” agreed with the statement (admittedly, there was a small sample size for this group).

This, in the context of an academy that we already know has a left-leaning bent (the respondents to our survey reflect this disposition), is frightening for intellectual diversity. . . 

When one sector of society feels they are free to participate and contribute to a discussion while another does not feel free at all, we all lose.

No matter who it is that is included/excluded, we will not develop the answers we need to address complex questions if major stakeholders are not free to participate.

Time and again in our past, important voices in our communities have not been free to contribute. To knowingly repeat this error again is folly.

These results are concerning, but the lack of engagement with research like this, and the problem they point to, is even more concerning.

Results last year indicated many academics do not feel they have adequate academic freedom. Each vice-chancellor was invited to participate in the research this year and learn from the responses of their own academics. Not a single one agreed.

Likewise, where is the Minister of Education on this issue? Where is the Tertiary Education Union or the Tertiary Education Commission?

Freedom in the university sector is stagnating, and its leaders either don’t know or don’t care. We need to pay attention and do something – our future is far more bleak without solutions, as disruptive or unexpected as they may be, that move us forward.

How trans ideology came for therapy – James Esses :

 . . . I had devoted four years of my life towards training to become a psychotherapist. I had spent tens of thousands of pounds in the process. In one email, my hard work and future aspirations had come crashing down. . . 

The truth is that this happened to me because I hold gender critical views. I believe that biological sex is binary and immutable. I do not believe that children should be taught otherwise. Nor do I believe that children should be unequivocally affirmed down a path of potentially irreversible medical transitioning.  

These beliefs, founded in science and ethical therapeutic considerations, were enough to cost me my vocation. . .

In total, I spent almost six years counselling with Childline. I felt so inspired by helping these young people that I decided to make it my life’s work. I undertook a Foundation Certificate before enrolling on what was supposed to be a five-year Master’s programme at the Metanoia Institute – a west-London specialist institute for psychotherapy and counselling. I found the course extremely fulfilling and before long I was starting to see clients weekly for private therapy with the charity, Mind.  

Over the years at Childline, I began to notice an increase in the number of children contacting us to discuss feeling trapped in the wrong body. My role wasn’t to advise, merely to listen and explore. Children as young as eight told me they were certain they were trans – but they didn’t seem to have much understanding of what ‘trans’ meant. Some were desperate to take medication to delay their puberty – but didn’t seem to know what puberty involved. Many told me that they had joined online communities where their trans identities were celebrated and encouraged. Most (but not all) were born as girls and wanted to be boys. Some were already using breast binders, a piece of clothing that compresses breasts and can cause serious damage if not used properly. I decided to immerse myself in literature and research on the topic and was shocked and horrified with what I found. 

In the UK, children are sometimes prescribed puberty-blocking drugs. Advocates say these drugs give children more time to work out their options, and they stress the drugs are ‘reversible’ (i.e., once you stop taking them, they claim, normal puberty resumes). But the science is far from clear. The medication is relatively new and experimental, so we have no long-term data. In my view, puberty is part of natural development. If we artificially halt that process, even if you later come off that medication, can it ever be said that you’ve gone through a natural development?  

Cross-sex hormones (which studies show that the vast majority of children on puberty blockers will go on to take) can also bring about irreversible changes to a young person’s body and may even impact on fertility and sexual functioning.  

For those who seek to eventually surgically transition, this may culminate in a double mastectomy. I have met many ‘detransitioners’ who deeply regret the emotional and physical scars, as well as the feeling that they were encouraged down a particular path. 

Mere ‘social transition’ – when a child simply starts living as the other sex, often involving a change of wardrobe and a possible change of name and pronouns – is usually seen as the soft and harmless option, because it doesn’t involve medical treatment. However, in my experience once you’ve started down that path, it’s difficult to change course. I’ve spoken to children who identify as trans and would secretly like to detransition but they’re too frightened of being labelling a liar or attention-seeker.  

I expected vigorous debate on this issue within my community of therapists. But instead, I found silence. There was very little serious engagement with the issue of gender dysphoria – the mental health condition one must be diagnosed with in order to legally or medically transition. People diagnosed with gender dysphoria frequently have other diagnoses, including autism, or may have experienced previous trauma. My training institute, along with my governing body, the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) appeared to ascribe to gender ideology – that sex is not binary.  

The message seemed to be that if a child we are counselling tells us they want to transition, we should simply ‘affirm’ that position. To challenge or explore the issue with them could be seen as ‘conversion therapy’ or possibly even ‘transphobia’. 

Frustrated with the lack of open dialogue, I co-founded Thoughtful Therapists, a group committed to discussion of these issues. Questions around transitioning are complex, nuanced, and can have serious ramifications. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise. . . 

Myself and many colleagues started to worry that the government’s proposed new law would also criminalise any attempt to openly explore issues with a child who has gender dysphoria. We have seen similar legislation passed abroad, including in Canada, New Zealand and Ireland, often with extremely ambiguous language and without clear safeguards for trained mental health practitioners. I have spoken to therapists in these countries who say they will no longer work with children who have gender dysphoria, as they fear being wrongly accused of carrying out conversion therapy and possibly even criminalised.  

Off the back of the government’s legislative announcement in early 2021, I started a public petition, calling on the government to safeguard essential, explorative therapy for children struggling with gender dysphoria as part of any ban and recognise that most children with gender dysphoria will eventually settle into their bodies. My petition quickly garnered more than 11,000 signatures and eventually a response from the government, which said: ‘We… are clear that this ban must not impact on the independence and confidence of clinicians.’ 

But my intervention was quickly met with abuse from trans rights activists on social media. I was labelled a transphobe, a bigot. I’m neither of those things. Nobody wanted to engage in discussion – they simply wanted to attack me. . . 

I received another email from the Deputy CEO, summarily expelling me from my course for bringing the institute and profession ‘into disrepute’. It was only a few paragraphs long. I was provided with no right of appeal, and not a single opportunity to defend myself or even have a conversation. It was all the more confusing given that just weeks earlier, I had been signed off by my institute to set up a private therapy practice. . . 

It felt truly horrible. I was being discriminated against for my beliefs and for simply trying to engage in a dialogue about safeguarding children. Given how tight knit the psychotherapy community is, I am starkly aware of the impact this ordeal has had on my future career prospects.  

Within a few weeks of my expulsion, Childline told me that they were terminating my volunteering contract with them, on similar grounds. Having devoted six years of my life to this organisation and supporting young children in need, this was extraordinarily painful. . . 

Much has changed in the landscape since my expulsion – the closure of the Tavistock, the interim Cass Report, the Charity Commission investigation into Mermaids, the blocking of self-ID in Scotland, the prohibition of biological males competing against females by UK Athletics, and the ongoing cautious debate around ‘conversion therapy’. 

These feel like somewhat of a vindication. Yet, there is something painfully ironic about the fact that the beliefs I lost my vocation for have now, in essence, been adopted by the UK government. 

Of course, I am seeking personal justice. But this isn’t just about me, as damaging as it has been to my life. It’s about the fundamental issue of free speech. Most importantly, it’s about protecting and providing the necessary support to vulnerable children. The stakes are far too high to stay silent. 

A point to the pointless – Roger Partridge :

This week’s revelation that the Government has spent over $80m in rebates to Tesla owners should cause outrage.

And not simply because subsidising the well-off into new cars fails to pass the sniff test.

The real problem is that the payments have been pointless. Aside, that is, from putting smiles on the faces of new EV owners. . . 

The policy’s goal is not to subsidise the wealthy into Teslas. It is to help the country meet its net emissions targets.

But, in this, the policy cannot work.

Understanding why requires only a basic grasp of the Emissions Trading Scheme.

Our ETS is one of the world’s most comprehensive. It places a fixed – and reducing – cap on net emissions. Fossil fuels for domestic transport must be offset under the scheme using carbon credits.

As people switch from using petrol/diesel cars to EVs, gross emissions from the transport sector decrease. But this simply frees up carbon credits, facilitating emissions in other sectors of the economy. The EV subsidies simply re-arrange the deck chairs. The ETS cap determines overall net emissions.

All those millions paid to lucky Tesla owners have been spent for nothing.

Worse still, the payments are just a fraction of the $300m already consumed under the Clean Car Discount scheme. Not to mention the cost of the hodgepodge of other initiatives targeting emissions also covered by the ETS. Like requirements that councils consider emissions when approving new housing. Or the millions spent on subsidies for businesses to shift to lower-emitting equipment.

But the wastefulness is symptomatic of an even bigger problem within Government: the failure to apply cost-benefit analysis to spending decisions to discover whether they make sense.

And that is a problem that really matters. A dollar wasted on a pointless policy is a dollar not available to pay teachers’ salaries, fund new pharmaceuticals or rebuild the country’s ailing infrastructure.

If paying $80m to the well-off prompts a call for greater scrutiny of government spending, it may not have been so pointless after all.

Only some will benefit from Labour’s winter health plan – Shane Reti :

Last week, Labour announced a 24-point Winter Health Plan to reduce the burden on hospitals over the next four months.

The Health Minister said the plan was the single biggest improvement on the frontline under the health reforms.

If this is the single biggest improvement in the frontline under the reforms, then we should be seriously worried.

I think everyone in New Zealand – bar the Health Minister – believes our health system is in crisis.

At the moment, the media is full of stories of people waiting hours and hours in emergency departments for medical attention, including mental health patients waiting up to four days to get help.

This is absolutely no reflection on the hard-working health staff who turn up under-resourced and understaffed day after day to look after unwell New Zealanders. They are doing a magnificent job.

It is simply the result of a Labour Government that decided to reorganise the entire health system during a pandemic and failed to focus on the needs of frontline staff.  . . 

The Winter Plan is a good idea in principle, but unfortunately, it falls short in many areas.

For example, the plan allows pharmacies to treat minor ailments, like diarrhoea and scabies.

But not at every pharmacy in the country. In fact, 250 are not eligible.

You can imagine the frustration of the ineligible Rotorua pharmacist who contacted me with concerns for his vulnerable population, who will miss out. Why?

This initiative is also not available to every New Zealander – only Māori, Pasifika, under-14s and their whānau and Community Services Card holders.

Why would you not just allow all pharmacies to treat everyone, or even those with Community Services Cards who have minor ailments?

Minor sprains and strains are also common in emergency departments, but these cannot be treated under the Winter Plan, which has no ACC involvement for pharmacies. . . 

The Winter Health Plan also allows for mental health patients to be diverted to a mental health service rather than an emergency department – which would be great, but mental health services are also in short supply despite Labour’s promise to invest up to $1.9 billion into mental health.

So, there are some serious shortcomings in Labour’s Winter Health Plan, not the least of which is: where exactly is the health workforce to do all of this?

National recognises our health system is in crisis and that the health workforce is a key reason. . . 

If you believe the polls, a lot of people are happy with the status-quo: Kate Hawkesby :

. . .  Luxon mentioned speaking with a nurse and a teacher – both in their 20’s, saving to buy a house, the rent had just gone up by $50 that week, they were looking at their outgoings compared to their income and they told him they’d actually started looking at jobs in Australia because they didn’t feel they could get ahead in New Zealand.

And that’s a real travesty.

If we’re seen as such an expensive place to live, that New Zealand is such a prohibitively costly existence for young people that they’re actually planning a future elsewhere, then we’re doing it all wrong.

We have to do better for our kids and their futures and the future of this country. And that’s the bit that worries me – the malaise that’s wafted over this country – during Covid – and is still not lifting.

The pandering to the lowest common denominator, the lack of targets, as Luxon pointed out which have been so debilitating for this country on every metric – health, crime, education, we seem to have decided that just scraping the barrel is good enough.

There’s a collective lack of ambition, lack of desire to be better or want for more.

Where’s our aspiration gone? Where is that ‘can do’ spirit that our grandparents had?

I worry we’ve given up, and we’re happy to just plod along and as David Seymour put it, basically just be a big Fiji.

The polls are tight – which means, if you believe them, there are a lot of people in this country happy with status quo.

That worries me.

 

Quotes of the day

 Figures provided to RNZ show that 532 comms people were employed in the year to June 2022, up 7.5 percent on the previous year.

It’s odds-on that people employed in comms work across the public and private sectors now far outnumber those in journalism. Even 14 years ago the then Commissioner of Police remarked to me, with what I thought was a hint of smugness, that he employed more trained journalists than most newspapers did. I had no reason to doubt him.

I’m sure this wasn’t unique to the police. – Karl du Fresne

Health Minister Ayesha Verrall recently revealed in response to Opposition questioning that Te Whatu Ora, the national health agency, employs 173 comms people and a further 26 contractors working in the same field. This would be outrageous at the best of times, but looks even worse when the health system is crumbling and desperately short of actual health professionals. It suggests seriously skewed priorities.

I’m reliably informed, meanwhile, that Wellington City Council employs 60 comms people across all its departments. If the effectiveness of an organisation’s comms staff can be gauged by its public image, you’d have to conclude that the comms people at both Te Whatu Ora and Wellington City Council are doing a spectacularly poor job.

Paradoxically, the expansion of comms departments hasn’t facilitated better communication with the public. Quite the reverse: many journalists will tell you that generally speaking, the ease of obtaining important information from government organisations tends to diminish as more comms people are employed. – Karl du Fresne

People who did useful and often admirable work as journalists now market themselves as content strategy advisers or communications and engagement leads, whatever that may mean.

I don’t entirely blame them. They have to make a buck, and they’re almost certainly earning a lot more than they did in their former career, though I bet they’re not having as much fun as they did when they worked in newsrooms.

I lament this enormous loss of skill and experience. You can see the results not only in the massive expansion of the comms sector, but more sadly in the greatly diminished quality of journalism.

The growth in the number of political press secretaries and media advisers, who wield more power than is healthy, is a striking manifestation of the trend.

Political press secretaries at the top level are more than mere functionaries. They are key influencers, practitioners of the dark arts: the equivalent of scheming courtiers in a royal palace. They often control the narrative when by rights it should be determined by the people who employ them. – Karl du Fresne

Back at the media coalface, a shrinking but honourable minority of working journalists remain committed to telling important stories and upholding traditional values of fairness and impartiality. They should be regarded as heroes. Others still do their best to ensure a wide range of opinions are published in letters to the editor columns. –

Unfortunately such people are now outnumbered by university-educated social justice activists posing as journalists who consider it their mission to correct the thinking of their ignorant, bigoted or misguided readers. This would be marginally more tolerable if they were competent writers, but many are not. They write as if English is their second language.

In the comms war, meanwhile, the balance of power has long since shifted from those trying to get information to those controlling it. They are unseen influencers whose role is invisible to everyone other than the people they work with. This has serious implications for democracy and transparency. – Karl du Fresne

There’s a crucial difference between straight, unembroidered information – factual information that’s openly disclosed and which people can use – and political or corporate spin that’s used to make organisations look good, to promote vested interests or to bury potentially embarrassing issues of public importance. The type of comms, in other words, that seeks to exert influence on public affairs without disclosing who’s pulling the strings and why.

To finish, a couple of crucial questions: is the quality of government better as a result of all these unseen “strategic” comms advisers in government departments and agencies? Most people would almost certainly say no. Do the public get more and better quality information? Again, probably not. The thing to remember is that the comms business is ultimately about control – and nowhere more so than in the political realm. – Karl du Fresne

It’s a cultural belief in the value of other people’s perspectives and competing ideas that helps progress us forward.

More and more we see people resist views that diverge from theirs and not give others the time of day to consider their perspective. – Jonathan Ayling 

It started with Trump but spread rapidly. We had it here over Covid. All these things mean people do not respect institutions of government as they once did.

They need to express themselves but the problem with that is you lose community cohesion. I think it is a profound political problem.

These are weird times we live in. This weirdness makes people uncertain. It means their normal lives are disrupted. They can’t get help quickly enough.

So the result of that is people go down rabbit holes of conspiracy theories, believing all sorts of nonsense that isn’t true. – Sir Geoffrey Palmer

The people who police the standards are not there. You can say whatever you like on social media and a lot of it is rubbish.

We don’t have standards and regulation and that is a danger to democracy.  – Sir Geoffrey Palmer

THAT TELEVISION NEW ZEALAND saw fit to run a news item on the subject of political debate tells us something. Unfortunately, it is that we have a very big problem on our hands.

A generation has grown to adulthood for whom the idea that all important issues have at least two sides has acquired a counterintuitive aspect. It is a generation raised to believe that all the great questions that formerly divided society have been resolved.

To indicate otherwise, by affirming ideas that have been consigned, with extreme prejudice, to the dustbin of history, is to signal a form of individual and social pathology. Such persons may merit treatment, but what they absolutely must not be given is an audience. –  Chris Trotter

Genuine political debate could hardly be more different from this argumentative cleverness. When real human passions are engaged, debates can become extremely fraught affairs. – Chris Trotter

It is possible that the increasing disinclination to debate contentious issues, a trend already evident in the nation’s universities, is a reflection of the emotional frailty of many younger New Zealanders. More and more we hear the argument that free speech causes real harm to persons of a sensitive disposition. Certainly, hearing one’s cherished beliefs trashed by someone in possession of finely-honed rhetorical skills can be a devastating experience. Especially so, if one’s personal identity has been, to a large extent, constructed out of those beliefs.

In order to avoid upsetting their paying customers, universities have begun to downplay the idea that there are multiple ways of looking at contentious issues, in favour of the notion that there is only one “correct” viewpoint which, if not acknowledged by students, may severely limit their academic success. From this position it is but a short step to denying those with “incorrect” views a “platform”, or to the shouting-down of any dissenters who make it as far as the stage.

Emerging from this environment, it is easy to see why university graduates – especially those from the liberal arts and communications studies – might find it both strange and intolerable to end up in institutions where the tradition of allowing all sides of an issue to be aired remains deeply entrenched. Trained to espouse only the “correct” version of reality, the idea of giving “incorrect” ideas access to the “bully pulpit” of the mass media, can only strike a large number of these youngsters as just plain wrong. – Chris Trotter

The experience, both overseas and here in New Zealand, is for younger journalists to stage in-house uprisings against what they see as excessive editorial tolerance of incorrect ideas and practices. Rather than defend the tradition of ideological diversity in journalism, most editors, publishers and broadcasters are opting to bow to the will of the young people destined to replace them.

Thanks to the events surrounding Keen-Minshull’s visit, however, at least some journalists have been given cause to re-think their attitudes. The news-media’s repetition of the charge that Keen-Minshull was an “anti-trans activist” – rather than a “women’s-rights campaigner” – contributed significantly to the aggressive temper of her opponents. Educated to regard the exercise of the “Heckler’s Veto” as an entirely legitimate tactic, trans-gender activists felt morally entitled to monster Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull off her stage and out of the public square.

That this led directly to serious assaults against those who had gathered to hear Keen-Minshull speak (much of it captured on video) only made it harder for mainstream journalists to square their consciences with the behaviour a growing chorus of critics has condemned as overtly partisan media incitement. – Chris Trotter

Back in the 1970s, the Right used to joke that a liberal was a conservative who had yet to be mugged by reality. Both Frykberg and Tame, while not exactly the victims of a mugging, show signs of having, at the very least, witnessed something uncomfortably close to one.

As an old lefty, I can attest to the emotional wrench involved in having to own-up to the wrongs of people you once believed were doing the right thing. It took me a long time to realise that exposing bad behaviour – especially by those who purport to share your values – is by far the best way to ensure the survival of those values. Journalists, in particular, must never play favourites. There will always be two sides to an important story – usually more than two. The trick is to give every side the opportunity to present its case – and then allow the audience to make up its own mind. – Chris Trotter

 Are we acting as dam busters or dam builders in Aotearoa New Zealand?

I often wonder if we are sabotaging one of our vital resources—civil society. While trust in our electoral process is high, the process of elections is not the only pillar of civil society.

Consider our education system with teacher fatigue, falling attendance, and students failing basic numeracy and literacy. Or our justice system with accusations of systemic racism, an almost full prison system, and increasing incidents of violent crime. Or our health system, in which people must wait so long that they might die before receiving treatment. Or our media—one of the least trusted institutions in our country. And let’s not get started on our politicians who often engage in ad hominem attacks and ideological squabbles rather than addressing the people’s concerns.

Whom do we trust? We trust people we perceive as experts rather than institutions. – Maxim Institute

Our country feels increasingly divided. And our institutions no longer have the same unifying effect. So, how can we fix it? Certainly not by attacking each other and winning points for “our side.” Instead, here are three ways we can become dam builders rather than dam busters.

First, let’s increase our participation in the democratic process. We are lucky to have a process that holds our government to account. However, the government can subvert this process by passing laws under “urgency,” meaning the public is shut out and unable to consult. – Maxim Institute

Second, we must enhance the transparency of our institutions. We need to see behind the curtain to understand how money is spent, assess its effectiveness, and comprehend decision-making processes. This involves auditing, oversight, publicly available reporting, and watchdog organisations. A concrete example would be giving the Official Information Act (OIA) broader powers in light of the recent Stuart Nash mess.

Finally, we can improve the political literacy of everyday Kiwis. People cannot engage with what they don’t understand. How many of us know how a bill becomes law or how to communicate with our MPs? This knowledge gap must be bridged.

These actions are little building blocks that will shore up the dams of our civic institutions. If we want to build, rather than break, our society and its foundations, we must critically evaluate our practices and prioritise participation, transparency, and education as the first steps in rebuilding trust and strengthening civil society in Aotearoa New Zealand. – Maxim Institute

WATCH YOUR STEP!!! Drive extra carefully and take your vitamins. The last place you want to end up is in the emergency department of your local hospital. Well, that is if you can get in the door. Already Auckland City Hospital has had to turn away ambulances with patients needing care and I was horrified to hear a paramedic on talkback say that one night they had 15 ambulances holding patients outside an ED because there was no space inside. But it’s all right, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says the health system is in better shape now than it was three years ago.

Staff are burned-out, disillusioned and our nurses are striking. Not just striking but also leaving: Reports this week said 5000 Kiwi nurses have registered to practise in Australia. Can’t really blame them.

Cancer patients in the south are being told of a 12-week wait to see a specialist. One had been told he had six to eight weeks to live and was then told to hang in there and he might get specialist care in 12 weeks. – Paula Bennett

The new Māori Health Authority has spent $9.2 million in its first eight months on contractors and consultants – not on frontline staff. That could have funded 460 knee replacements. While people suffer, we hear excuses from Hipkins and Immigration Minister Michael Wood, from our Health Minister Ayesha Verrall I hear despair at the mess she has inherited and the tired old lines she has to run out. – Paula Bennett

We all knew this year would be worse but still he waited to approve the fast track. Too little too late. But it’s all right, Hipkins says the health system is in better shape now than it was three years ago.

If you are a nurse or specialist from overseas, would New Zealand be your first choice to come to when you hear of the long hours, poor conditions and sheer exhaustion? I also feel immense sympathy for the guilt many feel when they can’t provide the kind of service they want to.

The Government has spent much resource and effort in rearranging the back office, centralising everything to Wellington and setting up the Māori Health Authority. The only ones to win out of that have been the consultants. But it’s all right, Hipkins says the health system is in better shape now than it was three years ago. – Paula Bennett

There are many concerns relating to the Vaccine Orders. It seems that the government did not fully disclose all material facts to the Courts or to mandated workers. Maybe the Courts will have something to say about that. In any event, it is not enough that the mandates have been removed. There is an urgent need for a structured programme to rehabilitate unvaccinated workers back into their professions. – Thomas Cranmer

Sir Geoffrey Palmer, Maxim Institute,

Quotes of the day

If the children had randomly guessed, their success rate should have been around 25 per cent.

That means we’ve introduced something into the NZ education system that is so bad, our Kiwi kids would have been better off guessing – Dr Audrey Tan

The collectivist Net Zero political project is starting to come apart before our very eyes. Making everyone poor, cold, hungry and confined to small living territories was always a tall political ask, but decades of green virtue-signalling, backed by a ‘settled’ version of science that cannot be debated in polite society, has kept the show on the road. – Chris Morrison

Elections are always tricky when attempting mass collectivisation projects like Net Zero. The science can be settled and admirable ecological objectives can be hijacked, but when the electorate twigs that it is their holiday, their car and their beef steak that is under threat, they can cut up rough. – Chris Morrison

The German online publication Pleiteticker noted that members of the upper middle classes had declared war on the lower middle classes with their destructive climate measures. For years, these groups have been spreading their ideas “in a self-righteous, arrogant and sometimes aggressive manner”. It suggested that outside the Berlin political bubble and other urban feel-good oases, there is not much support for these causes.

Certainly there doesn’t seem to be much support for giving up food. – Chris Morrison

Guardian activist George Monbiot recently called for an end to animal farming. It is difficult to know when this madness will end. The academic economist Ralph Schoellhammer recently noted in an article in Newsweek that climate activism isn’t about the planet – it’s about the boredom of the bourgeoisie. It might be argued that pampered and indulged elites have had it easy for so long that they have lost all track of understanding how food, warmth, shelter and security from the ravages of nature are both produced and secured. – Chris Morrison

It is the perfect farm animal. A pig, covered in fur, that lays eggs and can be milked. The Germans call it the ‘Eierlegende Wollmilchsau’, or an ‘egg-laying wool-milk-sow’. It provides everything you want and tastes great.

It doesn’t exist.

According to its cheerleaders, the Lake Onslow pumped hydro-electricity project will mean we don’t run out of electricity in winter, bring down power prices, and make our electricity system 100% renewable. An ‘Eierlegende Wollmilchsau’. – Josie Pagani

The titanic IOU makes this the most important decision the country will make in this year’s election. We should ask if there is a cheaper way. – Josie Pagani

Energy shortages have consequences. The thinking behind Onslow goes, we need a way to store energy – a battery. When we have excess wind or so much rain that the hydro lakes are spilling water, we would use the energy to push water uphill to fill Lake Onslow. Then, when we are short, we would generate from the stored water.

But if Onslow provides back-up energy when the wind doesn’t blow, which is every couple of days, then it is not going to be full when we have a dry winter. Or, if the water is held back for dry winters, every five years or so, then we can’t also use the same energy to generate on calm evenings. – Josie Pagani

Advocates say Onslow will buy energy when it is cheap, and sell it when it is expensive. Genius. But if the lake must be full and on stand-by, then you have to buy energy when you need to fill it, then sell when the country needs the energy. If prices rise when energy is short, then the market is already pricing shortages. So why isn’t a hydro lake already being kept back for dry years?

The answer is that it costs money to hold fuel for tomorrow that you could use today. Imagine if you bought all the petrol your car needs for the next five years and stored it in a tank, using it over the next five years. You have to pay for the tank. The money to buy that petrol could be used to pay down your mortgage or invest. Forgoing those gains is the cost of storage. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to hold energy in storage.

It is not believable to add so many costs and expect consumer prices to fall. – Josie Pagani

There are better, lower-cost alternatives to get the same outcome – and sooner. New Zealand has wind, geothermal, solar and potentially biomass and carbon capture use and storage (CCUS) options that can produce electricity at competitive prices today and in the future.

If we choose lower cost options, instead of building Onslow, the government would then have another $15.7 billion-plus, to build much more environmentally valuable projects like passenger trains or insulating homes.

Christopher Luxon should not answer a single question about ‘’where the money is coming from’’ until the Government has an answer for where the money is coming from for Lake Onslow. – Josie Pagani

I wholly support immigration from religiously and ethnically diverse countries, with the one proviso that it needs to be carefully managed so as to avoid destabilising the host society. Europe has shown us what can happen when large groups of disaffected migrants congregate in ghettoes.

This doesn’t mean we should want immigrants to assimilate to the point where they become submerged, as was expected of non-British migrants (including my own forebears) until well into the 20th century. Most New Zealanders welcome and applaud the cultural diversity introduced by the liberal immigration policies of the past few decades.

But it’s not too much to expect that immigrants respect the values and institutions of the country that has adopted them, as most do. Those values include, but are not restricted to, freedom of speech and the rule of law (we’re looking at you, Eliana Rubashkyn), equal rights for all and no special treatment on the basis of race, religion or sexual identity (which is what Shaneel Lal and his/her fellow cultists seem to be agitating for, as far as one can tell).

That’s the way we do things here. It’s why this country is seen as a sanctuary by people fleeing despotic regimes. To paraphrase the headline on my 2021 blog post, why move to a new and infinitely better country if your first instinct is to change it? – Karl du Fresne 

Free speech guarantees the right to both express perspectives and views, and also to hear others’ perspectives and views. The Police have failed in their duty to protect these foundational rights.

Kiwis expect the police to ensure that they can exercise their rights without being intimidated or attacked. If you allow the Thug’s Veto to take free speech off the table, contested opinions and beliefs don’t simply go away. However, the ability to express them peacefully is undone.

This leaves only far more extreme forms of expression on the table. We are concerned for the tenor of public debate, and the potential for this to produce violence. Free speech is an antidote for this, but it must be protected by the police. – Jonathan Ayling

Christopher Luxon’s suggestion of a “cover-up” on the ninth floor of the Beehive suddenly seem more than quotidian politicking. At minimum, the saga leaves us asking: just how often are OIA requests unscrupulously denied, stonewalled, ruled out of scope, for sheer, naked, political expediency? How often is official information withheld in defiance of the law, in affront to public scrutiny?  – Toby Manhire

Hipkins has been focused in his first months as prime minister on pruning the work programme, but this is something that surely needs to be added to the in-tray. What often looks like an esoteric subject of interest to few has suddenly emerged as emblematic of something much bigger, going to the heart of the probity, integrity and basic honesty of government.  – Toby Manhire

The rise of cancel culture, which involves public shaming and boycotting individuals or organizations for perceived harmful or offensive behaviour, is a threat to free speech, tolerance and civility. – Bryce Wilkinson

The current, and I fear increasing, polarisation of New Zealanders over the politics of gender and race is not a domestic phenomenon. Its origins are international.

British author and political commentator Douglas Murray’s 2019 book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, examines the ideological origins of this polarisation.

Murray’s key insight is simple. Instead of respecting individuals, the proponents of cancel culture judge them through the lens of an assigned group identity. What counts is not your individual character or what you have to say, but the group others put you in. This is group tribalism.

The next step is to declare one group ‘victims’, and others ‘oppressors’. Religion, skin colour, gender, politics, place of birth, and much else can be used to classify and demean individuals and, thereby, divide society. – Bryce Wilkinson

The point of telling individuals that they are victims because of their group membership is to make them feel resentful. Resent breeds a desire for vengeance. Those emotions foster hostility and intolerance. Marx was fostering revolution.

The ‘virtuous’ term for vengeance is ‘social justice’. Social justice is necessarily different from ‘blind’ justice where all individuals have equal standing. Group justice risks mob “justice”. – Bryce Wilkinson

Neo-Marxists may see individuals with white skin as oppressors, and claim that men oppress women. Similarly, heterosexual individuals are perceived as oppressing non-heterosexual groups, such as gay, lesbian and transgender individuals. These perspectives frame each ‘victim’ group as being oppressed by at least one other demographic group.

Individuality is thereby diminished. Those who opposed Posie Parker but valued free speech likely feel affronted by the intolerant members of ‘their’ supposed tribe. – Bryce Wilkinson

The debate over gender classification has been ongoing for centuries, with men and women traditionally differentiated based on biological factors. However, more recently, the argument has shifted towards self-identification as a determining factor.

There is room for civil discussion on these topics, but that was not what we saw last Saturday.

The events in the Auckland Domain show that the norms of civil society, such as tolerance of different viewpoints and respect for the dignity of the individual, are at risk. The risk was heightened by a member of parliament using the occasion to denigrate all white men as the main progenitors of violence. – Bryce Wilkinson

Scruton bleakly concluded that some simply wished to dismantle capitalism, without offering any viable alternative. Revolution without responsibility seemed to be the goal.

Fortunately, there is a silver lining. The events of last Saturday have induced people who value tolerance and mutual respect to speak up. Those values are worth fighting for.

Hopefully, one day universities in the West will, once again, lead the way in defending those values, rather than leading the charge against them. – Bryce Wilkinson

The Nash scandal is now far wider than the ex-minister, and there are fundamental questions about the role of the Government in allegedly covering up the misuse of public office for vested interests. Labour politicians are calling the suppression of official information a “stuff up” due to “human error” in the PM’s Office, while the National Opposition is calling it a “conspiracy”, and demanding an inquiry into what looks like “corruption”. – Bryce Edwards

In order to believe that Ardern’s Deputy Chief of Staff didn’t understand the problematic nature of the Nash email and the ramifications of releasing it to a journalist investigating political donations, you would have to believe that she was incompetent. If she decided not to elevate the email to her boss, then she would have been in clear dereliction of her duty.

Of course, it is possible that Donald did in fact elevate the issue to either Ardern or the Chief of Staff, and the public isn’t being told of this. Alternatively, Donald was fully aware of the need to keep the Nash email from her superiors, so that there was plausible deniability for the Government. – Bryce Edwards

In dealing with the burgeoning scandal, the Labour Government’s new strategy is to blame everything on Stuart Nash. He certainly deserves blame for his involvement in it all. But he’s also now being used as a convenient fall guy for what seems like unethical behaviour in other parts of the Beehive. – Bryce Edwards

Increasingly political commentators and journalists are using words like “stench” and “rottenness” in regard to the Government’s Nash email scandal. Hipkins will be forced to take the issue much more seriously than he has been if he’s to avoid his reputation being tarnished and his government associated with the smell of corruption. – Bryce Edwards

New Zealand is very proud of our reputation as a country that is consistently ranked as one of the least corrupt in the world. The international transparency index puts us at number two because of our perceived levels of lack of public sector corruption, and we must guard that very carefully. What we have experienced in recent days with a series of revelations reminds us that there is a grey area that Governments can stray into too easily that could put that reputation at risk. The grey bits matter.

I want to step through for the House what has actually gone on here, because this is not a matter about one man, Stuart Nash. This is not a matter about one decision. This is about Ministers in a Government being part of a culture that thinks that if you don’t want the public to know, you work out how to cover it up.

We have witnessed an egregious breach of Cabinet confidentiality in which a Minister shared information with his personal donors for reasons that have not been explained, but reasons that leave us all wondering. We have one group of privileged New Zealanders accessing information that is never available to everyday people. We now know for sure that it wasn’t just Minister Nash and his staff who knew about this; the Prime Minister’s office knew all about it too. They knew about it last year. They were actively consulted about how it should be managed, and they were complicit in the decision to cover it up. – Nicola Willis 

 The Nash email omission really serves to highlight the role of the Prime Minister’s Office in managing difficult and sensitive OIA requests and Written Parliamentary Questions across ministries. Whilst it is being portrayed as a one-off innocent mistake by two hardworking and trustworthy civil servants, in truth it reveals a small glimpse of the Machiavellian machinations of government. – Thomas Cranmer

Quotes of the day

If free speech does not include the right to make deeply offensive claims that are perhaps antiquated and even abhorrent to the average Kiwi, but that does not incite violence, then we no longer have free speech. And without free speech, we would never have had the Springbok tour protests, the Maori Land Marches, the Nuclear Free New Zealand movement, or many other examples of speech that stood up to prejudice, bigotry and hatred.

Free speech is not free. It certainly runs the risk of allowing incorrect, stupid, hateful, or wrong views to be expressed. But censorship is not free either and the cost is much higher. – Jonathan Ayling

THE NATIONAL PARTY stands at the beginning of an unsealed road which, if followed, might just carry it to victory. The question, now, is whether the party possesses the guts to set off down it. Sometimes politicians hit upon a winning strategy by accident, unaware that they have done so. National’s answer to the Government’s controversial Three Waters project may be a case in point. Wittingly, or unwittingly, National’s policy reflects the principle of subsidiarity – i.e. the idea that the best decisions are those made by the communities required to live most closely with their consequences. Set against Labour’s preference for large, centralised (and almost always unresponsive) bureaucracies, National’s preference for the local and the accountable has much to recommend it.

Labour, meanwhile, may find that its road to October has been closed. Rather than proceed with all speed down the path of repudiation and reprioritisation promised by Chris Hipkins when he became Prime Minister, the exigencies of dealing with the Auckland Anniversary Weekend Floods and Cyclone Gabrielle appear to have provided Hipkins’ caucus opponents with a chance to regroup and push back.

This was especially true of Three Waters. The period within which the unequivocal repudiation of the project remained politically feasible was always dangerously short. Indeed, the slightest delay threatened to make its abandonment impossible. Nor was the threat exclusively internal. The longer Hipkins put off Three Waters’ demise, the greater the risk that National would produce a viable and popular alternative. Which is exactly what it has done. – Chris Trotter

National’s decision to restore of local authorities’ property could hardly have come at a more opportune moment, given the very recent judicial observation that the asset base of the Three Waters’ “entities” had, indeed, been “expropriated”, from their local authority owners without the payment of fair and adequate compensation. It is a measure of the reckless radicalism of the Three Waters project that a New Zealand court could endorse such a claim. In no other context is it possible to imagine a Labour Cabinet signing-off on expropriation without compensation – a policy worthy of Lenin’s Bolsheviks. – Chris Trotter

If this is, indeed, what National is planning – and by what other means could citizens escape crippling rate increases and/or water charges? – then it is reasonable to predict a decisive shift in the relationship between New Zealand’s central and local government institutions. If the drift towards ever larger and more remote central bureaucracies is to be halted, then a radically new way of funding local infrastructure and the provision of local services will have to be devised. It is simply untenable for the present practice of central government offloading more and more responsibilities onto local authorities, while simultaneously withholding the funding needed to pay for them, to continue. There is a limit to how much can be borrowed affordably from private lenders, just as there is a democratic limit to the size and frequency of local government rate-hikes.

If National has, at long last, recognised this, then it can present itself as offering something new and progressive to the electorate. Subsidiarity is, after all, entirely congruent with the conservative (but not the neoliberal) view of politics. Conservatives are deeply suspicious of strong, centralised states which have no need to fear the displeasure of their citizens. Democracy, as a means of ensuring political accountability, similarly decreases in efficacy the further away the decisions affecting citizens’ daily lives are made. When the Americans say, “all politics is local”, they’re speaking the truth. – Chris Trotter

Making everything worse, are the public misgivings about the way Labour is handling the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle. Intended or not, accurate or not, Hipkins’ downplaying of claims of lawlessness in the stricken communities of Tairawhiti and Hawkes Bay reminded too many people of the Covid emergency’s infallible “Podium of Truth”. Compounding Labour’s difficulties is Forestry Minister Stuart Nash’s inability to fully articulate the locals’ white-hot rage at the forestry companies. The latter’s failure to do anything about the hugely destructive volumes of “slash” that repeated storms have sent crashing into bridges, fences, orchards and people’s homes, has outraged the whole country. If ever there was a moment for righteous ministerial wrath, then, surely, this is it. Action, not yet another expert inquiry, is what the situation demands. Action, and the colourful condemnatory language of a Bob Semple or a Jack Lee. Labour men who really did “move with speed” in a crisis.

For Chris Hipkins and Labour, the state highway to October has been rendered impassable by inaction and political slash. Christopher Luxon and National, meanwhile, have discovered an unsealed road without slips and fallen trees. It’s not their usual way of reaching the Treasury Benches, but, with a bit of luck, it just might get them where they want to go. – Chris Trotter

The London School of Economics has decided that it will not use dreadful words such as Christmas, Easter, Lent, and Michaelmas to designate its term times and holidays. Presumably, its management now congratulates itself that it has made a step toward true diversity, equity, and inclusion, the modern equivalent—irony of ironies—of faith, hope, and charity.

An article in The Daily Telegraph was headed “The LSE’s decision is not just drearily woke. It’s completely pointless.” Alas, if only this were true, if only the decision were merely pointless; but on the contrary, the decision was extremely pointed. It was part of a tendency—I won’t go so far as to say part of a conspiracy—to destroy all links of the present with tradition, particularly (but not only) with religious tradition.

Tradition and pride in institutions are obstacles to a managerial class who prefer people whom they manage to be birds of passage, or particles in Brownian motion in the ocean of time, who are completely fixated on the present moment. The managerial revolution, when it takes place, is very thorough, and nothing is too small to escape its destructive notice. – Theodore Dalrymple

That is why those who want to manage the whole of society love the kind of history that sees no grandeur, beauty, or achievement in it, but only a record of injustice and misery (which, of course, really existed, and all of which they, and only they, will put right). The real reason for the enthusiasm for pulling down statues is to destroy any idea of the past as having been anything other than a vast chamber of horrors, and since everyone has feet of clay, and the heroes of the past always had skeletons in their cupboard (to change the metaphor), reasons for destroying statues, even of the greatest men, can always be found. – Theodore Dalrymple

The Daily Telegraph said that it was insulting to Christians, but actually it was far more insulting to non-Christians, such as I, for it assumed that they are so sensitive and intolerant that they are offended by the slightest reference to the Christian religion or to any vestiges of the Christian past of the country in which they live, either permanently or temporarily. In other words, non-Christians are made of psychological eggshells and are so delicate constitutionally that they need the protection of the LSE apparatchik and nomenklatura class—which after all has to occupy itself with something (it held meetings to make this decision, no doubt under the mistaken impression that it was working, even working very hard).

No one wants to live under a theocracy, other, that is, than theocrats (and even they only want to live under a theocracy so long as they are the rulers), but the danger of that is vanishingly remote, at least until Islam becomes the majority religion. It is said that only a minority in Britain now claim to be Christian—about 44 percent—but the Christian past of the country can hardly be denied.  – Theodore Dalrymple

Perhaps one day, when decolonization is complete and Newton discovered to have been originally from Burkina Faso, attention will be turned to the triggering effects of so many Christian churches in countries such as Britain, edifices that so powerfully remind descendants of victims of Christian persecution of their ancestors’ traumatic experiences, which they are thereby forced to relive.

To this, of course, there is only one solution: pull them down, raze them to the ground. Likewise, cemeteries should be cleansed, crosses removed, religious inscriptions expunged.

Language, mon dieu, how it needs reforming! The place to start, of course, is schools, where the future of the nation is being developed. Any child who is heard exclaiming “God!” or anything like it should be told that he must in future use the good, solidly secular expletive “Fuck!” (this, of course, is happening spontaneously as well), under pain of punishment. The Bible should be made as illegal to bring into school as it is to bring it into Saudi Arabia, and expressions derived from that triggering work should be removed from common usage. Sufficient unto the day are the unjust social circumstances thereof. –

I am hesitant to write in a satirical vein because, as I and others have remarked, satire is prophecy. A number of current policies would have been regarded as satirical exaggeration only a few years ago. Who would have thought, say a decade ago, that a serious, or at any rate a prominent and powerful female politician (I refer here to the First Minister of Scotland), would argue that a man convicted of rape was actually, that is to say in reality, in fact, in every sense, a woman? Such propositions now elicit only irritation, not laughter; and irritation declines before long to resignation. Absurdity is first discussed, then adopted by a vanguard of intellectuals in search of a cause, and finally becomes an orthodoxy that it is socially unacceptable to question. Intelligent people give up opposition because it is boring to argue against what is not worth entertaining in the first place. – Theodore Dalrymple

Hipkins has tried to rebrand Three Waters by calling it an ‘investment in pipes and infrastructure’ and many other descriptions that are far better than the weird bureaucratic branding it received.

For most voters, it isn’t a vote-changing issue. But “Three Waters” as it has evolved over the past few years, does have a potent mix in it that’s potentially negative for Labour: Wellington-knows-best centralisation, thieving assets off councils and a bit of general secret Government agenda about it. – Luke Malpass 

Earlier this month, the White House announced a five-year plan for redressing racial inequality. It is essentially the Biden administration’s version of a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) plan, like those issued by nearly every major university, only at a vastly larger scale. The policy aims to “advance an ambitious, whole-of-government approach to racial equity and support for underserved communities” by embedding equity goals in every aspect of the government.

From the highest offices of the state down to the smallest local bureaucracies, DEI now pervades almost all levels of American society. And while it was once thought that the fringe racial theories that animate the DEI agenda could be confined to small liberal arts campuses, it is clear that is no longer the case. – John Sailer

To many in the universities and perhaps in the country at large, these values sound benign—merely an invitation to treat everyone fairly. In practice, however, DEI policies often promote a narrow set of ideological views that elevate race and gender to matters of supreme importance.

That ideology is exemplified by a research methodology called “public health critical race praxis” (PHCRP)—designed, as the name suggests, to apply critical race theory to the field of public health—which asserts that “the ubiquity of racism, not its absence, characterizes society’s normal state.” In practice, PHCRP involves embracing sweeping claims about the primacy of racialization, guided by statements like “socially constructed racial categories are the bases for ordering society.” – John Sailer

Shorn of any context, the principles of diversity and inclusion strike many people as unobjectionable, and even laudable. But in practice they are used as a shorthand for a set of divisive ideological dogmas and bureaucratic power grabs. Under the banner of DEI, medical institutions that are supposed to focus on protecting human life are being sacrificed on the altar of the racialist ideology.

Because of the ideological project associated with DEI initiatives, critics often highlight their effect on curriculum and teaching. But the more potent effect, in the long run, could end up being on scientific research and scholarship. – John Sailer

In other words, under the new ideological regime that has taken power both inside the federal bureaucracy and in institutions like UCSF, even medical research has become yet another front in a larger ideological battle. Tomorrow’s doctors and medical experts are being selected and trained on the basis of their willingness to “disrupt power imbalances between racialized and non-racialized people.” – John Sailer

Choose your Zelensky. He can be either saint or sinner. Either valiant repairer of the liberal international order or compliant puppet of the WEF. Either a one-man defender of liberal democracy or a stooge of nefarious globalists. These are the only two Zelenskys. There’s no in-between. He’s either a Guardian editorial made dashing flesh or the willing jester of Davos Man. Take your pick. – Brendan O’Neill

There’s a very important debate to be had about Russia, Ukraine, the West and war in the modern era. But what we’ve mostly had over the past year is the cheap exploitation of a serious global conflict to score points in petty wars at home. Chaise-lounge Churchills on one side, armchair Chamberlains on the other. And they’re all really talking about themselves, not Ukraine. Let’s change the record. Maybe Zelensky is neither saint nor sinner. Neither the world’s saviour nor its destroyer. Maybe he’s just a man doing what he thinks is best in the most horrifying and existential of circumstances. Call me a brainless dupe of Davos propaganda, but that’s what I’m going with. – Brendan O’Neill

My mum and dad have always taught us to have goals, and I realised quite early on that it didn’t matter what car you drive or what material things you have if you don’t have a safe, warm house to put them. – Steph George

Democratic accountability is why we now have elected Government, not Kings. – David Farrar

Quotes of the week

In the Lebanon, everything depends on which religious community you belong to, even your water and electricity supply (both intermittent and unreliable). Overseeing the whole polity are corrupt, kleptocratic, oligarchic leaders of various religious, political, and territorial fiefdoms, who dispute hegemony among themselves but nevertheless display a certain class solidarity so that nothing should change fundamentally and they remain permanently in charge. Protests and revolutions come and go, but the elite go on forever.

The potential for violence is always there, and indeed often breaks out; but most of the population, accustomed to chaos and breakdown, has become adept at survival. Life for them is a question of overcoming everyday obstacles, combined with evading the conflicts around them. Meanwhile, the elite live well.

No analogies are exact, but Western societies seem to be fracturing into various confessional communities each of which, like the Maronites, Druzes, Shiites, Sunni, and others, claims its share of the politico-economic spoils. They struggle like worms or grubs in the tins in which anglers keep their bait, while an unchanging elite preside, or at least glide, godlike, over the whole. In the meantime, public administration deteriorates, infrastructure rots, and inflation rockets. – Theodore Dalrymple

Go to the ant, thou sluggard, advises or even demands the Bible, addressing itself to the idlers among us, consider her ways and be wise. If I were revising the Bible today, I might write, “Go to the Lebanon, thou citizen, thou investor, consider its ways and be wise.” But the problem is that no one learns from the experience of others, and quite often not even from his own, let alone from valid deductions from self-evident premises. Man is the rational animal that somehow manages never to learn, at least not how to live. – Theodore Dalrymple

It’s just a bit of admin. That’s the line given by the SNP and supporters of the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill (GRR) which the Westminster government blocked this week. Letting a male person obtain a female birth certificate just by making a simple statement is no one else’s business. So keep out, shut up.

How maddening when women won’t. But equality law — a confusing, contradictory mess which needs urgent revision — is a delicate ecosystem: rights of trans people set out in the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) are balanced against women’s rights in the Equality Act 2010. The GRR lands in this like dynamite lobbed in a fish pond. You can only support the GRR getting royal assent if you’re happy to forsake women’s rights. – Janice Turner

For starters emergency housing is in the social development portfolio. The take-over of motels leading to social mayhem (think Rotorua) has been a tragedy for those housed in them and those in their surrounds. The waiting list for public housing has sky-rocketed since Sepuloni has been Minister. – Lindsay Mitchell

Worst of all Sepuloni has overseen a rise in children living in unemployed homes. The damage to their outcomes is well researched and documented. But unheeded by this government whose sole focus has been to lift incomes with their fingers firmly in their ears over the unintended consequences of paying people to do nothing … except have children.

If all of the above is “excelling” I hate to envisage what failing looks like.

Sepuloni has not been a great Minister. That the media are painting her as such demonstrates ignorance and bias. The only thing that has kept the social development portfolio largely away from the headlines is the comparatively worse performance of police, education and health. – Lindsay Mitchell

It’s all well and good that they [World Athletics] are putting restrictions in on the testosterone levels, and extending the number of years to qualify and so on… but none of that matters. They’d still be miles ahead.

I mean, the women’s shot is half the weight [of the men’s]. Apart from all the strength they’ve gained over the years, there is the height advantage, the wingspan, all the things hormones can’t replace… hip angles, lung capacity etc. Training would be easier for them. That’s just a fact.

If this happens I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a lot of world records fall to trans athletes. – Amelia Strickler

Basically all governing bodies right now are under pressure to issue guidelines. We’ve basically been waiting for it. The fact that World Athletics, one of the biggest, has not [put] its foot down, I think it is really, really upsetting. I think these rules really could open the floodgates.

There will be a lot, I think, who say ‘Well, I’ve waited. I’m ready to compete. What do I have to do?’ And you know, women will be out of a job. Even if there are only a handful, do you put the feelings of a few above an entire sex? – Amelia Strickler

I haven’t come across anyone who is like ‘Oh, it will be fine.’ Even the guys are like ‘Yeah, you’re screwed’. There are jokes made [in training] like ‘Oh yeah, I feel like being a woman today.’ –

I’ve got no problem with trans women competing in a different category. Sport should be for everyone. This is about protecting women at the end of the day. I hope more of us band together to prevent this because it’s going to be the end. – Amelia Strickler

Some of the headlines have been ridiculous. There was one headline I saw the other day about the Prime Minister being driven from office by online trolls. I mean, that is so melodramatic.

It’s just bizarre because, one, it assumes that she’s reading all of the online troll messages from the misogynists and whoever. And second of all, it kind of undermines the fact the polls weren’t going well – Ryan Bridge

Any smart politician will look at that and they will say, ‘Do I have another campaign in me? Do I really want to be scrapping with Chris Luxon over the cost of living when I’ve just got us through COVID? I might be going on to some international job after this. The longer I am here, the worse my reputation will be tarnished as I go through a very bloody campaign. Wouldn’t the smartest thing to do would be to pull out now?’ And I think that’s what the Prime Minister’s done. – Ryan Bridge

I think it’s a little bit condescending and perhaps a little naive to say that this [online hate] played a role. 

Nobody gets to be Prime Minister without having a thick skin, nor does any Prime Minister have the time or inclination to spend their time scrolling through Facebook or Twitter comments. – Brigitte Morten

Watching Jacinda Ardern’s departure speech, I reflected that even though I invented the word cry-bully – ‘a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper, duplicit Pushmi-Pullyus of the personal and the political’ – in this very magazine way back in 2015, it’s never had so many adherents as in the past couple of years, especially in the political arena. From Trump refusing to accept he’d lost an election to Matt Hancock ‘looking for a bit of forgiveness’ from his jungle camp-mates, the age of the over-emotional politician is upon us.

And now here was Ardern – the Adele of Antipodean politics, every trespass against her public judged more in sorrow than in anger because she really did mean well– quitting her role as prime minister of New Zealand after five years and fighting back tears as she delivered her dying swan-song. – Julie Burchill

So much for the crying bit – but what about the bullying? Ardern’s velvet glove concealed a pretty heavy iron fist. She promised to reduce migration, with disabled migrants getting particularly short shrift. Her Covid policy was draconian, preventing New Zealanders abroad from returning and punishing unvaccinated citizens. In a speech at the UN she stressed the importance of not letting climate-change sceptics have freedom of speech on social media. Her hijab-cosplay in the wake of an attack on a mosque was yet another grim example of a privileged western woman showing off by wearing what is for millions of non-western women a living shroud worn under threat of death, as we see most recently in Iran.

But none of this stopped her from dazzling the useful idiots of the liberal press after she became the youngest head of government in the world when elected at the age of 37. – Julie Burchill

 If it was any other politician, her desire to escape a spotlight she seemed to find quite enjoyable as she posed for selfies in shopping malls might cause cynics to speculate that there was a dirty great scandal on the way and that this was just a politician looking to get the hell of out Dodge before the storm broke. But this is the hallowed Jacinda, who must not be confused with your average nasty politico when her public image seemed more in line with that of a religious leader; as the usually tough Beth Rigby tweeted ‘I’ve only ever seen political leaders forced out or voted out… but in Ardern we find a rare exception, who again shows us how to lead differently’.

But impersonating the Dalai Lama butters no parsnips with an electorate who are wondering whether they can afford the price of a pat of Anchor. In 2020 Ardern’s Labour party took more than 50 per cent of the vote – the first time a single party has achieved this since 1951 – but it’s likely that it would now poll less than 25 per cent. And it might be the ladling on of the virtue-signalling which has made former admirers of Ardern even more disillusioned than they would be with regular politicians. – Julie Burchill

Ardern – Big Sister with a side-order of saint – has been used frequently as a weapon with which to beat other unashamedly tough female politicians by Woke Bros who believe that females should happily surrender everything, from toilets to trophies in the name of #BeKind. – Julie Burchill

Once more, the demise of a female political leader has made me feel something I’m sure I’m not meant to feel – and that’s nostalgia for the sheer inappropriateness of Margaret Thatcher, barging her way into the twentieth century global village and behaving as no female politician ever behaved before or since. Though I was fascinated by Mrs T, I never once voted for her – I pretended I did, but the tribal pull of my Communist upbringing was still too strong. But watching Ardern shuffle moistly off of the world stage, I do wish that Attila the Hen was still here; how no-nonsense she was compared to the trans-maids of Labour and the Tory dullards May and Truss who sought to imitate her style. I’d love to see her reaction when faced with the idea that women can have penises or that policemen can work from home. Or indeed, the equally outrageous idea that a woman who reaches the top of the political greasy pole at the age of 37 can be some kind of secular saint ­– rather than just a fresh take on a carpet-bagger, whose shtick is now revealed as wearing perilously thin. – Julie Burchill

The abuse that has been directed at Ardern is horrific and it has escalated dramatically since the Delta lockdown. There can be no justification for it. None. It is vile, gendered, and intimidating. Let me state, on the record, that what Ardern endured is beyond unacceptable.

However, if you want to address a problem, you have to look at what’s causing it. Some of the vitriol and abuse is from a deeply ingrained misogyny in our society. It’s prevalent in our communities, in some demographics, and the abuse comes from women too. Sit with that for a minute. Many feminists – and I am one of them – don’t want to confront the existence of female misogyny in New Zealand, but it’s there. Female misogynists live among us. In decent numbers.

But the volume of abuse that has been directed at the Government and Ardern is enormous, and it has escalated. And that’s because of some of the decisions this Government has made. Some of those decisions have left normal, law-abiding people feeling caged, controlled, judged, fearful and trapped – and when people feel controlled, and they can no longer determine their own destiny, income, or their ability to provide for their family – they rise up. Anger becomes rage. Rage becomes abuse. – Rachel Smalley

Ardern lost her way this term. She went from being a very good communicator in the first three years, to talking ‘at’ us in her second term. Not to us, or with us. It was at us. Ardern’s communication style changed with the arrival of Delta – it centred on control and fear.

If you, as a Government, tailor your communication so that it divides society and pits the vaccinated against the unvaccinated, if you split families and deny New Zealanders the right to come home, if you make Kiwis enter a lottery to return to their country, if you use the COVID death count as the only method by which you judge the success of your response, and if you don’t listen to people when they arrive on the steps of the Beehive in their thousands and call for change, people get angry. Really angry. – Rachel Smalley

If Chris Hipkins takes away one learning from Ardern’s leadership, it is this. You don’t have to have all the answers. But you do need to listen to the people you govern.

Ardern, perhaps believing it was a sign of weakness, never engaged with some of the brilliant corporate and entrepreneurial minds that offered to help with our economic recovery. The Government never listened to the health sector as they pleaded for more nurses. It didn’t listen to the people running our hospitality and tourism businesses who had come up with ways to protect us, and at the same time enable their businesses to survive. Instead, desperate people who had spent years building a business, had to stand by and watch it collapse. It is people like this who got on social media and raged at Ardern. – Rachel Smalley

There can be zero tolerance for the abuse that has rained down on Ardern. However, to ignore the factors that have helped to fuel the escalation of abuse against her and the Government means we have learnt nothing.

This Government, led by Ardern, sat in a silo and listened only to those who supported their narrative. People’s lives and livelihoods crumbled. That fuelled a rage like we have never seen before.

We can learn from it, or we can spend the next year yelling at each other that Ardern was driven from office because of it.

Here is the uncomfortable truth for many. Ardern walked away. It was her choice to do so, and I applaud her for doing what’s right for her and her family. But Ardern wasn’t driven from the job. Ardern ‘is’ human. She likes to be liked and there’s nothing wrong with that. But make no mistake. Ardern chose to walk away from the job. – Rachel Smalley

Ardern knew better than anyone that she couldn’t win this year. She had more critics than supporters. The adoration that gave her a single-party majority government, had left the building. It’s a bitter pill to swallow if you’re one of her backers. I know. Why? Because I voted for her too.

So if you’re a politician, sit up and take note. You aren’t the only humans. Stop thinking of us as nameless, faceless people in polls. Stop thinking of us as numbers. Stop thinking of us as your voter base, or swing voters, or some other way you chose to categorise us. Instead, find better ways to listen to us. Truly hear us.

Because guess what? Just like you, we’re human too. – Rachel Smalley

He can say what he wants but the reality is, it’s the same staff, same team, same people, same outcome.

It’s a party that is frankly out of touch with New Zealanders. When you see rapidly rising food prices, you’ve seen business and farmer confidence at all time lows, interest rates going through the roof, schools costs, this is a party that has actually lost touch and is out of touch with New Zealanders – Christopher Luxon

We are going to have a very close election, no doubt about it.

We need to change this country and we need a government that can get things done and that’s what I am going to do. – Christopher Luxon

But neutralising unpopular policies won’t be a game changer; finding a connection with voters with a message that resonates is what sets leaders apart from politicians. That’s the political hoodoo bit – and it can’t be learnt. Just ask Phil Goff, David Cunliffe, David Shearer, or Andrew Little. – Andrea Vance

Ardern’s cult-like status, and the legacy of Labour’s remarkable turnaround under her leadership, was enough to hold the party machine together in the face of such huge problems. Hipkins won’t have that backstop.

If voters fail to deliver him the hoped-for political honeymoon he might find that the runway has suddenly got a lot shorter. – Andrea Vance

Ultimately, though, Hipkins’s prospects will be determined by how much New Zealanders paid for their groceries, Christmas presents and holidays at the end of last year, and how firmly the Reserve Bank responds in February.

If any recession is modest or avoided, unemployment stays low, inflation falls back towards the mandated 1-3 per cent band and the All Blacks thrash France at the World Cup opener in Paris on September 8, then Labour should scrape home for a third term. If any of those go wrong, Hipkins is toast. – Matthew Hooton

And lo, it has come to pass. The rise of gender ideology — which for too long was dismissed as too niche and irrelevant to discuss by those too sexist or just too cowardly to listen to women’s concerns — has now exploded into a constitutional showdown, with the UK government blocking Nicola Sturgeon’s wildly unpopular gender recognition reform bill.

For those of us who have been writing for years about the insanity of rewriting the law to accommodate something no one can even define (is gender a feeling? A soul? Simple masculinity or femininity?), this feels a bit like watching your local cult band play at Wembley. Or, to put it from the perspective of those who desperately tried to pretend no problems could possibly arise from a philosophy that tries to rewrite the human experience, insisting being a woman is a mere feeling rather than a fact, this is like having a stain on your ceiling which you tried to ignore, only for it to then cause your whole house to collapse.
It was inevitable the fantasies sold by gender activists would crash on the hard rocks of reality, and not just because of the endless internal contradictions (if gender is different from biological sex, and given that sport is segregated by sex, why are trans women now on women’s sports teams?). The movement is increasingly underpinned by a frothing misogyny that is becoming all too visible to even the most casual observers. – Hadley Freeman

Gender activism has become the permissible face of misogyny for a certain kind of allegedly progressive man. It gives them latitude to call women derogatory names and make spittle-flecked videos, insisting that anyone who has a problem with male-born people in women-only spaces is on the wrong side of history. The effect is men’s-rights activism, but the energy is very incel — shorthand for people who are “involuntarily celibate”. Incels rage online about women who selfishly refuse to have sex with them; gender activists rage at women who won’t just bloody well shut up about their concerns about safety and say what the men tell them to say.
One of the sadder fallouts is the wedge it has driven between women and gay men. Once they were natural allies, not least during the Aids era, when so many women stepped in as caregivers to men with HIV. – Hadley Freeman

Sturgeon is making a big mistake in thinking that by denying science and trashing women’s rights she looks progressive, because the public are smarter than that. And as with all the angry “passionate” men, women won’t forget what she’s done, and they won’t forgive. – Hadley Freeman

In just over a year, we have witnessed the disintegration of a leader whose 2020 tenure of absolute electoral driven power started with overwhelming public support, gratitude and reverence but descended into a myopic and confused authoritarian rule. We have graphically endured a lesson of incoherent government and state overreach which has been on a march of portentous marginalisation through the private sector. It has elevated a ballooning and unproductive state sector of ‘bourgeois’ excess.

The descent to implosion started with the alienation of the vulnerable rural poor, sole traders, the unvaccinated, small business and economic sectors that could not adjust to lockdowns and the downstream consequences of dislocation. Then bewilderingly the whole rural sector was signalled as the primary target of climate change ideology that was more like an atheistic religious purge. This however was only ‘opium’ to the urban green economic activists in a Wellington bubble. Not content with this tirade of totalitarianism and messing with the means of production the Labour government drove the ‘out of control’ train of 3 waters, a dual racially divided health system and the continued and extending legislative requirements of ethnic consultation. Indigenous elites can increasingly demand influence and potentially equity before any progressive economic or environmental change can occur.  – Alistair Boyce

The structure is elitest and tribal. This is opposed in its very nature to ‘western’ democratically structured governance with potential equitable redistribution of wealth (i.e. Democratic socialism in action).

This Labour government have significantly eroded the NZ democracy and its sovereignty by caving into an apologist academic elite whose catch cry is to blame all society’s ills on the effects of post colonialism without acknowledging economic, social and political progression and benefits. The prevailing Treaty of Waitangi analysis is opportunistic as opposed to realistic.

Indeed, under this Labour Government the rich and propertied have prospered while by any measure the disadvantaged pains have dramatically increased. Buying a house for most socio-economic demographics is now an impossible dream. The egalitarian socialist democratic ideal has been replaced by a new totalitarianism where ethnic and economic elites prosper, the state sector is elevated in a new realm of ‘woke’ privilege and the disadvantaged now have no hope or aspiration to climb out of the mire of socio-economic depravity. Lawlessness is endemic, on the rise and set to remain, becoming the next government’s problem. – Alistair Boyce

Any balanced debate of ‘co-governance’ has been actively stifled through control of the messaging through mainstream media by NZ on AIR and the State Journalism fund to the point where mainstream media business models are no longer sustainable without government funding. Any alternative view or debate on the government led version of co-governance is ridiculously labelled as racism. Most New Zealanders under 30 and substantial other socio-demographic segments no longer trust the simplistic homogeneity of mainstream pro co-governance ‘propaganda’.

The people are not fooled and were never consulted in the 2020 election campaign on the radical policies to come. Consequently large, marginalised segments turned into an active fifth column which proceeded to personalise, taunt and harass the government and in particular the leader responsible. Mainstream media analysis is missing the point. The reaction of the people is an effect of the cause, a betrayal by state sponsored totalitarianism, and they have been marginalised in greater numbers than arguably any NZ constituency ever before. It was a battle of wills. Jacinda Ardern was faced with the impossibility of taking the blame and directing a recourse going against both ethnic and academic elites and still losing an acrimonious and unforgiving election. The PM raised the white flag choosing to leave the field of battle than capitulate in a spiteful and vicious public election campaign.

Now Chris Hipkins inherits the battle and the impossible plan without a compliant and grateful mandate, but still with the power of absolute government. Without political restraint and in the absence of strong and coherent leadership, unrestrained power has been a poisoned chalice for Labour. How Hipkins deals with the Maori caucus and co-governance not only in practice but through the power of the state will determine the fate of Labour and himself. A double down on existing policy will result in an acrimonious division of NZ society and electoral annihilation. The choices of restrained continuance or a ‘cup of tea’ with a modified agenda probably won’t be enough to win the election but it might prevent a 4-term government tenure of the centre right. – Alistair Boyce

 It appears the dangerous and impossible experiment is over and unwittingly, naturally market led Liberal Democracy is winning the battle, reverting it to a skirmish and hopefully avoiding a damaging and unwinnable social war.

The likelihood is Chris Hipkins will hang on uncomfortably until October 14, fighting fires. Hipkins will get burnt like Labour leaders before him. Being a boy from the Hutt with another ‘westie’ (no matter how diverse) for deputy will not save him, as Grant Robertson could probably predict. That story could be breaking news and will wait for another day. In the meantime, Robertson has carefully removed himself and the economic equation from the immediate reckoning leaving the new PM the poisoned chalice and nowhere to run.

The lasting legacy will hopefully be a nonapologetic restrengthening and re-correction of an effective, equitable and democratic policy framework based in proven Western Liberal Democratic traditions. An ‘Aotearoa New Zealand’ that might help working kiwis, the disadvantaged in equal measure and small business get through the imminent recession, believing a better future is to come. But for the near future that will be in the hands of Hipkins, Robertson and the dynamic of direct democratic power…hold on to your seats, it will be a wild ride!  – Alistair Boyce

The menace of misinformation has been used to threaten free speech everywhere, from Nigeria to Russia to New Zealand to France to China. Nowhere, however, has the debate been as heated as in the United States, where Russian dis- or misinformation is widely believed to have influenced the results of the 2016 election which put Donald Trump in the White House.

However, a stunning article published earlier this month in a leading science journal, Nature Communications, suggests that the Russians probably wasted their money. The misinformation gushing across Twitter and Facebook made hardly any impact on voters’ views. After studying election activity on Twitter, a group of American and European experts in social media and politics found that there was “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior”.

This doesn’t mean that Russia didn’t work hard to sway public opinion – simply that its Internet Research Agency failed. – Michael Cook

The hysteria about the Russians sowed the seed of distrust amongst American voters. If Trump had been elected in a manipulated election in 2016, it was entirely plausible that Biden was elected in a manipulated election in 2020. The researchers conclude:

Indeed, debate about the 2016 US election continues to raise questions about the legitimacy of the Trump presidency and to engender mistrust in the electoral system, which in turn may be related to Americans’ willingness to accept claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election … Russia’s foreign influence campaign on social media may have had its largest effects by convincing Americans that its campaign was successful.

In short, where Russian saboteurs failed, the American media succeeded – they spread discord and division throughout the nation. There is a straight line between gullibility about Russian bogeymen and the “stop the steal” invasion of Capitol Hill.

The question of how much toxic misinformation on social media influences public opinion is far from settled, as the authors of this article acknowledge. But it seems sure that Jacinda Ardern’s dream of censoring the internet deserves to fail. – Michael Cook

I think it has been quite a divisive and immature conversation over recent years, and I personally think it’s because the government hasn’t been upfront or transparent with the New Zealand people about where it’s going and what it’s doing. – Christopher Luxon

I think about Kōhanga Reo, I think about Whānau Ora, innovations that were delivered within the coherency of a single system of delivery of public service.”

We believe in a single coherent system – not one system for Māori and another system for non-Māori – for the delivery of public services. Things like health, education, and justice, and critical infrastructure like three waters.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t want Māori involved in decision-making and partnering with Māori, we have a principal objection because New Zealand has one government: it’s elected by all of us, it’s accountable to all of us, and its public services are available to anyone who needs them.”

While we oppose co-governance of public services as just discussed I want you to know the National Party wants a New Zealand where Māori success is New Zealand’s success. – Christopher Luxon

Absolutely, a 50 year plan would be fantastic. One that couldn’t be hijacked by ideology or some blue sky thinking. 93% of our goods are delivered by truck and you can talk all you like about how that needs to change, this is what’s happening right now. You want your bread, you want your milk, you want your chicken, you want your furniture. Basically, you want anything that makes your life a life a lifestyle. It’s delivered by truck. And while we have that level of goods being delivered on the road, and while we have this level of degradation on our roads, it’s costing you and me. When the trucking companies have to repair their trucks because of appalling potholes, they don’t wear that themselves. They pass on that cost. And so we all have to pay for the degradation of our roads. – Kerre Woodham

Much has been written about Jacinda Ardern having to deal with the Christchurch terror attack, the White Island eruption and the Covid-19 pandemic. It is worth remembering that dealing with crises and disasters is part and parcel of being a Prime Minister. During his time in office, John Key had to deal with the Global Financial Crisis, two Christchurch earthquakes, the Pike River Mine disaster, and the Swine Flu pandemic.

But he could also point to his government’s significant record of achievement in managing the country from recession to a “rock star” economy – by reducing government spending, lowering the debt, freeing up the labour markets, and reforming welfare to support more long-term beneficiaries out of dependency and into work.

And that’s the problem for Jacinda Ardern. When she looks at her legacy, what has she achieved?

She claims to have improved child poverty, but the record shows otherwise. She claims to have built houses, but 1,500 is not the 100,000 promised.

Instead, tens of thousands of families are living in motels, crime is rampant, immigration failure has created a nation-wide shortage of workers, union control has removed flexibility from the labour market, the welfare system has again become a trap for long-term beneficiaries, and the inclusion of employment and house prices in the Reserve Bank’s mandate has taken the focus off inflation, leading to the serious cost of living crisis that is now enveloping the country. – Dr Muriel Newman

On balance, she deserves credit for knowing when to throw in the towel if her heart is no longer in it. But Ms. Ardern leaves with much of her promised agenda unfulfilled. It’s been thrilling to be on the world map. But in the end, her years in power were like those maps that left New Zealand off: flawed and incomplete. – Josie Pagani

In the wake of Ardern’s abrupt resignation, the mainstream media are determined to convince us she was hounded from office mainly because she is a woman and had to fall on her sword to escape unrelenting “gendered abuse”.

The fact Ardern has overseen a bonfire of what was a vast store of political capital just two years ago and was facing a resounding defeat at this year’s election has mostly gone unremarked among the flood of columns defending her as the unfortunate victim of trolls and misogynists. – Graham Adams

Well, journalists and commentators are angry — but not at her. The object of their ire is mainly the allegedly mean-spirited, stupid and ungrateful public, who apparently refused to sufficiently acknowledge and respect her virtues as Prime Minister. – Graham Adams

The increasingly visceral reaction to her steady undermining of democracy, and her government’s general incompetence, seems to be interpreted by many commentators as a case of voters failing her rather than the reverse.

Against reason, we are effectively asked to believe that a nation that gave Ardern an unprecedented majority in 2020 — alongside personal popularity ratings in the 70s that outshone anything John Key achieved — has become a deeply misogynistic nation in just two years.

And this despite the fact Ardern herself has denied that misogynistic abuse played any part in her resignation. As she told Newshub when asked whether misogyny influenced her decision: – Graham Adams

It is evident from many reports that women in politics do receive more personal abuse than men but there is nevertheless a glaring imbalance in the type of abuse each sex gets and how they are expected to deal with it. Male politicians are personally abused in ways that would be unthinkable if directed at females. – Graham Adams

Usually, a captain abandoning a sinking ship ahead of the officers, crew and passengers in the first lifeboat available is regarded as an unforgivable act of cowardice. The fact he or she might be tired, or stressed, or overworked never trumps their duty to those in their care.

Astonishingly, in New Zealand, most journalists have preferred to blame the passengers for losing faith in their captain despite the fact she has recklessly steered the ship of state, and her party, onto the rocks. The media appears to believe the passengers are at fault for objecting to the fact Ardern was taking them on a voyage they mostly hadn’t agreed to be on.  – Graham Adams

Ironically, Ardern has been complicit herself in an extraordinary legislative move to make misogyny official government policy.

The passing of the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act in 2021 — which introduces a self-identification process for changing the sex shown on a person’s New Zealand birth certificate — effectively makes being a woman a state of mind.

By making the definition of a woman a moveable feast that includes biological men she has helped erase the scientific and common-sense definitions that underpin women’s sex-based rights.

Now that’s misogyny. – Graham Adams

Those who continue to ferociously support Ardern, are those who can’t see beyond the health response. Yes, the decision to lockdown in March 2020 was a life-saving and unprecedented decision. The failings came afterwards. The management of our economy, and the failure of the leadership team to horizon-scan on issues like accessing the vaccine, rolling it out, the economic response, and the crucial role that immigration was going to play in lifting our productivity. That was lost, it seems, on Labour’s leadership team who went back to the text books — they opted for ideology as opposed to responding to the dynamic reality we were living in.

Now, that’s what Hipkins has to shoulder. Policy, policy, policy. What is he going to do? – Rachel Smalley

And that’s what Hipkins has inherited. He is going to have to face into the policy and reform vacuum that Ardern has left in her wake. What to keep? What to ditch? And what of the hundreds of millions of dollars, in fact, it will be over a billion, that has been invested in some of these policies that he will shelve. In a country with significant child poverty and inequality issues, that will be a very uncomfortable pill to swallow for Kiwis.  – Rachel Smalley

I am sure Hipkins is sincere in his belief in state education. His allegations regarding charter schools were reckless. An independent report found they were wrong. Māori and Pasifika pupils greatly benefited from charter schools.

Hipkins has announced he is doing a review of Labour’s policies. Reviewing Labour’s opposition to charter schools would be a good start. New Zealand’s ranking in the international educational comparison tests are the lowest ever. Māori and Pasifika pupils are voting with their feet and fleeing state schools. – Richard Prebble 

The most reliable predictor of election results is the right way/wrong way poll. For around 18 months the polls indicate most of us think the country is going the wrong way.

Hipkins can only win an election if he can produce a new agenda to take us in a new direction. He has no mandate for a new direction. He can only get a new mandate from an election. I do not know if Hipkins can win a snap election. I know if he waits until October Labour will be swept away. – Richard Prebble 

The Budget is due in May. With Robertson at the helm, Hipkins has an experienced Minister of Finance in budget processes. But that Minister of Finance is also experienced in spending large amounts of taxpayers’ money. Hipkins has promised to address the ‘inflation pandemic’ but high fiscal spend doesn’t help with this.

Perhaps the hardest thing for Hipkins to be able turn the boat around, is all the Government has said on its reform agenda. Being a senior member of Ardern’s team, he has been rolled out numerous times to defend government policies, thus providing plenty of file footage for use in the media and in Opposition attack ads.

Hipkins’ biggest selling point as the new leader is the experience he brings to the role. But he cannot distance himself from the Ardern era. He received the two-thirds majority needed to get leadership within 48 hours of Ardern’s announcement, which is likely to mean he needed to make a lot of concessions to his caucus colleagues.

Hipkins may be speaking a big game of going back to ‘bread and butter’ issues, but the logistical and political costs are likely to impede any ambitious U-turns. – Brigitte Morten

Ihe Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighbourhoods by John McKnight and Peter Block led me to realise that we, as citizens in the broadest sense, had ceded our power to central and local government at great cost to our sense of agency as communities. And that’s what the aftermath of the earthquakes had restored for a moment in time.

These writers warn us of the dangers of the dependency that results from governments fixing our problems for us; robbing us of our capacity to problem-solve, and reducing our ability to build resilience. And that is something we are going to need in spades as we confront the challenges we know are coming our way. –  Lianne Dalziel

Do we want to be consumers of government services, or citizens active in our neighbourhoods and communities, helping to solve problems that affect us all? – Lianne Dalziel

To anyone living with a rare disease, there are new, promising medications being developed constantly, so… don’t give up. Don’t give up on hope. There are always things being developed that can be life-changing. – Judy Knox

Imagine if mainstream British politicians were photographed at a demo at which someone was holding a placard that said ‘Decapitate coconuts’. A demo at which there were open, horrendous expressions of violent contempt for black people who hold the supposedly wrong views. A demo at which it was stated that such sinful ethnic-minority people should not only be executed but eaten, too. ‘I eat coconuts’, one of the signs might say. There would be uproar, rightly so. It’s unlikely the politicians would keep their jobs for long.

Well, the sexist equivalent of this scenario did happen, for real, in Glasgow on Saturday. Politicians were seen standing in front of protest signs that fantasised about visiting bigoted violence, not upon morally disobedient black people, but upon morally disobedient women. TERFs, as they’re called, which literally means ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’, but which really means witch, bitch, scold, hag. Anyone who has witnessed a hardline trans activist spit out the word ‘TERF’ will be under no illusion as to the misogynistic menace that underpins that four-letter slur. Yet while there is concern over what happened in Glasgow, there isn’t as much public fury as one might expect. – Brendan O’Neill

 Not seeing two hateful placards is kind of forgivable – not seeing that trans activism now seems to consist of little more than angry men bellowing ‘witch’ in the faces of women who have the temerity to disagree with them is not.

We need to talk about the hatred for ‘TERFs’. It is out of control. It is the most vehement form of bigotry in the UK right now. Over the past few days, we haven’t only witnessed gender-deluded men in Glasgow saying ‘Decapitate TERFs’. We’ve also had Reduxx magazine reveal the identity of the Scottish trans activist – a man – who wrote despicable violent tweets about someone driving a car into one of Kellie-Jay Keen’s gatherings of gender-critical women, so that we might see TERFs ‘exploding like bin bags full of baked beans on your windshield’. The same gender jihadist spoke about murdering Rosie Duffield with a gun and JK Rowling with a hammer. – Brendan O’Neill

A political party that harbours men who dream of battering women, and whose elected representatives are seen next to banners calling for women to be beheaded, and whose councillors compare women who defend their sex-based rights to the people who oversaw the industrial slaughter of Europe’s Jews has a very serious problem, doesn’t it? –  Brendan O’Neill

Sexist hate is a daily reality for women who question the idea that you can change sex. Witness those clips in which mobs of masked men yell ‘fucking scum’ and ‘fucking piece of shit’ at Kellie-Jay Keen and her gender-critical friends. See the rape and death threats visited upon JK Rowling every week. ‘You are next’, a lowlife said to her when she expressed sorrow over the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. Or just behold the low-level intimidation that attends virtually every gathering of ‘TERFs’. There will always be gangs of men outside gender-critical meetings; men horrified by the idea of women speaking among themselves about their rights; men who ridiculously believe that their feeling of ‘womanhood’ and badly applied lippy makes them women, too. Better women, in fact. As India Willoughby tweeted at the weekend, ‘I’m more of a woman than JK Rowling will ever be’. That’s misogyny, too. The idea that a man – yes, India’s a bloke – even does womanhood better than women is testament to the low view of womankind that’s been whipped up by the trans cult.

Any movement that attracts so many bigots really should have a word with itself. Any activist set that helps to make it fashionable again to call women witches really should engage in some self-reflection. For here’s the thing: while it might be the outliers of the trans cult who scream witch and issue death threats and say ‘suck my girldick’, their tirades only express with greater ferocity and spite the misogyny that is inherent to modern trans activism. The root idea of the contemporary trans movement – that ‘transwomen are women’ – is itself misogynistic. Its reduction of womanhood from a biological, social, relational phenomenon to a costume that anyone can pull on, even people with dicks, is profoundly sexist. It dehumanises women. It denies the specificity of their experiences. It turns womanhood into a feeling, something flimsy.  – Brendan O’Neill

The mantra ‘transwomen are women’ underpins the resurgence of misogynistic thinking. There is a traceable line from this mainstream chant to the fringe cries of ‘cunt’ aimed at any woman who says transwomen are not women; that there’s more to being a woman than feeling and image. The violent hatred for ‘TERFs’ might mostly come from unstable individuals online, but it expresses the sexism and intolerance that are absolutely key to trans activism more broadly, and in particular to its belief that a man can be a woman. We need a firmer fightback against the hatred for ‘TERFs’ and in defence of the things that are threatened by this new witch-hunt – women’s rights, freedom of speech and scientific truth. – Brendan O’Neill

Recently, the private schools and in particular some of the more established public schools, remind me of the iceberg that has melted over time, weakened by their misplaced love of child-centred learning and rejection of adult authority over decades. In such a fragile state, when the woke brigade comes searching, these schools flip right over, suddenly and without warning, bowing to the incessant cry against the privileged.

Once upon a time, public schools were bastions of traditionalism, setting the standard for the rest of us. The richer in society used to have a sense of duty towards those less fortunate and these schools made it their raison d’être to inspire young men and women to serve others. Many graduates from these schools would seek careers that would allow them ‘to give back’ and live out their duty. – Katharine Birbalsingh 

Help out at the local soup kitchen? Join the army? Become a teacher? Why do that, when all you have to do is join a Twitter mob that will cleanse you well enough to earn a quarter of a million a year in the City and read the Financial Times – Katharine Birbalsingh 

Hipkins’ actions so far have been positive, enthusiastic, and polished, further encouraging a hitherto increasingly anxious caucus that the party’s fortunes may be about to change. With Parliament resuming in three weeks, this is all good news for Labour. However, the rapture notwithstanding, Labour’s electoral mountain remains as high as ever.

In addition to all the usual problems facing a government in election year, Hipkins faces three potentially insurmountable challenges to conquer before election day – time, the deteriorating economy, and the “Jacinda factor”. – Peter Dunne

Even if he manages to successfully overcome these hurdles, Hipkins still faces the biggest one of all – history. Since Peter Fraser succeeded Michael Joseph Savage in 1940, six prime ministers – Holyoake, Marshall, Rowling, Moore, Shipley and English – who have taken over during a parliamentary term have lost the next election. While Labour’s delight in the smooth way in which this week’s dramatic transition has been handled is understandable and justified, it is but one step in the confirmation process. The final, decisive word rests with voters, who will have their say on election day. – Peter Dunne

We are very conscious that lower-income New Zealanders are being absolutely smashed by inflation.

The great shame is that Labour increased the minimum wage so much in previous years, but what you’ve seen has happened is that they have not been able to increase it as much in these inflationary years because they know it will be passed on. – Nicola Willis

Now, every year National was in government we increased the minimum wage – we think that is the right thing to do – but how much you do that by is a very careful balance.

Because what we don’t want is workers on the one hand being paid more, but on the other hand having to pay so much more in costs at the supermarket, on rent and other things that their wages just get eaten up. – Nicola Willis

Starmer has unwittingly revealed what ‘Davos Man’ is all about: he’s about escaping the irritating plane of democratic decision-making in preference for the rarefied company of the 21st century’s self-styled philosopher-kings. He’s about liberating himself from the constraints of democratic politics – especially the constraint of being answerable to the masses – in favour of chumming about with the better-educated, better-dressed better people of the World Economic Forum. For Starmer to dismiss Westminster, the Mother of Parliaments, the one institution over which British citizens have some direct and meaningful control, as just a ‘tribal, shouting place’ is depressingly revealing. It reveals his contempt for parliamentary democracy, and it reveals Davos Man’s belief that politics is better done away from us pesky plebs.

The World Economic Forum has been taking place at Davos in Switzerland every year since 1971. It’s an ‘annual jamboree for plutocratic banksters, avaricious industrialists and superannuated spongers to come together in an orgiastic eulogy to global capital’, in the apt words of the Spectator. – Brendan O’Neill

In Britain, a democracy, aspiring PM Starmer is constantly bombarded with tough questions, like ‘Do women have penises?’. He’s forever torn between the Remoaner instincts of probably every single person he knows and socialises with and the Brexit beliefs of vast numbers of ordinary people, including Labour-voting people. He has to go into the House of Commons, that tribal hellhole, and submit his vision for the country to the criticism and even ridicule of his fellow elected representatives. What a nightmare! Far better to be in the cushy surrounds of Davos, far from the madding crowd, in polite, agreeable meetings with polite, agreeable people, where you’ll never bump into a Brexit voter or a ‘TERF’ asking you yet again if women can have penises. Davos is sweet relief for a political class that likes politics but not the public.

This is what Davos has always been about. It is nearly 20 years since the political scientist Samuel P Huntington popularised the term ‘Davos Man’ to describe an ‘emerging global superclass’ of ‘gold-collar workers’. Huntington nailed Davos Man. He’s part of a powerful ‘class’ that is ‘empowered by new notions of global connectedness’, he said. Davos Man is ostentatiously ‘post-national’, said Huntington. These elites ‘have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations’. – Brendan O’Neill

This is the key dynamic in globalist politics. Globalism is not a plot by sinister rich people, even if the WEF’s use of phrases like ‘the great reset’ and ‘global redesign’ are a tad chilling. Rather, it is the outward, physical manifestation of national elites’ turn against nationhood; of their search for new forums beyond borders, and beyond public accountability, in which they might make decisions. For much of the postwar period, and with real vim since the 1970s, insulating political decision-making from public pressure has been the great cause of the modern political establishment. Hence, we’ve had the rise of the European Union, the founding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, annual gatherings like COP and Davos – all justified on the basis that there are some issues that are so large and complicated that it is preferable for them to be discussed and decided upon by clever people untethered from the low-information urges of ill-read national populations. Davos is less the cause of the crisis of democracy than its beneficiary.

The end result of this cult of political insulation, of elevating policy from the national sphere to the global one, is the rise of a new elite that views itself as borderline godly. – Brendan O’Neill

There’s a religious fervour to nutty comments like these; a fantastical vision of oneself as the messianic deliverer of humankind from doom. Now we know what happens to the political elites when they free themselves from public pressure, from us: they go mad.

It’s time to bring them all crashing back down to Earth. Back to the terrestrial world of nations and politics and accountability. Back from Davos to London and Washington and Paris. So what if they’re bored with the institutions of national democracy? These are the institutions through which the rest of us can express our interests and keep politics fresh and responsive. The gold-collared superclass might have little need for national loyalty and national government, but the working classes still do. – Brendan O’Neill

Prior to Ardern’s resignation, Willis said “It’s well past time for the government to present a real economic plan.” And she said the government had to come back from the Christmas holiday and deliver one. They didn’t. It’s now January 26th, and the government came back from holiday and delivered a resignation. There is still no plan. Inflation is static — a stonking 7.2% – and we can feel the cool winds of a recession blowing in.

The pomp and ceremony is over for Hipkins now. He has to get on and deliver – something his Government has never really achieved in five years. And when he puts forward his economic plan, he does so knowing that a student of one of our most effective Finance Ministers is watching on, and she’s waiting in the wings. – Rachel Smalley

Now, in his first speech as incoming PM, Chris Hipkins said his focus would be on the economy & cost-of-living. It constitutes a full re-branding of Labour. Why do that? To answer that question, let’s first define former PM Ardern’s legacy.

In a line, it was a focus on non-economic and moral issues. If you read Ardern’s Harvard address, it refers to the likes of abortion, gun-control, “misinformation” on the Web, future of democracy & her “kindness” agenda. She never spoke a word about economics. Of course, Harvard students & professors would not take well to being lectured on that subject – but loved every word of her class on the morals – giving her a standing ovation.

But that’s not where it ends. Ardern also tried to be a climate change leader & championed minimizing Covid-related health issues during the pandemic by imposing strict rules, which led to large economic costs. Those economists who advocated quantifying the benefits of these rules against the financial costs were branded cold, heartless types at the time – folks who callously put a monetary value on human life. – Robert MacCulloch

Ardern’s leadership only saw an ad-hoc, stitched together set of reactions to put out the many fires blowing up in the Kiwi economy. However, with no guiding economic model behind her, I believe her sincere & earnest attempts to put out those fires proved immensely stressful and over-bearing.

Today, Kiwis are too busy paying food, petrol & mortgage bills to philosophize about trade-offs between freedom of speech and disinformation on the web with kids at Harvard. Surveys show the cost-of-living is our chief concern.

That’s why Hipkins first act as PM was to rebrand Labour. He thinks Ardern’s reputation as a global leader righting the world’s wrongs has morphed into a domestic liability. Hipkins is branding himself as “chippy”, an ordinary Hutt Valley kid who needs to save his own finances before he can save the world. – Robert MacCulloch

 Many commentators are now suggesting that Labour will abandon identity politics and move to the “bread-and-butter” right.

But there’s a deeper problem our new PM must contend with; the issue of trust in institutions, particularly in the government. A recent Herald poll showed that 32 percent of respondents found the government untrustworthy, and 15 percent found them very untrustworthy. The Herald also found that 64 percent felt the country had become more divided.

It is important to remember that leadership choices and decisions have far-reaching consequences. Leaders are responsible for the environment they create. Cheerfully saying that you are happy to create a two-tier society with vaccine mandates after consistently rejecting the idea erodes trust. Trying to vote through an entrenchment clause in the already controversial Three Waters bill does the same. As do financial stimulus packages that exacerbate the gap between rich and poor. – Jason Heale

But here’s the thing; as a representative democracy, it is ultimately our responsibility as citizens to hold leaders accountable by voting. During their time in office, we also have the privilege of providing feedback in various forms, whether through writing to them or protesting if we feel we are not being heard. The way we do it demonstrates the trust deficit that many are seeing.

Given that a week is a long time in politics, the election is quite far off. A Curia Poll of people who voted for Labour in 2020 shows that many key policies are unpopular. In fact, our new leader’s primary challenge is rebuilding our trust in the government. That will heal divisions. As Thomas Simpson has written, “there is evidence from the US that political polarisation is now affecting the ability of ordinary citizens to engage with each other on issues which are politically significant.”

The trust challenge is a big ask; Ardern turned her party around within weeks in 2017; Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has to turn the country around in a matter of months. – Jason Heale

Politics has become a struggle between those with knowledge capital, versus those with financial capital. The people left out are those with neither. They used to be called the working class, and I’m on their side. – Josie Pagani

AI is picking up the way ‘’progressive left’’ voices present to the world. Thomas Piketty calls it the “Brahmin left”, those who see their mission as clerics instructing the masses. The goal is not necessarily growth or affluence for the many, but a society shaped by their own beliefs.

When did the left stop talking about poverty first, and the hope implicit in lifting people out of it? – Josie Pagani

The left mimicked by AI is not hopeful, it is catastropharian. We are close to extinction, not the authors of a world within reaching distance of being free from poverty for the first time in history.

We were once nation-builders, whose pitch was hope. Norm Kirk put it into poetry at a time when politicians were more preacher than party. He believed everyone wants someone to love, somewhere to live, somewhere to work, something to hope for.

Robots see a left in which optimism and red-blooded moral crusade have been replaced by a professional political class whose 10-point plan beats a 5-point plan.  –

The educated class supports a version of ‘’diversity’’ that manages to exclude diversity of opinion or life experience.

I’m not so interested in the horse race of politics – who is up or down. Politics for me is the joyfulness of life, or why bother? – Josie Pagani

Labour, I believed, needed to face some uncomfortable truths. I am not qualified to unpack the origins of misogyny in New Zealand – that needs to be explored by a team of psychiatrists and social anthropologists. However, I do believe the escalation in generalised online anger is fuelled by New Zealanders who, for two years, didn’t have a voice.

The Government didn’t so much run a tight ship through Covid, it ran a submarine.

It engaged only with those who supported its narrative, and never critically appraised its decisions or strategy. For months, we saw only Ardern, Ashley Bloomfield, and Grant Robertson. Progressively, we saw Chris Hipkins too, but our lives were shaped by four people who, collectively, didn’t engage with or listen to the people they governed.

If you deny people their freedom – even if you believe it’s in their best interests – and you don’t provide an opportunity for open communication, you will ultimately create angry, caged animals. This doesn’t in any way justify the horrific abuse that Ardern has received, but it hopefully suggests that New Zealanders can pull themselves back from the horrible, polarised place we find ourselves living in today. – Rachel Smalley

Words are lovely. Saying the right thing is great but doing something, anything, shows you really mean it.

I have no doubt he’ll get there eventually, but if you’re sworn in as Prime Minister on the same day the annual inflation rate is announced and it’s stubbornly stuck at 7.2 percent, you should be asking your finance minister for something, anything that’s in the works or relatively easy to hustle together to announce at your first big, official public moment in the job. – Tova O’Brien

This new regime is promising change in the weeks and months ahead, promising greater support for low and middle-income earners and small businesses. 

Getting out there and listening as the PM is doing with businesses here in Auckland today is important, statements of intent are important. 

But when people can’t afford crumbs, throwing a morsel their way will fill bellies and petrol tanks far more than words and meetings ever could. – Tova O’Brien

One of the characteristics of fame is that it is essentially Faustian in nature; to become a celebrity, one must sell one’s soul to the devil. It’s a highly questionable idea — why should there be such a price for being proficient at acting or music, for instance? — but it is one that persists, regardless of continual pushback from those in the public gaze. The reason it does so is not just down to the power of the media but also because it offers a sense of justice, or at least morbid satisfaction, to the public. We can look at the rich and famous, with wealth, status and lifestyles beyond our wildest dreams, and assure ourselves that there has been a terrible cost to their integrity, privacy and ultimately wellbeing, and suddenly the world seems just a little bit more balanced and just. Even the paparazzi, hated and courted by celebrities, have this Mephistophelean quality. – Darran Anderson

What is particularly illustrative and sympathetic about Prince Harry’s relationship with fame is that it was not chosen. In the traditional Faustian transaction, the would-be genius or celebrity sells their soul, knowing that the cost is damnation and believing that the gains will be worth it. With the royals, fame is hereditary, which is as much of a curse as a blessing. The transaction is one-sided. No deal is made and yet the individual assumes precisely the same debt. In a world, even a country, where children are born into horrendous poverty and deprivation, it’s difficult to have sympathy for someone born into immense privilege. Yet it is warranted, given that child we watched walking along forlorn at his mother’s funeral did not choose any of this.

The problem is that Prince Harry is now a man and no longer a lost boy. Though he has chosen an arguably noble route of walking away from an environment that had shunned him, and he has the right to speak his mind and tell his own story, he has not walked away from fame. Sympathy, like any resource, is finite. It is entirely reasonable to wish to escape the stilted environment expected of the royals, the stiff upper lipped omerta that hides a multitude of pain and sins, the expectations to be a well-turned-out blind eye-turning mannequin (some years ago, I found myself in the unlikely company of a drunken lord who informed me that the royals were pitied by the rest of the aristocracy).

It is even more understandable to wish to escape the glare of the lens that played a part in the death of a beloved parent. Having chosen Meghan and America, Prince Harry had the chance to transcend fame and to effectively defeat the presence that has seemingly haunted his life. He could go semi-privately into any number of ventures. Harry was not, after all, a signatory to the Faustian pact. One of the most tragic aspects to what has been unfolding is not just the painful reality of a family schism, but rather that at the brink of escape, Harry decided to return to the table to sign the contract. – Darran Anderson

The point where sympathy dissipates is with this issue of fame, the courting of it rather than the walking away. This is where the public’s role in the Faustian bargain comes in. This is what differentiates celebrities from the rest of us, the point of departure, and the judgement can and may well be merciless. By aiming for the echo chamber of the terminally online and the patronage of the American establishment, the wider sympathy is lost. It is especially frustrating as the prince had a chance to get out. – Darran Anderson

Here lies the deeper issue. Whatever you think of Harry and Meghan or the Royal Family, you are expected to think something — whether acolyte or tormentor. The public are the essential piece of the Faustian contract, as much as the media. We are its creditors. When it is signed, what might begin as human sympathy becomes a detached form of judgement. The figures we gaze at become dehumanised, either as saints or demons. The weight of having to play these roles or simply being perceived as such is no small thing, though we can always say they are well renumerated for their troubles. It is worth considering what the gaze of the media does to such figures, and Prince Harry’s life is an ongoing example, but it is also worth considering what it is doing to those of us who watch. – Darran Anderson

Accuracy is the cornerstone of journalism, especially when it comes to news reporting. If a man appeared in court, claiming to be a brain surgeon when he was actually a hospital porter, we wouldn’t expect a headline announcing ‘brain surgeon convicted of rape’. The same rule should apply to other obviously untrue claims. – Darran Anderson

At a time when it has become routine for male defendants to be referred to in court reports as ‘she’, such a high-profile case presented newspapers and websites with a stark dilemma. The judges’ bench book, which consists of guidance rather than law, says it is a matter of ‘common courtesy’ to use the personal pronoun and name that a person prefers. Many women and some lawyers, however, think it is ridiculous — and insulting to rape victims — to enforce a pretence that a male defendant is female. – Joan Smith

The state the courts have got themselves into by submitting to the demands of gender ideology is vividly illustrated by the judge’s remarks to the defendant in this case: “Ms Bryson, you have been convicted of two extremely serious charges, this being charges of rape”. A woman cannot be convicted of rape, which is an assault involving the use of a penis. In a bitter irony, the prosecutor described Bryson’s evidence as “entirely incredible and unreliable” — yet the court accepted his claim to be a woman.

No one who has seen pictures of Bryson arriving at court in skin tight leggings believes that for a moment. Accepting his claim at face value has dire consequences, because it has been reported that he will be housed in a women’s prison while awaiting assessment, despite being convicted of violence against women.

Journalists should be calling out this nonsense, not going along with it. If editors feel it is being imposed on them by the justice system, why aren’t they campaigning against a blatant attack on press freedom? If it’s trans activists they’re afraid of, they need to get a backbone. Distrust of the media is widespread and this practice of ‘misgendering’ rapists is making it worse. – Joan Smith

It’s often difficult to distinguish the cunning from the stupidity, the foolishness from the evil, of the political class.

In Scotland, a bill has been passed to make it easier for 16-year-olds to change their gender on official documents and to be recognized as their chosen gender (the word sex has, of course, been expunged from the discussion, and will soon be as redundant as the word “unhappy,” which has now been replaced in common parlance by “depressed”). – Theodore Dalrymple

The multiple confusions of all this need hardly be pointed out. The term “gender assigned at birth” makes it sound as if the sex inscribed on a birth certificate was decided by the flip of a coin, that it was completely arbitrary and had no basis in objective reality independent of anyone’s will (it’s sex, of course, not gender, that’s assigned at birth). Moreover, to live as someone of the chosen different, that is to say opposite, gender suggests that there’s an essential difference between male and female, which difference it’s the ultimate object of transgenderism as an ideology to deny. If there weren’t such a difference, how could it be recognized that someone had lived as either of the genders? There would be no need for certificates. – Theodore Dalrymple

Naturally, not everyone in Scotland is opposed to the bill and there have been demonstrations (not very large ones, it’s true, but noisy and attention-receiving) in favor of it. I think this must be the first time in recent history, at any rate, that there have been demonstrations demanding what amounts to the abrogation of adult responsibility towards, and manipulation and abuse of, immature young people.

The most important question, perhaps, is what’s next on the progressive agenda, once the right of children to change gender (with present technology, they can’t yet change sex) has been granted? There will surely come a time when progressives will grow bored with the issue and seek another to give meaning to their lives.  – Theodore Dalrymple

Apparently, political agendas are okay in science so long as it’s your politics being promoted. The sad part is that so much of science is being damaged by the failure of advocates to understand that science is supposed to be largely free from political slants, and when a political viewpoint has permeated science, as in the Lysenko affair, it has always been harmful.  And make no mistake about it—the conception of DEI being promoted as the future pathway to “inclusive equity”, both here and in other science societies, is indeed an ideology, and one that can be rationally debated instead of being taken as a given that must be enforced. – Jerry Coyne

A child’s wishes must be taken seriously, but can be only one factor in reaching an overall decision about their best interests, in a highly charged and complex situation. Given the uncertainty surrounding diagnosis and treatment of gender dysphoria, the UK should, like Finland, Sweden and France, follow a more cautious path; we should end medication and medical transition for children and adolescents now. – Dr David Bell

The city has been badly let down: by a calamitous lack of under-investment in critical infrastructure, a mayor who lacks all the right qualities for leadership. Local emergency management, and critical transport agencies were caught napping. – Andrea Vance

This Government is already on thin ice with Aucklanders. There is no coming back from mishandling the emergency response.

And let’s not get carried away by a promising start. Hipkins is just a fresh coat of paint. The same weaknesses remain – competence and delivery. – Andrea Vance

Shuffling the chairs around the Cabinet table, and dumping a couple of policies, won’t be enough to convince a grumpy electorate Labour has really changed. – Andrea Vance

And so it ends. A most remarkable premiership has run its course and all we have left are the memories.

Well. We also have $60 billion of additional sovereign debt, an expanded social welfare roll, inflation, a generation locked out of homeownership, expanded restrictions on free speech, and a container-ship of social meddling, from a ban on plastic shopping bags to a law preventing the sale of cigarettes to anyone born during or after the reign of Sir John Key.

Ardern’s zenith was in the weeks after the Christchurch terror attacks.

Her leadership was powerful and sincere. The collective response to her genuine and empathetic reaction ensured that anger, both domestically and internationally, was directed at the one place it belonged: the terrorist. – Damien Grant

However, this brief season of national unity was used to force through a prohibition and compulsory acquisition of a range of firearms with minimal engagement with the usual democratic processes. – Damien Grant

Much has been written about the Covid response and the merits of the decisions taken. We are now in a position to reflect on the costs; both economic and social.

Under Ardern’s guidance we became a nasty team of 5 million.

We hounded the unclean out of their employment and our cafes. For anyone whose understanding of history is more extensive than whatever is taught in our schools, the sight of citizens having to show their papers to board public transport or attend a lecture was dispiriting. As was the public’s uncritical compliance.

Worse was to come. The Fourth Estate cowering on the balcony of the Third Estate as the marginalised, disenfranchised and desperate ranted in impotent rage on the lawn below is a metaphor for how civil society evolved under Ardern’s guidance.

Those protesting were not rivers of filth. They were driven by desperation and often delusion into an act of insanity no more deranged than demanding that a man languish in managed isolation as his father died in a nearby hospital.  – Damien Grant

As we look back, it becomes clear that we were in the grip of hysteria that was being used by the state to drive compliance.

What was done was done with pure intentions by those who believe with certainty that sacrificing the individual for the collective good is not only just but necessary. It is a rationale with a troubling legacy.

Yet the real gift Ardern has left the land of the troubled long white cloud is in the area of race relations.

Like most Pākehā I am not that interested in the Treaty. I have read the various versions, written columns on the topic, but like our current Prime Minister I’d struggle to rattle its principles off if put on the spot. And yet I, like most of my contemporaries, am perfectly happy with the process of dealing with historical grievances.

If land was taken, it should be returned, and if it cannot be then compensation paid.  – Damien Grant

I am suspicious about the elastic and ill-defined principles of the Treaty and believe that the Tribunal itself is operating outside its statutory remit.

Equally, I am aware that those whose lands were taken and ancestors attacked and killed by colonial forces breaching the Treaty’s undertakings feel that the regime is far too parsimonious, slow, and the compensation inadequate for the wrongs committed.

If you look around the post-colonial world, New Zealand has navigated these issues far better than most. The cost, in terms of our GDP, has been trivial, and the advantages of having a robust if imperfect process for resolving historical grievances far outweigh any errors at the margins.

Into this delicate balance crashed Ardern and her progressive thoughtlessness. – Damien Grant

We are moving from a regime where historical wrongs are being addressed, to a state where one ethnic class has an inherent and enduring political status that is based on their ancestry. This cannot end well.

It is possible that the reform remains in place amid a growing resentment in the wider population.

There will also be disenchantment when it becomes clear that this change does not benefit the rank and file within Māoridom but only those with the skills connections to capitalise on the opportunity. – Damien Grant

Ardern will forever be popular among those who are delighted not by what she did, but who she was.

In this she was the perfect post-modern prime minister for a generation who believe your identity matters more than your character, and where your intentions carry more weight than the outcomes of your actions. – Damien Grant

 People have stopped listening to Labour and simply don’t believe their promises. He can cancel a few things – but are they cancelled or just postponed?

Hipkins has been an integral part of the Ardern Government. As a senior minister and a close confidant of hers, he has approved and led much of the work that has been proven to be very unpopular.

Will people believe that he has changed his mind? More likely they will think that he is only cancelling some projects because he wants to win the next election. What happens if they do win? – Paula Bennett

Hipkins has already stated that he wants to see changes to our tax system. That he doesn’t believe the current system is fair, but he won’t make changes before the election. What will those changes be if he is PM after October 14?

We do know what Hipkins stands for. He has led much of the unpopular policy work over the past few years and he has not changed his ideology overnight. At a personal level I wish him well. However, this change of guard will not be enough to change the minds of the majority of New Zealand voters. – Paula Bennett

New Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ most urgent task is to convince Labour-sceptical voters his Government is different to Jacinda Ardern’s.

To do that, he needs to cut Three Waters immediately.

Nothing else would signal change as clearly as ditching Three Waters.

This policy is radioactive to voters. It is a symbol of how distracted and arrogant the Ardern government became.

Nothing screams “distracted” more than Labour pouring huge amounts of energy, money and time into water reform while Kiwis struggle to pay their mortgages and grocery bills.

Nothing screams “arrogant” more than Labour forging ahead with a policy voters hate. Hatred is not a strong word in this case. Voters filled town hall-style roadshows opposing it, they erected signs along rural roads begging the Government to drop it. Sixty per cent of Kiwis opposed it. Only 23 per cent supported it.

Few Labour policies generated more negative headlines. From the early dirty-tricks TV advertising campaign designed to scare voters with nonsense threats of filthy water, to Nanaia Mahuta’s attempt to entrench part of the law behind her colleagues’ backs. It’s been a dog from start to finish. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Hipkins will have a Herculean task on his hands convincing Mahuta to kill her darling. She has 14 other Māori MPs backing her up. 

The power behind the throne stays the same. Ultimately, a change in leader changes little.

This will test Hipkins’ mettle. How badly does he want to win the election?

On currently polling, he will lose. He can do any number of other things to try to win over voters: crackdown on crime, relieve cost-of-living pressures, wipe student debt. But, those things take time. Weeks, months, years. If he starts his prime ministership defending and pursuing a deeply unpopular policy, he’ll have lost the argument already. The phone – as they say – will be off the hook. What comes after that is defeat.

This is his chance to prove to upset voters that a Hipkins Government is not more of the same. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Mark it in your diary: the bicentenary of the Gaols Act 1823. The work of the social reformer Elizabeth Fry, this landmark law mandated sex-segregated prisons with female inmates guarded by female wardens. When women were incarcerated among men, Fry observed, they were exploited, terrified and raped. She established a principle which became enshrined in international law, from UN protocols to the Geneva conventions. How, then, was history rewound, 200 years of evidence memory-holed, so that this week the double rapist Adam Graham was remanded in Cornton Vale women’s prison? How could a “robust” risk assessment by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) conclude he was safe? – Janice Turner

It is a sobering reality that among the many pressures young people encounter today the constant barrage or doomsday predictions is taking a devastating toll.  Being told the world will end removes the will to live especially if accompanied by a plethora of other negative impacts.

Many of the predictions are simply rubbish, a product of scientists desperate to hang on to funding or a tenure combined with a media using sensationalism to try and stay profitable.

The psychological pressure is becoming worse.  Not content with playing havoc with young vulnerable minds by piling fear upon fear using unusual weather events as weapons the climate change monsters are now setting impossible targets that they already know full well will be missed creating greater panic and feelings of hopelessness.

This manipulation of impressionable minds is unforgivable. 

‘Net zero’ by 2050 is blatantly unreachable. – Owen Jennings

Having aided and abetted the Extinction Rebellion nonsense the catastrophic propounding scientists and their media lapdogs are now teasing the fearful with unobtainable goal setting.  It is evil mind games. – Owen Jennings

Allan’s reform proposals will criminalise Folau’s critics. Are new blasphemy laws really what the Minister of Justice wants? –  Roger Partridge

The decision by Sport Northland to deny ‘Stop Co-Governance’, a community group, use of their Whangarei venue to hold a public meeting is illegal and defies the rights given to all Kiwis to voice their political opinions. This case, yet again, illustrates the contempt held by many for the foundational liberty of free speech, and it cannot be allowed to stand,  – Jonathan Ayling

Ardern was the target of an extraordinary amount of abuse, but the toxicity extends further than the outgoing prime minister. Over the last decade or so, any public figure or politician – regardless of their politics, gender, and ethnicity – has become increasingly targeted for abuse, especially online. It began well before Ardern’s prime ministership.

Any sober observance of John Key’s time as prime minister shows the incredible hatred and abuse directed his way in the eight years he was at the top. This included his family, and Max Key claimed in 2016 that he received “death threats twice a week”.

Some of the aggression towards Key wasn’t even widely condemned. When gallows and death threats were cartoonishly made in leftwing protests, they were generally contextualised as expressions of anger and contempt for some of his policies as Prime Minister.

But a line was crossed in Key’s time – encapsulated by leftwing rapper Tom Scott’s “Kill the PM”, which spoke of assassinating Key and raping his daughter. At the time, the song and its artist had plenty of defenders on the left.

Since then, New Zealand society has become much more polarised. A survey published by the Herald in December showed 64 per cent of New Zealanders believe the country has become more divided in the last few years. – Bryce Edwards

Yes, there were and are huge numbers of vile, sexist putdowns directed at Ardern. But the story of her rise to great heights has shown that her gender or becoming a mother while in office haven’t held her back in the slightest. If anything, New Zealanders strongly celebrated the progressiveness of having a prime minister become a mother while in office.

And the fact that the New Zealand Parliament now has a majority of women says something very striking about how gender is not the barrier for electability that it once was in this country. It could be argued Ardern’s gender and motherhood have been an electoral asset rather than a liability. – Bryce Edwards

The leveraging of Ardern’s personality and star power epitomised the trend in politics for election manifestos, policy, and ideology to be de-emphasised. In fact, politics has become “hollowed out”, and substance and depth are now missing in democracy.

Few people join political parties, and the historic ties between parties and traditional constituencies have been eroded. Without the social anchors of strong ideologies and ties to social class and other demographics, elections are more about personality and the attributes of leadership than ever before. – Bryce Edwards

The unfortunate flipside of having one personality embody and represent a party and government so entirely is that when the popularity of that institution plummets, it’s the personality at the top who becomes the magnet for all the discontent. Unfortunately for Ardern, by having her personify the Labour Government so totally, this has meant that she has been the recipient of, first the adulation, and now the blame.

Labour’s spindoctors might well have been smart to push Ardern to do the cover shoots, and develop a big media presence around her personality and charisma, but ultimately it became a double-edged sword.

The lesson is that the hyper-personalisation of politics is deeply harmful and unhealthy for all involved. The antidote is to shift away from personality politics. New Zealand political parties must rediscover their soul and substance, and not be based so much around leaders. They need to recruit members again, encourage their participation, and focus on policy development. Politics should not be an elite activity.

The media, too, could learn to focus less on personalities. The total concentration on Ardern’s star power was such easy journalism. But it came at the expense of a policy debate. – Bryce Edwards

We need a debate about polarisation and toxicity in New Zealand politics. An increase in toxicity, and especially the gendered and racial nature of it, is likely to increase. We need to find a better way forward.

But this is very different to presenting Jacinda Ardern as a victim. As some commentators have pointed out, this desire to turn her into a victim of abuse is somewhat paternalistic and patronising. Former prime minister Jenny Shipley has warned, for example, that “If we overemphasize the abuse question, it implies women can’t do this job and that’s not true.”

Even worse, is if partisans and liberal-leftists attempt to use Ardern’s departure to provoke a culture war. By painting a picture of “the deplorables hounding the Prime Minister from office”, such voices are just increasing the toxic polarisation in a way that prevents a sober discussion of the problems.

An unsophisticated condemnation of political opponents just drives up tensions and looks like petty opportunism rather than a genuine concern to help find a solution for a real problem. Instead of reducing the hate and rancour, such “call out culture” methods tend to be counterproductive and are a dead-end.

Instead, what is urgently needed is a better understanding of what is driving social divisions, and an acknowledgement that the increased abuse of politicians comes largely from our unhealthy personalisation of politics.

This focus on individual politicians and New Zealand’s shift away from collective ways of doing politics is fuelling a hyper-individualisation by which political careers live and die, leaving us all the poorer. – Bryce Edwards

One can well imagine the Prime Minister going through the Christmas briefing papers with care, then looking at the family, at the unread books, at the sun and the possibility of going fishing – and contemplating resigning. – Brian Easton

It can’t, obviously, be that people get more enjoyment about some things than others, and that making your own mind up about what you’re going to enjoy, and in what measure, is part of the joy of being part of a free society.

The last thing we would want to do, of course, is to organize a whole economic system around that idea.

The advertising of junk food is, to quote Jebb one final time, ‘undermining people’s free will.’ What we need to do, and fast, is to crack down on the office profiterole-profferers and Schwarzwaldkuchen-suppliers and put an immediate ban on all advertising of nice, tempting things.

Only then will be truly free of the scourge of office cake. –  Dr James Kierstead

The Government giving itself only three days to choose a new Prime Minister seemed, at least initially, heroic. If you take them at their word, pretty much nobody except Hipkins knew until Ardern rocked up to caucus and shared the news on Thursday. And yet, magically, consensus candidates for both PM and deputy were arrived at by Saturday morning. It was almost like they knew the answer to the question before they asked it.

The second one still has me scratching my head. Why would the outgoing Prime Minister announce the election date and then promptly resign? Isn’t that one of the most obvious things you’d leave to your successor?

It only made sense if Ardern’s successor and their campaign chair (Megan Woods) were all in on the plan, and everyone had agreed on the new team ahead of time. And my strong hunch is they were.

Third, Grant Robertson was remarkably relaxed about not becoming the leader and sacrificing his Deputy PM role. Now we know why. By jettisoning his Wellington-based electorate yesterday, he signalled he has his eye on the exit sign as well. – Steven Joyce

All this might be considered trainspotting except that it highlights that Chris Hipkins is very much the continuity choice for PM. These are the same people rearranging the deckchairs to make room for the fact that one of their number (quite reasonably) wanted to retire, but to leave everyone else’s position broadly intact.

There was no public debate about policy, no discussion about who best to lead the party and whether it should go in a different direction, just a “Jacinda’s going, you’re up Chris” agreement.

Sure, they will talk about changing things and Hipkins has done little else for the past few days. He of course can read the polls. Ardern was doing the same before Christmas, so even that is continuity. – Steven Joyce

And that’s the problem. From Hipkins down, these are the people who, for better or worse, have made all the decisions over the past five years which have landed us where we are. Robertson is responsible for monetary policy settings and the re-signing of Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr. He’s responsible for the huge increase in the tax take that is squeezing Kiwi families and the gargantuan levels of inflation-stoking government spending. He’s allowed his colleagues to go nuts with the regulatory burden on businesses, and the convenient pandemic-driven curb on immigration is straight out of his “Future of Work” playbook.

New Deputy PM Carmel Sepuloni has overseen the explosion in the use of motels as emergency housing and the rise in the number of working-age people on a benefit despite low levels of unemployment.

Hipkins himself has driven a massive expansion in the size of the public service, a poorly executed centralisation of the polytechs, and shrugged off some of the poorest attendance records our school sector has ever seen. To say nothing of obstinately refusing to alter some of the most egregious settings during the Covid lockdowns and border closures which left such a sour taste with so many New Zealanders.

Even if the four at the top really wanted to repudiate some of their previous decisions in order to win re-election at the end of the year, will the key factions within the Government allow that to occur?

There are two big decision drivers in this Government, the unions and the Māori caucus. The unions bring the money and the volunteers, and the Māori caucus can count. Not only do they have the biggest bloc of votes in the Government, they are the only group in parliament which can at least theoretically side with the Opposition and defeat the Government in a vote. None of that has changed. – Steven Joyce

There is nothing wrong with continuity when the people are broadly happy with their lot. In 2016, continuity was the imperative. But when the polls are dropping and the public says you are heading in the wrong direction, continuity is not what you need. If those at the top of the tree can’t shed some of their pet beliefs and deliver real change, the public will no doubt deliver it themselves.

So when the new Prime Minister talks about a re-set, are we talking about change to the core belief systems that landed us where we are today? Or are we being set up yet again with more of that pre-eminent skill of the sixth Labour Government, its sophistry, albeit this time delivered in a more folksy, self-deprecating manner? – Steven Joyce

Quotes of the year

It has two sides, like day and night. The night part is dark, it has pain, it has sadness, I’m not free from that. At the same time, the night gives hope that soon it is going to be over and the sun is going to come out. – Farid Ahmed 

Everyone has that capacity to forgive, it is just a choice. If we decide with our own willpower that we want to choose love, then it is easy. – Farid Ahmed 

You might be forgiven for wondering who won the Cold War, so prevalent have Stalinist and even Maoist ideas and procedures become in the West, especially in the academy and among intellectuals. It seems almost as if we are reliving the 1930s, when similar groups of people, in response to the economic crisis and dislocation of the times, were captivated by the supposed charms of totalitarianism. – Theodore Dalrymple

We become, if we are white, not born-again Christians, but born-again anti-racists, though whether we shall ever be forgiven is doubtful, for there is the small matter of original sin and pre-destination to consider. – Theodore Dalrymple

By accident of birth, we are racist (if we are white), no matter what we do or whatever position we occupy; by accident of birth we are victims of racism (if we are non-white) whatever we do or whatever position we occupy. So change is both necessary and impossible, a perfect recipe for permanent political agitation, guilt on the part of whites and resentment on the part of non-whites.

Happily, there will always be work for the “experts” in diversity and inclusion to do. Now and forever—Amen. – Theodore Dalrymple

It isn’t difficult for them to find racism, of course, because it is everywhere; by definition it is present wherever and whenever it is perceived, by whomsoever it is perceived. A person accused of racism is guilty of racism by virtue of having been accused of it: there can be no such thing as misunderstanding, let alone malice, by accusers. – Theodore Dalrymple

No need, then, for such irrelevancies as evidence, or for the objective correlatives of an accusation. As guilt in communist countries derived from the class ancestry of an accused, so in the authors’ brave new world of racial justice it derives from the racial ancestry of an accused.

The underlying condescension and indeed racism of this should be obvious: persons of color who accuse do not rise to the level of true human beings because they are incapable of such human possibilities as misunderstanding, exaggeration, and lying. They are inanimate truth-telling machines without true consciousness. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is boring to have to argue against this intimidatory drivel, but not to do so is to let it spread unopposed, fungus-like, through both institutions and minds until it is too late to stop it. – Theodore Dalrymple

There is thought for people’s welfare overseas but here it seems like it is only important that the system is being upheld without a thought for the people in it. – Vincent Rall

The rallying call, ‘transwomen are women’ is simply not true. Rowling is right – sex does matter – but it is also the clear distinction between transwomen (who are male) and women (who are female). People can claim to be whoever they like – I might fancy being the King of Siam – but male and female are not the same. – Debbie Hayton

Misinformation risks people’s lives. It’s highly likely that people became seriously ill and died because of vaccine misinformation.

Some of this misinformation came intentionally from individuals against vaccinations, and others came from the unintentional effects of comments from politicians. Let’s just say that comments made in mainland Europe affected people in Africa. – Professor Sir Andrew Pollard

Like many of the significant shifts we have seen in education and NCEA over the last few decades, the current debate is underpinned by slogans and little if any evidence. . . 

By the way, the slogan underpinning this declining performance in mathematics is “we (NZ) teach knowledge with understanding and they (everyone else) teach rote learning”. Evidently we don’t teach much at all, while other nations give their children life skills. – Gaven Martin

The current slogan for the NCEA changes appears to be, “Many Māori are disengaged from science because they don’t see their culture reflected in it”.

There is no evidence that such a claim has any bearing on education success rates. The issue is not about groups or individuals seeing themselves in the curriculum. It’s about the way our children are tau​ght, and the knowledge and skills teachers bring into the classroom. – Gaven Martin

This policy, however, will reduce welfare (wellbeing would be more politically correct), increase unemployment, increase the duration of unemployment, reduce income, increase inequality, and lead to higher inflation. This outcome is robust and well-known in the field of macro-labour economics. – Dennis Wesselbaum

In conclusion, you will be paying higher income taxes, have lower income, and pay higher prices such that the Government can implement a policy which will be harmful for the economy in many ways and reduces welfare – which this Government claims to be its raison d’être.

This reform is against every lesson economists have learned.

In my opinion, this shows the Labour Government does not care about designing useful economic reforms that would lead to better outcomes, but rather does whatever is required to transform Aotearoa into a socialist welfare state with a central government controlling all aspects of life. – Dennis Wesselbaum

Your job as a support person is not to cheer people up. It’s to acknowledge that it sucks right now, and their pain exists. – Megan Devine

There is a sneaking suspicion that lower speed limits are the favoured tool of the anti-car lobby, who may perhaps not be happy until we are back to cars travelling at walking speed with a little man in front waving a red flag. – Steven Joyce

 We need to get on with building a safer, more fit for purpose, regional roading system. We’ve already wasted four years, let’s not waste more. – Steven Joyce

Ninety percent of women who are diagnosed with ovarian cancer couldn’t name a single symptom before they were diagnosed.

It’s a crisis in women’s health and we need to talk about it, and we need to act on it. – Jane Ludemann

As long as I’m still living from this cancer, I will keep fighting for changes to improve women’s outcomes and to grow the organisation so it can be strong when I’m not here. – Jane Ludemann

It would be amazing if I could live my life and focus on me, but if I did that, nothing would happen. – Jane Ludemann

Ordinary working New Zealanders, busy raising families and paying off mortgages, have little chance of countering the influence of the highly motivated, publicly funded ideologues who increasingly shape public policy.  – Karl du Fresne

We've all felt helpless in the face of other people's pain. One of the big reasons we feel helpless is that we think it's our job to take away someone's pain. But it's not our job to fix someone's pain. It's our job to companion them inside it. #ShowUp #Acknowledge #DontFix pic.twitter.com/HPDS7vtTz3

— Megan Devine (@refugeingrief) January 11, 2022

It seems obvious to me that no statue should be erected to him. Victimhood is no virtue and can’t redeem a crime. To erect statues to him is nothing short of disgraceful and to turn him into a hero is—or ought to be considered—an insult to black people everywhere.

However, feeling as I do about this doesn’t entitle me to pull the statues down where they’ve been erected legally. I can argue against them, campaign and start petitions for their removal, and so forth, but I can’t take the law into my own hands.

Moreover, even if I succeeded in my campaign, I should be inclined to preserve the statues somewhere or other rather than to destroy them—as monuments to human folly and moral confusion. It’s always timely to be reminded of human folly and moral confusion. – Theodore Dalrymple

In particular, New Zealand cannot afford to destroy its pastoral industries, with these alone earning $NZ30 billion of foreign exchange per annum.  But strategies for emission reduction will be needed, and there are ways that this can be achieved.

I am hugely frustrated that most of the urban community, and many of the politicians, do not understand that it is food and fibre exports that provide the overseas funds that allow New Zealand to purchase the fuel, vehicles, machinery, computers, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals that make our lifestyles sustainable.  They simply do not ‘get it’.

Just tonight, I heard for the umpteenth time on television how ‘agriculture has to pay its way’.  The idea was that agriculture has to contract. I could only sigh and shake my head, because there was no point in screaming at the box that food and fibre is how all of New Zealand ‘pays it way’. – Keith Woodford

At some stage the rest of the world is likely to question the economic sustainability of New Zealand. If that occurs then the exchange rate will crash.

If the exchange rate crashes, then that will be very bad for most New Zealanders. The exception will be for those New Zealanders who produce products for export.

A significant decline in the exchange rate may be what is needed to convince New Zealanders that export industries lie at the heart of our national well-being. – Keith Woodford

The harder the elitists, the media and the academics push for the adoption of Māori language, Māori ownership, Māori control, the adoption of ill-defined terms, the incorporation of Māori factors into science and, particularly, if the courts continue down the path of judicial activism by embracing ethnic and cultural values into judgements and judicial process the greater the problems will become. – Owen Jennings

The problem is there is no clear definition of many of the terms and concepts that the conceited want to impose.  They cannot even agree among themselves.  Because they are revisionists they will force the most extreme position.   – Owen Jennings

Uncertainty halts process.  Progress ends.  Investment stops, decisions get deferred or just not made, wrangles emerge, division and antipathy grow.  Instead of a nation of “one people” we are being cleaved down the middle – the totalitarian elitists on one side and the hoi polloi on the other.  The arrogant writing their own cheques on the back of those who have no claims, no acceptable blood. The anger is now evident.  The push is too far, too fast.  The future looks bleak, even bloody.  – Owen Jennings

This uncertainty, confusion and growing unresolved claims plays havoc in the business world.  It kills entrepreneurship, smothers risk taking and investment and jobs go.  The low paid jobs go first.  The crème le crème are not affected.  When their bloated salaries are insufficient they sell their over-rated service under contract and double their income.  They become a consultant and double it again. – Owen Jennings

What to do?  Can paradise be regained?  Ultimately power lies with the people.  It may take a decade, it may take a century but eventually the masses prevail.  If we do not want a split nation, a fully totalitarian state, a country of even greater ‘haves and have-nots’, a basket case economy where long proven values of free speech, freedom of association, freedom from state control are lost, we need to take action now.  We either do it now by talk and the ballot box or we do it later by more dramatic means. – Owen Jennings

The Great Awokening has not crowded out Millennial Socialism. It has absorbed it. (Or maybe it was the other way around – I am not quite sure, and it makes little difference.) This new Woke Socialism uses the methods of the Culture War, and applies them to economic discourse. Being branded a ‘Thatcherite’ now seems to be almost on a par with being branded a ‘transphobe’, a ‘racist’, or an ‘Islamophobe’.

Thus, the Culture War is by no means ‘beyond economics’. Instead, economics has become a major front in the Culture War. – Kristian Niemietz 

New Zealanders of all stripes have been very accepting of the need to redress historical wrongs perpetrated towards Maori. For the most part, these wrongs have been redressed by way of monetary and property settlements to the present-day Maori tribal authorities. But New Zealanders have become concerned as these claims have become more outlandish, encouraged in part by poorly-drafted legislation that has become the enabler for spurious claims for possession of everything from water resources to the entire coastline of New Zealand. But even these claims pale against the agenda that was outlined in a document that the current New Zealand Government tried to keep secret – the report known as He Puapua [PDF download]. – Kiwiwit

I believe most New Zealanders want to accommodate Maori aspirations for self-determination, but few will be prepared to accept the imposition of new constitutional arrangements that have the effect of making non-Maori second-class citizens in their own country. A government that sets itself against the will of its people cannot last – or at least, not as a democratic government. We need a genuinely open debate on how New Zealand is to be governed in future without anyone who expresses a contrary view being labeled racist. I have always thought the most important clause in the Treaty of Waitangi was Article 3, which envisaged that we would all be British subjects – in modern parlance, equal citizens. That is the aspiration that should drive all consideration of how New Zealand is to be governed in future. – Kiwiwit

More than anything, losing them taught me that life is so precious and you have only got the one life. I just don’t want to find myself languishing, – Lucy Hone

Resilience psychology is about working out how you get through whatever you’re facing, examining and being aware of your thinking patterns and whether they are helping you or harming you towards your goal. – Lucy Hone

I really encourage women to believe in themselves physically and not let other people’s opinions or what they’ve done as they’ve grown up, their family norm, establish what is right for them,” says Hone.

And to take on a challenge that intrigues them because the growth you get from doing those hard things is fantastic and massive and we can do hard things – even though it’s sometimes not fun and involves tears. – Lucy Hone

In my experience, the best way to achieve fiscal control is to actually solve the problems of the people who are driving the spend. Bureaucracies are very reluctant to admit that what they’re doing is not working … but we shouldn’t pretend when we know we’re failing. – Bill English

The first thing for governments to do is admit what they’re not good at,. And what they’re not good at is complexity – that is, people who need multiple services, and don’t fit the boxes. So those people are all getting little doses of commodity services that usually wear them out rather than have any impact – Bill English

[Identity politics is] saying that who you are determines what you will be; and, of course, that’s the kind of thing a lazy universal system would say. – Bill English

People on middle-class incomes … have no idea what it’s like to be enmeshed in 10 different systems (of payments) … these people are worn out … and we give them bad service. – Bill English

 A person develops learned helplessness when he is subjected to unpleasant situations that he can do nothing to avert. He generalizes his helplessness to unpleasant situations about which he can do something, such that he acts as if he were helpless when he is not.

I would like to extend this observation to a condition of learned stupidity, that is to say the stupidity of people who are by no means lacking in intelligence but who nevertheless make stupid decisions that people of lesser or even much lesser intelligence can see at once are stupid. Learned stupidity explains how and why highly intelligent people, faced with a choice, repeatedly choose a stupid, if not the most stupid, option, time after time.

In order for people to learn to be stupid in this sense, they must both undergo a prolonged education or training and be obliged to perform acts or carry out procedures that do not engage their intelligence and may even be repugnant to it, while simultaneously being under surveillance for compliance and conformity. Politicians generally fulfill these conditions. They are not alone in this, far from it: A good swathe of the general population also fulfills these conditions. People who are selected for intelligence and then denied the use of it are particularly apt to become stupid.

Politicians are denied, or deny themselves, the use of their intelligence by their need to curry favor, not necessarily of the majority, but of at least the most vocal minorities. It is a human propensity to come to believe what one is obliged, either by self-interest or by virtue of one’s subordination in a hierarchy, to say. That is why, in my professional life, I’ve heard so many intelligent people arguing passionately for the most evident absurdities, with all the appearance of believing in them. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is difficult to see how a system of government permitting 15 percent of the population to determine the fate of the remaining 85 percent can end anything other than badly. Pretty early on in the piece, the Māori nationalists, like the Pakeha liberals of the 1980s and 90s, will also be forced to choose:

Do we preserve our ideological victory and defend our hard won political supremacy by force – or not?- Chris Trotter

 Ministers have been treating good news about Covid as political, and failures (such as border testing) as let-downs by public servants, for the past two years. – Ben Thomas

There is no doubt Omicron will be swift as it makes its way through the community, but at the end, along with our high vaccination rates, there will be potentially additional widespread herd immunity. This may in fact, if we are lucky, put brakes on the pandemic. It could draw the threat of Covid-19 to a close. Covid-19 will not go away, though; it will still circulate, it will be just less dangerous.

My prediction is that the pandemic will end in six to 12 months, and we will be living in our new normal. Covid-19 will still be with us – that’s a given – but we can all play a part in helping to slow the spread of the virus in our communities.- Dr Bryan Betty

 Two years since the option to go home – a human right, and a lifeline for expats – was ripped away from most Kiwis. Jacinda Ardern spent press conferences referring to those back home as the “team of five million” and urging people to “be kind”, while the one million New Zealanders who live overseas looked on in desperation, the message clear: you are not welcome here. – Molly Codyre

 It’s been two years since most overseas Kiwis have been able to hug their families. It’s hard to express the mental toll that takes on a person – the constant uncertainty, the tearful FaceTime calls, the human desire to simply be near the people that you love. – Molly Codyre

Except in the worst-case scenario, you may not be able to get home. The Facebook group Grounded Kiwis recently obtained government data under the Official Information Act outlining how many emergency allocation spots had been approved in the period 1 July 2021 to 6 September 2021: just 7 per cent of applications for those suffering the death of a close relative were approved; only 10 per cent of people with a terminal illness themselves were allowed to go home. –  Molly Codyre

For the second Christmas in a row, just four of our five family members will be able to be together. This time, I’m the odd one out. The concept of hugging them all in February was getting me through. Now I just feel spent. I’m sick of shouting about how angry I am, I’m sick of writing articles and letters and telling the devastating stories of those who have been locked out of their country for months and years. I’m sick of watching athletes, pop stars and international DJs get coveted spaces over the average citizen.

I want to hug my family and be near the people I love. I just want to go home.- Molly Codyre

The innocent words “principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” were included in the SOE Act only because Lange’s then attorney-general (Geoff Palmer) assured the cabinet the phrase was meaningless.  Thanks to some judicial musing, this initial phrase became loosely associated with “partnership”.  About 30 years on, this link was subtly extended to the “principles of partnership”. Then that meaningless phrase was gradually manipulated into a linkage with co-governance. Now we have He Puapua working on converting that link into a string of “principles of co-governance”.

Thankfully, most New Zealanders see through the word games. They know that the big constitutional issues that affecting their lives and well-being can only be determined by their formal votes, and not by merely manipulating the language.- Barry Brill

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal? – Jordan Peterson

We are now at the point where race, ethnicity, “gender,” or sexual preference is first, accepted as the fundamental characteristic defining each person (just as the radical leftists were hoping) and second, is now treated as the most important qualification for study, research and employment. – Jordan Peterson

How can accusing your employees of racism etc. sufficient to require re-training (particularly in relationship to those who are working in good faith to overcome whatever bias they might still, in these modern, liberal times, manifest) be anything other than insulting, annoying, invasive, high-handed, moralizing, inappropriate, ill-considered, counterproductive, and otherwise unjustifiable? – Jordan Peterson

And if you think DIE is bad, wait until you get a load of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scores . Purporting to assess corporate moral responsibility, these scores, which can dramatically affect an enterprise’s financial viability, are nothing less than the equivalent of China’s damnable social credit system, applied to the entrepreneurial and financial world. CEOs: what in the world is wrong with you? Can’t you see that the ideologues who push such appalling nonsense are driven by an agenda that is not only absolutely antithetical to your free-market enterprise, as such, but precisely targeted at the freedoms that made your success possible? Can’t you see that by going along, sheep-like (just as the professors are doing; just as the artists and writers are doing) that you are generating a veritable fifth column within your businesses? Are you really so blind, cowed and cowardly? With all your so-called privilege? – Jordan Peterson

And it’s not just the universities. And the professional colleges. And Hollywood. And the corporate world. Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity — that radical leftist Trinity — is destroying us. Wondering about the divisiveness that is currently besetting us? Look no farther than DIE. Wondering — more specifically — about the attractiveness of Trump? Look no farther than DIE. When does the left go too far? When they worship at the altar of DIE, and insist that the rest of us, who mostly want to be left alone, do so as well. Enough already. Enough. Enough. – Jordan Peterson

The reluctance to let the public in on its thinking as it is developing, to engage in public debate and test ideas, to challenge the views of the favoured experts with the views of other experts, here and abroad, has been a sad hallmark of the government’s approach throughout the pandemic.

This prevailing mood of secrecy, dressed up as an “abundance of caution” has been a major contributor to the uncertainty and fear that has gripped the community, and frustrated businesses and cost jobs over the last two years. The Prime Minister’s comments so far this year suggest this approach is set to continue. – Peter Dunne

The point that arises from all this, fuelled by the government’s unwillingness to be completely open with us all and the steadily negative and therefore unrealistic utterances from its public health advisers, is that our whole approach looks more and more like putting a finger in the dyke every time a crack appears, rather than working out how to live with the problem.

While that approach was understandable, even justifiable, in the early days of the pandemic, when knowledge and science were developing, it is no longer the case. It is unrealistic for New Zealand to expect that it can suppress the virus here in a way that no other country has been able to do, unless of course the intention is we really do become the hermit kingdom some have feared. – Peter Dunne

While Jacinda Ardern claims she runs an open and transparent government, we now know that is a lie. Her election-night promise to govern for all New Zealanders, was also a lie. Without any public mandate, she has taken away democratic rights from communities and freedoms from individuals.

Not only has she embedded the radical socialist agendas of the United Nations and the World Economic Forum into our legal and regulatory framework, she is now attempting to replace one of the world’s oldest democracies with tribal rule. These are the actions of a totalitarian regime. – Muriel Newman

So being Maori is about understanding all of your heritage, not just a portion of your heritage, and that includes my European side as well and having respect for both.

And that’s why I think that inclusiveness is really, really important because I don’t like being told I have to either be a racist and a colonist or be a Maori. – Nicole McKee

So it’s more really about the here and now and what we are able to do for the country, and those that are stuck in the past will always remain stuck in the past. But we can’t go backwards. We can only go forwards. – Nicole McKee

We think that if you can offer better opportunities for mental health, better opportunities for education, then it’s better opportunities full stop.

If you look at the Maori that go over to Australia and get in the mines, they do so incredibly well. “And I know that we all have the ability to do incredibly well. It’s just we shouldn’t have to leave the country to do it.

And I think a big part of that is they don’t have any incentive to do well because they can be handed everything on a plate, whereas my mother brought us up to get educated and get out there and make a difference. – Nicole McKee

This is going to be a busy and difficult year for Government. It is planning major changes to the health system, tertiary education, local government (the “Three Waters”), environmental rules and wage-setting arrangements – while also struggling with Covid and the disaster that is housing policy.

None of these initiatives looks well thought through. All are being justified on the basis of good intentions. The established formula is: “this is a problem, something must be done, our policy proposal is something, therefore it must be done”. The Government’s contentious and divisive proposals for Three Waters epitomise this approach.

Unfortunately, good intentions are not good enough. Particularly when it comes to public policy. There are always unintended and undesired consequences. Responses to a misdiagnosed problem will often make things worse, not better. – Bryce Wilkinson

The situation smacks of the final years of the Muldoon era where every policy was pulling against at least one other policy. The policy contradictions mount until they overwhelm an administration. It took the succeeding Lange government years to extricate the country from the policy mess.  – Bryce Wilkinson

Removing commercial assets like water infrastructure from council balance sheets could ease the infrastructure funding problem. But this could be done without imposing the convoluted governance arrangements the government proposes for the three waters.

Unhappily, the Government’s proposed Natural and Built Environment Bill promises to pull in the opposite direction by making “the environment” more important than housing. – Bryce Wilkinson

The ban in 2018 on offshore gas and oil exploration is another example of incoherent policy. Under New Zealand’s Emission Trading Scheme, the ban can make no difference to New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions to 2050 and beyond.

It is effectively a subsidy for imported coal to produce electricity. Environmentalists groan, while an eliminated industry moans and other investors wonder who will be next. The unprincipled removal of interest deductibility for landlords answered that question.  – Bryce Wilkinson

Why is rigorous official analysis of policy proposals so uncommon? The only answer can be that decent analysis is dangerous for constituency politics. If enough people knew what outcomes could really be expected, they might thwart the policy.

Politicians are then forced to pretend that the inclusive overall public interest is at the centre of what they propose, even when the proposal might really be partisan.  – Bryce Wilkinson

But ultimately it is results that count. As mental health professionals have been pointing out since the 2019 Budget, pledging to spend a lot more money because it looks caring is one thing. Making a real difference is another.

Nor is Treasury above professing good intentions. For years now it has beaten its chest about its supposedly world-leading Living Standards Framework. It asserts that our wellbeing is at the centre of everything it does. Yet no framework for policy analysis has emerged from this effort. The tangible output is a dashboard of indicators. They have nothing to say about whether government policies are making New Zealanders better off or worse off.

Absent a policy framework, the risk is that the discrepancies they inevitably reveal as between aggregate categories of people will trigger yet more of the “something must be done” impulse to ill-considered policy action. – Bryce Wilkinson

Policy analysis is set to get worse. A new form of collectivism is in the ascendancy. Its narrative is that groups whose economic and health outcomes are worse than the population average must be ‘disadvantaged’ by others. The “oppressors” may glibly be the likes of foreign investors, capitalism, white colonisation, and the better off who are, by presumption, guilty of unconscious bias. Glib presumption displaces problem diagnosis. Individuals have no individuality.

The polarising focus on the collective or group, as if it is a homogenous whole with sharp boundaries, undermines horizontal equity. This is the notion that those in equal (needy) circumstances deserve equal treatment, even if they do not belong to a ‘disadvantaged’ group. More broadly, the focus on group membership undermines the importance of individual dignity, values, choice, liberty, initiative, work ethic and enterprise. Social cohesion becomes at risk. – Bryce Wilkinson

The Government faces a tough year in good part because it is locked into promoting major changes whose public interest justification is thin and whose nature is polarising. Worthy aspirations and fine intentions do not answer hard questions about likely effects.

For opposition parties, this is an opportunity. For those who care about public policy, it is a train wreck. – Bryce Wilkinson

Finally, businesses receive approval to bring RATs into the country and they have been operating very well. Until, the ministry decides to play catch up and has consolidated orders into this country. They call it consolidate, others say, requisition.

Even if there was a problem, what in the name of all that is holy makes the Ministry of Health think it can rollout Rapid Antigen Tests? Show me the evidence that the ministry could in fact see a problem and solve it.

It has shown itself to be inept when it comes to the distribution of PPE, and worse than that, it refused to listen to the pleas from the people on the ground who are most at risk in that first wave of COVID, who said there isn’t enough PPE. They utterly refused to listen to the people on the ground, so not just inept, but cruel.  – Kerre McIvor

This is yet another egregious example of an incompetent, shambolic ministry that was in utter disarray for many years. They are showing that they are out of their depth and playing catch up yet again and sensible, proactive, nimble New Zealanders who have foresight and preparedness are the ones who pay the price. – Kerre McIvor

It was tardiness of a different kind that caught the Government out on Wednesday. After repeatedly talking down the importance of rapid antigen tests (which were – to be fair, less useful during the Delta outbreak), and blocking their import, the Government quietly changed its mind and began diverting orders intended for businesses into its own stocks.

Well, that’s what the Government said. Distributors were slightly more blunt, arguing the tests were “seconded” “requisitioned” – many versions of “nicked”, essentially.

Politics is, at its heart, a language game. Control of language is a good proxy for political control, but it is difficult not to squirm a little at the notion there’s nothing smelly about the Government “consolidating” something that belongs to someone else and that it alone will choose when that person gets what they originally ordered.

Theft by any other name smells as foul. – Thomas Coughlan

After months of talking down RATS and blocking their import, the Government then over-restricted their use, while faffing its own order. Now, it appears the Government wants millions of the things, and instead of getting its own, it’s “consolidating” them from the businesses that it was blocking from receiving the tests just months ago.

And on that “consolidation” malarky – at least some distributors are concerned the Government applied its significant market pressure to force manufacturers to drop smaller orders in favour of the Government’s large order.  – Thomas Coughlan

The Government seems convinced the clear benevolence of the Covid response is an excuse for common thuggery – it is not.

Gangs seize the goods they want – Governments procure them. Ends do not justify means, especially not now. Don’t be surprised if the Auditor-General decides to go sniffing. – Thomas Coughlan

Unlike the early stage of the pandemic, when a bit of chaos could be excused by the fact the Government was responding quickly to a challenge that no one fully understood, this latest incident appears to show a Government covering its back having failed to act quickly enough to procure tests it should have acquired a long time ago.

The fact the Government’s silence on its procurement pivot appears to have something to do with the embarrassment it faces belatedly adopting a form of testing the opposition has been calling for since last year only adds to that embarrassment. – Thomas Coughlan

It takes a special kind of gall, and/or arrogance, for a government to turn up last week having been literally invisible for a month during a pandemic and announce without even the slightest hint of embarrassment, that one, you haven’t been off skiving, and two, you actually have a Covid plan for the year. When, as it inevitably turns out, no such plan exists. – Mike Hosking

As we enter the third year of Covid, we have had various forms of lockdowns, then levels (various forms), then lights (various colours), and now we have phases or stages.

Stage 1 for Omicron is the “stamp it out” stage … surely the most farcical of all the ideas so far. – Mike Hosking

At every step along this torturous journey, as well as being hopelessly ill-prepared, the Government has insisted things that can never happen will somehow magically happen here. – Mike Hosking

But the part that infuriates me most is not the incompetence of the Government, that’s now well established. No, the inexplicable part is the rationale of those who still believe all of this is somehow acceptable.

To expect and accept so little is an indictment on a country that once aspired to so much better. – Mike Hosking

The recent spike in the afforestation of sheep and beef farms is not the result of consumer driven demand, but heavy-handed and short-term Government policies designed to incentivize more trees, regardless of whether or not they are the right tree in the right place. – William Beetham

Overseas Investors can simply plant pine trees, claim the credits, sell them and take the huge profits overseas, while New Zealanders carry the consequences now and into the future. – William Beetham

Quite simply, those wanting to use land to continue farming for the future prosperity of Aotearoa New Zealand are being out-bid. There is little benefit but a huge cost to future generations. – William Beetham

In addition to teaching the knowledge associated with specific academic disciplines, it is the mission of universities to prepare students to think critically.

Critical thinking requires us to engage with ideas we find disagreeable, difficult and even offensive, and to learn to bring to bear reason and evidence, rather than emotion, when we respond to them. One of the core principles that have historically enabled universities to fulfil this mission is academic freedom. – Dr Michael Johnston, Dr James Kierstead,  Dr David Lillis, Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger, Professor Lindsey White, Professor Brian Boyd

Academic freedom – and the benefits to human knowledge it brings – requires the tolerance to hear and engage with ideas to which one objects. To be sure, such tolerance often doesn’t come naturally, which is why academics must model it to students.

But the importance of this kind of tolerance goes beyond the academy. The free and open society we, perhaps, take too much for granted depends on the willingness of its citizens to tolerate the expression of rival opinions. – Dr Michael Johnston, Dr James Kierstead,  Dr David Lillis, Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger, Professor Lindsey White, Professor Brian Boyd

The Ministry of Education is currently reviewing the achievement standards for NCEA science, in large part to infuse them with understandings from mātauranga Māori. It seems essential that scientists, philosophers and experts in mātauranga Māori should be able to conduct an open, public debate to inform that review. If we get it wrong, it may harm both sources of knowledge.                                         

One of the things that defines scientific inquiry is that it brooks no sacred claims. True science is never ‘settled’. Even when theories seem to explain observed phenomena perfectly, new information and fresh insights may throw everything up in the air once more. – Dr Michael Johnston, Dr James Kierstead,  Dr David Lillis, Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger, Professor Lindsey White, Professor Brian Boyd     

In science, ideas must be tested against evidence, never against what we would prefer to believe. For example, religious conviction does not provide a valid basis for objection to a scientific idea. Neither is it ever legitimate in science to allow personalised attacks to substitute for reasoned, evidence-based argument.    – Dr Michael Johnston, Dr James Kierstead,  Dr David Lillis, Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger, Professor Lindsey White, Professor Brian Boyd

 I am a researcher and former academic. I have been involved in many robust debates over my career. Inevitably these will hurt the feelings of various groups or individuals including those whose theories are being challenged. Its not a reason to shy away from such discussions. If avoiding upsetting some people becomes a key feature of universities we may as well close them down now. – Paul Callister

At what point do we begin to demand better from our Government? At what point do we stop accepting mediocrity? At what point do we start demanding a Government that delivers results? A Government that is proactive, forward-thinking, and delivers meaningful solutions rather than half-baked ideas delivered through a web of PR nothingness? – Nick Mowbray

I reflect on our Covid response, and we are not learning any lessons. Frighteningly we borrowed more money per capita than any other country in the world outside the US in 2020 and 2021. This was despite us being least affected by Covid due to our geographic location (ease of shutting borders) and low population density. – Nick Mowbray

And what do we have to show for the doubling of our national debt? Better hospitals? No. More ICU beds? No. More nurses? No. Wasn’t this the Covid fund? Two years later and even the most simplistic initiatives have not been executed. The learnings we’ve been able to witness internationally from our less fortunate geographic neighbours have not been integrated into our Covid response, common sense and basic strategic thought has not been applied, and consequently, the most basic of infrastructure has not been integrated into our short, medium or long-term plans.

We should demand better than this. – Nick Mowbray

The problem is now that we are more than 90 per cent vaccinated and we are still not getting on with life. Whatever way the Government wants to spin it, the reality is we are now, and will continue to live with a variant that has a very low hospitalisation rate and even lower death rate. Yet, because we have not improved anything over the past two years, we are having to live in fear that our public health system is not ready. – Nick Mowbray

What is truly worrying is the absence of research undertaken by our Government to learn from the actions taken by other countries. New Zealand was perfectly positioned to closely monitor the strengths and weaknesses of respective global efforts to tailor the best possible localised plan, proactively. It was clear a year ago Rapid Antigen Tests were going to be key to living with Covid, yet the Government has seemly spent its time communicating efforts around an idyllic, unrealistic elimination strategy rather than proactively securing supplies that will ultimately enable New Zealanders to get on with their lives. Every other country has had them available widely for well over a year. Like with everything we have been the slow to react and seems not learnt our lessons from our vaccination roll out. – Nick Mowbray

Our economy is high on a sugar rush from the past two years, but that will soon wear off. Inflation is running rampant, the cost of living is soaring, house prices are up 45 per cent. Companies and businesses like our own cannot get out into the world. How long can this go on for?

In Australia, 86 per cent of people now cite their biggest concern as the cost of living. Consumer spending in the US is down 27 per cent Q3 vs. Q1 – the flow-on effect of this is going to be monumental, and it’s only just getting started. At what price do we stop and say enough is enough? At what point do we demand better of our Government?

Surely that moment is now. – Nick Mowbray

Let’s start by being charitable. If the Government wanted to spread Omicron through the community as fast as possible, its actions over the last six weeks have been exemplary. – Matthew Hooton

A government wanting to stop spread would have cancelled major events like the three-day Soundsplash music festival in Hamilton. Instead, the Ardern Government — which since September has had a weirdly specific fixation on ensuring music festivals proceed — stood by, deciding only after the festival that Omicron was spreading in the community sufficiently to justify moving to red. The release of information about Soundsplash-linked cases was delayed. – Matthew Hooton

 Again, to be charitable, what would a government do if it wanted Omicron to spread through the community as fast as possible? It would encourage 8000 teenagers and early-20s from all around the North Island to gather at a music festival, thrash about together in mosh pits and sleeping bags, just before returning home to start school. 

If spread was the goal, the Government deserves a gold star. New Omicron cases have risen more than five-fold over the last four days, at least as fast as in Australia in December. – Matthew Hooton

The Ministry of Health, having finally decided it wanted as many RATs as possible, moved to stop their distribution to organisations which had ordered them as part of their business continuity plans. The ministry will instead ensure RATs get to the “right” businesses, as if health bureaucrats really understand which organisations are essential to maintaining basic infrastructure and food distribution as hundreds of thousands of us get sick with Omicron in the coming weeks. – Matthew Hooton

 The Government stands accused of laziness, negligence, incompetence, panicked authoritarianism and opacity over its response to Omicron. It is far too charitable to think it planned any of this. The wheels have come off its spin machine. – Matthew Hooton

Wouldn’t you love a government that lived within its means as you and I are trying to do? Wouldn’t you love a government that was fully accountable for it’s decisions as you and I are in our lives?

Those of us that work really hard just to afford a moderate life with the odd bit of fun, continue to be used as human ATMs for ministers of the crown who appear to think that hard work equates to hard times in the debating chamber.  –  Roman Travers

When the Taliban offers you – a pregnant, unmarried woman – safe haven, you know your situation is messed up. – Charlotte Bellis

My lawyer has taken MIQ to court eight times on behalf of rejected, pregnant Kiwis. Just before the case, every time, MIQ miraculously finds them a room. It’s an effective way to quash a case and avoid setting a legal precedent that would find that MIQ does in fact breach New Zealand’s Bill of Rights. – Charlotte Bellis

The decision of who should get an emergency MIQ spot is not made on a level playing field, lacks ethical reasoning and pits our most vulnerable against each other. MIQ has set aside hundreds of emergency rooms for evacuating Afghan citizens, and I was told maybe, as a tax-paying, rates-paying New Zealander, I can get home on their allotment. Is this the Hunger Games? Pitting desperate NZ citizens against terrified Afghan allies for access to safety? Who is more important – let’s let MIQ decide. – Charlotte Bellis

I am writing this because I believe in transparency and I believe that we as a country are better than this. Jacinda Ardern is better than this. I am writing this to find solutions for MIQ so that New Zealanders both at home and abroad are safe and protected. I write this for the people who send me messages every day: I need treatment, my father has months to live, I missed my loved one’s funeral, I’m in danger, or my visa has expired, I have nowhere to go…
…and I’ve been rejected. I do not have a pathway home.

Our story is unique in context, but not in desperation.

The morning we were rejected, I sobbed in my window overlooking Kabul’s snow-covered rooftops. I wasn’t triggered by the disappointment and uncertainty, but by the breach of trust. That in my time of need, the New Zealand Government said you’re not welcome here. It feels surreal to even write that. And so, I cried. I thought, I hope this never happens again. I thought, we are so much better than this. I thought back to August, and how brutally ironic it was, that I had asked the Taliban what they would do to ensure the rights of women and girls. And now, I am asking the same question of my own Government. – Charlotte Bellis

Jacinda Ardern recently told an American television host that she finds it ‘slightly offensive’ when outsiders assume every other New Zealander starred in Lord of the Rings. Quite so. New Zealand has only one real film star in 2022, and that’s the Prime Minister herself. But the way things are heading, she might best suit an adaptation of Lord of the Flies.  – David Cohen

Most striking of all, though, is the question of how any political leader this side of China could do all this without so much as the mildest challenge from what passes for the local media and scientific establishment, much less the culture at large. – David Cohen

Kiwis are not politically screamy like the Americans, still less given to kicking back against bureaucracy like the British. Shortly after arriving in New Zealand from London in the late 1930s, Karl Popper marvelled over what appeared to him to be ‘the most easily governed’ people on the face of the earth. The champion of open societies did not mean this as an un-alloyed compliment. – David Cohen

Racial minorities are no different from other human beings, in that we do not appreciate being spoken for or told how to think. The fetishization of identity politics is a superficial solution that rewards its believers with self-righteousness but won’t actually eradicate racism. I hear frequently from non-white individuals in my audience who do not believe their race is the most important thing about them, who are tired of being lectured by woke white people. – Debra Soh

At the heart of the RATs issue lies two problems; this Government’s failure to plan, first with the slow roll-out of the vaccination programme and now the failure to purchase enough RATs in time for Omicron, and then its increasing insistence on applying the draconian powers it has at its disposal under the Covid-19 Response Act.

The fact that the hand of Big Government is still being utilised, when the prime minister and Covid Response Minister Chris Hipkins talk about Kiwis taking ‘personal responsibility’ in regard to Omicron, only highlights the pervasive role Big Government now has in our lives.

It’s the same reason the Ministry of Health and the Government initially rejected saliva testing. It wasn’t accurate enough, they cried. What it really meant was that saliva testing gave people a degree of autonomy and allowed them to take on the responsibility which only now the Government is asking us to do.– Janet Wilson

This week the prime minister was at it again, saying that RATs “have a large variation in accuracy rates – some as low as 30 per cent”. It’s a case of if your own lack of performance is in the spotlight, throw doubt on the effectiveness of the product. What the Government seems to have completely forgotten is that personal responsibility flies out the window when you can’t get tested. – Janet Wilson

What the RAT issue epitomises is that while this Government wants us to prepare for the wave of Omicron that will reach our shores, it hasn’t done enough preparation of its own. If it isn’t prepared, how can all of us be assured that we’ll cope? Without access to cheap, easily available rapid antigen testing, how can we know if we’ve got Omicron in the first place? We can’t. – Janet Wilson

Picture this; as we face this next phase of the pandemic, with thousands of cases sweeping through communities a day and PCR testing overwhelmed, rapid antigen testing will be a vital tool to help us negotiate Omicron’s vicissitudes, as it has in the UK, the USA and Canada. Except you won’t be able to purchase it easily. Instead, it’ll be a man from the ministry who decides whether you get it or not.

It might make for a plotline from House of Cards but what it simply does is rob us of responsibility and self-determination – qualities we’ll all need in the coming months. – Janet Wilson

 I don’t think it takes rocket science to know that New Zealand and Afghanistan do not have equivalent healthcare. – Charlotte Bellis

The number of stories I could tell you about maternity care in Afghanistan…The UN said just recently they expect an extra 50,000 women to die over the next three years, giving birth here.

That takes the total up to 70,000 women, which is unfathomable in itself. But for the [New Zealand] Government to say ‘no stay in Kabul, I’m sure the healthcare there will be just fine’ – shows complete disregard for the wellbeing of your citizen. – Charlotte Bellis

They just need to use their brains and their hearts and think, ‘this person is a New Zealand citizen’.

At what point did we get so bogged down in these rules we’ve come up with that we can’t see that she’s a Kiwi in need of help and she needs to come home? – Charlotte Bellis

After that blissful summer break, how disappointing to find ourselves in exactly the same position we found ourselves at the end of last year.

Once again, authorities appear completely unprepared for something we could all see coming: Omicron.

That’s the real reason for the Government taking rapid antigen tests (RATs) off private businesses. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

It’s hard to fathom what basic errors were made at Government level. Did ministry staffers take too long off for summer? Did they not consider the possibility Omicron would arrive so soon in New Zealand? Had they not looked overseas and seen how important RATs had become to various countries’ Covid responses?

Either way, they were unprepared. And so they took the RATs away from those businesses that had prepared.

Businesses are extremely angry at this, and rightly so. They are being forced to risk their ability to remain operational because health officials and their government bosses dropped the ball. Again. This is the vaccine roll-out all over again: something obviously necessary left to the last minute, ultimately requiring a panicked scramble. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

This debacle will do nothing to repair the already-strained relationship between Cabinet and business. It will also do little to improve the reputation of health officials, who increasingly look like a department full of candidates for the cast of any future remake of “Yes Minister”.

Apart from the RATs debacle, the Government is quite obviously unprepared on many other fronts as well.

Two medications meant to reduce the need for hospitalisation if taken early in a Covid infection haven’t yet been approved in NZ. Both molnupiravir and paxlovid are already available in the UK, the US and Australia. By last count, we now have fewer ICU beds than we did at the start of the pandemic.The Prime Minister’s three stage plan for Omicron is so vague it’s clearly a case of Cabinet making it up as they go along. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Uncertainty is bad for people and bad for business. Businesses need certainty. They need to know that they can open their doors and that customers can come to visit them. They need to know that product will arrive when it’s meant to and that orders can be filled. They need to know what their bankers and landlords expect of them.

Caution does not come naturally to the spirited business owner. – Bruce Cotterill

Alongside the inevitable and ongoing questions about our Covid response, we now have to consider inflation, interest rates, debt levels and an out of control housing market that must surely come to a sudden halt soon.

The troubles with the global shipping cycle leave a small isolated country at the bottom of the world vulnerable in terms of supply of necessary goods.

We’re short of talented people too, and the good news is that there are a heap of those overseas waiting to come home. But we won’t let them. And then there’s the fact that while we’re distracted by this stuff, a government that seems intent on socially re-engineering the country gets on with the job of dismantling our democracy. – Bruce Cotterill

This week’s fiasco around the confiscation of privately imported rapid antigen testing kits reflects a government more intent on controlling the pace of our response, than the effectiveness of it.

That desire for control is one area where they have made progress over the last year. I refer to the gradual threat to democracy. Last year saw the early stages of the implementation of the Three Waters legislation, the installation of unelected representatives onto local authority councils and related boards, and the establishment of government bodies that are not representative of the population at large. – Bruce Cotterill

Not to have to talk to anybody for two days, what a luxury! An even greater luxury was not having to listen to what anyone said. Silence, blessed silence! Most talk, after all, is pure bilge, verbiage to fill the gaps in time. This applies as much to ourselves as to others, if only we stopped to listen to ourselves. A couple of days of silence is like a detoxification of the mind, much as hypochondriacs undergo detoxification of their bodies by enemas and starvation diets—except that detoxification of the mind is much more necessary than that of the bowel. – Theodore Dalrymple

But now, as Omicron gently settles there, Ardern’s New Zealand has lost any remaining halo of Covid superiority. It looks neither ‘compassionate’, nor even ‘tough’ or ‘hardline’ but completely pathological. Mad. Bonkers. Pitiable. And not without a whiff of totalitarianism.

You might think that a lefty as vocally committed to social justice and human rights as Ardern would shy away from draconian curbs based on a chimaera (zero covid). In the absence of a credible threat, it is a strategy whose main effect would be to destroy people’s livelihoods and will to live.

In fact, those who purport, like Ardern, to be the most virtuous and “inclusive”, the keenest on helping the marginalised, are often all too comfortable playing fast and loose with the little people’s lives: and the keenest on controlling everyone. They love power – so long as it’s in their hands – and Covid has provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for grabbing it. – Zoe Strimpel

Ardern’s obsession with iron-fisted power is the only explanation for an escalation in restrictions that, in January 2022, makes no sense whatsoever.

To the increasing horror of trapped New Zealanders, Omicron-affected NZ households must now isolate for up to 24 days, while gatherings are capped at 100 in hospitality venues (25 if vaccine passports aren’t being used). But home-testing has effectively been outlawed: only ‘trained testers’ or medical staff can perform Covid tests, and the import of rapid antigen tests, such as those we in Britain rely on by the bucketload to keep life going, could end up in prison. – Zoe Strimpel

But the most chilling aspect of Ardern’s monomaniacal leadership is the complete lack of respect for borders – not their inviolability (she has shown that aspect of them to be firmly intact) but their prison-like oppressiveness.

Previously, it was possible to enter New Zealand, by winning a coveted slot in a quarantine hotel, where you would be watched over by military personnel throughout. But since the Omicron Nine, the country has now closed itself to all travellers. Tourism was once New Zealand’s biggest export, but too bad: the Dear Leader’s obsession with total control comes first. – Zoe Strimpel

Saint Jacinda, so woke, so feminist, so unimpeachable, has blinded the world with her virtue, and in so doing has made controlling Covid not a balance of risks, but an iron-fisted moral mission. Within that context, almost any amount of masochism can be justified.

Yes, New Zealanders may be “safer” from Omicron than any other population on earth, but, thanks to Ardern, they are being robbed of the freedoms that make life worth living, with no end in sight. – Zoe Strimpel

We care deeply about people. That’s why we’re here…It’s not caring and it’s not kind to people…just to write them off. – Christopher Luxon

Over the past two years we’ve heard it ad nauseam. We’re a team of five million. We are constantly reminded to be kind to each other. And yes, the messages have come from the self-appointed team leader, Jacinda Ardern.

Many of us retired from the team shortly after it was created and it now grates to still be described as members of it. – Barry Soper

https://twitter.com/PronouncedHare/status/1488254590101295105

New Zealand’s universities are at a defining crossroads. Do we remain a universitas, a community of scholars developing knowledge according to the universal principles and methods of science or do we continue down the path of a racialised ideology? – Elizabeth Rata

Unfounded accusations of racism or other silencing strategies muzzle discussion about what is happening in our universities and schools. There are many layers needing discussion – the difference between science and culture, between cultural safety and intellectual risk-taking, between universalism and parochialism. However intense and heated the discussion may be it must take place. Too much is at stake to pretend that all is well. – Elizabeth Rata

University students from all racial and cultural groups tend to come from knowledge-rich schools which provide a solid foundation for university study. These are often the children of the professional class who have benefited from such knowledge in their own lives and insist that schools provide it for their children.

It is access to the abstract quality of academic knowledge and language, its very remoteness from everyday experience, and its formality – science in other words – that is necessary for success. Tragically this knowledge is miscast as ‘euro-centric’. The aim of the decolonisation and re-indigenisation of New Zealand education is to replace this knowledge with the cultural knowledge of experience.

But science is not euro-centric or western. It is universal. This is recognised in the International Science Council’s definition of science as “rationally explicable, tested against reality, logic, and the scrutiny of peers this is a special form of knowledge”. It includes the arts, humanities and social sciences as human endeavours which may, along with the physical and natural sciences, use such a formalised approach. The very children who need this knowledge the most, now receive less.

The science-ideology discussion matters for many reasons – the university’s future, the country’s reputation for science and education, and the quality of education in primary and secondary schools. But at its heart it is about democracy. Science can only thrive when democracy thrives. – Elizabeth Rata

To be clear, I was and consider myself very lucky to be adopted into a loving, caring family. For reasons outlined in this article below I am grateful for the life I’ve had considering the one that was offered to me at birth.  – Dan Bidois

I learned many things from this process. Above all, is that you’re not defined by the circumstances of your birth but by the environment you grow up in. And finally, identity or whakapapa is an important part of one’s confidence, wellbeing, and purpose in life.

Understanding one’s past provides the fuel needed for a happier and more fulfilling life in the future. – Dan Bidois

This whole thing has a Groundhog Day vibe about it. I mean, how come we’re still, as we go into our third year of this pandemic, still being reactive and responding on the hoof.

It beggars belief that lessons have not been learned, plans have not been made, preparations have not gotten into full swing.

We are behind on RAT kits, way behind, it’s woeful, it’s the vaccine rollout all over again. We have no greater ICU capacity than when we started, in fact suggestions are we even have fewer ICU beds than when we started. We have not bolstered our health workforce, we have not advanced our tragic and cruel MIQ system, we have not boosted enough people or jabbed enough children, because again, we were too slow with our vaccine rollout.  – Kate Hawkesby

Why can’t they learn the lesson? Why is the Government so slow on the uptake? Why’d they take an elongated holiday when they should’ve been planning and sorting and preparing?

Why are they so allergic to the private sector and reticent to include them more? Are they afraid of the private sector? Or are they just so arrogant now they think they know best, better than any established business?

Most importantly, why are we still asking these questions? How can all the same mistakes still be made? If you hear from the Government, when they’ve bothered rolling back into the office from the beach, they’ll tell you they’re world leading.

They’re faultless, blameless, it’s all perfect, we should be so proud of them. The fact they’re still peddling this crap and still in self-congratulatory mode also worries me.

It’s delusional. They’re backwards focused. – Kate Hawkesby

How many businesses look at KPI’s or performance reviews and go, “Oh well it’s a bit of a mess at the moment but two years ago was really good.”

No one does that, because it’s not real. It’s not relevant, it’s not honest. So why should we be expected to buy into that tosh from our government?

Our Rapid Antigen Testing situation is embarrassing, our MIQ lottery is embarrassing, our hermit mentality is embarrassing, our lack of vaccination coverage for children and booster coverage is embarrassing. Our Covid response looks antiquated and fear driven, and stale. But if you listen to this Government and it’s cheerleaders, we should be over the moon about it.

The disconnect here is actually beyond embarrassing, it’s tragic. – Kate Hawkesby

And that’s the tragedy of all this. Have a platform, make a song and dance, get a result. Surely the only message here is that unless you’re going to really publicly and internationally discredit and embarrass the Government, you’re not going to get a spot.  – Kate Hawkesby

A free society needs more than the incentives provided by the rule of law and the discipline of profit and loss. Both are underpinned by and help to reinforce a set of virtues – prudence chief among them. The prudence to buy low and sell high. And the prudence “to trade rather than invade, to calculate the consequences, to pursue the good with competence.”

Prudence matters. – Eric Crampton

The government had been imprudently late in ordering the tests that it ultimately decided were needed for the public health effort.

But no matter. The government had set itself a call option. It could simply take the results of others’ prudential efforts.

When the prudent expect predation, expect less prudence. Expect as well that many businesses will have cancelled remaining test kit orders rather than wait for them to be stolen by a predatory state.

McCloskey emphasised the prudence of trading rather than invading and stealing; of calculating the consequences of actions; and of pursuing the good with competence.

It is hard to see much evidence of prudence in this government. Prudent and imprudent alike will bear the cost. – Eric Crampton

At the end of an interview recently, I was asked whether people should express their emotions. I replied that it rather depended on the emotions that they had and their mode of expression. There were some emotions that were best kept to oneself, and some ways of expressing them that were disgusting. – Theodore Dalrymple

It seems to me (though I may be mistaken) that, at least in Anglophone countries, there has been a tendency of late years for ever more extravagant public expressions of emotion, which is something that I do not welcome. It leads not to the palace of wisdom, but to crudity of apprehension, and to an unfortunate positive feedback loop: if you want to show how much you feel, you have to indulge in ever more extravagant such demonstrations. – Theodore Dalrymple

This development favours the explicit over the implicit and the bogus over the genuine. Indeed, it reduces people’s capacity to distinguish between the two, or even to understand that there is a distinction between the real and the bogus. No one would now say, as did an old patient of mine upon whom fate had piled undeserved tragedy upon undeserved tragedy, that she would not cry in public because it might embarrass other people and her grief was her own: people would now accuse her of mere unfeelingness. – Theodore Dalrymple

The very notion of dignity and seemliness is destroyed by incontinent emotional expression. I haven’t tried the experiment, but I doubt that many people could or would now even attach a meaning to the word seemliness: but seemliness is to self-respect what incontinent expression is to self-esteem, and the difference between self-respect and self-esteem is of great importance. The first is demanding, effortful and social, the second is undemanding, egotistical and akin to an inalienable human right that survives any amount of bad behaviour. – Theodore Dalrymple

There are other advantages to negative emotions: insofar as they are far easier to stoke, can last much longer than positive emotions—joy is rarely more than fleeting—and are usually more intense, they are, in the long run, more rewarding, especially when, as in the present day, the locus of people’s moral concern is political rather than personal. It is surely almost self-evident that the strongest political emotions are negative: for example, the rich are hated much more than the poor are loved.

In such circumstances, expressions of hatred are often mistaken for expressions of love. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down the life of another for some class of person whom he favours in the abstract. Thus vehemence of expression comes to be taken as strength of feeling, and the greater one’s vehemence, the greater one’s strength of feeling and therefore of one’s virtue—virtue now being a matter almost entirely of the opinions one holds. Extreme expression of hatred becomes a virtue. – Theodore Dalrymple

As with so many things, the proper public expression of emotion is a matter of judgment rather than of doctrine or predetermined principle. It is also a question of good taste. . . If I had to choose between them (which of course I do not) I would choose emotional constipation rather than emotional diarrhoea. At least the former can give rise to powerful drama, whereas the latter gives rise to crude soap opera at best. Concealment is more interesting than revelation, and often ultimately more revealing into the bargain.    – Theodore Dalrymple

The government’s response to Omicron over the summer break has had too little method and too much madness. – Eric Crampton

But it is difficult to reconcile the tightening up of test-to-travel restrictions, to reduce risk, with the subsequent move to allow rapid antigen tests instead of PCR tests before travel. If the government considered rapid antigen tests to be safe enough because travellers were entering MIQ, why tighten the window for PCR tests in the first place? –  Eric Crampton

Education, the ladder out of poverty, has been kicked away. In the English-speaking world, New Zealand pupils are worst at maths, science and literacy. Last year, 44 per cent of Auckland students did not turn up for NCEA exams.  – Richard Prebble

Covid is not responsible for the growth in inequality. Covid infects the rich and the poor.

The growing inequality is the result of government policies and galloping inflation.  – Richard Prebble

The Government is becoming Muldoonist. Like Muldoon, Labour calculates huge “think big” spending is electorally more popular than the pain of tackling inflation. – Richard Prebble

Studies reveal that urban rail schemes never come in on budget or on time and rarely meet passenger projections. Worldwide, 75 per cent of urban rail projects have cost escalations of at least 33 per cent. A quarter have cost escalations of 60 per cent or more. The cost of light rail will escalate from the estimate of $15b to over $20b.

Here is another way to think about the cost. For less taxpayers’ money, every passenger could have a free Uber ride in an electric car to where they actually want to go. – Richard Prebble

The Reserve Bank is seeking a soft option. Returning “inflation to target too quickly would result in unnecessary instability”. Now inflation is established, there are no soft options. All that printed money is debt. The bank is yet to tell us how it is going to reduce its bond holdings.

While the Reserve Bank procrastinates, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.  – Richard Prebble

This Government has become like a can of CRC, oiling every irritating squeak which has become a deafening cacophony in recent weeks.  – Barry Soper

I’m not sure if it was the word “loyal” or the long-simmering anger towards the nation of my birth coming to a head, but I suddenly didn’t want to honour New Zealand by choosing a song by one of its legends.

I’m angry at Jacinda Ardern, I’m angry at her parochial and uber-protective policies and I’m angry that I’m banned from the place where – more than any other – I felt I belonged. It’s fair to say I’ve lost faith in the country I once loved and revered. – Angela Mollard

The cumulative stories about the human impact of the border policies have sullied New Zealand’s reputation as a fair and decent place.

All countries care about their reputations but it is more important to small countries because they do not hold economic or military power. Being a good international citizen, being an honest broker, doing the right thing has been important to New Zealand. – Audrey Young

The damage to New Zealand is exacerbated by the fact that Arderns’s reputation and New Zealand’s are one and the same. Her international brand, through leadership after the Christchurch massacre, is a caring leader.

Damage to New Zealand reflects badly on her; and damage to her reflects badly on New Zealand. . . She was rightly applauded internationally for the initial response to Covid-19. Now, for the most part, she is rightly being criticised. – Audrey Young

This is the insanity of what we’re dealing with. This is a rigged lottery. And I’m talking personally, not as Move Logistics executive director, when I say this: Can we have respect for a system where, basically, citizens are told, you can’t come home?

Non-citizens are told, if you’re an essential worker, whatever that description might be on a particular day. Or if you’re pregnant, and you’re in a third world country, you’re allowed in or not allowed in. So the rules are being made up as people go along. – Chris Dunphy

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the Bellis Embarrassment to understand is what on earth possessed those writing the rules to erect even the smallest obstacles to pregnant New Zealand women returning to their homeland to give birth. For most older New Zealanders, the rule has always been: “Women and children first – and pregnant women before everyone!” We were raised on the tragic example of the doomed “Titanic” – where men gave up their places in the lifeboats for the bearers of the next generation.

What does it say about the current crop of public servants that they were able to create a labyrinth of rules and regulations that made it possible for a British deejay to be welcomed into this country, while denying re-entry to a stranded Kiwi woman and her unborn child?More to the point, what does it say about the current crop of Labour ministers – Chris Hipkins in particular – that they did not intervene, with righteous wrath, to put an end to this unconscionable rejection of that most basic human instinct: the urge to protect, at any cost, mothers and their children? – Chris Trotter

But where is the “kindness” in the treatment of Charlotte Bellis, and scores of other pregnant New Zealander women aching to get home? If this desperate, pregnant, Kiwi journalist, stranded in starving Afghanistan, does not deserve kindness – then who does? – Chris Trotter

The risk for Robertson isn’t quite voter revolt – not yet. But the Government did just make it far easier for New Zealanders who spent the past two years in the country to think about moving overseas. Cheaper rent and better pay might not have been much of a draw in 2020 or 2021, when it was paired with longer lockdowns, more Covid-19, and no easy way home if you changed your mind. That won’t be true for 2022 – Henry Cooke

If travel broadens the mind, then perhaps the reverse might also be true.

We have become a more insular country since Covid started, and it is very unattractive. The social media vitriol and judgment directed at journalist Charlotte Bellis for daring to speak out about her predicament last week reflects badly on all who indulged. – Steven Joyce

It was Ms Bellis who was let down by her own country. Forget all the whataboutisms. When she needed to come home, when she needed a safe haven where she could be pregnant and give birth to her child, her country said no. That was simply appalling. It has never been who we are.

It was not just appalling for Ms Bellis. She was simply the human straw that broke the camel’s back. In being rebuffed by the bureaucratic monster that is our managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) system, she joins thousands and thousands before her over the past two years who have had their spirits broken in their time of need. – Steven Joyce

There are too many stories to count where a heartless decision-maker showed no empathy, no ability to walk a mile in the shoes of desperate Kiwis overseas, no willingness to make things right.

Somehow, the Government’s sudden ability to find an MIQ slot for Ms Bellis under the public spotlight of the world’s media made an appalling situation even shoddier. It was a brazen attempt at damage control by ministers, presumably breaking the rules their own officials had been zealously upholding. There was no apology for those who had come before, no acceptance that the policy had been wrong, just cold, naked politics at its worst. – Steven Joyce

Special treatment for those prepared to beg publicly is also not our country. What about all those who didn’t want to make waves, who suffered through their life events in silence, hurt by the intransigence of their own countrymen and women?

It is one of the most basic human rights that people be allowed to come home. The Government knows that. That’s why they maintained the legal fig leaf that the border wasn’t closed. It’s just that you have not been allowed to buy a ticket to come here without an MIQ slot. Which you couldn’t get. George Orwell would have been proud. – Steven Joyce

You can argue that in extremis a country can close its borders for short periods in a pandemic to protect the population. The case can be made that stopping the flow of people while a plan is worked on and new health measures are put in place is justifiable.

But not two years, and not while you sit on your hands and do nothing during that period to allow for more people to exercise their fundamental right to come home.

We passed up building more MIQ places, we passed up home isolation, we passed up privately run MIQ facilities, saliva testing, more hospital capacity, a decent booking system, a timely vaccination programme, or even filling the MIQ places we had … we passed up a lot of things that would have reduced the pain and uncertainty of so many Kiwi families. – Steven Joyce

We were a country of voyagers. Striking out to see the world and seek our fortune. We took Dr Seuss’ The Places You’ll Go! to heart. Travel was a rite of passage, which for some turned into careers offshore, with partners and families. We took pride in their success, basking as New Zealand metaphorically punched above its weight on the world stage.

There’s around a million of us who live offshore now — but always able to come home, to see grandparents, siblings, and reconnect.

Until the past two years.

In those two years we have had to stand in line, often behind DJs, children’s characters, performers, sportspeople and Government MPs, all of whom seemed able to win the MIQ lottery while more deserving cases didn’t. Let alone the people whose skills we need to help run our economy, our schools and our hospitals. Good job, some would chortle in their insular way. We don’t need all those bright young foreigners helping to make New Zealand a better place. – Steven Joyce

A wise friend of mine said at the outset of all this that it is much easier to close things down and encourage people to hide away than it will be to open it all up again. And so it seems. Once people have become fearful of the outside world, it’s hard to move beyond that fear.

Yet we must. We must get out and embrace that world again, let our young people take it on, prove themselves, have adventures and live their lives. We must invite people into our home and conquer our virulent insularity.

Let this be the last time we turn our backs on our own people. There must be a better way to protect ourselves in future that doesn’t involve simply barricading the doors.

We should never stop our own citizens coming home to see their dying relatives, or giving birth here. That’s not selfless and kind. That’s not who we are. – Steven Joyce

But open government appears to be on the wane. This is partly because of the growth in the “communications industrial complex”, where vast battalions of people now work to deflect and avoid, or answer in the most oblique manner possible. We journalists are vastly outnumbered by spin doctors.

And it is partly because of the very tight media ship captained by Jacinda Ardern. The prime minister has won plaudits the world over for her empathetic and straightforward communication style. – Anna Fifield

When I was writing about New Zealand’s response to the pandemic for The Washington Post, almost every minister or ministry I contacted for an interview responded with a variation on: I’ll need to check with the prime minister’s office.

Since coming home, I’ve been surprised by the lack of access to ministers outside carefully choreographed press conferences. – Anna Fifield

Perhaps the most alarming, and certainly the most prevalent, trend I’ve noticed is the almost complete refusal of government departments and agencies to allow journalists to speak to subject experts.

Like, you know, the people who are actually implementing complicated reforms and know what they are talking about. – Anna Fifield

We often just get insufficient answers written in bureaucratese.

There is no opportunity to get them to put their words in a more digestible form. There’s no opportunity to ask them to explain the background to a decision.

There’s certainly no chance to ask them anything like a probing question. That, of course, is the whole point of this stonewalling. – Anna Fifield

This obfuscation and obstruction is bad for our society for two key reasons.

One: It’s in everyone’s interest to have journalists understand the complicated subjects they’re writing about. We need to ask questions. We can’t explain things we don’t understand.

Two: It’s called the public service for a reason. They work for the public, aka you. It is the job of the Fourth Estate to hold the powerful to account. So we should be able to ask reasonable questions – like “When will the $1.25 billion Transmission Gully motorway open?” – and expect something that at least resembles an answer. – Anna Fifield

To be clear, our country is free and open compared to many other parts of the world. But I’m not comparing us to Iran (where I used to ask pointed questions at foreign ministry press conferences all the time) or China (ditto).

I’m comparing us to other proudly open and democratic societies. And I’m comparing us to the us we used to be. Where a journalist could ask a straight question and get a straight answer and deliver it to you – straight. – Anna Fifield

But my favourite must be this supremely arrogant line from the Ministry of Health, asked about releasing data during an Omicron wave: “We will release additional information if it is determined that there is a need to do so.” – Anna Fifield

I make two further predictions. First, the Ardern government will be utterly decimated in a landslide defeat next year and second, that in the course of time given some perspective, it will be recorded as the most incompetent by a country mile in our post-war history. – Bob Jones

Politicians bright-side scientific advice when they report it accurately, but selectively. They emphasise the politically helpful parts of this advice but omit the careful but politically-awkward provisos that scientists pair with their advice. – Nicholas Agar

While there has been little Covid death, the Government’s stance has exacted a price: mental health issues; the interruption of children’s education; the too-long separation of families due to MIQ restrictions; struggling “hospo” and tourism businesses; the inability to source much-needed staff from offshore; and mounting government debt among them. – Fran O’Sullivan

It is too easy to get on and stay on welfare in New Zealand. Labour have enhanced that ease by reducing the use of sanctions to impose work obligations. They recently shifted thousands of jobseekers onto the sole parent benefit because they no longer had to look for a job. The policy settings changed. It is now OK to keep adding children to a benefit to avoid work. That is not a “well-functioning” welfare system. – Lindsay Mitchell

Why anyone, however, would trust the Local Government Minister or the Prime Minister to deal with them in good faith after their sustained deception about mandating Three Waters remains a mystery. – Graham Adams

This is a vengeful government, it’s a nasty government, it’s the exact opposite of a kind government, and it’s exact opposite of an open, honest, and transparent government.  – Mike Hosking

Because here’s a fact we need to accept: no matter how important climate change is to people, it is hardly ever more important than being able to pay your bills or keep your job. Most people will vote for jobs and a warm house before they vote for the climate.

Governments should – and obviously do – bear that in mind. – Heather du Plessis Allan

Scientific studies show that singing has positive effects on mental health. People who sing are more inclined to be content with life.
Group singing seems to induce the production of oxytocin – the binding hormone that can reduce stress and anxiety, and decrease a sense of loneliness.
Singing heals pain and sorrow and increases a sense of well-being. – Robert Fulghum

A government that allows trespassers to unlawfully occupy and obstruct the entrances to the land and buildings symbolising its authority, and to block the main streets of its capital city, raises questions about whether it is truly sovereign.

Everyone has a right to go to Parliament’s grounds and protest, but everyone else has a right to visit those grounds and drive around Wellington. In more than three decades of watching students, teachers, farmers, unions, environmentalists, Māori and activists on both sides of social issues march on Parliament, none has behaved as disgracefully as the mob who turned up on Tuesday and refused to leave. – Matthew Hooton

Many are so caught up in conspiracism that their problems appear more medical than legal.

Yet the Wellington political, bureaucratic and media establishments should not kid themselves that only a deranged fringe is feeling enraged by the current situation. Two years of pandemic and the long and preventable Auckland lockdown have fuelled a seething anger towards the Government from a much larger and more reasonable segment of the population, even if its source may be difficult to pinpoint.  – Matthew Hooton

But more is based on legitimate irritation with a Beehive communications strategy seemingly targeted towards children rather than voting adults, and which cannot admit the slightest fault or setback for fear of undermining Ardern’s global brand as Covid vanquisher. – Matthew Hooton

For its part, the Wellington bureaucracy is under so much pressure from its political masters to support the Beehive narrative that it increasingly provides information that is radically incomplete, contradictory or just plain wrong. – Matthew Hooton

The incoherence in the Government’s Omicron strategy means public co-operation is radically declining, including for tracking and testing. The Beehive may think a few more earnest homilies from the podium of truth will turn that around, but the public isn’t stupid. – Matthew Hooton

This is sneaky reform. Three Waters is designed to relieve smaller communities of the inordinate costs of compliance with an excessive regulatory regime already enacted in law. I doubt it will make beaches and rivers one jot cleaner than current regional council efforts can achieve.

All we stand to get is another fungal outgrowth of government, four super-regional agencies, each with floors of box-ticking bureaucrats making work for contractors, consultants, researchers and publicity staff to comfort you and me, the disenfranchised suckers paying for it.  – John Roughan

Just 53 people have died here from Covid, and our prime minister has been lavished with praise as a result. For much of the pandemic, the team of five million went about their lives pretty much as normal, working maskless, travelling domestically and attending large outdoor gatherings in sunny weather, going home in the evenings to wade through tear-soaked emails from contacts abroad marvelling at our apparent Covid success.

But there has always been another team milling in the shadows, the team of one million, the expatriate Kiwis stranded abroad who have paid a heavy price for their home country’s Covid elimination strategy. – David Cohen

Jacinda Ardern’s plummeting popularity indicates a country questioning not only her racist white-anting of our democracy, but the hypocrisy of her kindness and well-being mantras. Her repeated emphasis on ‘well-being’ on which she stressed her intent to focus, instead of on GDP – when introducing her budget in 2019 – is apparently an important part of the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s ‘Great Reset’ agenda.

New Zealanders have been sold a pup. The economic, mental and emotional well-being of New Zealanders has been far from prioritised by her Labour coalition doing extraordinary damage – and determined on more of the same, judging from the controversial legislation it continues to ram through. – Amy Brooke

The European Commission has tried, so far unsuccessfully, to direct its staff not to refer to Christmas, as if mere mention of the word would act on atheists, animists, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Hindus, and no doubt others, much as garlic flowers or crucifixes acted on Dracula (at least as portrayed by Christopher Lee). 

Oddly enough in these times of multiculturalism, mere words provoke apoplexy, at least metaphorically, as never before. Euphemism, evasion and renaming flourish — supposedly in the name of tolerance, but really as exercises of power.  – Theodore Dalrymple

The academics, intellectuals and sub-editors of university presses who use the new style evidently believe that the world is populated by people of extreme psychological fragility, and whose self-esteem, which can be shattered by the mere usage of BC and AD, it is their duty to protect. 

Thus does condescension and sentimentality unite with megalomania to produce absurd circumlocutions. – Theodore Dalrymple

And this is where cancel culture is eating itself. It’s so inane and ridiculous that you now cannot even enjoy being the gender you are, for fear it upsets those who don’t believe in gender.  – Kate Hawkesby

Where is all this going? What’s the end game here? Why do we all have to be the same? And why do we have to bend and change ourselves constantly to fit in with whoever the latest person or group to be offended is? Surely that’s a bottomless pit?  

There will be no individuality left at all, if we go down that track. I mean the Tweeters that are outraged that she’s apparently confused teenagers by saying she loves being a woman, what about the teenagers who’re seeing this bullying backlash against a woman for saying she likes being a woman? What message is that sending them?  – Kate Hawkesby

Whether you agree or not with the people protesting on parliament grounds is not the debate anymore. What this government, that proclaimed it would govern for all New Zealanders, has done is turn its back on a good number of its people.

How hard can it be to at least front up and talk to the people assembled on parliament grounds?

The final straw for me, and what prompted me to go public, is the way government is treating these people – turning the sprinklers on them knowing there was a storm coming, and playing loud music at night so as to not let them sleep and make them feel miserable. No farmer would treat animals like that!

Although this protest has a different focus to Groundswell NZ, we support their right to be heard and cannot understand or agree with the Government’s actions. What is becoming of our once united and proud country? – Bryce McKenzie

Trevor Mallard has officially lost the plot. . . He’s done it under the guise of protection of course – appointing himself as some overarching protector of all – whether they want or need to be protected or not. 

It’s an old school ‘I know best’ approach that reeks of patriarchy and has no place here in the modern world. But what the Government’s tried to do here – and failed in my opinion, is grab the narrative on this protest and shut it down. Problem is they’ve only made things worse. – Kate Hawkesby

Refusing to speak to the protestors, writing them all off as wacko conspiracy theorists, and rabid far-right anti-vaxxers is a big mistake – and has only served to gaslight the situation. Media who’ve ignored Mallard’s instructions, have managed to gauge a large diversity of views from a raft of other people there too – yes there are your fringe nutters, but actually, the anger runs deep and there’re some genuinely aggrieved people out there too.

Only a fool would dismiss them and hope they go away.

Yet that’s what Mallard, Robertson and Ardern are trying to do. Robertson’s rolled out the usual sneering condescending frown down the nose rhetoric which is so popular in the left-leaning sandpit of Twitter.. just writing them off as dangerous rabid crazies. Mallard has taken it next level – he’s stooped to childish antics of pulling dumb – as someone pointed out “boomer” stunts -– like sticking hoses on them and playing them the Macarena. –Kate Hawkesby

Not even the Police support his actions and have distanced themselves from that stupidity. And why give it this much attention if the government line is supposed to be ignore them? Ardern on the other hand has done what she does best – head in sand, fingers in ears – vanish. She’s invisible. But when put on the spot to address it, she joins the Robertson ‘write them off’ camp.

But it’s not working, the protest is only swelling in number, not even a cyclone diminished their enthusiasm.

The other problem for the government is the hypocrisy on display here. Let’s not forget all these MP’s decrying the protest were all proud protestors themselves back in the day. So they support free speech, and your right to protest.. but only if it aligns with their views. I’m not on the side of the protestors here by the way – they’ve blown this by a long shot – it’s a disorganised shambolic out of control mess. – Kate Hawkesby

But I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to write them all off as anti-vaxxers and far-right conspirators. There is genuine anger that runs deep in this now very divided country, over mandates and the campaign of control and fear.

So to just write off those protesting without even hearing them, is a dangerous move I think, by a government increasingly out of its depth. –Kate Hawkesby

Although the protestors aren’t necessarily many people’s cup of tea in terms of approach, demeanour and attitude – the general consensus seems to be that they in their own way represent a wider frustration, if not anger, among many of us. 

That’s why there isn’t a leader or a point of contact or a specific cause. hat’s why it’s been a mistake to call them an anti-vax protest or an anti-mandate group. It’s been a mistake to suggest it’s a mistake that they didn’t have a singular point.

That’s the point, about the lack of a point. They represent all of us that right now have a sense that things aren’t right. – Mike Hosking

But it is an outpouring of emotion and I admire people who want to give up a lot of time and effort to travel and hunker down and presumably get a sense of some sort of accomplishment.

Which is why Trevor Mallard specifically, and the Government more generally, have misread this so badly. As a tiny collective they can be, and have been, dismissed but that’s to fail to see that they represent a wider mood.

The Government and Mallard in particular are on the wrong side of this. When you start turning sprinklers on, start playing loud, bad music at them, start pumping out covid-19 ads – you’re being obtuse. – Mike Hosking

Telling the media not to talk to protestors is anti-democratic. Opening your Speaker’s Balcony and telling media to look down on the protestors is also anti-democratic, authoritarian and controlling, not to mention the height of arrogance.

The fact so many of the media acquiesced is of deep concern and probably plays into the protestors beliefs that too much of the media is controlled. It’s certainly not open honest and transparent as Labour so often wanted us to believe they are. 

If the protestors need to be moved that is the job of the police, not a jumped bureaucrat with a puffed-up view of their own entitlement. There are no winners in this. But the more the Mallards of this world look to decry, misinform and bully, the sympathy will build behind those who just want to have their say.   – Mike Hosking

New Zealand’s secular liberal saint, Jacinda Ardern, seems to be losing a little of her previously strong odor of sanctity.  – Theodore Dalrymple

In typical bureaucratic fashion, the rules were interpreted strictly, and made no allowance for the fact that to be stranded pregnant in Afghanistan is a good deal more worrying than to be stranded, middle-aged, non-pregnant, and prosperous, in, say, Switzerland. No doubt the bureaucracy wanted to avoid charges of favoritism—one rule for the prominent and another for the unknown—but it did Ardern’s popularity no good that Bellis felt constrained to turn to those well-known feminist humanitarians, the Taliban, for assistance. They seem to have done the trick: Bellis has now been allowed to return to New Zealand; but in the process, Ardern’s government, not long ago praised as the model for all civilized countries to follow, has been made to look stupid, cruel, and weak. – Theodore Dalrymple

The bad news is that each time we’ve made the right decision to buy more time, we’ve made it late and with insufficient planning in place. The strategy has served us well, but the execution much less so.

When the Prime Minister spoke to the nation for the first time this year on 20 January, she repeated stressed that ‘every day counts’ and it was urgent to prepare for Omicron, before going on to tell us that over the summer the government and its agencies had done… sod all.

One example: A new testing regime and the introduction of rapid antigen testing was announced, not with the information that the test were in the country and ready to go, but that they were on order, and in insufficient quantities. – Tim Watkin

Government hesitancy or poor management have been as consistent as the ‘buy time’ tactic. The initial lockdown was a week or two late, the testing at the border got into gear weeks after it was meant to, security at MIQs was only sorted after a number of escapes, more ICU beds were only announced 22 months into the pandemic, and – crucially – the move to order the vaccine and roll out a programme was slow, for all its eventual effectiveness. And we’re paying the price for that slowness now, cutting the gap between second and third doses and less widely boosted than we could have been.

The urgent language Ardern has used since 20 January was also needed before Christmas and over summer. National’s Covid-19 Response spokesman Chris Bishop on 30 December issued a statement headed “Govt must act on boosters, kids vaccines and rapid tests”. –Tim Watkin

Time and again we’ve done the right thing, but late and lackadaisically. And time and again we’ve got lucky. Or, the rightness of the decision has bought us the time to play catch-up. That, for me, has been the defining story of our Covid response and our consistent ‘buy time’ tactics.

But now we face a new phase for New Zealand. Covid-19 has begun entering the community at a level we’ve never seen before. I give thanks to all that is holy that we have bought time and we are facing this now – informed, vaccinated, prepared, up against a less deadly variant – and not at any other time over the past two years, like so much of the rest of the world. – Tim Watkin

Critics have repeatedly – for the best part of two years – insisted that the government’s tactics have run their course and it needs to change. And they’re repeatedly been shown up. But now we truly are at the end of the ‘buy time’ era. We’ve bought all the time we could and the wave is upon us. Two years in and the government will need to pivot and take a new approach. Let’s hope their decision-making is as sound, but their execution improves. Because the thing about waves is that they keep on coming.– Tim Watkin

The day a Speaker dictates to the media on how a story can be told would be a dark day for democracy.

It fits with the current Beehive though: a government by remote control, refusing to engage with those on the ground who don’t fit their mould and that’s most certainly unwise if not unkind. – Barry Soper

We’re fighting all these regulations and restrictions to keep operating, to keep job security going.. . It’s just decimating and it’s so hard for businesses to figure this out when the rules are constantly changing, we’re just tired of all these changes and restrictions. If it was simple – if it was like just RAT tests, clear, come to work, that’d be great, but it’s not, we’ve got all these minefields to work through. – Simon Berry

Our besotted would-be train-spotters seriously oversell the benefits of “light” rail, such as the downtown-airport link. Who would want to trundle along in a train, stopping and starting at 18 stations en route, when an express bus using dedicated bus lanes can get you there in 35 minutes, as it often got me there pre-Covid? – Tim Hazledine

Even without the patently loony proposal to dig a long tunnel under Sandringham Rd, we have here a proposed “light” rail project that will cost New Zealand’s three million taxpayers between three and five thousand dollars each. This for the benefit of about 30,000 Auckland commuters, to improve their access to the higher-paid jobs in the CBD, if that’s still what they want to do. – Tim Hazledine

THE NEW ZEALAND liberal or woke left, most of it directly connected to the Labour Party or supportive of it, has lost its mind. How else can you explain its maniacal pursuit of ‘right wing extremists’, ‘Nazis’ and ‘white supremacists’ within the several hundred people dancing to Bob Marley on Parliament grounds? When Rob Muldoon used to be mocked by Labourites for looking for ‘reds under the bed’, today’s Labourites are worthy of our derision as they hunt for Nazis in every occupation tent.  – Against the Current

What the liberal left has been demonstrating is something other than liberalism. It instead owes much to the scourge of identity politics. It has displayed a toxic politics that’s profoundly anti-working class and which has jettisoned tolerance and free debate for  shaming, threats and intimidation. While the folk at the occupation have been remarkably optimistic and good humoured in the circumstances, the liberal left has been petulant, joyless, trivial and status quo-perpetuating. – Against the Current

More disturbingly though, the liberal left has displayed a willingness to unleash state violence against dissenters. The mask has come off to reveal something very ugly.  – Against the Current

The liberal left has indeed lost its mind. What we have seen on display for the past eight or so days is a motley rabble of cowardly keyboard warriors who are seeking to extinguish an emerging independent working class politics that owes no allegiance to the political status quo that the woke left benefits from. This is the real ‘crime’ of the Wellington occupation. – Against the Current

Shoot me now!  New Zealand’s system of science education continues to go down the toilet (along with Donald Trump’s papers, I guess) as everyone from government officials to secondary school teachers to university professors pushes to make Mātauranga Māori (“MM”) or Māori “ways of knowing” coequal with science, to be taught as science in science classes. All of them intend for this mixture of legend, superstition, theology, morality, philosophy and, yes, some “practical knowledge” to be given equal billing with science, and presumably not to be denigrated as “inferior” to real science. (That, after all, would be racism.) It’s one thing to teach the indigenous ways of knowing as sociology or anthropology (and but of course “ways of knowing” differ all over the world); it’s another entirely to say that they’re coincident with modern science.

The equation of “ways of knowing” like MM with modern science is, of course, part of the Woke Program to “decolonize science”. The problem, of course, is we have a big conflict—one between a “way of knowing that really works“, which is science, and on the other side a reverence for the oppressed and their culture, embodied in MM.  The result is, of course, that the oppressed win, and all over the Anglophonic world science is being watered down, downgraded, pushed aside, or tarred with adjectives like “white supremacist” and “colonialist.” – Jerry Coyne

The purpose of education, at least as I see it, is to impart generally accepted knowledge to students, and to teach them how to think and how to defend and analyze their views. This is precisely the opposite of MM, which is a kind of theology that cannot be questioned or falsified. Under my construal, education is indeed for everyone, but for those groups who have spiritual/religious/moral values that differ from those of other groups, they have to get those things reinforced on their own time. – Jerry Coyne

People of Aotearoa: rise up against this nonsense! Do you want your science education to become the laughingstock of the world? For that is what will happen if the benighted keep barrelling along that dual carriageway of science and nescience. – Jerry Coyne

This country survives on trading, often in markets at the other side of the world.

The fact that our standard of living is rated amongst the richest countries on the planet is solely dependent on our exporters having a better product to sell and being able to market it better than our competitors. It follows that the more you sell at these prices, the more we can afford to deliver higher living standards to the whole population of New Zealand. More and better schools and health services. More aged care and handicapped facilities. Better infrastructure, sporting, and leisure facilities.

As the economy grows, we all benefit. – Clive Bibby

It says something about the time we are in that politicians cannot state they are listening to a group without it being assumed they are therefore part of that group.- Brigitte Morten

It is unlikely the protestors, now emboldened by seven days in horrible weather, blasting music, and overflowing portaloos, will be easily mollified. But it is clear that the government’s decision to dismiss their views has validated these citizen’s argument that they do not have a voice. – Brigitte Morten

Irrespective of where you sit in the mandated vaccination debate, it is an extreme level of government coercion. Some of us will roll with it. In fact, close to 90% of the eligible population has done what the government has asked of it. But enforced coercion must be proportionate to the level of risk to public health and this is where the case for the mandated vaccination enters murky ground for those who gathered outside Parliament. The vaccine will stop our hospital system being swamped, but it doesn’t stop transmission.

You have both removed a citizen’s right to choose what is injected into their bloodstream and you have told them they will also get the virus. Are we really that surprised people have taken to the streets to oppose mandated vaccination? Has New Zealand society ever been this divided and this angry?  – Rachel Smalley

As I write this, the government hasn’t met with any of the protestors. Sure, some of the behaviour has been appalling and there are security issues, but few, if any, of the protestors would describe themselves as feeling recognised and free from prejudice. I don’t agree with their argument, but I support their right to be heard. And if you refuse to listen, the mob just keeps yelling.   – Rachel Smalley

Two years into this pandemic, the government and many of its agencies are still heavily distracted by Covid. The focus remains laser-like on the virus, but the protests have shown us what happens when a government loses its peripheral vision across all of society. New Zealand is turning on itself. . . The government is throwing everything at containing the Covid monster but, in doing so, it has run the risk of fuelling another monster that is far, far harder to contain.   – Rachel Smalley

The fight is far from over. Trans activists wield an enormous amount of cultural power, and their ideology is far from discredited in the eyes of progressive politicians, delusional academics, and their media microphones. Many still insist that without sex change surgeries and life-long dependence on drugs, gender dysphoric children will kill themselves—and this threat packs potent power. Yet, from the British Isles to the Continent to the Nordic nations, people are beginning to wake up. Major medical institutions are beginning to put research over ideology. Each time this happens, trans activists lose power that they can never recover. And as the ugly and irreversible consequences of their delusional experiment become clearer, we can begin to hope that their narrative will implode sooner than seemed possible only a short time ago.

For the sake of the children being inducted into lives of perpetual medicalization, I desperately hope so.  – Jonathon Van Maren 

Truth is never absolute. We should be inherently wary of those who proclaim a particular viewpoint – political, religious, or otherwise – with a ferocity that tolerates no possibility of an alternative view, let alone that it may contain some points of validity.

Unfortunately, we live in circumstances where not only has truth become absolute, but also where virtually any actions in defence of that new absolute are considered acceptable. In nearly every aspect of today’s society, reason and considered debate are giving way to uncompromising absolutes, with little room for the traditional middle ground between them. – Peter Dunne

 There is a new vehemence abroad that accepts no good in any contrary view and no acceptable justification in any stand or action taken to promote that view. Because the particular view being expressed is considered to be wrong, all those who hold or even dally with it are mercilessly scorned and vigorously condemned. –

The bigger picture, beyond this protest, and beyond Covid-19, is far more disturbing. Something is seriously wrong when protestors can see threatening to execute politicians and journalists because they disagree with them as legitimate. Equally, when political leaders can justify not being willing to engage in any form of dialogue with the protestors simply because they do not like the views they are expressing smacks of high-handed intolerance. It suggests our capacity for rational discourse and reasoned debate about a controversial issue has broken down completely. More worryingly, the vehemence of expression on both sides of the argument makes it difficult to see how differences of this type can ever be resolved constructively while such polarised positions and mistrust endure. – Peter Dunne

Having tasted attention and notoriety this way, the mob will not be easily dissuaded from similar action the next time an issue that riles them arises. We need to redefine the rules of social engagement in such circumstances, in a way that brings respect, reason and debate, rather than abusive slogans and haranguing, back to the forefront of public discourse. However unacceptable or offensive they may consider the views of the protestors, political leaders cannot remain haughtily detached, hiding behind civil authorities such as the police.

At its heart good leadership is about engagement – hearing from and listening to the disparate views of the community at large and then acting in a considered way in response. Good leadership is not simply telling people what to do and expecting unquestioning compliance. It also means having the courage to acknowledge the diversity of public opinion and its right to be expressed.

Personally distasteful it may feel, our political leaders across the spectrum need to initiate some form of dialogue with protest leaders to ease tensions and limit future recurrences. Otherwise, like Covid-19 itself, the new intolerance now emerging will, to our collective detriment, quickly become endemic. – Peter Dunne

The transfer of sympathy from the victims of crime to the criminal has been going on for a long time. This transfer is now taken as a sign of broadmindedness and moral generosity, marking out the intellectual from the general run of prejudiced, thoughtless or censorious persons. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is hardly surprising criminals take advantage of a tendency among the educated to view them as the victims of their own conduct. The criminals may be ignorant, ill-educated and foolish, but they are not therefore stupid. They know the emotional and intellectual weaknesses of their enemies or opponents and are prepared to exploit them. – Theodore Dalrymple

The root cause of crime is the decision to commit it: indeed, without such a decision, there is, or ought to be, no crime to answer. Of course, human decisions are affected by many factors, among them (but not exclusively) the likely adverse legal consequences for the people who make them. – Theodore Dalrymple

A fascinating political and sociological fault line has opened up – one that defies the normal understanding of New Zealand’s political dynamics. People at the bottom of the heap, as political scientist Bryce Edwards describes them – many of them working-class and provincial, with no formal organisational structure – have risen up in defiance of the all-powerful political class, the urban elites who are accustomed to calling the shots and controlling political discourse. I would guess most of the protesters outside Parliament have not previously been politically active and may not feel allegiance to any particular party. They appear to be angry about a number of things.  Covid-19 and the vaccination mandate galvanised them into action, but it’s possible there are deeper, less easily articulated grievances – such as perceptions of powerlessness and exclusion – simmering beneath the surface. – Karl du Fresne

 Most commentators in the mainstream media are framing the occupation of the parliamentary lawn as being orchestrated by sinister right-wing extremists, and therefore devoid of any legitimacy. How paper-thin their tolerance of the right to dissent has proved to be. The clear implication (where it’s not explicitly stated) is that the occupation is not a legitimate expression of the right to protest by sincerely motivated New Zealanders who present no threat to anyone, but an alarming phenomenon driven by alt-right agitators with an ulterior agenda. But there’s a very marked discrepancy between reports from people who have actually been on the ground at Molesworth St, who generally describe the event as peaceful and good-natured, and those who make judgments from afar and take refuge in simplistic stereotypes about the type of people who are protesting. – Karl du Fresne

I get the distinct impression that politicians from all the parties in Parliament, even ACT, feel threatened by this sudden gesture of assertiveness by the great unwashed and don’t know how to handle it. MPs have done themselves no favours by refusing to engage with the protesters. For one thing, it looks cowardly; for another, it reinforces the perception that the politicians prefer to remain isolated in their bubble rather than sully themselves by talking to a bunch of scruffs who dared to challenge the political consensus. Unusually, this protest is a rebuke to the entire political establishment, which the politicians probably find unsettling because it’s outside their realm of experience.  But they need to get off their high horse; the people standing in the mud outside Parliament are New Zealanders, after all. – Karl du Fresne

As part of the Parliament protest there are conspiracy theorists trying to take advantage to sell their wares, offensive signs, threatening language, destruction of property, and abuse of bystanders and local business.  None of this is okay.

Some use these reasons to treat protestors like they are deplorables; to argue that because some of the group are like this, none of the group should be listened to. But, as we saw in Trump’s America, the deplorables have a vote just like the intellectuals. And they have some valid grievances. – Brigitte Morten

No politicians, from any party, have met with the protestors. They are too scared of media reporting contact by them with protestors as if it signified anti-vax sentiment. That is not fanciful. It says something about the time we are in that politicians cannot state they are listening to a group without it being assumed they are therefore part of that group. – Brigitte Morten

There is no such thing as a ‘right to protest’. In our Bill of Rights there are rights to free speech and freedom of assembly. But not explicitly to protest. There is no unfettered right for the protestors to camp on the lawns or increasingly block more roads in the Wellington CBD.

In the same way the government was not able to hold Aucklanders in lockdown as long as they wanted because people simply would not comply; the protestors will also lose empathy for their cause if they continue their hinderance of Wellingtonians for too long. You cannot argue the government mandates unfairly treated destroyed your livelihood while destroying the livelihoods of the businesses surrounding Parliament. The social contract goes both ways. – Brigitte Morten

Those calling for the Police to forcibly remove people from Parliament grounds underestimate how difficult this will be. If the current protesters are violently suppressed, the conspiracy claims of far right inspiration will become real. Thousands of previously apolitical New Zealanders will have seen that our democracy has no place for them, and the language of force is all that is left if they are not to be oppressed indefinitely. – Brigitte Morten

It is unlikely the protestors, now emboldened by seven days in horrible weather, blasting music, and overflowing portaloos, will be easily mollified.

But it is clear that the government’s decision to dismiss their views has validated these citizen’s argument that they do not have a voice. – Brigitte Morten

 What are the building blocks of democracy? As “anti-mandate” protesters camp on Parliament grounds and images of police versus protesters fill our newsfeeds, it’s a timely reminder that trust, transparency, informed debate and respect for our civil institutions underpin a healthy democracy.

Beyond the many humanitarian and economic costs due to Covid, we cannot afford democracy and social cohesion to become casualties. – Sir Peter Gluckman

Trust in the political process has progressively fallen, the manipulation of information, the emergence of alternative facts, the blatant loss of transparency and respect for the truth are all features of many so-called democracies.  – Sir Peter Gluckman

Democracy has always depended on the integrity of both policy and political institutions and transparency in policymaking and knowledge. It requires ideas and policy to be contested civilly both through an informed and empowered opposition and an engaged civil society with the assistance of a robust fourth estate. From Plato’s thinking onwards, an honest and well-informed electorate has been central to effective democracy. – Sir Peter Gluckman

Arguably, there have been other costs, including democracy as an institution itself. There is a sense that decisions have been made without the deep oversight of Parliament and the plurality of external voices that makes for a quality democracy. Issues over Covid testing date well over a year now, including severe criticism from the Auditor-General over contracts, and now the availability of rapid antigen tests. There remains uncertainty about the rationale behind those decisions.

Crisis management is always best served by contesting ideas and approaches before decisions are made. In the private sector and military, “red teams” are commonly used to explore alternatives and ask frank questions of those managing the response. The furore about the role of the private sector and how its operational expertise could be of value has been evident since early in the pandemic and the next phase of the pandemic will be even more complex. – Sir Peter Gluckman

Sustaining trust and cohesion is hard and requires real efforts to reinforce transparency and promote open discussion on difficult matters. This involves respecting the value of diverse inputs and avoiding any sense of Government abdicating accountability through confusing language. An informed electorate, open discourse, empowered citizens, and respect for the institutions of civic society are some of the greatest assets New Zealand could have. – Sir Peter Gluckman

Prognostication’s a curse. You can see the train wreck coming, you can shout about it, but you just can’t convince an utterly useless government to do a damned thing about it. 

Bit of a shame that the Herald piece didn’t mention that all of this was entirely predictable, was predicted, and could have been avoided by contracting for more capacity with a testing lab that wasn’t running pooled samples.  – Eric Crampton

Dismissive arrogance towards the protesters at Parliament is making the situation worse.

That’s not just Parliament’s high-handed approach. Opinion pieces and public sentiment that mock and sneer at people’s sincerely held beliefs serves to isolate those in our community who reckon the Government has got it wrong. – David Fisher

These are just some of the chisels placed in cracks in our civil society. And then the pandemic came along, bringing anxiety, fear and uncertainty and smashed them like a sledgehammer. It caused industries to collapse, businesses and jobs to go, people’s dreams and hopes to disappear. Across our society, there is tension and, among many, the vacuum of despair.

That’s the hole dis/misinformation filled. That’s how it became possible for some people to self-radicalise and how it led to the protest at Parliament. – David Fisher

With such absolute surety on both sides, arguing over who is right and who is wrong is pointless. Rational argument and discussion has little place here. Those who have committed to their respective positions will not shift.

To dismiss those people – as the Prime Minister does by citing our 95 per cent vaccination rate – is wrong. To mock those people, as some in Parliament have done, is worse. Isolation is a classic part of the radicalisation process. The further and harder you push people away, the more fixed they become. – David Fisher

For every person that did make the journey, there are many others who wished they were there. They are people who stayed home and expected when they came out it would be over, who got their jabs and then thought that would be it, who had children stuck overseas, who knew someone who couldn’t go to their mother’s funeral, who lost their house when they lost their job. – David Fisher

The way out of the protest is not through the protest but with the protest. Rather than dismiss the protesters, recognise that the views they hold are genuine and hard-earned. Recognise they dedicated considerable thought to their views and adopted a stance that is honest and principled.

Having done so, recognise too that it is the one thing on which we disagree that is making it difficult to see what we like about each other. Finding a circuit-breaker to do that is hard but necessary.

Ultimately, most of those on Parliament’s forecourt want the same thing as those inside Parliament’s walls – for New Zealand to be a free and open democracy in which we are able to live our lives in the best way possible, subject to the freedoms enjoyed by each other.- David Fisher

For me, that’s been one of the interesting little hypocrisies in this whole episode. On one hand, politicians wanted to take a moralistic high ground by refusing to meet with protesters. How dare anyone dignify them with a response?! Only the moralistic high ground apparently didn’t apply to the Speaker, his sprinklers, and his irritating playlist.

Trevor Mallard’s efforts can only have served to antagonise the protesters. And every bit of scorn and hate hurled upon them only reinforces their self-image. The team of five million? Ha. This rabble, confused, misled, and deluded as they may be, felt well and truly left out of the team of five million. They joined together to protest precisely because they felt like outsiders. They felt ostracised. Very little from the past 10 days will have changed their minds. – Jack Tame

Yes, there were terrible, hateful, threatening messages. As far as I’m concerned, anyone making death threats should have been arrested immediately. But in this morass of different grievances and complaints are some very reasonable and articulate concerns around extraordinary state mandates. Personally, I don’t know why any right-thinking person who was only protesting the mandates would choose to stay and be associated
with someone making death threats. But the mandate issue is worthy of protest. I don’t agree with the protesters, but they do have a right to be heard. – Jack Tame

Hindsight is a very effective strategist, but there is one moment police may look back upon as the lost opportunity to nip the anti-mandate protests at Parliament in the bud.

That was on the afternoon of the first day the protesters arrived – Tuesday nearly two weeks ago. – Claire Trevett

The poor old police in particular have been made to look like laughing stocks. They appear to have severely underestimated the size and intent of the protest group, despite the social media that prefaced it.

There have been moments that have begged to be lampooned. High among them was Police Commissioner Andrew Coster’s so-called towing crackdown.

Coster did not front publicly until Tuesday – a week after the protesters arrived. He said the protest was now “untenable” and put protesters on notice that if they did not move their cars, the towing would begin the next day. He also admitted they could not find towies to do the job, and the Army didn’t have the right equipment.

The next day the only car that was actually towed was a police car, which had a flat tyre. – Claire Trevett

The protesters have not made serious attempts to storm Parliament, beyond a brief flurry at the very start. Coster’s “de-escalation” strategy appears to be police-speak for hoping like hell the protesters stay that way. – Claire Trevett

But the protest has long gone past the point at which police could simply wade into it and break it up. Coster has set out why: moving in with force at this point would be very ugly indeed.

Consent – the consent of the protesters rather than the wider public – is pretty much the only option left. – Claire Trevett

There is a danger the inhabitants of the parliamentary precinct have spent the week missing the wood for the trees. In focusing on the protesters directly in front of them, they seem oblivious to a much bigger mood shift that’s going on around the country.

What if what they are seeing is just the tip of the iceberg? – Steven Joyce

There is, however, a large and growing group of New Zealanders who have had their lives severely disrupted by the Government’s actions “for the greater good”, who are sick of having their plight ignored.

And there is a big bunch more who have had a gutsful of the ever-changing rules and restrictions in the face of what they see as a very mild strain of Covid-19. It is these larger groups the Government should be most worried about.

The evidence of discontent and disagreement is growing all around us. – Steven Joyce

 The Covid response has created many losers. We’ve rightly talked a lot about the people caught on the wrong side of the border. But they are not the only ones.

Anyone who owns or works in a hospitality business or a small retail shop is another. People working in tourism or international education have been in a world of woe. Young people have had their education disrupted and their sporting dreams curtailed.

There are people living in pain because their elective surgery or cancer treatment has been postponed to the never-never. They have all been stopped from doing things which were previously part of normal life. Covid has whipped the rug out from under them.

It is perhaps not surprising when so many have had their lives turned upside down through no fault of their own, that a few will turn to conspiracy theories and the like. – Steven Joyce

The Government certainly didn’t create the pandemic, but some of their actions have made it much worse than it needed to be. The vaccination delays, the inexplicable obstinacy against new forms of testing, the failure to increase hospital capacity, the layers upon layers of levels, traffic lights and stages which make people’s heads spin. – Steven Joyce

Then there are all the other tone-deaf announcements that heap insult on injury. What planet would you have to be on to think that whacking small businesses with a 6 per cent minimum wage increase and a new social insurance tax, plus the spectre of centralised wage negotiations, were good ideas now?

Why would you think that announcing a $15 billion light rail project for a privileged few in Auckland makes any sense when you are racking up debt all over the place that the next generation is going to be lumbered with? And at the same time as there is a real question mark over the future of commuting as we knew it?

And why would you be consulting on tighter immigration, visitor and student controls when your biggest problem after some pretty shoddy treatment amid two years of closed borders will be persuading enough people to come here? – Steven Joyce

The Government’s dogmatic determination to continue with a policy programme made instantly out of date by the pandemic indicates the same lack of flexible thinking apparent in their Covid response. They expect everyone else to adjust and cope but they intend to sail on, determined to do things they thought of six or seven years ago irrespective of current circumstances.

And their blind loyalty to the Ministry of Health and its Director-General is a sight to behold. Dr Bloomfield has been politically dissembling at best about his organisation’s confiscation of RAT test orders. In any other Government he would have been carpeted and there would be talk of resignation. – Steven Joyce

The country’s mood is darkening, and in dismissing the protesters and their motivations, the Prime Minister and her MPs are giving the appearance that they are dismissing all the concerns people are raising, or even just quietly thinking about.

I can’t tell the Government how to get the protesters to go home, although firing Trevor Mallard would probably help. I suspect in the meantime the numbers will only grow.

Ministers need to lift their sights and focus on the wider discontent among the public outside Wellington and outside the Bowen triangle.

If ministers showed a willingness to genuinely listen, adjust their policy response, and convince Kiwis they both care about and will mitigate the disruption in people’s lives, then they can right the ship. At that point the protest will also probably peter out. If they don’t, then a few hundred assorted protesters and conspiracy theorists camped on the lawn at Parliament will be the least of their problems. – Steven Joyce

I would say there’s probably a three-tier mandate. So the hairy shirt level is employment and losing your job, the next level down is the irritation level of not being able to do stuff you want to do, and then the third level down, which I think to be perfectly honest probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place, is a kind of mandate creep where we’ve been trying to really encourage secondary school students in that 12 to 17 year old age group to step up and get their doses which they have,” McIntyre said.

But schools have overinterpreted that and are imposing all these unnecessary restrictions on kids in that age group, not being able to play sport, not being able to go and participate in school activities, and it’s all because of their parents’ decisions which they are being punished for,” he said.

And let’s face it, you know, even if they are vaccinated, they are mixing with a whole group of other kids who are very low risk and they’re incredibly low risk now they’ve had their two doses, so I think particularly that third group, the kind of mandate that should never have been there in the first place, so I think that’s really an important one to tackle first. – Peter McIntyre

Why has a school been denied tests whilst it seeks to protect the health & safety of its own students & parents? Why has the government interfered with the contract? Our politicians and public officials would tell you that it has to do with things like MedSafe Approval – that health & safety red-tape is necessary when importing medical-related products.

However, that’s just one half of the truth. The other half is that our government has a very strong ideological problem with private sector involvement in the health-care sector. – Robert MacCulloch

Yes, the government doesn’t want buyers & sellers which it doesn’t control coming together to do deals together in the health-sector. Although they say its about public health, it’s equally as much about ideology. Labour has an anti-privatization philosophy. At present, in the context of virus-testing, that philosophy has just become a health hazard. – Robert MacCulloch

Largely Covid-free, New Zealand has been viewed as a paradise for much of the last two years. Jacinda Ardern, already considered by many the Mother Teresa of the Antipodes, excelled in the early stages, acting decisively and with compassion. Appealing to the population to act as one, her “Team of Five Million” approach did wonders for national unity at a time when most other leaders were floundering and failing. No wonder I voted for her – twice. 

But times have changed. Once saintly, Jacinda now appears merely silly, having led New Zealand to a place that looks more like a smug cul-de-sac than a nation wholly reliant on overseas tourism and trade. Then again, long-term strategic thinking was never a feature of her government’s Covid response, with “elimination” taking precedence over vaccination for much of 2021.   – Joanna Grochowicz

Not that anyone in New Zealand is really focusing on what she got wrong. Ardern’s $55 million (£27m) sweetener in the form of the Public Interest Journalism Fund has enabled her government to exert tremendous influence over private sector media outlets, as well as tightly control-messaging through state media channels. So much so that any coverage critical of Ardern now originates from pundits in Australia or Britain. Most recently, opposition leader David Seymour had to turn to the Daily Mail to get an opinion piece printed. This is when silly starts looking sinister.

If democracy is built on the ability to question those in power and hold them to account, then the Kiwi media are wholly complicit in Ardern’s swing from immaculate heart to autocrat. The major opposition party National have only made their job easier by offering nothing more headline-grabbing than leadership squabbles. Then again, the opposition’s perceived infighting might just be the PM’s grand media bribe in action. Gosh, she’s good!  – Joanna Grochowicz

Nobody can see the silent assassin at work next door; nor the mental health crisis her government’s Covid response has unleashed on New Zealand, where youth suicide rates are already the highest in the developed world. It certainly doesn’t fit the image of the leader I voted for – the young woman breastfeeding her new born at the UN General Assembly, the compassionate leader who offered succour to survivors of 2019’s Christchurch massacre. Here was a rare thing! A leader who understood both grand gestures and nuance.

Of course, there is nothing nuanced about Ardern’s shameless Covid scare tactics. They’ve worked a treat, keeping the public vehemently opposed to opening the country’s borders, and compliant in the face of tyrannical restrictions even as the rest of the world is emerging from crisis. Especially when combined with the bread of endlessly extended wage subsidies; and circuses in the form of a parade of overseas DJs, sports teams and stage shows that have breezed in without needing to enter the dreaded MIQ lottery. – Joanna Grochowicz

Her latest diversion has worked. Terrifying the Team of Five Million, and focusing their fear and loathing on outsiders importing pestilence into paradise, is a highly effective strategy – if a little lacking in originality. Despots for thousands of years have deployed such methods to distract their subjects from something infinitely more damaging to long-term wellbeing – an unchallenged leader. 

Ardern’s lack of transparency runs deep. One example, the He Puapua report currently before her Cabinet, was hidden from former coalition partner, New Zealand First. Finally outed as a result of an Official Information Act request, the report recommends a raft of co-governance structures along racial lines. – Joanna Grochowicz

Already, we are witnessing the corrosive impact of these policies and plans on national unity; and yet these issues and many others are being decided behind closed doors, with no regard for democratic process. Governments do this all the time, right? At least, oppressive regimes do. 

What’s particularly galling for me is the mind control Ardern has exerted over the population. Coming back here, I’m shocked at how few have lost their faith, and baffled by the self-congratulatory mood that pervades the country. After two years of sermonising from Ardern and nowhere to drink other than from the government fountainhead, New Zealanders have turned into a nation of self-congratulatory, cavorting maenads.

Mea culpa. In voting for Mother Teresa, I unwittingly ushered Caligula into office. The parallels are there: noble and moderate for a period, admired all over the world “from the rising to the setting sun”. Our esteemed leader has become self-absorbed, cruel and dangerous. Where’s it all leading? I’d love to know, but getting to the truth in New Zealand is a tricky business nowadays. I prefer my chances at the London bacchanal – there at least I can be assured in vino veritas! – Joanna Grochowicz

There are, of course, complaints and complaints. Some are purely individual or egotistical, but some point to general problems that affect many other people or the whole of society itself. A complaint is then emblematic of something beyond itself and may even become socially useful or necessary. Complaint that is merely about oneself is often akin to whining, and often serves to justify descent into the psychological swamp of resentful self-pity. – Theodore Dalrymple

There is thus an asymmetry between complaint and gratitude: one complains when things don’t work as they should, but one feels no gratitude when they do. There is a similar asymmetry where human rights are concerned: you complain when they are violated but are not grateful for receiving your due.

Perhaps this explains why people seem so angry all the time despite the unprecedented physical ease of their lives. As we grow ever more technically sophisticated as a society, but individually dependent upon mechanisms of whose workings we have not the faintest idea, we come to expect life to proceed like a hot knife proceeds through butter. When things go wrong – the computer crashes, the train is late, the car won’t start, the gutter is blocked, the bank’s website has a temporary problem, the promised delivery doesn’t arrive – we feel a quite disproportionate despair because of our expectations, though the inconvenience we suffer as a result is trivial by comparison with the kind of problems and deprivations that our forebears had to endure even within living memory, and did so with more equanimity than we can muster. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is now almost impossible to remain out of range of those with whom we would rather have no contact. Future generations will never know the joys of being incommunicado. The world is too much with us, wrote Wordsworth getting and spending – and that was in 1802! It is not too much with us now; it is with us perpetually, all the time. – Theodore Dalrymple

On the other hand, recognition of what is and is not within our control is an important manifestation of maturity. How far that control extends was the most important intellectual quarrel of the twentieth century, with extremists arguing either that nothing in a man’s life, or alternatively that everything, was under his control. The extreme positions obviate the need for judgment of individual cases, which Hippocrates told us (in the medical context) is difficult. However, that something is difficult does not go to show that it can or ought to be dispensed with. Life is not the passage of a hot knife through butter. – Theodore Dalrymple

Those MPs who are refusing to even meet with the protesters, seem to have forgotten that they were elected to listen to the concerns of constituents and represent their views in Parliament.

Not only have our political elite shown themselves to be tone deaf about the protest, they also appear to be equally uninformed about Omicron, which is now sweeping through the country at a great rate of knots. – Muriel Newman

The political elite in Wellington have misjudged the situation by maligning and dismissing the protesters. Their misrepresentation of those who are standing up for what they believe, will simply harden their resolve, and result in more good Kiwis like Sir Russell Coutts going to Wellington to support a movement that is aimed at ending forced vaccinations and restoring human rights, dignity, and the freedom of choice for New Zealanders.  – Muriel Newman

We live in a community. Obligations to one another flow from that. At the same time, obligations must be checked by individual freedoms because it is almost impossible for an individual to opt out. The law follows you to the boundaries of the State. Civilised societies try to find the right balance between communal obligations and individual freedoms. People tend to gravitate to societies which are relatively skewed towards individual freedoms. Migration flows speak to that. Empirically, such societies are also the most prosperous. Individual freedoms and prosperity move in sync. – Peter Smith

There is no opposition among the major political parties on combatting the virus, as there isn’t any more on combatting so-called “climate change.” In such circumstances despotism flourishes.

Media today verses yesterday: For sure, much more leftness, greenness, feminisation and callowness; but, dwarfing all of these pernicious trends is a precipitous fall in questioning curiosity, objectivity and common sense. Shows no signs of reversing. – Peter Smith

There’s something symbiotic about the protestors outside Parliament Buildings and the ministers inside who won’t talk to them. Both are motley, arrogant and short-sighted; they radiate confusion and specialize in messaging that is hard to understand. Virtually everything ministers have promised over the last four and a half years has crumpled in their hands, from building 100,000 new houses, abolishing homelessness, lifting people out of poverty, improving education, fixing the country’s creaking infrastructure, and enhancing race relations that have never been in a worse state. – Michael Bassett

The protestors are similarly confused on everything from a clear purpose through to whether they even want to talk to those who don’t want to talk to them. Most in this diverse assemblage of New Zealand’s modern underclass are engaged in a rumble with an “up you” message to the rest of us. As well, there’s a thin layer of brighter ideologues who are worried about the creeping shroud of authoritarianism that Jacinda Ardern is encasing us in. But, for the most part the IQ level on both sides is about equal. Some protestors would have happily joined Trump’s January 2021 Capitol riot; others are drawing welfare rather than having any work obligations. Both sides are mostly on the public payroll. The current ministers have similarly impoverished educational backgrounds and narrow life experience. Both sides seem ill-equipped to talk to produce a constructive dialogue, even if anyone wanted to. – Michael Bassett

The Prime Ministerial complaint appears to be that anti-mandate protests are acceptable, but anti-vaccine protesters were beyond some imaginary red line and thus were not to be tolerated.

But – and I realise this will come to as a shock to a few in the Beehive and those who pander to them – our political elites do not get to define the boundaries of legitimate dissent. –  Damien Grant

What the prime minister meant, I suspect, is it isn’t how she and her cohort of performance revolutionaries choose to conduct themselves, where the object was to get the Instagram photo and move on somewhere comfortable for a soy latte and vegan muffin. Getting mud on your designer clothing was to be avoided and being arrested was definitely not on the cards. Thank you very much. – Damien Grant

There is a qualitative difference between the theatre of protest and the real thing. Those who marched in Auckland in support of Black Lives Matter or against Donald Trump in the Women’s March after his election, were engaging in performative protest.

Their lives were not impacted, they had no expectation of effecting change, and the wrong being committed was happening in another country. This isn’t to diminish the significance of the issues or the genuine feelings of those who turned out, but we should not confuse these marchers with those who stood in the field at Rugby Park in Hamilton wearing helmets. – Damien Grant

Yet we understand that florid language is the last recourse of the powerless, a final act of impotent defiance against the relentless power of the state. To point at the weakest member of our community, whose pitiful status is the result of your policies, and feign outrage as he scribbles pathetically in chalk is a weak moral position.

It makes sense that Trevor Mallard put on the sprinklers and played bad music at the crowd, because such a strategy would have deterred him and his parliamentary colleagues. Demonstrations were to be done only in fine weather and during gentlemen’s hours. – Damien Grant

Those who refuse the vaccines do so for a variety of complex reasons, but if you are willing to lose your career rather than take the jab, then we need to acknowledge that this belief is genuine, if mistaken. But then, many believe all sorts of things are bad for them, from religion to a liking for craft beer.

If you believe that mRNA is going to rewire your genetics, you are not going to take the vaccine no matter how drastic the consequences, despite the fact that you, like me, have no idea what mRNA is.

The solution for most of us, when faced with the mandates, is to submit, whether we want it or not; but not everyone is built this way. Throughout history, we see examples of people taking strange ideological positions and being willing to suffer great hardship rather than compromise. – Damien Grant

But within the makeup of humanity, there is a small percentage willing to die for their beliefs and a larger cohort willing to stand in solidarity in the rain and muck of the parliamentary grounds to defy these mandates.

The prime minister is stuck. She cannot negotiate. She cannot back down. She needs to look upon those on the lawn and despair – for those rabble are the captains now. For as long as they can remain in place, they are the story. – Damien Grant

Rather than hailing the achievements of the Labour-led government’s management of the covid crisis, this left should have been decrying the government’s lack of an economic programme for those hurting due to the exacerbation of poverty and inequality. – John A.Z. Moore

What I’ve seen at Ministry of Health level borders on incompetent, and no one is taking advice that in any way shifts their thinking. – Ian Taylor

The emergency legislation in response to Covid-19 giving our Government the right to control our freedom of movement is no longer demonstrably justified in removing the fundamental rights to which New Zealanders are entitled.  –  Lady Deborah Chambers

However, section 5 in operation appears to be interpreted as broad enough to drive several trucks through. Our Government has removed our fundamental freedom of movement in a way that no other previous government has done. If the Government’s actions are justified under section 5, then that section needs to be narrowed and strengthened. –  Lady Deborah Chambers

The incessant and futile attempts to impose Covid-19 zero strategies will continue to fall away against the inevitable path towards endemic Covid-19. The never-ending onslaught of emergency powers and inane rules should be replaced now with sensible precautions, encouraged but not legislated by the Government, with an ongoing concentration of treatments, vaccinations, and health resourcing.

Instead, our Government has continued – against international trends – to impose even more draconian measures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. –  Lady Deborah Chambers

It is not justified to restrict the fundamental rights of other New Zealanders when we know that it is only a particular group in our community who are vulnerable to a low risk of death from this disease. The better approach in terms of human rights is that citizens who are vulnerable be more cautious and aware. –  Lady Deborah Chambers

The average age of Covid deaths is still higher than the average life expectancy. We do not need a government to talk to us like we are 5-year-olds over these risk factors. New Zealanders know them. New Zealanders know whether they are part of a vulnerable group and should be trusted to act accordingly and take that into account in the decisions they make about their lives without having the Government use that as an excuse to become authoritarian. –  Lady Deborah Chambers

Thirdly, the emergency regulations taking away our freedom of movement fail to properly balance social, educational, economic, and even other medical damage in favour of an obsessive focus on Covid-19 to the exclusion of all else. This is why health bureaucrats and epidemiologists should only ever have been a key source of advice, not dictators of Government policy.

I do not doubt that the Government genuinely thinks it is taking these extreme measures for all the right reasons, but the Government’s rulemaking is no longer proportionate to the risk and does not meet the requirements of the section 5 exemption. The “nanny knows best routine” is no longer justified.

Fourthly, to those who say that our Government’s refrain that they are entitled to claim credit for “keeping people safe” and go even further and demand a continuation of this protection pretense, I say this: It is not the Government’s role to attempt to prevent all death at any cost. –  Lady Deborah Chambers

Part of the reason large elements of the public are entranced by the unachievable goal of permanent insulation from Covid-19 is that our politicians have raised expectations that our Government cannot meet by using paranoia and political one-upmanship.

Some New Zealanders will not be happy until they ruin another school year or chalk up another $60 billion in debt and ruin the early careers of so many young people weighing them down with taxation for decades to come. Those views are not a justification for overriding the fundamental rights of other New Zealanders.

If you are very risk-averse, then the answer is simple: you choose to take the steps you wish to take to avoid infection. The answer is not that our Government removes fundamental freedoms by emergency regulations when we are now in a very different position from when we first faced Covid-19 without vaccines, little knowledge, and a much stronger variant.

Our leaders assure us we are no longer in elimination mode. They urged us to get vaccinated so we could dispense with the restrictions on our fundamental freedoms, but still, we are overwhelmed with onerous and illogical rules and restrictions. –  Lady Deborah Chambers

Most media are addicted to Covid-19 catastrophism, down-playing or ignoring the social and economic costs. Fear is even better than sex at selling newspapers. Oppositions have been too timid to call it out, preferring to profit from outrage and trepidation, preferring to complain about a bungled vaccination rollout when we have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and one of the lowest fatality rates.

It is time we elevated civil rights as a key component to decision-making. So far, the influence of the Bill of Rights has been zip.  – Lady Deborah Chambers

The pandemic has provided a stress test for the freedom of movement guaranteed to us and the results are not pretty.

The most common way people give up their rights is by thinking that they do not have any. New Zealanders should be justifiably proud and be prepared to defend the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. It is time we did.

Nothing strengthens authoritarianism so much as silence. – Lady Deborah Chambers

The rule of law needs to be respected and upheld. Should people reach the view they are not bound by it and the right to protest is unlimited, chaos would eventually descend upon us. It is a slippery slope. . . 

While the Bill of Rights reinforces the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of association and freedom of movement, none of these rights is absolute. – Sir Geoffrey Palmer

When Labour governments run out of ideas they have usually resorted to centralisation and more controls. In its final term, Peter Fraser’s ministry that had been one of the most creative in New Zealand’s history, centralised as tired ministers hoped their trusted bureaucrats would keep Labour’s faltering show on the road. The ministries of Walter Nash, Norman Kirk and Bill Rowling followed similar paths. Jacinda Ardern’s government, you’ll recall, had very little policy to start with. So little in fact that when it came to office in 2017 it had to set up more than two hundred committees and inquiries to tell it what to think and do. The results were pitiful. Almost no Kiwibuild houses were constructed, homeless numbers increased, poverty figures rose rather than declined, educational achievement standards kept slipping against other countries, and major infrastructure construction fell well behind schedule. Whenever criticised, rookie ministers blamed the previous government, and then Covid. Message? Centralising everything can’t compensate for the absence of carefully-thought-through policy. – Michael Bassett

Despite their lack of specific policies, they had ever-so-itchy fingers. They engaged across a wide front tinkering with everything in sight, thinking some ancient Labour dogma overlaid with a big dose of special privilege for Maori would fix things. The public hospital structure had been set in place by Helen Clark’s ministry. It is only twenty years old, but it is now being turned on its head for no good reason except that a more centralized system makes it easier to favour Maori. Health Department officials who have been under huge stress coping with Covid are also having to restructure a hospital system that wasn’t broken. Nor is there anything so wrong with water and drainage services nationally that they require Nanaia Mahuta’s Three Waters in the form set out in her current proposals. Her centralizing scheme seems to have only one over-arching purpose: control by Maori. Meanwhile, the school history curriculum is being restructured with one special purpose in mind: teaching a bogus version of New Zealand history to school kids about the Treaty of Waitangi. Making Labour’s centralisation work certainly keeps officials busy. Wellington has become a gigantic Lego-fest. – Michael Bassett

Over the years, the best ideas behind successful government schemes have always taken time to germinate. If they are specific to places or regions there has to be buy-in from locals who will benefit. And the best way to test the extent of that buy-in is to expect the same locals to own the project and pay the lion’s share. Centralizing everything always means bureaucracy and waste. But then, Jacinda’s ministry is so other worldly that they don’t know these stark realities. Her government is too expensive to indulge any further. – Michael Bassett

Compulsory wokeness, for example, has had limited success in healing division; while classifying people by what they say, rather than what they do, has not promoted much virtue.

State management of the economy to reduce instability and help the weak now threatens long-run productivity growth.  Meanwhile, support for decarbonisation evaporates as life-changing costs become transparent.   

And the taking by the state of ever-wider powers to regulate our lives to make us better people increasingly creates more problems than it solves. Oblivious of how it looks, we find the most ardent defenders of civil liberties yearning for extraordinary powers. – Point of Order

There’s an unmistakeable note of panic in the posturing of the woke Left. They suddenly realise they no longer control the public debate and are wildly lashing out at the scruffy mob that usurped their right to make a nuisance of themselves. How dare they! – Karl du Fresne

The level of condescension and intellectual snobbery on display from people who think of themselves as liberal has been breathtaking. The tone has alternated between sneering at this supposedly feral underclass and alarm at their sudden, forceful presence on the national stage – a stage the wokeists are accustomed to hogging for themselves. – Karl du Fresne

Oddly enough, we never hear experts on Morning Report expressing alarm about people being radicalised by the extreme Left, although it’s been happening for decades at the taxpayers’ expense and has succeeded in transforming New Zealand into a country that some of us barely recognise.

Similarly, we should conclude that ideological manipulation is a problem if it’s practised on an ignorant lumpenproletariat, but not when it happens to gullible middle-class students in university lecture theatres, where it flourishes unchallenged. – Karl du Fresne

What we can infer from this barrage of anti-Camp Freedom propaganda is that the woke Left is terrified of losing the initiative in the culture wars. It’s desperate to reclaim its sole right to lecture the rest of us and wants to do so without the distraction of an unruly mob that has the effrontery to adopt the Left’s own tactics.

The irony here is that having spent most of their lives kicking against the establishment, the wokeists are the establishment. They have won the big ideological wars and are on the same side as all the institutions of power and influence: the government, the bureaucracy, the media, academia, the arts and even the craven business sector.

The dissenters, disrupters and challengers of the status quo – in other words the people protesting outside Parliament – are the new radicals. This requires the moralisers of the Left to recalibrate their political thinking, and I get the impression it’s more than some of them can cope with. – Karl du Fresne

An unprovoked attack on a peaceful, democratic neighbour has not happened in Europe since World War II. It is a barbaric act that could take us into a dark age. It shakes the foundations of the international order and the world economy.

With the fall of Communism, there was hope for a new, liberal world order. Globalisation was spreading, as was democracy. There was a peace dividend in the form of reduced military spending and less need for autarky, especially in energy. It was the supposed ‘end of history’. – Oliver Hartwich

If the West needed a final wake-up call, this is it. If those who believe in liberal democracy, civil liberties, free markets and the rule of law still care about their values, this is the time to defend them.

Talk of solidarity with Ukraine is good, but it can only be hollow. There is no way to come to Ukraine’s military defence without provoking an even bigger war.

What the free and democratic world must do urgently is to reconnect with its own fundamental values. That requires a reality check. – Oliver Hartwich

We must rediscover the cultural and political foundations of our civilisation. It is the Enlightenment values of freedom and peace that we must defend against illiberalism, both at home and abroad.

It is a historic moment. But it is our choice how to respond to it. – Oliver Hartwich

They say having a baby changes what you value and it’s true. I want more for our country now. Nine months ago, a politician could’ve convinced me with a tax break. But now, I want to know that politician has a plan to keep New Zealand as wonderful as it was for us to grow up in. I want to know that our schools are world-class, that our jobs pay well and that our cities are good places to live. I want this boy to want to live here, in the same country as his mum and dad, and never leave for a better lifestyle in Sydney and London and New York. I want things that benefit all Kiwis, because what is good for all Kiwis is good for him. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

A commonality of skin color and associated facial features is as nothing compared to the fact that human beings of all races share the faculty of reason. The former may allow for an interesting group photo once in a while.

The latter is what underlies the accumulation and application of knowledge and gives to the members of all races the ability to produce the goods and services that the members of all races need and desire. – George Reisman

The absolute low point of the past three years was the public’s passive acceptance of the imposed nanny state. The “Team of five million” and “Be Kind” mantras belong in kindergartens. For me they were unbelievable. I was ashamed to be a New Zealander as common sense went out the window. The Be Kind childishness was particularly outrageous given the unbelievably cruel, unnecessary and illegal prohibition on thousands of Kiwis prevented from returning home, in numerous cases to farewell dying family members. – Sir Bob Jones

 Ardern is not a communist and its pretty stupid to argue that she is. In the continuum of recent Labour Party leaders I would see her as governing in the Norman Kirk/David Lange tradition … full of well meaning but half baked ideas but totally bereft of any understanding of how the economy actually works … and that will be her downfall along with her embrace of of separatist agenda laid out in He Puapua. – The Veteran

The most important lesson from the invasion of Ukraine is that we have to be willing to defend our freedom. If we are not, no one else will do it for us. – Richard Prebble

The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride – President Volodymyr Zelensky  

We are the people who can run the economy well … but I also want them to understand we care deeply about people. – Christopher Luxon

In the midst of war, what an uplifting week it’s been in terms of a world that, despite all its many worries, can still largely unite and offer hope. 

Never in my lifetime have I seen such a coordinated, effective, and immediate response to a crisis.  – Mike Hosking

This country should have, could have done more. Two million dollars for aid. As Mark Mitchell said Wednesday, the mongrel mob got more. God forbid, we should be like Australia and fund weaponry. Why help save a country when you can give them blankets when they are displaced?

But most of the world got it, and did something good about it. Thus, proving that in the right time and for the right reasons, we are all still on each other’s side.  – Mike Hosking

After the current price spike caused by bureaucratic incompetence, RATs will soon be ordinary low-cost supermarket items found alongside the Panadol, Tampax, Gillette and Rexona in the toiletries aisle.

As with everything else, Foodstuffs, Countdown and The Warehouse will do an incomparably better job than the Ministry of Health and MBIE at making sure stocks don’t run out. – Matthew Hooton

Even were New Zealand at its peak today, we should assume the new normal involves thousands of new daily infections and dozens of people with Covid in hospital for the foreseeable future. But very few will die, even if the authorities continue to count people who are murdered, killed in car crashes or are diagnosed with stage four lung cancer as Covid deaths because they test positive posthumously. – Matthew Hooton

There will be a hangover in the form of inflation, higher interest rates and rising unemployment. The silver lining is that inflation will reduce the value of the $60 billion Grant Robertson borrowed over the past two years, even as the nominal cost of servicing rises.

Consequently, expect governments and central banks to let inflation go higher and stick around for longer than they currently pretend. It’s politically safer to invisibly tax the poor with inflation and the middle class with bracket creep than to transparently raise marginal rates. – Matthew Hooton

For ALMOST two years, we – the press and the population – have been almost hypnotically preoccupied with the authorities’ daily coronatal. THE CONSTANT mental alertness has worn out tremendously on all of us. That is why we – the press – must also take stock of our own efforts. And we have failed. – Brian Weichardt

WE HAVE NOT been vigilant enough at the garden gate when the authorities were required to answer what it actually meant that people are hospitalized with corona and not because of corona. Because it makes a difference. A big difference. Exactly, the official hospitalization numbers have been shown to be 27 percent higher than the actual figure for how many there are in the hospital, simply because they have corona. We only know that now.

OF COURSE, it is first and foremost the authorities who are responsible for informing the population correctly, accurately and honestly. The figures for how many are sick and died of corona should, for obvious reasons, have been published long ago. – Brian Weichardt

There is no more weaselly expression in the modern lexicon than “identifies as,” which inherently emphasizes feelings over facts. I can identify as a nice person, but that does not mean that I am a nice person. Indeed, if most people who meet me abominate me, my self-identification as a nice person means nothing except (if I truly believe it) that I am deluded.

Asking people what they identify as is the natural consequence of what might be called the psychology and philosophy of the real me. The real me has nothing to do with the merely external me, the me that other people perceive through my conduct, manners, conversation, etc. The real me is a kind of homunculus who lives inside the merely apparent me, who preserves his innocence no matter what the apparent me may say or do. This is a very liberating psychological and philosophical conception of human life, because it means that a person can retain his belief in his essential goodness while behaving appallingly—as most of us would be naturally inclined to do from time to time. –Theodore Dalrymple

Multiculturalism—as an ideology, not as a fact—is another promoter, excuser, and rationalization of bad behavior. All you have to say to excuse your bad behavior is that it is part of your culture. Since there is no way to rank cultures, all being equal, your behavior is placed beyond criticism. And of course, if you must uncritically accept the cultures of other people, other people must accept uncritically what you claim to be your culture.

Everyone knows that cultures change, but almost any mass behavior soon falls under the rubric of culture. I was once the de facto vulgarity correspondent of a British newspaper that was not itself totally foreign to the charms of vulgarity, but which simultaneously thundered against vulgarity in others. The newspaper would send me to wherever young British people were gathering and behaving in vulgar fashion, so it was spoiled for choice, the British being not merely vulgar, but militantly vulgar, as if vulgarity were an ideology. – Theodore Dalrymple

That is why licentiousness and puritanism coexist in our societies, not so much in equilibrium as in a violently seesawing manner. We reprobate pedophilia and sexualize children from an early age. We demand that everyone watches his tongue while the vilest abuse is the common language of discussion and dispute. I demand the freedom to express myself, but that you shut up if what you say offends me.

“Identifying as” is an expression that would be used only in a society of mass egotism, in which the self is an object of auto-idolatry. – Theodore Dalrymple

Our obsession with ideological causes, in the absence of clear supporting (multivariate – and multidisciplinary) evidence, and our willingness to sacrifice the needs of higher achievers in order to equalize educational outcomes, guarantee the progressive erosion of educational standards… if you cannot lift achievement at the bottom, then lower it at the top.  The deleterious effect of this on higher achieving students, on education at large, and its ultimate effect on our economy, are considered worthy sacrifices if greater social cohesion is the end result. The fact that it makes us all materially poorer seems of little consequence.  Social cohesion remains elusive due to systemic denial of the real causes of social breakdown and dysfunction. – Caleb Anderson

In this time of distress, that’s the light, the human spirit that is so much alive. – Nir Zohar

Finally and while Russia will win the war they will lose the peace. 43,192.122 Ukrainians will never forget or forgive while, for much of the world, Russia will become a pariah state whose word is never to be trusted. The madman Putin has much to answer for … not the least to his own people. – The Veteran

Science has a hard time keeping up with the data. Nature reports results of a large trial on RATs. Plus side: they seem pretty accurate. Downside: data’s all from the first half of 2021, on a variant that’s no longer prevalent, with little sense of whether the results hold with Omicron. Omicron seems to express in saliva before nasal passages, and the RATs generally take nasal swabs. Remember how, when I used to think there was some point in trying to help get to better policy on Covid, I’d rabbit on about trialling different testing methods side-by-side in MIQ as horseraces? We could totally have known, right now, relative performance of a bucket of different RATs against both swab and saliva PCR, for Omicron. Government is just so hopeless.  – Eric Crampton

As Prime Minister in a pandemic, she ultimately decides just about everything we can do. She can decide to shut shops, close schools, cancel events, keep us confined to home. She even decides what is best for our health. But she doesn’t get to decide what defines us. Not all of us. – John Roughan 

When a Prime Minister on half a million dollars a year tells people on less than 10 per cent of that there isn’t a crisis, the “let them eat cake ” cloak of arrogance is draped ominously on her shoulders.

There is no doubt, we have a cost-of-living crisis, we live it every day. – Mike Hosking

The ANZ this week is forecasting inflation to peak at 7.5 per cent. Are wages going to rise at anywhere close to that level? Of course not.

We are going backwards at a rate of knots, if you hear different from this government they are either fudging figures or straight-up misleading you. – Mike Hosking

Non-tradeable inflation, that’s the stuff we create locally, is the second-highest in the world, they can’t hide from that.

Their spending, their borrowing, their scattergun distribution of cash they never had around the non-productive parts of the economy, is now coming back to haunt them. – Mike Hosking

National, with tax cuts on offer, will let you decide more of your own economic outlook, while Ardern and Robertson will tell you they know better.

With one speech and one line, in less than a week, Luxon can sit out his self isolation knowing he has turned the tide on his election chances. He has policy alternatives, and he has a government looking removed and out of touch, with a leader pretending what’s in front of every single one of us isn’t real. – Mike Hosking

 It is clear now that the issues around vaccination were but the catalyst for the expression of a deeper sense of grievance and anger that has been building up over recent years. That is what needs to be addressed to prevent similar events breaking out in the future. But that argument will not be won by telling those who oppose vaccination and mandates that they are part of an ill-informed minority rabble, any more than putting a wall around Parliament will stop other protests in the future. – Peter Dunne

 There is a significant group of people who feel left out, and increasingly shut out, of what is happening in our country. This runs deeper than just those politically opposed to the present government. Rather, it is a group that feels out of step with all governments, whatever their political complexion.

We need urgently to depolarise politics. That does not mean diminishing the strength of political convictions, but rather, softening the intolerant fervour that increasingly seems to accompany them. – Peter Dunne

Telling people that their views are crackpot and ill-informed, not shared by the mainstream of the population, and refusing to engage with the protest leaders merely fuels their discontent. Likewise, dismissing those who called for a more reasoned approach as basically supporters of the protestors was as incendiary as the petrol and gas heaped on Parliament’s playground last week.

It should be no surprise at all that people who think their backs are being pushed unreasonably against a wall eventually react. And the greater the perceived pressure, the greater the reaction. What is surprising is the belief that telling them they are plain wrong and should therefore go home, will lead to their meekly doing so. Such moral sanctity in a society that likes to parade its diversity when it suits is just humbug. – Peter Dunne

The right to dissent must always be upheld in a free society, and, alongside that, the right to promote minority viewpoints protected, as long they are not in defiance of the law or encouraging lawlessness. That should be an absolute given, not the contestable debating point it is seen to be today.

When I was at school a valuable principle was ingrained in me – I have the right to be right, and the right to be wrong. It seems to me that until that principle is more universally applied and accepted, whatever the issue, or however strongly it may be felt, we have no guarantee that the abhorrent events that came to a head last week in Wellington will not occur again. – Peter Dunne

Since this government has come to power, despite all the lovely words and jawboning, on home ownership the average price is up $350,000. Rents are up $7,300 on the same house you were renting four years ago and in state housing we have a four-fold increase, up to 25,000. Last night we had 4,500 kids in motels and emergency accommodations. We’ve got challenges.”

“This government hasn’t managed the housing situation at all, they’ve made it worse. By a dramatic amount, in every aspect, they’ve made it worse. We live in a country the size of Great Britain or Japan, with far fewer people and much higher house prices. This is a problem completely of our own making. – Christopher Luxon

The world is taking off big time. Some countries have come through Covid and are looking at how to put the afterburners on. They are thinking quite intently and purposefully about the country they want to see emerge. Others have become so obsessed with Covid, as we have, and haven’t got a sense of direction, of where we’re going. And to be honest, there is no reason to come here at the moment. It’s not an attractive place, you know. The world is moving on and we are playing a very fearful, very small, very inward game. – Christopher Luxon

In short, real freedom is fettered freedom. Your freedom to swing your fist must end before it hits my nose. The reduction or removal of the government mandate would not end the fetters.  – Bryce Wilkinson

One question New Zealanders might ask is what position the country would be in regarding oil and gas supply if the Ardern Government hadn’t stopped enabling new exploration of oil and gas in 2017.  Removing this ban today would have no effect, as it takes years to invest, explore and gain any results, but had it happened in 2017, then there might have been a contribution to global supply. The Ardern Government has deliberately decided to constrain supply of oil and gas, not on economic grounds, not even considering national security, but to virtue signal. – Liberty Scott

My view has always been that there are several reasons for our high inflation, but big government spending in an overheating economy is certainly one of them, and the one the Government can most quickly bring under control.

We should provide tax relief to New Zealanders on the way through, whilst also reining in government spending through a focus on discipline and quality investment. – Simon Bridges

The Dunedin and Christchurch studies suggest children are remarkably resilient if faced with one or two life challenges in their first two decades. What causes permanent harm is the so-called cocktail of disadvantage. That means children in stable homes and good schools should cope, but Covid will be the last nip in the shaker for the less privileged. – Matthew Hooton

Turns out that dealing with Covid is difficult when you can’t just throw up the borders, keep it out and let life continue basically normally here. People get tired of changing rules, restrictions and just Covid more generally. In focus groups, there have been niggles over various things for several months. – Luke Malpass

In fact, it turns out that the “this” in “let’s do this” was not the communism her more deranged opponents claim, but – from the perspective of the under 30s who backed her so strongly in 2017 – something along the political spectrum closer towards kleptocracy. As a small example, I have personally gained more, tax-free, under Ardern’s Government, without having to work for it, than under any New Zealand Government before. – Matthew Hooton

Yet even as all of this happens, we need to ask ourselves how we got into this situation. How we arrived in a world in which defending people from supposedly offensive words is considered more important than defending our borders. In which we seem to have so little need for the virtue of ‘strength’ that we’re willing to blacklist the word itself for being gendered and stereotypical. This is where the Ukraine war really confronts us. It interrupts, violently, our post-Cold War conceits. It upends our belief that history, in Europe at least, is largely settled, and now we can concern ourselves with petty things like pronouns and sexual identity or with purposely overblown, mission-creating projects for the technocratic elite, like the ‘climate emergency’. This conceit has impacted on almost every facet of public life in recent decades, nurturing the delusion that ours is a post-war, post-borders, post-everything continent, in which the highest aim of public life is either to manage the public or validate individual identities. Those bombs in Ukraine have shattered this Western arrogance and decadence by reminding us that history lives. – Brendan O’Neill

As well as living in an age of emotionalism, we live in a time of tribal politics. And these are a strange sort of tribal politics. They are no longer about left versus right, but more about feeling versus reason, of fashionable causes that earn you peer approval versus unfashionable causes that don’t. – Patrick West

To put it crudely, on one side today we have those who channel their feelings, instincts and fear into their worldview, and those who are circumspect and rational – and we are damned for it. – Patrick West

 Is Jacinda Ardern a megalomaniac?

Whatever the answer, we know that not only does New Zealand’s Prime Minister have what has been described as libido dominandi, a desire for power, she is also presiding over the most incompetent, destructive government in our history. Its thoroughly anti-democratic attacks on that vital principle of equality for all, under the law, show no sign of diminishing. – Amy Brooke

New Zealanders are suffering under a government viewed as further to the left of socialism and financially incompetent, with Ardern regarded as sly and evasive when it comes to answering questions she dislikes. In spite of her charm offensive, more media are risking her displeasure by voicing concern about the inappropriateness of so many of the control policies widely imposed. Only now reversed, for example, is forcing fully-vaccinated, well people from overseas to enter expensive quarantine facilities while Omicron rampages throughout the country!

The Ardern government’s provision of superior, unprecedented rights for part-Maori who belong to powerful, immensely wealthy, neo-tribal corporations was a factor bringing so many to protest at Parliament recently. Although it was pilloried as run by anti-vaxxers and others against vaccination mandates, the majority of the crowd – apart from an inevitable mob element – was there to protest against the loss of so many of our freedoms. – Amy Brooke

So much for the constant invoking of kindness and well-being, falling so readily from the lips of our leader. One thing was constantly obvious – Arden’s antipathy to those worried enough to voice their concerns. She simply told them to go away. And now our power-wedded leader is thinking of extending the confusing traffic light control system over the country – to cope with the possible emergence of flu this winter. New Zealanders have only just begun to protest. – Amy Brooke

We can all bring sweetness and goodness into our world, even small things like a smile to a passerby, feeding the birds, care for thirsty trees and drooping plants,  a bowl of water by the gate for thirsty dogs and other creatures, acknowledgement of the careful pattern on top of our freshly made coffee to the barista, these tiny things can mean a quality of life, actions which can bring softness into the harsh times in which we find ourselves. Small happinesses which we can give to others, usually make us happy too. And the light of gratitude we feel when we recognise the beauty and bountifulness of nature and the world  – these are the  things that can uplift us –  remind us of the miracle of life which can overcome fear, depression or anxiety. – Valerie Davies

It was dear old Samwise in Lord of The Rings who said,
“But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow.  Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer”.
Let us hope so. Even the shattered ruins of Leningrad have been transformed into the golden glory of St Petersburg with the passing of time. Let us hope that the devastation we see now will be healed in a real peace between nations whose people do not want to fight – that this Will pass and a new day Will come. And the light of the sun will shine on us all. – Valerie Davies

Jacinda Ardern “rejects” so much these days that New Zealanders are in danger of forgetting what she stands for.  – Fran O’Sullivan

One of the problems with Western society that has made it not only appear to be, but actually to be decadent, is what might be called its umbilicism, the habit of navel-gazing as if there were no world exterior to itself. Only navel-gazers could imagine that questions raised by transgenderism are serious. The West pretends to multiculturalism but has no real interest in developments outside its own borders. Like spoiled children growing up in the lap of luxury, it can’t imagine a world that doesn’t respond to its whims, let alone that threatens it, and this despite its catastrophic history almost within living memory. The failure of the imagination is almost total.

When authoritarian leaders of powerful countries see statues erected to a man merely because he was killed by a policeman and sanctified though he had led a thoroughly bad and indeed vicious life, they must surely think that the West is an overripe fruit that needs only a little shake to drop from the tree, incapable as it appears to be of distinguishing between a minor event and a major threat. For them, a serious country is one that can lock up thousands if not millions of its citizens with impunity, control access to information, and arm itself to the teeth, with or without impoverishing the entire nation.

Our challenge is to prove them wrong. For all our faults, our weaknesses, our foolishness, our dishonesties, our willful blindness, our errors, our self-indulgence, our way of life is incomparably superior, at least for us, to theirs, and must be defended. The verdict on whether we have the resolve to do so is not yet in, but not all the auguries are good. – Theodore Dalrymple

So having talked myself into a corner, I have to resolve to make the place where I stand the kindest, purest, most honest and most decent place possible. I can only love my corner of the world and try to share love to add to the goodness in the world, and not get bogged down in the pain of the world.

 Philosopher Martin Buber said,”You can rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way …. In the time I am brooding over it, I could be stringing pearls for the delight of Heaven”. He’s right. Yes, brooding is a waste of time, so I will try to string pearls instead of futile brooding over the tragedy of Ukraine – pearls of love and kindness and a little laughter. – Valerie Davies

When the opposition is seen as more economically competent the government always loses the election. – Richard Prebble

Inflation is deadly because the solution to inflation is even higher prices, and increased interest rates.

No prudent government lets inflation get established. – Richard Prebble

Reducing the excise tax on petrol just transfers the revenue raising to a less efficient tax. There is no Covid fund. It is an accounting fiction. The roads still have to be paid for from taxes or borrowing.

More worrying is the subsidy on public transport. The advice of the OECD regarding subsidies is “do not do it”.

Subsidies are poorly targeted. The winter energy payment goes to millionaires. Those who can afford to take a bus are being subsidised by those who cannot. Subsidies once on are very hard to withdraw. There has never been a social or economic justification for subsidising Gold Card holders’ ferry trips to Waiheke Island. – Richard Prebble

We will discover we are connected to events such as a probable Russian default in ways we cannot imagine. The double-digit food price inflation is just the beginning.

What could cause the price of petrol to fall is a worldwide recession, now a real possibility. – Richard Prebble

In politics, it is always later than you think. Labour has just 18 months of effective government before the next election. The way to solve inflation was a year ago, starting with increasing interest rates, 18 months ago to stop printing money, five years ago not to ban off-shore exploring for oil and gas.

Interest rates have to rise but it will not be in time to bring inflation under control before Labour faces the electorate.

The effect of interest rate rises on the mortgage belt electorates will be devastating. The Auckland median house price is $1.2 million. Last year with a 20 per cent deposit, monthly repayments on the loan at 2.50 per cent would be $3793. By election year at 5.25 per cent the repayment will be $5301.

Three months’ fuel tax relief and public transport subsidies is not going to save Labour. – Richard Prebble

 To become citizens in a democracy, young people must be taught how to think rather than what to think. – Michael Johnston

What is clear though, is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to discuss contentious topics openly. To present a viewpoint at odds with those fashionable can draw opprobrium, censure and even ostracism.  –Michael Johnston

In a democracy, political ideas must not only be contestable but must actually be contested. For democracy to remain healthy, diverse viewpoints must be included and welcomed in public debate. – Michael Johnston

In political discourse, the ability to make a sound argument is necessary, but it isn’t, on its own, enough to make a strong contribution to political debate. Certain dispositions are also important. Perhaps foremost amongst these is humility.

Humility entails assuming that there’s something to learn from those we disagree with. It means being open-minded and willing to alter our opinions in the light of new information. It is a quality that seems to be lacking in much of our current political discourse. Adopting a humbler stance when contesting ideas would do much to counteract our increasingly censorious and polarised political culture. – Michael Johnston

Intellectual humility needs to be modelled rather than taught explicitly. If children observe adults practising respectful, attentive and open-minded disagreement, they’re more likely to adopt that way of arguing themselves.

In a democracy, argument has a higher purpose than humiliating our opponents. That kind of argument does nothing to improve our ideas. If instead, we argue in good faith, we can discover things that we would not or could not have discovered alone. Facts, reason, humility and respect are the best guidelines for teachers interested in preserving and enhancing democracy. – Michael Johnston

This has gloriously given us insight into the new merciless standards of the puritanical woke.

They would eat their own if they weren’t all vegan. – Martin Bradbury

“Co-governance” in practice is a mechanism for stealing resources that belong to all of us, irrespective of race, in order to satisfy some primeval tribal goal that rackets through the minds of the undemocratically-selected Maori partner. The message is that whenever “co-governance” is proposed, it should be met with fierce resistance. There is no desirable alternative to democracy, majority rule, unless we all want to set off down the road towards an authoritarian, unaccountable tribal world. – Michael Bassett

Talking to a friend yesterday, his indifference to Ardern has mushroomed into a visceral loathing. His bristling is palpable. He is sick of being treated like a child, talked to as if he is an idiot. His words.

And when you think about it, living under Ardern has been like being back at school. Where most teachers preached conformity for your own good, or for the greater good, or for the sake of the school community.

Yet anyone who spent a moment reflecting knew that ultimately, you are on your own. You make your own way in the world. You love and look after friends and family, as they do you. But we are each an island. A self-contained intellectual entity. – Lindsay Mitchell

But the spark of human individuality cannot be suppressed indefinitely. Like the lad who mentioned the naked emperor’s actual state. Or the exceedingly brave Russian broadcaster who momentarily yelled to the tv cameras that it’s all propaganda.

Maybe, just maybe, the silver lining from the last two bewildering and stultifying years will be a re-emergence of individual independence – freedom of action, freedom of thought and freedom from fools. – Lindsay Mitchell

 No-one should feel unsafe or unable to express their thoughts. That is what New Zealand had become. That place.- Lindsay Mitchell

This is New Zealand’s most conservative government of recent times. Not so much in terms of its political ideology, but more in the way it does things. Its policy prescription, admittedly constrained by New Zealand First’s negativism in the first term, and the persistence of the pandemic so far in the second, has not been at all radical or innovative. And, with half the current Parliamentary term almost over, the prospects of its being able to devise and introduce radical and innovative solutions before the next election seem very slim. Wherever possible the current government has harkened back to earlier solutions belonging to governments of the past to deal with the issues it confronts today.- Peter Dunne

 Labour’s solution to the poor performance of the District Health Board structure it created when last in office is to go back to the system that preceded it. Labour had set up the District Health Boards in 2000 to replace National’s centralised Health Funding Agency and four Regional Health Authorities. It said then it wanted to restore local democracy to health service delivery and get away from centralised decision-making. But now this Labour government is proposing to replace the elected District Health Boards with its own centralised, unelected Health New Zealand entity, supported by a Māori Health Authority and four local commissioning authorities, in a model that, but for the name changes, is virtually the same as the system it got rid of over 20 years ago. – Peter Dunne

And yet more progress could have been achieved had Labour involved private-sector construction companies in its plans from the outset, as the first Labour government had done with Sir James Fletcher. But the current government was too focused on KiwiBuild houses being seen as government-built, and therefore solely to its credit, to do so. It was an early sign that the promise of transformation really meant a return to the big central government of the 1960s and 1970s. – Peter Dunne

However, the scale of borrowing to do so has been far more substantial and riskier, especially at a time of rising inflation and interest rates worldwide. Yet the government has seemed content to rely on the tactics of the Muldoon government and its predecessors and pass the repayment of the debt – about $60 billion so far – to future generations to repay. More innovative solutions could have been expected from a government committed to foundational change, let alone transformation. – Peter Dunne

The overall impression is of a very conservative and cautious government, risk averse, wary, and unwilling to devolve any responsibility to local communities or the private sector. It is determined to govern from the centre in the benign “we know best” way governments half a century ago and earlier did, overlooking that New Zealand has changed considerably since then. We are a far more pluralistic and diverse society today, unlikely to take comfortably to a return of stifling, all knowing, big central government.

The problem this has created for Labour, which the polls are starting to reflect, is among those of its supporters who genuinely believed in or were enthused by the prospect of a government of aspiration and transformation. They are now becoming disillusioned that while its rhetoric may be bold, in practice this government is no different from those that went before it. Moreover, by centralising everything again it has put itself in the position where only it can be blamed when things go wrong, or do not live up to what was promised. All that means is many of its erstwhile supporters may not be as nearly as inclined to vote for it again in 2023, as they were in 2017 and 2020. – Peter Dunne

It turns out not to be true that, at heart, all people desire only peace and will respond reasonably if you speak reason to them. The invasion of Ukraine has been, among other things, a lesson in the possibilities of human nature. The surprising thing, perhaps, is that, in Europe of all places, it is a lesson that had to be taught. – Theodore Dalrymple

Be that as it may, the Russian invasion of Ukraine purportedly acted on Europe (and the United States) much as the electric current acted on the corpse of Frankenstein’s monster: it brought it back to life. Suddenly, the cobbled-together body of the west began to act as a real organism, and a powerful one at that. There is nothing like an enemy at the gates to give a bit of backbone to a weakling. The speeches of the Ukrainian president, after all, moved everyone in a way that very few speeches by contemporary politicians move anyone. The west had revealed itself to be not so feeble as supposed. – Theodore Dalrymple

While western politicians have appealed to the best in human nature, an appeal that, however insincere or hypocritical, places constraints upon them, Putin has always exploited, so far successfully (if one measures success by survival in power), the worst in it.  – Theodore Dalrymple

Blame for the failure to prepare must lie with the Ministry of Health and the Health Minister. There was no decision to urgently hire or train more staff, and no rapid move to create temporary facilities. “Plans” to upgrade hospitals to cope with Covid patients were announced just three months ago. A pronouncement six weeks ago that the Ministry was “about to start” recruiting offshore for ICU nurses was rightly ridiculed.

These failures are emblematic of the Government’s ponderous approach to almost every aspect of the health response. Provision of PPE, vaccines, RAT tests and new medications have all been very slow, and served with a diet of dissembling and obfuscation.

The ministry and the Government have been way too reliant on the generosity of New Zealanders in accepting restrictions on their freedoms to “avoid putting pressure on the health system”, where too often it has really been about avoiding pressure on themselves. – Steven Joyce

There is nothing you can point to that will improve patient care, nor even a funding formula. Just lots of shallow statements about “fixing the health system”. Oh, and a half-billion-dollar-and-counting price tag.

It was ever thus. Incessant rounds of reforms at the top of the system end up leaving the same people in charge and no plan to improve patient care. – Steven Joyce

I’m all in favour of a greater range of health providers including Māori health providers, who often do a better job of reaching their communities. But it doesn’t make sense that a health provider with the country’s largest number of Māori and Pacific people enrolled gets paid less per patient than one which is Māori-owned. Funding according to the ownership of the supplier means patients miss out.

Similarly we shouldn’t be prioritising provision through government-owned suppliers as we did in the early stages of vaccine rollout, when GP’s in private practice and pharmacists were left on the sidelines. How was that good for patients? – Steven Joyce

Changes are needed in health to make the sector more robust so it can deliver more to New Zealanders. Reform that provides more patient-centred care and a larger workforce will make a difference. Reform with a big price tag that just rearranges the bureaucracy won’t. Unfortunately, the Government is serving up the latter. – Steven Joyce

We voters only care about the short term. And our politicians only care about keeping us happy. They’re not nimble or urgent. They’re cowardly.

But ask yourself this: regardless of your political stripes, wouldn’t you prefer a government to be led by its principles than by the polls?

A society deserves the leaders it elects. Once again, Jacinda Ardern’s Government has shown it’s more interested in doing what is popular than what is right.  – Jack Tame

The line between fact and fiction has become thin. In their second term, Labour has become adept at downplaying their mistakes, discrediting those who criticise, encouraging misinformation and diverting attention from bad news, while wrapping themselves in meaningless cultural signals. – Andrea Vance 

Politicians are enabled to gaslight us because of the torrent of information in our digital age. Who has time to fact-check every statement? And at a time when every press conference or speech is live-streamed, most of these confident assertions go unchecked.

We shrug off the lies because in a post-Trump world we no longer expect truthfulness, integrity or decency. The most pressing problems: hardship, climate change, the viability of our health systems, are too big to contemplate, so we happily accept slogans over real solutions.

All this gaslighting is enough to make you feel slightly insane. Which, I suppose, is the point. But the insanity would be in continuing to tolerate it. – Andrea Vance 

Media freedom is one of the crucial defining differences between a liberal democratic state and a totalitarian one. Put simply, it can be described as the right to know. It’s arguably at least as important as the right to vote, since a vote is pointless if it’s not an informed one. – Karl du Fresne

But here’s the extraordinary thing. In 2022 the independence of the New Zealand media is jeopardised not by threats or coercion emanating from the state, but by the media’s own behaviour. In this respect we may be unique.

Journalistic bias is rampant and overt. It’s evident not just in how the media report things, but just as crucially in what is not reported at all. New Zealanders wanting to be fully informed on matters of consequence need to monitor online news platforms such as Kiwiblog, the BFD and Muriel Newman’s Breaking Views – to name just three – that cover the issues the mainstream media ignore. – Karl du Fresne

Generally speaking, news that reflects unfavourably on the government tends to be played down or ignored. Bias is apparent too in the lack of rigour in holding government politicians to account. – Karl du Fresne

After a lifetime as a journalist, I’m in the unfamiliar position of no longer trusting the New Zealand media to report matters of public interest fully, fairly, accurately and truthfully. This situation hasn’t arisen because of pressure from government communications czars or threats of imprisonment, as in authoritarian regimes such as Russia’s. It’s far more subtle than that.

The Labour government doesn’t have to tell the media what to report, or how, because most journalists, and especially those covering politics and important areas of public policy, are ideologically on board.  They are sympathetic with the government and want it to stay in power. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that this means relinquishing the impartial status on which they depend for their credibility.  – Karl du Fresne

Nonetheless I wonder whether the editors and publishers who lined up to accept the government’s tainted money stopped to consider the full implications. While they indignantly reject claims that they are ethically compromised, they appear not to understand that the public is entitled to suspect that the acceptance of state money has influenced reportage and media comment even when it hasn’t. The public perception of media independence has been irreparably harmed.

To put this another way, in Russia the media can’t be trusted because they are controlled by the state, but in New Zealand the media have spared the government the trouble.  – Karl du Fresne

In other words, of our headline inflation rate, LESS THAN HALF is due to inflation in tradeables. However, if you listen to government spin you’d think the whole of our inflation problem was imported. Yes, President Putin is way less to blame than our domestic policies.

Like what? Like our supermarket duopoly. Like weak competition in our building industry, where some huge companies wield immense market power. Like our Reserve Bank’s bungled $60 billion money printing program which flooded our markets with liquidity AT THE SAME TIME the Finance Minister was boasting how low was our unemployment rate. Alternatively one could partly blame our extreme closed border policies which have led to exploding shortages in skilled & unskilled labour. One could also blame high government spending, financed by borrowing, which PM Ardern “absolutely refutes”.

Can’t Labour just tell a story as it is for once? That would help the country to better address the root of its problems rather than pretending everything is perfect. – Robert MacCulloch

It seems that the Government has to resort to a reactive approach instead of being proactive because it lacks any real underpinning vision about where it wants to take the country. To have direction, political leaders need to have policy, values, and be embedded in a milieu of critical thinking and innovation. –

This is traditionally what a political party is. It’s a big think tank of on-the-ground policy development based on a vision of a particular sort of world that it wants to create. The problem for Ardern and her colleague is that this is entirely lacking for them. There is no mass membership party feeding ideas and policies up from its base. In fact, the last Labour Party annual conference showed that the party barely has any debate at all, and certainly no real decision making powers like it used to.

Without a useful anchor in society, the Labour Government is now just floating around, lost at sea, only reacting to events as they arise. It means the party and government have little chance of taking the country anywhere, and voters will eventually tire of its managerial approach. To sell itself based on its competence during the Covid crisis is not going to work again at the next election – especially since much of that competence has been more questionable since 2020. – Bryce Edwards

The Government can jettison the more unpopular parts of its reform programme – especially things like its hate speech law reforms, and perhaps Three Waters – but what will these be replaced with? When a party lacks connection to its voter base, and has no strong ideological underpinnings, it is forced to make up policies as it goes, reacting to opinion polls. It means that badly formulated policies like KiwiBuild are quickly dreamt up, and just as quickly discarded when they become embarrassing. Cycling bridges are announced and then un-announced, again all in reaction to polls.

The even bigger problem is that Labour has forgotten its own traditional voter base. This is observable in the fact that they have overseen a massive transfer of wealth to the rich, while the poor have simply got poorer. – Bryce Edwards

This is why transformation is not possible under Labour at the moment, and why the party has become a conservative one. It’s been cut adrift from its original principles and support bases. This makes it more likely to lose power at the next election. Ultimately Labour needs to find a way to reconnect with some of its original working class constituents and ideologies. That’s the political soul of the Labour Party, and something that seems sorely missing at the moment. – Bryce Edwards

Why on earth a government can’t do its job and actually govern, make a decision and announce it – and then stand by it – is beyond most of us.

Is it about power or just plain incompetence? – Barry Soper

There is much about our COVID response that must be put under a microscope.

The Levels, Stages and Traffic Light System. The botched vaccine rollout. The legality and morality of a vaccine mandate that saw New Zealanders lose their jobs – and their minds. A clinical, archaic MIQ system that left Kiwi citizens stranded all over the world. The economic impact of never-ending lockdowns, a two-year border closure (and counting), the multi-billion dollar spend, and a failure to engage or listen to the private sector. And that’s just scratching the surface. – Rachel Smalley

What divides democracy and dictatorship? Public accountability.

And all of us need answers. – Rachel Smalley

Farming in New Zealand is under threat and overlooking the cost of fuel on-farm is yet another straw.

There have certainly been suggestions that a change in the way that farmers operate would allow them to remain in business, but none of the suggestions, whether organic, regenerative, veganism or synthetics (vat fermentation) get away from the use of fossil fuel – usually more than is required by pasture-based agriculture and resulting in food at a greater price to the consumer. – Jacqueline Rowarth

In this sense, Wellington’s distaste for economists can be understood. Because the profession is not characterized by knee-jerk big-government types, its’ members have become ideologically unacceptable to Kiwi politicians and bureaucrats who thrive on red-tape, centralization, moneyprinting, higher taxes and less competition in the welfare state. – Robert Maculloch

We replaced whale oil as a fuel source a century ago, not because we wanted to save the whales, but because we discovered a much cheaper and more abundant fuel – oil. Now we have to do the same to oil: double down on making the alternative cheaper and abundant. – Josie Pagani

We replaced whale oil as a fuel source a century ago, not because we wanted to save the whales, but because we discovered a much cheaper and more abundant fuel – oil. Now we have to do the same to oil: double down on making the alternative cheaper and abundant.

And we should follow the science. Look closely at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) latest report assessing the impacts of climate change and you will see the world has made progress towards limiting impacts. Cool heads, not hot takes, make for better responses. – Josie Pagani

The Bank of America has found that globally, achieving net-zero will cost $150 trillion over 30 years. In a new study, the international consultancy firm McKinsey finds most of the poorest nations in Africa would have to pay more than 10 per cent of their total national incomes every year toward climate policy. This is more than these nations combined spend on education and health.

This is not only implausible but also immoral on a continent where almost half a billion people still live in abject poverty. – Josie Pagani

The answer to the PM’s dilemma is relatively simple. They made too many mistakes, they didn’t admit those mistakes, and they certainly didn’t apologise. They relied far too heavily on ministry wonks who let them down and who also didn’t admit mistakes and apologise. – Mike Hosking

From the very beginning it has been haphazard … the PPE that never turned up for the nurses and doctors, the flu jab last year that got botched, the nurses that weren’t recruited until it was too late, the absurd mess around ICU beds and how you count them, the behind-the-scenes Machiavellian madness of the Ministry of Health refusing any number of Official Information Act requests on detail the media inquired about, the astonishingly cruel MIQ rulings where DJs got clearance and family members of dying people didn’t – the list, if you sit and think about it long enough, is exhausting and really provides the Prime Minister with all the material she needs to see why so many of us didn’t go along for the ride. – Mike Hosking

It’s a combination of their inexperience, reliance on officials, arrogance and passion for spin that has led them here.

I don’t know whether the PM knows this and just says she doesn’t, or whether she is genuinely confused. If it’s the latter then they’re in more trouble than I already thought they were. – Mike Hosking

They didn’t take more of us with them because they told us they knew better when they didn’t, they didn’t tell enough truth when they needed to, fundamentally they weren’t up to it from the start. They are “B” teamers handed a crisis, who were exposed for lack of talent and acumen.

A government that got famous early for lack of delivery, did the same with Covid as they did with KiwiBuild or light rail. It’s not hard to understand unless you don’t want to, or you don’t have the wherewithal to get it in the first place. – Mike Hosking

Labour’s obsession with the Maori language is destroying trust in the public service as official communications are increasingly being produced in pidgin English, which inhibits understanding, erodes accuracy, and damages public confidence in Government institutions.- Muriel Newman

All up, it’s hard to see those policy changes as anything but a cynical vote grab. They aren’t targeted at reducing costs or increasing incomes for those who truly need it. They’re undoing an otherwise positive effect of high fuel prices on carbon emissions. And they’re unlikely to have a positive effect (and may even be counter-productive) in terms of public transport patronage. Possibly, the government is hoping that the voting public has the same low level of economic literacy that they do. Things may not be that bad, yet. On the plus side, the government now seems to recognise that an excise is a tax. – Michael Cameron

#4 In human affairs, there is no perfection.
In one’s own life, there are times when one feels broken or cracked, or fragmented or even malformed.
Like the world dropped you on your head.

But one may choose to address those circumstances and reach for one’s inner super glue – one’s history of healing – one’s memory of recovery on another and better day – one’s capacity to know the difference between an inconvenience and a real problem – one’s capacity to get up and go on, no matter what.
I may choose. The super glue is in my attitude and memory. – Robert Fulghum

 But New Zealand’s economic situation is now overtaking the virus, politically. On one estimate, over 1.7 million New Zealanders either has had or has Covid-19 now. That isn’t to say it is trivial, but the chance of getting it is now just a daily reality for everyone.

But while Covid for most means a sick week or so at home, that light-fingered inflation will be peeking into wallets every week. And ASB’s $150 per week prediction will be scarier to a lot of voters than Omicron. – Luke Malpass

The gap between what we have and what we need is widening. We have the fact we waste money at a spectacular rate when we do build stuff. We have the fact that when something starts it doesn’t end on time or on budget. We have the fact things cost more than they need to.  – Mike Hosking

Then you have the ideology of the bike lanes, the bus lanes, and the coloured planter pots. All cost a fortune, aren’t used, and add nothing to the economy. All in the vein of hoping that people will take to them on their new bicycles in city centres they no longer come to town to work in.  – Mike Hosking

But really, what this country appears to do well is write reports outlining why so much stuff doesn’t work or live up to expectation. This week we’ve had the infrastructure report and the mental health report. $1.9 billion they cried, and for what? Well, the report tells us not much.

The Auckland report. Dysfunction that’s led to the place being the way it is. The literacy report where nearly half kids don’t go to school regularly, and 20 percent of 15-year-olds can’t even read.

It’s a shockingly poor state of affairs.

No one gets it perfect, obviously, but in a single week we have a shelf full of reminders that who we should be is not even close to the reality of what we are. – Mike Hosking

ACADEMIC FREEDOM is one of those “public goods” that most people seldom question. Even in New Zealand, a country not especially hospitable to intellectuals of any sort, academics are seldom identified as persons in need of official restraint. New Zealanders prefer to joke about the otherworldliness and impracticality of academic research – especially in the social sciences and liberal arts. That is to say, they used to joke about it. Over the last few years academics have given ordinary New Zealanders small cause for laughter.

Indeed, it has become increasingly clear to the Free Speech Union, along with many other advocates of freedom of expression, that the place where academic freedom is most at risk is, paradoxically, academia itself. – Chris Trotter

While paying lip-service to the principle of academic freedom, New Zealand’s university authorities have begun to hedge it around with all manner of restrictions. The pursuit of research subjects and/or the articulation of ideas capable of inflicting “harm” on other staff and students has become decidedly “career-limiting”. – Chris Trotter

The simple truth of the matter is that freedom is always and everywhere indivisible. Suppress it in our universities and its suppression elsewhere will soon follow. Those who do not subscribe to freedom have no place in our halls of learning – or anywhere else enlightened human values are cherished. – Chris Trotter

– Verity Johnson

I know with inflation and Ukraine it’s not entirely their fault. But they can’t ignore the fact that they ascended to the Beehive trumpeting their emphasis on wellbeing, like archangels with organic body-oil side hustles. They filled us with hope about wellness budgets and affordable living … and now this.

And refusing to call it a crisis just looks like they’re trying to gloss over this, so they don’t look so guilty. Not to mention it’s especially galling to have your frustration ignored by a Government who has been hammering on about kindness like a Care Bear with a jackhammer.

So now, as we come out of Covid, we’re looking to peacetime governance. And we’re faced with the underwhelming choice of staying in a loveless marriage – or cheating with Luxon. This is about as grim as $4.50 for one piece of broccoli.

But it’s true, you can’t stay in a relationship out of gratitude for the past. You have to actually have hope and faith in their future. And I don’t know if I do any more with Labour. – Verity Johnson

 As an intensive care doctor of 20 years I considered the concept of an intensive care to be immutable but now this turned out to not be so.

The inconvenient truth of their scarcity could be at least partially addressed by altering the definition.

A bed is a piece of furniture, incapable of providing any form of care, never mind intensively. To do so it needs a specialist intensive care nurse standing next to it 24 hours a day. This requires five to six intensive care nurses per bed as, inconveniently, they also want to sleep, have families, and not live in a hospital.

Caring intensively also requires equipment, drugs, doctors, a large array of allied health professionals (physiotherapists, pharmacists, radiographers etc) cleaners and administration staff. It costs around NZ$1.5m (£750,000) a year to keep one intensive care bed open, with the availability of intensive care nurses being the rate-limiting step. As the world realised we didn’t have enough, they became one of the most valuable (but not valued) people in healthcare. By necessity, at wave peak, their expertise was diluted. Rather than the optimal 1:1 ratio of critically ill patients to expert nurses, team structures “allowed” them to supervise others with little or no intensive care experience (with an entirely predictable effect on mortality). This may be politically appealing but, as a professor of intensive care medicine at Cambridge University commented, “no one sane would suggest this was the appropriate planning strategy for Covid if you had the opportunity to do otherwise”. – Alex Psirides

The accusation of bullying therefore left me confused but then a light went on in my head.

Of course! Bullying is when you say something with which someone else disagrees. – Gavin Ellis

I have been the recipient of a clear message that what I had to say has no value because it did not accord with the views of (I am led to assume) a majority, and I was out of touch with ‘reality’ because I conformed to unacceptable stereotypes. If that was insufficient to establish my unworthiness, I was also deemed to no longer be “a working journalist”.

Those stereotypes were based on assumptions that those over a certain age were stuck in the past, that being Pākeha (“white”) imbues an unassailable sense of social and cultural superiority, and that males are inherently domineering and dismissive. No longer being part of a newsroom assumed I knew nothing of “today’s journalism”.- Gavin Ellis

It is naive to think that the past has no relevance to what we do today. As for journalism, it is downright dangerous to think that the digital age – in which the stereotypers grew up – swept away all that went before and reinvented it.

Yes, there are aspects of journalism that are a moving feast. They reflect society’s own changes and are carried along by them. Take language: Although we have been converting nouns to verbs for centuries, ‘to medal’ or ‘to podium’ would have had the sub-editors of my youth in a state of life-threatening apoplexy. – Gavin Ellis

What worried me was the willingness to bring down a shutter on discussion that interfered with a particular world view.

That isn’t a generational phenomenon limited to millennials and Gen Zers. It is a current affliction that spans all demographics and many socio-political beliefs.  – Gavin Ellis

Journalists should have no part of that sort of thinking. Yet I fear this generation of journalists is complicit in some of it.

Matters dealing with race, gender (old men excepted), image and identity are handled with kid gloves. Debate on some subjects – such as the mātauranga Māori letter to the Listener signed by seven scientists – has become one-sided. ‘Old-fashioned’ views have no validity. We can only guess at what subjects get no exposure at all. – Gavin Ellis

Limits of space and time and the testing of stories against sets of (often uncodified) news values have always determined that some stories make in into print or on air and others do not.

There are also limits to what the New York Times’ masthead describes as “all the news that’s fit to print”. Outside those limits are such things as hate speech but some sections of the boundary must be contestable in order to prevent their use to stifle legitimate debate. Nevertheless, any redrawing of that boundary must be done collectively, carefully, and conservatively if society is to preserve a meaningful public sphere. Without a shadow of doubt, it should not be an amorphous and arbitrary process but I fear it is heading that way. – Gavin Ellis

Journalists should not use perceived majority views as some sort of selection yardstick. To do so risks falling into what German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann called a “spiral of silence” that stifles alternative opinion. The centrifugal force which accelerates the spiral of silence is fear of isolation and I wonder whether the prospect of falling victim to ‘cancel culture’ leads journalists – perhaps unconsciously – to become party to it.

We will be in trouble if journalists or media organisations start to condition their approach to the news by avoiding those things that might isolate them. It is a form of self-censorship that is little better than imposed constraints. And it, too, is a downward spiral. –  Gavin Ellis

 Populist authoritarian governments in eastern Europe, for example, use various coercive levers to keep media in line. It is another thing entirely to fall into line simply because one social trope or another determines the acceptability of a subject and limits or eliminates criticism of ‘protected’ topics.

Such acquiescence runs counter to what journalism should stand for and, in a perverse way, it takes us back almost 400 years to a time when presses were licenced to constrain what could be published. – Gavin Ellis

 I was not sure what to think of the pandemic when it struck, and am still not quite sure. Like many, I suspect, I find myself veering, or careening, from one opinion to another. Sometimes, I think that it is not so much the illness but the response to it that is the more damaging. At other times, I think that governments had little choice but to act as they did. On this subject, I lack fixed convictions. – Theodore Dalrymple

Where uncertainty is inevitable but the stakes are high, tempers are likely to flare and people to claim insights into the nature of things that they do not have. Humankind, said T. S. Eliot, cannot bear too much reality, but it also cannot bear too much uncertainty: humans then turn to conspiracy theories or cults to alleviate their sense of helplessness. That is why discussions of Covid so quickly become arguments: most people who are not sure of their ground make up for it by dogmatism. – Theodore Dalrymple

The disrespectful dialogue is reflective of real-life politics. Insults have replaced arguments in debate.– Andrea Vance

Politics has always been a nasty sport. But today it seems brutish. And what does all this toxicity achieve – apart from more ad dollars in the bank accounts of tech moguls? – Andrea Vance

Mainstream political reporting thrives on conflict. Protesting in dramatic and disruptive ways captures attention. There is no incentive to break out of incivility, to recalibrate politics. To be nice. – Andrea Vance

Personally, I believe you don’t need two systems to deliver public services, you need a single system that has enough innovation to target for people on the basis of need. – Christopher Luxon

Wherever you sit on fair pay agreements, if you support them or not, the timing of this legislation is wrong.  – Rachel Smalley

The government hasn’t read the room, and commentators who criticise the likes of Ardern and Robertson and say they don’t have real-world experience, will now throw their hands in the air and say “see? what did I tell you?! They are out of step with business.” – Rachel Smalley

Here are some of the questions the government should have asked… Will this improve wages? Will it drive productivity? Or, will the prospect of unions knocking on the door, potential arbitration… Will it drive already stretched businesses to the edge? Will it trigger job losses, a collapse in productivity, and will some of our SMEs fall over after two years of hanging on by their fingertips, trying to stay afloat and stay on top of the government’s requirements as it responded to COVID?

Did the government think about how businesses might perceive this? What it signals to me – and I’m sure it will be the same for many business owners – is that the government doesn’t trust kiwi businesses to do the right thing. The government doesn’t believe, without regulation, that businesses will look out for their employees. – Rachel Smalley

If you want to improve wages, the government needs to create an environment in which companies can be confident to invest. Confident to grow. Confident to employ people and reward performance. Confident that the government of the day understands that economies – more than ever right now – must be flexible and responsible, not heavily regulated.

Throughout the later part of our COVID response, businesses have struggled with the shackles of political over-reach and control. – Rachel Smalley

What’s happening to democracy in this country, let alone the promised transparency of this Government?

Labour is abusing its absolute power and it seems those opposing it are powerless to do anything about it because majority rules. – Barry Soper 

This goes beyond simply controlling the message. Like they say, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. – Barry Soper 

Unions are always likely to have a place as long as there are exploitative employers. But the business model will have to adapt to explicitly choose to be an ideological movement or be an employment services provider. Needing the Government to prop you up with enabling legislation, like the fair pay agreements, is not sustainable and makes you very susceptible to changes in Government. – Brigitte Morten 

 Unions will have a place in the future if they resist their collective urge to just cause labour shortages and instead focus on delivering policies that serve the country as a whole rather than those that are the lowest-performing. – Brigitte Morten 

With almost no debate, Labour has adopted a radical reinterpretation of the Treaty as a partnership to justify co-governance. With co-governance, there is no democratic accountability when half the power is held by those who do not have to answer to the electorate.

Co-governance was not in Labour’s manifesto. Labour ministers hid from its coalition partner He Puapua – a report that could result in co-governance being extended. Work on this radical document is continuing. – Richard Prebble

We do not need a new Treaty. The Treaty is fine as it was written in 1840. [In the English text version] there are just three articles: “Cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England absolutely and without reservation all the rights and powers of Sovereignty”; “guarantees … the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates, Forests, Fisheries and other properties”; and grants “all the Rights and Privileges of British Subjects”.

There is nothing about partnerships or being “a multi-ethnic-liberal democracy”.

As David Lange put it: “Did Queen Victoria for a moment think of forming a partnership with a number of thumb prints and 500 people?” – Richard Prebble

What the Treaty does say is still important today.

Sovereignty was ceded. Sovereignty is indivisible. The Crown is everyone as represented by the executive and the courts.

Property rights are guaranteed.

Citizenship grants the rights from the Magna Carta – no arbitrary taxation and the right to a fair trial with a jury.

Parliament is responsible for the present reinterpretation, and only Parliament can fix it.

Parliament has included in a number of laws the phrase “the principles of the Treaty”, without saying what those principles are. No MP thought that a court might say that a Treaty principle was a partnership. No court has. – Richard Prebble

Where Māori have a valid property claim, such as to some of our national parks, then co-governance is a pragmatic solution. It recognises the Māori property interest while maintaining the public interest in preserving the parks.

Labour ministers are now promoting co-governance on the basis that the Treaty is a partnership even where Māori have no property claim.

Māori interest in having access to health is the same as everyone.

As far as water is concerned, Māori only have an ownership interest as ratepayers in the dams, pipes, pumping stations and sewage plants. There is no case for co-governance. – Richard Prebble

Instead of a referendum, Act should campaign that Parliament legislate that the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi are those in the Treaty: namely, the Crown has sovereignty, the Crown guarantees property rights and everyone has the same rights of New Zealand citizenship.

When Parliament does that we can again repeat Governor Hobson’s words: “He iwi kotahi tātou: now we are one people”. – Richard Prebble

Will Smith walloping Chris Rock across the face live on international television was not a departure from Hollywood norms. In fact, the act was simply the entitlement and privilege of celebrity made manifest.  – Ani O’Brien

These, by and large, are people who are paid insane amounts of money to play dress up and pretend. Many of them have spent more time in rehab than they did at high school and yet they have the audacity to lecture the rest of us about life. 

The problem is that the echo chamber they are ensconced in is completely divorced from reality. Famous and wealthy, they buy into their own mythology. They forget that they are a mirage, a veneer. They are the sum of their most well-known characters to those who adore them and adulation as a result of fictional performance does not qualify someone to instruct the population on politics and morality.  – Ani O’Brien

Acting is without a doubt an art form – when done well. It is a skill and the very best actors should be acknowledged for their talent. But it is high time we stopped allowing actors to pretend they have the authority to ‘educate’ us on matters of importance.

Living in gated communities and with security entourages, many celebrities espouse social policies that they will never have to suffer the consequences of. Their pseudo-moralistic stances are profoundly ill-informed and deeply out of touch. – Ani O’Brien

Overpaid hired clowns do not know more about life than a single mother working as a nurse or a man who delivers packages and stacks shelves. Their bank balance does not qualify them to lecture on the environment, politics, and morality. Nor does the fact that people like to take photos with them.

At what point do we, those they may as well see as dollar signs, refuse to accept their fake profundity? If we all stop paying attention to their grandstanding will they stop? Does a celebrity preaching in a forest, with no one there to hear them, make a sound? – Ani O’Brien

History is a profoundly important subject, as well as being something that can provide an individual with an interest that endures over a lifetime. I read historical fiction and non-fiction for pleasure. Understanding where we come from and how we got here matters. – Damien Grant

Heading up the ministry’s document on the new curriculum is the statement: “If we want to shape Aotearoa New Zealand’s future, start with the past.” – Damien Grant

I congratulate the ministry on the transparency of their agenda, although the inclusion of this statement is more likely an indication of the author’s lack of anything approaching a classical education.

The programme shockingly misrepresents our nation’s past and is disturbingly one-dimensional.

In the document outlying the new curriculum, the local population is depicted living in some form of a bucolic harmony with each other and their natural environment, before the catastrophic and violent arrival of the Europeans. – Damien Grant

If we want to get students to seriously engage with our history, teach them about the battles, bloodshed and bravery, not “the ways different groups of people have lived and worked in this rohe have changed over time”. – Damien Grant

Because the ministry wants to use the past to shape the future, they are stripping everything from our history that has value and killing any prospect that our children will retain an interest in the topic.

There is no more evidence as to the banality of this interpretation of history that it excludes Te Rauparaha and includes Georgina Beyer.

Beyer is a significant historical figure in her own right and deserves a place in our collective history. She is magnificent and her story inspirational.

But if you are going to memory-hole a military leader who was compared by his contemporaries to Napoleon, well, you are not conducting history, you are re-inventing it. – Damien Grant

The most remarkable aspect of this version of New Zealand’s history is the exclusion of almost any topic that does not impact Māori. Everything is seen through this lens. What happened to Richard Pearse, Charles Upham and General Bernard Freyberg? – Damien Grant

There is a strong argument that we do not properly acknowledge the appalling treatment of the indigenous population of these islands by the colonial authorities.

I am in favour of bringing this failure to the attention to the next generation. It is a shameful aspect of our past and the consequences of it live with us today.

If the state wishes to address this by incorporating it into the national school curriculum, that is fine with me. I can get behind a bit of nation building.

But we should be honest about what is being done here. This is not, as the Prime Minister claims, our history. It is a selective part of it, and it appears to be driven by a desire to control how we move into the future. – Damien Grant

Our history has its roots in the migration from Hawaiki and the traditions and people who came on that journey.

It includes the cruelty and crimes committed by the colonial authorities against their treaty partners in the decades after 1840. But our history is more than that.

The New Zealand of today can also be traced to debates in the agoras of ancient Athens, in the marshlands of Wessex, the fields around Hastings in 1066 and the failings of King John.

We are a successor state to a remarkable empire and a proud sovereign nation with, inexplicably, the Union Jack still affixed to our flag.

This new history teaches our children none of that. It is not history at all. It is social engineering. – Damien Grant

Yet there are reasons for the decline in trust that should be blindingly obvious to anyone who is not suffering institutional capture from actually working for the mainstream media (or being entirely sympathetic to its approach to journalism).

The most obvious failure is that the mass media’s journalists and editors too often seem to not understand they need to reflect the important debates that are actually happening in society — including on social media — rather than only the ones they approve of. Or if they do cover contentious issues, not to present only one, approved side of the debate. – Graham Adams

As far as I can tell, no one in the media here has reported Lord Sebastian Coe’s warning that “gender cannot trump biology” when deciding whether transgender athletes should be allowed to compete alongside female contestants. Yet Lord Coe is eminently quotable as an influential two-time Olympic gold medallist and President of World Athletics. – Graham Adams

So here we are in 2022, in a liberal democracy, with a senior lawyer worrying that a court case of constitutional importance might not be covered in the media because journalists are afraid of being called racist or because they don’t want to offend the Government. – Graham Adams

It doesn’t help the mainstream media one little bit, of course, that the Government’s Public Interest Journalism Fund is providing $55 million over three years for a variety of projects and editorial staff positions — all under an agreement that successful applicants will commit to “Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to Māori as a Te Tiriti partner”. Consequently, any failure to comprehensively cover the Water Users’ Group case will be widely interpreted as evidence the media has been bought.

Given that public money with such strings attached is now firmly embedded throughout the mainstream media, the only way it can shrug off that widespread perception is to show that it is, indeed, reporting “without fear or favour”.

Otherwise, its apparent partisanship will kill it, as social media and alternative news sites continue eating its lunch in great bites. – Graham Adams

Personally, I believe you don’t need two systems to deliver public services, you need a single system that has enough innovation to target for people on the basis of need. – Christopher Luxon

None of the demands of the new left stray from the culture into the material, they are all about flags, statues, word changes, date changes, forced declarations and compelled pronoun announcements, all shielding privilege in virtue. The new green movement’s aim to consolidate international power to control energy production doesn’t seem at all suspicious to the new lefties, I can tell you the old left would have had some bells going off.  – Edie Wyatt

This agenda to create an elite New Zealand ethnic group is racist, its undemocratic, its destructive, it has no mandate from the people and its directly opposed to the true and communicated intent of Treaty, so to stand against it is a 100% morally defendable position, so stand and do whatever you can, no matter how little. – John Franklin

I was not much surprised after the continual fanatical research by the Thought Police, to read that the Declaration of Independence being displayed at the National Archives in Washington has now attracted a ‘trigger warning’ on one of the original copies. How could we even hope that those resounding words: ‘ We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’  would be acceptable in these days of endless virtuous Thought Correction. – Valerie Davies

Liberal thinking, modern concepts of liberty, equality, and diversity, whether in terms of race or gender, were not common in previous ages, so most of the great classics, though they often helped to push the boundaries of thought in all these things, are doomed, I fear.

Literature, described by one writer, as the ‘logbook of the human race,’ will struggle to exist if the woke mobs have their say – and history and theories that enlighten and educate and shift our thought processes, and initiate new paradigms. The creativity of uncensored minds is what leads  civilisation and lifts it to greater heights..

Power corrupts, and the power of virtue signallers of all colours seems to have brought about the disgrace and cancelling of numerous forward looking thinkers, of established and reputable writers like JK Rowling, and even of ordinary people who posses the common sense to see things in  perspective and the courage to speak out, and who lose their jobs and reputations as a result of this persecution. – Valerie Davies

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this sort of censorship is the way employees of publishers now seem to hold the upper hand, and refuse to work if they don’t like the content of a book, so that publishers and writers are intimidated. They have become fearful of publishing or writing any book which doesn’t conform to the guidelines of the new groups who demand that we all think like they do.  – Valerie Davies

Not only does this sort of policing of our minds and thoughts have terrible similarities both with the Nazi era, and the unforgivable brain washing of the Russian population during this latest unspeakable war, but it also limits the creativity and diversity of thought by which a society itself expands its perceptions, and explores the further reaches of thought and creativity, and the possibilities of the human spirit.

It’s called gaslighting when a person undermines the feelings of another person, making them feel that their feelings have no validity and don’t matter. What is happening to our history, to our literature, to our culture, is another form of gaslighting, which can also be described as bullying. – Valerie Davies

I wish it was different, I wish we had a better leadership, I wish we had more hope and more optimism, and I wish we had people running this place that were just a little bit in touch with the real world. – Mike Hosking

One of the criticisms this government faces — and has faced often — is that there is little substance to their policies and at times, little rationale for their decision-making.

There is certainly very little transparency in terms of what’s shaping their thinking, what the intended outcome is, and why they’ve have taken the position they have.  – Rachel Smalley

Forcing local councils into toothless submission via far-reaching national policy directives and rushed legislative change is becoming a familiar refrain. – Mike Yardley

Language is central in the culture wars and if you invalidate the words that enable people to articulate their concerns, you strip them of an essential weapon. By characterising users of terms such as “woke” and “political correctness” as alarmist, out of touch and jumping at their own shadows, the neo-Marxist Left seeks to minimise the implications of its radical agenda. The perception that New Zealand democracy is being systematically dismantled as part of a grand ideological project can then be presented as a figment of fevered right-wing imaginations.

Conservative New Zealanders tend to be reticent at the best of times, and are even more likely to keep their views to themselves if they fear being ridiculed for using the wrong words.  – Karl du Fresne

The lesson that arises, which is of acute relevance to the co-governance debate, is that reasonable public consideration of important issues will not take place if it is constrained by a framework constructed by politicians. All that ensures is that the outcome of any such consultation is shaped and ultimately decided according to the partisan political lines dominant at the time. – Peter Dunne

The job of the fourth estate is not to take a position and tell anyone what to believe; it is to ask questions and report the answers, and investigate as far as possible and report evidence that may show whether those answers are truthful and comprehensive.

In other words, journalists are not endowed with special powers of insight by dint of their profession – though some may be uncommonly perceptive – and they should not be expected to take either a particularly antagonistic or obsequious stance in order to be seen to be doing their job well. – Andrew Barnes

When people feel afraid, when downtowns are no-go zones when police aren’t there to be seen when Kāinga Ora evicts no one despite the threats to blow you up or burn your house down when you curtail your lifestyle because of fear, and perhaps worst of all when your Government fails to accept any of it is true, just how long can you go rejecting the premise of the question before you are rejecting it from the opposition benches? – Mike Hosking

For the record, I was a lousy public servant. Truly. I was the worst of the worst. I was eternally frustrated by the glacial pace of progress, the bureaucracy, the obsession with tiers and titles, a sector-wide fear of ministers, the Wellington-centric view of New Zealand, and the level of waste. – Rachel Smalley

This week, I wondered if the Government had learned anything from KiwiBuild.

Some of its decision-making continues to feel hasty, off-the-cuff, and lacking in strategy and substance. Remember the public sector pay-freeze in the middle of a pandemic? The policy around hate speech that neither Kris Faafoi nor Jacinda Ardern could articulate? The bungled border decisions that left Kiwis stranded overseas? And the little-scrutinised major health reforms announced almost a year ago. – Rachel Smalley

The July deadline is fast approaching and the CEOs of the country’s 20 DHBs have limited insight into what August will look like. In fact, Health NZ is yet to confirm an operating model.

It feels like KiwiBuild all over again. Health NZ began with a big announcement, but there is little substance behind it. The Ministry of Housing & Urban Development couldn’t wait to offload KiwiBuild to Kāinga Ora to manage, and Bloomfield may have timed his exit to avoid having to deal with the inevitable Health NZ mess.

The origins of major reform may lie with ideology, but they must be built on strategy and ‘real world’ thinking. – Rachel Smalley

At universities there has been a strong trend towards what is called “no platforming”, a concept that argues “platforms” shouldn’t be provided for harmful or wrong ideas and debates. It’s essentially the concept of “banning” bad ideas from being available. This concept has led to several speakers and ideas being kept off New Zealand campuses. Not only that, but it has also sent a strong message to academics about the possibility of being “called out” or marginalised if they don’t conform to orthodox views. – Bryce Edwards

In a sense, the left has swung from one extreme in the 20th century, when everything was about economics and class (and important issues around gender and ethnicity were not given their due focus) to one where the focus is much more on culturalist and identity politics. – Bryce Edwards

The modern version of the left – or the “liberal left” – has different ways of pursuing political change. Largely it’s an elite, top-down model of politics, reflective of the left being made up of the highly educated stratum of society. They confidently believe that they know best.

This elite leftwing approach is very compatible with a more censorious approach to politics and that partly explains the authoritarian impulses we are seeing today. – Bryce Edwards

The rise of “culture wars” has been incredibly important for shaping the political atmosphere we are currently in. Rather than debate and discussion, or finding a middle ground, it’s more polarising – with both conservatives and liberals focusing more on personalities. For example, from the left we see widespread labelling of opponents as racists or sexists. There is now a sneering tendency on the left – especially at those who are seen as socially backward. – Bryce Edwards

One logical consequence for many on the left is to take an approach of “language policing” and concern for “cultural etiquette”, in an almost Victorian way. Again, this is topsy-turvy – it used to be the conservative or rightwing side of politics that was concerned with policing people’s behaviour, and looking down on the less educated and enlightened.

The contemporary left has a mistrust in the ability of society to make the right decisions or to understand the world. In an elitist way, many on the progressive side of politics view the public as being ignorant or lacking enlightenment. Hence, the view of gender or ethnic inequality or oppression is often understood as something to do with personal behaviour and “bad ideas” (racism, sexism, homophobia) – rather than a fundamental part of how our society is structured. – Bryce Edwards

I think what people would say about me is that I play politics like I played sport.

I mean when I got the ball in rugby, I ran it up the guts. That’s the truth. Because for me if you want to achieve something you look at the best route possible and for me it has always been from A to B. – Louisa Wall

The natural consequence of an ideology that holds the group, not the individual, as the standard of value, is complete disregard for the rights of individuals. If what really matters is the Russian state, who cares if some Ukrainian civilians are sacrificed for that ideal? This sounds callous and brutish to Western ears, precisely because Western culture places great importance on the value of the individual’s life. When that standard of value is lost—when the state or the group replaces it—the door is opened to unthinkable depths of inhumanity. – Thomas Walker-Werth

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in an address to the Russian people that he does not believe the invasion is being perpetrated in their name, echoing the view expressed by many that Putin is acting against the values of Russian people. However, although Putin is clearly a madman, his actions are enabled by a philosophy that has as thoroughly permeated Russia today as it had Germany in the 1930s. This truth is borne out in the reaction of many Russian people to the invasion of Ukraine: According to independent polling agencies cited by Forbes.com and other Western sources, Putin’s approval ratings have increased sharply since the war began.¹⁴ Many Russian people accept the government’s “justification” for the invasion.¹⁵ There are some valiant individuals who resist, and they deserve enormous credit, as do those Russian soldiers who defect or refuse to obey orders to murder civilians. But they are a small minority.

What is happening now in Ukraine is a kind of barbarism many in the West thought was consigned to history. But the collectivism that led to the murder and brutalization of millions upon millions of people in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and numerous other collectivist tyrannies during the 20th century, is still alive and capable of inflicting gruesome harm on millions of innocent people.

The only antidote to collectivism is a principled defense of the very ideas Putin opposes: individualism and individual rights. That is what was missing in 1930s Germany, and that is what is missing in Russia and many other countries today. Nationalist parties inspired by Dugin have made significant electoral gains in relatively free European countries such as France and Germany.¹⁶ Collectivist ideology even underpins policies of both major American political parties. It will lead to ever more human suffering—until and unless people come to understand and embrace individualism and individual rights. – Thomas Walker-Werth

Even Dr Bloomfield appears reluctant to join the Prime Minister on stage for a repeat of their hit 2020 performances.

Back then it seemed to matter. Now it has the ring of a Culture Club farewell tour playing to shambolic dive bars while still dreaming of the packed stadiums of yesteryear. – Damien Grant

This administration has the feeling of a dead-man-walking. New Zealand has tuned out. Money, interest and attention has now turned towards Messrs Luxon and Seymour, as there is now a sense of inevitability about a change of government.

Here is my take: Outside of Covid, this administration has a terrible record. Inequality, if you care about that metric, has deteriorated. The only way a working family can now obtain a house is through inheritance. We are toiling longer, with unemployment having fallen, but the wages being earned are worth less thanks to inflation.

Few things better define the Ardern government than the Auckland Harbour cycle path. Announced with great fanfare then quietly forgotten. KiwiBuild, the Provincial Growth Fund, transparency, mental health funding and even the entire Well-Being budget framework have all fallen over. – Damien Grant

The poor now struggle to get credit, thanks to changes to the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act. The poor now have to pay more for their petrol cars, thanks to the tax on dirty petrol cars. The poor now struggle to cover the cost of groceries as prices rise faster than wages, thanks in part to changes to the mandate of the Reserve Bank away from a single focus on inflation.

Other than increasing benefits at nearly the rate of inflation, the Ardern Government has achieved close to nothing outside of Covid, and in many key areas the welfare of Kiwis has fallen. – Damien Grant

Not all of this is Ardern’s fault. Her agenda was derailed by the pandemic and the paucity of competence within her caucus from which to draw talent. There are only so many portfolios you can force onto Chris Hipkins before he loses focus and begins to bait pregnant journalists trapped in Kabul.

There are still a few big projects on the books. The Fair Pay Agreements and unemployment insurance may become law by the next election, but if the past performance is any guide these reforms will not be well-designed and be implemented badly. – Damien Grant

Never, in the history of the world, have we lived in more generally inclusive and accepting societies than those that make up the West nowadays. That is not to say things are perfect and we should consider the job of promoting equality and fairness done. However, it seems the further we have progressed, the more ardently some quarters of our society declare evil to be found everywhere.

Instead of ‘reds under the bed’, these zealots find racists in the pantry, homophobes in between the couch cushions, transphobes in the bedside drawer, and misogynists under the rug. Again, I am not disputing that there are still the odd ‘phobes’ or bigots lurking unwanted, but the insistence that there is an epidemic of these uncouth kinds of folk runs the risk of manifesting them into existence. – Ani O’Brien

Much of New Zealand lives in incredibly multicultural communities – Wellington to a lesser extent and maybe that’s why bureaucrats are some of the worst offenders when it comes to imagining racists.

We, of all backgrounds, attend kindy together, then school. We are friends, neighbours, lovers, life partners, parents, family, and whanau. We cheer for the same sports teams, despair at the same petrol prices, and often share aspects of the same Kiwi sense of humour.

But despite our integrated, though at times flawed, society there are those who will have you believe that every white New Zealander harbours hatred towards New Zealanders of other ethnic backgrounds and especially Māori. – Ani O’Brien

The reductive view these privileged theorists take paints the poorest, drug-addled beggar on the street as the oppressor of a successful and wealthy businessperson if only the beggar is white and the businessperson is not.Their concept of racial privilege is so lacking in nuance that a kid who has his shoes and raincoat supplied by a charity and is fed at school will be taught by his teacher that he is privileged over some of his more fortunate classmates because he is white and they are not.

This constant placing of people in diametrically opposite camps based on race is a recipe not for improved cohesion and furthering equality. It is a sure way to increase divisiveness and create distrust and animosity between groups of people.

When already marginalised people are told constantly that they are “bad” because of the colour of their skin, or that people like them need to “sit down and shut up”, and that they have less claim to their country of birth than the bloke next door, they begin to see themselves as outsiders.

And, when the criteria for being a ‘racist’ or a ‘white supremacist’ is so diluted that accusations are flung about as frequently and as flippantly as they currently are, the accused begin to be a larger and larger group. – Ani O’Brien

In this context, a white identity group is being formed not by those it is being imposed on, but by the mostly white, educated, ‘liberals’ who somehow exclude themselves from the characterisations they make about other white people as entitled, greedy, mean, ignorant, privileged, and, of course, racist.

White identity is being manifested by those who most decry it.

People who have always been more invested in a ‘Kiwi Identity’ untethered to race, now find themselves being repeatedly told that they cannot understand their fellow countrymen and women because they are racially different. People who have heartily taken part in the haka and sung Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi at the top of their lungs are now self-conscious and reluctant to attempt te Reo Māori for fear of being accused of appropriation or disrespect. – Ani O’Brien

White New Zealanders are being told “you stay over there in your lane”, while Māori are told “look at those guys over there – they’re racist and hate you”, and New Zealanders of all other races and ethnicities wonder ‘where do we fit into this dysfunctional situation?’

Division is being driven from the top. Government agencies, academia, media, and our education system are all complicit in dreaming into reality a toxic ‘white identity’ that imposes the very worst of fringe extremism on a population that still makes up the majority of New Zealanders. – Ani O’Brien

There is a glorification of making white New Zealanders uncomfortable as if that in itself is an acceptable and entertaining pastime by those at the top. It is inevitably white people with more institutional and economic power sneering at white people with much less than them. One should, in my opinion, rightly be made uncomfortable if they are racist, but often the shaming that happens is gratuitous and not in the pursuit of bringing an end to genuine racism.

Likewise, it seems to be a small group of wealthy, highly educated Māori who are driving the culture war from their end. Your average Māori, just like your average white New Zealander, is uninterested in ‘intersectional politics’ and reckons everyone should just get a fair go regardless of race. They certainly do not profit from the divisiveness like those who get air time and academic papers out of it. 

It is unlikely that the behaviours driving the manifestation of white identity are going to change anytime soon. The establishment white ‘liberals’ are too drunk on the power of denigrating ‘lower’ white people and promoting their own exceptionalism. They will continue to drive wedges between communities that otherwise live pretty harmoniously.

As with much of the antagonism in the culture wars, the accusation of racism is largely a weapon wielded by the powerful and fortunate against those who they see as the great unwashed and uneducated masses. They cancel others with relative power in order to retain control of the narrative and prevent the empowerment of the majority. Cancellations are punishments for deviating from the dominant discourse, but they are also warnings; ritualistic public shamings intended to make anyone who would be inclined to challenge norms, think twice.

There are ultimately more of us who wish to live peacefully in our multicultural country than those who want to pit us against each other. We can choose not to be afraid of the tactics used to make us comply. We can refuse to allow the toxic ‘White Identity’, they are attempting to manifest, to take hold. We should celebrate our shared values and manifest instead a Kiwi Identity that we can all be proud of. – Ani O’Brien

When I heard Ukraine’s President Zelensky arguing for a fundamental overhaul of the United Nations, and especially of the Security Council, I recalled our greatest New Zealand Prime Minister and World War Two leader, Peter Fraser. He envisaged just the sort of issue we face today with Russia’s war on Ukraine. Old Peter, a wily, highly intelligent Scotsman, was one of the world’s few prime ministers to attend the San Francisco conference in 1945 that set up the rules for a postwar body to monitor the peace. With support from nearly all the smaller countries represented at the conference, Fraser objected strenuously to the great power veto that enabled any of the five victorious powers – the US, Britain, France, Russia and China – to block any substantive move the Security Council might want to take in the event of a breach of the UN Charter, even if all other countries favoured action. Peter Fraser pointed out that by allowing a veto, one of the five might behave as it pleased, and then act as judge and jury in its own cause. He was right. That’s exactly what has happened several times since 1945. The US has done it and Russia much more often. The veto is why today the United Nations is such a toothless tiger. It is unable to protect Ukraine, one of its member states, from the ruthless onslaught from neighboring Russia. The recent motion to condemn Russia passed the Security Council with a significant majority. Several Security Council members abstained from voting or absented themselves, but Russia exercised its veto, thereby preventing what should have resulted in international punishment, with Russia having to pay reparations for the damage it has done. – Michael Bassett

Wise heads are needed to work out some way of dealing with nuclear blackmail. Over Cuba in 1962 the United States stared Russia down and Nikita Khruschev blinked rather than take responsibility for blowing up the world. This time the US couldn’t be sufficiently sure that Putin wouldn’t push the nuclear button and blow everything up. The problem with high level threats is that one has to presume that both the offenders and the victims are capable of making rational decisions. With modern Russia, this has always been in doubt. Putin has never produced any rational explanation for the invasion he kept denying he intended, and then suddenly launched. There is considerable speculation that after 22 years in office he’s been removed from reality for too long. In his search for some kind of legitimacy for the corruption and looting that he and his oligarch mates have undertaken within Russia he’s become obsessed with Russian Orthodox Christianity which so far has placed a firm stamp of approval on his years in office. Put simply, he seems to have lost it, and to be beyond reason.

If this is so, it raises a further issue that Peter Fraser and the founders of the United Nations hoped they wouldn’t face again once that Adolf Hitler was dead: how to deal with a madman possessed of the wherewithal to blow up the world. In the meantime, a concerted effort to reform the Security Council and remove the veto powers has become urgent. President Zelensky is right. – Michael Bassett

To call a belief a myth is usually to denigrate it, though there are beneficial myths as there are noble lies. There’s no doubt that myths can be harmful, however, for they can, and often do, obstruct critical thought.

In Britain, the mythology of the National Health Service (NHS), which now manages to combine the baleful characteristics of Stalinist administration with pork barrel politics, has obstructed necessary reform for decades. Because of the mythology, the NHS is the nearest to a religion that the country comes, according to Nigel Lawson, the second-most powerful British politician during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Even the Iron Lady feared to reform it fundamentally. It was much more difficult for her than confronting the Soviet Union. – Theodore Dalrymple

It’s therefore difficult to know how representative of the whole any scandal is. But the institution is coated in a kind of Teflon, to which no scandal can stick.

And yet everyone knows that it’s better to be ill in almost any European country than in Britain. The outcomes of various diseases—heart attacks or cancer, for example—are worse in Britain than elsewhere. When the NHS was established, in 1948, British life expectancy was six years higher than France’s. Now it’s two or three years lower. Life expectancy is not determined by health care alone, of course, but the government report that led to the establishment of the NHS stated that health care in Britain was superior to that in most of the rest of Europe. No one would claim that any longer.  – Theodore Dalrymple

I had never heard of a colour-coordinated library. I stood looking at her in total disbelief. After about 20 seconds of stunned silence I managed to blurt out, “Well, my books have to be read! I will not sell any of my books just to be put in a fake library and forgotten. You can’t buy any of these books!” – Ruth Shaw

When I hold one of my mother’s books I remember her; I touch the same page she touched, I read the same words she read. Books collected over many years become part of the family. They have been loved, read and re-read, and have often travelled around the world. They live in silence for years in a family home bearing witness to many special occasions, bringing the reader joy and sometimes tears. – Ruth Shaw

This underlines a striking trend in recent years for the mainstream media in New Zealand to align themselves consciously and deliberately with causes that they must know alienate a large proportion of their readers, viewers and listeners. Call it slow-motion suicide.

The bigger picture is that the media have abandoned their traditional role of trying to reflect the society they purport to serve in favour of advocating on behalf of divisive and often extremist minority causes. By doing so they create a perception of New Zealand not as a cohesive, stable society made up of diverse groups with vital interests in common, but as one characterised by aggrieved minorities whose interests are fundamentally incompatible with those of a callously indifferent (or worse, deliberately oppressive) majority.

Media outlets that once tried conscientiously to provide a platform for a range of opinions and ideologies now unashamedly attack, or just as insidiously ignore, views and beliefs that run counter to the narrative favoured by the leftist cabal that controls the institutions of power. The most obvious example is the collective undertaking by major media organisations to ignore any opinion, including those of distinguished scientists, that runs counter to the “approved” narrative on climate change or the effectiveness of policies intended to ameliorate it.

Such flagrant suppression of news would have been unthinkable not long ago. Now it’s official editorial policy.- Karl du Fresne

As an occupational group, journalists have long tended to lean to the left. Earlier generations of reporters countered this by restraining their natural impulses, knowing that media credibility hinged on public confidence that events and issues would be covered fairly, accurately and impartially. That professional discipline is long gone, along with the moderating influence exercised by editors who insisted on the now highly unfashionable principle of objectivity.

We are bombarded daily with politically slanted content masquerading as trustworthy and authoritative reportage. A recent example was an episode of the New Zealand Herald’s newly launched podcast The Front Page (which claims to “go behind the headlines” and ask “hard-hitting questions”), in which Herald journalists Damien Venuto and Georgina Campbell purported to examine the Three Waters project without once mentioning its most contentious feature – namely, the proposal for 50/50 co-governance with iwi.

“High-quality, trusted” coverage as promised by Herald managing editor Shayne Currie? It’s time to revive the Tui billboards, surely. – Karl du Fresne

The war immediately combined the personal and public. And this is probably the fatal mistake of the tyrant who attacked us. We are all Ukrainians first, and then everything else. He wanted to divide us, to shatter us, to provoke internal confrontation, but it is impossible to do this with Ukrainians. When one of us is tortured, raped, or killed, we feel that we all are being tortured, raped, or killed. We do not need propaganda to feel civic consciousness, and to resist. It is this personal anger and pain, which we all feel, that instantly activates the thirst to act, to resist aggression, to defend our freedom. Everyone does this the way they can: Soldiers with weapons in their hands, teachers by continuing to teach, doctors by conducting complex surgeries under attacks. All have become volunteers—artists, restaurateurs, hairdressers—as barbarians try to take over our country. I’ve seen this raise the deepest patriotic feelings in our children. Not only my children, but all the children of Ukraine. They will grow up to be patriots and defenders of their homeland. – Olena Zelenska

Blocked, destroyed Mariupol is our terrible pain. That continues. And the Kyiv region has become horrible—that’s what we’ve seen as the Russian army has retreated. The world has learned the name Bucha. This is one of the once-beautiful towns near the capital—but the same horrors can be seen in dozens of villages and towns in Kyiv region. People killed on the street. Not military—civilians! Graves near playgrounds. I can’t even describe it. It makes me speechless. But it is necessary to look at it.

I hope we are not the only ones who see the message Russia is sending. This message is not only addressed to us. This is their message to the world! This could be what happens to any country that Russia does not like. – Olena Zelenska

The democratic world must be united and give a tough response, thus showing that in the twenty-first century there is no place for killing civilians and encroaching on foreign territory. – Olena Zelenska

The main thing is not to get used to the war—not to turn it into statistics. Continue going to protests, continue to demand that your governments take action. Ukrainians are the same as you, but just over a month ago, our lives changed radically. Ukrainians did not want to leave their homes. But so often they did not have homes left. – Olena Zelenska

My family—just like every Ukrainian—and my compatriots: incredible people who organized to help the army and help each other. Now all Ukrainians are the army. Everyone does what they can. There are stories about grandmothers who bake bread for the army just because they feel this call. They want to bring victory closer.

That is what Ukrainians are like. We all hope for them. We hope for ourselves. – Olena Zelenska

Change in linguistic usage is normal, and it can either add to or detract from language’s expressive power. It’s much more likely to be sinister when it’s directed by some organization acting in an official or public capacity than when it arises spontaneously from the population at large.

Directed change in linguistic usage is usually done in pursuit of some practical or ideological end, acknowledged or unacknowledged—or both. – Theodore Dalrymple

Why is there this drive to exculpate people totally from their own situation, if that situation is in some way undesirable or worse?

First, there’s the desire for power by those who see their fellow beings as pure victims, that is to say, as inanimate objects acted upon but not acting. But I don’t think that this is the whole explanation.

Another part of the explanation is the debased secularization of Christian ethics. Christian ethics enjoin us to forgive our enemies, to love others as oneself, and to be charitable toward the unfortunate. But the secularized version of these ethics omits one important aspect, namely that we’re all sinners in need of mercy. In the secularized version of Christian ethics, there’s no notion of sin, at least not in victims: Only perpetrators, such as commercial interests and governments, can sin in the new revised version. – Theodore Dalrymple

In the older view, a Christian could—and, in fact, should—recognize the sinfulness of every person, including the very fat, but at the same time attempt to be compassionate toward him. For essentially he, the Christian, was in the same boat, if not necessarily with regard to the same sin—but he was a sinner of some kind or another.

Again, it isn’t the case that Christians always practiced what they preached or should have preached. Far from it: They can be as censorious, cruel, punitive, and sadistic as anyone else. But at least, in theory, their belief or doctrine allows them the possibility of recognizing both a person’s sinful part in bringing about his own bad situation and being compassionate toward him. – Theodore Dalrymple

 It wants to be compassionate toward those who suffer. But because it hangs on to Christian ethics with the concept of sin removed, that turns almost everyone, including the readers of this, into inanimate objects, with all the potential for a totalitarian dictatorship and abuse that such a worldview inevitably implies. – Theodore Dalrymple

Why do we feature car or motorbike racing as though it is sensible to drive very fast to nowhere in particular, or simply round and round to get back to where we started? – Jacqueline Rowarth

Those of us who want our science free of ideology can only stand by helplessly as we watch physics, chemistry, and biology crumble from within as the termites of Wokeism nibble away. I once thought that scientists, whom I presumed would be less concerned than humanities professors with ideological pollution (after all, we do have some objective facts to argue about), would be largely immune to Wokeism.

I was wrong, of course. It turns out that scientists are human beings after all, and with that goes the desire for the approbation of one’s peers and of society.  And you don’t get that if you’re deemed a racist. You can even be criticized from holding yourself away from the fray, preferring to do science than engage in social engineering. (Remember, Kendi-an doctrine says that if you’re not an actively working anti-racist, you’re a racist.) – Jerry Coyne

And everybody knows, though few dare to say it, that what’s happening is the erosion of the meritocratic aspects of science, replacing them with standards of social justice determined by a small group of “progressive” people on the Left. Further, the less that merit is considered and used as a fundamental tenet of science, the slower science will progress. But I suppose the proponents of injecting Wokeism into science would say “merit is an outdated criterion; what we really need is equity.” Perhaps, but the effort is all directed at calling present science riddled with “structural racism.” And that’s not true. – Jerry Coyne

Incitement to psychological fragility is one of the most important enemies of freedom today, especially where the taking of offence requires no justification and confers certain moral rights automatically, including those of censorship, upon the offended. Anyone who does not compassionate the offended compounds the supposed reason for his or her having taken offence in the first place. Moreover, taking offence is the highest proof of that most sterling of all human characteristics, vulnerability. Only the insensitive and hard-hearted lack vulnerability.

To increase people’s vulnerability is thus to improve their character. As it happens, it also creates job opportunities, for example those of so-called sensitivity readers, those youngish women, educated in the humanities, who read books for publishers in order to pre-empt any offence that readers might take. Without people primed and ready to take offence, where would they be?

Of course, only certain types or categories of people must be protected from offence; others may be offended with impunity, indeed it is a duty and a pleasure to do so.- Anthony Daniels 

The more people are protected from that against which they might take offence, the more hypersensitive and easily offended they become, so the more protection they need. Sensitivity reading is a job for life.

It is therefore important to seize all possible occasions to emphasise the fragility of the human psyche.  – Anthony Daniels 

Now I am myself somewhat prudish by nature, especially in the matter of bad language. I think it should be kept in reserve and brought out only on very important or special occasions. If used all the time, it has no real impact and is inexpressive. English is rather impoverished when it comes to bad language and so, apart from being bad in the moral sense, it is bad in point of monotony and uninventiveness. I am told that by comparison Hungarian, for example, is rich in expletives and the like, and it is possible to swear and insult in Hungarian for minutes on end without repetition. – Anthony Daniels 

I regret very much the resort to bad language in Anglophone life. In England, the rapid increase in its daily use is almost exactly datable, back to the time when the highly superior theatre critic Kenneth Tynan first pronounced a certain word on BBC television, thinking thereby that he was liberating his fellow-countrymen from the terrible chains of respectability. It is sometimes claimed that the Irish writer Brendan Behan had used it before him, but he was so drunk at the time, and his speech so slurred and incoherent, that nobody could quite catch what he said.

Less than fifty years later, it was more or less compulsory for anyone who wanted to be taken seriously to use the word constantly. – Anthony Daniels 

Warnings that assume that we are a population of histrionic or hysterical personality disorders are common these days.  – Anthony Daniels 

At whom, then, was the warning aimed? Perhaps this is the wrong question: it should be, “What was the purpose of the warning?”

I think it was to instil in the population the idea that there are large numbers of delicate people—adults—in our society who need protection the way that minors were once thought to be in need of protection, because they are psychologically so sensitive, fragile and vulnerable. This in turn necessitates a great army of sensitivity readers and the like to prevent distress, and counsellors, psychologists and so forth to cure it after it has occurred. At the same time as our culture is unprecedentedly vulgar, crude and violent, we must protect people from representations of vulgarity, crudity and violence. In the words of the old Flanders and Swann song, “It all makes work for the working man to do.” But we have progressed somewhat since their benighted time: it makes work for the working woman too. – Anthony Daniels 

As I’ve always said, I don’t mind using whatever pronouns someone wants to be known by, but the buck stops for me when transgender women are considered as full biological women—and by that I mean women who produce (or have the potential to produce) large and immobile gametes. It’s not the word “woman” I object to; it’s the implicit conflation of biological women with transsexual women in every possible way: the equation of biological women with biological males who consider their gender to be female and may or may not take action to change their bodies. (I don’t care if they “transition” physically or not; I’ll be glad to use their pronouns.) In this case the Post uses “people” instead of “women” because they want to go along with the mantra that “transmen are men”, though transmen who can get pregnant are actually biological women, which is the only reason they can get pregnant. – Jerry Coyne

There was once a place called the University. I knew it well – in fact I grew up there. The son of a mathematician, I often spent time in my formative years hanging around campus. I enjoyed interacting with my father’s colleagues. They were people who loved to argue. Even when I was a child they paid me the respect of challenging my thinking. They did so in a manner as generous and good-humoured as it was intelligent and robust. The idea that it might take courage to be a dissenting voice would, I think, have occurred to them as strange.

The people who inhabited that University knew what academic freedom was. They didn’t talk about it, they simply lived it. They understood implicitly that academic freedom was both a privilege and a duty. They understood that the University was an institution at the heart of democracy, that the health of democracy is a contest of ideas and that, as academics, they had leading roles in that contest. Academic freedom – the freedom to say things that are controversial, unpopular, almost unthinkable – kept culture fresh and provided grist to the mill of politics.

The University I grew up in is fading fast. In the New University, academic freedom is all too often seen as an embarrassing relic of the past, or worse, as a tool of oppression. Recent research commissioned by the Free Speech Union (FSU) shows just how far it has fallen out of favour. – Dr Michael Johnston

The Treaty, as well as sex and gender issues, have become sacred cows. There are doctrines about them that many academics feel scared to openly disagree with. – Dr Michael Johnston

I will add only that academic freedom is actually one of the principal mechanisms at our disposal for challenging the status quo. But I suspect that the academic who made that comment thinks that the status quo is simply whatever he or she disagrees with.

I encounter some of my dad’s old colleagues around campus from time to time. It’s always good to see them, but it makes me sad about what’s been lost. They’re in their 70s and 80s now, and they must wonder what’s happened to their university. To dispel any doubt, when I say, “their university”, I’m not speaking of a specific university, but of the spirit of open-minded scholarship they embodied. I hope that, in time, we’ll find a way to rekindle that spirit in the bricks and mortar of our country’s campuses. – Dr Michael Johnston

The Black Death (bubonic plague) in the mid-1300s is reckoned to have killed 30 per cent of Europe’s population at the time. The “Spanish” flu a century ago killed 50 million, 2.5 per cent of the world’s population. Covid-19 has so far killed 25 million, according to the Economist’s measure of “excess deaths” of all causes, 0.3 per cent of today’s population.

Clearly a pandemic in epidemiology is not what I imagined it was. But it therefore becomes more important to ask, were lockdowns ever a proportionate response now that we can see what a pandemic really is? – John Roughan

We live in an age of serial expertise. First we were experts in climate change, whether or not we believed it was taking place, and consequently in energy policy. Then, with Covid, we became expert epidemiologists, though most of us would shortly before have been hard put to explain what epidemiology as a science actually was. And now, with the war in Ukraine, we have become expert military strategists. – Theodore Dalrymple

How does one become a panjandrum? Is there a special school for them? If there is, I suppose they teach there such subjects as gravitas and pomposity, pretentiousness and portentousness. No doubt students are selected by natural ability in these subjects, and perhaps psychologists have already developed validated and reliable scales for them, as they have for practically all other human characteristics. (Psychology is another subject of our chronic expertise, of course.) – Theodore Dalrymple

As to increasing human capital, delightfully so-called, in the hands of government it is likely to result in an overgrowth of qualifications irrelevant to, and even obstructive of, any productive activity whatsoever, to what one might call, if it were a disease, fulminating diplomatosis. – Theodore Dalrymple

I do not want to cast doubt on the idea of expertise in some kind of know-nothing way. But there is no more important task for the citizen than the recognition of true expertise, as well as the recognition of its limits. – Theodore Dalrymple

The delusions of the protesters outside Parliament have been debunked. The delusions of those inside Parliament also need debunking.

The fantasies of anti-vaxxers primarily hurt themselves. The fantasies of our leaders hurt us all. – Richard Prebble

An analysis of the Consumers Price Index reveals most of New Zealand’s inflation is domestic. Actions such as printing $55 billion and government deficit spending have pushed up prices more than either fuel increases or supply chain congestion.

The adult minimum wage has gone from $16.50 in 2018 to $21.20 today. Only a politician could call that a “race to the bottom“. – Richard Prebble

Surrounded by lackeys saying “Yes Minister”, it’s a struggle to keep in touch with reality. – Richard Prebble

When it is leaders who have delusions, it is very dangerous. President Vladimir Putin’s delusion that Ukraine is not a country has brought the world to the edge of nuclear war.

Ministers’ refusal to accept that their reckless government spending is inflationary makes reducing inflation very difficult. At a time of full employment, the effectiveness of the Reserve Bank’s anti-inflationary interest rate rises is being countered by inflationary government deficit spending. – Richard Prebble

Awards did not result in cleaners and bus drivers being well-paid. As Minister of Railways I found that, despite unions, awards and industrial action, railway workers needed social welfare to top up their income. As a law clerk, my union negotiated an award wage that was less than the unemployment benefit.

Despite prohibitions on strikes, the system of awards allowed those with industrial power to extort high incomes. For hours worked, wharfies earned more than brain surgeons. – Richard Prebble

Successive studies have found that a factor such as having a fifth of all pupils leaving state schools functionally illiterate is one reason for our poor productivity. The appalling productivity in the unionised state sector is another.

One-size-fits-all union wages and conditions mean few are happy. It is why union workplaces often have industrial unrest. – Richard Prebble

This Labour Government is the master of gesture politics. Maybe a majority of voters can be persuaded that inflation is imported. Maybe a tenth of all workers will vote for union sector-wide wage fixing.

What we do know is that gestures cannot change reality. Just saying “inflation is imported” will not reduce our grocery bills.

Fantasies that union bargaining results in “higher quality goods and services” cannot make New Zealand a prosperous country. – Richard Prebble

Governments like scapegoats. A good scapegoat can take the blame for something that is a government’s fault. It can also help justify measures the government was itching to take for other reasons.

When all goes well, a very good scapegoat can do both. – Eric Crampton

Greed is a poor explanation for inflation, not because companies are altruists, but because greed is always with us. It isn’t cyclical.

Should we credit corporate public-spiritedness for the five years from December 2011 through December 2016 when inflation ran well below the midpoint of the RBNZ inflation band?

Of course not. Monetary policy drives inflation, not changes in greed. – Eric Crampton

In short, the minister was wrong from beginning to end. Absolute economic ignorance would be the most charitable explanation, but even then he might have considered asking Treasury’s advice.

More plausibly, Clark was scapegoating the supermarkets to justify populist measures against them, or to deflect attention from his government’s failure to keep the Reserve Bank on target, or both.

Voters should be wary of policies justified by scapegoating – Eric Crampton

New Zealand is one of the oldest democracies in the world. This system of government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ – that treats all citizens as equals before the law – has been a liberating force of human endeavour throughout the ages. We have indeed been fortunate in New Zealand that successive governments have faithfully upheld policies to protect our democracy as sacrosanct.

That is, until now. – Muriel Newman

Do we uphold the foundation of our Westminster Parliamentary democracy, namely one person one vote, where all votes are equal, or do we go down the path towards an Orwellian Animal Farm democracy, where all are equal – but some are more equal than others?

Unfortunately, this is not a trivial question. It’s time for a national conversation about what we want from our democracy, and in particular, whether we want those New Zealanders identifying as ‘Maori’ to be guaranteed greater rights and privileges than everyone else. – Muriel Newman

A key problem New Zealanders face is that the partnership the Government is using to justify what amounts to totalitarian tribal control – through the transfer of democratic power and public resources to the iwi elite – is actually fake. Since it is constitutionally impossible for a partnership to exist between a Sovereign and the governed, it represents a massive deception of New Zealanders by the Government. – Muriel Newman

The resulting upheaval isn’t measurable so much by legislative change as by a profound shift in the political and cultural tone of the country. Ardern’s re-election was like an injection of steroids for the leftist cabal that now exerts control over all New Zealand’s institutions of power and influence, including the media and the craven business sector.

This university-educated and predominantly middle-class neo-Marxist cabal is distinct from New Zealand’s dwindling old-school socialist/communist Left, which ironically now finds itself aligned with conservatives on issues such as free speech and identity politics. But the New Left wields far more power than the comrades of the Old Left ever dreamed of. – Karl du Fresne

How is this leftist cabal’s influence manifested? Chiefly through the divisive phenomenon known as wedge politics, and most provocatively through the promotion of 50-50 co-governance between representatives of the European majority and a minority consisting of people with Maori ancestry.

There are now effectively two levels of citizenship in New Zealand, one of which confers entitlements not available to the other. This is evident across a range of public policies that include compulsory Maori representation on local councils, the appointment of Maori activists to positions of power and the splurging of vast sums of money targetted exclusively at people who happen, by what is effectively a genetic accident, to have a proportion of Maori blood.

All this is predicated on the notion that people of part-Maori descent are entitled to redress for the baneful effects of colonisation. These deleterious effects presumably included the introduction of democratic government, the rule of law and the end of cannibalism, slavery and tribal warfare. – Karl du Fresne

Whether decolonisation includes rejecting such innovations as literacy and Western medicine isn’t clear, since the advocates of decolonisation are careful not to spell out exactly what they mean. – Karl du Fresne

. The stark choice facing New Zealand voters at next year’s general election will be between democracy and a different form of government for which we have no name.

But the cultural upheaval goes far beyond that, stoked by state-subsidised media that have abandoned their traditional purpose of seeking to reflect the society they purport to serve, and which instead bombard the public with indoctrination promoting the interests of attention-seeking minority groups.  – Karl du Fresne

This sense of polarisation is magnified by an authoritarian intolerance of dissent and by Stalinist-style denunciations of anyone bold or foolish enough to speak out against prevailing ideological orthodoxy.

Meanwhile, Ardern floats above it all. She’s a shrewd enough politician to have remained largely aloof from the rancour her government has generated, and who avoids entanglement in any unpleasantness that might detract from her carefully crafted image as an empathetic politician. But she cannot disown responsibility for presiding over a government that is promoting the politics of division and destabilising what was previously an admirably cohesive and harmonious society. – Karl du Fresne

What were normal people—those who did not have any trouble defining woman, those who found talk of “pregnant people” and “contested spaces” and “rabbit holes” baffling—to make of this obvious discomfort with “women”?  – Zoe Strimpel 

But now these exemplars of female empowerment—educated, sophisticated, wielding enormous influence—seemed to have forgotten what “woman” meant. Or whether it was okay to say “woman.” Or whether “woman” was a dirty word. 

It wasn’t simply about language. It was about how we think about and treat women. For nearly 2,500 years—from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” to Seneca Falls to Anita Hill to #MeToo—women had been fighting, clawing their way out of an ancient, deeply repressive, often violent misogyny. But now that they were finally on the cusp of the Promised Land, they were turning their backs on all that progress. They were erasing themselves.  – Zoe Strimpel 

By the 1980s, women had won several key victories. Equal pay was the law (if not always the reality). No-fault divorce was widespread. Abortion was safe and legal. Women were now going to college, getting mortgages, playing competitive sports and having casual sex. In the United States, they were running for president, and they were getting elected to the House and Senate in record numbers. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.

In the wake of all these breakthroughs, the movement began to lose steam. It contracted, then it splintered, and a vacuum opened up. Academics took over—hijacked—the cause. – Zoe Strimpel 

It wasn’t just that these academics took it upon themselves to develop fiendishly complex theories about women, dressed up in a fiendishly complex language. It was that this hyper-intellectualized feminism, by embracing this hyper-intellectualized language, excluded most women. It transformed feminism from activism to theory, from the concrete to the abstract, from a movement that sought to liberate women from the discriminations imposed on them by their sex to a school of thought that was less interested in sex than gender. 

Sex, to the academics, was outdated. It was crude, fleshy, obvious—the stuff of everyday women everywhere. Gender, on the other hand, was fascinating—the starting point for an endless theorizing that, with each passing paper or book or conference, became more abstruse, more removed from the daily challenges faced by ordinary women. – Zoe Strimpel 

The new, abstracted feminism had little interest in changing political or economic reality, as the older, grittier feminism had. It was like a fancy garment that only the well off—those who had gone to college and lived in big cities and were fluent in the new vernacular—could afford. Or knew to buy. –

It is not an accident that the rise of gender ideology coincides with the long anticipated petering out of the feminist cause.

That’s because the rise of the one and the decline of the other are closely linked with our fetishization of identity. The fight for transgender rights over and above that of biological women’s rights, just like the war on systemic racism, jibes perfectly with our new identity politics.

Unfortunately, identity politics cannot content itself with simply defending women’s rights or LGBT rights or the rights of black people to be treated equally under the law. It must persist indefinitely in its quest for ever-narrowing identities. (The ever-expanding acronym of gay and gay-adjacent and vaguely, distantly, not really in any way connected communities, with its helpful plus sign at the end, neatly illustrates as much.) Everyone is entitled to an identity, or a plethora of identities, and each identity must be bespoke—individualized—and any attempt to rein in the pursuit of identity runs counter to the never-ending fight for inclusivity. Even if that inclusivity undermines the rights of other people. Like women.

This dynamic, with the most marginal interest trumping all others, easily took over a feminism long primed by whacky postmodern ideas like Butler’s—paving the way for its second, related hijacking. This one by biological males. – Zoe Strimpel 

And so Post-Feminist Feminism has morphed into a dark, strange Anti-Feminism. Anti-Feminism borrows from the language of liberation, but it’s not about liberating women. It’s about pushing women out of college sports. It’s about telling girls they aren’t lesbians or tomboys, but in fact men struggling to find themselves.  – Zoe Strimpel 

To attempt an answer, any answer, to the question—Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?—would be to re-center women, biological sex, the concrete, mundane experience of ordinary, boring, bourgeois and working-class and very poor women the world over. It would be to attempt to undo the hijacking of the feminist cause and to return it to the people for whom that cause was created so many decades ago.

Returning the cause to the people for whom it was created is the only way to save it, and to stop the many discriminations that girls and women still face: domestic violence; the economic and psychological penalty of having babies; the manifold hurts and crimes visited upon countless women in non-Western countries simply for being women. For now, doing anything about all of that is a fantasy. First, we have to honor the actual meaning of words, like woman. We have to insist that those meanings are important. We have to go back, again, to first principles. That is the only way forward. – Zoe Strimpel 

The simple approach is to require integrity in communication and employ strategies suitable for the target audience. The bureaucracy and “political correctness” the Plain Language Bill promotes are not the answer. A basic principle is to communicate in a manner your audience can understand, as I hope I have. – Dennnis Gates

Our business leaders big and small are currently being forgotten for their contribution to society. They put themselves on the line, take risks, worry about paying their staff and their bills and hope to make a profit, although, for many that last one is a distant dream, survival now takes priority. They have been broken by having to close their doors or cut right back and for most, it has been the heartbreak of letting people go they have worked with and cared about for many years.

Those that have survived through the worst of the Covid years now need our support more than ever but instead, they are treated with disdain as cost after cost is piled on to them with regulatory changes that make it harder to stay in business. An extra public holiday, increases in the wage bill, transport costs going up and a struggle to get workers will drive a whole lot out of business. Their contribution is more than the goods and services they provide, it is how they play a vital part in our community, employ us and our neighbours and support the many charities that need them – often quietly and without recognition. We need their entrepreneurial spirit and their dream of the next big thing. – Paula Bennett

 I thought the chance of another civil war in the US was minimal and in a country like New Zealand, neglible. . . The most important single factor is when one or more major parties in a country’s political system doesn’t organise around left-right political values but around identity – race, religion or ethnicity. –  David Farrar

The bottom line is that some of our friends on the left want to shoot at the rich, but they wind up wounding the poor instead by greasing the rungs on the ladder of economic opportunity. – Dan Mitchell

FPAs are a solution looking for a problem. – Levi Gibbs

Of course, wages in New Zealand are lower than those overseas – most notably in Australia.

But the strong relationship between productivity and wages indicates the problem is not weak collective bargaining power, but our sluggish productivity growth.  – Levi Gibbs

The problem with misdiagnosing a problem like low wages is that the prescribed cure may in fact do harm.

FPAs are inflexible in the face of technological change – firms seeking to maximise productivity need to respond nimbly to new challenges and opportunities presented by change. Sometimes, such a response will necessarily involve adjusting employment arrangements. – Levi Gibbs

One-size-fits-all FPAs will mean “unproductive” firms with low profit margins, unable to bear the same wage costs as their larger competitors, will exit the market. Denying small firms the chance to grow more productive and forcing them to lay off workers is a short-sighted and unimaginative way to make productivity and wages look higher.

Wage floors will mean those on the outside looking in – including 188,000 job seekers and unskilled young people (NEETs) – will find it harder to find work, as they have not developed the skills to justify the entry-level wage. Higher labour costs will reduce the likelihood of firms hiring additional workers, and force those firms that do not simply shut down to reduce their workforce, cut back hours, or accelerate automation. – Levi Gibbs

The increased influence of trade unions will come at the expense of the vulnerable, the low skilled, and less experienced workers. This threatens New Zealand’s good record of high labour participation and low unemployment.

Improving productivity requires investing in people, taking risks on new ideas and innovative processes. It requires reforming New Zealand’s underperforming education system, attracting foreign direct investment, promoting capital reinvestment, and reallocating resources to the productive sector via tax relief. That is how New Zealand makes up for lost time over the past forty years. The ultimate result will be higher wages for workers and more prosperity.

The Fair Pay Agreement fantasy is an ill-advised, union-driven attempt to hack a shortcut to higher wages. – Levi Gibbs

Decolonisation is not only destructive but simplistic. Although cultural knowledge is not science, the science-culture distinction doesn’t exclude traditional knowledge from the secular curriculum. It does however put limits on how it is included. Students can be taught in social studies, history, and Māori Studies about the traditional knowledge that Te Hurihanganui describes as the “rich and legitimate knowledge located within a Māori worldview’. But this is not induction into belief and ideological systems. The home and community groups are for induction into cultural beliefs and practices. – Elizabeth Rata

Ironically, decolonisation ideology is justified using the universal human rights argument for equity. But the equity case misrepresents the problem. As with all groups, it is not ethnic affiliation but class-related cultural practices that are the main predictors of educational outcomes. Māori children from professional families are not failing. Rather it is those, Māori and non-Māori alike, living in families experiencing hardship and not engaging in cognitive practices of abstract thinking and literacy development, who are most likely to fail at school. This is not inevitable. Education can make a difference to a child’s life chances but it requires all schools, Maori medium immersion and mainstream alike, to provide quality academic knowledge taught by expert teachers. – Elizabeth Rata

Decolonisation will indeed divide society into two groups – but not that of coloniser and colonised locked into the permanent oppressor-victim status used to justify ethno-nationalism. Instead one group will comprise those who receive an education in academic subjects. These young people will proceed to tertiary study with a sound understanding of science, mathematics, and the humanities. Their intelligence will be developed in the long-term and demanding engagement with this complex knowledge. It is to be hoped, though this cannot be assumed given that the rationality-democracy connection is analogous not casual, that they will have the critical disposition required for democratic citizenship, one that is subversive of culture and disdainful of ideology.

The second group comprises those who remain restricted to the type of knowledge acquired from experience and justified in ideologies of culture. Distrustful of academic knowledge as colonising and oppressive, ethnically-based cultural beliefs and practices will provide the community needed for social and psychological security. In this restricted world they are insiders. And as there are insiders, there must be outsiders – in traditionalist ideologies these are the colonists who are seen to have taken everything and given nothing. And yet the tragedy is that it is the cultural insiders who are to be the excluded ones – excluded from all the benefits that a modern education provides.

A revolution is coming. The government’s transformational policies for education make this clear. It will only be stopped by a re-commitment to academic knowledge for all New Zealand children within a universal and secular education system. Colonisation is not the problem and decolonisation is not the solution. – Elizabeth Rata

Once the principle of one person, one vote is abandoned at local government level, pressure will build for something similar at the central government level.

It is hard to think of a more divisive agenda for any government to be pushing. – Paul Goldsmith

Big, radical changes to our democracy are being peddled in obscure local Bills by backbench MPs – with the Minister of Justice, the Attorney General and others nowhere to be seen.

These rushed, sneaky bills have become the stock-in-trade of this government.

It astounds me that the human rights lobby, constitutional lawyers, the Crown Law Office and other members of civil society are so relaxed about all this. Sadly, it speaks of a climate of fear that stifles open debate on these issues. – Paul Goldsmith

Our country is imperfect. We have many inequities, a fraught history and much work to do. But no inequities will be improved by shifting away from the bedrock of our relative success as a nation.

A core element of the liberal democracy we enjoy is the fundamental principle of one person, one vote.

We should not casually throw it away. – Paul Goldsmith

Parliament imposed tough penalties. It meant these crimes to be serious. So consider the constitutional consequences of the police deciding to overrule Parliament. If the police are wrong in their judgments about which crimes to enforce, then there is no way for the rest of us to bring about justice. – Josie Pagani

Road rules are rules, but who decided that bus lanes and doing 110 on a brand new motorway are a higher priority than robbery?

Deciding which laws should be enforced is Parliament’s job. If the police do not have enough resources to enforce acts of Parliament, then democracy demands that citizens participate in ranking their priority offences. I want theft policed ahead of driving in a bus lane. – Josie Pagani

Last year, police attended more than 70,000 events that involved a person having a mental health crisis or attempting suicide (an increase of 60% in five years). Police are called in because they are the social agency of last resort.

But mental health professionals are needed for those cases – trained staff who were promised in the ‘’wellbeing Budget’’ and never delivered. The Government had nearly $2b, and three years, to train specialist staff. They can’t train a psychologist in that time, but they could have trained carers with more skills for mental health than a stressed constable. – Josie Pagani

Campaigning on values, mental health, and fixing inequality was electorally successful for Labour. It has been a shameful policy disaster. – Josie Pagani

Call the Budget what you want – ‘’Wellbeing’’, ‘’Wellness’’, ‘’Well Done’’. We don’t care. Just make sure it’s not the police turning up when people need mental health professionals and somewhere safe for loved ones to go.

Tell us why we can’t have the decent mental health care that was promised. Don’t wait until the promise has failed.

Let voters make choices about which crimes to enforce, don’t pretend you’re not choosing.

If you can’t have that honesty then you have stolen our trust, like a scooter thief in the night, knowing you won’t be caught. – Josie Pagani

When it comes to the Three Water reforms, it is subordinating the rights of ratepayers to the interests of local iwi, and doing so without consent or compensation. – Damien Grant 

We have a process for settling Treaty issues. Not everyone agrees with the outcome of a Waitangi Tribunal decision, but almost everyone agrees to abide by their decisions. It isn’t a perfect system but it works better than Molotov cocktails and hunger strikes. – Damien Grant 

Central to the reform agenda is the claim made by Nanaia Mahuta that 34,000 New Zealanders become ill each year from drinking poor-quality water. This number is softer than a week-old feijoa. – Damien Grant 

Taumata Arowai is the regulatory body set up in response to Havelock North. We can see in this organisation that their focus isn’t solely water quality. According to their website, “Our name Taumata Arowai was gifted to us by Hon Nanaia Mahuta, Minister of Local Government”.

Having your name “gifted” by the reigning minister has a North Korean feel to it. This body enjoys a Māori advisory board whom it must consult. The chair of this advisory body is the minister’s sister. – Damien Grant 

If iwi believe their water rights have been compromised they can seek refuge in the Waitangi Tribunal, as they did when some energy companies were up for sale in 2012. (I was uncompromising in my support of the Māori Council’s intervention at the time.)

This is not happening, presumably because any such claim would fail. What possible claim can there be on dams and polyethylene pipes constructed and paid for in the 182 years since 1840?

If we are being asked to enter into a new compact with Māori, where rights that do not exist under the Treaty are to be created, then this does need to be put before the public. – Damien Grant 

Mahuta has no electoral, legal or Treaty mandate for her vision of co-governance, and even the claims of poor water quality are based on weak foundations.

If she wants to remove from ratepayers their legal and property rights, perhaps it is she, and not David Seymour, who needs to be putting this issue to the public.

After all, removing property rights without consent is what got us into the mess in the first place. – Damien Grant 

That this government spends record amounts of our money on political spin and social engineering is evident from propaganda campaigns to which we are subjected – none more reprehensible than the $5.3m commercial on the government’s 3 Waters intention.

Also frequently aired is a puerile presentation aimed at convincing us that a reduction in speed on our roads will increase our safety. – Garrick Tremain

Destroying confidence in the science – culture distinction, a distinction which is one of the defining features of the modern world, will be decolonisation’s most significant and most dangerous victory. According to the International Science Council science is ‘the systematic organization of knowledge that can be rationally explained and reliably applied. It is inclusive of the natural (including physical, mathematical and life) science and social (including behavioural and economic) science domains . . .  as well as the humanities, medical, health, computer and engineering sciences.

In contrast, culture is the values, beliefs and practices of everyday life – the means by which children are socialised into the family and community. For a Māori child, this may well involve immersion in marae life – or it may not.  But the experiences of everyday life should not be confused with the ideology of cultural indoctrination, what I call culturalism or traditionalism and others call decolonisation. It is this ideology which is permeating the government, universities and research institutes, the Royal Society Te Apārangi, and mainstream media. Here we are presented with an idealised Māori culture of what should be, not what it actually is.

It is as much a moral, quasi-religious project as a political one, its religiosity responsible for the intensity, and perhaps success, of its march through New Zealand’s institutions. Indeed, the spiritual is a central theme in decolonisation. The belief is promoted that Māori are a uniquely spiritual people with a mauri or life force providing the link to their ancestors – the  genetic claim for racial categorisation. Political rights for the kin-group are justified in this claim. –  Elizabeth Rata

Given that over 50 percent of Māori already have no religious affiliation, it is doubtful that there is a constituency for a spiritual-based education. This is where decolonisation plays its part with Te Hurihanganui and the refreshed curriculum promoting the ideological version of culture. Those hesitant Māori who are suspicious of the ideology will be outed as ‘colonised’, in obvious need of decolonisation.Those who are now racially positioned on the other side, officially the non-Māori, will require decolonisation to ensure support for the new moral and political order. Numerous consultants are already on hand to provide this profitable reprogramming service. Intransigent dissenters, who determinedly refuse the correct thinking will be ostracised as fossilised racists and bigots. 

The tragedy is that this decolonising racialised ideology will destroy the foundations of New Zealand’s modern prosperous society. The principles of universalism and secularism are its pillars in education as elsewhere. Academic knowledge is different from cultural knowledge because it is universal and secular. We could certainly live without this knowledge – our ancestors did,  but would we want to? – Elizabeth Rata

 The formidable task of acquiring even a small amount of humanity’s intellectual canon is made even more complex and remote because abstractions are only available to us as symbols – verbal, alphabetical, numerical, musical, digital, chemical, mathematical – creating two layers of difficulty. While it is unsurprising that the much easier education using practices derived from action rather than abstraction is more attractive, to take this path, as teachers are required to do, is a mistake.

We humans are made intelligent through long-term systematic engagement with such complex knowledge. Yet decolonisers reject the fundamental difference between science and culture claiming instead that all knowledge is culturally produced, informed by a group’s beliefs and experiences, and geared to its interests. Indigenous knowledge and ‘western’ knowledge are simply cultural systems with academic education re-defined as the oppressive imposition of the latter on the former.

What is deeply concerning is the extent to which this ideology is believed by those in education and uncritically repeated in mainstream media.  – Elizabeth Rata

Decolonisation is not only destructive but simplistic. Although cultural knowledge is not science, the science-culture distinction doesn’t exclude traditional knowledge from the secular curriculum. It does however put limits on how it is included. Students can be taught in social studies, history, and Māori Studies about the traditional knowledge that Te Hurihanganui describes as the “rich and legitimate knowledge located within a Māori worldview’. But this is not induction into belief and ideological systems. The home and community groups are for induction into cultural beliefs and practices.

What about the proto-science (pre-science) in all traditional knowledge – such as traditional navigation, medicinal remedies, and food preservation? This knowledge, acquired through observation and trial and error, as well as through supernatural explanation, along with the ways it may have helped to advance scientific or technological knowledge, is better placed in history of science lessons rather than in the science curriculum.

Science provides naturalistic explanations for physical and social phenomena. Its concepts refer to the theorised structures and properties of the physical world, its methods are those of hypothesis, testing and refutation, its procedures those of criticism and judgement.  The inclusion of cultural knowledge into the science curriculum will subvert the fundamental distinction, one acknowledged by mātauranga Māori scholars, between naturalistic science and supernaturalistic culture. – Elizabeth Rata

As with all groups, it is not ethnic affiliation but class-related cultural practices that are the main predictors of educational outcomes. Māori children from professional families are not failing. Rather it is those, Māori and non-Māori alike, living in families experiencing hardship and not engaging in cognitive practices of abstract thinking and literacy development, who are most likely to fail at school. This is not inevitable. Education can make a difference to a child’s life chances but it requires all schools, Māori medium immersion and mainstream alike, to provide quality academic knowledge taught by expert teachers. – Elizabeth Rata

Unlike authoritarian regimes, liberalism can tolerate some dissent. What it cannot tolerate is the removal of its very foundations – those principles of universalism and secularism that anchor democratic institutions into modern pluralist society. The separation of public and private, of society and community, makes room for both science and local culture. (The recent commonplace practice of using ‘community’ for ‘society’ is one of a number of indications that the separation is being undermined.) Valuing culture and devaluing science in a merger of the two fatally undermines the universalism and secularism that creates and maintains a cohesive society out of many ethnicities and cultures.

Decolonisation will indeed divide society into two groups – but not that of coloniser and colonised locked into the permanent oppressor-victim opposition used to justify ethno-nationalism. Instead one group will comprise those who receive an education in academic subjects. These young people will proceed to tertiary study with a sound understanding of science, mathematics, and the humanities. Their intelligence will be developed in the long-term and demanding engagement with this complex knowledge. It is to be hoped, though this cannot be assumed, that they will have the critical disposition required for democratic citizenship, one that is subversive of local culture and disdainful of ideology.

The second group comprises those who remain restricted to the type of knowledge acquired from experience and justified in ideologies of local culture. Distrustful of academic knowledge as colonising and oppressive, ethnically-based cultural beliefs and practices will provide the community needed for social and psychological security. In this restricted world they are insiders. And as there are insiders, there must be outsiders – in traditionalist ideologies these are the colonists who are seen to have taken everything and given nothing. And yet the tragedy is that it is the cultural insiders who are to be the excluded ones – excluded from all the benefits that a modern education provides.

A revolution is coming. The government’s transformational policies for education make this clear. It will only be stopped by a re-commitment to academic knowledge for all New Zealand children, rich and poor alike, within a universal and secular education system. Colonisation is not the problem and decolonisation is not the solution. – Elizabeth Rata

Which brings us cheerfully to our friendly “be kind”, “listen to the science”, “we’re so transparent” Ardern-Robertson government, which seems to be now acting like a “friend” who would like you to look the other way, so it can get on with what’s good for it, such as getting re-elected. – Kevin Norquay

In 2022 NZ, it’s starting to look more like “of the people, by the party, for the party.” – Kevin Norquay

“Listening to the science” now carries a taint, as decisions made could be seen as party political, rather than public health related.

It’s an erosion of trust. Why cover up things that are supposedly done in our best interest? – Kevin Norquay

There’s that “friend” again, telling us all the secrecy was for our own good. Whether MIQ did a good job is not the point here, it’s when that good job might have ended.

You could argue “we listen to the science” remains accurate, with the coda “but our decisions are based on the politics”, but transparency was always a fiction written boldly on a blocking PR wall.

What’s the next slogan: “You’ve got to be cruel to Be Kind?” – Kevin Norquay

The truth of Hōne Heke’s rebellion deserves to be more widely-known. His story was the beginning of a proud lineage of anti-tax protest that is today carried on by the Taxpayers’ Union (even if we prefer to use arguments over axes). So congratulations to Hōne Heke for rightfully being recognised as one of the greatest New Zealanders. If it were up to us, he might even be ranked number one. How many taxes did Sir Ed cut, after all? – Louis Holubrooke

You don’t want to live in fear but I’m not going to be blasé about it. We are seeing very sick people every day, it’s not worth the risk at the moment. The more I read, the more bad things I find that this virus can do to your body, particularly your brain. You hear people say ‘might as well get it over with’. Well I wouldn’t want to voluntarily risk taking on a bit of brain damage for any reason. – Dr Greg White

Whatever New Zealand does in isolation as its contribution to the world wide battle against climate change, it will have next to zero affect on whether or not we reach or even get close to the IPCC’s greenhouse gas emissions reductions that they say will be required to save the planet.

I can make that statement with confidence that l will be proved right simply because those key nations who have the capacity to collectively turn things around, with or without our help, are in fact increasing their use of fossil fuels at an alarming rate and as a result, increasing their emissions as if there was no tomorrow. In that context, our efforts, no matter how self sacrificial, will be like a blip on the radar as the rest of the world continues to condone the destructive activities of those who could and should be making a difference. – Clive Bibby 

We will watch on from the sidelines seemingly unnoticed by even the UN heavy hitters whose praise we appear to crave.

And in the meantime, we will destroy what remains of our agriculturally based economy at a time when we are emerging from the pandemic suffering from self inflicted wounds that already have reduced our capacity to earn overseas funds when we most need them. – Clive Bibby 

It appears that the government is still hell bent on cementing in place policies that will negatively effect the two most important ingredients that will determine our survival as a sovereign state.

The first is economic growth and the second is race relations, both of which are in danger of managed decline because both are reflecting the deliberate implementation of programmes that will have the opposite effect of what is needed now more than ever.

If allowed to be fully implemented, these policies: – the emissions reduction policies such as the halving of our dairy herds and the race based legislation that is being un-necessarily promoted giving control of our natural resources to Maori – have the capacity to propel a sufficiently divided nation into a state where civil war is a serious possibility. – Clive Bibby  Clive Bibby  Clive Bibby  Clive Bibby 

I choose my words carefully when discussing these potentially dangerous policies simply because it appears we are not yet prepared to acknowledge that the immediate danger to our collective future comes from within rather than anything from the world at large – including climate change.

In order to have a rational discussion about our future, we need to be acutely aware of the options available to us. In that context, the truth remains our only hope.

We can and must stop this erosion of trust before it is too late. – Clive Bibby  Clive Bibby  Clive Bibby  Clive Bibby  Clive Bibby  Clive Bibby  Clive Bibby  Clive Bibby 

But if I could go back in time and find a doctor who made me feel like they were treating my health, and not my size, that would have been a real gamechanger. – Megan Whelan

Democratic Socialist. Isn’t that a bit of a contradiction and maybe even an oxymoron?

Presiding over a government that has gone out of its way to decimate democracy by promoting the politics of division, there is nothing democratic in these actions! – John Porter

Don’t you think the way Ardern’s government, its Maori caucus and tribal leaders are surging ahead with their co-governance agenda, is pushing New Zealand close to that point of, if not actual civil war, then certainly civil disruption?

In New Zealand there is a significant degree of apathy and almost total lack of comprehension and knowledge around the subversion of democracy and promotion of Maori exclusivity that is very, very scary.

The overarching concern is that, based on ethnicity, a minority section of the population is being given an absolute right to control the rest of the population without, it appears, any limits on their power or any route for appeal. – John Porter

There is a very small group of those of part-Maori descent, Maori tribal elite, presumably swollen with self-importance because a small part of their cultural inheritance that they are clamouring for co-governance of this country. This co-governance agenda is gathering speed and, dare I say it, credibility at an alarming rate.  – John Porter

Ardern and her government’s separatist agenda combined with their inept fiscal management, are bringing this country to its knees!

Are we speaking out loudly, are we protecting our democracy, our rights to one person, one vote and do this government actually respect and represent the majority of New Zealanders? – John Porter

It’s either a caricature or merely a hallmark of a modern conservative New Zealand politician to be comfortable with whatever change has happened up to the present, but to think that any more would be a step too far.

This is by and large a positive. The fact that only journalists writing profiles on centre-right politicians, rather than the politicians themselves, ever want to revisit milestones like the marriage equality vote of 2013 means that the country has avoided the destabilising and counterproductive culture wars that have racked the United States for decades. – Ben Thomas

When the government spends $51 million to not build a bridge, that’s inflationary. Spending money on a new hospital that increases the provision of necessary services does not have the same effect. – Liam Hehir

There are six provisions in our law that are so important for democracy that they can only be changed by the vote of 75 percent in parliament or by a majority in a referendum. One is clause 36 of the Electoral Act that guarantees everyone regardless of race has an equal vote. – Richard Prebble

Having unequal voting will not solve Rotorua’s real issues. Here is one. The Labour government has filled our motels with the homeless from all over the Central North Island. There are enough children in our motels to fill a primary school. Borders are reopening. Where are Rotorua’s tourists to stay? – Richard Prebble

For most Westerners, the war unfolding in Ukraine makes no sense. Russians and Ukrainians look the same, speak the same languages, have lived lives that were, until very recently, culturally indistinguishable. Why are they fighting?

The chilling answer is that both sides are commanded by ghosts. It is the unquiet dead, the unpunished crimes, the gagged memories of countless perpetrators and their victims that drive these armies forward. Impulses barely understood, inherited from parents and grandparents who could neither speak about nor forget the horrors they had witnessed or performed.

Two nations to whom great evil has been done are being driven, by dead hands, to do evil in return. – Chris Trotter

R for recession comes after I for inflation in the economic alphabet. Then comes v for voter and w for wallet. Get the drift? – Shane Jones

Behind the scenes, officials are working on other ways to make New Zealand less rather than more attractive to prospective students. They have plans to almost double the amount of money each student must bring to New Zealand for each year’s study, and heavily restrict post-study work rights. This is all part of the Government’s immigration re-set, more correctly called an anti-immigration re-set. – Steven Joyce

If we are to avoid a recession, which is looking an increasingly difficult goal, we need to encourage more outward facing sectors to grow, rather than be always putting up new barriers to their success. International education is one of the best placed to resume pulling its weight, to the benefit of our country’s education system and the wider economy and society. The Government needs to get over its ambivalence to it. – Steven Joyce

We’ve become accustomed to hearing the words, “I support free speech, but ….” New Zealand is full of people in positions of power and influence who purport to defend free speech, but always with the addition of that loaded word “but”. You can’t say you support free speech and then, in the next breath, put limitations around it beyond the ones that are already clearly established in law and broadly accepted, such as those relating to defamation and incitement to hatred or violence.

We’ve been introduced to phrases unheard of a few years ago: cancel culture, speech wars, hate speech, gender wars, safe spaces, culture wars, trigger warnings, transphobia and no-platforming. We’ve acquired a whole new vocabulary. We’ve seen the emergence of a media monoculture in which all mainstream media outlets adopt uniform ideological positions that effectively shut out alternative opinions, even when those marginalised voices may represent mainstream opinion.

We’ve seen traditional ideological battle lines totally redrawn as people on the left and right of politics unite around the need to save freedom of speech from a new and powerful cohort of people who have co-opted the term “hate speech” as a pretext for banning any opinion that they dislike.

We’ve even seen radical feminists, who were once at the cutting edge of politics, demonised as dangerous reactionaries who must be shut down because of their opposition to a virulent transgender lobby that appeared to spring out of nowhere.

All this has happened within a remarkably short time frame. Mainstream New Zealand has been caught off guard by the sheer speed and intensity of the attack on free speech and as a result has been slow to respond. But what’s at stake here is nothing less than the survival of liberal democracy, which depends on the contest of ideas and the free and open discussion of issues regardless of whether some people might find them upsetting.– Karl Du Fresne

The right of free speech, after all, means the right to hear as well as the right to speak. Our Bill of Rights Act doesn’t just talk about the right to speak freely. It refers to “the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and opinions of any kind and in any form”. That seems pretty clear-cut and unambiguous. To deny New Zealanders the right to hear opinions that some politicians and public officials don’t like is a flagrant abuse of power and must be challenged at every turn, which is exactly what this union is doing. – Karl Du Fresne

In other words there are people in the police who apparently think that anyone who criticises the government should be watched. This is how police states begin. Fortunately in this case, wiser senior officers stepped in before things got out of hand. – Karl Du Fresne

The reality is that the enemies of free speech have no fixed ideology. Control is enforced with equal brutality whether it’s Nazi Germany or communist North Korea. The only thing the enemies of free speech have in common is a desire to exercise untrammelled power and to forcibly suppress any speech which threatens that power.

As it happens, the present threat to free speech in New Zealand doesn’t come from either the traditional left or the traditional right. It comes from a powerful new cohort that largely controls the national conversation. This cohort is dominant in politics, the bureaucracy, academia and the media and regards the exercise of free speech as serving the interests of the privileged. Free speech to them means licence to attack oppressed minorities and is therefore something to be deterred, if not by law then by denunciation and intimidation.

Depressingly, this group is entrenched in universities and libraries – institutions that have traditionally served as sources of free thought and access to knowledge. Libraries were at the forefront of the effort to shut down the feminist group Speak Up For Women, which was targeted by aggressive transgender activists because it opposed legislation allowing men to identify as female. It was only after this union went to court on the feminists’ behalf that libraries in several cities were forced to back down and allow them to hold public meetings.

A common factor in these instances is the belief that people have a right not to be offended and that this right takes precedence over the right to free speech. It’s as if the woke elements in society have developed an allergic reaction to the robust democracy that most of the people in this room grew up in, where vigorous debate was seen as an essential part of the contest of ideas that democracy depends on.

If a statement can possibly be interpreted as a slur against one’s gender, race, body type or sexual identity, it will be, no matter how innocent the intention of the person who made it. Apologies will be demanded and the ritual humiliation of the transgressor inevitably follows.

The purpose is clear: it sends a message to others that they will get similar treatment if they’re bold or foolish enough to challenge ideological orthodoxy. Yet paradoxically, the same people who insist on the right not to be upset don’t hesitate to engage in vicious online gang-ups and ad hominem attacks on anyone who disagrees with them.

A recurring theme in the speech wars is the notion of safety – not safety from physical danger, which is how most people understand the term, but safety from anything that might upset people or challenge their thinking. – Karl Du Fresne

Safety, then, is a highly elastic concept – critically important for women attending abortion clinics, even if no risk of harm exists, but not a problem if those who feel threatened are white guys in suits.

The enemies of free speech are blind to the contradictions in their position. They bang on about the right to be safe but applaud aggressive and intimidating behaviour against people they don’t like. And they demand protection against hate speech while freely indulging in it themselves on Twitter and other social media platforms, their purpose being to bully people into silence. – Karl Du Fresne

I can claim to be something of an authority on freedom of the press if only for the reason that I’ve written two books about it. Back then the concern was with threats to media freedom from outside sources, principally the state. But ironically we’re now in a position where I believe the New Zealand media abuse their own freedom.

They have fatally compromised their independence and their credibility by signing up to a government scheme under which they accept millions of dollars in taxpayer funding and in return commit themselves to abide by a set of ideological principles laid down by that same government.

Defenders of the Public Interest Journalism Fund justify it on the pretext that it enables the media to continue carrying out worthwhile public interest journalism at a time when the industry is financially precarious. They bristle with indignation at the suggestion that their integrity is compromised. But it is. You need only look at the projects approved for funding to grasp that this is essentially an opportunistic indoctrination project funded by taxpayers.

From a free speech standpoint, however, it’s the ideological uniformity of the media that is of even greater concern. The past two decades have seen a profound generational change in the media and a corresponding change in the industry ethos.

News outlets that previously took pride in being “broad church” – in other words, catering to and reflecting a wide range of interests and opinions – are now happy to serve as a vehicle for the prevailing ideology. They have abandoned their traditional role of trying to reflect the society they purport to serve. The playwright Arthur Miller’s definition of a good newspaper as a nation talking to itself is obsolete. The mainstream media are characterised by ideological homogeneity, reflecting the views of a woke elite and relentlessly promoting the polarising agenda of identity politics.

The implications for free speech are obvious. What was previously an important channel for the public expression of a wide range of opinions has steadily narrowed. Conservative voices are increasingly marginalised and excluded, ignoring the inconvenient fact that New Zealand has far more often voted right than left. – Karl Du Fresne

But it’s worse than that, because the prevailing ideological bias doesn’t just permeate editorials and opinion columns. Its influence can also be seen in the way the news is reported – in the stories that the media choose to cover, and perhaps more crucially in the issues they choose not to cover. The Maori co-governance proposals in Three Waters, for example.

Underlying this is another profound change. From the 1970s onward, journalism training – previously done on the job – was subject to academic capture. Many of today’s journalists were subject to highly politicised teaching that encouraged them to think their primary function was not so much to report on matters of interest and importance to the community as to challenge the institutions of power.

Principles such as objectivity were jettisoned, freeing idealistic young journalists to indulge in advocacy journalism, push pet causes and sprinkle their stories with loaded words such as racist, sexist, homophobic and misogynist. In the meantime, older journalists who adhered to traditional ideas of balance and objectivity have been methodically managed out of the industry.

Worse even than that, we now have mainstream media outlets that actively suppress stories as a matter of official editorial policy, and even boast about it. I’m thinking here of climate change, a subject on which major media organisations have collectively agreed not to give space or air time to anyone questioning global warming or even the efficacy of measures aimed at mitigating it. This would have been unthinkable 20 or even 10 years ago. People are bound to wonder what else the media are suppressing. – Karl Du Fresne

Robert Muldoon was a tyrant who tried to bully the media into submission, but eventually journalists and editors stood up to him. In the past few years, however, we’ve gone backwards. We now live in a climate of authoritarianism and denunciation that chokes off the vibrant debate that sustains democracy, and tragically the media are part of the problem.

There are positive signs however, and this meeting is one of them. As I said at the start, the sheer speed and intensity of the culture wars caught the country off-guard. Ours is a fundamentally fair and decent society, eager to do the right thing and rightly wary of extremism. For a long time we stood back and allowed the assault on democratic values to proceed virtually unopposed. We were like a boxer temporarily stunned by a punch that we never saw coming.

But the fightback has begun and is steadily gaining momentum. In giddy moments of optimism I even sense that the tide might be turning in the media. Even the most cloth-eared media bosses must eventually realise they have alienated much of their core audience, as reflected in steadily declining newspaper circulation figures and in opinion surveys measuring trust in the media. – Karl Du Fresne

The risk New Zealand runs in 2023 is that the policy promises of the contending parties will be come to be seen by their respective supporters as critical to the survival of the nation. On the Right, the introduction of co-governance will be equated with the death of democracy. On the Left, a racist referendum endorsing the elimination of co-governance will be construed as an all-out assault on the Treaty of Waitangi and the indigenous people it was intended to protect.

In such circumstances, the uncompromising partisans on both sides begin to believe that if they concede defeat there will be no “next time”. At that point the cry goes out for a “continuation of politics by other means”. Bullets replace ballots, and peace ceases to be an option – for anybody. – Chris Trotter

The provocation of fragility requires a bureaucracy of defenders to alleviate its consequences. The more fragile people become, the more they will run to the authorities for protection, as children run to their parents when they imagine witches at the window. A fragile population requires protectors, for the fragile by definition are incapable of protecting themselves, for example by confronting or moving away from a starer, but the would-be protectors themselves are cowards who prefer imaginary enemies to real and dangerous ones: thus is the dialectic between fragility and public employment on futile tasks created and maintained. – Theodore Dalrymple 

We in the anglosphere have become so used to conducting our business affairs in a “marketplace” that we take it for granted and if we give it any thought at all we ignore how fundamental it is to our way of life, preservation of our liberties, and to the health of our democracy. It is no accident that those who seek to destroy those liberties and democracy must first destroy the market economy by either state ownership on the Lenin model or an ersatz market place on the Russian and Chinese models. But what do we know about the history of this phenomena. – Anthony Willy

This means of organising society by allowing the untrammelled myriad daily personal decisions of the market place fulfils our most basic needs of food and shelter leading to the intellectual drive involved in the rise of science and the arts in what we call our civilised society. Above all it contributed to what may be mankind’s greatest achievement; the flowering of democracy which for many years we have taken for granted. However all is not well in the free market garden. Until recently the law was clear that any trader incorporated as a company with shareholders and a board of directors, (and that is most of the larger traders) the directors owed duties solely to their shareholders, and their only function was to maximise the profits of the company for the benefit of the shareholders with whose money they had  been entrusted. Increasingly this is no longer the case and there is a growing tendency for governments and pressure groups to require the directors to be influenced in their decision making  by extraneous matters such as global warming and gender politics. The Human Resources departments of many of New Zealand companies have responded enthusiastically to these demands with the result that the company is no longer able to trade freely and maximise the returns to the shareholders. In some cases this has resulted in the company ceasing hitherto profitable ventures with the loss of autonomy that entails.  Over the longer term nothing could be more destructive to the survival of free markets particularly as these are not constraints suffered by competitors in the totalitarian economies with whom we do business. In addition to these self imposed fetters there are of course ever present and more malign alternatives.   – Anthony Willy

That Marx’s prescription for substituting a system of state control for the free market is contrary to human nature has been amply borne out by the experience of those despots who have tried to impose it. The reason is simple, nowhere in the world has it flourished by the voluntary acceptance of the people. All such despots have failed sooner or later and will continue to do so, including those, such as the Peoples Republic of China and Russia who have attempted a bit of both by allowing a “market economy” to operate but only with the consent of the state and without democracy. The toll in human suffering when the state snuffs out private enterprise has been incalculable. – Anthony Willy

The other alternative to democracy and the free-market system and one gaining a lot of airtime among the “intelligentsia” in New Zealand is that of tribal control of the means of production and exchange whereby each tribe owns and controls its own assets and, human nature being what it is defends them from the covetous eyes of its neighbours. This alternative to free markets and communism was that practised by Maori tribes in New Zealand before the arrival of the Europeans, and it no doubt worked throughout their uninterrupted occupation of the country. It has shortcomings however as a means of maximising the wealth of society not least of which are: nobody owns anything and therefore cannot prosper from their labours (no pumpkin man), it invites tribal warfare if one tribe is being seen to do better than the neighbour, it creates no enduring “wealth” and causes envy and disaffection when eyes are cast  over the fence at those tribes enjoying the fruits of their labours. – Anthony Willy

There is nothing exceptional about this course of events, it is to be found in the remaining tribal societies mostly in Africa. It is always accompanied  by horrendous violence such as the genocide that occurred in Rwanda and to a lesser extent Kenya. Unsurprisingly after the bloodletting this is now in the past as most African countries have rejected communism and tribalism and have embraced free markets and democracy (albeit a bit dodgy at times). But astonishingly in New Zealand with a record of a settled and prosperous society second to none separate Maori tribal representatives, egged on by other worldly academics are promoting a tribal take over of our hitherto democratically elected institutions based solely on race.  –  Anthony Willy

Languages exist for one reason only — to communicate meaning. To this end they evolve with time and what is useful endures and what is not withers. And that’s it. That’s the inevitable, immutable, blind process, and nothing we say or do will alter it. Languages cheerfully borrow from each another. English has adopted hundreds of Maori words, largely to describe things that exist here and nowhere else — pukeko, rimu, mana and so on. And Maori has taken on board no end of words from English to describe the materials and ideas that settlers brought. But having borrowed them a language makes them its own. It fits them into its own structure. So while there is some overlap of vocabulary between te reo and English, there is none of grammar or syntax. The languages remain grammatically distinct.

The RNZ National announcer appeared to be speaking a new and hybrid tongue, part te reo, part English. In reality she was speaking English — the language she used to convey meaning — and she was dropping in chunks of te reo for a moral or political purpose. And language evolution scoffs at moral or political purposes.

In short, she was wasting her time. In doing so she was alienating Ms Plum, educating noone, patronising Maoridom and barking up a barren linguistic plum tree.- Joe Bennett

One of the most witless, inane and paradoxically evil ideas to contaminate contemporary culture in recent years is kindness, or, as what amounts to a campaign slogan says, ‘Be Kind’. On the surface, what could possibly be wrong with being kind to each other? Only brutes and criminals would find something wrong with such an obviously decent notion. The problem, though, is that beneath its beautiful and superficially moral surface, kindness, in its contemporary iteration, is surreptitiously ideological and smuggles into everyday life entirely new ideas of metaphysics, logic and epistemology, ones that have profoundly negative consequences for liberal democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. – Roger Franklin

We’ve established that kindness per se is not a sufficient condition for decent behaviour because political ideologies determine who can be treated with kindness and who can be treated with cruelty. This gets to the crux of the present situation because underpinning the current notion of kindness is the contemporary moral and ethical system of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), which has been introduced into almost every institution in Western liberal democracies. The HR department in your workplace, and workers’ rights legislation in your state or country, will almost certainly be infused with this ideology.

The problem, though, is that the politics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — wokeness, in other words — establishes a hierarchy of the saved and the dammed through the postmodern notion of identity. Where you sit on the hierarchy of marginalised groups, or whether you are intersectionally oppressed — perhaps doubly, triply or multiply oppressed — determines your saintly status. Individual rights, then, are no longer the sine qua non of liberal democracy. What we have, essentially, is irrationalism as a new metaphysics. – Roger Franklin

How are individual rights being supplanted by group rights, which are the modus operandi of all authoritarian regimes? How has this occurred in a liberal democratic political system where debate is a constituent part of its philosophy? It’s simple: institutional capture. Individual rights have been hollowed out from the inside by ideologues. What’s most depressing, though, is that the whole unedifying spectacle has been performed in the plain sight of our governing elites, who, while often hard-working and honest, are seldom intellectually sophisticated.  – Roger Franklin

While kindness is the slogan, the Trojan Horse of the ideology is the triple strategy of equivocating speech with violence, subjectivism and the weaponising of mental health. It’s a tapestry of confusion where all the threads fit together.

Conflating speech with violence means that hurt feelings, rather than damaged bodies, are utilised as a weapon of the ‘oppressed’. Hurting someone’s feelings — subjectivism, in other words — is viewed as violence. This is important because liberal democracy, at its core, rejects violence. Violence, as any civilised person should know, is always the last resort in adjudicating conflict. Consequently, indulging in violence, especially towards a disadvantaged person or an identity group, is the very definition of discrimination.

Modern subjectivism is based on the postmodern claim that truth is a fiction — bizarrely, even logical and scientific truths. – Roger Franklin

“Truth”, in its modern iteration, is defined as the epistemology of straight white males, who are viewed as the purveyors of all that is destructive in modern history. According to postmodernists and intersectional feminists, though, there are other ways of understanding the world, amongst them the ‘lived experience’ of identity groups , which are presented as equally valid. Feminists, for example, have claimed for decades that witchcraft and alternative medicine have been ‘marginalised’ by male ways of knowing, and that these epistemologies are as legitimate as the scientific method. That this is nonsense needs to be stressed because the idea that all opinions are valid has become a constituent narrative of contemporary culture. The irony is that postmodernists could not flourish if they followed their own philosophy, because irrational people live sub-optimal lives or simply die. – Roger Franklin

The expansion of mental health psychology into areas that, until recently, were considered the existential and ordinary facts of life, is not coincidental. The phenomenon runs parallel and in conjunction with the rise of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Feelings are now the gold standard of whether one is suffering from a mental health problem, not an imprudent lifestyle choice or any of the dreadful psychological conditions that make life a misery for people whose minds or brains are not working in a functional way.

The three strategies are equally important to the ideology, and they shift, twist, intertwine and turn depending on the situation. Put them all together and a comprehensive strategy exists to curtail freedom of speech, individual conscience and, inevitably, liberal democracy. – Roger Franklin

What DEI means in practice is not what its proponents advertise to the world. In practical terms the ideology works in the following way: Diversity stresses a plurality of group identity and not a plurality of opinion. Equity is an impossible dream which can only be enacted, with dreadful consequences, by force. And inclusion, by definition, welcomes different identity groups without criticism, and no-one else. Remember that, according to the theory, subjective feelings, which are denied validity by individuals and society lead to mental health issues, while truth itself is grounded in the identities of race, sex, class and gender. Everything must be affirmed rather than rejected or criticised because words which offend are construed as violence or are damaging to a person whose “identity” is questioned or criticised.

This is why statues are being pulled down around the world; why people with what were, until about five years ago, moderate views are called bigots; why supporters of free speech are called Nazis; why J.K. Rowling is called transphobic; why bad works of art by minority figures are replacing Beethoven, Shakespeare and Renoir (or, at the very least, how they are presented in concert halls, theatres and art galleries). It’s why those who offend are hounded from their jobs and see their reputations and livelihoods ruined. And all this is being perpetrated by ideologues with a fanatical zeal and, ironically, not a shred of kindness. – Roger Franklin

Nothing solid survives this pernicious attack on everything of value, and it’s why the cult of kindness and its three subordinate strategies — equating speech with violence, subjectivism and weaponising mental health — undermine the entire edifice of liberal democracy, which is a form of government based on individualism and the robust claims of negative rights. Two things define liberal democratic philosophy: don’t do this, and you’ve a right to offend. In straightforward terms, you can be an absolute bastard if you don’t commit a crime or perpetrate violence on your fellow citizens. That’s about all people can ask for or expect.

The rest of the noise about rights is virtue-signalling nonsense, money-making scams, or snake-oil drenched in false morality. Sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind. And sometimes you just need to be kind. Woke kindness is the inverse of the normal conception of kindness and it is toxic to individual rights. Don’t fall for the nonsense, linguistic equivocation is one of the oldest tricks in the book. – Roger Franklin

Just because you are Māori does not make you an expert in anything except being Māori. The government, in their determination to divide this nation racially, are mixing too many things together and hoping you won’t notice.

Clean water is one thing, and we all want it. Hijacking democracy for ideological purposes around race, we don’t.

This fight is far from over, and as such Friday’s update changes nothing. – Mike Hosking

Some defenders of Three Waters argue that the regional representation groups made up of iwi and council representatives are so removed from the day-to-day control of the water assets that anyone asserting iwi will play a significant role as co-governors can only be intent on making mischief. But if that argument is correct, Mahuta should have no trouble at all in dropping iwi members from her proposed set-up.

The fact the minister shows no sign of bending on co-governance — no matter how intense and overwhelming the opposition — will only convince increasing numbers of voters that the whole point of Three Waters is to function as a Trojan horse to hand unelected iwi members control over billions of dollars’ worth of community assets. – Graham Adams 

The belief that free speech is a “Right-wing conservative” ideal reveals a very limited knowledge of history. In different generations, the Left and the Right have both advocated for and opposed free speech. That’s why free speech is not a Left-Right issue; it’s a liberty-orientated vs authoritarian issue. – Jonathan Ayling

Now, that word “racist”. I believe a racist is someone who thinks certain races are inherently superior to others and therefore entitled to rights not available to supposedly “inferior” races. That’s a meaning we can all agree on. But the moment you stretch the definition beyond that, the word can mean anything the user wants it to mean. In the contemporary New Zealand context, that means it can be applied to anyone who disagrees with you – for example, on issues such as 50-50 co-governance with iwi. But the people who throw the term “racist” around don’t realise that they have stripped the word of its potency. “Racist” should be the most offensive epithet imaginable, placing the accused person on a par with Adolf Hitler or the Ku Klux Klan. But the word is so overused as to have become meaningless, so Shelley’s wasting her breath there. – Karl du Fresne

There is a unique record of co-operation, harmony and goodwill between the two main racial groups. That’s manifested in the history of inter-marriage which today ensures that every person who identifies as Maori must also own up to some European blood, which means their supposed oppressors included their own white forebears. I’ve yet to see anyone reconcile those awkward truths. If we’re to move forward as a society we need to acknowledge that all our forebears did bad things in the distant past and then put them behind us. We have too much in common to risk fracturing a society that the rest of the world has long seen as exemplary.

Where we run into trouble is where the Maori activist agenda collides with democracy. Democracy isn’t a white supremacist invention imposed to keep minority groups firmly under the heel of their oppressor. On the contrary, it’s a system whereby every citizen’s vote – Maori, Pakeha, Pasifika, Chinese, Indian, whatever – carries the same weight. I believe absolutely in democracy because ultimately, everyone benefits from it and everyone has a say. It is the basis of every free and fair society in the world, and those who undermine it need to think very carefully about what form of government might replace it. I can’t think of any that would appeal to me – certainly not one that grants special rights, privileges and entitlements on the basis of ancestry. We have a name for that: feudalism. We were smart enough to abandon it several centuries ago.

To finish, I am Tangata Tiriti and proud to be so. Like all Pakeha New Zealanders I’m here by right of the Treaty, a point often overlooked by Treaty activists who talk as if it grants rights only to Maori. My forebears came here in the 1870s and 1890s and New Zealand, therefore, is my turangawaewae. The thing is, we’re all beneficiaries of the Treaty and we need to think very long and hard before unravelling the many threads that bind us.- Karl du Fresne

The real tragedy of the wage rises of that size is that they are, of course, adding to the very problem they are trying to solve. If you are paying more because you are making more, selling more, and getting higher returns that’s good. But if you are paying more merely to hold talent so you don’t go bankrupt then that serves no one well in the long run. – Mike Hosking

If you are offering work to all who want it through expansion, and as a result of expansion everyone shares in the success with wage increases, that’s your economic sweet spot.

But if you are in a country that doesn’t let people in, has an economy that’s stalled because growth is not possible due to lack of staff, but those staff get paid more anyway, then you have a pending disaster.

It’s grinding to a halt. It isn’t good for anyone. And when your jobless rate doesn’t go down even when there are jobs galore and no one coming in to take them, that is a seriously large red flag. – Mike Hosking

Ultimately what counts most in a democracy is what the public thinks and why people vote the way they do, and there can be few people more poorly qualified to assess the public mood than press gallery journalists. The narrow world they’re exposed to is simply not the world most New Zealanders live in.

It would be a useful grounding exercise for them to listen to talkback radio for an hour or so each day. I wouldn’t pretend that’s the key to understanding what real New Zealanders are thinking, but it would expose press gallery reporters to a more authentic world than the one they inhabit, which largely consists of fellow members of the political class. (Of course it wouldn’t happen, because the typical political journalist probably regards talkback callers as the untermenschen.) – Karl du Fresne

If this seems a rather sweeping condemnation of the entire gallery, I plead guilty. I acknowledge there are capable political journalists who make an honest attempt to do the job well. It’s just unfortunate that they are tainted by association with others who come across as self-absorbed, over-confident and, dare I say it, sometimes not very bright.  – Karl du Fresne

In my fairly long experience as a doctor, I discovered that many were those who willfully, knowingly, and unnecessarily sought misery. They did things that they knew in advance would end disastrously, often in short order. I also discovered that the ways of self-destruction were infinite: One could never enumerate or come to the end of them.

Among the proofs that we were not made for happiness but on the contrary often seek out its opposite is the fact that so many of us follow the news closely, though we know it will make us wretched to do so. We pretend that we have a need to be informed and are shocked when we meet someone who hasn’t the faintest idea of what is going on in the world. How can he bear to be so ignorant, how can he be so indifferent? It is our duty as citizens of a democracy to be informed, or to inform ourselves, even at the cost of our own misery; because, of course, news rarely gives us reasons to rejoice. – Theodore Dalrymple

To observe happiness in others and to think of misery is, of course, the sign of an unhappy or discontented life. There are those who would look at the Taj Mahal and think only of how absurd it was, how unjust to the toiling multitudes, that the wife of an emperor should be memorialized in this extravagant fashion when all she had was the accident of beauty and the luck to be beloved of an emperor; these are sour people who would prefer the perfect justice of universal ugliness to an unevenly and unjustly spread beauty. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is clear that Ardern’s government plans to produce a document which sets out a future plan for Maori only, at the expense of parliamentary democracy and the civil and human rights of 84% of the New Zealand population. They are following exactly the same strategy they have in imposing “co-governance’ and compulsory acculturation of the New Zealand population throughout the public service, education system, health, welfare and justice, plus the enforced establishment of Maori wards in local authorities. – Henry Armstrong

The Declaration Plan feedback document contains many proposals which will effectively establish a race-based,  separatist Apartheid structure in New Zealand. Mainstream media have deliberately downplayed the huge adverse implications for New Zealand going forward and have purposely contributed to the Ardern government’s ongoing strategy of deception, untruths and misinformation.

If we believe Ardern (who has a habit of reneging on her previous statements, such as taxes), the NZ public will be “consulted” sometime this year, with no guarantee that this “consultation” process will in any way affect the Plan, once decided upon, for to do so would mean Ardern and co are themselves racist – and we cannot of course have that, can we?

And you thought Putin is evil?  – Henry Armstrong

Do not let low unemployment fool you into thinking everything is fine. It might well be the opposite .- Oliver Hartwich

Bad rules and regulations are more common than you think. Although the worst offenders eventually prompt action, it’s the costly (but not too costly) rules that accumulate over time that kill an economy by sclerosis  –Sam Dumitriu

Anyone who asks the question “what is a woman?” is thereby revealing that they have the intelligence of your average garden slug. This is why we shouldn’t trust these so-called “archaeologists” who claim to be able to determine whether those ancient skeletons they’ve uncovered are “male” or “female”. This is pure pseudo-science. Next they’ll be telling us they can work out their pronouns by measuring the femurs.

Let me settle this matter once and for all. A woman is anyone who says she is a woman. A woman is a feeling, a shimmering nimbus of possibility, an echo of distant dreams reverberating gingerly through a winter’s gloaming. She is a mewling constellation, a bagful of semi-felched pixies, the enchanted stardust that pirouettes luminously on the spindle of time.

It’s got absolutely nothing to do with tits. – Titania McGrath

 It shouldn’t come as a surprise that so few people are familiar with Maori. For all the current chatter and virtue-signalling, the language is not taught as a compulsory subject in a public school system where young Maori kids, especially boys, already leave early in disproportionately high numbers.

If Ardern’s government really wanted to make a difference, it could do more to encourage deprived Maori kids to stay on in education. As it is, it seems more content to change road signs and baffle visitors with startling name changes.– David Cohen

I find it unacceptable that despite our feedback over several decades, the government are still coercing the Pakeha identity on New Zealanders with European ancestry and am sure other ethnic groups have a similar frustration. – John Franklin

In this day and age where a boy is permitted to change his gender identity to female on the way to school at a whim, why are we being forced to assign to an identity we clearly don’t want?

The truth is that no one else’s opinion matters regarding our identity, we don’t need anyone’s permission, we don’t need a team of language experts, we don’t need a hui, it’s 100% our choice so all we need to do is to make a decision and then demand that our rights are respected. – John Franklin

There will always be those who will throw out their hate anchors to stop New Zealand from healing and moving forward but we can’t let them divide us further with their racist policies in the guise of indigenous rights.

Anything that undermines every New Zealander’s right to be treated equally or gives extra rights based on ethnicity is racist, it’s wrong and will have bad consequences. Don’t be fooled by the twisted use of the equity philosophy employed by those who want to justify their special privilege, only equality can be the foundation of our rights and freedoms. If the UN thinks the answer to divisive history is to elevate the rights of one ethnic group above the others, then they are just meddling fools that should be ignored as that undermines the foundation of equality which in turn undermines the rights and freedoms that are built on it. – John Franklin

The “woke” always surprise me with their high boredom threshold, for one would have thought that nothing could be more boring than always looking at the world through the narrow distorting lens of race, gender, and so forth and always coming to the same conclusion about it.

However, one has to give it to the woke: Just as you think that their idiocies can go no further, they come up with something new. They display a kind of malign inventiveness in finding new ways to provoke people of more sensible dispositions. The woke manage to be inventive and boring at the same time (as Marxists used to be); and while it’s boring to have to argue constantly against bores, it’s necessary to do so, because otherwise the undecided will come to think that the arguments of the woke are unanswered because they’re unanswerable. – Theodore Dalrymple

I think rather that wokedom is analogous to diseases such as Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob in humans and scrapie in sheep, caused by particles called prions that infect the brain and cause it to degenerate, resulting in strange and disturbed behavior ending in death. Unless a remedy is found, what will die, however, isn’t an individual human being, but ultimately a culture and a civilization. – Theodore Dalrymple

The problem with being a social justice advocate in a progressive liberal democracy is that there isn’t always enough overt sexism and racism from which to draw the requisite amounts of indignation. – Damien Grant

This country can stand rightly proud on what we have achieved when it comes to equality and diversity, even if serious mahi needs to be done in some areas. – Damien Grant

Investing with the disreputable Simon Henry provided an eight-times better return than with Companion of the NZ Order of Merit recipient and My Food Bag co-founder, Theresa Gattung.

This will be a surprise to no one who understands commerce, but to those who think EBITDArefers to a new grouping of intersectional identity, this result will have come as a bit of a shock. – Damien Grant

In years to come some government agency may run a slide-rule over similar comments to assess if they breach beefed-up hate-speech laws, but for the moment the only consequences are public scorn and the associated commercial risk of having said something objectively awful.

This is appropriate. Free speech isn’t speech without consequences. In a free-market, people can choose who they do business with, who they work for, and who they associate with. – Damien Grant

While many in the media were content to report and comment on what Henry said, others decided that they are guardians of a new morality.

It isn’t enough that sunlight be applied to Henry’s choice of language. There isn’t any point in being a Social Justice Warrior if you don’t occasionally bayonet the wounded. – Damien Grant

Is it possible that the search for outrage is inadvertently manufacturing it? – Damien Grant

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is widely misinterpreted as an effect where the observer changes what is occurring by their observation. It is possible that, through the manner in which the fourth estate has covered this event, they have created the very thing upon which they now breathlessly report on. – Damien Grant

Being a member of Parliament can bring out the best and the worst in people. You have to be slightly bonkers and have a high degree of confidence just to want to be an MP – unfortunately, that can click into arrogance really easily when you get there if not kept in check. I should point out that this arrogance is not the domain of just one political party. – Paula Bennett

I can’t believe that just three weeks ago Poto was denying there is a gang problem in NZ. But the PM has probably consoled herself that it’s not arrogance but incompetence and, as we see daily, that is acceptable in her Cabinet. – Paula Bennett

What should increasingly be worrying the PM is the arrogance of Trevor Mallard and the damage this is doing her. From badly handling the actual Parliament protest and then badly handling the aftermath by trespassing ex MPs and unforgivably giving Winston Peters a platform to crow from to generally running the debating chamber with ridiculous rulings that mean people can’t actually debate, it is time for him to bow out. – Paula Bennett

It is high time we stopped using History as a weapon, and started relying upon it as a guide. – Chris Trotter

Before we all became mesmerised by the internet, humans spent much of their time in a little place called the real world. Here, people tended to interact with each other face to face, in the flesh, and as such, one could get a good sense of a person’s character by observing their behaviour.

This all changed with the rise of social media. The transition from a world in which people interact in person to one in which people interact through text led to a shift in the way we define and judge people. With little visibility of a person’s deeds, we had to focus on their words. And so we began to define people primarily by their opinions.

Since opinions are now the basis of public interaction and identity, there’s a new pressure to have a point of view. If you don’t have a perspective on the thing everyone else is talking about, it becomes difficult to socialise—you basically don’t exist. The result is that people feel compelled to take a stance on everything. – Gurwinder

Research suggests that when humans are pressured to have an opinion on an issue they know little about, they’ll often just hastily make one up, ad-libbing without regard to facts or logic, rather than admitting they don’t know. To compound the problem, people dislike changing their opinions (as it requires admitting they were wrong), so their impromptu views, which they cobbled together from whim and half-remembered hearsay, will often become their new hills to die on.

Essentially, the pressure to have an opinion in the digital age can cause people to resort to believing, or professing to believe, babble. – Gurwinder

Since people are now defined chiefly by their opinions, there’s not just pressure to have an opinion, there’s pressure to have the best opinion—the smartest, most sophisticated, most high-status. Digital society has become a beauty contest for beliefs, an opinion pageant.

Clearly, if people are simply improvising their opinions, they’re not going to have good opinions, let alone the best ones. So people will often employ a different strategy: copying the opinions of others.

They typically do this by outsourcing their thinking to professional commentators, who offer prepackaged “designer opinions” that people can wear like haute couture to become the envy of their friends. – Gurwinder

However, just because a commentator is offering their opinions for sale, doesn’t mean their opinions are good. On the contrary, opinion-sellers often sell poorly considered opinions, because not only are they under the same pressure as everyone else to take stances on issues they know little about, but they must do so quickly. For a professional commentator, being the first one to think of a take is everything. As such, opinion-sellers will often rush their opinions out, and then, since they can’t change their view without looking bad, they’re forced to stick with it. – Gurwinder

Opinion-sellers make life easier for themselves and their customers by selling not just isolated opinions, but “opinion packages”. These are simplistic worldviews from which a set of consistent opinions on almost anything can be easily computed, equipping the bearer to opine on virtually any matter that comes up in conversation.

Arguably the most fashionable opinion package in the West today is what some refer to as “wokeness”. This is a kind of conspiracy theory that uses a lexicon of dubious concepts, such as “white fragility” and “toxic masculinity”, to portray Western society as “systemically” racist, misogynistic, and transphobic, and to scapegoat such problems on white people generally, and on straight white men specifically. – Gurwinder

Woke opinions are popular for several reasons. For a start, they lift a great burden from the brain; there’s no need to understand a complex world if you can just blame everything on bigotry. But arguably the most important advantage of woke opinions is their success in the opinion pageant. They’re an effective way to improve one’s social standing, because constantly calling out bigotry makes one look unbigoted, compassionate, and socially aware—all values with high social capital.

The social capital offered by wokeness makes it an indispensable opinion package in image-oriented industries like media, academia, Hollywood, and public relations, which may be why wokeness is most dominant in these spheres. – Gurwinder

But the trouble with opinions is that one cannot know for sure whether or not they’re sincerely held, which leads to another problem of the opinion pageant: fraud. Just as designer clothes can be counterfeited, so can designer opinions. Except opinions cost nothing to fake.

Ersatz beliefs are now common in the business world. Savvy corporations have realised that in the opinion pageant, they must take a political stance to secure relevance, and since wokeness is the most high status suite of opinions, they almost exclusively subscribe to that package. – Gurwinder

Wokeness offers corporations, celebrities, and other status-conscious entities the most prestigious package of views in the opinion pageant, but it’s increasingly having to contend with competitors. Perhaps the most notable of these is the “based” worldview. This opinion package is often sold by conservatives, but it’s less defined by what it’s for than what it’s against. And what it’s against is the reigning champion of the pageant, wokeness. – Gurwinder

The division of people into based, woke, and other competing worldviews has had an unfortunate side effect. It’s created a culture war between the various customer bases, a war that’s phony because most of the combatants are fighting for beliefs they haven’t properly considered, since they idly plagiarised them instead of concluding them through careful reasoning.

But the worst thing about the culture war is that it perpetuates the opinion pageant. When people become divided into factions, there becomes even more pressure to pick a side and have an opinion, or else one risks being known as a fence-sitter, a coward, or even worse, an enemy (“silence is violence!”, say the woke). The result is that even more people take a stance on issues they know little about. –

The end result of the opinion pageant is a fraudulent world, a world where most people’s opinions are not their own. It’s a world of puppets being ventriloquised by strangers—strangers who are likely themselves puppets. In such a world, where words matter more than deeds, and opinions matter more than character, being “smart” requires no gift for thought, only a gift for mimicry, and being “good” requires no heart of gold, only a silver tongue & brazen nature. – Gurwinder

In the end, opinions are a hopeless way to define people, because, like designer clothing, they’re both faddish and easily counterfeited. If you want to know someone’s true nature, look beyond their words, and scrutinise the one aspect of their character that’s costly to fake—their actions. – Gurwinder

While news from Ukraine has mainly been about infrastructure destruction, a small miracle is taking place in the war-torn country. As Putin’s forces continue to bombard their cities, Ukrainian authorities have already begun reconstruction. . .

The road holes where the shells exploded have been repaired. Water and electricity are back on.

Amazingly, even large pieces of infrastructure have been rebuilt. Among them were road and rail bridges that were destroyed by the Russians in the first weeks of the war.

Irpin’s main bridge is now replaced with a temporary bridge measuring nine meters wide and 245 meters long. It took five days of uninterrupted work to complete it. – Oliver Hartwich

So let’s send Waka Kotahi to Ukraine. And if they find Ukraine’s infrastructure secret, we may allow them to return to New Zealand – Oliver Hartwich

It is well known in all agricultural circles that the nitrogen fertilisers are the major contributor to lifting the third world out of poverty and why now, obesity is a bigger world-wide issue than malnutrition. And the peasant farmer getting richer is why the third world birthrate is dropping. But the watermelon Malthusians don’t want that.. You can’t establish a centrally planned world order in that environment. – Chris Morris

Bureaucrats sitting in Wellington are invariably highly skilled and the Ministry has some of the brightest public health advisors on staff too.

But I still feel they fail to realise the true impacts of the decisions they make on the lives of New Zealanders. – Merepeka Raukawa-Tait

Governments always talk about solutions being developed and decided closer to where the problems exist.

I couldn’t agree more. Communities do know what’s best for them. But with health that appears to be a “no go” area.

Communities are not trusted enough to be given the opportunity to have real input into planning and designing services.

They know the difference between primary and secondary healthcare and they know where they can make a meaningful contribution. – Merepeka Raukawa-Tait

We are in a warped world now, where work of minimal use and skill is better paid than what you might call a profession.

A world where reward comes from closed borders and a determination to limit the labour supply.

This is the recipe for economic ruin. It’s why today’s Budget will be in deficit, why the debt will be higher, and why the growth numbers will be anaemic if not non-existent.

A nurse starts at $53,000, a teacher $52,000, a dental assistant $46,000 and a lollipop person? $46,000.

You’ve got to be kidding me. – Mike Hosking

They have corrupted a crusade to save the planet into sleazy pork barrel politics. Labour and the Greens new climate change policies are just vote buying.

The climate change policies announced this week will not bring New Zealand one day closer to net zero emissions but will fund, to name one policy, changes to school curriculum and NCEA so we “embed an understanding of the collective nature of our wellbeing.” Our schools will be teaching socialist dogma.

It just proves we cannot trust politicians with our money; they will spend it on buying votes. – Richard Prebble 

Even those schemes that will reduce emissions will not alter the country’s path to net zero emissions. The path is already in place. The ETS requires all carbon producers to buy credits equal to their emissions. The total amount of emissions is capped and will decline to net zero by 2050.

The policies announced this week will not alter this path. Under the ETS scheme every unit saved from say switching to an electric vehicle frees up a unit for some other activity such as driving an eight-cylinder gas guzzler.

All these new policies will do is enrich some at the expense of others. Many, such as corporations, who will be feeding at the pork barrel, can finance their own route to zero emissions. – Richard Prebble 

A carbon credit from New Zealand forests has the same effect on the planet as a credit created from a tropical forest in the Solomon Islands.

It matters. While New Zealand is the world’s most efficient producer of milk we will never be the most efficient at growing forests to absorb carbon. An equivalent tropical forest absorbs four times more carbon.

New Zealand should be assisting poor countries like the Solomon Islands to regrow their tropical forests and earn ETS credits. Instead international investment funds are buying up productive New Zealand farms and turning them into inefficient carbon sinks.

Climate change in one country means the spot price of New Zealand carbon credits is $76.50. The world price is just US$20.81 – Richard Prebble 

Market price signals – not politicians – should decide the best way to allocate the carbon credits.

No marketplace would ever fund a “cash for clunkers” scheme. Everywhere it has been tried the scheme has proved a very expensive rort. When my daughter was training to be a teacher and needed a car to get to her rural school on section, I bought her an old clunker. Under this scheme she could trade that old clunker, get the $10 thousand subsidy, plus help from me, and buy a new car. I could drive the new car and let her drive my old car. She no longer has that car but you can see how easy the scheme is to rort.

Similar criticisms can be made of every one of the announced initiatives.

It is old fashioned centralized planning. Saving the planet is no reason to bring back failed socialist central planning. Combating climate change is so vital it is essential we use the most powerful and successful economic tool, the free market. – Richard Prebble 

When one surveys the various idiocies pursued by Western governments of late years, one cannot help but marvel at the stupidity of this branch of the human race, without immodestly guaranteeing that one would have done better than the buffoons and poltroons had we been in charge.

One of the reasons we could not guarantee this is that a condition of attaining power in modern democracies (other than insensate ambition and inner emptiness) is that those who seek power must promise six impossible things before breakfast to their credulous electorates. They must promise to square the circle, to part the Red Sea, to turn back the waves, to reconcile the irreconcilable. Afterward, they are trapped by their own rhetoric. When the circle refuses to be squared, the person who promised it becomes a figure of hate, ridicule, or contempt. It goes without saying that no electorate ever blames itself, any more than any fly blames itself for being a nuisance. –

For many years, the policy of several Western governments has been, by various subterfuges, to live beyond their means, to spread largesse they do not have, to put off the reckoning to another day, to deceive the electorate into thinking that what cannot continue will nevertheless continue, and moreover continue forever. No doubt it is economically primitive of me (by comparison, say, with the new monetary theorists), but I believe that the greatest economist who ever lived, or at least lived in a certain sense, was Mr. Micawber: – Theodore Dalrymple

To be frank, climate change is not high on my list of prioritise personally. I’m not a denier, I just don’t care terribly.

So, I’m not unhappy about this announcement today, because I feel like I’ve dodged a cost bullet again.

But I do wonder what the heck they’ve been up to if it’s taken them this long to pull together a plan that has no plan in it.  – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Since Grant Robertson became minister of finance, government spending has gone up 68 percent. With all of the growth forecasts slashed and most of the increased tax revenues spent, there is little in the Budget that shows the government is doing anything to stop the country from going backwards.

Granting everybody’s wishes may be fun, but it is unsustainable. – Brigette Morten

Labour’s failure to order the Covid vaccine on time looks to have cost the average Kiwi household around $7000. Don’t worry. That average household has already forked out around $5500 in extra taxes to help pay for it. We’ll pay the rest later. – Matthew Hooton

In Auckland in particular, the preventable lockdown also drove more family businesses broke, ruined a second school year for tens of thousands of students and worsened already fragile mental health.

Yet no one in the Beehive or the bureaucracy has even apologised for the failure to begin our mass vaccination programme six months earlier. – Matthew Hooton

The vaccine fiasco underlines that it is more often managerial competence than the amount of your money ministers boast they are spending that determines the efficacy of government programmes. Government didn’t ignore Pfizer’s 2020 offer because it was underfunded but because it was gormless.

Yesterday, Robertson boasted that he plans to spend more money than any of his predecessors. For 2022/23 alone, core Crown spending is now picked to be $127.1b, up another $6.9b over what was estimated as recently as December, already factoring in Robertson’s planned $6b of extra spending. This is not a sign of success but of failure, or at least that things are going wrong.

The increase over the December forecast is an extra $3500 per household. In 2022/23, Robertson now expects to spend $35.9b more than he and his predecessor Steven Joyce did in 2017/18. That is a 45 per cent increase, or nearly $20,000 per household.

To pay for it, Robertson estimates he will collect over $14,000 more per household in tax than he and Joyce did together in 2017/18. By the middle of next year, each household will carry over $50,000 more in net core Crown debt than when Robertson took the job — and debt will grow again in 2023/24. – Matthew Hooton

But if ministers, the media and the public continue to see increased government spending as a sign of success, not failure, then future finance ministers should do nothing. Demographics alone will allow them to boast big increases in spending, yet with no improvement in access, services or outcomes. – Matthew Hooton

The lesson from the 45 per cent increase in spending over which Robertson has presided is that the Government is taxing and borrowing quite enough. It has more than enough money to do a reasonable job at providing the services and support expected of it. But none of those services and support will in fact get better until the conversation turns to competence — and where governments at least apologise for things like unnecessary multibillion-dollar lockdowns. – Matthew Hooton

Here I am with my pronouns – Cactus Kate NPUWYWS (not putting up with your woke shit). Bite that as a pronoun. – Cactus Kate

Government spending has increased by 66 per cent since Labour came into Government. That means that they are spending $51 billion more than in 2017. I really want to repeat that. $51 billion. The Labour Government won’t be worried that I repeated that number, because most of you don’t think in billions and so you won’t be too bothered because the number is so big it is unrecognisable to the average person.

So let’s make it relatable. That is $10,000 per New Zealander. Yes, you have paid $10,000. So far. Well actually they have borrowed most of that, so your kids and grandkids will have to pay that back. When people say that spending $145 million on consultants at our transport agency Waka Kotahi is chump change, you’re the chump. – Paula Bennett

There are a whole lot of things going up under this Government. The number of kids not regularly attending school has gone up. Not your problem as you’re a good parent who can afford to read Premium? Well, it is as those kids are disengaged from society, some illiterate as they haven’t learnt the basics, they are going to be problems in the future. At best they will spend a lot of time on welfare, at worst they will join the growing crime spree as they feel they have nothing to lose. – Paula Bennett

Pattrick knows how to include her research so that it’s a background wash rather than a foreground blob. – David Hill

Yes this inflation is not temporary, it is not “transitory”. New Zealand will NOT be achieving its agreed inflation target, not even remotely, over the “medium term”. My question is: since when can a Finance Minister and a Reserve Bank Governor put their signatures to an “agreed” course of action, then willfully ignore it? In monetary economics, we call it a loss of credibility. – Robert MacCulloch

https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2022/05/hilary-calvert-government-must-come.html

The Decolonisation of New Zealand Education

The energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine disabused many politicians of the notion that the world could make a swift transition to green energy powered by solar, wind and wishful thinking. As food prices skyrocket and the conflict threatens a global food crisis, we need to face another unpopular reality: Organic farming is ineffective, land hungry and very expensive, and it would leave billions hungry if it were embraced world-wide. 

The rise in food prices—buoyed by increased fertilizer, energy and transport costs—amid the conflict in Ukraine has exposed inherent flaws in the argument for organic farming. Because organic agriculture shirks many of the scientific advancements that have allowed farmers to increase crop yields, it’s inherently less efficient than conventional farming. – Bjorn Lomborg

A small country depends on our ability to sell stuff to the world with clear rules that everyone follows. The alternative is a trading world tilted to the powerful, where we’re forced to take sides and we survive by transferring wealth to our economic masters. – Josie Pagani

The explosion in trade mirrored almost exactly an unprecedented decline in extreme global poverty.

Despite record levels of international trade last year, that pace of growth is slowing. Slower growth in globalisation has coincided with slower progress in reducing poverty. –

While we welcome the US commitment to security in the Pacific, there is a gaping lack of a real trade and economic agenda.

Without market access, the US cannot hope to counter Chinese influence in the region. – Josie Pagani

There is nothing a strong government likes more than a weak people; and therefore, whether consciously or not, everything is done to render the people ever feebler. Not physically, of course, we are raising up giants of a size and strength never before seen, as can be seen on any sports field, but psychologically—which is why psychology is the handmaiden of soft authoritarianism, it teaches people their vulnerability.

The more vulnerable people can be induced to believe themselves to be, the more they need assistance to keep themselves going. Such assistance (which is self-justifying, though never sufficient, or indeed even partially effective) requires a vast legal and other infrastructure, put in place and regulated by the government. The government is the pastor, the people are the sheep. – Theodore Dalrymple

Are men now like sugar that dissolves in the slightest moisture? It seems so. Surely at one time men could have withstood or laughed off an insult or two without bursting into tears or seeking compensation for the terrible trauma to their ego that such an insult did. Of course, where a perceived harm is actionable at law, more such harm will be perceived. It is an established fact that in countries in which whiplash injuries as a result of car collisions are not legally actionable, people do not suffer from the kind of whiplash injuries that they experience when there is the possibility of compensation. The real cause of whiplash, then, is not accident but tort law, and it is the lawyers whom the sufferers from it should be suing, not the people who ran into the back of their cars. – Theodore Dalrymple

The more lawyers we train, the worse things get. As the French Revolution amply proved, underemployed and disgruntled lawyers are a very dangerous class, and they therefore have to be employed somehow. What better way of doing so than by promulgating a constant deluge of ever-changing regulations and ensuring that a population is made of eggshells? The proliferation of helplines (most of which are exceptionally busy today, that is to say whenever you ring them) indicates this.– Theodore Dalrymple

Better a society of cheats than one of informers. The fact is that informers are not thinking of the betterment of society but of settling scores with those they inform upon, or they take a malicious pleasure from inflicting discomfiture on others. – Theodore Dalrymple

Such qualities as resilience and fortitude are the deadliest enemies of any modern government bureaucracy.– Theodore Dalrymple

In the city, you’ve got consistency, convenience and control,” says Lim. “When we lived in Auckland, we got My Food Bag delivered, or you could pop out to the shops and get something when you felt like it and very quickly. Down here, it’s the complete opposite. Nature dictates when you’re going to have it and how much you are going to have. There isn’t any consistency. You just have to work with what you’ve got. – Nadia Lim

 I didn’t necessarily want to be on a big farm, I would have been quite happy on a lifestyle block, but Carlos wanted to do the proper farming thing.

“And I always felt, more so probably in the past five years, this overwhelming sense of responsibility to not only be part of the process of preparing food – teaching people how to cook and use these ingredients – but to also be part of the process of how the ingredients get to your plate. How you grow your food, how you raise it . . . I want to complete the full cycle. – Nadia Lim

There is no black and white. I don’t buy into the idea of people saying farmers should do things this way, or that way. There are far too many variables and there are pros and cons to all systems, whether they be conventional or organic or spray-free or regenerative.

“People watch documentaries or read an article, and of course humans like things to be made simple . . . I can 100 per cent put my heart on the line and tell you it’s not. – Nadia Lim

When it comes to growing food, to me it is the most simple, natural thing in the world – there is no such thing as an ecosystem that does not have plants AND animals in it. It’s not as simple as ‘livestock bad, plant good’. It comes down to who is helping curate the balance of the two. – Nadia Lim

Our leaders need to stand up, back our police and give them all the support and resource they need to keep us safe. It does not help when leaders like our current mayor reportedly state that there is a perception that our city isn’t safe. It is not a perception, Mayor Goff, that is insulting to the woman cowering in her own lounge as bullets explode around her property.

The violence can no longer be ignored by the Government and by us. It is no longer something that is happening among them – it is happening to us. – Paula Bennett

I worry when my kids are in town, I hate them going in there. They tell me town was OK, “only about 3 fights,” that they witnessed.

So just the 20 bullet holes, the 3 fights (that we know of), and the suburbs filled with opportunists hitting people up for cash.

Welcome to Auckland – what a cool place to live. – Kate Hawkesby

As I’ve been pointing out now for a couple of years, the obvious gap in the plans of our betters for a carbon-free “net zero” energy future is the problem of massive-scale energy storage. How exactly is New York City (for example) going to provide its citizens with power for a long and dark full-week period in the winter, with calm winds, long nights, and overcast days, after everyone has been required to change over to electric heat and electric cars — and all the electricity is supposed to come from the wind and sun, which are neither blowing nor shining for these extended periods? Can someone please calculate how much energy storage will be needed to cover a worst-case solar/wind drought, what it will consist of, how long it has to last, how much it will cost, and whether it is economically feasible? Nearly all descriptions by advocates of the supposed path to “net zero” — including the ambitious plans of the states of New York and California — completely gloss over this issue and/or deal with it in a way demonstrating total incompetence and failure to comprehend the problem. – Francis Menton

Bottom line: I’m not trusting anybody’s so-called “model” to prove that this gigantic energy transformation is going to work. Show me the demonstration project that actually works.

They won’t. Indeed, there is not even an attempt to put such a thing together, even as we hurtle down the road to “net zero” without any idea how it is going to work. – Francis Menton

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is backfiring for Russia on every front. For now, it has given the EU an advantage. How Brussels will use it may be a different matter.- Oliver Hartwich

Win $2 million in Lotto and you’re celebrated. Earn $2 million busting your arse to help other people and you’re criticised. Welcome to New Zealand.– Lani Fogelberg

Someone could be busting their arse in a business capacity and the good they’ve done won’t be celebrated. There will be an undertone that encourages people to envy them or ask why they should have $2m? But they may have worked hard and gone through quite a lot to have a genuine contribution. – Lani Fogelberg

The tall poppy syndrome here is worse than in Australia. The responses are pretty aggressive and it’s getting worse. If you’re successful in business, people treat you well to your face but behind your back, it’s different. They don’t want to be associated with successful people; rather than being celebrated, they’re viewed as someone not to hang out with. – Lani Fogelberg

A lot of New Zealanders think the only way you can be successful is using other poor people, walking over them for their own profitability and benefit, that’s the mindset of this country because we’re taught everyone must be equal. – Lani Fogelberg

My God! The amount of shit you get for owning a Ferrari. I’m a petrolhead. It’s no different to a woman being passionate about fashion. – Lani Fogelberg

In the Great Game of the 21st century, face-to-face diplomacy is perhaps the single most valuable tool – as Australia’s Penny Wong and China’s Wang Yi successfully demonstrated over the past week. The global geopolitical temperature is steadily rising. New Zealand needs to ensure it can withstand the heat. – Geoffrey Miller

 Humanism valorizes the individual—and with good reason; we are each the hero of our own story. Not only is one’s individual sovereignty more essential to the humanist project than one’s group affiliation, but fighting for individual freedom—which includes freedom of conscience, speech, and inquiry—is part of the writ-large agenda of humanism. It unleashes creativity and grants us the breathing space to be agents in our own lives.

Or at least that idea used to be at the core of humanism.

Today, there is a subpart of humanists, identitarians, who are suspicious of individuals and their freedoms. They do not want a free society if it means some people will use their freedom to express ideas with which they disagree. They see everything through a narrow affiliative lens of race, gender, ethnicity, or other demographic category and seek to shield groups that they see as marginalized by ostensible psychic harms inflicted by the speech of others. – Robyn E. Blumner

 Rather than lifting up individuals and imbuing them with autonomy and all the extraordinary uniqueness that flows from it, identitarians would divide us all into racial,  ethnic,  and  gender-based groups and make that group affiliation our defining characteristic. This has the distorting effect of obliterating personal agency, rewarding group victimhood, and incentivizing competition to be seen as the most oppressed.

In addition to being inherently divisive, this is self-reinforcing defeatism. It results in extreme examples, such as a draft plan in California to deemphasize calculus as a response to persistent racial gaps in math achievement.² Suddenly a subject as racially neutral as math has become a flashpoint for identitarians set on ensuring equality of outcomes for certain groups rather than the far-more just standard of equality of opportunity. In this freighted environment, reducing the need for rigor and eliminating challenging standards becomes a feasible solution. The notion of individual merit or recognition that some students are better at math than others becomes racially tinged and suspect.

Not only does the truth suffer under this assault on common sense, but we start to live in a Harrison Bergeron world where one’s natural skills are necessarily sacrificed on the altar of equality or, in today’s parlance, equity. – Robyn E. Blumner

But nobody should be under any illusion: the Government’s ongoing stimulatory fiscal policy is contributing to the need for the Reserve Bank to increase interest rates, something which the Treasury warned the Minister just weeks before the Budget when the Minister decided he wanted to dole out some cash sweeteners to help low income New Zealanders with the cost of living.

It’s like a car being driven with one foot on the brake and the other on the accelerator – the more the Government stimulates the economy with fiscal policy, the harder the Reserve Bank will need to apply the brakes of higher interest rates. – Don Brash   

A 2021 Canadian law on assisted suicide contains a provision that will allow doctors to provide assisted suicide to the psychiatrically ill starting next year. Given that severe psychiatric disorder tends to cloud the judgment of those who suffer from it, one wonders who will benefit most from this law, if passed. Certainly, it might remove from society people who are often difficult, unproductive, and expensive for others. They might be encouraged to shuffle off this mortal coil as a service to their relatives or even to their county. The distinction between the voluntary and the compulsory might become blurred. – Theodore Dalrymple

An illness may be serious but not fatal; it may be bearable or unbearable, but whether it is the one or the other is not simply a technical question that can be answered by ticking a few boxes on a form. An easy way out will always tempt people to take it who might otherwise have carried on. And in times of economic stringency, they might well be encouraged to take it. Our hospitals, after all, are full, and often urgently in need of beds for those who can be helped.

On the other side of the question is the fact that everyone can easily imagine circumstances in which he would rather die than carry on and would appreciate an easeful death. The principle of double effect, according to which doctors are permitted to prescribe drugs intended to comfort the dying but that will also shorten their lives, has long been in operation. It is not a perfect solution to the dilemma—but then, there is no perfect solution. –Theodore Dalrymple

WHETHER NANAIA MAHUTA followed the conflict-of-interest rules set out in The Cabinet Manual hardly matters. A dangerous political narrative is forming around the appointment of, and awarding of contracts to, Mahuta’s whanau in circumstances that, at the very least, raise serious questions about this Government’s political judgement. Enlarging this narrative is the growing public perception that the mainstream news media is refusing to cover a story that would, in other circumstances, have attracted intense journalistic interest. The conflation of these two, highly damaging narratives with a third – the even more negative narrative of “co-governance” – has left the Labour Government in an extremely exposed and vulnerable position. – Chris Trotter

Since the widespread assumption among Pakeha New Zealanders is that co-governance and representative democracy are fundamentally incompatible, Labour’s willingness to be presented as co-governance’s friend runs the risk of being cast as democracy’s enemy.

Of even greater concern is the inevitability of this anti-democratic characterisation being extended to an ever-increasing fraction of the Māori population. Statements from Māori leaders appearing to discount the importance of, or even disparage, the principles of democracy have done little to slow this process. –

The problem with this willingness to indulge in ad hominem attacks on people holding genuine reservations about the Government’s proposals is that more and more of them will decide that they might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and embrace the very racism of which they stand accused. In this context, the revelations that some members of a Māori Minister of the Crown’s whanau have been the recipients of Government funds, and appointed to roles not unrelated to the furtherance of the Minister’s policies, will be taken as confirmation that all is not as it should be in Aotearoa-New Zealand. – Chris Trotter

The result could very easily be the emergence of what might be called a “super-narrative” in which all the negatives of co-governance, media capture, and Neo-Tribal Capitalism are rolled into one big story about the deliberate corruption of New Zealand democracy. The guilty parties would be an unholy alliance of Pakeha and Māori elites determined to keep public money flowing upwards into protected private hands. In this super-narrative, the structures set forth in He Puapua to secure tino rangatiratanga, will actually ensure the exclusion of the vast majority of New Zealanders from the key locations of power. The only positive consequence of which will be a common struggle for political and economic equality in which non-elite Māori and Pakeha will have every incentive to involve themselves. – Chris Trotter

What lies ahead, as the institutions of co-governance take shape, is the coming together of two very privileged birds of a feather: the Pakeha professionals and managers who have taken command of the society and economy created by Neoliberalism, and the Māori professionals and managers created to produce and operate the cultural and economic machinery of Neo-Tribal Capitalism.

This, ultimately, will be the spectre that arises out of the controversy swirling around Nanaia Mahuta. The spectre of the worst of both the Pakeha and the Māori worlds. Worlds in which the powerful trample all over the weak. Where tradition constrains the free exploration of ideas and techniques. And where the petty advantages of separation are elevated above the liberating effects of unity. Where “Aotearoa” creates two peoples out of one. – Chris Trotter

Crying in the movies and in response to really compelling stories, it actually shows … you have a strong empathy response and empathy is one of the five key characteristics of emotional intelligence, so it’s a strength. – Deborah Rickwood

People who are high in emotional intelligence have better social and intimate relationships, and it helps you to deal with stress and conflict, and I guess it just means that you’re more aware and attuned to your emotions, and as long as you can regulate them, that makes you better able to be socially connected, get along with other people. – Deborah Rickwood

Crying is basically a way of getting over getting upset and humans are the only animals who emotionally cry.

“Crying releases endorphins in your brain. I mean, [for] most of us, if you have a really good cry, you’ll notice you need to go and have a little sleep afterwards. You’re kind of drained, you’re more relaxed, it is a release of emotion that’s good for us.  – Deborah Rickwood

You hear particularly from people who become parents and especially men when they become fathers, they find that when they see movies about fathers and sons … they will cry and really respond to that, which they wouldn’t have before they became a father.

So, I think the older you get, the more experience of social connections, the more things you pay attention to that are meaningful to you, so more things then emotionally arouse you. – Deborah Rickwood

I’d love New Zealand to establish a Victims of Communism Museum which details all the mass deaths caused by communism. It could even include half price entry for people living in Aro Valley. – David Farrar

When I was Governor of the Reserve Bank I used to talk about the contrasting fortunes of my uncle and me, to illustrate the effect of inflation. In 1971, my uncle sold an apple orchard he had spent a life-time developing and, being of a cautious disposition, invested the proceeds in 18-year government bonds at 5.5% interest. Perhaps fortunately, by the time those bonds matured my uncle and his wife were dead, because the $30,000 for which he had sold his orchard was by then worth only a small fraction of what it had been worth in 1971. In 1971, $30,000 would have bought my uncle 11 Toyota Corolla cars. By 1989, $30,000 would have bought him just one Corolla, with a small amount of change left over.

By coincidence, in 1971 my wife and I returned from the United States to a very well-paying job in Auckland. We bought a five-bedroom home with a great sea view for $43,000, which was almost exactly three times my substantial salary. By the late eighties, the house was worth more than ten times what we had paid for it, and I have no doubt that today it would be worth several million dollars (I have had no financial interest in the house for more than 30 years).- Don Brash

There are simply no good reasons why an under-populated country like New Zealand should tolerate the ridiculous “house prices” (really, ridiculous land prices) which we currently have. Blame central and local government politicians, not greedy speculators, people with Chinese-sounding names, or the purveyors of building materials. – Don Brash

The use of the word “outcomes” (aka results, deliverables) should not be so earth-shattering but our media, entranced by this Government’s strategy of throwing money at problems to make them go away, have now realised we also need ‘outcomes’ or ‘results’.

Luxon and Willis, having grabbed the narrative and set the agenda, are re-educating the media (the public already knew) that it actually is results that we want and we don’t have much evidence of that with this Government so far. Just billions of wasted spending and excessive appointments of highly paid public servants, which National have promised to go through with a fine-tooth comb once they gain office next year. – Wendy Geus

A creative writing course at a British university has withdrawn graduation requirement that students should attempt a sonnet, not on the reasonable grounds that it is futile to try to turn people with cloth ears for language into sonneteers, but because the sonnet is a literary form that is white and Western. – Theodore Dalrymple

As a psychiatrist, I understand identity as a crucial part of every person’s self-concept. Each person’s identity is cobbled together from multiple identity fragments: for example, gender, race, religion, nation, family, and ideology. These fragments can include their opposites, a negative identity fragment that represents something that person absolutely is not and defines themselves against. They might include someone’s love or hatred of flowers, sports, or the ballet. Over a person’s lifetime, these fragments may conflict with each other and get reordered and revalued in ways big and small, many times.

In the political and other societal realms, identity conflicts play out in an analogous way to how they play out within individuals. The key conflicts are over the prioritization of identities, particularly which comes first. In a totalitarian society, one identity is required to be the primary focus of all public and private action. This directive can serve as a definition of totalitarianism. – Elliot S Gershon

What seems to be overlooked in the rush toward “equity, diversity, and inclusion” is the fact that when one identity fragment within a population is selected for benefits, or favored for whatever reason, the other fragments are penalized. This has been proven mathematically for Darwinian selection and applies to any other selection within a finite environment.  – Elliot S Gershon

Identity-based regimes, like the one taking hold in the United States, do not necessarily consider the extent to which people agree with or give importance to the race or gender to which they are assigned. Based on my skin color, I might appear to be white, but I never think of myself as white. My grandfather and other family members were murdered in the Holocaust because they were not white, according to the identity-based regime of the time. So am I white? Not according to me.

Doctrinal identity assignments routinely disregard voluntary identity choices, limit transitions, accentuate distinctions, and generate very severe reactions among those who are assigned to favored and unfavored groups. Persons assigned to one identity are encouraged to see other identities as enemies or oppressors. Identity-based entitlements can therefore generate resentment and even violence, which can become routine, and can be used to justify the continuation of entitlements ad infinitum, even as the institutionalization of entitlements based on state-assigned identity groups creates its own devastatingly destructive forms of exclusion and corruption. – Elliot S Gershon

Gender identity is widely accepted as a matter of choice for everyone. But gender fluidity is a doctrine, and it generates resentments. Many parents of young children resent fluid-gender-identity education programs; they have their own understanding that children in those ages should be encouraged to integrate and solidify the gender identity of their natal sex. Gender transition has also led to widespread resentment when male-to-female transgender athletes win prizes competing against girls and women who are born female. Yet in the same political and social context where gender is held to be a matter of choice, race is considered immutable. Any person can be accused of having “white privilege” or “unconscious bias,” regardless of their actual ancestry or beliefs.

Although there is a case to be made for gender transitions, there is a stronger case to be made for racial transitions. Gender as a social construct is very closely related to biological sex, an unambiguous characteristic of the vast majority of humans. Race is also a social construct, associated with statistical differences among population groups. Race, however, does not have a rational or scientific definition unambiguously applicable to all individuals, and for many people it is impossible to determine—leading to casually racist assumptions based on skin pigmentation or “one drop” theories that lack any legal or scientific currency. – Elliot S Gershon

There is nothing pure about race. As a category, it is remarkably fluid. In a modern American urban population, we statistical geneticists frequently find people who self-classify as white or Black but whose genotypes are ambiguous. People with the same amount of “white” or “Black” ancestry may identity with either race, or with neither race. Many people who are identified as “Latinx” by Harvard would identify themselves as “white,” while many “whites” would identify themselves as something else, based on ancestry, upbringing, culture, or personal affinity. Why should the state or private elite institutions be empowered to impose these slippery and often poorly framed identities on individuals without their consent, especially when the social cost to the society of doing so is real?

One way out of our current identity conflicts is to permit individuals to freely choose their own racial and gender identities and at the same time to forbid any societal rewards or penalties based on these identities. – Elliot S Gershon

Pursuing race- and gender-blindness under the law is preferable to enforced alternatives that have consistently failed for more than a century. – Elliot S Gershon

My faith is not a political agenda, right? I am there to represent all New Zealanders, not one faith or one religion, and you shouldn’t vote for me because of my faith, and you shouldn’t reject me because of my faith. –  Christopher Luxon

My faith is actually about tolerance, compassion – not discriminating, not rejecting people. That’s what I think my faith is about. – Christopher Luxon

Every human being in this country is valuable and equal. That’s the guts of it. I want everybody to genuinely flourish and so when I arrive in a business environment and I don’t see diversity being embraced and people being able to come to work as their whole self, that’s a problem. – Christopher Luxon

There is no substitute for personal knowledge of the patient and their conditions. It saves the health system huge amounts of money. If they turn up at an ED in crisis, they end up having scans, tests, all sorts of expensive treatment that good GP care could have prevented. – Dr Samantha Murton

When fundamental facts of human nature, and fundamental values and institutions such as marriage and the family are contradicted by law and taught to new generations, of course those who disagree will feel alienated. Some will persevere in dialogue about these issues, but others will find an outlet not just on social media, but, as we have seen, in more militant ways.

Then, keyboard warriors will be the least of our worries. – Carolyn Moynihan

This Government’s activist-driven drive towards a Maori-dominated neo-apartheid political structure, cannot be allowed to continue. We must not just stand by and watch our democratic structure and democracy be overridden and destroyed — particularly by a group of in-caucus-activists driven solely by self-interest and totally, deliberately and fraudulently misrepresenting and misinterpreting the Treaty of Waitangi  in an attempt to justify what they are about.

What we are seeing and being subjected to is a TOTAL abuse of the privilege, power, objective-responsibility and trust and integrity inherent in and expected of those in Parliamentary office. Particularly galling is the fact that it has all been fraudulently sprung on us, following the election, without notice. It is treachery at its very worst — and it must be stopped. – Hugh Perrett

Lying awake at night imagining the worst possible complications – amputations, kidney failure, blindness? That sucks too. People with chronic illnesses will understand this, and this is hardly something I am alone in, but the worst part is the way my diabetes is a shadow over my whole life. It’s a constant companion I live with and try to placate. – Megan Whelan

There are many studies that show deprivation is a significant factor in both developing type 2, and in having complications from it. People who are having to choose between buying fresh vegetables and sending the kids to school camp aren’t quibbling over which protein powder brand is the best. – Megan Whelan

Green energy is a wild bull in the electricity china shop. Australia’s new green government has a $20B plan to “rewire the nation” to connect the spreading rash of wind and solar toys. Eastern Australia recently had a couple of days of high wind, which caused many outages as trees and powerlines were blown down. Imagine the outages after a cyclone cuts a swathe thru this continent-wide spider-web of fragile power lines connecting green energy generators, batteries and markets. – Viv Forbes

Working for Families has given us a mess that may have no solution. Or at least no solution that doesn’t cause other problems. – Eric Crampton

A 57 percent Effective Marginal Tax Rate facing families who pay zero percent net tax is a mess. But it does not seem to be the kind of mess that can be cleaned up.

Unlike housing.

Would that governments fixed the problems that can be fixed before putting effort into the intractable ones. Ending the housing shortage and improving supermarket competition could do a lot more good for family budgets than tweaking transfers to middle-income families. – Eric Crampton

In a democracy, as on the marae, matters of collective interest should be decided by robust and respectful debate. The Government should stop trying to curate the conversation and force predetermined outcomes on constitutional matters, because this is backfiring. Exchanges based on racial framings provoke racist reactions; and questions that need airing are being swamped in a tsunami of racist abuse, foreclosing a proper (‘tika’) discussion. – Dame Anne Salmond

By using the Treaty ‘partnership’ deception to justify giving control of essential services to the Maori elite, Jacinda Ardern is deliberately robbing New Zealanders of crucial democratic safeguards, placing them instead at the mercy of unelected and unaccountable iwi business leaders working in their own best interests, not in the public good.

The reality is that once co-governance is put in place, the opportunities for tribal enrichment will be endless, with contracts, fees, and other mechanisms able to be used to secure taxpayer funding – exposing the country to the problems that plague all tribal societies including corruption and nepotism.   – Muriel Newman

Jacinda Ardern’s path to co-governance and tribal rule, has barely got off the ground, but is already proving to be a recipe for Maori privilege by an inherited elite that will divide and weaken our society. Their end goal, of course – as outlined in He Puapua – is to ‘take the country back’ to tribal rule by 2040.

Are we really prepared to stand by and let this become the future for New Zealand? – Muriel Newman

It’s just possible that one reason so many MPs are unknown to the public is that the media have largely abandoned their traditional function of reporting what happens in Parliament. And I mean in Parliament – not outside the debating chamber where members of the press gallery (sometimes known as the wolf pack, but perhaps more accurately characterised as a mob of sheep taking their cue from whoever happens to be the most aggressive among them) wait to ambush whichever politician they have collectively decided will be that day’s target.

We are largely ignorant not only about who represents us in Parliament, but also what they do there. The only time the mainstream media take an interest in the debating chamber is when something happens to excite them, such as a squabble involving the Speaker or the inflammatory hurling of an insult.- Karl du Fresne

Much of the time we have no idea what business is being conducted in the House, still less any knowledge of which MPs are making speeches or asking questions. Often we don’t learn about important legislation until its consequences – not always welcome ones – become apparent long after it has been passed.

This means there is a vacuum at the heart of the democratic process. We elect our representatives every three years, and then what? To all intents and purposes they disappear into a void until the next election, with the exception of the handful of activist MPs already mentioned who attract journalists’ attention. The feedback loop that should tell us what all those other MPs are doing is broken.

Yet the right to observe and report Parliament is arguably the most fundamental of press freedoms. – Karl du Fresne

My guess is that you’re more likely to see a polar bear in Bellamy’s than a row of reporters busily taking shorthand notes of speeches in the House. As a result, MPs largely escape the public scrutiny that should inform our votes. This magnifies an absence of accountability already inherent under MMP, where a substantial proportion of MPs are answerable not to the public but to their party hierarchy. Call them the invisible MPs.

Online platforms (Newsroom, BusinessDesk, Point of Order, to name three) fill some of the gaps in parliamentary coverage, and Radio New Zealand’s The House caters to a small audience of political obsessives. But it’s hit and miss, and the result is that we are arguably less informed about the business of Parliament than at any time in living memory. That can’t be good for democracy. – Karl du Fresne

Wording is no doubt a small thing by comparison with the horror of a mass shooting such as the one of schoolchildren and teachers at Uvalde, but it’s nonetheless of some significance. In all the reports, I noticed that 8, 9, and 10-year-old children were referred to as “students.”

They were not students, they were pupils.

Does it matter what you call them, you might ask? If words matter, then it does matter (and Confucius thought so more than 2,500 years ago, for he wrote that when words were used wrongly, the state and society could not hold).

In fact, nobody believes that words don’t matter, least of all at the present time, when bitter disputes break out about nomenclature and by what pronouns people should be addressed. Such disputes are battles for power rather than for improvement or happiness. Since speech is so central to human existence, forcing people to change their language is an exercise in power over them, which isn’t to say that in no circumstances whatsoever should such changes be suggested or even mandated. It’s true that there are terms that are intrinsically degrading to those whom they designate, but with a few exceptions, struggles over language are not usually concerned with them. –  Theodore Dalrymple

A pupil is a child who is under the authority of a teacher who chooses for him what he should learn. This is because the child isn’t capable of choosing or deciding for himself: If the child were so capable, there probably wouldn’t be any need for teachers in the first place.  . . .

A student is a young person old enough to be at least partly self-directed in the choice of what to learn, increasingly so as he progresses. – Theodore Dalrymple

What does the abandonment of the word pupil signify? In the first place, it’s unctuous and hypocritical, for in practice adults are still obliged to choose what it is that young children should learn, even if they have changed their opinions as to what it is that should be taught.

But there’s something deeper than this, a kind of insincere refusal of authority as such. People now refuse to admit that they are exercising authority even as they are doing so, because authority is supposedly so undemocratic or paternalist in nature.  – Theodore Dalrymple

This denial of proper distinctions is a characteristic of our age. For example, the distinction between men and women, inscribed in biology, is increasingly being denied because (what is true) there are some marginal cases. Those who wish to eradicate distinctions, however, start by making the marginal central to all considerations. Failing to agree to this sleight of hand is characterized by the eradicators of distinctions as a sign of intolerance or worse, as if everyone who thought that the marginal should not be made central necessarily is in favor of ill treatment of the marginal, which, of course, is true neither empirically nor in logic. Moreover, few people recognize that the virtue of tolerance can be exercised only in the presence of disapproval or distaste, for unless there’s one or the other, there’s nothing to tolerate. Everyone, surely, tolerates what he likes or approves of. Nor is acceptance of something the same as celebrating it. For example, I accept rock music in the sense that I don’t wish to suppress it, but I don’t celebrate it and avoid it when I can.

No doubt there are some 8-year-olds somewhere who are capable of being students in the sense of choosing what and how to learn, but I think that they must be about as rare as giant pandas, if not rarer. By calling such young children students we’re suggesting that they have authority, and you can’t suggest such a thing without children taking you at your word and coming to think of themselves as authorities. This is abject. – Theodore Dalrymple

The mainstream media tells the public repeatedly that the criteria in the $55 million media fund mandating the promotion of a radical view of the Treaty as a 50:50 partnership are insignificant and do not compromise their independence with regard to reporting on matters such as Three Waters.

However, their unwillingness to contact a highly qualified analyst who is closely investigating the power structures of Three Waters — which is probably the most contentious political issue for the government right now — certainly won’t convince the public they are not constrained by the criteria they signed up to as a condition of receiving handsome amounts of government cash.- Graham Adams,

A good Speaker, like a good person in any public role, needs to know when it is time to go. –  ODT editorial

New Zealanders may not be the most forthright people when it comes to saying what they really think. But in the Three Waters debate, this ‘Yeah, nah’ culture is reaching new heights.

Three Waters is about everything. It is about the government’s new race-relations agenda. It is about the Ardern Government’s direction for the country. It is about the divide between Wellington and the regions.

And yes, it may even be a little about water. But not for everyone.– Oliver Hartwich

If skills like reading and arithmetic are not learned, creativity is stunted and well-being is compromised. Without knowledge, critical thinking is empty. If young people cease to learn disciplines like history and science, cultural and technological innovation will gradually grind to a halt. Or maybe we’ll just outsource those things to machines as well. – Michael Johnston

Until Jacinda Ardern became PM, New Zealanders were largely trusting of their Prime Ministers, secure in the knowledge that if they deviated too much from the straight and narrow, the Fourth Estate would hold them to account.

Not so anymore. Labour’s $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund ‘bribe’ has put paid to that.

As a result, through her own actions, Jacinda Ardern has gravely undermined trust in the Government for many New Zealanders. – Dr Muriel Newman

Luxury beliefs have, to a large extent, replaced luxury goods.

Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. – Rob Henderson

The yearning for distinction is the key motive here.

And in order to convert economic capital into cultural capital, it must be publicly visible.

But distinction encompasses not only clothing or food or rituals. It also extends to ideas and beliefs and causes.   – Rob Henderson

In the past, people displayed their membership in the upper class with their material accoutrements.

But today, because material goods have become a noisier signal of one’s social position and economic resources, the affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs. – Rob Henderson

Expressing a luxury belief is a manifestation of cultural capital, a signal of one’s fortunate economic circumstances. – Rob Henderson

Plenty of research indicates that compared with an external locus of control, an internal locus of control is associated with better academic, economic, health, and relationship outcomes. Believing you are responsible for your life’s direction rather than external forces appears to be beneficial. – Rob Henderson

Undermining self-efficacy will have little effect on the rich and educated, but will have pronounced effects for the less fortunate. – Rob Henderson

When people express unusual beliefs that are at odds with conventional opinion, like defunding the police or downplaying hard work, or using peculiar vocabulary, often what they are really saying is, “I was educated at a top university” or “I have the means and time to acquire these esoteric ideas.”

Only the affluent can learn these things because ordinary people have real problems to worry about. – Rob Henderson

The chief purpose of luxury beliefs is to indicate evidence of the believer’s social class and education.

Members of the luxury belief class promote these ideas because it advances their social standing and because they know that the adoption of these policies or beliefs will cost them less than others. – Rob Henderson

Why are affluent people more susceptible to luxury beliefs? They can afford it. And they care the most about status.

In short, luxury beliefs are the new status symbols.

They are honest indicators of one’s social position, one’s level of wealth, where one was educated, and how much leisure time they have to adopt these fashionable beliefs.

And just as many luxury goods often start with the rich but eventually become available to everyone, so it is with luxury beliefs.

But unlike luxury goods, luxury beliefs can have long term detrimental effects for the poor and working class. However costly these beliefs are for the rich, they often inflict even greater costs on everyone else. – Rob Henderson

We don’t need last centuries, centralised, one-size must fit all ideology imposed on a vastly different modern workplace. – Alan McDonald

The idea of equal suffrage – equal voting rights, regardless of gender, class and ethnicity – has been a pillar of our democracy for decades. All New Zealanders should have an equal say in who governs them; an equal say in appointing the people that make the decisions that affects their lives.

Equally fundamental to our system is the ability to throw poor performers out at the next election – that is the bedrock accountability in our democracy.  – Paul Goldsmith

If we as a country no longer think that equal voting rights apply at one level of government, pressure will build for change in national elections. – 

We recognise the burden of history, but no past injustices are fixed by undermining something that makes this country the great place it is – preserving the pillars of our open democracy. – Paul Goldsmith

If Jacinda Ardern and her government Ministers no longer think that Kiwis should have equal voting rights, then they should make the case and ask New Zealanders whether they agree.

It would be a constitutional outrage to use a transitory parliamentary majority to set a precedent that changes the nature of our democracy so dramatically, without asking the people first. – Paul Goldsmith

The real crime with the incompetency is not only were we all affected in terms of their inability to do their job properly, but the fact we had no choice.

The entire Covid response has been a top down exercise in dictatorship. Rules, regulations, and instructions we had no option but to follow.

In this specific case, the testing was a mess because they refused to recognise RATs, labs and private facilities were screaming out to help, to fill gaps, to provide products, and to solve problems. But no, the Ministry knew best. And yet, they didn’t.

It started at the start of Covid the lack of PPE, it rolled on through the lack of vaccine, the lack of testing, and the lack of beds . – Mike Hosking 

This report this week will be dismissed along with all the other reports that got dismissed. When one day we have the Royal Commission, it’ll find all the same stuff, and that will be dismissed as well.

Where was the anger? Where were the demands to be better? Or do the majority these days just enjoy being shafted by incompetence, hence it’s not really news?   – Mike Hosking 

The Bill of Rights is oft-quoted; however, what people forget, particularly those quoting it in order to engage in yet more undisciplined behaviour, is the consideration of whether it interferes with others’ rights. – Wendy Geus

The wish to avoid evident but uncomfortable truths, and to allow people to maintain their blindness to them, makes it difficult for politicians to speak about the real problems that confront their respective societies. One might almost define truth in these circumstances as that which people wish to evade or do not want to hear about. The wish to preserve a treasured worldview is another reason for blindness to the obvious: We prefer our worldview to the world. Such willful blindness is not confined to one political tendency; it is common to all. It is a human trait.

In the modern world—perhaps in all worlds that have ever existed—blindness becomes institutionalized. The very existence of jobs may depend on not recognizing complex verities. Vested interests are, of course, visible in proportion to the square of the distance from the person perceiving them. Everyone thinks that the pursuit of his own vested interests is simply a manifestation of his own desire to do good in the world.– Theodore Dalrymple

I would give his appointment the charity of my silence. I don’t think he’s the appropriate person to send for any sort of diplomatic role but bigger than that it raises a more serious question,” he told AM Ealy host Bernadine Oliver-Kerby.

“Diplomatic roles and jobs overseas of that nature aren’t there to be political rewards for long-servers. There have been a few of them over the years from both parties I know, I just think it brings that whole question into starker relief that you don’t use a plum appointment overseas as an excuse to bump someone off the scene domestically, that seems to be what has happened. – Peter Dunne

Minus 0.2 pecent is a mess. It was avoidable, it is the result of an astonishing fiscal error from the Government and Reserve Bank, and don’t let them tell you differently. Yes, the war doesn’t help. But neither does money we never had tossed at bollocks and expecting it not to wreck us. – Mike Hosking

$337,000 for cutting a ribbon. And you wonder why we are broke. – Mike Hosking

What I know from the real world is the Government gave us $50 billion plus to blow on crap, and blow it we did.

But once we had blown it and we needed to pay for stuff ourselves, the price of everything was rising, and we had to cut back. And when you cut back and 70 percent of your economic activity is in the services sector, guess what happens? You go backwards. – Mike Hosking

I don’t blame the forecasters; we all get stuff wrong. But if you can’t see a recession when it’s knocking on your door, if you can’t smell the lack of confidence, then it’s time you got off the whiteboard and walked the streets for a while. – Mike Hosking

Economic growth matters for everyone. It has made people in the United States and other rich countries better off. And it has pulled more than one billion people out of extreme poverty. We also have a pretty good idea of what institutions are required for economic growth. One key factor is free trade. Another, as the comparisons of North and South Korea and East and West Germany show, is a relatively high dose of economic freedom. –  Dr David R. Henderson

Three Waters will bail out those councils who neglected their water infrastructure – and penalise those that didn’t. – Frank Newman

It has become more and more obvious that this Government is not governing for all New Zealanders – this united team of five million is actually a disaffected and dissatisfied group with tensions the worst I have seen for decades. Let’s use this Matariki to find the good. – Paula Bennett

Free speech exists for no other reason than to protect minority views from the tyranny of the majority opinion. A language, which encapsulates the soul of a people, articulates a unique point of view. If a politician wants to offer a heartfelt tribute in this language, and your response is to threaten them, you are no better than the extremist who believes that their political or religious views must dominate the discourse, to the complete exclusion of others. – Dane Giraud

But I say all this to remind you that the free speech battle in Aotearoa will not be won in the courts. It will not even be won by convincing politicians that this central progressive value is of benefit to us all.

It will be won when New Zealanders en masse exhibit the tolerance that should define the populations of all democratic nations. Understanding what was lost by Māori, and supporting efforts to reclaim it, would be a good place to start. – Dane Giraud

Restructuring rarely succeeds in achieving sustainable improvements. But the Government instead listened to external consultants who, unsurprisingly, are the biggest beneficiaries of this restructuring.

Health structures were not the cause of the workforce crisis and neither is restructuring the (or part of) solution. This is an ABC of health systems, but one that the Government has failed to grasp. – Ian Powell 

There is no way ‘Team Interim’ (aka Health NZ) will turn this crisis around so it makes a tangible difference to healthcare access before the next election.

But what has made the situation doubly worse is the most incompetent decision I’ve seen made by a government in health – in the middle of a pandemic dismantling the system of provision and delivering healthcare in communities and hospitals and replacing it with an untested alternative which, for some time at least, will have an interim leadership.

By the time of the next election the government will be in no position to blame the workforce crisis on DHBs or the previous government. Labour is trending in the polls towards being under Damocles’ Sword. It will certainly be under it by the time of the election. – Ian Powell 

From the outset, Three Waters has been a damning indictment of the Labour Government. Built on lies and misrepresentations, the whole reform programme is shaping up to be a major election issue in 2023. – Muriel Newman

Whichever way you look at the Three Waters reforms, given there are many different ways central government could help councils upgrade their water infrastructure – including emulating the 50:50 shared funding arrangement they use for local roading – the inevitable conclusion is that the primary motivation for the reforms is Minister Mahuta’s desire to advance the interests of Maori in water. – Muriel Newman

This is not democracy, as we know it. This is Jacinda Ardern delivering on yet another He Puapua goal – in this case, tribal control of water.

Since Three Waters will not be fully operational until 2024, it will become a defining election issue: vote Labour for iwi control of water infrastructure and services – or vote for the opposition to ensure local authorities and their communities retain control of this crucial public resource. – Muriel Newman

Treasury helpfully publish statistics on Who pays income tax… and how much? (treasury.govt.nz)

Those figures record that in 2020 (the last year for which figures are available) the top 5% of income earners (some 196,000 individuals – the very people that the Greens are targeting) paid a total of $11.31billion in income tax (out of total income tax of $36.85billion paid by the 3.85million individual taxpayers). 

So the top 5% already pay 31% of all tax paid by individual taxpayers. By contrast, the bottom 74% of income earners (2.84m individuals) pay only $10.95billion, which represents only 29.7% of all tax paid by individuals. 

This means the top 5% are already paying more tax than the bottom three-quarters of taxpayers combined.  – Mark Keating

Every day’s Inbox brings pleas about new and surprising regulatory and policy abominations. The combined efforts of Hercules and Sisyphus would not clear it.

In graduate school, my professor of regulation told the class that even if the most an economist might ever achieve is the delaying of a bad regulation by a few months, the value of that breathing space would easily exceed our lifetime salaries many times over. He also reminded us that we’re all part of the equilibrium – things would be far worse without our labours.

He didn’t warn us that we’d wind up envying Sisyphus.- Eric Crampton

Pick a government department, any government department.

All they’ve done to try and fix deep seated, really big issues within our Government departments is hire communication teams to again adapt the jazz hands approach and just not front, they just will not front and you kind of see why.

How do you explain it? How do you justify?

You can’t, so you refuse interviews and you don’t show. It’s appalling. I don’t know how you fix it. – Kerre Woodham

Good to see that after five years in power and months into a plasterboard shortage, the Government has again hit the ground reviewing. – Luke Malpass

It is a human trait to harbour a cherished opinion and then torture evidence and employ rhetorical legerdemain in its support as if it were a conclusion. – Theodore Dalrymple

The transformation of what is desirable into a right is the delight of politicians, lawyers and bureaucrats, for the more such rights there are, the more they need to be adjudicated and disputes resolved when there are contradictions between them. Moreover, supposed rights to tangible benefits always raise tempers and the temperature of disputes: for what is more outrageous than a right denied? And once a right is granted or, if you prefer, won after a prolonged struggle, it enters the realm of the untouchable. The period before the right was recognised as such becomes, in the minds of those who believe in it, the equivalent of jahiliyyah in Islamic thought, that is to say the period of ignorance before enlightenment was attained. And in a sense, this is logical: for a right to be a true right, it must always have existed, like America before Columbus, albeit in an ethereal or platonic world. It was simply that no one had discovered it yet, usually as a consequence of the malice of the powerful or of wilful human blindness. – Theodore Dalrymple

Where rights alone determine the permissible, the government, from whom rights to tangible benefits derive, becomes the sole arbiter of conduct. “There is no law against it” becomes “I have a right to do it”, even if “it” is bound to cause the antagonism of others. The only dialogue possible is that of the deaf, sure of their rights, and irresolvable conflict is the result. – Theodore Dalrymple

This government cannot get anything done, it doesn’t matter which portfolio you pick up, they’re actually spending more money, hiring more bureaucrats and getting worse outcomes. – Christopher Luxon

For bureaucrats, procedure is holy, a rite that must be followed come what may, however absurd it may appear to outsiders; a bureaucrat’s superior is a god who must be propitiated. – Theodore Dalrymple

The bureaucrat who asks the question out of obedience and fear for his position comes to believe that he’s engaged in important work for social reform. There’s no one as shameless as a bureaucrat following orders who has persuaded himself that those orders are for the good of humanity.

Naturally, he must suppress in himself the inclination and even the ability to laugh. He must have no sense of the absurd. – Theodore Dalrymple

While no one likes to admit to himself that he’s performing worthless tasks merely so that he may continue to collect his salary and eventually his pension, in a situation in which the task is as fatuous as asking a 66-year-old man whether he’s pregnant, a subliminal awareness of its absurdity, at least, must defeat the best attempts at denial. The person of whom such a task is demanded therefore lives in bad faith, at one and the same time demanding that a task be taken seriously and knowing that it’s nothing short of ludicrous.

Such a man, of course, is emasculated; at heart, he despises himself, for he knows that he’s useless or worse than useless (which is why he’s so often touchy and defensive). And that’s also why my detestation of idiotic bureaucracy is tempered by personal pity for the bureaucrat whose work it is. – Theodore Dalrymple

That such patent absurdity as I’ve described could actually become inscribed in an important institution, one that’s supposedly dedicated to saving human life, an absurdity that probably met with about as much opposition as a piece of tissue paper offers to a monsoon, is an indication of how thoroughly not only our institutions but also our characters have been rotted. – Theodore Dalrymple

Are we running this country on Blu-Tack and paperclips?

We almost had power cuts again this morning and apparently we need to get used to it because this is just the way our winters are going to be from now on. – Heather du Plessis Allan

So is this all women’s fault? No: the decline in opportunities for working-class men isn’t a malign feminist conspiracy, but rather an effect of technological developments. It makes little sense to blame women as a sex for structural material changes that have disadvantaged working-class men. But it makes a great deal of sense to point the finger at knowledge-workers as a class for their efforts to wave away externalities, via a self-righteous ideology that often flies under the banner of feminism. – Mary Harrington

A long way from its roots in the labour movement, progressivism has become a story knowledge-class women tell about why their material interests are good in an absolute moral sense. And once you believe that, you can say with perfect conviction that anyone opposing my class interests is an enemy of progress, and thus is by definition a fascist. And faced with this accusation, we may have difficulty persuading working-class men not to turn their ire, frustration and resentment on women — especially while economic shifts that feel like disastrous decline continue to be narrated by the progressive Left as feminist progress. – Mary Harrington

Primary care in New Zealand is falling over … it’s been chronically underfunded by the Government and we’ve tightened and tightened and tightened to keep it on the road. But it is now in the process of falling over right in front of us. – Dr Peter Boot

Is it not the height of hypocrisy to laugh along with the atheists who poke fun at the Christian eucharist, only to recoil in horror from the suggestion that there might be something just a wee bit peculiar about offering-up a cooked meal to a random configuration of stars?

For a country which, historically, has eschewed the very idea of a state religion, isn’t it also a little jarring to hear state broadcasters helpfully instructing New Zealanders on the ways in which their new state-sanctioned religious festival can be appropriately celebrated? – Chris Trotter 

At times, it can be surprisingly difficult to see clearly from the ninth floor of the Beehive.

To understand what people are thinking out in regional New Zealand, you have to look past the officials in the office buildings arrayed protectively around the seat of power, past the Wellingtonians with their unique take on life, and most of all, past the preoccupations of your own Cabinet and caucus. – Steven Joyce

In regional New Zealand, the only immigration re-set that’s needed is one that brings people to help sustain and grow their communities. – Steven Joyce

Regional people have watched suspiciously as Wellington takes away their ability to run their local polytech or hospital on the grounds that Wellington knows better, with the unspoken corollary that locals aren’t up to it. – Steven Joyce

Regional businesses fear national pay agreements making it harder to run a niche exporter from places like Gisborne and Invercargill – where such businesses are celebrated and all too thin on the ground. And regional people are sick of hearing about vanity projects in Auckland and Wellington with ridiculous price tags, like bike bridges and light rail. – Steven Joyce

Few in the regions are under any illusion that the convoluted spaghetti of governance arrangements has been set up to suit Labour’s Māori caucus and pretty much no-one else.

Good luck working out who to call if your “water service entity” fails to fix a sewer pipe, or a stormwater drain causes a pothole in the road outside your gate. In past times you’d ring the mayor and get it fixed. Now you’ll be given an 0800 number and no way of voting the bastards out. – Steven Joyce

Regional people suspect their interests are being sacrificed for Labour’s internal political needs, and not for the first time. They’ve had a gutsful. – Steven Joyce

We’ll make it through winter. We always do. But we’ll do it on the sweat and tears and long hours of Kiwi health workers. And maybe we’ll lose some Kiwis who didn’t need to die if only there were enough nurses and doctors to see them. And Labour will have no excuse for not fixing a problem they knew existed five years ago. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

The health system is in meltdown. Call it a crisis, or don’t. It is collapsing around us.

Healthcare staff are at the end of their rope – undervalued and underpaid for years, the wave of strikes is a cry for help. Most are distressed because they know people will die because they can’t access treatment.

As the system buckles, there is incredulity that Health Minister Andrew Little is pushing ahead with a bureaucratic overhaul. Doctors are being asked to work – unpaid – on groups advising the ministry on how to bed in the new regime. No-one seems to know how it will work – the changes are yet another burden that the workforce cannot absorb.

Instead of prioritising a flow of overseas healthcare workers, or returning normal care to reasonable timeframes, his Ministry is pre-occupied with an administrative rejig. The reforms have their merits and are necessary – but staff say they can wait until this storm passes. – Andrea Vance

The entire system requires a rethink – inequalities and uneven access need tackling, and the priority must be prevention, and social care.

But workers are too busy dealing with the immediate crisis. Rather than deal with the long term health of the system, we have no choice but to make do with emergency treatment. – Andrea Vance

Who, then, are ideologists? They are people needy of purpose in life, not in a mundane sense (earning enough to eat or to pay the mortgage, for example) but in the sense of transcendence of the personal, of reassurance that there is something more to existence than existence itself. The desire for transcendence does not occur to many people struggling for a livelihood. Avoiding material failure gives quite sufficient meaning to their lives. By contrast, ideologists have few fears about finding their daily bread. Their difficulty with life is less concrete. Their security gives them the leisure, their education the need, and no doubt their temperament the inclination, to find something above and beyond the flux of daily life.

If this is true, then ideology should flourish where education is widespread, and especially where opportunities are limited for the educated to lose themselves in grand projects, or to take leadership roles to which they believe that their education entitles them. The attractions of ideology are not so much to be found in the state of the world—always lamentable, but sometimes improving, at least in certain respects—but in states of mind. And in many parts of the world, the number of educated people has risen far faster than the capacity of economies to reward them with positions they believe commensurate with their attainments. Even in the most advanced economies, one will always find unhappy educated people searching for the reason that they are not as important as they should be. – Theodore Dalrymple

The need for a simplifying lens that can screen out the intractabilities of life, and of our own lives in particular, springs eternal; and with the demise of Marxism in the West, at least in its most economistic form, a variety of substitute ideologies have arisen from which the disgruntled may choose.

Most started life as legitimate complaints, but as political reforms dealt with reasonable demands, the demands transformed themselves into ideologies, thus illustrating a fact of human psychology: rage is not always proportionate to its occasion but can be a powerful reward in itself. Feminists continued to see every human problem as a manifestation of patriarchy, civil rights activists as a manifestation of racism, homosexual-rights activists as a manifestation of homophobia, anti-globalists as a manifestation of globalization, and radical libertarians as a manifestation of state regulation.

How delightful to have a key to all the miseries, both personal and societal, and to know personal happiness through the single-minded pursuit of an end for the whole of humanity! – Theodore Dalrymple

Some ideologies have the flavor of religion; but the absolute certainty of, say, the Anabaptists of Münster, or of today’s Islamists, is ultimately irreligious, since they claimed or claim to know in the very last detail what God requires of us.

The most popular and widest-ranging ideology in the West today is environmentalism, replacing not only Marxism but all the nationalist and xenophobic ideologies that Benda accused intellectuals of espousing in the 1920s. Now, no one who has suffered respiratory difficulties because of smog, or seen the effects of unrestrained industrial pollution, can be indifferent to the environmental consequences of man’s activities; pure laissez-faire will not do. But it isn’t difficult to spot in environmentalists’ work something more than mere concern with a practical problem. Their writings often show themselves akin to the calls to repentance of seventeenth-century divines in the face of plague epidemics, but with the patina of rationality that every ideology needs to disguise its true source in existential angst. – Theodore Dalrymple

The environmentalist ideology threatens to make serious inroads into the rule of law in Britain. This past September, six environmentalists were acquitted of having caused $50,000 worth of damage to a power station—not because they did not do it but because four witnesses, including a Greenlander, testified to the reality of global warming.

One recalls the disastrous 1878 jury acquittal in St. Petersburg of Vera Zasulich for the attempted assassination of General Trepov, on the grounds of the supposed purity of her motives. The acquittal destroyed all hope of establishing the rule of law in Russia and ushered in an age of terrorism that led directly to one of the greatest catastrophes in human history. – Theodore Dalrymple

In the end this sinister drift towards authoritarianism in the name of fairness to Maori has to be sheeted home to the feeble quality of Labour’s current caucus. Did none of that slew of low-level lawyers raise questions about “Te Tiriti” let alone its use in a nation-wide move to undermine our constitution by way of co-governance? And about the semi take-over of the MSM that comes with strings attached to the Public Interest Journalism Fund? Co-governance is contrary to the real Treaty that was signed in 1840, contrary to our Bill of Rights, and to international conventions among those countries that believe in democracy. The Fund is contrary to customary democratic standards that govern the relationship between governments and the MSM outside of authoritarian regimes. – Michael Bassett

We’re heading into some worse economic times. I do not expect it will lead to better policy. Rather the opposite. – Dr Eric Crampton

The problem is that while New Zealand is increasingly backing the West, the West is not fully backing New Zealand.

Neither the EU, nor the US are supporting their rhetoric of solidarity and unity with the economic deals New Zealand would need to have a true alternative to China. – Geoffrey Miller

There is something not right about the whole Mahuta thing. The Foreign Affairs appointment came so far out of left field it made the Poto Williams appointment look like a stroke of genius.

A person who hates flying but is Foreign Affairs Minister. A person who has barely travelled post Covid, telling us the Pacific is fine and we can wait until the Pacific Leaders Forum next month while the Chinese park themselves locally aiming to achieve God knows what, and Penny Wong on a plane most days to try and mop up the potential damage.

There is a power struggle between the Prime Minister and the Māori caucus. There can be no other explanation for the ridiculous defence over a Minister who is low profile, work shy, and letting her portfolios down.- Mike Hosking

The Australians call it the pub test. Does the fact Mahuta’s husband and other family members getting money for contracts pass the pub test? A simple and easy no. Does the fact family members receive high-powered appointments pass the pub test? The answer is a simple and easy no.

The amount of money so far doesn’t appear to be massive but that’s not the point. The question that needs to be asked and answered is, do the jobs and the contracts go to people in the Mahuta family who offer skills experience and expertise that no one else can offer? The answer is an obvious no. – Mike Hosking

The whole Mahuta thing stinks. It should never have happened, and they should have been smart enough to know that.

And yet here we are, more mess, more murk, and more reputational damage. – Mike Hosking

But the world has changed since the 1990s, and it’s changed in a way that makes republicanism seem a lot less attractive. For the past 15 years the 21st century has experienced a “democratic recession”: a global decline of liberal democracy, a widespread failure of liberal and democratic institutions. And almost all of this democratic backsliding has taken place in republics: Turkey, the Philippines, Venezuela, Brazil, the ex-communist republics of central and eastern Europe. Even the US system looks shaky. And they’ve failed, or are failing in exactly the way liberal theorists who favour constitutional monarchies predicted they would: via “autocoups” in which an authoritarian leader wins the presidency and then takes over the country, arresting the opposition, deposing judges, postponing elections, taking over the police and armed forces.  –

Under a constitutional monarchy the presidential role is split out into a ceremonial head of state with almost no political power, and the executive that has power but is legitimised by the monarch. You can’t contest the monarchy because it’s hereditary, and when there’s a legitimacy crisis or a constitutional crisis over who controls the executive, all of the politicians, soldiers and police have sworn to obey the monarch, not the head of government. And the monarch can play no role other than to direct them to serve the legitimately elected government, or for the country to hold new elections. They’re the apolitical actor at the apex of the political system.

During the late 20th century, this extra level of stability seemed superfluous: it prevented coups the same way Lisa Simpson’s rock “kept tigers away”. In the 2020s it looks as if this form of liberal democracy really is more stable. Most of the peer nations we like to compare ourselves to – your Canadas and Australias and Denmarks and Swedens and Norways and Japans – use the same system, and seem in no hurry to change it.  –

The constitutional monarchy is not a perfect system: if the UK’s monarch or presumptive heir looked like Edward VIII, or Thailand’s Rama IX, or Prince Andrew, we’d probably be looking for the exit and a new head of state (King Richie? First Citizen Swarbrick? We’d figure it out). But in the absence of any such crisis it’s no longer obvious that the republican model is inevitable, or even desirable. Our current system is not broken and may be far better than the alternatives. Republicanism is not the solution to any of our current problems, and it may create terrible problems of its own.  – Danyl Mclauchlan

I’m not interested in importing cultural wars into New Zealand. We have a much bigger agenda at play, which is that we have a great country, we have to realise our potential. We’re heading in the wrong direction. – Christopher Luxon

Throughout my electorate, Parliament, and the places I go in between, food and fuel prices are the biggest topics of conversation.

Given what I do, talks quickly turn to another F word — failure.

Failure by the Government to do anything remotely useful to address the crisis we’re all living in. – Barbara Kuriger

Co-governance. Partnership. The unrelenting quest to try to refashion the New Zealand Diceyan unwritten Constitution (one of the modern world’s most successful ever, as it happens) into something else never quite specified, and to do so on the basis of a UN declaration that has the most scanty, exiguous, meagre democratic credentials imaginable. A government with a seemingly pathological desire to downgrade the English language (the world’s reserve language, meaning that to have been born into a country where it is the first language is akin – through no acts on your part, just dumb luck – to having won the biggest lottery going) in favour of the Maori language. Identity politics and the elevation of ethnic or group or race-based thinking and policy-making. After having just returned to Australia from a four-day speaking tour across the Tasman arguing against a radical government report, all this and more would unfortunately describe my observations of New Zealand, the country my family and I happily called home from 1993 to 2004. – James Allan

That government-commissioned report I was asked to critique and flown across the Tasman to speak about wants Aotearoa (what else?) to move away from procedural democracy to a ‘co-governance’ or partnership model – one where about 15 per cent of the population are put into one group and everyone else into the other and the former counted as equal to the latter, with an implicit veto on decision-making. That’s identity politics writ large, though in my view no 15-can-veto-85 setup is stable or sustainable (but what do I know, I never guessed Australians during the pandemic would submit sheep-like to the biggest inroads on our freedoms and civil liberties in three centuries, the preponderance of my fellow citizens seemingly welcoming despotic, petty, irrational rules and oversight by a public health clerisy which got just about everything wrong, we now see). Throw in the desire for a written constitution with that U.N. Declaration and an early nineteenth century short treaty stuffed into it – and surely with the unelected Kiwi judges then empowered to gainsay the elected branches on the basis of both – and you have the idea of the path down which this Ardern government is thinking of travelling.  – James Allan

The science and scientific approach that has delivered the most spectacular increases in human welfare from which all New Zealanders benefit – derisively dubbed ‘Western science’ – is to be put on the same plane as ‘traditional knowledge’? For this report to suggest that somehow this scientific worldview is tainted due to where it emerged in the world, and that it offers no better answers (in medicine, in food production, in international travel, pick any field you want) than so-called traditional knowledge does, is laughable. The claim, one that is likewise advanced regularly here in Australia by the way, can only be put forward because most people are too polite, actually, to laugh. (Test question: If the authors of this radical report were to get very ill, would they opt for ‘Western’ scientific medicine or traditional concoctions? I’ve got a theory on that one.)

Readers, it’s time a lot more of us started to laugh. And to grow a backbone. That goes doubly for my Kiwi friends. – James Allan

And now, with the apparent prospect of a food shortage worldwide – although New Zealand should be well placed as an agriculturally productive country – the selling of prime agricultural land to those planting pine plantations to eventually replace fossil fuels is folly. So is the ridiculous, punitive decision to now tax farmers for the supposed contribution of their livestock to global warming.

Moreover, the fanatical Climate Change Commission and Ministry for the Environment have both confirmed that the current emissions reduction targets have been envisioned to go much further, requiring farmers to help offset warming produced by other sectors of the economy. The damage to this vital industry will very likely drive many out of business. Yet there has not been a single scientific model of agriculture’s warming effect made publicly available. – Amy Brooke 

Independence does not mean never taking sides. That would be neutrality.

Independence does not entail never deploying one’s military, either. That would be pacifism.

Independence means to make one’s own choices based on one’s values.

Such value-driven choices can (and indeed should) lead towards taking sides when democracies and dictatorships collide. – Oliver Hartwich

With tens of thousands of jobs currently going begging, it surely remains a fiscal and moral failure that tens of thousands of fully able working-age Kiwis are sticking with the dole. – Mike Yardley

Welfare dependency has rapidly expanded since Labour took office nearly five years ago.

In December 2017, there were 289,788 on a main benefit, or 9.7% of the working-age population. That has grown to 11% today. – Mike Yardley

Under Labour’s watch, jobseeker support recipients have soared from 123,042 four years ago to 173,735 today.

Despite the recent downtick, that still represents a 42% increase in four and half years. – Mike Yardley

How is it kind to stand idly by and allow so many people to diminish their horizons and wither their lives away in a perpetual state of dependency?

And what meaningful efforts are being made to enhance the work-ready potential of so many jobseeker recipients who have specified health issues? They aren’t serious enough health-related issues to have their benefit status changed to the supported living payment. – Mike Yardley

So don’t blame cows. Ruminants have been roaming the planet for millennia. Blame people. Climate change is a man-made problem.

The primary sector is responsible for 80 per cent of our export income. This pays the bills for a country which, in the next few months, will depressingly have 80 per cent of the population receiving some sort of state benefit. – Jamie Mckay

The country has lost its mojo after a decade of feeling good about itself. – Oliver Hartwich

The biggest contributor to New Zealanders’ grumpiness is the discrepancy between political promises and reality. Without constant promises of world-class performance, even mediocre results would be easier to bear. – Oliver Hartwich

NZTA is symptomatic of a much wider problem in New Zealand, even though it is only a small puzzle piece. Faced with a serious problem, the government sets an ambitious long-term goal. It then launches massive public relations campaigns. Following that, it blows up the bureaucracy but fails on deliverables.

It is the same story in practically every major policy area. – Oliver Hartwich

New Zealanders used to be proud of their education system, which was considered world-class.

Today, the only measure by which New Zealand schools lead the world is in declining standards. – Oliver Hartwich

Aside from such big policy failures, New Zealanders are bombarded with worrying news daily. There are GPs reportedly seeing more than 60 patients per day. Patients are treated in corridors at some hospitals’ A & E departments, where waiting times now often exceed ten hours.

As gang numbers have grown, gun crime has also become a regular feature in news headlines. Ram raids, where youths steal cars and crash them into small shops, have become common.

Rather than dealing with these and many other issues, the government appears determined to add new challenges to doing business. It is about to introduce collective bargaining in the labour market and an extra tax on income to fund unemployment insurance.

And these are just the big-ticket items. Practically every industry can tell its own stories about new complex regulations, usually rushed through with minimal consultation, if any.

Furthermore, there is growing unease about the government’s move towards co-governance. It sounds harmless but it would radically alter how democracy operates in New Zealand and undermine basic principles of democratic participation.

All in all, the picture that emerges is that of a country in precipitous decline. That would be alarming enough. What makes it even more so is a perception that the core private and public institutions lack the understanding of the severity of the crisis or the ability to counteract it. – Oliver Hartwich

New Zealand needs to be careful not to turn into a failed state. That does not mean it should expect civil unrest, but a period of prolonged and seemingly unstoppable decline across all areas of public life.

The only way to reverse this process would be for New Zealand to regain its mojo: its mojo for serious economic and social reform. It has happened before. And it must happen again. – Oliver Hartwich

Although we “returned” to the university campus this past semester, students are reluctant to physically attend classes. They can’t see a future. Their mojo & buzz are gone. Despondency rules. One student said she’ll never know what opportunities may have arisen these past years & what doors may have opened had nearly her entire course not been on Zoom. Many say they want to leave NZ after graduating for foreign climes offering higher pay and lower living costs.

What did the government do to them? How did it manage to suck the oxygen out of the air they breathe? An answer has now emerged. It took away their dreams. – Robert MacCulloch

The proportion of people with high levels of psychological distress increased by far the most for 15-24 year olds between 2020 and 2021. It stands at record levels, rising from 5% in 2012 to nearly 20% in 2021. By contrast, for over 55 year olds, distress has fallen these past years to just 5% today. New Zealand has become a country for oldies to enjoy whilst the young silently drown.

There’s more evidence of our youth’s angst. National now polls better than Labour for voters under 40, an incredible turnaround for the PM. Gone are the days when the young embraced her. Their concerns about saving the world from itself have given way to anxiety about personal survival. – Robert MacCulloch

For starters, NZ’s virus policies, which included stringent lock-downs for everyone, regardless of age, were primarily designed for the benefit of the elderly. – Robert MacCulloch

What’s more, the Reserve Bank’s $52 billion money-printing programme during the pandemic favoured the asset-rich elderly. It inflated their wealth by increasing the value of their property and shares, crushing the young’s dream of home-ownership. – Robert MacCulloch

They’ve been robbed of income, since their cost-of-living-adjusted wages are dropping at the same time that inflation is “creeping” them into higher tax brackets.

Most students are hard up, but on the way up. They don’t want to live off the State. They want to be successful. Independent. Yet rewards for achievement don’t figure in our politics. Instead, it is dominated by David Parker-style talk about the evils of inequality between the top 1% and bottom 1%, as if the 98% don’t exist. – Robert MacCulloch

So all told, the unwillingness to vote of young, ambitious, non-work-shy Kiwis, except with their feet to leave the country, is not hard to explain. – Robert MacCulloch

With methane, scientists know that the flow of methane into the atmosphere from New Zealand ruminant animals is close to what it was 30 years ago.  As a consequence, and linked to the scientific knowledge that about eight percent of methane molecules decompose each year, an approximate balance in the atmospheric ‘bath tub’ has been reached and the atmospheric cloud of NZ pastoral-sourced methane is close to stable. Hence, this argument goes, New Zealand’s agriculturally-sourced methane is contributing to further global warming in a minimal way. – Keith Woodford

If the new system is to have any hope of giving Kiwis the health services they deserve, there is only one certainty – the Government is going to need the buy-in of those on the frontline.

There is every sign of the opposite being the case.

Imposing another health system restructure on them at a time when workers are already exhausted by one of the most demanding health crises in decades, and especially when they already feel undervalued and misunderstood by the Government, is not a great way to start. – Tracy Watkins

It’s very Ardern to gloss over the reality and spin the theory. – Mike Hosking

The vast amounts of money given away by officials to businesses who did not need it has cost each taxpayer several thousand dollars and all the surplus cash started an asset price bubble.

This has impacted on the wellbeing of many New Zealanders by greatly increasing inequality, unaffordable housing, child poverty and inflation. The predictable outcome was the opposite of what the Government said that it wanted to achieve.

The failure of public servants to act in the public interest and the lack of accountability and transparency has highlighted the need for the public service to have greatly improved financial objectives and standards.

A royal commission of inquiry could investigate the management of taxpayer funds since March 2020 and recommend reforms. – Grant Nelson

But everyday life seems to be getting more difficult, more costly, more tiring.

Sorting even the simple things appears harder than it used to be. Slower, dearer, harder seems a suitable motto.– Kevin Norquay

New Zealand’s economic foundations are starting to crack pretty severely.

“If we do not see a substantial change in economic direction, there is a risk the whole house gets blown down.

You need those strong economic foundations and more and more of the pillars are starting to take knocks. A lot of warning bells are starting to ring. We are not heading to a nice place. – Cameron Bagrie

We’ve got a very divided society, ethnically, the haves versus the have-nots, wealth inequality… and educational attainment levels, whether you look at actual achievement, or attendance.

If you wanted to pick a variable as to where New Zealand is going to be economically 30 years out, educational attainment today would be probably the best predictor.

The fact that we’ve let that one go for a long time is flashing warning signs about where we are going to be about 30 years down the track. – Cameron Bagrie

We can’t just say New Zealand is broken. New Zealand is a great place, but … cracks are appearing very quickly, and they’re big cracks, and not the sorts of things you can ignore.

You can’t ignore inflation. You can’t just keep on spending and think it’s going to fix inflation. – Cameron Bagrie

There’s a shortsightedness. 

They don’t think ‘if I train really hard and get good at this, I can make a load of money for myself, and have my freedom, and the sorts of things that people want’.

Whether it’s a general problem with society, the youth can’t see a way out. It’s ‘I’m never going to own a house, I’m never going to have that’, so they just give up, and just do what’s easiest to get by. – Duncan Field

Angry people on Twitter is not a legal basis. I’m amazed WCC don’t realise this. – David Farrar

John Cochrane, another American economist, asked why free trade agreements are so long; thousands of pages.

He says that these trade agreements should say no more than: “We do not charge tariffs, nor restrict quantities with quotas, nor will government procurement discriminate in favour of local companies.

“We will do the same.”

Job done. That is a free trade agreement.

Any free trade agreement that is longer than these few sentences will be an opportunity for special interests on the right and the left, both unions and big corporations, to feather their own nests. – Jim Rose

The EU deal has brand-new gremlins, such as a climate change chapter and restrictions on the use of wine and cheese product names.

These rules give up a little bit too much sovereignty for little in return, and legitimise the fraught concept of green tariffs between us and the European Union.

The modelling released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade suggests that the EU trade agreement will in time boost the level of New Zealand’s real GDP by between NZ$1 billion and NZ$2 billion.

That is a tiny amount, one-fifth to one-third of 1% of real GDP, in return for a box of tricks. – Jim Rose

Using carbon taxes, an optimal realistic climate policy can aggressively reduce emissions and reduce the global temperature increase from 4.1°C in 2100 to 3.75°C. This will cost $18 trillion, but deliver climate benefits worth twice that. The popular 2°C target, in contrast, is unrealistic and would leave the world more than $250 trillion worse off.

The most effective climate policy is increasing investment in green R&D to make future decarbonization much cheaper. This can deliver $11 of climate benefits for each dollar spent. – Bjorn Lomborg

I think even the most law abiding lockdown fanatic would find it hard to stomach more restrictions coming back, just as we’ve worked so hard to shrug them off and find some normality. Compliance would be an issue. – Kate Hawkesby

Nor would it be a great look in the middle of the PM’s globe-trotting exercise, pitching the Great Re-Opening of New Zealand and assuring the word we were open for business. Open for business provided you are seated and separated doesn’t have the same ring. – Claire Trevett

First, we are all in a Covid new normal. It’s hanging around for a fair while longer.

Second: let’s all remember to have a little humility about what has and hasn’t worked. No country has got it entirely right. Not the UK, but not NZ either. We are increasingly working out Covid policies are not just about Covid health, strictly speaking, but have wider health, economic, social, and – ultimately – societal ramifications, short and much longer term.

Incidentally, the normalisation of Covid means we can’t stay in crisis settings – and I am not suggesting the New Zealand Government has. Good official advice whether about, say, masks, lockdowns, or borders needs to be coupled with realism about what a populous fatigued by everything will take from its political masters. –  Simon Bridges

There is no doubt that people are sick of the virus but the problem is, the virus is not sick of us. – Brent Edwards

She has been in New Zealand for a decade, working in healthcare and studying towards a nursing degree.

But after graduating late last year, she was denied the ability to apply for fast-tracked residency and told she must wait two more years.

Uncertain, overworked and unable to buy a house, she is now looking for work in Australia. Of course, she will find it. – Erica Stanford

The Government’s policy to exclude nurses from the fast-track residence list makes no sense.

Ultimately, it is costing New Zealanders their lives. – Erica Stanford

Perhaps it makes sense that women — those supposedly compliant and agreeable, self-sacrificing and everything-nice creatures — were the ones to finally bring our polarized country together.

Because the far right and the far left have found the one thing they can agree on: Women don’t count. – Pamela Paul

Far more bewildering has been the fringe left jumping in with its own perhaps unintentionally but effectively misogynist agenda. There was a time when campus groups and activist organizations advocated strenuously on behalf of women. Women’s rights were human rights and something to fight for. Though the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, legal scholars and advocacy groups spent years working to otherwise establish women as a protected class.

But today, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end: to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.

As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word “women” has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like “pregnant people,” “menstruators” and “bodies with vaginas.” – Pamela Paul

The noble intent behind omitting the word “women” is to make room for the relatively tiny number of transgender men and people identifying as nonbinary who retain aspects of female biological function and can conceive, give birth or breastfeed. But despite a spirit of inclusion, the result has been to shove women to the side. – Pamela Paul

If there are other marginalized people to fight for, it’s assumed women will be the ones to serve other people’s agendas rather than promote their own.

But, but, but. Can you blame the sisterhood for feeling a little nervous? For wincing at the presumption of acquiescence? For worrying about the broader implications? For wondering what kind of message we are sending to young girls about feeling good in their bodies, pride in their sex and the prospects of womanhood? For essentially ceding to another backlash?

Women didn’t fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldn’t call ourselves women anymore. This isn’t just a semantic issue; it’s also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves. 

Seeing women as their own complete entities, not just a collection of derivative parts, was an important part of the struggle for sexual equality.

But here we go again, parsing women into organs. Last year the British medical journal The Lancet patted itself on the back for a cover article on menstruation. Yet instead of mentioning the human beings who get to enjoy this monthly biological activity, the cover referred to “bodies with vaginas.” It’s almost as if the other bits and bobs — uteruses, ovaries or even something relatively gender-neutral like brains — were inconsequential. That such things tend to be wrapped together in a human package with two X sex chromosomes is apparently unmentionable. – Pamela Paul

Those women who do publicly express mixed emotions or opposing views are often brutally denounced for asserting themselves. (Google the word “transgender” combined with the name Martina Navratilova, J.K. Rowling or Kathleen Stock to get a withering sense.) They risk their jobs and their personal safety. They are maligned as somehow transphobic or labeled TERFs, a pejorative that may be unfamiliar to those who don’t step onto this particular Twitter battlefield. Ostensibly shorthand for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” which originally referred to a subgroup of the British feminist movement, “TERF” has come to denote any woman, feminist or not, who persists in believing that while transgender women should be free to live their lives with dignity and respect, they are not identical to those who were born female and who have lived their entire lives as such, with all the biological trappings, societal and cultural expectations, economic realities and safety issues that involves.

But in a world of chosen gender identities, women as a biological category don’t exist. – Pamela Paul

When not defining women by body parts, misogynists on both ideological poles seem determined to reduce women to rigid gender stereotypes.  – Pamela Paul

The women’s movement and the gay rights movement, after all, tried to free the sexes from the construct of gender, with its antiquated notions of masculinity and femininity, to accept all women for who they are, whether tomboy, girly girl or butch dyke. To undo all this is to lose hard-won ground for women — and for men, too. – Pamela Paul

But women are not the enemy here. Consider that in the real world, most violence against trans men and women is committed by men but, in the online world and in the academy, most of the ire at those who balk at this new gender ideology seems to be directed at women. – Pamela Paul

Tolerance for one group need not mean intolerance for another. We can respect transgender women without castigating females who point out that biological women still constitute a category of their own — with their own specific needs and prerogatives.

If only women’s voices were routinely welcomed and respected on these issues. But whether Trumpist or traditionalist, fringe left activist or academic ideologue, misogynists from both extremes of the political spectrum relish equally the power to shut women up. – Pamela Paul

Combatting stereotypical thinking is not assisted by pretending that there is no difference between the present and the past. – Chris Trotter

How are young people supposed to understand the racism and sexism of their grandparents’ generation if they’re never allowed to see it depicted on the screen, or read about it in novels? How will their grasp of how far women have travelled toward equality be assisted by recasting Jim as Jackie Hawkins, and installing our diversity-affirming heroine, now a thirteen-year-old girl, on a schooner crewed by cut-throats?

All Dame Lynley is guilty of is delighting generations of Kiwi kids. A much lesser crime, I would have thought, than telling lies about the past to placate the woke censors of the present. – Chris Trotter

Is it fair to actively seek out a relationship knowing full well a potential partner might find themselves dealing with my cancer, chemo and all the other unpleasant things that go with it? . . .

I’ve asked around and, whilst I’d originally thought I’d be selfish to do so, the resounding answer has consistently been YES. Dive in and test the waters. Go for it. What have you got to lose? If a potential partner can’t handle your uncertain future, then they probably aren’t right for you anyway.

Ultimately, none of us know what’s around the corner in any relationship. So why deny myself opportunities to meet someone who might be willingly all-in to support me through whatever life might have in store? Even when I know it’s highly unlikely we will end up growing old together.

So I’ll dip a toe back in. I know I’ll be OK on my own but who knows who is out there and what adventures might be had.

Because we all deserve a chance at love – no matter how long that might last… right?

Life is short – wish me luck. – Kelly Hutton

The state housing waiting list had increased to more than 27,000, up 500 per cent, since Davis’ government took office, and more than 4500 children now live in taxpayer-funded motels.

The total motel bill so far has topped $1 billion. Won’t be too long and it will exceed the $1.6 billion value of the free-trade agreement the PM signed in Europe last week. – Peter Jackson 

How exactly is it an achievement to concede that national superannuation is insufficient to enable goodness knows how many pensioners to keep warm over winter, without a top up?

How is it an achievement to concede that more than two million of us, earning less than $70,000 a year, which until recently was the threshold for the top income tax bracket, are unable to feed themselves and their families without extra help (over and above Working for Families, which supposedly makes the tax system fair)?

And how, exactly, is $27 a week for three months going to solve that problem? – Peter Jackson 

The only people who seem to be thriving are those who work for the Government, and that seems to be most of us these days. And why shouldn’t they be buoyant? They are well paid, secure in their employment (at least until the next election), and now they can aspire to very senior positions in the civil service without even having to produce a CV. Good times indeed.

For the rest of us, this country is rapidly becoming a cot case, and it is galling to hear senior members of the administration, who have done to this to us, boasting about what they have achieved. Forgive us, Kelvin, if some of us are struggling to get into party mood. Apart from those who might have been hanging out for an extra $27 a week for three months, there doesn’t seem to be much to celebrate, let alone cause for congratulations. – Peter Jackson 

It used to be that if Jim Bolger, Helen Clark or John Key spoke, we tended to believe what they were saying. Today, Beehive press conferences are laced with spin and half-truths.

We even have a Prime Minister who says things like “we have a mandate to do this” despite never having mentioned what “this” was during the election campaign. – Bruce Cotterill

We seem to have empowered a group of politicians, at both national and local government levels, to do things we don’t want them to do. And yet their so-called “mandate” sees them driving major constitutional change irrespective of what the people might think or say.

Because we don’t say much really, do we? Compared to most countries, we have tended to be a society that does not stage massive protests. – Bruce Cotterill

I suspect that part of the reason has been that we are relatively happy with our lot. And until the past few years, we have been broadly trusting of those in positions of power and authority. We have traditionally respected our leaders, and expected them to do the right thing.

However, we’re not like that at the moment. To me, it feels as though we are more divided than we have ever been. Many of us are certainly more openly critical of the government or the direction the country is taking.

In the opinion of the many people I speak to, a Government majority does not authorise that Government to do whatever it wants to do. No, in theory that right should only extend to the policies and initiatives they campaigned on.

Those policies did not include the centralisation of education or healthcare, changes to governmental governance structures, Three Waters or ute taxes. – Bruce Cotterill

So mistrust creeps in. We find it difficult to believe what we are being told. So they tell us again, this time with more selective detail. So the spin increases. We disrespect the source. Trust is lost. It’s a vicious circle. – Bruce Cotterill

In the meantime, our Prime Minister goes to the United States, supposedly to promote New Zealand business. However, on her two major platforms — a prime-time TV audience and a high-profile university lecture — she speaks of gun control and social media.

There is no doubt in my mind that she is travelling the globe promoting herself, not New Zealand.

As an aside, you have to laugh at the PM telling the Yanks how successful our post-massacre gun control initiatives have been while we’re in the middle of our worst spate of gun violence that I can recall. –Bruce Cotterill

I believe the outcomes of the task forces, the working groups, the government reviews and the inquiries will see the Government and their co-conspirators cleared of any blame or wrong-doing.

But the behaviours are more common. And those behaviours should make us ask questions. We ask questions because we don’t believe what we’re hearing any more. As a result, trust is lost. The lack of trust turns into scepticism. And if they can get away with it, maybe we can, too. It’s a slippery slope.

We can accuse our leaders of misrepresenting the truth, deliberately misleading us or even telling porkies. The language doesn’t matter. What does matter is where such behaviours lead. – Bruce Cotterill

We were told we would have the most transparent Government ever. It turned out to be the opposite. So, we have to start calling this stuff out now. The trouble with corruption is that it creeps up on you over time. You don’t want to start getting used to it.

You have to stop it before it becomes commonplace or acceptable and we become desensitised to it. If we don’t, it becomes very difficult to turn around. – Bruce Cotterill

A strident coalition of housing advocacy groups, the left-leaning Auckland Council and motivated journalists melted into the background after the 2017 election as quickly as they had arisen, confident their work was done and sanity restored.

Flash forward five years and it’s hard to believe how horrendous the situation now is. The $12m on motel accommodation has become $1.2 billion. Whole streets of motels like Ulster St in Hamilton and Fenton St in Rotorua have become permanent emergency housing suburbs.

The waiting list for social housing has risen five-fold to a massive 27,000 and this week, despite all the extra investment in wrap-around services, a woman died while living in her car. How did things get so bad? And if all this was a crisis five years ago, what is it now? – Steven Joyce

Sepuloni should look closer to home. Her Government has made three big policy changes that have made the house rental market immeasurably worse for society’s most vulnerable, and they can’t even claim ignorance. Each time they were warned about the impact of the changes, and on they went.

First, they made the private rental market hugely less attractive for people to invest in. . . .

Second, the Government stopped asking people to move on when they no longer needed the support of Government-owned social housing. People sitting in houses often too big for them, regardless of their circumstances, and until the end of their lives, means fewer houses for those who need them.

Third, they placed all their bets for expanding social housing supply on one provider, Kāinga Ora, the latest incarnation of the old Housing New Zealand. This is purely ideological.

While in this post-socialism age nearly everybody would be happy with a warm, dry house in preference to a motel unit, the Labour Party believes it will somehow be better if it is a warm, dry government-owned house. – Steven Joyce

The situation is making people desperate. It is no surprise our inner cities are being blighted with crime and an assertive and growing gang culture.

Being forced into living in long-term temporary accommodation with no hope and no plan to move elsewhere can do that to people. – Steven Joyce

We need to correct course and mobilise all our resources to get these kids into a real house, quickly. That means recruiting private investors and community housing providers, as well as Kāinga Ora.

This is no time for ideological blinkers. – Steven Joyce

An excellent challenge was thrown out in Sydney yesterday to immigration authorities — to think more like a recruitment agency than a police force. – Fran O’Sullivan

The primary sector faces big headwinds — Covid-19, the war in Ukraine, inflation, labour markets, export markets and coping with major regulatory change.

The sector is the engine room of the economy. But the notion that it can easily diversify away from China is fanciful. China takes 37 per cent of NZ’s agricultural exports. The US takes 10 per cent, Australia 8 per cent, the UK 8 per cent and the EU 2 per cent.

Even while we have two new free trade agreements — and in the UK’s case will get a decent deal for our dairy over time — that won’t happen with the EU.

Some $52.2 billion was brought in through agricultural export receipts in the past year. This is 81.8 per cent of our overall trade. It just does not make sense to trivialise the sector’s call to relax rules. – Fran O’Sullivan

If a civilization is dying or has died, however, who is to blame or what is to account for it? Do civilizations, or parts of civilizations, die of their own accord, by a natural process akin to the apoptosis of a living cell, or are they killed either by neglect or design?

The old always blame the young for what they dislike in them—for example, their taste for crude and vulgar music—but they do so as if they bear no responsibility whatever for what they think undesirable in the younger generation. If the taste for the almost miraculous artistic achievements of the past has been all but extinguished, and is now but the secret garden of a tiny and insignificant number, no doubt of the highly privileged, must not this be because the older generation has signally failed to instill any love for it in their own children?

Why didn’t they? Therein lies the rub. – Theodore Dalrymple

With legions of Kiwis set to leave the country – and the hospitality, education and healthcare sectors crying out for workers, why is it the Government seems to have no trouble in staffing the Wellington bureaucracy? – Andrea Vance

It seems there is no problem so intractable that it can’t be outsourced. Labour has a record of refusing to make the hard decisions of governance, happy to let ‘experts’ and zombie policy managers take over.

In 2010, then-Prime Minister John Key decried the growth of the industrial-bureaucratic complex. New Zealand’s state service was too large for a country this size, he argued. Since then, the bureaucracy has expanded to meet the needs of the expanded bureaucracy (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde).- Andrea Vance

The ‘core business’ of the sector is to improve the quality of life and wellbeing of New Zealanders. Will the Ministry for Disabled People have any significant impact on the difficulties faced by the people it purports to represent? If we look to Te Puni Kōkiri, Ministry for Pacific Peoples, the Ministry for Women, the Office for Seniors or the Children’s Commissioner, then likely not.

Will the new health agencies be staffed with street-level bureaucrats: the doctors, nurses, and other professions responsible for actual care? Experience suggests we can instead expect an overpaid legion of pen-pushers drawing power into an ever-growing administrative vortex. – Andrea Vance

A strength of New Zealand farming has always been the willingness to get the job done no matter the obstacles, and to share ideas and information. Gatekeeping is a foreign concept to most Kiwi farmers, and the rise of social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok have only accelerated the pace at which we are exposed to new ideas and methods of farming. –   Craig Hickman

Despite the huge diversity in farming, we are all bound by some very common things: we are in it for the long haul, and we look to make incremental gains season on season over a very long period of time. We rarely gamble on big changes that might revolutionise the farm because we simply cannot afford the consequences if it goes wrong. We are planners and incrementalist by necessity, not disruptors.

As a group we also find it very hard to articulate our thoughts. We’ve never had to in the past and the rise of social media makes it easier to blurt those emotions out without being able to articulate the reasoning behind it, and unfortunately those social media posts are very easy to mock. – Craig Hickman

The classic Kiwi farmer is no longer Dagg or Footrot or even Crump. Farmers have always been willing to change, albeit slowly, and the massive growth of the industry in the past two decades only served to hasten the change at a pace more than a few found uncomfortable.

The Hiluxes Barry Crump used to drive in those old TV commercials are now classics simply by virtue of having been around for more than 20 years, and I think that’s a fitting way to classify the new generation of classic Kiwi farmers; we’ve been in the game long enough to know what we’re doing but we’ve not been in it so long that we’re constrained by ties to the past. – Craig Hickman

It just doesn’t feel right. Whatever your view on assisted dying, I don’t think anybody would support that system, where you’ve got a free choice to die, or an expensive service to live. – Dr Catherine D’Souza

The Ministry of Health has six full-time workers dedicated to euthanasia; none dedicated to palliative care.

The fear is that it’s not a free choice at all between euthanasia and palliative care when the odds are so heavily stacked against dying patients accessing the sort of palliative care they deserve. – Tracy Watkins

This was my fear in 2020 when the euthanasia laws were being debated; that we hadn’t earned the right to euthanasia so long as we continued to do palliative care on the cheap.

Clearly nothing has changed since then. If anything, the situation has worsened.

Shame on us. We need to do better. – Tracy Watkins

We will never fix truancy while schools are paid for the number of pupils they enrol, not the number they teach. Make funding dependent on attendance. Stopping truancy will then be every school’s priority. – Richard Prebble

It is time for the Government to admit that believing it can build houses better than the private or community sector is a failed hypothesis. And for the electorate to stop believing Labour when it says it does. – Brigitte Morten

Those of us authentically comfortable with Māori language and culture can take a more balanced view. Like many of the chiefs at Waitangi, we understand that both worlds have their strengths and weaknesses.

We understand that liberal democracy, the idea that one person should have one vote, and every human being is born alike in dignity, is the best system of government humans have discovered, period. –  David Seymour

New Zealanders have literally fought for these values because the alternative is apartheid, oppression, violence and hate. There is no good reason to think New Zealand is uniquely immune to human reality. Treating people differently based on race is not just misguided, but dangerous. – David Seymour

That our country has been prepared to look back 180 years for injustices and breaches of property rights, and offer redress where possible, is a triumph. In some cases, rather than giving back land fee simple, an interest in governing the asset has been offered.

The co-governance of Auckland’s volcanic cones is an example of that. It was an appropriate way to recognise a specific loss.

Wholesale co-governance of councils, healthcare, Three Waters infrastructure, and resource consenting decisions is quite different. There is no historic grievance, such a grievance is impossible. – David Seymour

These modern public institutions were created in a democracy, post-Treaty. They should be governed democratically. Co-governing them means that Māori have inherently different political rights, rather than the same rights to their property as everyone else.

Proponents of that view want a “tiriti-centric Aotearoa”, with “tangata whenua” (land people), here by right and “tangata tiriti” (Treaty people), here by permission. Assigning different races different rights is racist.

Dame Anne Salmond has forcefully argued that the corporatist conception of the Treaty as a partnership between two races is a product of a time and place. Namely the judiciary in the 1980s. It is not consistent with the events surrounding the Treaty’s signing, or the way New Zealand society has evolved since.

A better conception of the Treaty is that it means what it says. It grants nga tikanga katoa rite tahi, the same rights and duties, to all. It guarantees tino rangatiratanga or self-determination over all your land and property. – David Seymour

Our best future is a modern, multi-ethnic, liberal democracy. Each of those words matters. We should be a leading society with an equal place for all, no matter a person’s background.

Nobody should be born special, nobody should be born a second-class citizen. It’s a sad sign of the times that you can have a regular column in the country’s largest paper, and think such beliefs are “racist”. – David Seymour

A  government   which began with a  show  of  capability,  if  not in a  blaze  of  glory, is  now finding  that  almost everything  it  touches   fades  into  ashes  so  quickly that   there  is  nothing, or  very little, to see.

Ministers  are  exceptionally  good  with  announcements but  not  with  achievements.  Instead of improved general wellbeing, we have raging inflation,  soaring  food prices, and rising mortgage  rates. – Point of Order

As a country, we’ve just flunked that test psychologists set for small children, offering them one marshmallow now, or two if they wait five minutes.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern decided delayed gratification wasn’t the right strategy for the much-anticipated European Union free-trade agreement (FTA) and returned from her travels with just the one marshmallow. – Jane Clifton

The trouble with settling for the bird in the hand in international trade is that it leaves all the other, plumper birds in the bush for one’s competitors. – Jane Clifton

In folding its hand on greater access for this country’s biggest export earners, meat and dairy, the Government has made several problems worse for itself. The most serious is, it no longer has the same trade and political leverage with China and the United States. The Government is rapidly recalibrating relationships with the superpowers, including by trying to reduce trade dependency on China.

Acceptance of this FTA betrays how little alternative our economy now has. A country this size has little enough to bargain with, but while the potential existed that the EU might make us a better deal than either the US or China, there was an unseen poker hand. Each superpower wants New Zealand more on-side with it than the other, for geopolitical and reputational reasons first, with trade a secondary consideration.

Now, unless some genius negotiator can get us an “in” with the notoriously FTA-shy India – a feat with similar odds as peace in the Middle East – we have no alternative big-daddy trading partner. We’re now firmly wedged in the Sino-US crevice, hoping that our biggest customer, China, doesn’t collapse our export market, or that our American buddy will give us greater export entry if, or preferably before, China starts pulling the rug out. – Jane Clifton

It’s possible Europe, now probably more protectionist than ever, would never have given us a better deal, and that what one economist described as the “chicken feed” of this FTA is better than nothing.

But this is one of those “marshmallow” times, when waiting in hope is at least better politics than getting a disappointing answer straight away. That’s certainly how the farm sector sees it, regarding the FTA as a sell-out. – Jane Clifton

The Government’s relationship with agriculture is at an especially tetchy juncture. Farmers are waiting to see if it will accept the recommendations from the primary-sector climate-action partnership He Waka Eke Noa (HWEN) on a pollution-charging regime. A furious minority are against the proposed measures, and this FTA let-down may further reduce support. However, the HWEN plan is a vital truce among vested interests facing peril.
Mutual hostility between farmers and Labour is an ancient fact of our politics, but climate change and food security make that enmity a cynical luxury.

New Zealand will struggle to meet its emissions targets without farmers’ HWEN-style goodwill. The alternative – the government forcing some production out of business with less carefully calibrated charging – would simply export emissions and make the country considerably poorer. Never mind emissions reduction: that would be a vote killer. – Jane Clifton

Meanwhile, the government’s decision to fold on the FTA remains a puzzle. It can’t have been just for some skitey photo ops to tickle up the sagging polling at home. The deal has inevitably been greeted as the trade equivalent of getting socks and undies for Christmas – no, really, you shouldn’t have! Expectations had been doused, so few would have been disappointed to see Ardern come back empty-handed, since this may be the toughest environment ever for trade negotiations. Food security – once something for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to nag about but not of immediate concern to the EU’s mostly wealthy countries – has rocketed to the top of the worry list, thanks to the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Were logic to apply, this would be the ideal time for New Zealand, which produces high-quality protein more sustainably than any competitor, to receive greater market access. Instead, EU countries are looking towards more self-sustainability – aka, greater protectionism. – Jane Clifton

From here, it’s a race to see whether this protectionist cycle will end before China goes DIY with food – something it’s gearing up for – or whether New Zealand will be left with ever greener produce and ever fewer customers. The memory of that first marshmallow may be rendered somewhat bittersweet. – Jane Clifton

Jacinda Ardern has lost touch with her voters, lost touch with the country, lost touch with the healthcare sector and, actually, has lost touch with herself.

This was a leader – a once great leader – who purported to model her leadership on kindness, on empathy. She told us she was a different kind of politician. – Tova O’Brien

We are so desperate for nurses, to have them in the country, in the job, for even a couple of years – we’ll take it. Our crisis is now. And our Prime Minister is too proud to admit it. Pride can’t care for our elderly like that aged care nurse who’s leaving us for Australia can. – Tova O’Brien

Belief systems are about as varied as the languages that are spoken all over the world. And sometimes – in fact, often – this means the beliefs of one group clash with the beliefs of another. It is inevitable. – Ani O’Brien

It isn’t a viewpoint I like, but I understand that despite the laws governing the secular institution of marriage now extending to same-sex couples, the Christian concept of marriage as connected to their spiritual belief system is a strictly one-bloke, one-lady situation. – Ani O’Brien

I urge strong caution when it comes to encroaching on the rights of religious people and organisations. – Ani O’Brien

While of course in some people’s version of utopia we would all share the same beliefs and values, in our wonderfully messy reality of multicultural, religiously diverse societies, this is simply never going to be the case.

In a truly liberal and democratic society, we tolerate things that we don’t like, don’t agree with, and which might hurt our feelings, because history shows the alternative is the violent, authoritarian ways of the past where homogeneous beliefs were imposed by violence.

Our laws and policy should reflect equal rights and responsibilities and homosexual law reform and equal marriage rights show we have come a long way towards achieving this. – Ani O’Brien

Nonetheless, to say that no one can hold a position that is different to anything in New Zealand law would be tyrannical and would stop all debate on any matters already legislated in their tracks. – Ani O’Brien

Regardless of my own scepticism about the Christian God, and any of the others, it would be wrong of me to seek to encroach on the rights in law and policy of religious people who deeply hold beliefs I disagree with.

Likewise, it would be wrong of those religious people to seek to prevent me from speaking about my disagreement with their beliefs. – Ani O’Brien

We must insist that everyone obeys the laws that govern us, but the application of particular religious beliefs and restrictions to the spiritual lives of individuals and congregations must be respected … or at least tolerated. – Ani O’Brien

Being gay is still tough for many New Zealanders; we still face homophobia at times. However, we won the battle of public opinion through free speech.

How can we rob others of that now? The majority of the population understands we simply want to lust, love, and create family units just like everyone else.

We want to be whole parts of society and being part of a functioning, secular, democracy means tolerating the (lawful) ideas and beliefs of others that we consider bad or hurtful. – Ani O’Brien

You talk about Jacinda Ardern caring, but it’s not really caring, is it…it’s performative caring. It’s all about seeming to be good rather than doing good, and I think people, finally, in New Zealand, are starting to see through that.

It took them a while and they have got some of the most putrid media in the world in New Zealand, where they’re just fanboys and girls of the current Prime Minister, so there’s very little in the way of scrutiny and criticism. But the New Zealand people are living through those radical changes that Winston Peters mentioned this week, and a lot of them are feeling pain. She’s not delivering on her core promises and this is something that people in Australia don’t seem to realise.

She had these bold housing plans – nothing’s come of it, she’s got nowhere near what she said she was going to do. And, again, you can’t just keep making promises, not fulfilling them, and expect to get re-elected over and over again. – Rita Pahani

The problem, of course, is that listening to the people can get a government into all kinds of trouble. It is also extremely difficult to sustain. It requires a very special political talent to recognise the voting public as the country’s most important interest group, especially when everybody else in the circle of power is telling you that it’s the business community, Treasury, the Reserve Bank, academic experts, the news media.

Turned out Ardern simply didn’t have enough of that special talent. Turned out 2020 was a fluke. Six months of genuine kindness was the most “Jacinda” could summon forth. And when she could no longer make it, she faked it.

Sadly, “performative caring” sums up Jacinda Ardern and her Labour Government all too well. – Chris Trotter

Values like free speech, liberal democracy, the rule of law, self-determination, free trade, the rules-based multilateral system and even no first use of nuclear weapons are broadly shared in the South Pacific, southeast Asia, parts of northeast Asia, North America and Europe.

They aren’t shared by Moscow and Beijing, never have been and probably never will be.

Why not just say so? –  Matthew Hooton

Big areas are not covered, or there are long waits, and more vulnerable areas are under-serviced.

This leads to a much higher need for secondary services down the track. This is one of the main complaints.  Primary care right across the country needs to work better. –  Dr Anthea Prentcie

A lot of times we have a lot of chitchat going on in our heads … flowers take you away from that and they keep you rooted in the now.”

“They’re a way to recalibrate your happiness meter. – Natalie Tolchard

It’s as if journalists are happy to find a Māori who will talk on any and all subjects if he is handed the mic. Pakeha journalists from across all sectors of the media – and a few Māori ones as well – have rushed to Tukaki to seek comment on all things Māori. – Aaron Smale

There’s a tendency to try and find that definitive Māori voice who can provide quick quotes when some national issue requires a soundbite to drop into the “Māori say” slot. Tukaki has become a convenient go-to.

The problem is, no-one speaks on behalf of Māori. I doubt even King Tuheitia would make such a claim. There are a few Māori leaders who might be able to pull together a coalition of Māori voices to speak with unity on some kaupapa of the moment, but Māori have a jealous tendency to always retain the right to speak on their own behalf. Even a kuia of Whina Cooper’s mana struggled to hold together the coalition of Māori interests that swung in behind the Land March of 1975. What is so hard to grasp about this – Māori are as diverse in thought and opinion as any other group of people. – Aaron Smale

It’s time to tell the truth. For too long, politicians have been telling us that we can have it all: have your cake and eat it. And I’m here to tell you that is not true. It never has been. There are always tough choices in life and in politics. No free lunches, no tax cuts without limits on government spending, and a stronger defence without a slimmer state. Governing involves trade-offs, and we need to start being honest about that. – Kemi Badenoch

The scale of the challenge we face means we can’t run away from the truth. Inflation has made the cost-of-living crisis acute, but the problems go back way further. We’ve had a poor decade for living standards. We have overburdened our economy. There’s too much unproductive public spending, consuming taxpayers’ hard-earned money. And there are too many well-meaning regulations slowing growth and clogging up the arteries of the economy. Too many policies like net-zero targets set up with no thought to the effects on industries in the poorer parts of this country. And the consequence is simply to displace the emissions of other countries. Unilateral economic disarmament. That is why we need change. – Kemi Badenoch

The underlying economic problems we face have been exacerbated by Covid and by war. But what makes the situation worse is that the answers to our problems, conservative answers, haven’t been articulated or delivered in a way appropriate to the modern age. We have been in the grip of an underlying economic, social, cultural and intellectual malaise. The right has lost its confidence and courage and ability to defend the free market as the fairest way of helping people prosper. It has been undermined by a willingness to embrace protectionism for special interests. It’s been undermined by retreating in the face of the Ben and Jerry’s tendency, those who say a business’s main priority is social justice, not productivity and profits, and it’s been undermined by the actions of crony capitalists, who collude with big bureaucracy to rig the system in favour of incumbents against entrepreneurs. The truth that limited government – doing less for better – is the best way to restore faith in government has been forgotten, as we’ve piled into pressure groups and caved in to every campaigner with a moving message. And that has made the government agenda into a shopping list of disconnected, unworkable and unsustainable policies.

The knowledge that the nation state – our democratic nation state – is the best way for people to live in harmony and enjoy prosperity has been overridden by the noisy demands of those who want to delegitimise, decolonise and denigrate. And if we don’t stand up for our shared institutions – for free speech, due process and the rule of law – then we end up with a zero-sum game of identity politics, which only increases divisions when we need to come together.

So free markets, limited government, a strong nation state. Those are the conservative principles we need to beat back protectionism, populism and polarisation, and to prepare us for the challenges ahead.- Kemi Badenoch

You can only deliver lower taxes if you stop pretending that the state continues to do everything for your country. It’s not just a matter of doing the same with less. We need to focus on the essential. We need to be straight with people. The idea we can simply say ‘efficiency savings’, click our heels twenty times and they’ll materialise is for the birds. It’s the scale and structure of government that drives the inefficiencies.  – Kemi Badenoch

By reducing what government tries to do, we not only reduce the cost of government, we not only focus and focus government on the people’s priorities, we allow the space for individuals, employers and entrepreneurs to solve problems. And only then do we create the opportunity to cut taxes.  – Kemi Badenoch

There is almost nobody who actually hates trans people. Almost no one actually wishes them harm. Ours is a very live-and-let live society, and if people want to dress or present one way or another then that´s hardly new. New York alone must count as the most colorful society anywhere on earth.

Yet repeatedly activists pretend that to even discuss this area is to commit a terrible harm. They pretend not only that the evidence around “gender dysphoria” is completely clear, but that it has zero consequences. The trans extremists try to pretend, for instance, that there is no tension at all between some trans rights and some women’s rights. Despite the fact that such tensions — and worse — keep emerging everywhere from college sports to the nation’s jails. – Douglas Murray

What exactly is a “trans kid”? Does anybody really know? Our society pretends to be radically certain and knowledgeable about this. But in fact we know almost nothing about it.

We have almost no idea why some people believe they are born in the wrong body. We have very little idea of when this is a passing feeling and when it might be a permanent one. And we have almost no understanding at all about the extent to which claims by children that they are trans are in fact a demonstration of “social contagion,” where one kid in a school comes out as trans and a whole bunch of others start to follow suit. – Douglas Murray

Are there questions marks to be raised? You bet. Considering that the consequences of getting this question wrong means the medical neutering of children and their physical mutilation I would say that the question marks are very real indeed. – Douglas Murray

Of course this is all a modern form of Jesuitical nonsense. “Trans men” who are still capable of pregnancy are still biological women. Nobody really knows what “non-binary” means, other than “look at me.” But anyone identifying themselves as “non-binary” who is also capable of becoming pregnant is also in fact still — wait for the big reveal — a woman. – Douglas Murray

All of America is being told to shut up and just get with the trans program. Otherwise we are killing people. Or making them kill themselves, or something.

What a way to have a debate. Or rather what a way to shut one down. And what an appalling way to approach an issue which — as American parents know — we have the right to think about and discuss. – Douglas Murray

The lockdowns would never have worked without our buy-in. That’s the mistake people continue to make even now, assuming that it was all only achieved by Government proclamation.

But there was an implied contract with the Government in return that it would use that time well to prepare us for the inevitable wave once it hit our shores.

Two years on it’s obvious to anyone that our day of reckoning with Covid was merely delayed, not avoided. – Tracy Watkins

GP shortages, perilously low nursing levels and critical shortages in ICU capacity have all been paid lip service over the last two years – the very reasons, in fact, that we went into lock down in the first place, to avoid overwhelming the very same hospitals that are now in crisis.

Meanwhile, the Government spent two years keeping out tens of thousands of Kiwis, many of them with the skills we desperately need in our health system – and not just our health system, but in many other industries as well where workers are scarce – all in the name of keeping out the virus which is now widespread among us.

We can see now who’s carrying the burden of those failures – the doctors and nurses and other staff who’ve been sounding warnings for the last two years, and who deserved a lot better. – Tracy Watkins

The politicians would tell us that New Zealand is heading into a high-tech global 22nd century future. But the numbers tell a different story – we are spending more on superannuation than we do on education. As a country, we are effectively investing more in our past than our future. – Kevin Norquay

Does the education sector really suit the 21st Century economy, or are we stuck in the 20th? Truancy is becoming really problematic, and we have been thinking around the edges, opposed to asking some really hard questions,” he says.

There needs to be a sense of urgency in that. My personal opinion is teachers, like nurses, are seriously underpaid. – Cameron Bagrie 

New Zealand has a short-term, she’ll be right attitude, rather than long-term thinking.

The infrastructure deficit is ultimately an issue of long-term thinking, the ongoing debate about what is a bicultural, multicultural New Zealand, there’s a difference of having a complex conversation, an open and difficult conversation over many decades. – Sir Peter Gluckman 

Why has the loss of mental and subjective well-being doubled or tripled in the last 15 years? That is a far deeper systems question.

We need to ask why, after decades, do we continue to have intergenerational disadvantage, not just for Māori but for other groups in the community as well. How do we break that? – Sir Peter Gluckman 

These are complex multidimensional issues, which require more than shallow, political or partisan argument. And that’s what we’re not good at. 

The reality of it is, the world is in a dangerous place at the moment, conflict, climate change, biodiversity loss, supply line problems, fractured geostrategic issues – it’s a very unstable place. And you know, even in the issues of the moment, we’re not really having a particularly sophisticated conversation. – Sir Peter Gluckman 

We’ve got ideology driven decision-making as opposed to quantitative driven decision-making, and that’s coming through in a whole lot of areas, not just in regard to health.

I do not believe for one instant that the Government’s splatter-gun approach to Government finances is the right solution, nor do I believe that going out there and giving people tax cuts is the right solution. – Cameron Bagrie

What we are seeing over a few years is Jandal Economics, so you get Flip Flops – in some periods we are investing massively in capital, in the other years it’s as lean as. – 

You’ve got to have quality people making quality decisions, and getting quality advice. We have quite a dearth of (political) talent compared to what we had 20 years ago. …it’s a global issue.

Business has got to stop pointing the finger at government, the business sector needs to take some responsibility here in regard to some of the healing that needs to take place. – Cameron Bagrie

We are all growing empathy by being in some form of hardship. The amazing whakataukī (Māori proverb) ‘he waka eke noa’ (we’re all in the same boat), that’s not quite true.

We’re on the same ocean right now, which gives us a great broad understanding, but we’re in different boats. Some of us have little holey row boats, and some of us are on big cruise ships, but we all understand that the ocean is rough. – Taimi Allen

Within New Zealand, which is now quite a melting pot, we have some very diverse views. We have a historical set of situations, we have an evolving situation, and somehow we have to find a consensual way through. And that’s not easy.

“But if we take some of the deep issues that we’re now confronted with, and keep on putting them aside they will just compound over time. There are some green shoots out there, green shoots don’t work unless they’re watered. – Sir Peter Gluckman 

The inflation figures were in all of our calendars, but the impromptu Sunday announcement was not – and had the Government not had something further in place when the bad news came out it would have looked ill-equipped, inadequately prepared and knee-jerk.

As it stands, and unfortunately for the Government despite its best, hurried, last-minute efforts it still looks ill-equipped, inadequately prepared and knee-jerk.

And gosh nothing quite like 7.3 percent inflation makes an announcement that you’re just doing the same thing as before but for a little bit longer look… well… ill-equipped, inadequately prepared and knee-jerk.  – Tova O’Brien

Is anyone else tiring of all this green hysteria over the heatwave? There is something medieval about it. There is something creepily pre-modern in the idea that sinful mankind has brought heat and fire and floods upon himself with his wicked, hubristic behaviour. What next – plagues of locusts as a punishment for our failure to recycle? The unhinged eco-dread over the heatwave exposes how millenarian environmentalism has become. Climate-change activism is less and less about coming up with practical solutions to the problem of pollution and more about demonising mankind as a plague on a planet, a pox on Mother Earth. – Brendan O’Neill

The Associate Local Government Minister seems to think losing our assets will be offset by councils not having to front up and pay that $185 billion he says is needed to get our drinking water, wastewater and stormwater up to scratch.

But I don’t buy that for a minute. And, as far as concerned, this announcement by the Government that it’s going to give money to councils to help them implement these water reforms, is just adding insult to injury.

The Government says it’s support but in my book when you pay someone to do something they don’t want to do, it’s bribery. – John MacDonald

The solution to our mental health crisis is not throwing more money at it. The issue concerns leadership, creating a shared vision, and being accountable.

This Government is great at making announcements but utterly incapable of delivering improved outcomes. – Matt Doocey

Te Pāti Māori’s overarching position is that there has been quite enough immigration since whalers, sealers and missionaries started arriving in the late 1700s. – Matthew Hooton

Here’s the good news: on this one question at least, our two main parties are offering policy based on competing economic models rather than converging wherever the focus groups drive them.

Whatever happens, we should know by election day the answer to this old, important but hitherto unresolved argument between labour-market economists.

The answer will determine whether Labour leads us into a lovely new world where artificially raising wages delivers higher productivity — or whether we have to do it the old-fashioned way under National, by working smarter and producing more from less, in order for wage earners to enjoy the higher sustainable incomes both parties promise.

Place your bets. – Matthew Hooton

The chickens of negligence have come home to roost – but they’re not welcome in the Henhouse of Education. – Michael Johnston

There are many pressing problems facing New Zealand, but none more urgent than the decay of our once great education system. Every time a young person leaves school without basic literacy and numeracy, it is a travesty. As democratic citizens we must all shoulder a share of the responsibility for that. We must demand much better and demand it loudly. –Michael Johnston

We need to know the facts of our own history. This enables us to separate reality from mythology. It also forces us to acknowledge that reality, rather than creating a story by revising the facts to fulfil and perpetuate the social and political ideologies of those who promulgate them. – Bruce Moon 

New Zealand is a small country, and whether it’s journalists, politicians or businesses, there’s a sense that you don’t want to speak out or have a different view because you might see that person again and you’ll have hurt their feelings.

I’m not saying be cowboys, but if we had a bit more boldness from time to time we would perhaps have a more vibrant, exciting and dare I say it, successful country. – Simon Bridges

I think there is a deep strain within Māoridom that is rooted in conservatism,.

Everyone likes to lay claim to the greats, you know like Āpirana Ngata, but it’s clear, in their speeches and thoughts. People forget that National held the Māori seats, until quite recent history – that’s why you get guys like Tau Henare who were able, with a straight face, to join National. – Simon Bridges

What I’ve worked out is, you can have every bit as much influence and some serious fun outside of politics. I think a lot of politicians make the mistake of thinking it’s the be-all and end-all of everything. – Simon Bridges

With the La Niña weather pattern presently turning the country into a quagmire, the nation’s mood is bogged down in a morass of its own.

A slew of reports out this week confirmed what we were already grappling with; rising levels of concern about the cost of living, which is, in turn, making us stressed and unhappy. Turns out we’re more worried than any other country on the planet – Janet Wilson

And while the Government ploughs on with its reform programme, spending $11 billion on changing the health system with the Three Waters programme having already cost $2 billion without a water pipe renewed, it’s easy to see how Labour has become part of inflation’s problem and not its solution.

Just as you don’t go on a diet by eating all the pies and cakes, you can’t  hope to reduce inflation by throwing more money around.

Not unless you want inflation to bed in and lead to what seems now to be almost inevitable. Recession. – Janet Wilson

Instead of pulling together and being a team of five million, it increasingly feels that the distance between some New Zealanders is more like a canyon. There are more and more people who have lost hope, don’t believe in the values that used to bind all of us and/or just truly think that they don’t have to work for a living. – Paula Bennett

The Prime Minister, or one of her ministers, blames employers for not paying enough. Hospitality, construction and other sectors have responded to the tight labour market with improved wages and conditions but still 105,000 people are on benefit instead of in work. The benefits of work are more than monetary – although if money is the motivator then I say to beneficiaries, “Get a job, prove your worth and seek a higher wage.”

In other words, you have to start somewhere and that has to be in paid work. The other benefits include a healthier, more social life and a sense of meaning and purpose. I get that there are people who don’t think they should have to “sell out” to big business or do “menial” work. I believe in free choice – I just don’t think that taxpayers should have to pay for it. – Paula Bennett

You can say a lot of disparaging things about Nanaia Mahuta but what you have concede is that when it comes to really applying herself to undermining democracy she can be very strategic and clever. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Jacinda Ardern oozes self-satisfaction, whether swanning about at Davos or lecturing the world on climate change and the importance of “wellbeing”. At first this young PM became the darling of the progressive world – many admired the feminist credentials, sensitive handling of the Christchurch mosque attack and zero-Covid strategy. But the carefully constructed façade is wearing thin. Ardern is on track to lose the next election, with the latest opinion polls indicating a 10 percentage point drop over the last six months. No amount of positive global press coverage can disguise the lacklustre economic situation in New Zealand, the growing list of broken promises and mounting unpopularity at home. – Matthew Lesh

The New Zealand imagined by the international press is about as fictional as Middle Earth. The country is struggling. Lacking the capacity to address the numerous challenges facing her nation, the Ardern gloss has faded. In the end, standing ovations at international conferences will not make up for a loss of confidence at home. – Matthew Lesh

The Government’s polytechnic mega-merger is unravelling at pace. In a worrying sign for its whole grand centralisation push, details are emerging of a project with a half-billion-dollar price tag so far achieving less than nothing. – Steven Joyce

The report laments there is no plan to make the new entity financially stable. This is not a surprise. The mega-polytech has so far distinguished itself mostly by setting up an expensive Hamilton-based head office of about 180 people. These folk have yet to achieve much beyond lofty mission statements and a plan to rebrand all the regional polytechs around the country to the new Te Pūkenga name.

One way of looking at the reforms is to consider that we used to have a single agency in Wellington, the Tertiary Education Commission, which funded and monitored the individual polytechs nationwide, alongside other providers.

Now we effectively have a second bureaucracy duplicating that in Hamilton, and in fact a third one, because there is a beast called the ROVE Directorate, which oversees the overseeing of the overseeing. Little wonder a review of all this in March politely suggested the roles and responsibilities of those three should be “clarified”.

This experiment in shuffling the deckchairs and building a bigger bureaucracy has so far cost taxpayers $200 million in extra startup funding, which runs out at the end of this year. At that point the mega-polytech’s deficit will only grow. – Steven Joyce

As well as merging all the polytechs into one, Te Pūkenga inherits the newly nationalised industry training organisations, which used to arrange on-the-job training around the country. Their surpluses propped up Te Pukenga last year, so this year’s $100m loss is worse across the sector as a whole. Quelle surprise.

But wait, there’s more. The other $300m spent on this folly has gone on setting up yet another lattice of make-work bureaucracy. Fifteen new regional skills leadership groups are to advise the new polytech on what skills each region needs, while six workforce development councils have been created to collect industry views on how the mega-polytech should train people.

Each skills leadership group has now written a glossy report explaining in many words how they will collect the views of local employers and tell the workforce development councils what is needed, so they can tell the polytech head office in Hamilton and they can in turn tell the polytech branch in New Plymouth or Invercargill what it needs to do.

This is a Monty Python level of silliness. In pre-Hipkins time, the local employers would just talk to the local polytech or their ITO directly. – Steven Joyce

The problem, as with so many grand schemes of this government, is the muddy thinking that was applied to dreaming it all up.

Nobody, least of all Minister Hipkins, has seen fit to ask one simple question: how will any of this help one single person be trained better and more effectively in their trade than they were before?

It will probably make things worse. A lumbering monopoly is generally a recipe for increasing costs and reducing responsiveness and innovation. The Government hates monopolies when it’s not busy creating one.

The minister has started asking where cuts will be made to bring this thing back on track and avoid more political embarrassment for him. In education, cuts mean people losing jobs. Stand by for your local polytech to feel the brunt of all this extra cost at the centre.

He’s also sucking money away from private providers, who often do a good job with more hard-to-reach learners needing extra help. All providers used to be paid the same to deliver the same course. Now the new polytech will get more, again to help prop it up, while the private sector gets less. This will suit the minister’s ideology but I doubt it will suit the students who miss out. – Steven Joyce

The magic isn’t in government agencies, or the wiring diagrams of the revised funding models requiring new hoops be jumped through to keep performing the same service. I used to say to the trainers, don’t listen to us too much — we are just the funders. They are the practitioners.

Just think what could have been done with that half-billion if it had been used to train people rather than rewire the system. Half a billion extra dollars in the tertiary sector could deliver a lot – more chefs, more nursing places, or even a third medical school. – Steven Joyce

Hipkins has proudly declared these are the biggest reforms in tertiary education in decades, as if on its own that is a worthy goal. It isn’t. A worthy goal is one that allows more magic to happen at the front lines of tertiary education.

The minister has bought some more training places in recent years, but he could have done so much more with this money and the old model. He has little time left to prove that this whole vocational education reform is more than just a political vanity project. –

I pondered our conflicting desires — the desire to stand out and do things differently, rallying against our desire to fit in with our peers and look the same. Our desire for excitement and change, rallying against our desire to be comfortable and secure. We learn from our experiences, but, as we age, our mindset doesn’t shift as much as we think it does. – Anna Campbell 

Peer pressure never leaves us, except for a few free-spirited souls. No matter our age, we want to fit in, we want to keep up with the Joneses and we don’t want to imagine others thinking badly of us.

What we forget is, that most people don’t think of us at all and if they do, we are a fleeting thought in their minds, we are yesterday’s fish and chip wrapping, we are a topic of conversation for mere moments. That’s because most people are too busy inside their own heads worrying about what other people think of them — we are the definition of absurdity! – Anna Campbell 

New events and life decisions can be genuinely hard, from dresses to career changes. Sometimes our decisions go wrong; we can learn from that, dust ourselves off and try again. Rationally we understand this.

It’s fair to say, the worst reason for not making change is to be scared of what others will think of you. In these situations, remind yourself, they don’t think of you at all. They are far too busy thinking about themselves and if you do fail, imagine their delight — giving such pleasure should not be underestimated. – Anna Campbell 

This is a government that doesn’t actually do stuff. They talk they promise, they hold press conferences, but they don’t get stuff done. They spend money, and God knows where it goes. – Mike Hosking

A simple wedding is one of the most beautiful things in the world. A wedding where everyone concerned, even the bride and groom, are turned into props in some overwrought and self-absorbed drama is one of the most nauseating. – Giles Fraser

An A for aspiration and an E for execution. – Jack Tame

It takes a bizarre kind of chutzpah to translate a question about your failures into an accusation that the interviewer really meant you should have set your sights much lower. – Graham Adams

In Ardern’s world, it appears that intentions count for everything. It’s almost as if she has not shrugged off her strict Mormon upbringing and doctrine, in which believers are saved principally by faith and grace, not works.

Intentions are apparently sacred to Ardern; results are nice to have. – Graham Adams

An ability to talk smugly and seamlessly without making a skerrick of sense is one of Ardern’s principal skills. She has an astonishing capacity to not answer a question at length — while appearing to answer it in a stream of fluent gobbledegook. –

It should worry everyone if the nation’s Prime Minister really can’t understand the difference between majority rule and everyone eventually agreeing on a matter under discussion. However, it is equally possible that she understood the difference perfectly and was slithering away from what she saw as a trap. – Graham Adams

Although Ardern is quick to pose as a dedicated champion of democracy overseas — including warning 8000 Harvard students in May that “democracy can be fragile” — at home she is far more evasive and equivocal when questioned. – Graham Adams

24 hours after the madcap nuttiness of paying out $800 million we don’t have, to people who may or may not reside here, and may or may not need any assistance at all, we then get the idea that we have $10,000 to get a nurse here.

The cost-of-living payment is well intentioned, but oh so Labour in its delivery. In other words, it’s the usual wasteful mess dreamed up by a government that time and time again shows how little real-world experience it has.

The nurse package, at least, starts off with good intentions, but also the real possibility it might play a part in solving a crisis. – Mike Hosking

So Hindsight Economics, is it, eh Grant? No, that’s your style of economics. Folks like Wilkinson, Hartwich & Crampton at the NZ Initiative, former Governor Wheeler & me, we do Foresight Economics. We do so to try to prevent inflation & cost-of-living crises like the one you threw us into. We put in effort to help serve the public interest – my work for doing so is unpaid – and all you can do, Grant, is put us down for political purposes. – Robert MacCulloch

This is the Labour Government to a T.

Spend money you don’t have, make it scattergun because it’s too hard or they’re too lazy to do it properly, ignore the advice about the wastage and inflationary issues,  when it comes to delivery, balls it up from the get go, get a long queue of disaffected, and then spend the rest of the week defending yourself. –   Mike Hosking

What they would have been hoping for was adulation, thanks, gratitude, and some sort of poll bounce. Instead, they have frustration, anger, and disbelief.

For a government that entered into this with a shocking reputation around delivery, and I mean delivery of multi-faceted projects like light rail, roads, and public housing, it now appears they can’t even spend money properly. – Mike Hosking

 Governments should never lose sight of their aspirations to make the country a better place. That is, after all, why they have been elected in the first place. But, at the same time, they should also never lose sight of heeding practical advice about the best way to achieve those aspirations.

Too often, this government has been so focused on the aspirational aspect of its policy agenda that it has given insufficient attention to how it might be achieved. The failure of Kiwibuild, the confusion and division around Three Waters, the uncertainty surrounding the move to Health New Zealand, the emerging controversy over plans to merge the country’s 16 polytechnics into one super vocational training entity, Te Pukenga, are all examples of where bold aspiration has hit major implementation roadblocks.  – Peter Dunne

We also need to do more to remind New Zealanders that the principles of democracy should not be tampered

But what looked like a political winner at Budget time is now looking like becoming an object of ridicule because of the way in which it has been rolled out, a risk the government was warned about at the time but chose to ignore. It looks like Kiwibuild all over again, where a laudable policy intent became widely derided because the government failed to appreciate the challenges associated with implementing it.

The lesson that emerges once more for this government is that while aspirations are laudable, their credibility quickly founders if they cannot be made to work as they were intended. But, given how this government has handled previous situations, the lesson is unlikely to be taken notice of. Talking about things and making vague, soothing, aspirational promises is always easier than taking officials’ advice to help make things work. – Peter Dunne

We also need to do more to remind New Zealanders that the principles of democracy should not be tampered with nor altered to suit the selfish power-hungry motives of an aggressive minority. – Muriel Newman

Generations before us have fought and died for the democracy New Zealand had, before she became our Prime Minister.

We owe it to them, and to our future generations, to take a stand and defend our democracy against this attack.

Our collective goal must be to save New Zealand – and our democratic Kiwi way of life – and in this mission, we cannot allow ourselves to fail!- Muriel Newman

To change a government, voters must perceive it as comical or corrupt, a test the Ardern regime passed with flying colours from the get-go. – Matthew Hooton

I think we’re seeing two forms of centralisation. One is centralised solutions, but we’re also seeing highly centralised processes that led to these solutions. Basically the political arm of government is coming to the table with a solution to a problem they’ve identified. And that centralisation means that they’ve been particularly poor at looking at ranges of plausible alternatives to the particular services they’ve chosen.

But also .. they’ve not been particularly good at a process of consulting the public with an open mind. And I think that’s the reason we’re seeing public disquiet or pushback. – Simon Chapple

We’re looking in every case at big, expensive, consequential and difficult-to-reverse decisions. Now, if you are making big, expensive, and difficult-to-reverse decisions, you should make those in a very careful and deliberate way with a pretty high degree of non-partisanship. 

And I think that public policy agenda is running into the fact that we have a first-past-the-post government and they have an agenda. They perceive, I suspect, that they have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get that agenda through. – Simon Chapple

The Labour Party is desperate, right? They are a flailing, useless, tired, arrogant, incompetent Government, which has delivered nothing in five years. The Labour Party is throwing everything they can at him because they know they have got no track record to defend and they’re incompetent and wasteful and useless and Christopher Luxon is doing a wonderful job at explaining that to people. – Chris Bishop

Humanity is a great cable, woven together out of numberless threads of DNA. To follow only those threads that lead back to “Maori” ancestors, as the Maori ethno-nationalists do, is to thoroughly misrepresent, and ultimately corrupt, the true meaning of whakapapa. The spiritual power that flows through one’s bloodlines cannot be constrained, either by time or place. We are descendants of the whole world and everything, and everyone, that has ever been in it.

Salmond’s heresy is enormously powerful – hence the anger and doubt it has spawned among those who only weeks ago had counted her among their greatest allies. Her interpretation of the Treaty as a document that speaks to and for everyone who lives here, undercuts the entire intellectual case for co-governance. Te Tiriti o Waitangi’s spirit is democratic and gloriously colour-blind. It was not written for, or signed on behalf of, a clique of aristocratic rulers who, like the Scottish lairds of the same period, believed themselves to have the right to replace their people with more profitable ventures. It was written to secure the future of “all the ordinary people of New Zealand”.

How can you set up a system of co-governance when we are all maori – with a small ‘m’? – Chris Trotter

It is astounding, but unsurprising, that researchers assume that those who employ staff are racist when there is no evidence from which to form this view. The gaps in their data are, literally, ‘unexplained’. Racism is an unambiguous moral wrong. It is a crime. To ascribe this sin to an entire class of New Zealanders because your analysis is deficient is, if I am being polite, disappointing.

It is also easy to disprove. You can be solvent, or you can be racist, but in business it is very difficult to be both. If the assumption behind these sorts of reports is valid; that Pacific people are being paid less than Pakeha while producing the same level of output, then I could make more profit by hiring Pacifica candidates and paying them less than I pay non-Pacific workers.

My racism would need to be intense to leave that profit on the table and if I was such a terrible person, the business owner down the road would out-compete me and I would be forced to rely on my writing to pay the bills. – Damien Grant

Society is complex. People make different decisions and pursue differing lifestyles. The fact that I am spending time writing this column rather than engaging in more productive and better paid work is a decision that will lead me receiving a lower income.

If your priority is community and family rather than wealth accumulation your life’s achievements will differ. Some prefer to die with seven children rather than seven houses and that isn’t a bad thing and nor is it a problem that needs addressing. – Damien Grant

One of the ideas floated is mandated pay transparency; forcing firms to publish salaries by gender and race. The law of unintended consequences will ensure this will reduce employment opportunities for low qualified women and minorities and increase them for inadequate white men.

More intervention will be introduced to correct for these failures in a never-ending cycle of regression. – Damien Grant

We have accepted as given that the Crown has not only the right but an obligation to embark on social engineering programmes to produce a society that confirms to the preferences of the cultural elite even if it defies the wishes and customs of the population.

Cultural change on the level envisioned cannot be achieved without Draconian intervention into the minutia of our economy and society and an unwavering certainty by those in power that the escalating costs are a necessary price to achieve their Arcadia.

Their ignorance is only matched by their determination and the lack of any willingness to confront these cultural commissars means their ambitions will be translated into policy with the inevitable, and now unavoidable, perverse outcomes. – Damien Grant

So white people: be aware of your privilege. Acknowledge that all whites are racist, even if they’ve never had any racist thoughts. And remember that your very existence is proof of your family’s racism, because the only reason white people have children is so that they can simulate the experience of owning a slave. – Titania McGrath

What’s good about it is as we go to the election, the choices are increasingly stark.

You want to keep your money or do you want more of the wastage? A good clear choice, let’s see who wins. – Mike Hosking

The idea of equal suffrage – equal voting rights, regardless of gender, class and ethnicity – has been a pillar of our democracy for decades. All New Zealanders should have an equal say in who governs them; an equal say in appointing the people that make the decisions that affects their lives.

Equally fundamental to our system is the ability to throw poor performers out at the next election – that is the bedrock accountability in our democracy. – Paul Goldsmith

These concepts – equal voting rights and accountability at the ballot box – are basic to our democracy and precious.  Sadly, they are becoming rarer in an increasingly authoritarian world. – Paul Goldsmith

If we as a country no longer think that equal voting rights apply at one level of government, pressure will build for change in national elections.

I can’t think of a more divisive agenda for any government to run.

We recognise the burden of history, but no past injustices are fixed by undermining something that makes this country the great place it is – preserving the pillars of our open democracy. – Paul Goldsmith

If Jacinda Ardern and her government Ministers no longer think that Kiwis should have equal voting rights, then they should make the case and ask New Zealanders whether they agree.

It would be a constitutional outrage to use a transitory parliamentary majority to set a precedent that changes the nature of our democracy so dramatically, without asking the people first. – Paul Goldsmith

New Zealand increasingly stands alone, hobbled by punitive climate restrictions that have been justified on the basis that such controls are necessary to avoid constraints on trade – yet the European Union trade deal exposed the fundamental fallacy of that rationale.

The reality is that countries are increasingly backing away from the demands of green fanatics for their low carbon fantasy, instead prioritising economic stability and public wellbeing over UN socialism. – Muriel Newman 

The Government must get out of the way of private developers who have the expertise and private capital to get developments done. Driving up the price of land and using Kiwis’ hard-earned cash to do so is both counterintuitive and nonsensical. – Jordan Williams

The so-called reforms are basically a solution for the wrong problem.

Actually, I think they were simply an ego trip on the Minister of Education’s part, to be frank. – Phil Kerr

Those hundreds of millions have just gone into structural stuff.

Not a single dollar has been put into improving outcomes for learners, not a single dollar to strengthening the regional providers, and so the issues that we had before Mr Hipkins started this misguided venture are not only still there, they’re worse. –

The bulk of our learning does not occur on campuses. What that means is that support for learners — academic support, pastoral care, health support — these things can’t be delivered to learners nationwide.

They’re not being delivered now, not by a long shot. This is something that can’t be put together by individual providers, and so it could be a Te Pukenga initiative to do so.

This is an example of where valuable dollars should be spent to get better outcomes for people — not on bureaucracies, not on large salaries. – Phil Kerr

I would challenge you to find a single, solitary additional initiative in the last two years that has delivered more or better. It just hasn’t happened. I think it’s a national disgrace. – Phil Kerr

I want innovation to focus on education and training, rather than having to set up non-core revenue schemes. – Phil Kerr

The current model for local government is not sustainable, and the biggest issue is funding,” she said.

“Currently local councils deliver 52 percent of public services on 12 percent of the budget.- Tina Nixon

It’s been a very very tough week, like I said there’s been a lot going on behind the scenes that people have no idea about.

“But when you’re strong in the mind anything is possible and that’s what I had to do this week because my body was not able but my mind was and the fighting spirit is what really got me through. – Joelle King

Certainty and confidence are what the sector needs from a government and that is what we intend to provide them.

Technology is key to achieving emissions reductions, not taxing or banning things.

We need to manage emissions while retaining food and fibre production, because it is crucial that we don’t lose our industry in the process. – Barbara Kuriger 

We now have bureaucratically driven unworkable rules with a ‘one size fits all’ approach, which I can assure you does not fit anyone. – Barbara Kuriger 

Don’t we all want to live in a New Zealand that embraces diversity and multi-culturalism, recognises the Treaty, acknowledges Auckland as the biggest Pasifika city in the world, welcomes needed migrants, but that first and foremost serves the common cause of all New Zealanders.

A country that emphasizes what unites us, instead of what divides us. A country that says absolutely, explicitly, that there is one standard of democracy, equal voting rights and no co-governance of public services.

That’s the New Zealand I want to live in. – Christopher Luxon

Labour cannot deliver anything. They conflate spending more with doing more, when those are two very different things.

Since Labour came into office, 50,000 more people are dependent on the Jobseeker benefit than when National was in office five years ago. It’s a Government failure that I’m going to talk more about in a minute.

Since Labour came into office, there are four times as many people living in cars, rour times as many on the state house waiting list, and 4,000 kids in motels – at a cost of a million dollars a day.

The Government is spending $5 billion more a year on education, but now only 46 per cent of our children are attending school regularly. These are economic and social failures under Jacinda Ardern’s watch, yet she never holds herself or her ministers accountable for them. – Christopher Luxon

This year, the Government will spend $51 billion more than National did only five years ago.

That equates to about $25,000 per household of additional new spending this year alone.

This year’s Budget included by far the most new spending of any Budget in New Zealand’s history, and it was delivered when the economy was already overheated and inflation was rising. – Christopher Luxon

If you think of the economy like a car, then the Government and Reserve Bank have been squashed together in the driver’s seat, pushing the accelerator flat to the floor. Now, like some terrified passenger realising the car’s going too fast, the Bank’s pressing down hard on the brake. The car’s got the wobbles and there’s a very strong likelihood it’s going to crash. – Christopher Luxon

Labour believes in an over-bearing State that thinks people need to be told what to do and how to do it. They believe in centralisation and control.

Just look at the mega-mergers of our polytechs, health system and Three Waters. It’s always the same story. Labour thinks that Wellington knows best, and better than the rest of New Zealand. They’ve spent more money, hired 14,000 more bureaucrats, and got worse results.

Only Labour could spend so much to achieve so little. – Christopher Luxon

National believes those closest to the problems should be closest to the answers. That’s why we back community-led solutions. For example, the Covid vaccine roll-out showed that bureaucrats in Wellington don’t always know best how to reach people. Just ask the Maōri organisations who had to take the Government to court so they could get people vaccinated.

National also believes in personal responsibility. We back Kiwis to make the best decisions for themselves, their families and whānau. – Christopher Luxon

National wants all New Zealanders to be able to pursue their aspirations. A good education, followed by a job, is the best and usually the only long-term path to achieving this.

When it comes to welfare, every New Zealand government, Labour or National, will always support those who permanently cannot work and those who are temporarily unable to work.

But when it comes to those who can work, Labour and National’s approaches differ.

Having a job in early adulthood sets you up for success throughout your working life. Conversely, if you’re on a benefit before you turn 20, across your lifetime you’re likely to spend 12 years on welfare. – Christopher Luxon

Welfare dependency pushes people further away from the rungs of social mobility. It locks them out of the opportunities, sense of purpose and social connections that jobs provide.

Benefit dependency not only harms the person trapped on a benefit, but it also can harm the children who grow up in benefit-dependent households. And under Labour, there are more of them. There are now one in five children in New Zealand growing up in a household that depends on welfare. One In Five.

As a nation, we all bear the costs when welfare becomes not a safety net to catch people if they fall, but a drag net that pulls the vulnerable in. –  Christopher Luxon

In summary, I have messages for three groups of people.

First, to young people trying to find a job: That is a hard place to be and, if there was a National Government, you’d get more support and encouragement from your own job coach.

Second, to young people who don’t want to work: You might have a free ride under Labour, but under National, it ends.

Third, to taxpayers: National is on your side. – Christopher Luxon

Like many women, over the years I’ve absorbed the message that being thin is the most important goal there is, and that no end of dangerous behaviour (like starving yourself) is justified to reach it. And I can see how easy it could be for that to tip my behaviours over into something much worse. – Megan Whelan

Inflation plays havoc with the virtue of prudence, for what is prudence among the shifting sands of inflation? When inflation rises to a certain level, it is prudent to turn one’s money into something tangible as soon as it comes to hand, for tomorrow, as the song goes, will be too late. Everything becomes now or never. Traditional prudence becomes imprudence, or naivety, and vice versa. – Theodore Dalrymple

We have entered a more ‘traditional’ phase of inflation. No one knows how long it will last, or how serious it will be. But the very unpredictability creates anxiety even among those who have no real need to feel it – or rather, whom events will show to have had no need to feel it.

Inflation has not merely economic or social consequences, but moral and psychological ones too. – Theodore Dalrymple

The control of assets is just as important as ownership, and control and ownership don’t always amount to the same thing. Most Kiwis understand this. Strangely enough, though, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern sat down with TVNZ’s Jack Tame this month and argued just the opposite. – Kate MacNamara

Control matters: controlling parties will set the prices charged for the use of water assets (possibly subject to a regulated cap); they will decide how those charges are levied – by volume/use perhaps, or maybe by property value if that’s how they judge fairness; and they will almost undoubtedly decide that the cost of improving water assets in some regions will be met by ratepayers in other areas, so those who have already paid for adequate infrastructure will pay again for assets in areas which have underinvested.

If the Prime Minister thinks control is immaterial, she should try giving it up. – Kate MacNamara

. Totalitarianism has its pleasures, chief of which is doing harm to others, albeit that today’s denouncer tends to become tomorrow’s denounced.

Raised ideological temperature inevitably brings with it the temptation to denounce. Where someone who doesn’t agree with you isn’t merely mistaken, but wicked or even evil, either in favor of your ideology or against it, there ceases to be any reason to argue against his point of view: it’s more a matter of denouncing him, of revealing him to be an enemy of the people to be exiled or excommunicated from decent society, or otherwise punished. – Theodore Dalrymple

We must fight the totalitarian tendency within ourselves. – Theodore Dalrymple

Increased benefit rates drive increased deprivation.

This is no surprise to logical thinkers. Simply upping benefits doesn’t mean the extra money will be well spent. Benefit increases have the effect of drawing more people onto benefits, away from work and the structure work brings to people’s lives. – Lindsay Mitchell

Millions of dollars in welfare has to deliver the desired impact of hope and positive change, instead, Rotorua has seen a steady increase in deprivation since the onset of Covid-19, largely driven by increased benefit rates. – Rotorua Lakes District Council 

My own views on the Ukrainian situation are deeply conventional: I believe that Russia under Vladimir Putin, and possibly under his successor, threatens the peace of Europe, which it believes it must subjugate or bend to its will in order to feel secure. One of Putin’s apologists on state television, asked where Russia’s true borders lay, replied “At the Pas de Calais.”

The contortions of the Russian mind on this subject are beyond my capacity to unravel. They are like those of a criminal who blames all his bad conduct on an unfortunate past. His past may indeed have been unfortunate, but analysis (not psychoanalysis) is usually sufficient to demonstrate to everyone except himself that he has been an important contributor to his own misfortune, having always taken a path that leads to disaster. Indeed, someone once said of Russia that all its roads lead to disaster, and there are individual people like that too. – Theodore Dalrymple

I suspect that sympathy for Ukraine and Ukrainians is rather typical of our emotional lives nowadays: our emotions are both intense and superficial and are like gusts of wind rushing through a cornfield. This is not to say that they are unimportant or insignificant, for they affect public policy, usually in a deleterious way.

For example, how deep is our commitment to the preservation of the environment or to so-called ecology? People have, or claim to have, cuddly feelings towards the surface of the earth, which they worship with a kind of pagan reverence. They may eschew meat and animal products, cycle wherever they can, and even suspend wind-chimes in their garden, but all of these things actually impose very little sacrifice on them, albeit that vegetarian or vegan food takes time to prepare, and all are perfectly compatible with normal everyday lives in our society. However, I doubt how far they would be willing to forgo such comforts as heating and warm water in order to reduce their own consumption of energy. – Theodore Dalrymple

The point, however, is that our population (in which I include myself, I do not claim to be very different from it) is soft. This is a sign of the advance of at least some aspects of civilisation, and I am far from believing that discomfort is good for you morally, as lifting weights is supposed to be good for the musculature. I remember the days when rugby pitches hardened by frost were deemed good for boys’ character, and I never really believed it as a matter of empirical observation.

However, people who have known little hardship are not apt for sacrifice of the type required by prolonged war or confrontation. I admit I may be wrong: I have been wrong before and will be wrong again. Perhaps, cometh the hour, cometh the people: but I don’t bet on it, and neither does Vladimir Putin.  – Theodore Dalrymple

What the Government is doing is the equivalent of passing a bill that defines Pi as 4, and then claiming it must be true because the law states it is 4.

The bill states that Councils will own the water entities, but all they are doing is getting the word “ownership” rather than actual ownership. –  David Farrar

There is a high standard for those who hold office and so there should be. Your behaviour while in office should hold up to public scrutiny and if it doesn’t then you shouldn’t be there.- Paula Bennett

Those that have been knocked around and not only stay standing but come back stronger are the type of people I want in public office. I don’t want someone who is so nervous that a photo of them chugging a depth charge while dancing on a table at 20 years old will surface that they don’t live life to the full. – Paula Bennett

Of course, there are standards to be adhered to and lines that should not be crossed, I am not going to list them because I am not the moral police and it is subjective. The age you are, your honesty, the life you have lived, all come into play as to whether you are fit to hold office. – Paula Bennett

All politicians can’t and shouldn’t be the same, but let’s make sure we leave room for people of character and those that have perfectly lived an imperfect life. – Paula Bennett

Further to that reality – when accusations of racism are used to silence debate – we can safely assume there are aspects of this issue that certain people do not want examined or debated – and that social dynamic will be what has emerged out of politics and ideology – when in fact discussing the realities and the history of things – ideology and politics have no place.- Denis Hall

Each of us is a living Ship of Theseus; which raises the difficult question of how should we access the character of an individual today when they have done things, great or malign, in their past? – Damien Grant

You need to choose. You decide that a teenager is incapable of redemption, or you look at the husband, the father, the damaged, optimistic and frightened man before the spotlight, and assess that individual on his merits.

Young men are reckless by design. I cannot explain why some degenerate into malign actions and most do not, despite the reality that I was one of that minority who were driven by forces beyond my understanding into acts that were both destructive and, ultimately, self-destructive.

Nor can I articulate why, with the passage of time, the forces driving me shifted, but I know what happened. The desire to belong to a community, to contribute, to become a husband and ultimately a father eclipsed, without eradicating, the demons of my younger self. – Damien Grant

The question we should be asking is the same question that was asked of me: who is the person before us today? – Damien Grant

Uffindell stands in the spotlight stripped bare in a manner few can comprehend; the country debating the contents of his character and the future course of his life, his standing within his family and his community now resting in the hands of others.

It is, dear reader, a place that I have stood; thankfully with far less intensity, but with consequences equally as grave for the individual. A place where you are forced to reflect on yourself in a manner few are ever compelled to withstand.

It is possible that enduring such a process forges a better person. It can also shatter you into 10,000 pieces as you stare into the abyss.

I am unsure if I am worthy of the second chance I have been given, but the fact that it has been awarded says a lot more about the community than it does about me.

We owe it to ourselves to offer Sam Uffindell that same consideration. It is up to him to earn that opportunity and, if it is gifted to him, do something with it. – Damien Grant

Unbelievably, executive positions in the water services entities are already being advertised. It seems they are building the gallows for our democracy before the jury has heard the evidence. – Stuart Smith

The important issue here though is that should this legislation pass, rate payers will lose control of their assets to these water entities, who have at best a tenuous connection to their rightful owners. The governance structures are so convoluted and the entities so large that the local voice has no chance of being heard. The minister has said that councils will still own their three waters assets. But ownership is in essence the right to control the assets, and this will not be possible, so the minister’s words are hollow and an attempt to calm the masses.- Stuart Smith

The key point is we would work with councils rather than seek to take their assets. We would ensure that ratepayers continue to own and have a direct say in the running of their three waters assets. After all, they paid for them in the first place. – Stuart Smith

The system our Labour government wants to foist on us, with the open backing of the Green Party and Maori Party, is a dual-class system of citizenship based on race.  Only one race matters and will be preferred in all things.   – Derek Mackie

 By voting for ANY political party which actively promotes or condones this agenda you are either knowingly or unwittingly complicit in the dismantling of our democracy and way of life.  

 Take a stand.  DON’T vote for racism.   Vote for DEMOCRACY – it’s the best imperfect system we’ve got.  – Derek Mackie

We all want a more environmentally conscious and sustainable industry that protects our country from the degradation and overcrowding of our wilderness, pressure on infrastructure, and human waste on the roadside.

But do we need to be exclusive and snobby to get it?  – Francesca Rudkin 

If we want our tourism industry to recover, we really can’t afford to be fussy right now about who we welcome in. 

But if we want to transform the tourism industry, Stuart Nash needs to pull back from the headline grabbing elitist comments, and focus more on both the short term issues facing the industry – where to find staff and accommodation for them – and the long term issues of how to achieve a sustainable, regenerative, higher-wage industry. –  Francesca Rudkin 

The vitriol that comes the way of the mayor and councillors and council staff is inexcusable. I take my hat off to them all – I don’t know how they get out of bed some days, the shit they have to deal with. – John Bougen 

Eco-zealots ram wind and solar power down the throats of Third World governments, purporting to save the planet and drag millions out of poverty. But it never takes their targets long to work out that wind and solar power are both insanely expensive and hopelessly unreliable; sitting in the dark, night after night, generally does the trick. – Stop These Things

We eventually decided to buy a small two-bedroom, turnkey apartment on the fringe of Wellington’s suburban sprawl. It was only 800 square feet, the commute would be miserable, it had no backyard or parking space. The area didn’t have a grocery store and the government had labelled it one of the country’s worst for socio-economic deprivation. But we thought we could attempt a bid with the 750,000 New Zealand dollar ($602,000) asking price.

We walked into our local bank in August, 2020, holding our mortgage application. We were beaming to show that after a decade of frugal living – quite literally passing up on avocado toast, and cycling to work to save on bus fare – we’d paid off student debt and had more than six figures set aside for a deposit. An adviser looked at our bank balances and asked if we were expecting a large donation from family. Our smiles faded. Without at least 20 per cent down, the bank wouldn’t even look at our application papers. A year later, we tried again with the help of a mortgage broker. The result was the same, but house prices had soared by 50 per cent. – Justin Giovannetti

New Zealanders found themselves with some of the developed world’s most unaffordable homes before the pandemic. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern quipped back in her days as an opposition politician that the country’s economy was basically “a housing market with a few bits added on.” Since she came to power in 2017, house prices have increased by nearly 60 per cent. – Justin Giovannetti

 In New Zealand, the country’s Byzantine environmental rules make the construction of new subdivisions immensely difficult. New legislation to rezone nearly the entire country to allow multi-family homes has run into a wall of NIMBYism at the local level. It isn’t for a lack of land. New Zealand’s five million inhabitants are spread across an area twice the size of England. – Justin Giovannetti

Unaffordable house prices didn’t appear in New Zealand overnight. Prices had steadily grown for most of the past two decades, and while most middle-class parents could continue to help their children get on the property ladder, politicians from the right and left could promise to tackle the problem and then shrug as their interventions failed to launch. The blame does not fully rest on the incumbents in Wellington or Ottawa.

However, Ms. Ardern came into office with a marquee promise to build 100,000 homes within a decade. The program became an embarrassing failure, delivering only 1,000 homes in its first five years. Her government then changed course, putting forward a rebooted $321-million program to help first-home buyers. The country’s Housing Minister drew laughs with a triumphal press release where she announced that only 12 families were helped. – Justin Giovannetti

Worse than the economics is the clear social damage. Reports come in every week warning New Zealanders about the heavy price of expensive housing. Poverty rates are growing, while the country’s emaciated welfare net fails to keep pace. Gang violence is often on the front pages, a daily reminder of the country’s fraying social fabric.

The health impact of substandard and crowded housing is growing on the country’s Indigenous population. Rheumatic fever is a rare but life-threatening disease, eliminated in most developed countries. It is still sometimes detected in First Nations communities in Canada’s North. Cases of rheumatic fever are diagnosed every few days in New Zealand, nearly all in Indigenous children. Many of the cases happen in homes only a short drive from the Prime Minister’s residence. It’s one of the reasons New Zealand’s children’s commissioner reported in June that the country is now “one of the worst places in the developed world to be a child.” – Justin Giovannetti

Leaders should take note, not only of Ms. Ardern’s rapidly fading popularity at home, but the speed with which a housing crisis can become a catastrophe. – Justin Giovannetti

The only politicians who no one bothers to dislike are those who are totally useless. Around a third of the electorate are committed lefties. They dislike Luxon because they think he can win. Labour would not be testing attack ads if their polling did not say the National Leader is a threat.

Objectively, Luxon’s achievements as a leader are astonishing. When he took over as leader the National caucus was a poisonous bear pit.

It is a remarkable turnaround. He could now boast to his conference that his “MPs have their hopeless Labour counterparts on the run”. He now leads what appears to be a cohesive team.

Luxon has been in Parliament for less than two years and leader for just eight months. It takes most MPs six years and three elections to become effective. What is remarkable is not his occasional slip-up, but that he has made so few. – Richard Prebble

Luxon has been in Parliament for less than two years and leader for just eight months. It takes most MPs six years and three elections to become effective. What is remarkable is not his occasional slip-up, but that he has made so few.

National received just 25.58 per cent of the vote in the last election. Now it is New Zealand’s most popular party. – Richard Prebble

Luxon has the great advantage of not only having a good CV, but of looking like a prime minister. Nothing else has changed, so he has to be given the credit for National’s revival.

The next election is now Luxon’s to lose. Labour’s only hope of re-election is to politically destroy the National leader.

There is a tried and tested formula. Accuse the Opposition Leader of having no policy. And when he does announce some policy, put it on trial and find it guilty. – Richard Prebble

There is great unease over how the young are faring under Labour. Just 46 per cent of pupils attended school regularly in term one. There is a 49 per cent increase in the number of young people on the Jobseeker benefit. When Luxon says “get the kids back to school” and that young adults need to “find a job and become independent”, the country agrees. – Richard Prebble

A true conservative does not campaign claiming to have the most radical new policy. A real conservative pledges not to do anything that might damage New Zealand’s values. When Luxon campaigns to do nothing that might harm our liberal democracy, he will win by the landslide. – Richard Prebble

The 1980s was a decade that saw the beginnings of the breakdown of traditional political and moral boundaries, an unravelling with which we are still coming to terms. – Kenan Malik

For others, the Rushdie affair revealed the need for greater policing of speech. It’s worth recalling how extraordinary, in contemporary terms, was the response to the fatwa. Not only was Rushdie forced into hiding but bookshops were firebombed, translators and publishers murdered.

Yet Penguin, the publisher, never wavered in its commitment to The Satanic Verses. It recognised, Penguin CEO Peter Mayer later recalled, that what was at stake was “much more than simply the fate of this one book”. How Penguin responded “would affect the future of free inquiry, without which there would be no publishing as we knew it”.

It’s an attitude that seems to belong to a different age. Today, many believe that plural societies can only function properly if people self-censor by limiting, in the words of the sociologist Tariq Modood, “the extent to which they subject each other’s fundamental beliefs to criticism”.

I take the opposite view. It is in a plural society that free speech becomes particularly important. In such societies, it is both inevitable and, at times, important that people offend the sensibilities of others. Inevitable, because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable. They are better openly resolved than suppressed in the name of “respect”.

And important, because any kind of social progress means offending some deeply held sensibilities. “You can’t say that!” is all too often the response of those in power to having their power challenged. To accept that certain things cannot be said is to accept that certain forms of power cannot be challenged. – Kenan Malik

Rushdie’s critics no more spoke for the Muslim community than Rushdie did. Both represented different strands of opinion within Muslim communities. Rushdie gave voice to a radical, secular sentiment that in the 1980s was highly visible. Rushdie’s critics spoke for some of the most conservative strands. It is the progressive voices that such conservatives seek to silence that are most betrayed by constraints on the giving of offence. It is their challenge to traditional norms that are often deemed “offensive”.

Human beings, Rushdie observed in his 1990 essay In Good Faith, “shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men”.

We can only hope for Salman Rushdie’s recovery from his terrible attack. What we can insist on, however, is continuing to “say the unsayable”, to question the boundaries imposed by both racists and religious bigots. Anything less would be a betrayal. – Kenan Malik

The attack on Rushdie is exactly the same as the threats to kill Rowling.  Rushdie was accused of being blasphemous and Rowling of being gender critical.  Shortly after the attempt on Rushdie, Rowling received a text saying you’re next.(4)  The threats against feminists by the Wokerati are the same as the ones made against Rushdie by Islamists.  They come from intolerant parts of our society, that believe they hold a monopoly not only on truth but who gets to speak and what they can say.  They must be opposed and defeated and we should never forget who didn’t stand beside women under threat from men. – Gearóid Ó Loingsigh

What we should have learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic is that the public health response is only one part of the equation. Public health interventions have broader economic and social impacts, and invariably give rise to human rights issues. Our planning for managing public health emergencies needs to extend beyond the health sector response.

The failure to embed human rights considerations into pandemic planning resulted in Covid-19 response measures that did not give sufficient weight to human rights concerns. – Lorraine Finlay 

We need to formally review all aspects of our Covid-19 pandemic response – especially its impact on human rights – to allow us to be better prepared for the next health crisis. We also need to ensure that future emergency planning incorporates human rights considerations as a priority. Even in the middle of an emergency – perhaps especially in the middle of an emergency – human rights matter. – Lorraine Finlay 

Future histories will see the Salman Rushdie affair, which followed the publication in 1988 of his novel, The Satanic Verses, as a pivotal moment in the history of Islamism: for the British response, and that of the West as a whole, was weak and vacillating, encouraging Islamists to imagine that the West was a kind of rotten fruit, ripe to fall from the tree, and therefore susceptible to terrorist attack. The Rushdie affair was to Islamists what the annexation of Crimea was to Vladimir Putin, or, indeed, the occupation of the Saarland to Hitler. – Theodore Dalrymple

 Free speech must be defended, irrespective of whether those who exercise it are wholly admirable. The person does not defend free speech who demands only that those with whom he agrees should be heard or free to speak. – Theodore Dalrymple

Rushdie was attacked by an enemy of free speech while about to speak in defense of free speech, a principle of which he has been a staunch and brave supporter. His assailant and likeminded others are believers in an alien ideology that we find repellent. But are they the only—or even the main—threat to free speech in the West today? – Theodore Dalrymple

You can’t convince enough people that you are the right people in these key leadership roles when the record continues showing failures to deliver on major promises to the electorate (housing, child poverty, economic well being, you name it) and management errors that have effectively destroyed important parts of our economy (tourism, high quality pastoral hill country going into trees, etc).

The only way for any chance of a change for the better is to lance the boil and start again with a whole new set of inclusive policies that will ensure our survival as one of the last remnants of a true democracy – a sovereign state that is best in the world at doing the things that matter.- Clive Bibby

This is bad enough, but it’s made worse by the exposure of the Labour Party who made so much of the honest, transparent, and kindness nonsense that has blown up so badly in their faces.

They are Machiavellian, fundamentally dishonest, and about as shallow as a puddle. – Mike Hosking

All parties have trouble and a party with a large caucus was always going to have some kind of trouble, if not several episodes of trouble, in this three-year term.

But like all the other stuff they’ve cocked up from the economy, to Three Waters, to co-governance, the list is now bordering on endless, they have taken a rogue MP and made it a mile worse than it ever had to be, by yet again not understanding that honesty counts and transparency works.

Pretending you are something you are not will always get exposed. – Mike Hosking

The next generation of New Zealand audiences simply doesn’t get media and broadcasting content from our public sector. It chooses innovation, ideas and imagination. It doesn’t care where they come from or who has funded it. We need to think about media as platform neutral and flexible. We need to think about supporting media not in terms of $$$ but in better regulations, in growing an economy that supports best practices and a platform neutral approach to content funding over feeding whatever comes along just from the public purse with little accountability.

A Public Media Monolith guarantees the latter and discourages the former.- Melissa Lee

The irony, of course, is that the prime minister, characteristically empathetic throughout, has never failed to express her personal concern for Sharma and “his wellbeing”, in the same way a mobster might fret that it would be a real shame if something were to happen to a local shopkeeper who hadn’t paid protection money. – Ben Thomas

There is no doubt Sharma has felt unfairly victimised by the party’s internal disciplines, and there is no doubt that, after the die was cast last Thursday, his party has set out to defang and then destroy him. If there is a salient difference between what he had earlier experienced and “real” bullying, it will be obvious to Sharma now.. – Ben Thomas

Just as economist Adam Smith described the miraculous functioning of free markets as seeming to work as if directed by an invisible hand, so too is the functioning of political parties. But in politics, even if it’s hidden, the hand is really there, and if you force it into the public eye it will usually appear as a fist. – Ben Thomas

That said, of course we should continue nullifying the numerous human factors contributing towards global warming but what’s happening is no reason to panic. Let’s have an end to this blather that humans are destroying the globe. It’s gone through ice ages and massive geographic changes on numerous occasions in the millions of years it’s existed, long before humanity evolved, initially in the sea.

When the first of our ape ancestors dropped form the trees and eventually stood and learnt to walk, you can be assured there’d have been a gibbering timid faction remaining tree-bound, clutching one another and crying alarm. Their fear-ridden ancestors live on today, behaving exactly the same in their advocacy for collectivist security. – Bob Jones

The two age-old human failures are religious superstition and warfare. Humans will not destroy the globe but unless militarism is finally abandoned, they may well destroy themselves. – Bob Jones

The problem here is that many people on the Left – apparently including those who are huffing and puffing over Arps – don’t trust democracy. They don’t think their fellow citizens can be relied on to make the right decisions. They prefer to put their faith in state decrees that restrict people’s freedoms. In this respect they reveal their essentially elitist, authoritarian leanings. – Karl du Fresne

Let Arps stand, I say, and put his support to the test. Provided the school community exercises its right to vote, I believe he’ll make an even bigger clown of himself than he is already. The votes of right-thinking people – and that means most New Zealanders – are the obvious antidote to extremists. – Karl du Fresne

When people are convinced that nothing worse can exist than that which they already experience, they do not stop to consider even the possibility that a policy advocated to release them from their “hell” might actually make things worse for them. – Theodore Dalrymple

Whoever forms the next Government will inherit a country with a much-increased public debt burden. Crime, especially in Auckland, is out of control. The New Zealand health service is stretched. Education results have plummeted. The defence force needs to be rebuilt. The Reserve Bank is fighting inflation. The labour market is tight. The public service headcount has ballooned. The number of people on benefits has increased. Infrastructure projects have stalled. Energy security is no longer a given. Race relations are fractious. And according to a poll, one in five Kiwis consider emigrating. And who could blame them?

New Zealand’s situation could not be more perilous. The coming parliamentary term will decide if the country is to remain a first-world country. Or if New Zealand will be relegated to the status of economic and political basketcase.

Such circumstances cannot be overcome by marketing slogans. No amount of clever electioneering will be a substitute for economic reform. No aiming for the median voter will cut the mustard. – Oliver Hartwich

To be clear, I support the left half of the Republican Party and the right half of the Democratic Party!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 16, 2022

Our roads are going backwards – this isn’t an issue that has suddenly developed over the last year or two – we at a tipping point and starting to see and pay the cost of that underinvestment. – Dylan Thomsen

We fund our roads on a consumption model rather than an investment model, so we are constantly falling behind, – James Smith

Ultimately, the problem is that funding is being pulled from road maintenance and being put into things like cycleways and public transport, and there’s a lot of money being wasted with little to no accountability. – Geoff Upson

The overall impression given by these warnings is that we are a population of rather weak-minded, ignorant minors who are, or ought to be, the wards of a small class of well-intentioned guardians who know better. The problem is that one tends to become what one is treated as being; and some people might take the illogical leap to conclude that if something does not bear a warning, then it must be safe or even beneficial. After all, if it were harmful, officialdom would have warned us about it.

More irritating, at least to me, than this relatively innocuous sloganeering masquerading as benevolence or concern, that enunciates obvious truths than no one would go to the trouble of denying, are the unctuous messages or slogans that we are now often subjected to. – Theodore Dalrymple 

The other day I saw a photograph of a poster in New Zealand, apparently in response to the dramatic rise in cases of Covid there. “Stay safe,” it said in very large lettering, “Be kind.” I think this would win a trophy if there were a competition for the most nauseating slogan of the year. Indeed, if I were a very rich man I would fund such a competition, perhaps to be called the Unction Prize. – Theodore Dalrymple 

The common principle of Rushdie’s critics is that if you offend someone’s beliefs then you are at least partly in the wrong, and so threats are somewhat excused. Giving offence justifies violence.

It is monstrous position. Words are not violence. Violence is violence. – Josie Pagani

If you give offence you are not protected from criticism. Stupid and offensive comments are words. They should be debated, ridiculed, disproven – with words. You should not be murdered, locked up, sanctioned, or threatened.

Hold the violent to account for their violence. Do not make excuses. Do not give comfort to their motive. Give comfort to the enemies of violence.

Polite people don’t change the world.

Being prepared to offend is how we progress. You cannot tell people that the Earth orbits the sun when centuries of status and identity depends on forcing everyone to agree that the sun goes around the Earth. Usually, offensive views are simply offensive. But sometimes, occasionally, they are Galileo. – Josie Pagani

Putting up with vile, nasty, dehumanising words is the price of our freedom and safety, of being adults able to detect truth and falsehood for ourselves, and of not being subjected to lies and suppression. – Josie Pagani

Fear of violence and fear of offence might prevent The Satanic Verses being published today. Cancelled, it would avoid offending anyone. We would be deprived of the right to decide the book’s merits for ourselves.

But fear is the point of terrorism. So decide not to be afraid. – Josie Pagani

We elect a parliament, not a government, and we elect a parliament of individuals. The waka-jumping law places political parties, and not the parliament, at the apex of sovereignty. – Damien Grant

Bureaucratic structures are inevitably hierarchical, fostering rules, rigid operating procedures and impersonal relationships, with initiatives and policy directions blown in by egos and the political wind. As in a beehive, a self-perpetuating, circular organisation will evolve comprising thousands of drones fussing around the queen, enabling her to expand her colony thus ensuring the continued survival of the drones.

Inputs and outputs are the currency of bureaucracies – rather than insights and outcomes. In government, academic and local authority sectors, there are few profit-and-loss assessments, only budget allocations. – Mike Hutcheson 

I can sense the mounting frustration felt 70 years ago by Professor Parkinson, at the inexorable and seemingly unstoppable rise of bureaucracies of the world – and mourn the ever-increasing cost-of-living being added through more bureaucrats, more compliance costs, more levies, higher local body rates and taxation. – Mike Hutcheson 

Lowering the bar is a natural response if you want to paper over the cracks rather than fix the actual problem, a combination of low school attendance and acres of missed learning as a result of Covid lockdowns. Rather than the inconvenience of mobilising a full-court press to help those who have been missing out, we are to maintain a façade that these students have been as well-educated as those from pre-Covid years. This is a short-term decision which will have lifelong impacts. – Steven Joyce

Our kids have had a raw deal from this pandemic. Many have given up their start in life to protect their elders from this pernicious disease. While some of that was unavoidable, especially early on, the lockdown that really sucked the life and happiness out of Auckland teenagers was the one that started this time last year and ran for five months. That lockdown was caused by the governments “world-leading” vaccine rollout and it should never have happened.

Someone needs to research how much the vaccine lockdown of 2021 scarred this generation. I suspect the low levels of school attendance this year and the current wave of youth violence can be directly traced to that period. – Steven Joyce

We have been witnessing a steady decline in literacy and numeracy amongst our young people for many years, and nothing tried so far has managed to halt it. Our relative performance on international tests in language, maths and science is turning from a steady decline into a nosedive, and the number of young people not regularly attending school is becoming a sad national joke.

When you lay the current issues over the top of a general decline in performance and school attendance, you have to ask whether our school system is completely broken? I fear it is. – Steven Joyce

We have a very top-down school sector largely created to serve the people that operate within it. An overbearing Ministry of Education offers detailed guidelines on everything from how you teach to how schools should refer to “people who have periods”. The education unions have a tight grip on anything which happens in the government-operated part of the system which is most of it, and in their collective mind should be all of it. The vindictive, nasty approach the unions took to killing off partnership schools was a sight to behold.

The unions hate independent testing of students lest poor (or indeed excellent) teaching be exposed, and are allergic to principal’s paying individual teachers what they are worth. Woe betide an education minister who doesn’t genuflect before the twin powers of the NZEI and the PPTA.

Centralisation and control is the solution to everything. The education bureaucracy hates competition between schools, hates parental choice, and hates innovation, unless it’s being driven by the centre and pre-ordained by the mandarins as the solution to all our problems. – Steven Joyce

Philosophical debates must only be had by appropriately credentialed insiders, and then everyone must march together towards the latest silver bullet, be it modern learning environments, the fad for junior and senior high schools, or the latest prescription for the history syllabus.

I sighed this week when reading about yet another debate between advocates of ‘phonics’, “phonemic awareness” and “balanced literacy”. What happened to the idea of letting good teachers teach the approach that works for each student, and measure that with independent testing of the outcomes. It works in every aspect of life, but not in education apparently.

This cult of standardisation, commoditisation and monopoly provision of education services must end. If it was going to achieve great results for our kids it would have done so by now.

We need to encourage competition, choice, and innovation in our school system, not snuff it out. We need to celebrate excellent teaching and encourage it with better pay. We need to give lower-income parents similar choices for their kid’s education that wealthy parents get. We need to experiment with new models, give schools more autonomy, and re-orient the bureaucracy to focus on results and outcomes rather than prescriptive minutiae. And yes, we need to invest more.

Taking on the challenge of genuine improvement in our school system is not for the faint-hearted. It will be a bumpy ride and the public will need to be prepared, as the vested interests so feather-bedded by our current system will feel very threatened. – Steven Joyce

Right now, any child that succeeds at school and comes out with incredible qualifications and is ready to face the world is the outlier, they are the exception, not the rule.

Every child deserves to have a decent education and we are failing. We give ourselves an ‘F’ for failure, because that’s what we’re delivering.   – Kerre Woodham

What happens when democratic principles collide with cultural values and political self-interest? In New Zealand, that’s starting to look like a quaintly naive question. Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government appears supremely untroubled by accusations of nepotism and conflict of interest swirling around one of its most senior ministers. – Karl du Fresne 

The problem here is that what constitutional purists would categorise as nepotism, many Maori people would justify as simply looking after your own whanau or tribe – a cultural imperative in the Maori world. But anyone bold enough to point out that looking after your own is incompatible with proper constitutional practice – and more specifically, the principle that appointments should be made and contracts awarded on merit rather than notions of familial loyalty – risks being denounced as a racist. – Karl du Fresne 

If you think a Government that can’t build houses, build light rail, deliver health services or be open, honest and transparent can sort your grocery bill – and this is the same bloke who cocked up the CCCFA and is now sorting your flour and biscuits – then you need to wake up.

You’re being had. – MIke Hosking

I’m not scared of death. I’m scared of a life where speech is watched, surveilled, curtailed, sanctioned, and therefore totally skewed because of it. Kind of how things are right now. – Rachel Stewart

To observe the New Zealand media vilifying and reputationally destroying those who dare to go against the Covid/vaccine narrative has been sobering. Except that it takes a gulp (or seven) of high-proof booze to make that particular medicine go down, and even then I’m left gagging. – Rachel Stewart

Journalists keep repeating some strange heady brew about how these “right wing fascists” are trying to infiltrate democracy and overthrow it. Last time I looked democracy was about encouraging diversity of viewpoints and civic duty. Wasn’t it?

I mean, if their views are as heinous as they keep saying, they simply won’t get voted in. Right? Or, if they do, are they somehow more hateful and radical than, say, the Greens or the Maori Party? Or even Labour? Believe it or not, not everybody views Labour as “kind”.

Does media no longer trust voters to make up their own minds because we’re all as thick as planks?

Do they not see how this looks? It’s divisive, elitist and arrogant. It portends the end of legacy media, and it’s entirely deserved because ‘hate’ is a two-way street. Asserting that democracy should be available solely for people who think like them is not really a winnable strategy for the cohesion of a tiny fractious country at the bottom of the world. What’s the end game here? – Rachel Stewart

Things cannot go on like this. If media keeps using their fast-expiring social licence to continually tell a sizeable chunk of the Kiwi population that they’re “loony tunes” – rather than rationally trying to find out why so many feel so deeply disenfranchised – then they’ll be blood in the water alright. And not just tiny traces, but bloody great globules. – Rachel Stewart

We let ourselves be ruled every day by politicians without checking they are qualified and trained to do the job. An unqualified surgeon is bad enough, but untrained politicians and their staff decide on the policies and budgets for not just one operation, but every hospital, and every area of society. – Jennifer Lees-Marshment

Standard HR selection processes don’t exist in politics. Politicians and political staff are not recruited or appointed by assessing their skills against a job description. Party members select candidates and voters choose MPs for a myriad of reasons including what they look like; and MPs often choose staffers on their ideology or to reward their help on an election campaign. – Jennifer Lees-Marshment

It’s time to invest in proper professional training programme for politicians and political staffers built on solid research into the reality of politics. We shouldn’t just be putting the spotlight on individual parties when an issue comes up, as that inevitably ends up with whatever created the issue being buried in the interests of limiting the political fallout.

This is a problem that affects political parties globally, so we need to engage in non-partisan debate about how to fix it for the sake of better functioning democracies. – Jennifer Lees-Marshment

On Friday night, when I heard that Rushdie had been stabbed, my sorrow was twofold: I felt saddened by the horrific injury of an exceptionally talented man whose mind and imagination I knew intimately through his writing; and saddened by the world we live in—a world in which the diplomatic immunity granted to every creative-ambassador of the kingdom of imagination, which I had always viewed as a solid fact, was crumbling. When literature departments refuse to teach Lolita, conferences on Dostoevsky are cancelled over the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Oscar winners feel comfortable slapping standup comedians on live television, journalists and cartoonists can be killed because they publish a thought or joke that offends their readers, it is a dangerous world for both artists and art itself. It’s a two-way street: a writer is stabbed because of ideas and fantasies he shares in a work of fiction, while a creative artist’s problematic conduct in religious, moral or political realms is punished by boycotting art that harms no one. And, unlike in the past, when artistic freedom was curtailed by totalitarian regimes and religious movements, today it is under attack from all fronts, including the liberal community, which is willing to police art by means of shaming and boycotting. In this reality, no artistic creator or creation is safe. Art has ceased to be a city of refuge unrestricted by pragmatism and agendas, and has become instead a battlefield in which artists who express ideas that infuriate someone might find themselves or their works bloodied. – Etgar Keret

If I believed in God, I would pray for Salman Rushdie’s recovery. And honestly? It turns out that even without exactly believing, I find myself constantly praying, hoping that in a few days I’ll get another issue of Rushdie’s excellent Substack newsletter. While I pray for his health, I can’t help adding on another agnostic prayer: for a world in which book pages, cinemas, and theater stages are once again places in which it is safe to think, to imagine, to write our fears and weaknesses in wild, ambivalent, confusing and troubling stories. Yes, confusing and troubling. Because, after all, even when we read something that angers us, shocks us, or shakes our worldview—it didn’t really happen. It’s just a story. – Etgar Keret

Racial segregation is back in the US. That old foul practice that most of us thought had been done away with by the 1964 Civil Rights Act has been given some politically correct spit-and-polish. Jim Crow’s gone woke. Consider the University of California, Berkeley. A student house there has decreed that white people are forbidden in its common areas. People of colour, the house says, must have the right to ‘avoid white violence and presence’. Therefore, no honkies allowed. The colour line resurrected to protect allegedly fragile blacks from devilish whites. – Brendan O’Neill 

There is certainly a pathological disdain for all things white in woke circles. But the Berkeley antics strike me as pretty anti-black, too. The notion that black students need to be shielded from the words and ideas and even just the ‘presence’ of white individuals implies that they are weak and fragile, childishly incapable of navigating everyday life in a pluralistic society. – Brendan O’Neill 

This is woke segregation. Sure, it isn’t fuelled by the supremacist idea that whites should never have to interact with their racial inferiors, as was the case in much of the Jim Crow South. But it is palpably reminiscent of another key conviction of the Jim Crow era – namely, that the races just don’t mix well. That they have their own customs, their own ways, and they should get on with it, separately. ‘Separate but equal’, as the Jim Crow ideology put it. The claim that blacks need a safe space from whites, that white ‘presence’ doesn’t sit well with black comfort, is a woke renovation of old racial ideas. As the Atlanticsays, there’s a ‘fine line between safe space and segregation’ on the modern American campus.

And it isn’t only on campus that the segregationist mindset has taken hold. What is the stricture against ‘cultural appropriation’ if not a demand that each race stay within its own cultural boundaries? No mixing, please. Blacks drink from one cultural fountain, whites from another. Some racial grifters have even questioned the wisdom of white people adopting black kids. Ibram X Kendi implied that Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has adopted children from Haiti, is a ‘white coloniser’ seeking to civilise ‘these “savage children” in the “superior” ways of white people’. Even mixed-race marriage risks being problematised. As one scientist, herself in a mixed-race marriage, wrote last year, the woke ideology that says ‘all white people are oppressors, while people of other racial groups are oppressed victims’ leads to a situation where ‘every interaction between white and non-white people’ is seen as oppressive, even in the marital home. This oppressor / victim narrative ‘erases my love for my husband. It erases my humanity’, she said. – Brendan O’Neill 

That the new Jim Crow demeans rather than celebrates whiteness is not progress. For it still rehabilitates the depressing, anti-human creed of racial separation. Separate but equal living quarters, racially divided culture, racial hang-ups even in personal relationships – these are the dire consequences of the racial myopia promoted by the new elites. Nothing better sums up the crisis of liberal thought than their abandonment of Martin Luther King’s vision of a post-race society and their embrace instead of the outlook of the notorious Alabama governor George Wallace: ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!’ – Brendan O’Neill 

For some reason, and despite plenty of other priorities, this Government has decided to make the confiscation and centralisation of water assets a priority. They seem to be doing so with undue haste, without proper process, and irrespective of what others, including the current owners of the assets, think. In fact, their urgency in the matter makes you wonder what the real agenda is. – Bruce Cotterill

It is clear that the current Government doesn’t care too much what the public thinks about Three Waters. They will continue with their rhetoric that our water is of poor quality, which it isn’t, and that desire for centralisation is because that is the only solution to these largely imagined problems. –

There is a strong view held by many New Zealanders that a centralised plan, one that robs Peter to pay Paul, and one that will inevitably see the smaller regions play second fiddle to the needs of the larger cities, and Wellington in particular, all set up with a complicated co-governance model, will be a recipe for failure, fragmentation and ultimately collapse. 

As you would expect, the record of this majority Government on getting controversial legislation passed is strong. However, the record of this majority Government on delivering good outcomes for the people of the country once said legislation is passed, is very very poor.

If allowed to proceed, Three Waters will become another disruptive saga along the lines of the polytechs, the new health authority and the burgeoning public service in general. – Bruce Cotterill

Kiwibank has been given the kiss of death. Grant Robertson announced this week the Government has bought full control of the bank, wasting another $2 billion it has taken from you and me. – John Roughan

Since then the bank has made the most of its founding purpose, always presenting itself as a brave little battler against Australian giants, doing its best to disguise the fact that not many Kiwis have put their money where their sentiment was supposed to be.

It’s hard to see how it is “keeping the big banks honest”. That’s a government’s job anyway, and governments have more effective tools than owning a bank. That makes about as much sense as the Government setting up a supermarket, which has been suggested, apparently seriously, as a response to rising food prices. – John Roughan

If it really had the courage to tackle inflation it would be telling us it has to reduce its spending now, not wasting money for purposes as pointless as keeping a bank in government ownership. – John Roughan

A political kiss of death kills a company with kindness, relieving it of competitive demands, covering its failures, keeping a zombie alive to everyone’s cost. – John Roughan

Stepford Wife also describes what is commonly referred to as ‘the left’ in today’s discourse. This left has been hijacked by power; it’s the Stepford Wife of political ideologies, a possessed husk of what it once was. – Mark White 

When the principle of free speech is betrayed–as it was in the totalitarian Soviet Union–or abandoned as it is today, the result is an ideology that has become the submissive enabler of everything it has always sought to reject. – Mark White 

Leftist analysis of capitalism, which once centered around class, has been rejected in favor of identity politics. Speech is conflated with violence, and punishment is swift for those who use words deemed to cause harm or offense.

To be ‘right-wing’ or to have ‘right-wing ideas’ has been defined so broadly that it has become meaningless. When you call everyone who strays from your approved speech a fascist or a Nazi, what language do you have to identify real fascists when they appear? – Mark White

In spite of the fact that Karl Popper and the Paradox of Tolerance has become a mantra of the liberal-left, policing “harmful” wrong-speech does not prevent the rise of intolerance and fascism. It didn’t work when Weimar Germany tried to suppress Nazi speech and even shut down Nazi newspapers and jailed their leaders. Their efforts to censor made the fascist ideology all the more interesting and popular. This same dynamic is true in present day Germany and France; both make full use of hate speech laws to suppress intolerance and deprive the ‘far right’ of a platform. The result has been a steady rise in the power and influence of far-right ideology in both of these countries.

The left today is in an existential moment. It must shake off this Stockholm syndrome posing as a political movement or it will have suffered total defeat.

The first step is to stand up once again–for free speech. – Mark White

But most importantly, a reversal of this upward surge demands a wider appraisal and acknowledgement of societal changes that have lessened the likelihood that children will experience material and emotional security and stability throughout their formative years. If children were genuinely placed at the centre of the family, given time, given unconditional love, given space to explore but surety to return to, there may still be no guarantees. But the odds of that child developing good mental health will massively increase.- Lindsay Mitchell

I would think in some quarters, having covered that story, it could be perceived as being some malice. But to me, it was justice and power over the powerless – and that’s something that in a democracy we should never tolerate. – Barry Soper

Accountability is one of the most important attributes of leadership.

If you have a mandate to make decisions, then they must be defended and the decision maker must be held to account.

This Government doesn’t want to be held to account. – Mike Hosking

 Little who tends to get angry when confronted said last week when it was suggested to him he had ignored the letter, he said “a letter from an advocate is not evidence of anything, its evidence of a letter being sent”. 

That will help things a lot won’t it.

If Andrew stopped being angry long enough to offer some sort of defence I assume he would spruik his new centralised health behemoth, which appears to this point to have achieved less than nothing but cost a fortune to get to that point.

The one announcement they have made is to get everyone on a waiting list, onto another list to get a date for your procedure. Doesn’t mean you’ll get the procedure, just a date.

And that’s Little and that’s this Government isn’t it, paper shuffling and announcements.  – Mike Hosking

That should further enhance his reputation as the nearly perfect minister – one who left the country better off than he found it and knew when to move on. – Nevil Gibson

The problem with characters like Arp is that their behaviour is so prone to causing public outrage that  citizens find it all-too-easy for to switch-off their critical political faculties and remain silent when politicians call for Nazis to be declared ineligible for public office. After all, who wants to be seen sticking up for antisemitic fascists?

The answer, of course, is: we should all want to be seen resisting any attempt by the state to weed-out “undesirable” ideas, and the dubious individuals who hold them, before they get anywhere near a nomination form. As democrats, our firm position must always be that the only body qualified to decide who should, and should not, be elected to public office is the electorate itself. That is to say, You and I – the voters. – Chris Trotter

For some time now, both the Labour and Green parties have struggled to acknowledge in the electorate a collective wisdom more than equal to the task of distinguishing good from evil, right from wrong, democrats from fascists. Indeed, both parties show signs of believing the opposite to be true: that the electorate is neither wise enough, nor resilient enough, to recognise Nazi bullshit when they hear it. – Chris Trotter

Once the most determined defenders of free speech, the New Zealand Left has, for more than a decade, been evincing less-and-less enthusiasm for the critical democratic insight that freedom of expression must never become a privilege, to be rationed amongst “our side’s” best friends, but remain a right, freely available even to our worst enemies.

The Covid-19 Pandemic made matters worse. When the fight is with a potentially fatal virus, individuals and groups communicating false information can endanger the health of millions. In these circumstances, the temptation is strong to rank the health of the democratic system well below that of the population as a whole. Or, even worse, to start seeing the key elements of democracy: freedom of expression; freedom of assembly; freedom of association; as the vectors of a dangerous political disease.

This is now the grave danger confronting New Zealand: a Labour Government which has convinced itself that people communicating lies can undermine the health and well-being of the entire population – rather than a tragic fraction of it. – Chris Trotter

The political class’s historical mistrust of democracy, long resisted by the Left, has now been embraced by what is left of it. No longer a “bottom up” party, Labour has grown increasingly fearful that its “progressive” policies are unacceptable to a majority of the electorate. Ardern’s government, and its supporters, are terrified that the Far Right will opportunistically seize upon this public unease and whip it into some sort of fascist majority. Hence their determination to shut them up, shut them down and shut them out. – Chris Trotter

 Poorly educated though they may be, ordinary citizens are not stupid. They can tell when they’re not sufficiently trusted or respected to be given a decisive role in the government of their own country.

With distressing speed, New Zealand is dividing itself into two hostile, camps. The smaller counts within it the better part of the better educated, is positioned on the commanding heights of the state, and considers itself the brain and conscience of the nation. The larger camp, nothing like so clever, seethes with frustration and resentment, anxiety and rage. It fears that its world: the world it grew up in; the world it knows and trusts; is shifting on its foundations.

What remains to be seen is which outcome represents the greater catastrophe for New Zealand: that the policies of those occupying the heights should proceed unchecked; or that the depths should find a leader equal to the task of bringing them down? – Chris Trotter

We are almost the size of Japan in terms of geography, yet we’re trying to pay for the necessary roading networks with five million people, compared to Japan’s 125 million. 

Ultimately, this is a question of whether we want to supercharge New Zealand or just grind down our economic growth.

If bringing in 4 million people over the next ten years helps us make money and pay for things, I’m up for it.  –  Heather du Plessis-Allan

One of the most remarkable developments of recent years has been the legalization—dare I say, the institutionalization?—of corruption. This is not a matter of money passing under the table, or of bribery, though this no doubt goes on as it always has. It is far, far worse than that. Where corruption is illegal, there is at least some hope of controlling or limiting it, though of course there is no final victory over it; not, at least, until human nature changes.

The corruption of which I speak has a financial aspect, but only indirectly. It is principally moral and intellectual in nature. It is the means by which an apparatchik class and its nomenklatura of mediocrities achieve prominence and even control in society. I confess that I do not see a ready means of reversing the trend. – Theodore Dalrymple

As the article makes clear, though perhaps without intending to, the key to success in this brave new world of commissars, whose job is to draw a fat salary while enforcing a fatuous ideology, is mastery of a certain kind of verbiage couched in generalities that it would be too generous to call abstractions. This language nevertheless manages to convey menace. It is difficult, of course, to dissent from what is so imprecisely asserted, but one knows instinctively that any expressed reservations will be treated as a manifestation of something much worse than mere disease, something in fact akin to membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

It is obvious that the desiderata of the new class are not faith, hope, and charity, but power, salary, and pension; and of these, the greatest is the last. It is not unprecedented, of course, that the desire for personal advancement should be hidden behind a smoke screen of supposed public benefit, but rarely has it been so brazen. The human mind, however, is a complex instrument, and sometimes smoke screens remain hidden even from those who raise them. People who have been fed a mental diet of psychology, sociology, and so forth are peculiarly inapt for self-examination, and hence are especially liable to self-deception. It must be admitted, therefore, that it is perfectly possible that the apparatchik-commissar-nomenklatura class genuinely believes itself to be doing, if not God’s work exactly, at least that of progress, in the sense employed in self-congratulatory fashion by those who call themselves progressives. For it, however, there is certainly one sense in which the direction of progress has a tangible meaning: up the career ladder. – Theodore Dalrymple

Although the modern prestige bestowed upon science is laudable, it is not without peril. For as the ideological value of science increases, so too does the threat to its objectivity. Slogans and hashtags can quickly politicize science, and scientists can be tempted to subordinate the pursuit of the truth to moral or political ends as they become aware of their own prodigious social importance. Inconvenient data can be suppressed or hidden and inconvenient research can be quashed. This is especially true when one political tribe or faction enjoys disproportionate influence in academia—its members can disfigure science (often unconsciously) to support their own ideological preferences. This is how science becomes more like propaganda than empiricism, and academia becomes more like a partisan media organization than an impartial institution. – Bo Winegard

In plain language, this means that from now on, the journal will reject articles that might potentially harm (even “inadvertently”) those individuals or groups most vulnerable to “racism, sexism, ableism, or homophobia.” Since it is already standard practice to reject false or poorly argued work, it is safe to assume that these new guidelines have been designed to reject any article deemed to pose a threat to disadvantaged groups, irrespective of whether or not its central claims are true, or at least well-supported. Within a few sentences, we have moved from a banal statement of the obvious to draconian and censorious editorial discretion. Editors will now enjoy unprecedented power to reject articles on the basis of nebulous moral concerns and anticipated harms. – Bo Winegard

Asking ethicists to assess the wisdom of publishing a journal article is as antithetical to the spirit of science as soliciting publication advice from a religious scholar. Who are these “ethics experts” and “advocacy groups” anyway? I am skeptical of ethical expertise. I am especially skeptical of ethical expertise from an academy more inclined to reward conclusions that support progressive preferences than those that emerge from empirical study and rational thought. I am more skeptical still of advocacy groups, which exist to pursue a political agenda, and are therefore, by their very nature, a good deal more interested in what is useful than what is true. – Bo Winegard

 I find that I am more positive about the science of the past than the editorial’s authors, and more gloomy about the social-justice-oriented science of the future they are proposing. Yes, humans are flawed and fallible and always will be, so we must accept that science will forever be an imperfect endeavor. But the best way to correct its imperfections is not to demand the capitulation of science to ideology, but to remain alive to our biases and devise mechanisms that can compensate for them. Trying to counter past bias by replacing it with a new kind of bias is self-evidently nonsensical—like trying to conquer alcohol consumption by replacing beer with hard liquor. – Bo Winegard

Science is a human activity, and like all human activities, it is influenced by human values, human biases, and human imperfections. Those will never be eliminated. The banner of science has undoubtedly been waved to justify, excuse, or otherwise rationalize appalling crimes and atrocities, from the racial pseudoscience of the Nazis to the blank slatism (and Lysenkoism) of the communists. But the correct response to these distortions is not to endorse a highly partisan vision of science that promotes a progressive worldview, alienating all those who disagree and further encouraging doubt about the objectivity of scientific endeavor. The correct response is to preserve an adversarial vision of science that promotes debate, disagreement, and free inquiry as the best way to reach the truth. – Bo Winegard

Recently I enjoyed the experience of helping two young local men shear some of my sheep.

The exercise was a mixture of one that helped to restore my faith in our local farm based economy but also another that reinforced my concerns about the contemptuous manner in which the farming industry is being treated by the current government. – Clive Bibby

Yet here we are lamenting that those who have the power to safeguard the jobs and welfare of those who make it happen, actually doing their best to destroy our number one asset – all in the name of an already discredited ideology. It is criminal activity and those who are responsible should be held to account. – Clive Bibby

It looks as if the “jewel in the crown” is gone forever, sacrificed on the altar of idealogical madness when it didn’t need to happen this way. 

I have said many times before, that there is more than enough marginal unplanted hill country available in this country that would satisfy the government goal of reducing carbon emissions 50% by 2030 without forcing a single hectare of our very best out of livestock production. 

I believe the government knows that to be true and will be hoping that this irrational decision will be the last in its search for idealogical purity. 
However, my guess is anything is possible with these incompetents and we should buckle up expecting the worst while hoping for a change in direction foreshadowed by a change of government. 

It can’t happen soon enough. – Clive Bibby

. I believe the mainstream media in New Zealand have lost sight of what was previously their primary objective, which was to reflect society back to itself and report, as neutrally as possible, on matters of interest and concern to the communities they purported to serve. Instead they have positioned themselves in the front line of the culture wars and put themselves at odds with their diminishing audiences by haranguing them with an ideological agenda largely driven by disaffected minorities. The subjects of Fire and Fury just happen to be the wrong disaffected minorities.

To summarise: While purporting to be concerned about the potential harm done by wacko extremists (and some do have the appearance of being truly wacko), Stuff’s big-statement documentary drives another wedge into an already dangerously fractured society. Oh, and by the way: did I mention that it was made with funding from the Public Interest Journalism Fund? – Karl du Fresne

According to St. Paul, Jesus Christ said it’s more blessed to give than to receive: But we’ve changed all that. In the modern state, it’s more blessed to receive than to give—and possibly more common, too.

Giving in the modern state is compulsory, and the donors have no choice in the matter, either as to the quantity or the destination of their gifts, perhaps better known as taxes. Of course, in the process of distribution, a proportion of their gifts don’t reach their ostensible recipients, as distribution itself doesn’t come as a gift but as an additional reason why the compulsory gifts must be so large. – Theodore Dalrymple

There are, however, people who clearly receive more than they give: those who exist entirely on gifts. Some of them couldn’t possibly exist other than by such gifts, being incapable of looking after themselves. But they aren’t the majority of those who live entirely on gifts. Again, the distinction between those who are incapable and capable of looking after themselves isn’t absolute; there are shades of incapability between them, those who require partial but not complete help.

The fact that there’s a spectrum of need, from total to none, gives bureaucracies of welfare the pretext or excuse for expanding them ad infinitum, thus expanding also the requirement for further compulsory donations from the rest of the population. An incompetent population is the joy of bureaucrats.

As for the recipients of gifts, they don’t really regard them as a blessing, but more as a right, certainly after they’ve become accustomed to receiving them, which they do very quickly, almost instantaneously. – Theodore Dalrymple

While, in constitutional theory, no government can commit subsequent governments to any particular policy, in practice, many policies, especially those bestowing “gifts” upon a population, are exceedingly difficult, politically, to reverse. Governments that come into power promising the reduction of government expenditures often fail to do so—or even end up increasing it. They find that, in practice, it’s more blessed to increase than to decrease.

Once a benefit is received, even if one has paid or continues to pay for it oneself through taxes, it’s painful to have it withdrawn. – Theodore Dalrymple

The Government cannot find $300 million for a third medical school. Instead, last week the Government spent seven times that amount – $2.1 billion – to buy a bank. Minister of Finance Grant Robertson admits the taxpayer may have to inject more cash. The purchase of Kiwibank could cost the taxpayer a lot more. – Richard Prebble

Ministers are hopeless at governance. When the taxpayer owned the Bank of New Zealand the bank funded the Wine Box rort. The BNZ had to be bailed out by the taxpayer to avoid its collapse.

When David Lange made me the first minister of state-owned enterprises I was in charge of 22 government businesses. I discovered not one was paying any company tax because none were profitable. The services and products were awful and overpriced. Politicians are just hopeless business owners. – Richard Prebble

Kiwibank has always been a political stunt that has produced few, if any, of the benefits promised. This month the bank was the first to increase its mortgage interest rates. The bank almost ruined New Zealand Post. All of New Zealand Post’s earnings went into supporting Kiwibank.

NZ Post could not invest to expand its courier services to deliver Internet shopping deliveries. NZ Post had to beg the government to let it sell shares in the bank to ACC and the Super Fund to avoid bankruptcy. With the cash from the partial sale and NZ Post concentrating on its core delivery business the SOE has returned to profitability. – Richard Prebble

Some Kiwi Fund managers have said they would support a share float. Other analysts say Kiwibank is a risky investment. The New Zealand Super Fund knows far more about investing than Robertson. The fund believes Kiwibank needs a shareholder that would strengthen governance, presumably an overseas bank.

Labour is so keen to promote competition in the supermarket sector that it is encouraging foreign-owned Costco’s entry. At the same time Labour is spending billions of taxpayers’ dollars to prevent real competition in the banking sector that a foreign bank shareholding in Kiwibank would bring. The only winners are the Australian-owned trading banks.

If you cannot get a doctor you can take comfort in knowing that the government owns a bank. – Richard Prebble

Once again, I find myself a bit confounded by a government that seems, at heart, basically dishonest. Can they argue the GST treatment on KiwiSaver fees is not a new tax, given they said there would be no new taxes? Yes they can, because GST is not a new tax.

But are you paying more tax because of the Government’s move on KiwiSaver fees? Yes you are. So has the tax take gone up because you are paying more tax? Yes it has. And so we dance, I guess, on the head of a pin.- Mike Hosking 

Such a classy Government with so much honesty, so much transparency, so much openness.

If you are one of the 50 percent who voted for this, surely you’ve worked out how bad the con was. – Mike Hosking 

We can only surmise wearing your religion ‘loudly’ is a bad thing, so what have Roxborogh and his colleagues got to say about a Speaker of the House with enormous influence, the 3rd most powerful person in NZ, and a practicing Christian? No doubt radio silence. It’s traditional to denigrate National, but not so often do we hear criticism of the left’s beliefs.

However, one has to ask how much more of this hypocrisy can we take from the tone-deaf, biased media commentators, who selectively choose who to torment based on subjectivity and emotion, not reason or logic? – Wendy Geus

So, we look forward with anticipation to hearing the media ‘loudly’ call out Rurawhe for his ‘unpopular’ beliefs which, like Luxon, could be detrimental in some way, yet to be determined.  Don’t hold your breath. Kermit said, “It’s not easy being green.” Copy that: It’s not easy being a National MP. – Wendy Geus

Today there are still a few who have faith in Jacinda’s Labour government despite the overwhelming evidence that it is an outmoded religion, lacking analytical and executive skills. Ministers tell you they’ll solve inflation by spending more; they’ll fix the shortage of nurses in hospitals by refusing to allow easy entry for foreign-trained medical staff; they’ll stop our locally trained nurses heading off overseas by getting them to settle their wage claims for half the current rate of inflation; they’ll lift kids out of poverty by persisting with failed methods of teaching literacy and numeracy in schools, and by teaching them Te Reo; they’ll improve Maori lives by giving co-governance powers to Maori aristocrats; they’ll fix all your problems by employing 17,000 more bureaucrats than we had five years ago, and inflation will waft away on the breeze, hopefully in election year…. –  Michael Bassett

The problem with this government is that many of its policies have been shown historically to work no longer. Even before the Labour Party was formed in 1916, rent controls led to landlords selling their rentals, causing central city slums in many countries. By the mid 1940s one European economist who had surveyed rent controls at work in Europe concluded that the only thing that did more damage to central cities than rent controls was pattern bombing. But we hear today’s crop of Labour ignoramuses still musing about possible rent controls. Learning from history is not something the current lot are prepared to risk instead of their doctrine. A caucus of trade union hacks, low level lawyers and lesser bureaucrats simply rely on Labour’s ancient religion: if it moves, control it, if it makes money, tax it, and if there’s still a problem, throw taxpayers’ money at it. – Michael Bassett

The banking lessons learned by the Fourth Labour Government in the 1980s where the ASB and then the BNZ under Jim Bolger quickly strengthened themselves by allying with expanding international entities, will now never be available to Kiwibank. You can count on it not growing much above its current 4% of the banking market. It will be tied hand foot and finger to the Minister of Finance and the government’s purse strings. A stagnant asset. – Michael Bassett

Come the next election, I suspect the Labour government will resemble those 1931 pilgrims, traipsing down the mountain like wet sheep. One has to hope, however, that eventually a brighter, better educated crop of political hopefuls comes along, a group that understands what works and what doesn’t, who aren’t tied to some old-time religion, and have been living in the real world. – Michael Bassett

It’s becoming more apparent every day that this Government is on its way out and I just wonder whether that’s why they’re spiralling now into the realm of the nutty. – Kate Hawkesby

I just don’t know how they’re so tone deaf. Their ability to try to barrel through policy that negatively impacts us, instead of doing anything that’s actually useful, is worrying. – Kate Hawkesby

The Nats called it as they saw it; a government addicted to spending, and we know this with the free-for-all spray around treatment of the cost of living payment. – Kate Hawkesby

They’re lucky to be a two-term government – thanks to Covid – but at this stage I don’t think even another pandemic could save them.

This is a circus that fewer and fewer of us want tickets to. – Kate Hawkesby

The Ardern administration has finally confirmed — were confirmation required — that it is the most incompetent New Zealand Government in living memory, and perhaps ever. – Matthew Hooton

This Government has managed to “deliver” the biggest cut for at least 30 years in the real wages of the middle and working class — those a “Labour” Party supposedly represents. It is paying for it in the polls. – Matthew Hooton

It took this Government’s special idiocy to decide that which wasn’t broken should be fixed, by moving the Reserve Bank away from its laser-like focus on inflation, approving the appointment of Adrian Orr as Governor and signing the so-called dual mandate in March 2018.

Meanwhile, it accelerated increases to the minimum wage and began putting greater shackles around the labour market, including abolishing automatic 90-day trial periods, and restricting access to foreign labour and preparing the ground for 1970s-style national payment awards for workers.

After all this — and most likely because of it — real wages rose by just 1.5 per cent in Ardern’s first three years, before any effect from Covid. – Matthew Hooton

Infamously, ultra-loose monetary and fiscal policy transferred about $1 trillion to property owners at the expense of wage earners and savers. Now the data is in on real wages.

From mid-2020, real wages began falling and have done so for eight quarters. Since the Labour Cost Index (LCI) began in 1992, that has never happened before. – Matthew Hooton

Perhaps a government of political science rather than economics student presidents could be forgiven for putting votes ahead of sound money, but the Ardern regime has proven incompetent even at handing out free cash.

It turns out cost-of-living cash went to foreign landlords, Kiwis living permanently abroad and those who are no longer alive. – Matthew Hooton

Perhaps we should forgive them their confusion for, on everything except public emoting, it is clear that they know not what they do. This is a pattern. –  Matthew Hooton

 The defeat of the Ardern Government is increasingly likely, and more than deserved.

Labour governments can do many things and survive. Enriching property owners while slashing workers’ real wages isn’t one. – Matthew Hooton

I suspect that we are fast approaching a state of society in which pedantry will be the best defence against the prevailing moral and philosophical (not to say physical) ugliness. Find a corner of the world about which nobody cares, and immerse yourself pedantically in it. That will be the way to survive until you reach the bourne from which no traveller returns. – Theodore Dalrymple

At its worst, and the worst was on display this week, the party puts too much emphasis on increasing the size of the state, and neglects to ask itself what it’s taxing people for. If no one can articulate a good reason for why the Government is taking citizens’ money, can you really blame them for getting upset? – Thomas Coughlan

Not only is increasing tax difficult at the best of times, but after committing not to introduce taxes beyond what it campaigned on at the 2020 election, Labour proceeded to break its promise in spirit if not letter, multiple times this term, most obviously in its extension of the bright line test, the removal of interest deductions for landlords, and now, on GST.

The party needs to regain the public’s trust on tax.  It won’t do that through stealth taxes on their savings. – Thomas Coughlan

If the Minister of Finance demands evidence on value-for-money in adjudicating between different budget bids, because there will always be more bids than there’s space to accommodate, that drives demand for rigour in analysis. If the Government wants everything put through a soft-focus wellbeing lens instead, then that razor gets dulled. And if you combine it with a ludicrously soft budget constraint where government borrows $50 billion, nominally for Covid, and then spends it on any darned thing that passes a comms test, you’ll get what we’ve had.  – Eric Crampton

It all looks pretty bleak. Europe’s heading for disaster if the energy futures market is anything to go by. Covid shocks were bad but what happens when European factories supplying critical parts into NZ supply chains can’t afford to run? There’s terrible mess ahead, we can’t afford for policy to continue to be this persistently stupid, and there’s no reason to hope that policy will stop being this persistently stupid. – Eric Crampton

Lowering the bar means you allow yourself to dream but you don’t chase dreams that are ridiculously out of reach — that they are in the ballpark of possibility for who you are: Your genetic inheritance, talents, skills and work ethic.

And that you don’t hold off celebrating until you’ve smashed that dream over the fence. Instead, you enjoy, and celebrate, all the milestones — the twists and turns and tiny triumphs — along the way.

Because a successful life does not come down to whether you hit any high bar or not. It’s not in the fact that your name and achievement will the answer to a pop quiz question 20 years from now.

It’s in the life you quietly created below the bar, it’s in the people who joined you on your journey and the experiences you had, along the way. It’s in whether you stayed anchored to the things that mattered to you and found fun in the littlest things. – Karen Nimmo

I do not know quite where to place snobbery on the scale of vices, but wherever it is placed, I think it may be very serious in its effects, though it is probably ineradicable from the repertoire of potential human feeling and conduct.

Snobbery is the feeling of social superiority on the grounds of some quality over which the person believed to be inferior has little or no personal control, such as birthplace or parenthood. If this feeling is conspicuously displayed rather than merely felt, it is likely to provoke furious resentment, far more so than actual injustice. Disdain causes the rawest of wounds, which seldom heal. That is why people who triumph over snobbery in practice nevertheless often retain within themselves a strong core of resentment toward those of the type (not necessarily the actual individuals) who formerly disdained them. And this resentment often impels them to do seemingly self-destructive things. – Theodore Dalrymple 

It is probable that intellectual and aesthetic snobbery are now more prevalent than the more traditional forms that attach to place of birth and parentage. Many of us are appalled by the tastes and interests of others and secretly, and not so secretly, congratulate ourselves on our superiority to them. I am far from immune myself from such feelings. I have to control myself not so much in my outer behavior—that is a relatively easy thing to do—but in my inner feeling, that is to say to limit my own feelings of superiority to the people whose tastes I despise. After all, there is more to people than their tastes or enthusiasms, and I have never talked to anybody who struck me as anything other than an individual. Just as we are enjoined to hate the sin but not the sinner, so we have to try to dislike the bad taste but not the person who displays it. This requires the overriding of emotion by conscious thought and self-control. – Theodore Dalrymple 

Fear of appearing snobbish is harmful because it threatens the willingness to make judgments between the better and worse; and since the worse is always easier to produce, it contributes to a general decline in the quality of whatever is produced. This fear of appearing snobbish and therefore undemocratic is now very strong and pervades even universities (so I am told), in which one might have supposed that elitism, in the sense of a striving for the best that has been said and thought, would be de rigueur.

One of the forms that snobbery now commonly takes is disdain of simple, repetitive, and unskilled jobs (which are generally ill-paid as well). The educated can imagine no worse fate than to be employed in such a job, no matter how necessary or socially useful it might be—the person at the supermarket checkout (increasingly redundant, of course) being the emblematic example. With a singular lack of imagination and sense of reality about their fellow creatures, they simply put themselves in the place of these people and imagine thereby that they are being empathic. But of course there are people for whom such jobs are not unpleasant and are even rewarding. Not everyone wants to be, or is capable of being, a master of the universe. – Theodore Dalrymple 

The trouble is that snobbery toward the unambitious overvalues ambition as a human characteristic, and thereby helps to usher in the regime of ambitious mediocrities, or even sub-mediocrities, under which we now live. There is nothing wrong with mediocrity, it is indeed very necessary; but it is harmful when allied with ambition.

Irrespective, then, of how bad a moral vice snobbery may be, it is socially harmful and must be guarded against—especially where it resides often in secret, that is to say in the human heart. – Theodore Dalrymple 

 The Pharmac Review Panel proposed that Pharmac’s spending be skewed to favour the needs of “priority populations”, notably Māori.

That approach treats Māori lives as being of higher value than those not in a priority population. The report illustrates how this might be quantified. It also shows how even Māori might end up worse off.

Official documents justify this racially polarising approach for health care generally. Their main grounds are relatively poor average health outcomes for Māori, ‘equity’, and the Treaty.

Non-Māori outnumber Māori by 40% in the bottom decile of according to New Zealand’s Deprivation Index. To favour Māori over others in this decile violates horizontal equity. To favour Māori in better-off deciles over non-Māori in the lower deciles violates vertical equity. – Bryce Wilkinson

People who do not care for accurate diagnosis cannot care much if their remedy does not work.

Finding remedies that work for all is critical. The previous government’s social investment approach had that focus. The current racially polarising approach does not. – Bryce Wilkinson

While political risk management shouldn’t be the sole focus of any Government, it does actually serve a critical purpose, in applying a blowtorch to policies to make sure they are targeting the right people and there are no unintended consequences.

It’s hard to know which is more damaging in this instance. Devising a policy which would have had such a disastrous effect on peoples’ nest eggs at a time when inflation is already eroding their sense of wealth and wellbeing.

Or being so careless as to wave it through it without even understanding who it would hurt most. – Tracy Watkins

A lambasting by the Auditor General over the cost of living payment and the humiliating backdown on a plan to impose GST on KiwiSaver fees marked a torrid week for the Labour Government.

Both instances raise the question about whether Labour’s political antenna is broken – and its willingness to be take responsibility for stuff-ups. – Claire Trevett 

It may be too soon to tell how the public spending watchdog John Ryan will be remembered when his term finishes – but there are signs he is starting to get under the skin of the Government.

And looking at his work plan for the current year, it is easy to see why. – Audrey Young

What we don’t see on the other side is ‘what did we get for that money?’ For the $130-plus billion a year, what got better, what got worse, how are things trending? Where is the reporting on that?

We really want to push quite hard on agencies to really hold themselves to account for their performance and to connect that to the public in what they are interested in seeing the agency do. – John Ryan

The art of the political U-turn, flip-flop, volte face – call it what you will – is a delicate one. If you don’t call an end to an unpopular policy quickly enough, you stand to entrench voter outrage, which can result in an election loss. If you do too many of them your party is seen as inept and lacking in conviction, beginning with those within your own caucus. – Janet Wilson

Then there’s the cost-of-living payment, in which the second of three instalments came out this week. Having earned a reprimand from the auditor-general, who said the Government should have made better efforts to make the sure the payment was going to its intended targets, and having shed a recalcitrant MP only last week, a prudent Government would be desperate to right the ship.

Instead, it finds itself in a conflagration of its own making, seemingly more interested in increasing its own coffers than helping cash-strapped Kiwis whose vote it’ll want next year. – Janet Wilson

The fact that it’s one of many, and is reminiscent of Ardern’s captain’s call in scotching the capital gains tax in April 2019, shows that when presented with either retaining its ideology or staying in power, this party will always choose the latter.

It also paints a party that can’t be trusted when it comes to tax. – Janet Wilson

Not running a balanced Budget after the past couple of years is not a criticism, but the fiscal story has become unanchored from that basic discipline, and Robertson and Labour have not found anything significant to replace it.

The National Party, on the other hand, is forming a compelling narrative of economic turgidity with Labour at the centre of it – whether you agree with this or not. Its narrative is coherent, simple and builds a picture of failure, profligacy and incompetence that the current Government cannot fix. – Luke Malpass

Labour’s retirement tax plan might be their biggest mistake yet. It was huge.

It would’ve affected most of us. Three million in all. It would’ve left us poorer. Some would’ve been down $20,000 by the time they reached retirement. And it would’ve hit us when it hurts the most: our old age. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Labour will pay for this. The biggest price is trust.

This is the party that has now twice promised no new taxes and twice broken that promise. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Labour’s sneakiness will also cost them. The only thing worse than someone breaking their promise, is someone breaking their promise and trying to hide it.

Good luck to Labour trying to convince the public at the next election that they won’t introduce new taxes. If National plans to run a tax-and-spend scare campaign at the next election, Labour will have no defence. They can hardly ask us to trust them that there will be “no new taxes”. We’ve been there, done that, and we’re paying the taxes. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

It’s been a tough few weeks for Labour. The Sharma allegations made them look dysfunctional. The Auditor-General slamming them for sending cost-of-living money overseas made them look reckless with our tax dollars. And now they’ve been busted trying to take more without telling us .- Heather du Plessis-Allan

So unless there is a total breakdown of the normal decision-making processes within government, which is highly unlikely, this decision and the underhand way it was announced was premeditated.

How on earth could you get to such a tone deaf point? After all, this is not a new government, it has been in office for five years. Ministers surely knew this decision would wind up ordinary New Zealanders and cement the perception they are a high tax, high spending government. They must also have known that trying to avoid actually announcing the change could be political suicide, particularly given the media had given them fair warning they were interested in this upcoming decision. – Steven Joyce

There is every sign the Government believes its own BS to an unwarranted degree, so maybe it thought it could spin its way through this issue in the same way as it has so many others. The Prime Minister is certainly adept at arguing black is white and that failure to deliver is the result of aspiration, so there’s plenty of evidence for this theory.

An even more likely possibility is that ministers are getting completely out of touch with the public they serve. There is a very long series of announcements suggesting that is the case. The TVNZ-RNZ merger, the bike bridge, Three Waters, Trevor Mallard’s appointment to Ireland and his pending knighthood, the bank credit changes, immigration policy, and industry pay bargaining are some that leap to mind. They are either completely inexplicable (think GST on KiwiSaver), or clearly designed to serve a part of Labour’s power base to the bemusement or downright hostility of the general public. – Steven Joyce

Whatever the final cause of the Government’s awry political antennae, it appears very likely the die has been cast and the public have made up their minds about this lot, and ministers increasingly know it. – Steven Joyce

Expect to see much more attacking of the opposition over the next 12 months. Labour’s strategists may not have been able to work out that adding GST to KiwiSaver this way was political poison, but they are aware that the only way to level the playing field for the next election is to drag the alternative government down and create as much doubt about them as there is about Labour. It’s the 2005 and 2008 playbook all over again. And it won’t be pretty. – Steven Joyce

The failures of letting government aspirations become unanchored from reality are becoming difficult to ignore. Doing a more limited number of things well might just be better than failing at many things simultaneously. – Eric Crampton

What is being proposed by Andrew Little and his minions is morally abhorrent. It is a paternalistic, white-man’s burden re-imagined for a modern era.

As the Initiative report’s title states, every life is worth the same. – Damien Grant

If a workplace relations system requires armies of HR people and lawyers to work, it is too complicated. –

These workplace relations reforms run under the name ‘Fair Pay Agreements’. It is a misleading label since there is little that is fair about them. And with the threat of compulsion, they are not much of an agreement, either. – Oliver Hartwich

Still, the Fair Pay Agreements approach is based on little more than voodoo economics.

In conventional economics, wages reflect economic conditions. If a company does well, if it increases its productivity and then its profits, that growing pie will be distributed between owners and workers. So, in this way, the wage increase reflects how well the company is doing.

In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of New Zealand Labour, things work differently. Their starting point is not a how the economy is doing but how it should be doing. – Oliver Hartwich

This approach is courageous, in a ‘Yes, Minister’ way. No wonder even the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment warned its ministers about proceeding with their Fair Pay Agreements plan.

There is an obvious problem with banking on future productivity increases: They might not happen.

It comes down to companies deciding on paying above-productivity wages in the vague hope they will be able to afford them later.

But business does not work like that. And economies that see wages rise faster than productivity will sooner or later face rising unemployment, since companies will not pay their workers more than what they produce. – Oliver Hartwich

For negotiations to take place, it takes two sides. Though the unions are keen on going down the Fair Pay Agreements path, BusinessNZ has declared it is no longer prepared to represent the employer side. So either the government finds another organisation to represent business, or it must artificially create one.

Either way, while Australia has now started the process of reforming its broken employment relations system, New Zealand has started to break its working one.

That is good news for Australia. And terrible news for New Zealand. – Oliver Hartwich

No sane person should be fooled. A climate-cult madness has infected governments and their activist agencies; exemplar, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). Delusions of grandeur is a common manifestation of madness. Climate cultists fit the profile. Clothing themselves in virtue, they strut about proclaiming that they can save the earth from a fiery end if only we would give away the foundational building block of progress and prosperity; namely, fossil fuels. – Peter Smith

Sometimes the best people to fix the problems are actually those affected most by them.  – Kate Hawkesby

Rarely has a political party promised so much in an election campaign and achieved so little during its time in office.

Labour made extravagant promises to end child poverty, to build 100,000 houses over 10 years and make housing more affordable, to make a major contribution to reducing greenhouse gases, and to improve our education system. Instead child poverty has increased on most measures; the number of new houses built has been trivial and, while house prices are at last easing somewhat, they are still among the most expensive in the world; we’re still burning imported coal to keep the lights on; and more and more kids are coming out of the taxpayer-funded school system unable to read and write.

And to top it off, New Zealanders are now facing the highest inflation in more than 30 years. Some record! – Don Brash

The Prime Minister pretends that local councils will still own the water infrastructure which their ratepayers have funded but by every measure on which “ownership” is judged, this is a total nonsense: local councils will have absolutely no authority over the water infrastructure in their area. Among other things, because any new urban development is dependent on water infrastructure being put in place in a timely way, this means that the great majority of the decisions which a council makes around urban development – where roads and houses should go – will be effectively determined by the four enormous “entities” into which all water infrastructure will be grouped. – Don Brash

The legislation establishing the four entities makes it clear that it is tribal authorities which will control the four entities, not the local authorities which notionally retain ownership of the assets. – Don Brash

The audacity of the Government’s move is surely astonishing. The effective confiscation of billions of dollars in water infrastructure assets built up over decades by ratepayers throughout the country is astonishing enough in its own right. But then to hand effective control of those assets to tribal groups up and down the country is almost beyond belief: it is a full frontal assault on any concept of democracy.

This policy alone should cost the Government next year’s election. If it does not, it is a sad indictment on the Opposition parties, on the media, and indeed on every New Zealander. – Don Brash

But there’s another even bigger and more tragic irony that Gorbachev’s death forces us to confront. While we smugly complimented ourselves on winning the Cold War, the democratic, capitalist West was all along being systematically undermined from within by ideological forces far more insidious than Soviet communism.

Call it the culture wars, call it identity politics, call it wokeism, call it neo-Marxism … whatever the label, a multi-faceted assault on Western values has been fermenting for decades, mostly in our institutions of learning, and is now happening in plain sight.

It aggressively manifests itself in attacks on all the values that define Western society and culture: free speech, property rights, the rule of law, economic liberalism, history, science, literature, philosophy and, most damagingly, democracy itself. The attacks are sanctioned by our own institutions, including the media, and have largely gone unopposed by nominally conservative politicians who give the impression of being in a state of paralysis.

We watched enthralled as Gorbachev defied political gravity and neutralised what we regarded as a potential threat to the free world, but I wonder who will save us from the even more menacing enemy within. – Karl du Fresne

Organic beef farms, whose animals take longer to raise and need even more land, lose twice as much nitrogen for each kilogram of meat produced as conventional beef farms. They also create more methane during their extended lifetime. – Jacqueline Rowarth

As for veganism and reducing animal emissions, the concept of removing animals from the diet might seem positive, but the reality is that for a human to stay healthy, supplements and more food needs to be consumed, with consequent greater calorie intake, and hence waste material excretion. The waste contains more nitrogen and this has implications in terms of increased greenhouse gases . – Jacqueline Rowarth

 Different people have different perspectives, but the science facts remain – more people, limited land, and organics and veganism are not the answer for the bulk of the population.

What is clear is that meat and milk produced in New Zealand has lower impact than that produced overseas. The global message should be minimising dietary impact by eating only what is needed – and, where possible, choosing New Zealand food. – Jacqueline Rowarth

We’ve had five f——g years of this ‘be kind’ guilt-tripping propaganda shoved down our throats and everywhere you look the results are crippled systems and crippled people. – Lindsay Mitchell

Another week, another demonstration of Government incompetence, nastiness and deceit. – Matthew Hooton

However good the political antennae of Ardern, Robertson and the rest of the 20-strong Cabinet, they can’t fulfil even that modest function without reading the papers they receive each Friday. Once upon a time, prime ministers required that every minister read every paper before showing up to Monday’s Cabinet meeting. There were even discussions and arguments before decisions were reached.

Apparently that rudimentary expression of Cabinet collective responsibility and basic political management is out of fashion.

With her PR talents, perhaps Ardern and her Cabinet don’t think they need to understand decisions they are taking or announcements they are making. Besotted cub reporters in other daily media let them spin out of anything that pops up. – Matthew Hooton

While other countries are pulling out the stops to attract global talent to their shores, the New Zealand Government seems to think we can manage without it. It’s a decision based on archaic thinking, and it will cost our economy dearly. – Aaron Martin

At a time when we’re competing in a global talent shortage, Australia is rolling out the red carpet to skilled migrants, while New Zealand has put out a dusty old doormat. – Aaron Martin

Not staying globally competitive means we’re not only falling behind in attracting the experienced people we need to build our own capability, but also puts us at risk of losing our own talent. – Aaron Martin

The New Zealand Government still appears to be stuck in the mindset that employers should be reducing their reliance on migrant workers. The philosophy of Australia is completely different – for them it’s not about reducing reliance, it’s about the very realistic approach of understanding what resources are needed to help their economy grow.

Reliance is ingrained in the modern economy, especially one that has a low birth rate and a low population – as New Zealand does. Not being able to offer certainty for migrants who are not on the Green List is going to make it hard to attract scarce and valued talent. That talent will be snapped up by countries who are taking a more progressive approach. – Aaron Martin

The government is completely blind to the fact that skilled migration actually leads to job creation. Internationally experienced managers play a crucial role in upskilling local staff. Without it, staff capability and business growth is limited, and so is the potential of New Zealand’s economy.

So not only do we miss out on all the benefits of their expertise, but New Zealanders go looking for it offshore. If the government wants to put a stop to the brain drain and fix our skilled migrant shortage it needs to get its skates on to remedy our crippled immigration system. – Aaron Martin

Part of the hard-to-explain grief I feel today is related to how staggeringly rare that level of self-restraint is today. Narcissism is everywhere. Every feeling we have is bound to be expressed. Self-revelation, transparency, authenticity — these are our values. The idea that we are firstly humans with duties to others that will require and demand the suppression of our own needs and feelings seems archaic. Elizabeth kept it alive simply by example. – Andrew Sullivan

She was an icon, but not an idol. An idol requires the vivid expression of virtues, personality, style. Diana was an idol — fusing a compelling and vulnerable temperament with Hollywood glamor. And Diana, of course, was in her time loved far more intensely than her mother-in-law; connected emotionally with ordinary people like a rockstar; only eventually to face the longterm consequences of that exposure and crumble under the murderous spotlight of it all.

Elizabeth never rode those tides of acclaim or celebrity. She never pressed the easy buttons of conventional popularity. She didn’t even become known for her caustic wit like the Queen Mother, or her compulsively social sorties like Margaret. The gays of Britain could turn both of these queens into camp divas. But not her. In private as in public, she had the kind of integrity no one can mock successfully.

You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy — but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery — two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.

The Crown satisfies those needs, which keeps other more malign alternatives at bay. – Andrew Sullivan

The Crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness. However shitty the economy, or awful the prime minister, or ugly the discourse, the monarch is able to represent the nation all the time. In a living, breathing, mortal person.

The importance of this in a deeply polarized and ideological world, where fellow citizens have come to despise their opponents as enemies, is hard to measure. But it matters that divisive figures such as Boris Johnson or Margaret Thatcher were never required or expected to represent the entire nation. It matters that in times of profound acrimony, something unites. It matters that in a pandemic when the country was shut down, the Queen too followed the rules, even at her husband’s funeral, and was able to refer to a phrase — “we’ll meet again” — that instantly reconjured the days of the Blitz, when she and the royal family stayed in London even as Hitler’s bombs fell from the sky.

Every Brit has a memory like this. She was part of every family’s consciousness, woven into the stories of our lives, representing a continuity and stability over decades of massive change and dislocation. – Andrew Sullivan

The Queen was crowned in the cathedral where kings and queens have been crowned for centuries, in the same ceremony, with the same liturgy. To have that kind of symbolic, sacred, mystical thread through time and space is something that is simply a gift from the past that the British people, in their collective wisdom, have refused to return. – Andrew Sullivan

Because, in a way, the Queen became a symbol for many people in the English speaking world, even if England itself meant nothing to them.

A symbol of what you may ask?

Maybe of times gone past, of an old way of doing things.  But maybe of a kind of ideal. A person of good character when so many news pages are filled with politicians and celebrities displaying the opposite.

A person who never stopped doing what she said she would. On her 21st birthday she said “I declare before you all, that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.”

And she kept that promise.

Maybe also because we watched her publicly face the challenges of being a mum, a grandmother, and the head of a family.  That’s a job a lot of us know is hard enough without having to do it in public.- Heather du Plessis-Allan

She would say that Prime Ministers were always faced with difficult decisions to make, and real challenges and there often was not a right answer, but to do the thing that you believed was the correct thing to do, was not always the easy thing to do.

She had huge amounts of grace and warmth, but equally so much history and wisdom that you could ask questions and get answers that came from a perspective and vantage point that probably no other person had seen. –  John Key

In Britain, there have been few manifestations of extreme grief at the death of Queen Elizabeth.  But there is a profound and shared sense of loss, that everything has changed, and all expressed in a controlled way.  How very British.

She had breezed past the markers of mortality for so long, that in a quiet moment one could almost believe that she was a truly permanent fixture.

But the singing of God Save the King on the accession of King Charles was a marker of finality.  And a reminder that one can’t step in the same river twice. – Point of Order

One can guess that Her Majesty felt she had a great deal to live up to.  Most would say she did it superbly.  

And now that burden falls to her son.

Burkean conservatism is all about reconciling continuity and change, when change is necessary and can be undertaken in accordance with the traditions of the country and people.

Queen Elizabeth embodied something about ‘us’ and on her death, we need to reconsider just what ‘we’ means. – Point of Order

Perhaps, just for a moment, reflection on her life and death can briefly refract our thinking and remind us that while it does seem impossible to love one another, we do sometimes need to try a bit harder. – Point of Order

Because a human being can embody something that otherwise defies expression. She (or indeed he) can make the intangible concrete in a different way to symbols like flags (New Zealanders might recall) or words in legal documents.  

Of course, in the beginning was the Word.  But don’t forget the still surprisingly widespread conviction that it became Flesh and dwelt among us.– Point of Order

Media coverage has laid bare what locals have known for a long time: Rotorua has, whether deliberately or through absolute dereliction of duty, been transformed into a dumping ground. A place where the vulnerable are treated like cash cows, lining the pockets of a select few.

I despair that I’m at the point where I’m writing this column, knowing that more negative publicity will compound the impact upon Rotorua. But the situation is dire, it must change, and the people who have created this nightmare must be held accountable.- Lizzie Marvelly

I find the word “transitional” ironic. Transitioning to where? The people in these motels are stuck. The conditions are squalid, the social challenges are profound and danger is ever-present. Many of the rooms in these motels don’t even have functioning smoke alarms. Single mums and their tamariki have been housed next to 501 deportees from Australia. It makes you wonder whether they are better or worse off than they were before they landed on Fenton Street.

The people who are undoubtedly better off are those receiving millions of taxpayer money to house and care for the vulnerable. But what do we have to show for the money being thrown around? If the system was working we’d see the number of emergency housing motels decreasing. We’d see a reduction in negative social impacts as people received the support and assistance they needed.

We are seeing quite the opposite. What key performance indicators, if any, have been put in place? When organisations and the offshore owners of Fenton Street motels are receiving millions of dollars of public funding, surely the public have a right to know what the spend is achieving. Forgive the crass expression, but in my view millions of dollars of taxpayer money are being pissed into the wind in Rotorua.  – Lizzie Marvelly

Rotorua has become a new kind of visitor Mecca, housing visitors who may never leave. – Lizzie Marvelly

It is undoubtedly vital that Rotorua looks after its own vulnerable citizens, with the appropriate support from Government agencies. It is outrageous, however, that such a small city, already decimated by the impact of Covid, is being expected to also take on vulnerable people from other cities and towns around the country. For a start, it fractures valuable social support that people may have in their home regions. Unsurprisingly, it has created a group of displaced, broken people. It’s time for other centres to look after their own people.

What is often missed in the soundbites is that the tourism industry was the biggest employer in Rotorua, and many of the Rotorua people in emergency housing landed there because they lost their tourism industry jobs. How on earth are they going to get back on their feet, and out of transitional housing, if the tourism industry doesn’t recover? And when walking around town in Rotorua can be objectively dangerous, why on earth would tourists want to come back?

It is the view of many at home that the current leadership, both locally and nationally, are destroying Rotorua. Locals have been voicing their concerns to officials for years, yet things continue to get worse. It is difficult to see how the city will recover. There must be an independent review immediately, followed by swift and lasting change. – Lizzie Marvelly

What I look like or what my body is like has no bearing on whether or not I’m a good person, whether or not I’m smart, whether or not I’m attractive, whether or not I’m sexy, whether or not I’m fit or motivated. [My size] doesn’t have the relationship to those things that I had previously thought it did – Alice Snedden 

Anyone who’s fat or has ever been fat knows that’s always in the back of your mind because that will have been an insult people have levelled against you. It doesn’t feel like a good thing to be for the most part. – Alice Snedden 

I’m interested in being a good person with the least inconvenience possible. It would be good if it were easy but what do we do in the face of knowing that it’s not? – Alice Snedden 

And I remember learning how flowers grow.
That flowers bloom not just with light from the sun, but also with rain from the clouds.

And then I realise that I can grow this way, too.

That grey skies will form and I will feel sad again, but I will grow understanding that my sadness is made of love.

That tears of sadness will come and fall like rain again, but I will grow knowing that my tears are made of life. – Ben Brooks-Dutton

The claims are unbelievable but I would venture to say that none of you has been through the emotional and physical trauma that being overweight can cause.

At first, I didn’t think anyone would believe it. Then I remembered how insecure being overweight made me. How I desperately looked for answers and beat myself up daily for the poor choices I made and my lack of self-control. The company is completely playing on people’s vulnerabilities. It is cruel and I am genuinely sorry for those who have been taken in by it. – Paula Bennett

I think it’s possible to feel ambivalent (at best) about the institution and what it represents, and at the same time a deep respect for the Queen herself as an individual.

In her case, the privileges of the role, the money and castles and special treatment, were surely offset by the extraordinary burden of service.

The figure that stuck with me on Friday was 21,000 – the barely fathomable number of private service engagements the Queen undertook during her reign.

No one on the face of the earth will know a life quite like it. – Jack Tame

In an increasingly tribal and partisan world, she was a steady, neutral force.

She was the steady force. I admired the Queen’s careful restraint.

The Queen lived through arguably the greatest period of change the world has ever seen.

And in that period of great change there is no figure on Earth who has represented a greater picture of stability. Queen Elizabeth was the constant. – Jack Tame

It is a sign of how dysfunctional Auckland Council is that it considers a debt-to-revenue ratio of 258% as a positive. It had budgeted for 290%. – Damien Grant

I’m an engineer. We don’t do empathy. We fix things. – Wayne Brown

 New Zealand has amassed billions of dollars in debt trying to make it through a global pandemic. Our debt levels are huge. Businesses, employers….They’ve carried the brunt of it. And now we’re going to ask them to pay for everyone to have a day off, and at the same time face a 20 percent reduction in output and revenue. 

Madness. – Rachel Smalley

What I would say is this – and I realise I am slightly practical when it comes to these matters — but the Queen is dead. This woman who has lived through wars and great upheaval would tell us to crack on. I think she’d tell us that these are challenging economic times and we’ve already been disrupted by COVID and spent too much time at home, so she’d urge us to keep working.

Keep calm, and carry on, perhaps. – Rachel Smalley

 In a world of vacuous comment, more people than not these past few days have come to the party with their thoughts in an eloquent and kind fashion. The energy and effort was put in to say more than you would have expected on other occasions. – Mike Hosking

 In a post-Covid world where we have indulged ourselves to a ludicrous degree, for the monarch little changed.

Little changed as we moved to the country, invented quiet quitting, started the great resignation, and all wound up and bound up in our own wee world of upheaval and change.

I wonder how many times the Queen wanted to quietly quit?

But duty, service, and a promise made all those years ago overrode it all. They are wonderful, uplifting, life-affirming characteristics that are so sorely and sadly missing too often these days.

And you didn’t have to be a monarchist to admire that. – Mike Hosking

Everyone is agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic drove people mad, but there is disagreement over who the madmen were, itself another cause of ferocious argument: a kind of meta-madness, as it were.

I am still not clear in my mind what I would or should have done if I had been in charge (would have done and should have done being very different, in all probability), or whether my darling scheme of concentrating efforts exclusively on those at significant risk would have worked.

What constitutes significant risk is, of course, not a purely scientific question. So-called listening to the science can never be enough—quite apart from the fact that the science does not exist where there are still many unknowns. It is not true that no scientific truths are indisputable: No one seriously expects it to be discovered, for example, that the blood does not circulate in the body. But even in the treatment of well-described diseases there are an infinite number of unanswered questions that could be asked. – Theodore Dalrymple

Giving up a worldview is more difficult than giving up a bad habit.

That is why conspiracy theories are so attractive to us. We want the world to be tractable, and for events to have been wrought by human design, even if those who do the designing are evil. In fact, it is really quite reassuring that the bad things that happen in the world must be by evil design (as, of course, some of them are). This gives us the hope that, by removal of the evilly disposed persons, the world may be made perfect. Besides, searching out evil is fun. – Theodore Dalrymple

Plenty will say the nation has lost its grandmother, that we are a family bereaved of its matriarch – and that comparison is not so wide of the mark. Not because everyone knew or loved the Queen like a relative, because obviously that is not true. But the comparison holds in this much narrower sense: she was a fixed point in our lives, a figure of continuity when all around was in constant flux. Everything has changed since the day in 1952 when she inherited the throne. That country – of black-and-white television, gentlemen in hats, and Lyons Corner Houses – and this one would barely recognise each other. The one thing they have – had – in common was her.

She was woven into the cloth of our lives so completely, we had stopped seeing the thread long ago.  – Jonathan Freedland

As with parenting, so with serving as the national figurehead: a big part of the job is simply showing up. Elizabeth understood that very deeply, realising that continuity amid turbulence was the great value that a monarchy could add to a democratic system. – Jonathan Freedland

The result was that an epoch that witnessed enormous social upheavals, a shift to the demotic and democratic in manners and mores and an end to deference – an age that could have proved disastrous, if not terminal, for a feudal institution such as monarchy – instead saw royalty cement its position. Republicanism was a lost cause in the Elizabethan era, even as the notion of allocating any other role in public life according to genetic bloodline would have been dismissed as an indefensible throwback.

Advocates of an elected head of state struggled to gain traction for the simple reason that the Queen did the job so well. Republicans could only argue that it was a fluke, that although the lottery of heredity had thrown up a winner this one time, there was no guarantee it would do so again. But it was no good. For as long as she was there, the monarchy seemed to make sense – an illogical, irrational kind of sense, but sense all the same. – Jonathan Freedland

But millions will now be mourning something more intimate and more precious: the loss of someone who has been a permanent fixture for their – our – entire lives. Her death will prompt memories of all that has passed these last 70 years, and all those others who we loved and lost. There is grief contained within grief. Today we mourn a monarch. And in that very act, we also mourn for ourselves.- Jonathan Freedland

If republicans want to succeed, they will need to offer New Zealanders something they can gain from a republic, not just something they will lose. – Henry Cooke

The sadness I naturally feel at the passing of someone important, who had, in a sense, accompanied me throughout my childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and into my old age, Queen Elizabeth II, is accompanied by a sense of foreboding as to what might follow. It might give an opportunity for political mischief-makers to make mischief, not for the sake of human improvement or happiness, but for the sake of making mischief. – Theodore Dalrymple

There must surely be very few examples of such single-minded dutifulness in contemporary history. That is why she maintained her popularity from the moment she ascended the throne to the day of her death. Her conduct was as modest as her position was exalted. She never made the mistake of thinking that she was an interesting or remarkable person in herself, and thereby became remarkable. – Theodore Dalrymple

And then, of course, there are also the republicans who want to fish in troubled waters. Starting from the irrationality of monarchy when considered from abstract first principles, they point to the deficiencies of any monarch, though this was harder to do in the late monarch’s case. In doing so, they forget that, in practice, people are infinitely more likely to be oppressed by their elected representatives than by their constitutional monarch, and indeed are increasingly oppressed by them every day of their lives. Like many intellectuals, they prefer to fight shadows rather than substantive beings: it is easier and more gratifying. – Theodore Dalrymple

Some MPs can swear an oath to the Queen and to “her heirs and successors” and then proclaim they are republicans. As they make promises they never intend to keep why should we be surprised that they do not keep their oaths?

A government that does not want to run on its record might be tempted to stage a diversion and hold a referendum to become a republic. Those who advocate holding a referendum first need to say what sort of republic. – Richard Prebble

Some nations have had parliament elect the president and others the electorate. Even if the head of state’s role is ceremonial the election by itself gives the president power. The temptation to use power is overwhelming.

The conflict between presidents and parliaments is one of the reasons presidential government is so unstable. – Richard Prebble

A hereditary head of state from another country is weird. Constitutional monarchy just works better than the alternatives. The World Economic Forum says New Zealand is the world’s third oldest democracy. The Economist Intelligence Unit this year rated New Zealand the second most democratic country. Why fix what is not broken?

We are a small, isolated country. Having a shared monarchy with the UK and 14 other countries has been advantageous and will be in the future.

Monarchy is more fun. It has given me one of my first memories, a social success, a great embarrassment, a nice compliment and an honour. – Richard Prebble

If we became a republic what would the Woman’s Weekly do? Seriously, the record is that our system of government is much more stable than a republic.

We have real issues but being a constitutional monarchy is not one of them. –Richard Prebble

Death holds up a mirror to everything — moments of love, stretches of strife, memories that punish and exalt. This is true if your family is far removed from the public eye, and it’s true if your family is ensconced in the world’s spotlight.  – Patti Davis

All of us know the difficulties and travails of the royal family. Each time the family members come together, the news media and the public analyze every gesture, every interaction. Did William and Harry speak? Embrace? Having been on the receiving end of such scrutiny, I can tell you that it’s a balancing act. You want to be present, available, sincere, yet there is a part of you that’s always aware you’re being watched and, in all likelihood, judged.

Queen Elizabeth had the ability to call her fractured family together to show up … because of her. My father was the beacon of light we all gravitated to, no matter how we felt about each other. When forces like this die, the fault lines in the family that were always there remain. Yet the beauty of memorial services and funerals is that for a while, that breakage is healed. – Patti Davis

Several times during that period, friends remarked on how hard it must have been to mourn in public. I always said, “No, that actually was the easy part.” I felt thousands of locked hands beneath me, keeping me from falling. That’s also why I didn’t want the week to end. Once it did, I would be left with the solitariness of my own grief, slogging through the waters that would inevitably rise around me.

Even if you are the royal family, the most famous family in the world, everyone doesn’t see everything about you. There is grief that spills out in the shadows. We need to remember that when we watch the public ceremonies surrounding the queen’s passing. – Patti Davis

Driving home through dark quiet streets, I knew the river of grief that was waiting for me, and I knew I would have to cross it alone.

My hope is that people remember this about the royal family: In the end, though they breathe rarefied air, they grapple as we all do with life and death, with the mystery of what it means to be human. When darkness falls, and they are alone, they sink into the same waters that everyone does when a loved one dies. And they wonder if they’ll make it to the other side. – Patti Davis

I have often been labelled a conservative. This doesn’t mean I am some unthinking reactionary.

Instead, it just means, to me, that we should always very carefully weigh the transaction cost of change.

When it comes to possibly moving on from the monarchy I believe those costs are much higher than would be commonly thought and indeed are too high to meet a threshold for change. – Simon Bridges 

The point of this minor heraldic history, if any, is simply that politicians are almost infinitely and hilariously corruptible, for reasons ranging from cynical to deeply idiosyncratic, at even the most minute level.

Most of this can be easily handled and harnessed by the process of democracy. But as the final constitutional backstop, in the event of uncertainty or chaos, are politicians what we should rely on?  – Ben Thomas

What we might really need is some institution stripped of agendas, aspirations, or even hope. And in the modern royal family, we have that. Of course, monarchy bestows wealth and privilege on the undeserving. And while no-one would overplay the hardships of royal birth in comparison with the vast bulk of humanity, who have something in the nature of real problems, it hardly measures up to ideas of what extreme wealth involves.

Elon Musk can potentially go to Mars. Her late majesty could go to Balmoral, where candid pictures showed a two-bar heater in the fireplace and council flat wallpaper. Mentions of her “life of service” are not a mere platitude, but a recognition of the daily grind of ribbon cuttings, ceaseless tours and banal social interactions.

Sitting up the front of a formal dinner or prizegiving while maintaining a facade of benign interest is fine for an evening. But smiling politely for 70 years?

Well, critics might say, we don’t all love our jobs. The contradiction is not so much dullness in the middle of excess, but the paradox of powerlessness at the very epicentre of the sovereign. – Ben Thomas

But our head of state has almost no autonomy that they can exercise without receiving the imprimatur of Parliament or the advice of the prime minister.

The last remaining, ultimate power they have is deciding who has the right to be the prime minister, and will give them the advice to which they are beholden. This is the constitutional equivalent of carrying around the nuclear codes – a responsibility of last resort so great, and terrible, and absolute that it is generally unthinkable that it should ever be used. And in the meantime, sitting still, and acting interested. – Ben Thomas

If you were to take note of most public commentary on the issue, you’d be justified in thinking the weight of public opinion overwhelmingly favours a republic – but that’s only because republicans make up most of the commentariat.

Many of these commentators miss the point, I suspect wilfully. They treat it as an issue of personalities. Their argument, essentially, is that the Queen was popular whereas Charles is not (although the latest opinion polls in Britain show a sudden spike in his favourability rating). Therefore the time has come to sever the constitutional connection with the Crown. – Karl du Fresne

Monarchists, on the other hand, view royalty strictly in constitutional terms. They ask the vital question: do our existing constitutional arrangements serve New Zealand well? Unarguably, the answer is yes. We may have acquired them almost by historical accident and they may be ill-defined and poorly understood, but they have made us one of the world’s most stable democracies.

Paradoxically, they depend on a head of state who appears to do little apart from merely existing. The monarch’s powers are more notional than actual, but they serve as a vital constitutional backstop in case they’re needed. It’s weird, but it works. – Karl du Fresne

The crucial point about the monarchy is that it gives us a head of state who is above politics. It provides an element of impartiality, stability and continuity that could never be guaranteed under a president.

Whatever method might be used to elect or appoint a New Zealand president, political factors would intrude.  There are no constitutional mechanisms that can guarantee us a wholly apolitical New Zealand head of state. And unless the post is held for life, which would never be acceptable, there would be the risk of instability and uncertainty whenever it came up for renewal.  – Karl du Fresne

There is another vital respect in which the monarchy works. As one authority has put it, the significance of the monarchy is not the power it possesses but the power it denies others. For “others” read “politicians”, who may not always act with the purest of motives. The fact that the head of state is unelected runs counter to democratic principles, but it means the monarchy is immune to political pressures. As I said: weird, but it works. –

In constitutional terms, the Queen’s death changes nothing. It may be true that people loved the Queen and don’t feel the same about Charles, but the constitutional underpinnings are unchanged. – Karl du Fresne

I feel I knew the Queen because she was almost indistinguishable from my mother. They were born within three years of each other and died within two. Their hairstyles kept pace for 90 years. Their hemlines also. Both married soon after the war, and both had a son, followed by a daughter, followed by two more sons. (Thank you for asking, I am Edward.) Disregarding the odd palace, the Queen and my mother could have swapped photo albums.

Both women, then, were prisoners of their time and their biology. Nothing odd there. Most of us are. But the Queen was also imprisoned by her role, and that role was one of paradox. She was limitlessly wealthy, but she never shopped. She ruled over kingdoms, but went nowhere freely. She was top of the pile, but her job was to serve. She was just an ordinary woman, but it was her lifelong burden to embody the myth of royalty, the big juju.– Joe Bennett

Mentally, this country is already a republic. When royals visit, it is as characters from a soap opera, not as potentates or juju-mongers. No-one holds up a sick child for them to touch. So it would seem fitting now to sever the tie.

But there’s a difficulty. Consider Africa. It is thick with republics and I would struggle to name an incorrupt one. The problem as always is power. To whom do you entrust it? – Joe Bennett

If we ditched the monarchy, we could vest its power in an elected politician. But would you be comfortable with, say, a President Muldoon? The alternative is to give power to someone apolitical.

The obvious choice would be the All Blacks captain. All Blacks are already local royalty. But they do tend to be blokes, and blokes have a worse record with power than women. Also, they get knocks to the head. Perhaps a cricketer, then, would be more suited to the role.

In the light of which, and in the event of our becoming a republic, I propose our head of state be the captain of the White Ferns.

Or we could keep Charles. – Joe Bennett

The critical minerals that will power green technology need to be mined somewhere. They cannot be recycled at the rate and volume they are needed, though of course the contribution of recycling will be valuable.

The West Coast has potential for such minerals, including, Nickel, Cobalt, Lithium and Rare Earth Elements. GNS Science has assessed that much of that potential lies in the conservation estate.

It makes sense to keep the option open for mining on conservation land to access these minerals. That is not to say it will happen at scale, or that it will be open slather. – Josie Vidal

We don’t want to see opportunities for creating wealth, jobs and healthy regional economies lost overseas.

And we certainly don’t want to see our best and brightest off to Australia which is on the cusp of a mining boom to beat all others.

While we fully support the Government’s conservation objectives, we believe the negative impact of mining is overstated. The truth is that mineral extraction, suitably regulated, can and should contribute to the solution. – Josie Vidal

The real risk for biodiversity is with pests and predators, such as stoats, rats, and possums.

“Mining and other commercial activities can contribute to the funding of pest control. Mining is part of the solution to conservation, not the problem. – Josie Vidal

Of course, I knew that all men are mortal, etc., and therefore (if I had been asked) that the Queen would one day die, but I still entertained the faint and absurd hope than an exception would be made in her case. A locus of stability in an increasingly unstable and dangerous world, at least one thing was beyond contention except by a few professional malcontents.  – Theodore Dalrymple

For someone in office for seventy years to remain as popular at the end as at the beginning, while also being an immensely privileged person, is surely a most remarkable feat, and a tribute both to that person’s combined sense of duty and psychological canniness. Of course, it helped that she was a figurehead, at most someone with influence behind the scenes, rather than someone who exercised real political power, such exercisers of power retaining their popularity for a few months if even that. But the iron self-control she exercised in the performance of her duties—many of which must have bored her, and some of which, such as meeting and being polite to odious or even evil heads of states or governments, must have repelled her—was testimony to her sense of duty and her determination to keep her vow, made when she was twenty-one, to devote her life to service.

Another cause for astonishment, especially in the present day, is that she survived her seventy years of office, during which she was adulated, deferred to, and so forth, without becoming a monster of egotism. This was attributable, surely, to an existential modesty—an awareness that she received such deference and adulation not through any exceptional qualities, gifts, or virtues of her own, but by sheer accident of birth. Such modesty in celebrity is not exactly the characteristic of our age, to put it mildly. – Theodore Dalrymple

In Elizabeth’s reign of seventy years, the country changed as much as it had during the reign of the previously longest reigning monarch, Queen Victoria. In many respects, especially measurable ones, the changes were for the better. The infant mortality rate, for example, declined by nearly ninety per cent. The kind of poverty in which millions of people had no indoor bathrooms has been eliminated. Comforts that were once the perquisite only of the better off have come to achieve the status almost of unalienable human rights. When Elizabeth ascended the throne, rationing of some items was still in force, the legacy not so much of the war as of the economic policies pursued after it, though with the excuse of war indebtedness—levels of which we may soon approach without having had a war to account for them. – Theodore Dalrymple

During her reign, money ceased to be a reliable store of wealth. In nominal terms, for example, it now costs eighty-eight times what it did in 1952 to post a letter. Many things that did not exist then are now deemed indispensable (invention being the mother of much necessity). Other things have become more expensive in nominal terms, but not by so much as postage. In terms of the labour necessary to pay for it, a house takes probably five or ten times as long to buy as it then did.

In intangible ways, the quality of life has deteriorated. At the beginning of her reign, Britain had a low rate of crime, but by its end it was among the most crime-ridden countries in the West. – Theodore Dalrymple

At the start of the Queen’s reign, the general culture had not coarsened to such an extent that decorum and seemliness meant nothing: they had not yet been mocked to death, with the result that coarseness and vulgarity have become marks almost of political virtue.

The Queen was responsible for none of this, of course. She was in no sense an intellectual, and even appeared to have no intellectual interests apart from her formal duties in affairs of state, and this saved her from subscribing to some of the idiocies subversive of conduct and culture that have resulted in the sheer ugliness, physical, spiritual and cultural, of modern Britain. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is for their own lost virtues, exemplified by the Queen, that the people mourn, not least their distinctive understated humour and irony, now replaced almost entirely by crudity. – Theodore Dalrymple

Like all wordsmiths, Mr Bartlett understood that if one truly wishes to tell the truth, then one had best write fiction. – Chris Trotter

A government of the people, in Lincoln’s phrase, has changed by degrees into a people of the government. When one considers the number of duties or obligations one must fulfill to the government, it is clear who is boss in the relationship—and it is not we, the people.

Naturally, the government offers us all sorts of benefits, some real but many notional, in return for obedience to its diktats. But it is as unreasonable to expect it to confer those benefits without taking something for itself—especially power—as it is to expect a company to sell us its products at no profit. The trouble is that governments make John D. Rockefeller look like a disinterested do-gooder. – Theodore Dalrymple 

The fundamental point is, however, that the citizen (and bear in mind that I am not quite at the bottom of the social scale, at least not yet) is now so oppressed by his duties toward authorities that they are sufficient to convince him that he is of no more significance or account than is a single bacterium in a colony of bacteria on a petri dish .

And we call ourselves free! – Theodore Dalrymple 

People of loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders of loving service are still rarer. But in all cases those who serve will be loved and remembered when those who cling to power and privileges are long forgotten. – Justin Welby

We will all face the merciful judgement of God: we can all share the Queen’s hope which in life and death inspired her servant leadership.

Service in life, hope in death. All who follow the Queen’s example, and inspiration of trust and faith in God, can with her say: “We will meet again.” – Justin Welby

If it was not for the existence of, and the protection of, women’s sporting categories we would have no female medalists or even contenders on the international stage in any sport where strength, speed, or stamina matters. New Zealanders would have never heard the names of athletes like Alison Roe, Susan Devoy, Sophie Pascoe, and Lisa Carrington. As much as some people may wish to deny reality, biology and physiology matters because we play sports with our bodies, not our identities. – Rowena Edge

Save Women’s Sports Australasia had heard from female athletes and the parents of girls across New Zealand who have been impacted by the inclusion of male transgender people in their sports category. They have included cricketers, cyclists, roller derby players, swimmers, netballers, runners, hockey players, weight lifters, and mountain bikers, among others. They have shared stories of how they have been injured and given up sports that they love. They have told how they have been ostracized by people they have previously considered to be friends, called bigots and transphobes, and dismissed by their sporting organisations when they raised concerns. – Rowena Edge

As another example, right now in a community cycling club in New Zealand there is a male transgender cyclist who holds the award for both best female cyclist of the season as well as best overall cyclist. Why? Because this cyclist not only cleaned out the women’s field, posting times so fast that no female had a chance of competing for first place, but on some occasions even beat the fastest male competing in the men’s category.

This is what kindness and inclusion now looks like. Female athletes being forced out of sports that they love and out of their rightful placings and recognition because including males in their category is considered to be a higher priority.

Sportswomen don’t need saving, but their category certainly does. – Rowena Edge

Today’s heirs of William the Conqueror are blank sheets that reflect the will of their prime ministers. Nothing emphasises this more dramatically than the speech from the throne, where a docile sovereign reads a speech written for them. Reducing the king to a ventriloquist dummy is a powerful statement. – Damien Grant

It is better to have an excellent monarch, such as Elizabeth, rather than one less impressive as Charles threatens to be, but in a constitutional monarchy it does not matter.

Its success in the modern era relies on the impotence of the office. It works because ultimate political power rests with a person unable to exercise it, and it works because it gives us a focus separate from the state, from the nation, from the prevailing political authority. – Damien Grant

In a constitutional monarchy, those with political, administrative, military or judicial power have it on loan from the sovereign. Their time in office is limited and the boundaries of their authority constrained, yet what power they do have is legitimised due to the sovereign’s recognition of it.

No domestic president can compete. Replace Charles III, a literal and metaphorical descendant of Alfred the Great (warming-pan scandals notwithstanding), with some failed political apparatchik or even Richie McCaw, and we will have dropped something of inestimable value, simply for the pleasure of its destruction. – Damien Grant

 As it is now common practice to accord sentencing discounts to criminals with childhood experiences beyond their control, what about surcharges for not exercising self-responsibility?

Every individual has the ability to exercise personal agency. It might be argued for some it is reduced to a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea but it is usually evident that arriving at that impasse could have been avoided. – Lindsay Mitchell

Effort and persistence go unremarked while failure and indifference mark out the victims among us. And don’t we love victims.

So long as, of course, the culprits are fashionable – colonization, capitalism, racism and patriarchal oppression. – Lindsay Mitchell

If it were my call, there would be no discounts. They make a mockery of the free will that defines us. They are in direct conflict with the very reason laws exist. Worse, they send an ambiguous and confused message to offenders and society.

If they are going to be handed out, they should be delivered with a surcharge and explanation.

“Yes, you had a terrible childhood, but so did many others who managed to avoid criminality. You knowingly chose the wrong path so here’s a matching surcharge for not exercising the self-responsibility that others with similar backgrounds managed to.” – Lindsay Mitchell

There is a dialectical relationship between human reality and the language in which we describe it, which is why semantic shifts are so important and often contested. – Theodore Dalrymple

One of the shifts that I have noticed is in the use of the word depressed for unhappy. No one is unhappy any more, everyone is depressed. It is as if being unhappy were a moral fault, while being depressed is not merely to be ill, but to be laudably sensitive. How can any decent person be happy when there is so much suffering in the world? The news brings us evidence of fresh catastrophes every day: to be happy is to be complacent, and to be complacent is to be callous. To be miserable, therefore, is the only decent stance towards the world.

How did the shift come about? I do not think that anyone decreed or directed it, though no doubt it was convenient for some, for example the drug companies that were able as a result to sell their doubtfully useful wares to millions, even to tens of millions, of people. About a sixth of the Western world’s adult population now takes them, suggesting either the looseness of the diagnosis or the misery of modern life despite its material advantages. – Theodore Dalrymple

The linguistic termites (or police) are now every­where, and while no individual termite has much of an effect, hosts of them will eventually cause a building to collapse, often unexpectedly. I have in the past had one or two struggles with young sub-editors over the new moral correctitude of language, and so far I have been able to gain my point, though I am under no illusion that my little victories can be anything other than local and temporary. Apart from anything else, the struggle is asymmetrical. I do not want to turn myself into a monomaniac by engaging in prolonged struggles with monomaniacs. That is why monomania so often wins the day in the modern world: the subject of the monomania is only one among others for normal people, but it is all in all, the very meaning of life itself, for those who are in the grip of it. – Theodore Dalrymple

Semantic shift when it is not genuinely spontaneous is a manifestation of a power struggle that is not solely, or even to a very large extent, semantic. Some words are genuinely offensive, but most of the concern over terminology is not about the elimination of such words from polite conversation. Rather, it is a question, as Humpty Dumpty pointed out long ago, of who is to be master, or perhaps I should say dominant, that’s all.- Theodore Dalrymple

We need unity now more than ever but some of our leaders can’t resist the temptation to focus on separate development as a means to an end. It is a false narrative that will only harm those who need help more than most – it is a lie. – Clive Bibby

There’s a reason why most people aren’t engaged with local government, because by and large, the things it tends to do adequately are taken for granted (local roads, footpaths, rubbish collection), and people have busy lives getting on with making a living, looking after their families, their homes, and living their lives.  – Liberty Scott

Local government also attracts a particular type of person.  More often than not it attracts busybodies, planners, pushy finger-wagging types who think they know what’s best, over what people actually indicate according to their willingness to pay. It particularly attracts socialists who see local government as a stepping stone to central government for Labour and Green Party members.  – Liberty Scott

So vote if you must, but the real problem is that local government has too much power.  It has stuffed up water, the only unreformed network utility (except in Auckland).  Local government used to manage local electricity distribution, but that was taken off it in the 1990s.  At one time it was responsible for milk distribution, which is why until the late 1980s buying milk OTHER than by kerbside bottles was unusual, and indeed there was no plastic or cartoned milk.

So pick candidates who want to get out of the way, of new housing, of new supermarkets, of enterprise and don’t want to promise grand totemic projects that you have to pay for.  Don’t pick those who think that local government can “do so much good” by spending your money and pushing people around.  Maybe pick those who actually have some understanding of the limits of the ability of local government. – Liberty Scott

However, I’m largely quite pessimistic. People wildly enthusiastic about local government are generally the opposite of people I want in local government, because local government attracts far too many meddlers, regulators and planners.

Try to pick the least worst and hope for the best, at least until there is a central government that keeps them on the leash.  You’ll have to make some compromises. – Liberty Scott

The pandemic response was the biggest public policy intervention in people’s lives, in our lifetimes. From lockdowns to the mask and vaccine mandates, from closing the schools to effectively closing the hospitals. Everybody was affected. Everyone’s life trajectory changed, some permanently.

People died, some from Covid and some from other things that could be traced to the choices we made about Covid.

We owe it to ourselves and to the memory of those lost to stop and take stock.

We need to examine what worked and what didn’t. What had the biggest positive effect and what was more trouble than it was worth? When should we have moved more quickly, including both into and out of restrictions, and when should we have waited longer?

A Covid inquiry should not be a journey of recrimination or blame. Responding to a pandemic like this was never going to be a game of perfect. This has been a crazy two-and-a-half years of big decisions on top of big decisions where there was no game plan to work from. Nobody could have got everything right.

Some things obviously worked, some obviously didn’t, and the jury is still out on many more. – Steven Joyce

If we do this inquiry right, we will have a game plan for next time. And to me that is the most important thing. The past two-and-a-half years have been a journey of policy experimentation by necessity. We now have a golden opportunity to perfect a blueprint for future pandemics. – Steven Joyce

The sort of lessons I’m interested in vary from the big to the small. How much did hard lockdowns achieve versus what other lesser restrictions could have? Could we keep working on, say, big construction sites with strong health and safety protocols without adding significantly to the risk? Could we keep butchers and fruit and vege stores safely open in hard lockdowns? How could we manage our border more humanely and stay connected to the world without materially worsening the risk?

What should be the threshold for closing our schools, and what are the true costs to the children of doing so, balanced against the risks of virus transmission?

How do we scale up hospital capacity quickly without sending ourselves broke in the meantime?

Is there a better procurement system we should use for buying urgently needed equipment and vaccines? And how do we ensure contestable advice from others besides the public health people, while respecting their expertise? – Steven Joyce

A well-constructed commission of inquiry will encourage reflection and planning for the future while learning the lessons of the present. Contrary to the Opposition’s wishes and the Government’s fears, it would likely not offer an advantage to either political side. The Government would probably even attract public kudos if it instituted a clearly nonpartisan inquiry for the country’s benefit, rather than lapsing into its trademark defensiveness. – Steven Joyce

On Roe v. Wade, I am with the Supreme Court ruling, though I am by no means as opposed to termination of pregnancies as some people. It seems obvious to me that if you can derive a right to abortion from the American Constitution, you can derive anything from it, for example a children’s right to teddy bears or an employee’s right to four weeks’ paid holiday a year at a resort of his choice. The proper aim of a constitution is not to secure all the things that people would like, but to provide a limiting framework of liberty in which laws should be made. By returning the legislation on the matter of abortion to the states, the Supreme Court was increasing the scope of democracy, not (as was dishonestly alleged) curtailing it. It remains open to believers in, or enthusiasts for, abortion to work for a properly worded constitutional amendment, granting the right they falsely claim to have found in the Constitution as it now stands; or alternatively (and more realistically) to work for changes in the laws of those states that are highly restrictive. That would be the proper way to go about it, if they believed in constitutional democracy, but they don’t: They believe instead in their own virtue and moral right to govern. – Theodore Dalrymple

From the outsider’s point of view, what is alarming about the situation in the United States is the complete polarization of opinion, precisely at a time when opinion is the sole measure of virtue. A man can be an absolute monster, but if he proclaims the right views at sufficient volume, he remains a good man. It follows from this that a man who disagrees with me does not merely have a different opinion from mine, but is a bad person, even a very bad person. And I am told by American friends whom I trust that people of differing political standpoints can scarcely bear to be in the same room together. They tell me (so it must be true) that the left is worse in this respect than the right, and that while a young conservative is happy to date a young liberal, the reverse is not true. It can’t be long before sexual relations with a person of differing political outlook come to be regarded as a sexual perversion, indeed as the only sexual perversion, all others being but a matter of taste. – Theodore Dalrymple

Nevertheless, there seems to be something different about the present level of social hostility between people of different political outlooks, which has now become chronic. This cannot be a favorable augury for the future of a functioning democracy—or rather, for a free country (which is not quite the same thing). While a phenomenon that is more or less binary, sex, has become nonbinary, something that should be nonbinary, that is to say political opinion, has become binary. If you know a person’s opinion on one subject, you know his opinion on all, and you either clasp him to your bosom or cast him out of your sight. Tolerance is not an a priori acceptance of how someone is, however he may be; that is indifference, not tolerance. Tolerance is behaving decently toward someone some aspect of whom one dislikes or disagrees with. I have friends with whose outlooks I strongly disagree, and which I believe to be deleterious (as they probably believe mine to be); I have friends with whose religious views I find alien to me. There is a limit to the tolerable, of course, and where that limit should be placed is a matter of judgment and no doubt of circumstance. But I do not want to live in a social world in which there are only two blocs, akin to those of the Cold War. – Theodore Dalrymple

My record of failure does not prevent or even inhibit me from prognostication, however. I think we have entered a golden age of bad temper that will last some time, one of the reasons being that too many people go to university where they have learned to look at the world through ideology-tinted spectacles. There is nothing like ideology for raising the temperature of debate and eventually of avoiding debate altogether. – Theodore Dalrymple

Poor evidence bases for major educational initiatives is, regrettably, nothing new. In fact, our education agencies have a history of flying in the face of evidence.

NCEA was introduced in 2002 against the advice of prominent professors of education. They warned that the standards-based assessment system would result in egregious variability in assessment results. In 2005, the Board Chair and Chief Executive of NZQA both resigned amidst a political storm caused by … egregious variability in assessment results.

I could go on: The literacy teaching methods promoted by the Ministry, their failed ‘numeracy project’ and the knowledge-poor New Zealand Curriculum are all examples of educational initiatives implemented against a preponderance of evidence. All have had disastrous results.

Perhaps the true inspiration for MLEs was the open plan offices in which public servants work. If so, the Ministry’s record of failure might be all the evidence we need that MLEs were a bad idea. – Dr Michael Johnston

I fear for New Zealand’s future when the mainstream news media, which not long ago championed free speech, are instrumental in creating a climate of fear, suspicion and denunciation that resembles something from George Orwell. It becomes even more dangerous when government departments appear to have been frightened or bullied by the media into succumbing to a moral panic.   – Karl du Fresne

Cosyism: a new word for one of the most chronic problems in New Zealand public life. We are largely spared, thankfully, the envelopes-stuffed-with-cash corruptionthat infects other countries. But we’re suffused with overly close relationships: nepotism, jobs for the boys, all that jazz.

Some call it cronyism, but that doesn’t quite fit here: “cronies” sound too much like Mafia hitmen. “Cosyism” better describes those insidious processes by which public positions, jobs and contracts sometimes go not to the best-qualified applicants but to the friends, contacts and family members of people in power. It’s an apt term for a famously small society in which cousins and mates are always – cosily – rubbing up against each other in public life.

Cosyism isn’t solely an injustice to the well-qualified but poorly connected people who lose out; it can cost us all, since the winners – the well-connected but poorly qualified – often do bad work, expensively.

A cosy society also tolerates the most colossal conflicts of interest: situations where power-holders’ decisions could be biased by a personal incentive, be it to protect a business connection or aid a relative. Even just a public perception of bias can be harmful, corroding trust and promoting political disengagement. – Max Rashbrooke

No doubt the agencies will improve their protocols, at least to meet current standards. But given what they allow, are those standards fit for purpose? Could any public servant, in any department, deal confidently with a contractor – including, if necessary, rejecting substandard work – if they knew the latter were the minister’s relative?

What, too, about the advantageous information a minister could convey to their contractor relative? There may be no reason to doubt the integrity of current ministers, but that’s not the point. We must design systems for the most corrupt actors, not the least.

Some people respond to such problems with a shrug: in a small society, they say, these conflicts are inevitable. But that’s back-to-front: we have to be tougher on these problems precisely because we’re a small society, and they will crop up so often.

The current default is to “manage” a conflict of interest by leaving the room, sometimes literally, when a particular issue is discussed – as if this removes every opportunity to influence the decision. That default needs to change. – Max Rashbrooke

A cosyism crackdown would, of course, be hard on some people. Too bad. That’s the price we pay for probity, and for public faith in our institutions. – Max Rashbrooke

Voters don’t dislike cycleways. They are over the priority placing they get compared to other civic enhancements.

The misalignment between voter preferences and what their elected representatives do is not a local phenomenon.

New data by global polling company YouGov, not yet publicly available but presented to a Toronto conference I attended this week, reveals seismic changes in what voters want governments to do. – Josie Pagani 

Since Covid and rising inflation, our priorities have changed.

The cost of living worries 78% of people. It simply costs too much to exist.

This is an ‘’everyone, everywhere crisis’’: all incomes and political persuasions. It’s a survival issue for some, a top anxiety for others. – Josie Pagani

Seventy-six per cent of voters think that inflation is increasing inequality, and pulling communities apart. Even if you can weather the rise in prices, you’re worried about how this will divide the nation even further.

People expect governments to do more. A whopping 84% of citizens think that it’s a government’s job to help (followed by central banks at 79%).

But only 46% want a one-off direct payment of cash (assuming a government can even get the cash out the door to the right people). – Josie Pagani

Here’s another seismic shift: People are prepared to pay more for public services, but with a sting in the tail – they want the services in their local region. More money spent on their parks, sports clubs, wifi, police stations and services, rather than increases in welfare, or even tax credits. Voters want a transfer of wealth to their communities. They resist paying for services if they see the cash being spent elsewhere. – Josie Pagani

People are willing to trade some growth to bring poorer regions up to the level of wealthier ones.

Even if you don’t live in a poorer region, rebuilding nations, and bringing citizens together after Covid, is a priority. Leave no town behind.

No-one in politics should ignore that there has been massive global shift to the left in the way people think about the economy. – Josie Pagani

The daily congestion on the harbour bridge costs the country money in lost productivity. People need to move to make money. They need to get to the pipes to fix them to get paid. They need to drop off the parcels to get paid. They need to open the shop to sell things. Refusing to build cars into the next crossing is actively choosing to keep Auckland and New Zealand poorer than they should be. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

The next Mayor of Auckland should be building a city for future growth, not stealing ideas from the 1970s. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

The blinkers have now come off for many. They feel lied-to. They feel cheated. All the promises, all the words about improving everything from child poverty to housing to crime to cost of living have come to nothing. In fact, we are substantially worse off. Yes, people are angry and they don’t feel they are being listened to. – Paula Bennett

Perhaps the Government should listen to some of those angry people. Understand where they are coming from.

Perhaps they should stop with false promises and actually deliver something and then people might happily get on with their lives. – Paula Bennett

Through almost every tier of the social spectrum, there seems to be an excess layer of tension and anxiety creating conflict and division.

Whether it’s the homeless fighting outside central city supermarkets, gang shootings, or the fisticuffs of middle-class parents at posh PTA fundraisers – the nation seems to be at boiling point. – Liam Dann

These females are walking, emoting examples of how women have risen to power in recent years and they are enough to put any sensible woman off.

It is increasingly obvious that the female ‘leaders’ held up as flagbearers for feminism, and who spend their time rubbing shoulders with celebrities, are painfully vacuous. They are promoted as ‘nice’ – gracing the covers of fashion magazines where they prioritise image ahead of competence, sound judgment, and the wellbeing of the people they are elected to serve.

No woman with serious mental firepower would want to be associated with such shallowness. – Lillian Andrews

It is as if adopting a caring head tilt and sad eyes in Insta(gram)-ready propaganda photos serves as the equivalent of having actual solutions to critical social and economic challenges.

It is also no coincidence that they are uniformly Woke in their politics. – Lillian Andrews

They bleat about how committed they are to openness and transparency while using media teams to deflect scrutiny away from their actions. When politics gets difficult, they opine obsessively about equality and fairness – as if having a vagina bestows some special insight. At the same time, they turn a blind eye to the cold, hard statistics that show deteriorating socioeconomic conditions and more people struggling.

Powerful women like this can thunderously denounce bullying in public life and then attempt to shove under the carpet contentions of rampant bullying that happens under their watch. They fanatically adopt mantras about gender equality to substitute for having no idea about how to increase security and prosperity for all. Then they use this as an excuse to appoint equally dubious women to senior positions, turning a blind eye to subsequent displays of incompetence, nepotism, and cover-ups.

All the while, the only contribution these women make to public debate is to recycle vague, tired platitudes about inclusion, kindness, and social justice. – Lillian Andrews

The message that women in politics send is this: if you want power without principles, influence without intellect, and command without competence, we want you. Women who secretly yearn to be influencers, but instead delude themselves into the belief that they are policy giants who deserve leadership roles, gladly answer this call. However, it is not one that will be heard by those with the strength of character of a Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, or even Helen Clark.

The more this self-perpetuating cycle repeats, the more insecure lightweights are going to become the carefully botoxed face of women in power. – Lillian Andrews

Men in politics are frequently every bit as bungling and hypocritical as women, but men’s grandstanding is fittingly and increasingly ‘called out’ whereas women are allowed to hide almost interminably behind a cloak of faux-compassion and historical ‘systemic’ factors that were caused by somebody else. We are meant to believe that these systemic issues only become apparent after a woman gets elected on the back of promising to deliver a fix. Any woman of integrity rightly sees this as a demeaning and counter-productive double standard.

It is no coincidence that as the new wave of ‘look at how much I care, aren’t I lovely’ female politicians have risen, other women’s interest in being actively engaged in politics has languished.

Society believes it to be fashionable to denounce patriarchal oppression and sexism for causing this. In reality, the reason why women who should go into politics frequently choose not to, is because of the women who are already there.

For as long as their much-feted but ultimately fraudulent model of ‘success’ persists, the only women who will gravitate to politics will be the ones who are most interested in themselves and least suited for truly serving the public. And no amount of talk about childcare, sexual harassment policies, and flexible working conditions are going to change that. – Lillian Andrews

The expression “people of color” has always seemed to me in equal measure stupid, condescending, and vicious. It divides humanity into two categories, whites and the rest, or rather whites versus the rest; it implies an essential or inherent hostility between these two portions of humanity; and it implies also no real interest in the culture or history of the people of color, whose only important characteristic is that of having been ill-treated by, and therefore presumably hating, the whites. Compared with the phrase “people of color,” the language of apartheid was sophisticated and nuanced.

It should not need saying that, as the history of Europe attests, whites have not always been happily united, and that “people of color” do not necessarily form one happy, united family, either. – Theodore Dalrymple

The very phrase “people of color” is as mealy-mouthed as any Victorian prude might have wished for and, among other things, is a manifestation of the fear we now live under, sometimes without quite realizing it. Truth has now to be varnished so thickly that it becomes imperceptible. – Theodore Dalrymple

On the whole I found listening to people and understanding where they were coming from was part of the job and actually made me better at it. Hiding from the public and hearing only the good stuff is ignorant and dangerous. – Paula Bennett

The blinkers have now come off for many. They feel lied-to. They feel cheated. All the promises, all the words about improving everything from child poverty to housing to crime to cost of living have come to nothing. In fact, we are substantially worse off. Yes, people are angry and they don’t feel they are being listened to. – Paula Bennett

 Perhaps the Government should listen to some of those angry people. Understand where they are coming from. Perhaps they should stop with false promises and actually deliver something and then people might happily get on with their lives. – Paula Bennett

These days we can no longer trust that what we’re reading or seeing is actual smoke, let alone fire. It’s a world where fake news flourishes on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and where any lie can easily be presented as fact – and swallowed as such by anyone who was already inclined to believe it.

But that’s why governments, and those in power, need to be even more mindful of the need for transparency. And that’s also why managing perceptions around issues like the current controversy surrounding Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta is even more critical. – Tracy Watkins

My thesis was that the Port of Tauranga, which had been partially privatised and therefore subject to market discipline, would do better than the Port of Auckland that was shielded from commercial scrutiny by being 100% owned by the Council.

No one paid attention and I didn’t expect anyone would. If my wife doesn’t take me seriously there is no reason why others should. Still. Haven’t events played into my hands?

The Port of Tauranga just declared a $111 million profit. The Port of Auckland, by contrast, declared a $10m loss. The red-ink down at Quay St, however, is far greater than what has been reported.  – Damien Grant

I have no view if the port should be moved or not. I think you need to own land in Ruakaka to have a strong opinion on this matter, but it is self-evident that the current governance model is broken and has been for far longer than a decade.

We know, through long and painful experience, that market provides a degree of discipline that those running a local council can never provide.

Perhaps we should try that; or just sell the cursed thing before any more harm is done. However, I am confident this will not happen, and I look forward to revisiting the topic in 2032. – Damien Grant

It’s not easy looking after kids, and I wonder how many people in charge of hiring have never been alone at home with small children for any period of time? They don’t appreciate how hard it is. It’s relentless. You can’t tell your kids ‘Oh you guys can stop needing stuff now, I need a break’. – Kelsey Ellery-Wilson

In early childhood you’re working with really vulnerable children who are going through a critical time in their development, and it’s hard work,” Cherrington says. “We know if we give them a good start now, they’ll do better later in life.

I think the pandemic provided a window into that, and then people just picked themselves up and went back to work and forgot about it. – Sue Cherrington

Obviously I’m a staunch monarchist, but I’ve always thought in this regard, for those who want New Zealand to be a republic, they might want to ask themselves what they would actually get for that. – Sir John Key

If you want to change government direction then stand for government get involved in national politics. If you want to deliver locally for the community within the rules of our nation then stand for local council and get involved in delivering for community today. – Sam Broughton

It’s a good example of the disconnect between the media and the real world. When the Queen dies, the media thinks of what the next angle is. Given her death isn’t changing, all you are left with is the republic question. The poll result tells us we have better things to think about.

There are some suggestions the Prime Minister’s offshore presence might have played better for them. I think the reality is that we are over that. If you were ever enamoured with Ardern on the world stage, that has worn well and truly thin, as it’s become apparent that a lot of what she does amounts to literally nothing.- Mike Hosking

I think we’d feel better about the PM promoting New Zealand if and when her Government had addressed all the pressing issues really upsetting New Zealanders right now, like the upsurge in violent crime emergency housing, poverty, inflation and kids not turning up to school.

But if at home is a mess, there’s a fierce labour shortage where many places still don’t even have enough staff to open their doors, and then others who do are being ram raided and smashed into, then what does that say about priorities? – Kate Hawkesby

It should not be scary, or dangerous, to go into a mall with your family at the weekend. It should not be dangerous for retailers to go to work and yet, here we still are. – Kate Hawkesby

No person should be judged by their identity but rather by their words and actions, – Karen Chhour 

It feels like if you don’t agree with us, you’re not a real Māori, or you’re not Māori enough, or you don’t have the mana of a Māori, and I find that quite hurtful. – Karen Chhour 

But central government is not helping public perceptions of the effectiveness of local government. The more central government tries to centralise and control policy making as it is at present – in housing and water services especially – the more the public will see local government as ineffective. Therefore, to restore public confidence in local government, central government needs to pull back and allow local government more genuine say on these critical issues, rather than continuing to tell them what to do.

Until that happens, public apathy towards local government will continue, and the harder it will become to attract quality candidates for major leadership roles. The likely poor turnout at the coming election will undoubtedly shake local government leaders, but it should be an even bigger wake-up call for central government. – Peter Dunne

There is a modern superstition that for every terrible experience suffered there is an equal and opposite psychological technique that, like an antibiotic in a case of infection, can overcome or dissolve away the distress it caused or continues to cause. This superstition is not only false and shallow but demeaning and even insulting. It denies the depths of suffering that the most terrible events can cause, as well as the heroism and fortitude that people can display in overcoming that suffering. Fortitude can even be sometimes dismissed as ‘repression’. – Theodore Dalrymple

A psychologically fragile population is the delight of bureaucrats, lawyers and professional carers, and resilience and fortitude are their worst enemies. Repression in the psychological sense is deemed by them not only as damaging but almost as treason to the self. A person who does not dwell on his trauma must expect, and almost deserves, later trouble, as does someone who wilfully ignores the formation of an abscess. – Theodore Dalrymple

Repression can also mean the deliberate putting memories of trauma to the back of the mind so that life can be got on with. It is not that such memories cannot be called to the conscious mind when necessary, or even that they never do harm: but the person who represses in this fashion has an instinctive understanding that dwelling on them is an obstacle to future life, rather than a precondition of it. They do not forget, either consciously or unconsciously; they choose to think of something else. – Theodore Dalrymple

Psychology seems often to forget or disregard the fact that humans live in a world of meaning, and that they are actors rather than mere objects acted upon. In the process, it destroys resilience, fortitude and self-respect. – Theodore Dalrymple

A university is a community of scholars. It is not a kindergarten; it is not a club; it is not a reform school; it is not a political party; it is not an agency of propaganda. A university is a community of scholars. – Robert Maynard Hutchins

How many universities see themselves as lobbies, political parties, reform schools, and agencies of propaganda? I’d say a large fraction, for political statements and social-justice manifestos proliferate on college websites. And of course you know how universities behave as kindergartens: just look at the recent follies of The Evergreen State University, Yale University, or Oberlin College. Will we even recognize the university as a community of scholars in fifty years, or will it abjure its academic mission in favor of an ideological one?– Jerry Coyne

There is a disturbing entrenchment happening in regard to attitudes to benefits and that is that it’s just easier to give people a hand out, when the focus really should be on giving people a hand up.- Kate Hawkesby 

But this is a government of ideology and no matter what you tell them, you must always remember that you are wrong, and they aren’t. – Mike Hosking

What’s the point of funding a programme if no one hears it, sees it, or reads it?

What’s the point of the money and time if it plays to an audience of no one or one that barely registers? How much time and money do you want to spend on stuff people don’t use, want, or absorb? And how much damage do you want to do to the other players in the industry as you pump up your own little fiefdom with money that isn’t yours anyway?

The biggest issue with this issue is unlike Three Waters or co-governance it’s not a political hot potato. They won’t win or lose votes by doing it hence they’ll probably get away with it. Plus, they seem desperate to get it up by next year.

It’s only years down the track once they’ve been booted out of office that the damage will be done, and the folly exposed.   – Mike Hosking

 

But beyond all this, there is one other enormous and overwhelming reason, never mentioned in the debate, why we must cling to King Charles. The very fact that it is never mentioned is itself significant. It is obvious ~ and yet it is deliberately ignored. The reason is simply this ~ that if the monarchy were to be abolished, that abolition would undoubtedly be the pretext for introducing the ‘principles’ of the Treaty of Waitangi into our fundamental law. The principles, of course, are a blank cheque. The latest announcement from the Waitangi Tribunal is that they require ‘co-governance’ ~ in other words, an end to democracy and racial equality. That not what they meant even a few years ago ~ and for all we know, we may discover a few years down the track that the ‘principles’ require complete Maori control of our country. That is, after all, what some radicals are saying right now.

But whatever the principles are, we can be certain that they would be to our disadvantage ~ and we would have them imposed on us in a new constitutional arrangement. The argument would be that the Treaty ~ in itself, of course, still a legal nullity, and in any case never anything more than a few vague words of general approach ~ was of course entered into by Queen Victoria’s representative. It was a treaty with ‘the Crown’. If we now do away with the Crown , the argument goes, the Treaty itself might somehow vanish, or be weakened ~ and so to avoid that heart-stopping eventuality the Treaty will have to be formally ‘enshrined’, as we enshrine other idols, in a special written constitution, so that it may last even when the ‘Crown’ has disappeared. –  David Round

And once we had the Treaty in our constitution, we would be sunk. No matter how mild the references to the Treaty might be, we can be certain that they would be used, not just by politicians but by politically activist judges in the courts, to impose apartheid on us for ever. Even without such a provision, our previous chief justice, the unlamented Sian Elias, raised the possibility that judges were entitled to ignore Acts of Parliament which did not comply with her own radical interpretation of Treaty principles, and there is no doubt that several decisions of the courts have already done just that.  What a disgraceful claim that was. But whatever we have in a constitution will be interpreted and applied by courts, and against the judgment of the highest of those courts there is no appeal. And even if a parliament far braver than today’s pack of racists, incompetents  and cowards were to say ‘No, that is not what we meant’, the judges would simply reply that parliament was breaching the constitution ~ was behaving unconstitutionally, and illegally ~ in saying that.  Even now, the law is not what parliament says, it is what judges say parliament says. Once we get a written constitution, a higher law which binds parliament itself, there will be no stopping judges as they interpret it as they please. The entire argument for a written constitution, a higher sort of law, is an attempt to remove matters from parliament’s’ authority and hand them over to judges. I have little respect for most of our politicians, as you gather ~ but all the same, I would rather have elected people in charge ~ and after an election or two we might even get some decent ones ~ than hand our entire future over to a tiny handful of unelected woke  racehorse-owning lawyers in the Supreme Court.   

There might indeed even be more in any new constitution. But can we believe that any new constitution we might acquire would be, as in Cromwell’s time, an opportunity for a new start and new just legal and social arrangements? For ending poverty and inequality, making the law available to all, attempting, in whatever way, to make our country a better and finer place? Dream on. At present, any new constitution would merely be the entrenchment of the intellectually bankrupt,  politically correct,  deeply intolerant and racist current establishment.

‘Monarchy’ and ‘Republic’ are but the battle cries. The battle is over what New Zealand is going to look like; what sort of country, in fact, it is going to be. The battle lines are being drawn. As in the English Civil War, when a hundred slightly different shades of support and sympathy for King and Parliament were forced by circumstances to coalesce into support for one side or the other, sometimes surprising alliances are being formed between different shades of opinion that realise that they have more to lose than to gain from standing alone.

Who is going to run our country? Them? Or us? – David Round

Under our present constitutional arrangements, the ultimate law-making power rests in Parliament – and, through our elected representatives, voters. That has been our democratic strength as it continues to remind our law makers that they are answerable to the people.

Those calling for a new “written” constitution want to transfer that ultimate law-making power from voters, to unelected judges – who cannot be sacked.

If we want to preserve what little democracy we have left, any attempt to replace our present “unwritten” constitution, must be firmly rejected.

Right now, iwi leaders are scheming over how best to introduce a Treaty-based constitution without alarming the public. If we are to counter this grave threat to New Zealand, we must ensure other Kiwis become aware of the dangers a new constitution represents. – Muriel Newman

At least now, MPs are able to repeal Judge-made law and replace it with laws that voters want.

Imagine just how much worse it would be if Judges held the ultimate law-making power through a new constitution, that usurped the authority of Parliament.

Worse, with Maori supremacists determined to enshrine the Treaty of Waitangi in any new constitution, New Zealand would be turned into an apartheid society, where race would determine whether we are part of a privileged ruling class or are relegated to second-class status.

Anyone pressing for constitutional change in this political climate, no matter what their intentions, would be opening up the country to capture by separatists. There are no two ways about it – a new constitution would lead to Judge-led tribal rule. – Muriel Newman

But sadly, this looming crisis appears to be receiving scant political attention – across the board. Yet the future of our young people is one of the most important determinants of our country’s future overall. It ought to be taken far more seriously by all the political parties, whether in government or not, than appears to be the case at present.

Lofty speeches about the war in Ukraine, the risk of nuclear conflagration, climate change, and cyber security are of course important and deserving of much attention, but equally so too are the educational opportunities, attainments, and wellbeing of our children.

As New Zealand moves on from the pandemic and begins the slow process of recovery, looking after the future wellbeing and educational attainments of our children must become a top priority for all politicians, whatever their political stripe. – Peter Dunne

The worst aspect of all this is that the government’s relentless pro-Maori push is seriously damaging race relations in New Zealand. The 83 percent of our population who aren’t Maori – people like Chinese and Indians who have come here to work hard and to get ahead, not to mention the many generations of Europeans – have to watch rewards going to people on the basis of ethnicity rather than work ethic. Hard-working, talented Kiwi without a drop of Maori blood – and that’s all that most self-designated Maori possess – are passed over for promotion and a place in the sun under this government. The hermit kingdom they call “Aotearoa”, with its tightly controlled borders, has become a social laboratory aimed at facilitating a takeover of authority by a small racial minority backed up by a false narrative. – Michael Bassett

When Kelvin Davis used Question Time to say that I view the world through a “pakeha lens” it was nothing I haven’t heard before: “You’re a whakapapa Māori but you’re not kaupapa Māori”; “You’re a plastic Māori”; “You’re a born-again Māori”. It just comes with the territory of being a Māori woman who doesn’t always fit the left’s comfortable stereotype.

Problem is, I don’t think Kelvin is the only Labour minister who thinks what he said. The others might be smarter at hiding it, but they also worship identity politics.

They believe that who you are can matter more than what you do or say. How do I know this? That attitude is all through the policies they promote. Oranga Tamariki, the area I was asking Kelvin about when he made his comments, is just one example.

I came to Parliament out of sheer frustration around these kinds of attitudes and to fight them. As Act’s Children’s spokesperson and as someone who grew up in state care, I’m starting by fighting against what I view as racism within Oranga Tamariki. – Karen Chhour

In fairness to Oranga Tamariki, it was following the law, something called Section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act. Section 7AA means the chief executive of Oranga Tamariki has to consider the Treaty when making decisions.

Sure, 7AA may be well-intentioned. But it creates a conflict between protecting the best interests of the child and race-based factors enshrined in 7AA. This conflict has the potential to cause real harm to our children.

I was a Māori child in state care. I could have only dreamed of a loving home like the one Mary was placed in.

What I needed was what every child needs. To be loved, cared for, clothed and fed.

I bounced between the system and family for years. I still carry the physical and mental scars from that time. It didn’t matter to me whether the adults I relied on were Pākehā, Māori, Chinese or African. I just wanted to be loved and cared for.

I came to Parliament to fight for that for other children. – Karen Chhour

Last week, my Member’s Bill was drawn from that Ballot. It repeals Section 7AA.

Since my Member’s Bill was drawn, I have been called a racist. If anything, the opposite is true. My Bill will make Oranga Tamariki colour-blind. It will have to focus on all of the factors that a child needs, instead of placing race at the centre of their decision-making.

When this Bill comes up for the first reading in Parliament, the predictable and tiresome responses will come from the Labour Party, the Māori Party, and the Greens.

I ask them, before they vote this down, to think about Mary and what was best for her. A family who loved and cared for her? Or returning to her abusers?

Mary’s foster parents traced their family tree back far enough that they could find enough of a link to say they were Māori. This twist also shows how bizarre the law is, Mary’s foster parents are the same people, but something that happened centuries before they were born made it okay for them to parent.

Mary still lives with them. She has come out of her shell, she is doing well at school, she has a home for life where she is safe and is thriving. Thank goodness for that branch they found on the family tree, or Mary’s story might have been very different.

I can only hope that my Bill gets a fair hearing because another child might not be so lucky.– Karen Chhour

KELVIN DAVIS believes that Karen Chhour is looking at the world through a “vanilla lens”.

Racially-charged sentiments of this sort used to be reserved for embarrassing Pakeha uncles, a little the worse for drink following a big Christmas Dinner. Family members winced at the old man’s reliance on “Māori blood” fractions to determine who was, and wasn’t, a “real Māori”.

Equally embarrassing, however, is the spectacle of a Māori cabinet minister belittling an Act MP of Ngāpuhi descent for refusing to leave “her Pakeha world”. New Zealanders of all ethnicities now need to confront and deconstruct Davis’s objectionable ethnic dualism – because it is extremely dangerous. – Chris Trotter

Essentially, Davis was declaring the existence of two quite distinct realities – Māori and Pakeha. Viewed from the perspective of Pakeha reality, the behaviour of Oranga Tamariki may appear to be egregiously negligent – even cruel. But, viewed from Te Ao Māori, its behaviour may be construed in an entirely different way. The key to unlocking this profound ontological problem is Te Tiriti – or, at least, Te Tiriti as currently interpreted.

The contemporary interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi would have us believe that it set out to define the relationship between Māori, Pakeha, and their respective instruments of governance. That it was, indeed, a document intended to regulate the interaction of two very different realities. Two ethnic worlds, which were to remain separate but equal in perpetuity. – Chris Trotter

However prettily the Treaty expressed the fiction of kawanatanga and tino rangatiratanga accommodating each other’s needs in peace and harmony, the Māori world would not long survive its collision with the rest of Planet Earth.

And so it proved. Call it the inexorable march of “civilisation”; call it “colonisation; call it the making of the New Zealand nation; call it what you will. Te Ao Māori soon ceased to be a description of reality and became, instead, a metaphor. And metaphors are poor armour against the real weapons of one’s foes. The Pai Marire faith may have reassured its warriors that a divine power would deflect the Pakeha bullets – or turn their soldiers to stone – but the imperial troopers cut them down regardless. In the end, there is only one world.

Kelvin Davis knows this as well as anyone. So why is he insisting on treating metaphors as if they were scientific facts? The only rational answer is that he, along with those controlling the increasingly powerful Māori corporations arising out of the Treaty Settlement Process, intends to alter the political reality of New Zealand in such a way that the Māori aristocracy, and the te Reo-speaking, tertiary-educated, professionals and managers of the Māori middle-class (the only Māori worth listening to?) will soon be wielding very real authority over the rest of New Zealand.

Included among “the rest” will be all those Māori without te Reo, without tertiary credentials, without six-figure salaries. Māori struggling to make it through the day in a world that has little sympathy for the poor. Māori without proper housing. Māori on the minimum wage. Māori lost to drugs and alcohol and crime. Māori whose kids suffer horribly for the sins of their fathers and mothers. Māori with backgrounds identical to Karen Chhour.

Chhour was demanding to know what Davis was doing for these, the most vulnerable inhabitants of her world, the real world, the only world. And all he could offer, by way of an answer, was a metaphorical bridge to a world that disappeared 250 years ago. A world which certainly cannot be conjured back into existence by a Minister of the Crown who does not care to be questioned by a wahine Māori who, all-too-clearly, sees him struggling to do his job.  – Chris Trotter

When political figures are powerful they need to be held to account, regardless of race. Allegations of racism are extremely powerful, precisely because of the history of appalling discrimination towards Māori in this country. But such allegations should not be used to shield those in power from scrutiny. Te Pāti Māori is a product of our democratic political system and, as such, has to be held to account in the same way as other political parties, especially on an issue so important and fundamental as the funding of political campaigns.  Double standards can’t be accepted by anyone wanting clean and fair politics – especially those of us worried about vested interests looking for ways to leverage their political donations. – Bryce Edwards

Let us not get bogged down in the need to achieve real benefit for Maori when we can instead deliver a bunch of virtue signalling nonsense that benefits only an elite class of Maori, who can slap each other on the back enjoying the success of bullying those who are trying to advocate for the vulnerable. – Casey Costello 

I wonder by whose measure the understanding of my “Maori world” is tested. After six years of advocating for equality of rights for ALL New Zealanders in my role with Hobson’s Pledge, the attacks on my right to speak as a Maori are truly water off a duck’s back. Unlike the Kelvins of this world, I don’t claim to speak for ALL Maori. I am not afraid of my views being challenged and I will debate the issues and demand accountability. I do not need to resort to name-calling and insults that belittle those who have a different point of view. – Casey Costello 

So we now expose the truth of the Labour Maori caucus agenda: we are not being divided just by whether we are Maori or non-Maori, that is too simple. For being Maori, although undefined, now requires you to meet the standard set by Labour. The qualification to join this exclusive club is no longer whakapapa, it is whether you agree with the elected and self-appointed elite. – Casey Costello 

This Labour Government has not achieved, in their five years in power, one positive shift in the dial for any measure of Maori outcomes. There have been no better education outcomes, no real reduction in homelessness and no increase in home ownership, no lifting out of poverty, no reduction in prison numbers, no enhancement to mental health………nothing. But rather than hanging their heads in shame or seeking better solutions, they double down, apparently believing the best form of defence is attack. Their failures are laid at the feet of systemic racism and colonisation.

What a perfect scenario: you can be the Government of ineptitude and abject failure but protected from any accountability for that failure – “it’s not our fault, it’s colonisation”. – Casey Costello 

It seems in New Zealand we are not championing the aspirational words of Martin Luther King in that we are not seeking to have our children valued on the content of their character but rather judged on the subjective measure assigned by Kelvin Davis. – Casey Costello 

It is looking ever more likely that the economic piper must indeed be paid, with the odds shortening on a worldwide recession in the next 12 months.

It still beggars belief that governments and central bankers didn’t realise what they were flirting with when they opened the fiscal and monetary spigots to such an unprecedented degree during the pandemic.

Or that they took no corrective action once it became apparent we had a supply shock rather than a demand shock. –  Steven Joyce 

We can’t control inflation with big wage increases and partying up at restaurants all the time.

The immediate cause of the inflation we have been seeing is, as always, too much money chasing too few goods and services. – Steven Joyce 

On the supply side, easing supply bottlenecks and the services sectors coming back on stream will help.

However, the big issue both in services and more widely is labour supply and gummed up borders. Plus, in our case, a Government that can’t philosophically or practically get out of its own way long enough to even have a decent crack at solving the problem. – Steven Joyce 

So where did we go so wrong?

I blame a trend I’ll call performative policymaking.

Over the last five to eight years there has been a worldwide tendency to make grand rhetorical gestures that instantly sound good, but with little regard for execution risk or consequences, especially economic consequences. – Steven Joyce 

Our own Government was an early adopter.

Who can forget the oil and gas ban that has directly led to burning more coal, KiwiBuild’s 100,000 homes, reportedly dreamt up in the back of a taxi? The plan to slash migration? Or Shane Jones’ one billion trees? – Steven Joyce 

There is a legitimate debate to be had about the size of the state and money being better off in the hands of the people that earned it rather than legions of bureaucrats.

Particularly in tight economic times and including in our country where a statist Government has significantly increased its own size as a proportion of society under the cover of Covid.

And no surprises which side I’m on. But you can’t be aspirational and half-arsed about it, and forget about balancing the books. – Steven Joyce 

Politicians have gotten used to being able to make feel-good announcements and rely on the short news cycles of the social media age to sweep away the need to deliver and be accountable.

But times are a-changing again.

Our political leaders are increasingly being faced with the return of political gravity and economic reality.  – Steven Joyce 

I think we are witnessing a new age of political realism dawning.

It will likely be tough for a while as we unwind all the consequences of this performative policy-making but the world will ultimately be the better for it. – Steven Joyce 

What it gives away is the degree to which people in Britain have come to believe that all money is the government’s and that what is left over for the people has been granted them by the government’s grace and favor. But the government cannot give money (or at least economic product) away; it can only refrain from taking it. – Theodore Dalrymple

Beyond the correct rate of taxation, however, lie the much deeper problems of the country. For years, regardless of who was in power, government policy has been to import cheap unskilled or semi-skilled labor, while paying large numbers of people to remain economically inactive, in the process placing great strain on housing and public services through overpopulation. The government has subsidized socially irresponsible behavior to the point at which, for people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, such behavior is more profitable than work; these people depend on the government for everything. Through its education system, Britain has performed miracles of inefficiency, resulting in a substantial population of expensively educated semi-literates, whose labor would be too expensive even if it were free. – Theodore Dalrymple

At $370 million, the Government is going to spend more to merge RNZ and TVNZ than the combined net worth of those entities. – Melissa Lee

I was honoured to have been asked to take up a position on the board of Māori Television, and assumed I was there because of the way a small team of clever, young, white people I worked with from Dunedin had started using the latest technologies to bring Māori stories, a Māori world view, to life across a wide range of platforms that now made up the media landscape.

But no – I didn’t have te reo – so I was quite clearly in Willie’s “useless Māori” category.

That didn’t really bother me because nothing Willie said could take away from my sense of who I was and where I came from. Especially because, at the time, I felt his contribution to the media landscape was more hui than doee.

But Willie is now Minister of Broadcasting and Media and he is charged with merging Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand into a future-focused broadcasting entity that has to face the huge challenges of the new online platforms that are decimating the old world of radio and television. The skillsets and experience needed for a role such as this have challenged some of the largest media organisations in the world, not to mention some of the most tech-savvy storytellers on the planet.

But, when I look at Willie’s CV, there is not a lot to suggest that this is a job he is particularly well qualified for.

He does have te reo – I have to give him that – but where is the detailed knowledge and vision for a future-focused entity that will deliver content that will engage viewers across the wide range of platforms that are now available to all?  – Sir Ian Taylor

There is no place for discrimination by Māori, for Māori who are dismissed as having a “vanilla lens on the Māori world view” simply because they do not have te reo, or who choose to embrace all sides of their whakapapa – my father was Scottish. – Sir Ian Taylor

Kō ngā tāhū ā o tapu wai inanahi, hei tauira ora mō āpōpō.

The footsteps laid down by our ancestors centuries ago, create the paving stones upon which we stand today.

To that we add: innovation is in your DNA, wear it with pride. – Sir Ian Taylor

It’s] pretty clear to me that you are either born a male of female, or else, there are some people who are born with both genders. I have no problem with other people choosing to be whoever they like to be.

Personally, I self-identify as a 27-year-old Slovakian model. – Judith Collins

That Davis and Jackson were quick to temper betrays their character. But it also speaks to a wider problem within the Labour tribe – who prefer invective to rational debate.

This is the anger of the pure believer towards the apostate. It is easier to suppress criticism by dismissing or marginalising the critics as ‘bad’ people (whether that be racist, over-privileged, transphobic, etc) rather than actually addressing the issues.

Ardern’s empathy and cool-headed compassion was not a construct – that is her nature. But it’s easy to be nice when you are winning. Now that the political landscape looks significantly less favourable, some of her MPs are becoming defensive. It is the wrong kind of anger to harness if they want to remain in Government. – Andrea Vance

Things happen in your life and unfortunately they can shape you in negative ways. I became very fearful, I was holding it within me. I actually, in my little kid brain, thought that if I was around drugs or the white powder that I was responsible for killing people because of what I’d seen.

I had this internal guilt, I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I had no safe spaces at that time so it ate away. But after talking about, accepting it and releasing that guilt and shame [I realised that] sometimes these things happen.

It left no what-ifs about it. If you don’t get on top of your drug problem, this is what happens. It’s a bad road. – Ruby Tui

What happens to us, especially what happens to us as children, doesn’t need to define who we are as adults. And it’s never too late to look into these things that happened to us.

It’s never too late to forgive ourselves. I had to forgive myself because I thought I was killing people, and I wasn’t.

We’re all human and we all have our dark stuff and our dark times. People are so scared of the dark but without those times you can’t appreciate the light. You learn things at rock bottom that you’ll never learn on mountaintops. – Ruby Tui

There’s nothing as inspiring as seeing your mum get out of a bad relationship and organise and reach out and get help. It just makes me feel like I can do anything. – Ruby Tui

A stoush between collectivist and individualist Māori is long overdue. It has simmered for a long time but this week boiled over when Kelvin Davis exposed his thinking for all and sundry to examine. He confirmed that a Māori world with its own set of values exists, and that anyone with even a smidgen of Māori heritage should get themselves into it. It wasn’t a kindly suggestion. It was a command. The cost of not complying? Derision and ostracism. It’s reminiscent of the treatment handed out to those who don’t want to be part of the Gloriavale commune.

The tribe is a communistic unit. The tribe takes precedence. It owns you. Its culture is all-encompassing. It provides strength in numbers, security and identity. But it is also stultifying and limiting depending on which lens it is viewed through. Ultimately, inevitably, whether at the micro or macro level, the question must be answered. Is your allegiance to the tribe, or is it to yourself and your chosen group of family and friends. – Lindsay Mitchel 

Mixed partnerships are more common than those with the same ethnicity. And each of these partnerships – many producing children – will face issues of concurrent cultures.

Increasingly, through media and public services, through health, justice and education, the Māori culture is being prioritised. To the point of being romanticized and lionized. Long-standing rules about the state being secular are broken to accommodate Māori spiritualism. Te reo – or knowledge of te ao – is de facto compulsory inasmuch as, if you don’t have it there are now careers that are barred to you. The Māori ‘team’ propelling this are on a roll. They are in ascendancy. They have gathered non-Māori into their tribe with astonishing success and seeming ease, though reflecting on the creeping compulsion maybe ‘ease’ is the wrong word. –  Lindsay Mitchel 

In the middle of last century sociologists observed Pakeha men who married Māori women tended to move into the tribe; Māori men who married non-Māori moved into the non-tribal society. Tension would have existed always but so did the freedom to choose.

What kind of society wants to remove that freedom? One in which the collective trumps the individual.

Forget all the hoo-ha about culture, values and Māori mysticism. Colonisation, oppression and racism. They are only trinkets to tempt followers of fashion.

What is happening is a clash between philosophies. Politics is the practical expression of philosophy.

So it isn’t surprising that the strong-arming to get with the Māori worldview programme is coming from the left (the Labour Māori caucus, Green and Māori Party MPs). And those resisting are coming from the right (National and ACT). What played out in parliament this week, and is still reverberating with non-politicians now entering the fray, is the age-old stoush between collectivism and individualism. It’s New Zealand’s cold war.

If we are going to be forced to take a side, and mounting evidence points to this eventuality no matter your ethnicity, think of the conflict in these terms.

Do you want to own your own life? –  Lindsay Mitchel 

 In public life we need more good people doing things and fewer strutting peacocks admiring their reflection in a wall of camera lenses.

Media attention is addictive and those who crave adulation are driven to ever-greater acts of absurdity. Those who get things done are often unseen and, in the case of Finlayson, unsung.  – Damien Grant

 In what is my favourite line of his book this criticism is airily dismissed: “The pettifogging concerns of professors of law did not worry me.”

Now, I am not qualified to arbitrate on the issues, but I endorse the robustness of the language and the withering contempt that goes along with it. Those that can, do, those that can’t, teach. –

This is a book written by someone who was in politics to do something, even if at times the reader gets a sense that the author wasn’t entirely sure what that something was.

But when the ministerial warrants came his way, he applied his mind, energies and a systematic, if at times inconsistent, set of principles to the task before him. –

If you wish to write a book after you leave office, make sure you have something to write about other than snarky barbs traded between colleagues. Although there is enough of that to keep things lively. Journalists would also do well to put down their phones and read it. –

 

So what if they are vulnerable, poor or uneducated or, dare I say it, ‘victims of colonisation’. Go tell that to the dairy owner when his business has been smashed and robbed for the fifth time this year, or when a baseball bat is swung at his head, or the security guard who just got bashed for it. How does that make it OK?

There are thousands upon thousands of kids in our country who have suffered those issues, and more, but they don’t stoop so low as to use it as an excuse to commit violent crime. The vast majority pick themselves up with a thing called ‘pride’ and ‘respect’ and crack on with life in society and are productive and have never committed the crimes the small minority do. – Darroch Ball

For goodness sake, any parent knows bringing up kids in a household needs boundaries and consequences. The further they push the boundaries, the harsher the consequences. It’s not a hard concept.

Give these kids what they need – care, genuine adult involvement, boundaries and, most importantly, consequences. And by consequences I mean something they won’t like. Not a slap on the wrist and not giving them ‘street cred’ with their mates. – Darroch Ball

Put money and resources into prevention all you want. But this is not binary. It can’t be at the sacrifice of punishment and accountability – which is what this current government seems to think.

Newsflash – it’s not working and the numbers of youth committing these violent crimes are growing for reason.

“If you keep doing what you’ve done you’re gonna keep getting what you’ve got.”

Time for change. – Darroch Ball

I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. Learn how to target, Labour. Find your audience, talk to them. Don’t tarnish our reputation with yet another media conference telling all and sundry that we’re terrible employers.

Give me strength. If National gets into Government, their first job is to rebuild Brand New Zealand and boy, they’ve got a bit of work to do.  – Rachel Smalley

Proof of how people vote undermines the secrecy of voting in a way that telling people how you voted does not. A society in which people regularly show – not just tell – others how they voted, is one that is just a little more open to pressuring and bribery of voters.

There are people in long-term relationships with partners who might tell them how to vote, but who will never actually know if their advice was taken, because we have the secret ballot. A secret ballot reinforced with rules about voting in private and bans on photography in voting places. (I know this also makes less sense with postal voting.) – Graeme Edgeler

Yesterday was one of the proudest days of my life. To be offered the role of CEO of the Essendon Football Club – who I have followed since I was a boy – was a profound honour,” Thorburn wrote.

However, today it became clear to me that my personal Christian faith is not tolerated or permitted in the public square, at least by some and perhaps by many. I was being required to compromise beyond a level that my conscience allowed. People should be able to hold different views on complex personal and moral matters, and be able to live and work together, even with those differences, and always with respect. Behaviour is the key. This is all an important part of a tolerant and diverse society.

Despite my own leadership record, within hours of my appointment being announced, the media and leaders of our community had spoken. They made it clear that my Christian faith and my association with a Church are unacceptable in our culture if you wish to hold a leadership position in society.

This grieves me greatly – though not just for myself, but for our society overall. I believe we are poorer for the loss of our great freedoms of thought, conscience and belief that made for a truly diverse, just and respectful community. – Andrew Thorburn

Today’s police could do with taking a leaf out of Robert Peel’s nine principles of policing, which form the basis of policing by consent. Principle five states that officers should be committed ‘to seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy

It’s a lesson worth heeding. If the police continue to pander to political lobby groups, public trust will continue to fall. – Carrie Clark

But the larger the group of employees covered by a Fair Pay Agreement, the less workable will be the outcomes for businesses needing terms and conditions tailored to their individual workplaces.

Even by the 1970s, cracks were emerging in the compulsory centralised wage bargaining system that had dominated New Zealand’s industrial relations for most of the 20^th century. It was proving insufficiently flexible to cope with the increasing sophistication of the New Zealand economy.

In New Zealand’s more complex 21^st-century economy, the one-size-fits-all approach to collective bargaining will be even more unworkable.

You can almost hear the armies of employment lawyers getting ready for battle. – Roger Partridge

Last week, during her address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern proved, once again, she is the very definition of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

While she poses as the smiling, doe-eyed, “compassionate” face of modern progressivism, beneath the soft veneer is a sneering intolerance for anyone who may challenge her. – Daisy Cousens 

However, what’s important is her use of the words “disinformation” and “misinformation”.

Those two words have been rendered almost meaningless in recent years, thanks to leftist leaders using them relentlessly to silence other points of view. – Daisy Cousens 

The purpose of this “mis-or-disinformation” branding was to outlaw dissent by shaming its proponents.

Such attempts to control the conversation are not unique to late 2020; the left have used terms such as “hate speech” and baseless accusations of bigotry to sully competing opinions for many years.

However, since nobody has ever been able to define “hate speech” et al, “mis and disinformation” has become the primary tool of the trade. – Daisy Cousens 

Beware the left-wing leader who accuses the other side of spreading mis-or-disinformation.

A non-alarmist approach to managing climate change is not mis-or-disinformation.

Perhaps if Ardern and her ilk had policies that were actually beneficial to the public, they wouldn’t be so trigger happy when they crack down on dissent. – Daisy Cousens 

That’s convenient, isn’t it? The pre-existing rules around fairness and balance in journalism that have worked for decades are suddenly in need of some tweaking, right as Stuff’s ‘Fire and Fury’ documentary is due to come before the Media Council for voiding its bowels all over a group of very disillusioned Kiwis and not bothering to speak to them.  – Ben Espiner

Dealing with nay-sayers and holdouts can definitely be frustrating, especially when the need for change seems urgent. But disagreement is part and parcel of the democratic process, not to mention something that’s protected by the fundamental liberal right of free expression. – James Kierstead

Our Government, unfortunately, perceives businesses to be big powerful employers with endless amounts of money – but the opposite is true.

Statistics NZ tell us that only 3 per cent of all New Zealand enterprises employ more than twenty staff while the other 97 per cent are either small employers or just self-employed Kiwi battlers desperately trying to get ahead as independent contractors. – Max Whitehead

A member of the British parliament called Rupa Huq was once a university teacher of sociology and criminology, and may therefore be assumed to have, ex officio, a firm grasp of unreality. Such a grasp is no handicap, of course, to a political career, indeed of late seems almost to be a precondition of one, to judge by the performance of many of our leaders. But some things are unforgivable, and Huq has just committed the unforgivable.

Speaking at a joint meeting of two pressure groups called British Future and the Black Equity Organisation, Huq said of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, that he was only “superficially a black man,” and that if you heard him speak on the radio, you would not have guessed that he was black. – Theodore Dalrymple

But what Huq’s comments suggested was that he wasn’t really a black man because (a) he is highly educated and (b) he does not speak as many denizens of a black ghetto speak. She was but a short step away from saying that the superficiality of his blackness was proved by his non-use of dope or crack, and his lack of a criminal record. If he had been deeply rather than only superficially black, he would have been out mugging old ladies. You can’t really get more racist than this. – Theodore Dalrymple

Now, however, we are plagued by what Stalin, referring to writers, called “engineers of souls” such as DiAngelo: those who will not leave us alone until all our thoughts and feelings are “correct” according to their own conceptions of what is right and proper, thus assuring themselves of a job forever, since our thoughts and feelings are never correct. They underestimate or even deny the possibility of self-control, which is the deepest enemy of the would-be purifiers of our souls. – Theodore Dalrymple

New Zealand’s foreign policy should be driven by our values, security, trade and a rational examination of our interests. When our foreign policy is promoting the celebrity status of a politician and her personal agenda the result damages New Zealand.- Richard Prebble

Across the country there is a growing sense of disconnection and disempowerment. So much needs to be done, but the democratic transmission-belts that are supposed to carry the needs and wants of the citizenry to the individuals and entities charged with delivering them, no longer seem to work.

Plans are made, and decisions are taken, but not by citizens: not even by the representatives of citizens. At both the national and the local level, unelected and increasingly unaccountable bureaucrats appear to have taken charge. Everywhere, New Zealanders see evidence of centralisation. Everywhere the checks and balances of democracy are being discarded. Elected councillors are expected to act as rubber stamps. Citizens are the stampees. – Chris Trotter

At the start of this year, New Zealand’s then justice minister Kris Faafoi was one of those quoting the nation’s high standings in the index, issuing a press release that again confused a corruption perception index with an actual corruption index. Now just 10 months later – and only three months since leaving the cabinet table – Faafoi has left parliament and started his own lobbying firm.

This is an appalling situation. A politician who was intimately involved in the conversations that shape our country now has a job trying to influence the way those conversations go, and is armed with the knowledge that only someone involved in those conversations would have – from the individual positions of other ministers to highly sensitive information from public servants.

And it speaks to our overall naivety as a country – a naivety that probably helps us on that corruption index. – Henry Cooke 

The rules should not allow him to be reading cabinet papers in June and then lobbying his former colleagues on the same matters in October. Other countries – ones that aren’t naive as us – have so-called “revolving door” policies to stop this very thing, forcing elected officials to cool down for some period of months or years before engaging in lobbying.

Opinions vary on how long these things should last, but at the very least an MP should not be able to start lobbying until the end of the parliamentary term in which they were elected. That would keep Faafoi off the blocks for a bit longer than a year. It would also allow people to lose their jobs at elections and immediately find new ones as lobbyists, which would be far from ideal, but it would be a start.

Yet the structural problem exists not just in our hard and fast rules. It’s also in Wellington’s culture. – Henry Cooke 

Those who leave politics do have a right to build a new career, and use the skills politics gave them in that new vocation. But the public has every right to be appalled when the turnaround is this quick, and the service on offer is not just the skills and knowledge of a seasoned political operative, but also the connections retained from someone’s time acting as a servant of the public.

I have hope we can do this, because I don’t think those survey results are really that far out. It’s true that you can’t bribe a cop to get out of a speeding ticket in New Zealand, and that you don’t need to pay off a border guard to get your goods into the country. Our big public institutions are generally aware of these kinds of risks and do their best to mitigate them with very clear rules and norms. It’s time parliament itself did the same. – Henry Cooke 

Probably the most corrupt and broken part of the New Zealand political system is the role of corporate lobbyists influencing policy decisions of governments on behalf of vested interests. This is a group of political insiders – usually former politicians, party staffers or senior Beehive officials – who work at the centre of power and then depart with inside knowledge and networks that they can leverage to help corporate clients influence government policy.

It’s known as a “revolving door” in which corporate interests can prosper through having insiders who move backwards and forwards in and out of the Beehive and other positions of influence. It’s a growth industry in Wellington.

The extraordinary thing is New Zealand is unique in having no regulations on this part of the policy process. – Bryce Edwards

Democratic countries don’t normally allow political insiders like Cabinet Ministers to shift straight into jobs with conflicts of interests. In every other similar country there is a mandatory “cooling off” period for political insiders after they leave their taxpayer-funded positions. Transparency International recommends a minimum of a two-year period. – Bryce Edwards

“Every child born in New Zealand, and every legal immigrant, has the same rights. Those are the rights of a citizen. Nobody should get an extra say because of who their great grandparents were. Nobody should have to be treated differently because of who they are, – Nicole McKee

All of the good political movements of the past four hundred years have been about ending discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex and sexuality to treat each person with the same dignity. We are the first country in history that’s achieved equal rights and has division as its official policy. – Nicole McKee

Having spent much of my professional life among convicts, I’m all in favor of attempts to reintegrate them into society once they leave prison. The slate cannot be wiped clean—no wiping of a slate can undo a crime once committed—but the writing on the slate shouldn’t act on the rest of a person’s life as a kind of severe chronic disabling disease.

As is so often the case in human affairs, there’s another side to the question. If I were an employer seeking someone in a position of trust (and practically all positions are those of trust), I should quite like to know if an applicant had been guilty of dishonesty. Other things being equal among applicants, I would probably prefer someone who had not been found guilty of a crime, though in some moods I might feel inclined from a sense of social duty or humanity to offer an ex-criminal a job. However, I would like the choice to be mine.  – Theodore Dalrymple

The energy crisis sees Europe now scrambling to reopen mothballed coal power plants and nurse aging nuclear power stations through the winter. They are scrambling to reopen coal mines and reverse fracking bans – but, unfortunately, finding and developing gas reserves takes time, and new gas energy will not come on stream this winter.

The sad fact is that people will die of the cold. In a normal year in the UK, there are 80 times more climate-related deaths due to cold than to heat; regrettably, this winter, it will be more.

Unfortunately, we have already started down the same policy path as Europe and it is crucial that we stop and learn from their mistakes, or we are doomed to repeat them. And at what cost? –  Stuart Smith

The great virtue of a free market is that it can cause tens of thousands of people to pursue promising technologies and promising ways to reduce carbon at their own expense. The market leads to discovery. Politicians, by contrast, think they know “the” answer, and they’re always wrong. – David R. Henderson

India is at 23 per cent of world milk production, and their ambition is to keep growing at 6 per cent per year to be at 43 per cent in 20 to 30 years.

They’ve got a carbon footprint per litre of milk that’s about 10 times what you get for a New Zealand litre of milk … And when questioned on what sustainability meant to them, they said: ‘a full belly’. That’s as far as they’re interested in sustainability going.

And so it really made me think if New Zealand’s place in the world is cutting our own production, cutting our own throats, or is it about taking our know-how and can-do attitude to other agricultural systems in the world. – Andrew Hoggard

Sheep and beef accounts for 92,000 workers in this country. 

If this leads to a straight 20% loss of workers, that’s 18 and a half thousand people. 

And then there’s the cost to the economy.  A 24% drop in net revenue means we could lose up to 2.88 billion a year in sheep and beef exports alone. That’s more our entire education system costs us every year. It’s a huge amount of money to pass up.

And it’s not going to stop climate change from happening. It runs the risk of making it worse. New Zealand farmers are the most efficient farmers in the world.  They produce the least carbon emissions per animal.

You take 20% of our meat out of the word, some other country is simply going to step in and take up the slack and they will not farm that meat as efficiently as us, so every animal of ours that they replace, they will put more emissions into the atmosphere than we would’ve.

This plan is an expensive exercise in stupidity. We are definitely making our country poorer and possibly making the planet hotter, for what? 

For bragging rights. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Nobody, least of all the farmers of this country, should be surprised by the government announcement this week of their immoral plan to drastically reduce the nation’s green house gas emissions for no other reason than the pursuit of a debatable objective that has been abandoned in almost all of the original IPCC supporting countries throughout the western world. Note we don’t include the major polluters of the world who also signed the Paris and Glasgow agreements while having no real intention of participating in this flawed response to the latest round of global warming. – Clive Bibby

Nothing forces politicians to do the proverbial back flip more, even when dealing with policies that have been regarded as sacrosanct when times allowed flexibility of choice, than being subjected to the reality of a rapidly changing world. 

Yet here in little old New Zealand, our government is so driven by its own death wish that it is willing to kill the beating heart that has made us the utopian dreamland where everyone wants to be. – Clive Bibby

FOUR ELECTIONS IN A ROW the centre-left romped home with the Auckland mayoralty. Four elections of postal voting. Four elections in which the logistical management of the ballot was contracted out to the private sector. Four elections won by white, male politicians over the age of 55 years. Four elections of entirely satisfactory results – at least from the perspective of the centre-left.

One defeat, however, is all that it has taken for the centre-left (and its more combustible fellow-travellers) to denounce the entire electoral process as a rort, and to strongly insinuate that the victorious mayoral candidate, Wayne Brown, is lacking in democratic legitimacy. If this is not a case of sour grapes on the part of the losers, then it is difficult to imagine what a case of sour grapes might look like!  – Chris Trotter 

A powerful sense of entitlement does, however, lie at the heart of the 2022 losers’ sour grapes. Not the entitlement derived from democratic principle, but the sense of entitlement ingrained in political activists who believe themselves to be on the right (that is to say left) side of history. This certainty concerning their own ideological rectitude exists in inverse proportion to their knowledge of the actual nuts-and-bolts of historical and political agency. – Chris Trotter 

Democracy isn’t cheap, and it isn’t easy – but it is simple. Don’t insist that the voters be given what they don’t want. Build your footpaths where the people walk. Never, ever, be a sore loser. And, always remember: vox Populi, vox Dei.

The voice of the people, is the voice of God. – Chris Trotter 

I want to talk (briefly) about a difficulty which has grown up in even talking about the problem – that is an ideology of supposed “antiracism” which is beginning to assume the dimensions of a religion or a cult under the influence of which people and institutions are casually and inaccurately labelled as “racist” without any evidentiary basis for the charge. I say an ideology of “supposed anti- racism” because the underlying assumption of this ideology appears to be that Aboriginal people must exist in a permanent state of victimhood, an assumption that is in fact deeply racist. Further, among those in thrall to this ideology, labelling someone or something “racist” seems in many cases to be an end in itself – not a prelude to remedial action, but a substitute for it. – Justice Judith Kelly

… it is important to call out false claims of individual racism and false claims of systemic racism – as it is to call out racism where it occurs. It is not helpful to see victimisation where it doesn’t exist. Apart from anything else, it detracts from the search for solutions.

Not all disadvantage is a result of racism. People (all of us) have enough problems as it is without inventing more. – Justice Judith Kelly

It is either a brave or stupid political party, that having received a clear signal from the electorate on its failure to deliver its transformation agenda, forges ahead with more change just days later.

And while Jacinda Ardern denied that the centre-right swing in the local government elections last week was a rejection of her Government’s failure to deliver on its Three Waters programme and identifiable progress on Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand, that’s exactly what the election of right-wing mayors in Auckland, Rotorua, Whanganui, Christchurch and Dunedin determined.

After all, with less than a year before another general election, and the hallowed trophy of a third term, there are hearts and minds, not to mention votes, to be won. – Janet WIlson

It’s also proof that the Government has lost touch with its voters when newspaper headlines tout that its emissions scheme will lead to higher food prices – the No 1 concern now – and it forges ahead anyway, happy to claim a world first with emissions pricing across the board.

There’s a good reason for that. Reasons wrapped up in the politics of self-interest and fraught emotions. Being first may give Brand NZ a shiny halo, but that’s not going to be much use when it collapses its largest industry. – Janet WIlson

It’s a brave or stupid political party that wants to swipe 20% off the sheep and beef industry when last year it was worth $9.1 billion in export earnings.

With farming bodies from Federated Farmers to Groundswell NZ enraged, it’s also relevant to ask if this proposal will go the way of Labour’s other transformation policies only to stall and wash up on the rocks of its own aspiration. – Janet WIlson

And if it does pass? That will deliver a double blow for Labour’s core constituency – low-income households – who are already struggling to feed themselves.

It’s a brave or stupid party that decides to implement policies that fail voters. – Janet WIlson

Speech should not be the subject of State interference solely because the message is unpleasant, discomforting, disfavoured or feared to be dangerous by the State. This is known as “content or viewpoint neutrality”. This approach prevents the State from regulating speech simply because the speech’s message, idea or viewpoint is unpleasant, discomforting, offensive, disfavoured or feared to be dangerous by government officials or community members. That approach – what could be called “viewpoint discriminatory” regulation – would attack individual liberty but also democratic principles. Officials could use it to suppress unpopular idea or information or manipulate public debate.

Censoring speech because it is disfavoured, no matter how deeply, violates the viewpoint neutrality principle. That principle is also violated when the State suppresses speech about public issues. This can include “hate speech” simply because its views might have a disturbing impact upon the emotions or psyches of some audience members. The State may not punish “hate speech” or speech with other messages simply because of its offensive, discomforting, disfavoured, disturbing or feared message.

Counterspeech is available to address such messages. Only when the speech crosses the threshold into the emergency test – that is when it directly, demonstrably and imminently causes certain specific, objectively ascertainable serious harms that cannot be averted by other than censorship – may the State intervene. – David Harvey 

One of the difficulties facing freedom of expression in New Zealand lies in the climate of fear that has generated over the period of the Covid pandemic. There has been fear about the consequences of the disease, fear if the various directives of the government are not complied with, and fear arising from the expression of contrary views.

Anti-vax sentiments have morphed into anti-government protests and those who express contrarian views have been accused of spreading misinformation and disinformation. All of these views are in the main disfavoured, disturbing or adding to the climate of fear. So much so that the former Chief Censor lent the weight of his office to a publication about misinformation and disinformation entitled the “The Edge of the Infodemic – Challenging Misinformation in Aotearoa”.

One wonders whether the Chief Censor of the time wished to see misinformation come within his ambit and be subject to classification or even being classed as objectionable. It is difficult to see how misinformation or disinformation could fall within the emergency test. Although it may be disfavoured, wrong-headed or disturbing it falls within the scope of viewpoint neutrality, best met with counterspeech. – David Harvey 

A recent demonstration of the overreaction of the public to forms of expression, the rise of the harmful tendency approach and the belief that the State should intervene is chilling and concerning. Rather than addressing the problem with counterspeech or some such similar demonstration, citizens required the Police to investigate incidents involving the flying of flags. – David Harvey 

Although these cases may seem insignificant or trivial in themselves there is a deeper level of concern. Are we becoming too precious about taking offence? Are we leaning towards a “harmful tendency” position? Is the answer to something with which we disagree to complain to the authorities or try to shut it down? That is not what freedom of expression in a democratic society is all about.

That these sentiments seem to be surfacing should be no surprise. The Government holds itself out as the sole source of truth and any disagreement is cast as misinformation or disinformation. Some elements of the media demonise contrary opinions and there seems to be a developing trend to silence or cancel opposing points of view simply because they are perceived to be disagreeable or offensive, rather than engaging with the issue.

The reason that is advanced for failing to engage with the issue is that to do so merely gives oxygen to a contrary point of view, but only by discussion and challenge can the holders of contrary views understand and perhaps even accept they are wrong.

We need to be more robust in the way that we deal with views with which we disagree. We must remember that those expressing such views have as much right to express their sentiments as we have to express ours. And we must remember that the only time speech should be censored is if there is a clear, immediate and present danger that it may cause harm. If the ideas that are the subject of speech are controversial, offensive or disfavoured the remedy lies in debate or persuasion and not the intervention of the State. – David Harvey 

The relationship between intelligence, education, knowledge, and good sense is far from straightforward. Bad and foolish—but allegedly sophisticated—ideas can beguile the educated, or important portions of the educated, for decades at a time. The Marxian labour theory of value was one such which held much of the European intelligentsia in thrall for a long time, despite its obvious untruth. They wanted it to be true, so for them it was true, and in the process, they often became learned in their own fundamental error. For them, the wish was father to the conviction.  – Theodore Dalrymple

But in the eyes of most people, the fact that the rich would benefit from the tax cuts more than the poor was enough in itself to condemn them, irrespective of their outcome for their economy as a whole: that is to say, even if they were to increase general prosperity, they would still be undesirable because they would have increased inequality.  – Theodore Dalrymple

A dog-in-the-manger attitude to the rich is now morally de rigueur, even among those whom the majority of their fellow citizens would consider rich. To hate the rich is, ex officio almost, to sympathise with the poor, and therefore be virtuous: but hatred and sympathy are not two sides of the same coin. Hatred not only goes deeper than sympathy but is easier to rouse and to act upon. It is quite independent of sympathy. Hatred of the rich in the name of equality was probably responsible for more death and destruction in the twentieth century than any other political passion. The category of the rich tends to expand as circumstances require: ‘Rich bastards,’ Lenin called the kulaks, the Russian peasants whose wealth would now be considered dire poverty, and which consisted of the possession of an animal or two, or a farm tool, more than other peasants possessed. What Freud called the narcissism of small differences (the psychological equivalent of marginal utility) means that grounds, however trifling, can always be found for hatred and envy.

This is not to say, I hope I do not need to add, that wealth is coterminous with virtue, that the rich always behave well, or that no wealth is illicit. We have probably all known in our time some rich bastards, but it is their conduct, not their wealth, that we should revile. 

An obsession with relative rather than absolute measurement of people’s situation can only foster discontent and envy, if not outright hatred. What matters it to me if someone is three or a thousand times wealthier than I, provided that his conduct or activity does me no harm? – Theodore Dalrymple

It is difficult to overstate the dangers when society begins to divide itself along tribal lines.  This problem is manifesting in New Zealand to a marked and accelerating degree, and shows no sign of abating. Every statistic is broken down by ethnicity, tribe is broken down by iwi, and iwi by hapu. While tribalism seems to be exponentially impacting almost everything in modern New Zealand, it has been a long time coming, and its ultimate results could cost us much of what we value. – Caleb Anderson 

What is interesting is that projection can also occur on a mass scale, and this is when it can become especially dangerous.   This is when whole groups opt to lay all of their ills at the feet of other groups, protestants at the feet of Catholics, atheists at the feet of Christians, eastern nations at the feet of western nations, socialists at the feet of capitalists, liberals at the feet of conservatives, urban at the feet of rural, intellectuals at the feet of the middle class, those who have not at the feet of those who have, indigenous people at the feet of colonizers etc. etc.  This is done with conviction and blind fervour, and we have plenty of similarly minded people to cheer us along, and psychologically stroke our egos. Tribalism provides the perfect opportunity to feel better by demonizing others.  A complex problem becomes simple, singular causality is the order of the day, and we have dodged the bullet.   – Caleb Anderson 

History contains many examples of leaders who have advanced their causes through division.  Prior to the emergence of constitutional government and universal suffrage, this was generally the way things were done.  In more recent times, the left, by infiltrating the media and academia, has made an art form of this.  And those who speak words of division, have a burgeoning audience of those who have decided (and have been helped to decide) that any burden of personal responsibility and change, is just too great to bear. The left has conveniently, and nonsensically, divided humanity into oppressor and oppressed classes, and then the oppressed class into an almost unlimited number of oppressed sub-groups.  If you are especially unlucky you qualify as oppressed on multiple grounds simultaneously (something called intersectionality).

The comparative successes of capitalism (notwithstanding its imperfections), and the growth of the middle class, has forced the left to find new “enemies”, be they white, male, middle class, conservative, rural  …  Each is apportioned a dollop of responsibility for the ailments of others and these ailments are laid exclusively at their feet.

While projection is an unconscious action, by and large, the left is well aware of what it is doing, in fact this is its strategy.  If you can divide, and get it right, you will rule.  The current pervasive and never-ending divisions of our population on the basis of ethnicity, as if nothing else mattered, giving loud voice to one group, and no voice to the other, constructing selective narratives of past and present, applying villainy and virtue, as if these were mutually exclusive domains of being, provides rich opportunities for leverage.

By its very nature tribalism contains the seeds of its own destruction.  Once one “enemy” is dispensed with, another needs to be found, because that’s how projection works.  Division continues unabated until there is literally no-one left to blame, and society has divested itself of everything of value.   – Caleb Anderson 

Borrowing the words of Carl Jung, you might say that New Zealand is being swept away by an outbreak of insanity, entirely unaware of where this could lead us.  We have traded the Judeo- Christian imperative of personal responsibility, for a dumbed-down collectivism, which has the potential to sweep away everything of value, and return us to the very dark age from which all of our ancestors emerged, and which, most scarily of all, still resides deep within the hearts of each one of us.  

If we forget where we have come from, most certainly we will return there, and we might not like what we find.  The west is facing multiple crises, but the real crisis the west faces is the absence of responsibility – Caleb Anderson 

It seems a very dangerous predicament when government requires people to lie and to feign agreement with false propaganda in order to contribute their training and experience to our country. It’s totalitarianism, in our case racist, socialist totalitarianism. Who wanted this? – A.E. Thompson

That raises the question; does the prime minister care about reducing emissions to address climate change, or does she want to reduce New Zealand’s emissions regardless of whether that reduction leads to an increase in global emissions? I suspect it is the latter.  – Stuart Smith 

When the National Party supported the so-called Zero Carbon legislation, we did so with a clear undertaking that we in government would take the following approach: a science-based approach; a focus on innovation and technology (rather than reducing consumption); long-term signals to the economy; New Zealand to act with international partners – not in isolation; [to] consider and manage wider economic impacts. Clearly, the Labour Government’s proposal does not align with at least the last two points, and we will all pay the price for this.

National takes a more rational approach. Yes, we must reduce our emissions; however, moving in isolation ahead of our trading partners will not reduce emissions to the atmosphere. Rather they will likely increase them as production shifts elsewhere to less efficient producers, not to mention decimating one of our major export sectors and impoverishing us all.

We simply should not let the prime minister’s personal ambition of leading the world in climate change compromise our best interests. – Stuart Smith 

This isn’t just environmentalism and it isn’t really railway enthusiasm (which I have some sympathy for, because I like trains), but is hatred of human beings.  Hatred not only of their freedom of choice, but also their lives.  – Liberty Scott

They wont stop protesting until it becomes too hard for them to do so, they will block more roads and demand “action” from whatever government is in power, regardless of the action being carried out for their cause.  Because what they want is applause and approval from the like-minded, their own little network of misanthropes, and most of all, media attention so they can be interviewed, endlessly.

This raises their social standing to have disrupted “evil” car “fascists” and drawn attention to a “righteous” cause (diverting taxpayers’ money to some train services). They’ll feel special and privileged, and hopefully get selected to go on the Green Party’s list.

I doubt ANY of them have ridden on the Northern Explorer, Coastal Pacific or TranzAlpine trains, ever! Because it’s not about trains.

It is, after all, performative, status-seeking, social misanthropy.  – Liberty Scott

 

– Breanna McKee

New Zealand farmers, located further away from most markets than any other producers, compete on a global market, a market heavily distorted by import quotas (restricting how much New Zealand farmers can sell), tariffs (taxing their products but not taxing domestic producers) and subsidies (undercutting the higher cost of production). If there were largely a free market for agriculture, similar to many manufactured goods, then inefficient producers (that use more energy and emit more CO2) would be out of business or would need to improve efficiency.  

However there is not.  – Liberty Scott 

The most generous view of this is it is futile. It buys virtue signalling from unproductive multi-national lobbyists like Greenpeace and enables Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw to claim they are “world leading”, but the savings in emissions get replaced by higher emissions from elsewhere. When New Zealand reduces production, others will sell to those markets instead, at a slightly higher price, but with higher emissions and less economic efficiency.  The least generous view of it is that it is economic treachery.  It harms a local industry to ineffectively achieve a policy objective. – Liberty Scott 

Sure, whatever New Zealand does on emissions will make ~0 impact on climate change, but if there is going to be action on emissions New Zealand has to join in, or it faces the likelihood of sanctions from several major economies. What matters though is this small economy does not kneecap its most productive and competitive sectors in order to virtue signal.  
Of course there are plenty who hate the farming sector, either because of what they produce and who they vote for, and the Green Party thinks agriculture should go all organic, produce LESS at HIGHER prices, and you can imagine the impact of this on the poor (but the Greens think they can tax the rich to pay for everyone).  They are very happy to spend the tax revenue collected, but treat it as a sunset industry.

So sure, agriculture needs to be included, but there needs to be a Government that doesn’t want to shrink the sector in which New Zealand has the greatest comparative advantage.  – Liberty Scott 

While we are a long way from having an officially approved national culture we’re not that so far away if a political environment has been encouraged by the Labour Government  that allows Creative NZ to think it’s entitled to defund a thirty year old high school Shakespeare festival because it doesn’t measure up to what it considers to be part of our so-called ’emerging culture’. Of course, Creative NZ has also decided what that ’emerging culture’ is as well.

The absurdity of this view is such that it actively seeks to delegitimise the work of the man widely considered to be the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s greatest dramatist. In the bizarre view of Creative NZ, Shakespeare’s body of work, which includes some of the greatest plays ever written, is nothing more than than a ‘canon of imperialism’. This, in itself, is a nonsensical argument because imperialism, as a feature of the emerging global capitalism, didn’t appear until the late nineteenth century. So Creative NZ’s view of Shakespeare’s work is also lacking in historical context and perspective. – Against the Current

IT IS DIFFICULT to see the Arts Council’s decision to defund Shakespeare as anything other than “propaganda of the deed”. In the current, unusually tense, cultural climate, the idea that a decision to refuse a $30,000 grant to an organisation responsible for introducing the art of William Shakespeare to a total of 120,000 (and counting) secondary school students might, somehow, pass unnoticed and unremarked is nonsensical. The notion that the Council’s decision was a carefully targeted ideological strike is further buttressed by the comments attached to its refusal. To describe these as incendiary hardly does them justice. – Chris Trotter

Putting to one side the self-evident reality that a festival involving thousands of young people in acting, directing, set-designing and painting, costuming, composing and providing incidental music to a host of independent theatrical productions, offers an unassailable prima facie case for being of great relevance to New Zealand’s “contemporary art context”: how should we decode the assessment document’s gnomic formulation: “Aotearoa in this time and place and landscape”?

Given that all state institutions are now required to ensure that their decisions reflect the central cultural and political importance of te Tiriti o Waitangi, as well as their obligation to give practical expression to the Crown’s “partnership” with tangata whenua, the advisory panel’s meaning is ominously clear. At this time, and in this place, the policy landscape has no place for artistic endeavours that draw attention to the powerful and enduring cultural attachments between New Zealand and the British Isles.

Expressed more bluntly, Creative New Zealand is serving notice on applicants for state funding that, unless their projects both acknowledge and enhance the tino rangatiratanga of Māori they will be deemed to have insufficient relevance to the “contemporary art context” to warrant public financial support.

This is even worse than it sounds.  – Chris Trotter

A “decolonising Aotearoa”. Here exposed is the unabashed ideological bias of the Arts Council and its assessors. There is a considerable head-of-steam building among some Māori (and their Pakeha supporters in the public service, academia and the mainstream news media) for a wholesale stripping-out of the political, legal and cultural institutions of the “colonial state”, and for their replacement by the customs and the practices of te ao Māori. At present, this is the agenda of the “progressive” elites only. Certainly, no such proposition has been placed before, or ratified by, the New Zealand electorate.

Not that these same elites would feel at all comfortable about important cultural judgements being placed in the hands of the uneducated masses. Indeed, it is likely that the decision-makers at the Arts Council are entirely persuaded that an important part of their mission is to so radically reshape the cultural landscape that the “decolonising of Aotearoa” comes to be seen as entirely reasonable. If re-educating this benighted Pakeha majority means limiting their own (and their children’s) access to the works of “an Elizabethan playwright” (a man who is, indisputably, among the greatest artists who ever lived) then so be it. – Chris Trotter

The panel of assessors is concerned that the festival’s sponsoring organisation, the Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand, is too “paternalistic”, and that the entire Shakespearian genre it is dedicated to promoting is “located within a canon of imperialism and missed the opportunity to create a living curriculum and show relevance”.

That’s an imperialistic “canon” with one “n” – not two! Alluded to here, presumably, is the entire theatrical menu of Western Civilisation: from Aristophanes to Oscar Wilde. (The English had no empire to speak of in Shakespeare’s time!) A cultural collection which, apparently, has no place in a “living curriculum” – from which, one can only deduce, Dead White Males have been ruthlessly purged. Only by excluding the cultural achievements of the past, the Arts Council seems to saying, can any artistic endeavour hope to “show relevance”.

To those who shake their heads in disbelief at this rejection of historical continuity, it is important to make clear just how hostile the post-modern sensibility is to the whole idea of a materially and imaginatively recoverable past – a past with the power to influence both the present and the future. The post-modernists hate the idea of History as both tether and teacher – fettering us to reality, even as it reveals the many ways our forebears have responded to the challenges of their time. When post-modernists talk about relevance, what they really mean is amnesia. Only an amnesiac can inhabit an eternal present – post-modernism’s ideal state-of-being.

Shakespeare and his works are downgraded and rejected precisely because his words and his plays connect us to the past – revealing the tragi-comic continuity of human existence. More than that, Shakespeare’s art is of a power that at once confirms and dissolves history. In his incomparable mastery of the English language he reminds us that we are more than male and female, rich and poor, Māori and Pakeha. What this “Elizabethan playwright” reveals to us, and hopefully will go on revealing to succeeding generations until the end of time, is the wonder and woe of what it means to be human. – Chris Trotter

Creative New Zealand should be about embracing all forms of art and all artists. It should be flexible, empathetic and responsive. It should have a well understood and fair system for allocating funds, with checks and balances throughout. It should operate under proper governmental oversight and public accountability.

But this is a far-off dream. Creative NZ missed the memo. – Terry Sheat 

CNZ has a prescriptive and inflexible view of what artistic endeavours are worthy of funding. To be funded, and funded fairly, you must fit within CNZ’s vision of what art should be in New Zealand. The Arts Council, which is supposed to be in control, is most likely being led around by its nose by CNZ and seems to be functioning as little more than a rubber stamp. Governmental oversight is non-existent. No one is held to account.

As well as de-funding, there is a gradual and insidious underfunding of CNZ’s non-preferred grant recipients. Many must suspect that they are already on the slippery slope. – Terry Sheat 

If I were to mark CNZ’s funding criteria and outcomes against the duties under the legislation, I would be forced to give them a failing grade. I wouldn’t give them funding. They are not delivering to the proper scope of their mission statement. Diversity is not diversity of “New Zealand art”, it is diversity of all art in New Zealand, with freedom of artistic expression for all. That is literally in the statute. – Terry Sheat 

But the problem is much more pervasive than just one funding round or a couple of disappointed applicants. The issue is at the core of the general stewardship of the health and well-being of the arts in Aotearoa New Zealand. CNZ appears to be busy funding new arts organisations in their own image to replace existing professional arts infrastructure, and then progressively de-funding those original organisations because they do not align with CNZ’s philosophy. It’s dangerous and self-fulfilling stuff.

Creative NZ should be a trusted and respected organisation with the full faith and backing of the wider arts community. It is not. It’s time for a public inquiry so that all affected parties and the public can have their views heard. – Terry Sheat 

In really simple terms, we take the golden goose of the economy, charge it more, and theoretically save the world. It’s a farce. As our costs go up, and we produce less, someone fills the gap, it’s called market economics.

The Government doesn’t understand that bit and perhaps more dangerously, they don’t want to.

They don’t like farmers or farming. They have been after them for the past five years and treat them like idiots and enviro-terrorists. The fact they are the best in the world never seems to have mattered. – Mike Hosking

I think demand was driven largely by expectation.

When people begin to hear about others in their circles being provided with motel accommodation for free they will start to respond. When people see modern state housing being built with attractive income-related rents they will want to get into one even if that means waiting in emergency housing for free for a period.- Lindsay Mitchell

 Labour is tanking in the polls and if the party does win next year, it won’t be with a majority. They’ll have to bring the Greens, Te Pāti Māori and possibly New Zealand First into a coalition to get across the line.

And that’s just a shambles. It will be paralysis by analysis. New Zealand First will block everything unless it involves more free stuff for Boomers, Te Pāti Māori will realise life was a whole lot easier in a coalition with the Nats and ACT,  and the Greens won’t agree to anything unless Labour throws in a free cycle-way or agrees to shoot dead another 200 dairy cows. – Rachel Smalley

Also….look at the policies they’re trying to get through. Three Waters, the emissions pricing plan for farmers, HealthNZ’s major overhaul….huge reforms and they’ll trigger huge issues.

So, if Labour wins a third term under Ardern, that’s going to be a hellish ride. Awful. All of the economic and social fallout from COVID will start peaking as well, the impact of the Government’s multi-billion dollar spend – and a good chunk of that was reckless – will start to rear its head. You’ve got the cost of living issues, high-interest rates and inflation will still be trotting along….and while Ardern is good at a number of things, I don’t think she’s good with the numbers. – Rachel Smalley

With respect , if you decide to cancel the greatest writer in English, or any language come to that, you sound like a f***ing idiot. And you make NZ-Aotearoa look bloody stupid– Sam Neill 

Lifting kids out of themselves, harnessing their own force to something that carries way beyond the mundane and transcends cultural boundaries rather than limiting or suppressing them.

“For heaven’s sake, we’re surely beyond parochialism in this inter-connected world. No one denies the benefits of developing our own stories, but this is ridiculous.- Michael Hurst 

It is a curious phenomenon today that our ruling elites twist themselves in knots to claim that they have protected, via government action, every human life from harm and every human right from being infringed. Yet they often extol a life of individual isolation cut off from every human tie that might demand some self-sacrifice.

Witness the undermining of marriage, the downgrading of having and raising children, and the contempt toward our shared national heritage that might otherwise glue strangers together toward common objectives. Academics as a whole are, of course, the worst, with frequent hatred of unchosen or solemn commitments often mirrored in their trainwreck personal lives. – Chris Sheehan 

My suspicion is that, at its heart, much progressivism is the incongruous dream of radical individuals coming together without having to sacrifice a skerrick of their treasured self-expression. Since this never happens, and many are actually disgusted by raw humanity, the next best thing is to use the levers of power to make it look like it is so.

Loving humanity through government is attractive precisely because it is so impersonal. I pay my taxes and the government sets up a program, run by paid professionals, who can deal with whatever problems beset large classes of sorry, oppressed individuals. I don’t have to deal with a single difficult person unless I am paid to do so under controlled conditions.

Government programs can be useful in their time if properly scrutinised. But to think they are a substitute for the thousand daily sacrifices made by those who build their lives on lasting commitments to other imperfect humans is to engage in the worst kind of folly. – Chris Sheehan 

“Every government intervention creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions,” observed the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. He was being generous by describing interventionism’s nasty side-effects as “unintended.” Some younger interventionists are naïve, and know not what they do, but the older, street-smart captains of progressive politics understand the harms their policies entail. For them, the adverse consequences are features, not bugs. The only downside is the risk of political retribution at the polls.   – Marlo Lewis

I am concerned that it is often not clear to the public or Parliament what outcomes are being sought by governments, how that translates into spending, and ultimately what is being achieved with the public money the Government spends – about $150 billion last year. – John Ryan

Whole-of-government performance reporting that links government spending to outcomes would help focus debate on the longer-term and on some of the more intractable issues we face as a country. And, of course, help answer for the public and Parliament how well governments are playing their role in addressing them. – John Ryan

In my view, a comprehensive review is needed of the arrangements that enable Parliament and the public to understand what governments are seeking to achieve, what is being spent, and what progress is being made. In exchange, this will help the public sector maintain an informed, trusting, and enduring connection with the public they ultimately are there to serve.

An outcome I think we would all support. – John Ryan

Truss and Kwarteng are not wrong in thinking the government taking over half of everything produced in the UK is hurting the British economy. 

Thanks to huge sacrifices in a Chinese experiment we know what happens when the government takes everything, people stop working. The result is famine. Thirty million Chinese starved to death in the Great Leap Forward.

Taxation does not only affect the incentive to be productive, it is costly. It costs money to collect tax. We have to fill out forms, keep records and hire accountants, just to pay tax. It is called the dead weight of tax. The greater share of GDP collected, the higher the cost. There comes a point when even if the rates of tax are increased it is so damaging to the economy the total revenue from taxation cannot increase. Tax rate increases can result in less revenue. – Richard Prebble

The economists were asked: “What is New Zealand’s dead weight of tax?” “What percentage of GDP can the government take before it affects the economy’s ability to pay?”

The government was at that time taking 34 per cent of GDP. Dr Sully and Dr Knox Lovell found the dead weight of tax was not 8 cents as Treasury thought but for every extra dollar of tax the cost was a staggering, $2.64. Their modelling indicated once the government was taking 20 per cent of GDP any further taxation reduced the economy’s ability to pay.

The Treasury hired an Australian economist, Ted Sieper, to review the research and disprove it. Sieper did his review and found that once government was collecting 15 per cent of GDP any further tax was counterproductive. Treasury’s response was to close down the project and ignore the results. – Richard Prebble

When the Lange government reduced the top rate of tax from 66 cents to 33 cents the new top rate raised far more revenue than Treasury’s model predicted. The projections of the Office of the Budget are never right. In part because the models fail to predict how incentives change behaviour. – Richard Prebble

The demand for free services is infinite. Governments must adopt the ideas of reformers like New Zealand’s Professor Robert McCulloch and Sir Roger Douglas and create patients’ health accounts. Then we will be incentivised to manage our health costs. Otherwise rising health costs will destroy our economies.

No country can afford to have government spending over 30 per cent of GDP. In New Zealand government’s share of GDP has risen from 35.64 per cent under Bill English to 42.94 per cent last year. Treasury predicts this will fall but, as we have noted, treasury predictions are rarely correct. –

Don’t focus on the dead, Prime Minister. Put your voice and energy behind the Iranian women who are dying in protests today. 

Be a woman who stands up for women. – Rachel Smalley

Kent’s warning is particularly apposite today, because we live increasingly in a world in which words and words alone are the measure of all things, especially vice and virtue. A good person is one who espouses the right opinions, and an even better one is someone who trumpets them. The converse is also true, that a bad person is one who does not have the right opinions, and an even worse one is someone who trumpets the wrong opinions.

This has a gratifying effect, for it dichotomises people into the kingdom of the damned and the kingdom of the saved: it is gratifying because man is a dichotomising animal who abjures complexity and ambiguity if he can, and loves scapegoats.

Another advantage of making opinion the measure of virtue and vice is that it frees man from the restraint and discipline that were traditionally necessary to be considered a virtuous person. Think and say the right things, and you are free in many spheres of existence that formerly were subject to rules. – Theodore Dalrymple

No doubt every philosophy of life has its anomalies, but what may be called the logocratic conception of virtue (the espousal of the right wordsas the measure of personal moral worth) is especially rich in them. Usually, this modern overemphasis on opinion both decries censoriousness and is highly censorious, particularly about the censoriousness of others: a meta-censoriousness, as it were.

Thus, a person who believes that it is wrong for someone voluntarily to drug himself to the point of intoxication, or who decries the various forms of self-mutilation that are now extolled as a liberation for self-expression, thereby reveals himself to be censorious and intolerant, tolerance now being taken to be a willingness to condemn nothing except condemnation itself, perhaps with the “celebration” of behaviour that deviates transgressively from former social norms. The expropriation of the expropriators has been replaced as a political desideratum by the censure of the censurers.

The fear of appearing censorious soon leads to fear of making moral judgments of any kind, but especially if they are of a straightforward, immemorial or conventional nature. – Theodore Dalrymple

But to return to Kent’s warning to Lear not to take words at face value or to assume that they bear only the most literal interpretation. As I have mentioned, this is a lesson to be relearnt today that is particularly apposite in a culture in which opinion is almost the sole touchstone of virtue. One of the consequences of this shallow conception of virtue is an almost inevitable inflation of expression: a verbal arms race in which extravagance of expression is taken as evidence in itself of the depth of feeling and therefore of virtue also. – Theodore Dalrymple

Resentment is the easiest lesson to teach and learn because no life is entirely without reason for it. This is because perfection is not of this world, at least where human existence is concerned. There is almost a natural propensity to resentment, insofar as it offers many sour comforts such as an explanation for failings and failures. No doubt there are some people who have, by exercising self-control, avoided the expression of resentment throughout their lives, but I surmise that there are almost none who have never felt it. And since resentment almost always contains a strong element of dishonesty by focusing on harms done and ignoring benefits received, inflation of language serves its end admirably. Everyone wants to be a victim, not in the sense that everyone has been a victim of something in his life, but a victim in a big way. Little slights therefore have to be magnified into gross, traumatic and lasting insults or worse, rather than a normal part of living in society. It is not surprising that an ever-greater number of people come to believe that they have been flayed alive—permanently. This is an attitude that no amount of success or privilege by comparison with others can assuage. In the midst of the greatest luxury, there is always room for resentment.

Inflation is as bad for language as it is for money. Keynes pointed out, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (published in 1919), that monetary inflation changes the balance of economic power in a society. Inflation of language changes the balance of political power in society. It is the Gonerils and the Regans who benefit from it while the Cordelias languish. Those who fail to master the arts of exaggeration, self-dramatisation and emotional incontinence (especially when combined with bureaucratese) are sidelined politically and derided culturally, leaving the world in control of specialists in discourse studies. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is true that the authoritarian-left is denying biology, but the deeper truth of the situation is perhaps even more concerning. The incoherence of the protesters’ responses and the fact that the walkout was scheduled in advance suggests something darker: the protesters are “read-only,” like a computer file that cannot be altered. They will not engage ideas — they will not even hear ideas — because their minds are already made up. They have been led to believe that exposure to information is in and of itself dangerous.

Scientists, philosophers, and scholars of all sorts have effectively been accused of thoughtcrimes before it is even known what we’re going to say. The very concept of thoughtcrime, as Orwell himself well understood, is the death knell to discourse, to discovery, to democracy. – Heather Heying

Yes, we need better science education and literacy1. But more important — more fundamental — we need to reinvigorate the concept of education itself. Those who are truly educated are also educable, which means taking in new information throughout your life, and being willing to re-investigate, and throw out, even your most cherished beliefs. If our schools and universities are not prepared to do this job, we must ask ourselves: where shall our next educational structures be built? – Heather Heying

Freethinkers of Portland State find ourselves confronted with a new secular religion, called “intersectionality.” This doctrine conceives of human beings in terms of a good-and-evil binary of “oppressed” and “oppressor,” reducing individuals to a collection of group identities rated within a hierarchy of “marginalization.”

Intersectionality’s true believers tend to be far less tolerant than traditional religious believers with their sophisticated apologetics. To intersectionalists, skepticism is an existential threat. To question their beliefs, I’ve been told, constitutes “debating someone’s right to exist.” – Andy Ngo

This Government is trying to claim progress on homelessness by making sure the reports it publishes focuses on the amount of money spent and the number of programmes started – not the actual outcomes.

Unfortunately for this Government, starting programmes and throwing money at them is not the same as improving outcomes for New Zealanders. – Chris Bishop

On every metric, housing has gotten worse. Rents are up $140 per week, thousands of households live in emergency housing motels, including nearly 4000 children, and the state house waitlist has increased by over 20,000 applicants since Labour came to office.

The Government now spends over $1 million per week on emergency housing and there has been a quadrupling in the number of families living in cars and tents since 2017.

If failure is the target, then the Government gets a gold star. – Chris Bishop

The private sector is facing the biggest assault from central and local government in living history.

It is now a constant that business, on the back of footing the bill directed by the government response to COVID is now to be the instrument of State to front the fight on equality and climate change. The free market led mixed economy that has provided decades of economic expansion and derivative wealth is fast becoming a command economy. This is the antithesis of your role as business leaders fronting competitive organizations driving profit, productivity and economic growth.

A new era of equal outcomes is dominating the territory previously held by promotion of ability. The State is no longer satisfied by a primary role of providing an even playing field and equality of opportunity. The face of business is now deemed more important than its substance. Business now carries the burden of social and economic engineering dangerously shifting to being an arm of the State, under the realm of this government.- Alistair Boyce

A strong free market liberal democracy is vital. By acquiescing to the ideological assault vulnerable small and medium business becomes gradually condemned to economic starvation. Ultimately the State inherits what’s left of productive capacities and then reconnects it with remaining economic expertise to rescue the inevitably failing experiment. The proliferation of business consultants is needed to bandage and artificially extend the compacting economic tumult.

Do not acquiesce. Be honest and lead the path to a productive growing economy based on New Zealand’s business led multiplier that drives our cities, towns and rural economies. Business of all sizes need the policies of practical reality and an even playing field to have a stable future. Say no to the coerced ‘Fair Pay Agreements’, ‘Emissions Trading Scheme’ and ‘National Income Insurance Scheme’ at every point. Do not allow dilution or negotiated compromise on obviously flawed legislation.

Changing or shaping by coalescing with government and State sector is short term expediency. Bold opposition is required followed by real change in government. – Alistair Boyce

Totalitarian centralized government is at odds with the sprawling socio economic reality of New Zealand’s sparsely populated country. The government sector needs to listen, learn and support the business environment to a goal of equitable growth based on ability, innovation, persistence and entrepreneurship. The low bar of satisfying perceived social equity is stifling confidence and growth.

At some point ineffective lobbying has to turn to outright condemnation.

I challenge and implore you-do not accept the false god of State domination on the back of climate change ideology to minimise and demonise your primary purpose. Any perceived threat to social license is ideologically driven by the State and media as opposed to socio-economic reality.

Please be proud of the economic growth achieved through the thrust of free market liberal democracy and demand it’s primacy. It has achieved growing measures of wealth and derivative independence for the marginalised and oppressed faster and more permanently than State interventions. Global economic growth and productivity has and will allow freedom and equality of opportunity. The market can be the natural curb to climate change albeit only in developed economies. Do not be embarrassed by these principles and this identity. – Alistair Boyce

The State can inhibit what you do best or encourage and promote it within the bounds of civil society, allowing creation of wealth. The State should concentrate on providing a fundamental equality of opportunity for all in equal measure.

Do not compromise to maintain spurious power within the State machine. Work to drive, control and shape the machine positively forward to drive growth and profit. Your independent spirit and resolve will earn respect as the protectorate of economic freedoms. – Alistair Boyce

Preserve stable Liberal Democracy at all costs. Our future depends on this as opposed to marginalising and alienating segments of society and economy through overt State expansion and centralisation.

If business has to continue operating on its knees it is half dead already.

Embrace your knowledge, ability and experience, stay true to business ideals and boldly engage with the State and government. – Alistair Boyce

The tests to initiate so-called Fair Pay Agreements are anti-democratic, forcing the process on workers who don’t want them – Paul Goldsmith

These mis-named agreements will reduce flexibility, choice and agility in our workplaces, at the very time when we need to be agile in a competitive world.

There are three hurdles for starting a Fair Pay Agreement: a mere 10 per cent of workers covered by a proposed agreement, or just 1000 workers, which is less than half a per cent of an occupation with 200,000 workers, or a loose public interest test that could apply even if nobody voted for it.

There is nothing ‘fair’ about Fair Pay Agreements, if a tiny fraction of workers can initiate bargaining and dictate terms for the majority. – Paul Goldsmith

Even if no one wants an agreement at all, bureaucrats in Wellington can force the bargaining process to begin anyway. Once started, there is no stopping it. – Paul Goldsmith

If the majority of workers do not want a Fair Pay Agreement, they should not be forced into a deal at the whim of the unions or because a bureaucrat decides that is what is best for them – Paul Goldsmith

We are pouring billions of dollars into an energy transition, health reforms, Three Waters. And our watchdogs are telling us we have no adequate way of knowing whether our efforts are making a difference, or assessing whether one set of initiatives is better than another.

We need better information about what is being attempted and what is being achieved, but, more importantly, better ways to make use of information about policy effectiveness. – Josie Pagani

The chronic inability to be precise about the objective of government initiatives has real-world effects beyond its linguistic crimes.

We saw a fresh example this past week when Creative New Zealand was called out over its decision to decline a funding application from the Shakespeare Globe Centre NZ​. Its own reviewer stated, to global ridicule, that the Bard’s work is located in a ‘’canon of imperialism’’.

Even if it were, Creative NZ is not there to fix the historic sins of imperialism. – Josie Pagani

Ironically, the point of Shakespeare is the improbable precision in his descriptions of universal experiences: ‘’wild goose chase’’ (Romeo and Juliet), ‘’eaten me out of house and home’’ (Henry IV), or ‘’cruel to be kind’’ (Hamlet).

Timeless expressions achieve their beauty through their matchless clarity. From clarity comes transparency, and from transparency emerges accountability and improvement.

A lack of clarity is not just drivel dressed in pretty words. It has a political purpose. Real power resides in the thickets. (Ahem: King Lear.) – Josie Pagani

I have previously advocated for initiatives like much stronger select committees, equipped with sufficient policy grunt to evaluate policy choices, and led by MPs whose career choice to be a legislator balances the choice of others to be executives.

There are legitimate debates to be had about how much money is spent by government in pursuit of goals, and what those goals should be. But no matter where you stand on that, we need far stronger institutions to track value for money, because then we can achieve so much more. – Josie Pagani

magine spending billions of dollars a year and not really knowing whether it makes a difference or not.

Welcome to the world of government. – Brent Edwards

Surely the Treasury must know how effective the spending is? No. It tracks where the money goes and ensures that it is spent according to the Budget appropriations, but not whether it had the desired effect. Inputs and outputs drive the fiscal system, not outcomes. – Brent Edwards

More broadly though, most people – whether they support high or low tax rates – would surely want to know whether the taxes they pay make a difference, not just to the environment but particularly in big spending portfolios such as health, education and social services. – Brent Edwards

Better information might also lead to more informed debates about the efficacy of one policy over another. Spending more is always a point politicians can make but the big question is whether their spending achieves anything? – Brent Edwards

So, this is not an argument about spending more or less. It is an argument about ensuring whatever amount is spent is as effective as it can be.

Upton, for instance, is not arguing for a reduction in spending on the environment. He does not believe the Government is spending too much protecting the country’s fragile environment. He simply wants to know whether that spending is effective or not.

When it comes to total government spending – now about $150b a year – shouldn’t we all?

The public deserve to know whether that spending is making a difference. – Brent Edwards

I hesitate to give advice, but I have to say that if you’re ever in a situation like the one in which my family found ourselves, do not forget to love, touch and look into the eyes of every other family member regularly. Early during our time in hospital, I started to think of us as five fingers of the same hand. Every finger is important, even the crooked and/or hairy ones. There is a temptation to only pay attention to the patient, especially if they’re a young child, but you ignore other family members at your peril. I can’t speak for my Henry, but I’m willing to bet he was happy that Leah and I took good care of the brothers he loved so much, and each other. – Rob Delaney

As to these yokels gluing themselves to walls or pavements or streets, my idea is that they should just be left there to fend for themselves! Give them a few days super-glued to a busy street and see how long before they beg for help.

They are idiots who destroy rather than build. Nothing is sacred for these hoons. But as their destructive antics become even more alarming, one fears for what lies ahead.

As a result of activists terrorising art galleries, we can expect to see the need for far more stringent security measures being put in place, with the costs to visitors going up and the ability to get close to some of these great works of art taken away from us. – Bill Muehlenberg

Conservatives, as the name implies, like to conserve. We like to preserve what is good in a culture. We like to maintain order amid chaos, and some beauty amongst ugliness.

But the radical Left simply wants to tear down and destroy. It is their way or the highway. And their way usually seems to gravitate towards bullying, intimidation, aggression, and destruction. – Bill Muehlenberg

The incapacity and lack of courage of the political class, no matter how lengthily or expensively educated, is a clue to the despair that many people now feel in Britain. Its incompetence and lack of probity, its absence of the most elementary understanding, compares unfavorably with the practical intelligence of the local plumber, carpenter, or electrician. No one has confidence that any replacement of Truss from within or without the Conservative Party will be for the better, only incompetent in some different way.

The wrong lessons will be drawn, of course, from the Truss debacle. If lower taxes (even if only in prospect) do not work, then higher ones must. The solution to Britain’s deep-seated problems now offered by almost the entire political class is to turn the country into a giant version of the National Health Service, the country’s socialized health-care system that has made paupers of almost the whole population, which is obliged to accept what it is given whether good, bad, or indifferent.

By her incompetence, Truss has given lower taxation a bad name. We now face a cycle of high taxation and expenditure, with low growth necessitating ever-higher taxation and expenditure. Much of the educated class already believes in the moral value of taxation irrespective of its effects. The British are now trapped into slavery to their state—a state more incompetent, and more corrupt, than its European equivalents or even than the European Union.

It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. An apparatchik class will prosper among the embers of the slowly expiring economy. Truss, whom no one will remember with affection, was not to blame for the problems of her country, but by her incapacity and utter lack of common sense, she has worsened those problems for years to come. That’s quite an achievement for 44 days in office. – Theodore Dalrymple

The headlines of the last week will tell you that our health system is indeed in crisis. The educational outcomes and achievements of our young people are at their lowest ever. Those headlines tell the story of a country in decline. – Bruce Cotterill

We know that 40 per cent of our kids are leaving school without the necessary literacy or numeracy skills to function in society. I asked an education specialist, a university professor on the topic, what “to function” meant. Her response? To fill out a form!

But the headlines continue. The police lost more than 300 rounds of ammunition in transit. Rotorua hospitality businesses slamming the Government’s approach to seasonal workers. Our immigration stats telling us there are more people leaving than arriving, and our universities saying that the best case scenario is to have international student numbers back to 50 per cent of pre-Covid levels by this time next year.

Sometimes I find myself asking … is this really happening in New Zealand? The answer, sadly, is yes. – Bruce Cotterill

The list above is a fraction of what is going wrong in New Zealand right now. To be fair to the Government, their focus is on something else. They are busy changing the social structure of the country to suit their leftist ideology.

Why you would restructure the health system during a health crisis is beyond me.

Tertiary education has been centralised too, with consequences so far that should send board members scrambling to review their directors’ insurance.

When we’re so short of people across every industry, why would we constrain immigration? When our finances are under so much pressure, why would you spend the equivalent of what it costs to build a regional hospital on the merger of two media outlets that are already government owned? The answer is that you do so if you want to control the narrative. – Bruce Cotterill

Interestingly, a small number of ministers get pushed forward to respond on the Government’s behalf.

These people now carry multiple roles. My observation is that their appointment is based more on their ability in public relations and communications than their ability to get things done. – Bruce Cotterill

I’ll admit, I think political leaders would be better equipped if they had real-life experiences in the workplace before going to a career in politics. Those experiences would provide core executive skills that enable a leader to effectively drive projects and processes, and to assemble management tools for their toolbox: planning skills, execution frameworks, people management capability and the ability to follow up effectively.

I also think we’d be better served by our politicians if they had a maximum term — say nine or 12 years. That way we wouldn’t have people whose entire career is spent inside the walls of the parliamentary system. – Bruce Cotterill

And so we have people who are good at communicating and spinning a story when a microphone is pushed in their face. They’re very good at telling us how many more nurses, teachers or police they’ve recruited. What they don’t tell you is how many have left. They can’t explain why we have the problems we have, nor can they shed any believable light on their proposed solutions.

And yet, in most of the critical operational functions of government, we are in bad shape. Good government would see the existing problems get smaller as new ones emerge. Not here. The problems are just getting bigger. And the attention of government and the ministers seem to be diverted away from the real issues.

The recent emissions policy is a case in point. New Zealand doesn’t need to be a world leader. We don’t need to set world firsts. Even the global elite of the climate change hierarchy state clearly that climate change policy should not come at the expense of food production.

And the reality is that it doesn’t matter what this country does on climate change policy; we are not going to make a difference to the global outcomes for the planet. And yet here we are, risking our biggest export industry, destroying farming families and reducing our own food supply because we think we want to lead the world. – Bruce Cotterill

Education will give these young people skills for life and a new perspective. The military provides discipline and the family environment that these young people could benefit from and perhaps hanker for.

Make it option if you like. A life of crime? Or a life.

But it’s almost as if our leaders have decided that the bad stuff doesn’t matter as long as they can cope with the PR fallout.

Instead, it seems that the time and effort goes into their pursuit of the social adjustments and ideological projects that they want to be remembered for. – Bruce Cotterill

We have seen the face of evil and it sold us sneakers. – Michael Johnston

The word ‘woman’ is rich with centuries of meaning, and has instant recognition. Technically, the definition in reputable dictionaries is adult human female, and is the same understanding that the general law of New Zealand has. In life, culture, and society it informs, conveys, encompasses, evokes, and involves more than we could ever get from the term ‘people with a cervix’. To use that term in place of ‘woman’ is reductive, demeaning, and unnecessarily convoluted. Neither does it arouse the same level of engagement from us as when we read the word ‘woman’. – Katrina Biggs

Plain language and inclusive language can be uncomfortable marriage partners. Plain language says that we should use the word ‘women’ for women, because that’s the word that conveys the most meaning and understanding in the shortest possible way. Inclusive language says we should use a term like ‘people with a cervix’ for women, because transgender females and transgender males prefer it, due to the word ‘woman’ potentially causing discomfort for them. This particular type of term to replace the word ‘woman’ is mainly used in health-related narratives concerning our bodies, as transpeoples’ biology and gender identity are at odds with each other.

Language helps us navigate the world by having rules. They ensure that we commonly understand both spoken and written narratives without first having to spend time deciphering or decoding them. Even when language evolves, there are still rules about how it is used. Inclusive language, as we know it in the context of using terms like ‘people with a cervix’, has no rules. Just like gender identities and neo-pronouns, a Google search does not find a concise and stable list of inclusive language terms. All three are mobile concepts, and completely unknown in many walks of life. Yet they are being used in place of language that has rules which enable widespread understanding for the greatest number of people the most amount of time.

Will the Plain Language law apply plain language rules to women, where we will once again be called women instead of ‘people with a cervix? Depending on how it’s applied, we may have a tool in the Plain Language law to fight against inclusive language – a harmless-sounding moniker on the surface, but with deep indignities, misunderstandings, non-engagement, and resentments arising from its’ use. This new law will be tracked with interest, and, feasibly, women will use the full force of it to take back our language. – Katrina Biggs

In our mind we just need to know what the story is here. Under the government proposal, sheep and beef farmers have the potential to be the most affected. Nobody wants that and HWEN would never support a proposal that makes the farming sector unviable – let’s be clear about that. – Andrew Morrison

We can’t have rural NZ decimated and we would never support that. We have worked in good faith in partnership and so now we have to quickly sort out why government has failed to deliver on some of our recommendations. – Andrew Morrison

Emissions pricing needs to be practical, pragmatic and fair for farmers, and there is still a lot that needs to be improved to make what the Government have announced workable. Remember that if farmers are asked to do something they need to see the logic of what they have been asked to do and benefits of it.

So we are trying to make sure that whatever is put in place is right and that farmers can say, that makes sense, and will get on with it. – Jim van der Poel

It’s gut wrenching to think we have a proposal by government that rips the heart out of the work we have done and to the families who farm the land. Feds is deeply unimpressed with government.- Andrew Hoggard

Now they’ll be selling up so fast you won’t even hear the dogs barking on the back of the ute as they drive off. The Government’s plan means the small towns, like Wairoa, Pahiatua, Taumaranui – pretty much the whole of the East Coast and central North Island and a good chunk of the top of the South – will be surrounded by pine trees quicker than you can say ‘ETS application’  – Andrew Hoggard

Just as the word homophobia has been stretched far beyond its original meaning (that is, a hatred or fear of homosexuals) and the accusation of racism is routinely hurled at anyone who challenges the cult of identity politics, so the claim of misogyny is frequently used as a smear against people who refuse to bow to feminist orthodoxy.- Karl du Fresne

All this tells us is that Parliament is slow to adjust to the times. It may have seemed quaint, but it was hardly misogynistic. – Karl du Fresne

It seems inconceivable that at a time of hyper-inflation and global unrest, any government would deliberately destabilise the agricultural sector by introducing policies that would increase costs to primary producers, reduce production, and fuel price increases. Yet that’s what Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government is planning to do. – Muriel Newman

That our Prime Minister wants the owners of ruminant livestock to pay a penalty for a by-product of a digestive process that is older than the dinosaurs, is madness personified.

Methane, an atmospheric trace gas, is part of an ancient natural cycle. Plants absorb carbon dioxide and using the green chlorophyll in their leaves combine it with water to trap the sun’s energy as food. When plant matter is eaten by ruminants, methane is produced, which breaks down into carbon dioxide and water vapour to continue the cycle.

Over three-quarters of the planet’s methane comes from natural sources such as wetlands, with the balance produced by landfills, rice paddies, and livestock. Since New Zealand has only one percent of the world’s farmed ruminants the actual contribution of Kiwi livestock to methane in the atmosphere is almost too small to measure.  – Muriel Newman

Agriculture is New Zealand’s biggest industry, generating more than 70 percent of our export earnings and about 12 percent of our gross domestic product.

The impact of Jacinda Ardern’s tax on the sector will be significant. Prices of home-grown protein – including milk, cheese, and meat – will undoubtedly rise as local production falls. And our crucial export returns will decline – by up to an estimated 5.9 percent for dairy, 21.4 percent for lamb, 36.7 percent for beef, and 21.1 percent for wool.

We can see the potential fallout by reminding ourselves of the consequences of a previous reckless decision by our Prime Minister when, without warning, she banned new offshore oil and gas exploration on the eve of a meeting of world leaders – so she could boast about her decisive climate change leadership.

That decision contributed to the closure of the Marsden Point Oil Refinery – with a loss of 240 local jobs and many hundreds more indirectly – leaving New Zealand dependent on imported fuel that we used to produce ourselves.

Paradoxically, the PM’s actions did not reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but increased them – as the Taranaki based methanol producer Methanex explained: – Muriel Newman

There are very real concerns about the fallout from Jacinda Ardern’s radical plan to tax livestock emissions without allowing farmers to balance their ledger by claiming credits for sequestering carbon dioxide through the plant matter on their farms – including woodlots, shelter belts, riparian planting, native bush, crops, and, of course, pasture.

As a result, the policy will have profound and widespread consequences, far beyond the damage to those farmers who are expected to be forced out of the industry.

Many of their farms are likely to end up in the hands of those seeking land for carbon farming. If that happens, not only will the soil be ruined for future pastoral use, but the resilience of our rural and provincial communities will be undermined through the loss of farming families and the downstream jobs they helped to sustain. Their departure will impact heavily on farm services, meat processing plants, local schools, and the other local businesses.

What’s even more irrational is that the forced exit of the world’s most emission-efficient farmers will increase global emissions as other less efficient nations increase production to fill the gap. – Muriel Newman

Given that a day’s worth of their increased emissions will totally swamp a year’s worth of the reductions the PM is planning to impose on our agricultural base, one has to wonder about the sanity of our decision-makers.

Surely common sense should prevail. Firstly, no New Zealand government should even consider dangerous Armageddon-style policies that will fundamentally disrupt the industries that have created our nation’s wealth. And secondly, all climate policies should be put on hold until the main emitters begin to curb their emissions. – Muriel Newman

It’s been two and a half bloody years or more of dumb regulation after dumb regulation after dumb regulation, and  for me, it’s just like, Nah, screw it, I’m done with being polite about it. – Andrew Hoggard

Yes, we want the research and development to happen, and we want the science and technology to be able to lower the emissions, but we need to be doing it in step, so pricing can’t get ahead of competitor countries, and we can’t put our food security at risk. – Penny Simmonds

Dumping milk onto floors. Hurling food onto walls. Refusing to eat. Gluing body parts. Throwing paint. Refusing to leave. Threatening to pee and poop in your pants. Screaming accusations. Are those the behaviors of a toddler’s temper tantrum? Yes. But they’re also the dominant tactics of today’s climate activists. – Michael Shellenberger, 

The activists who keep degrading precious works of art, and themselves, claim to be concerned about food and energy supplies, but in opposing oil, gas and fertilizerproduction they are actively reducing both. Over the last several months, I have described the demands of climate activists as fanatical and pointed to a large body of evidence suggesting that nihilism, narcissism, and feelings of personal inadequacy are the primary motives.

But nihilism, narcissism, and personal inadequacy alone do not explain why climate activists have chosen temper tantrum tactics. After all, the greatest protest movements of all time engaged in far more grown-up and dignified tactics. Think of the Salt March led by Gandhi, the Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Martin Luther King, and the anti-whaling protests of Greenpeace. – Michael Shellenberger, 

Where protesters in the past asked to be treated like adults, climate protesters today demand to be treated like children. Civil rights activists in the 1950s sat at lunch counters and demanded to be treated like full adults. Notably, it was racist counterprotesters who poured milkshakes over them. Today, it’s the protesters who are spilling milk and throwing food. – Michael Shellenberger, 

JK Rowling has written these great books about empowerment, about young children finding themselves as human beings. It’s about how you become a better, stronger, more morally centred human being. The verbal abuse directed at her is disgusting, it’s appalling.

I mean, I can understand a viewpoint that might be angry at what she says about women. But it’s not some obscene, uber-right-wing fascist. It’s just a woman saying, ‘I’m a woman and I feel I’m a woman and I want to be able to say that I’m a woman.’ And I understand where she’s coming from. Even though I’m not a woman. – Ralph Fiennes

Righteous anger is righteous, but often it becomes kind of dumb because it can’t work its way through the grey areas. It has no nuance. – Ralph Fiennes

When Kelvin Davis used Question Time to say that I view the world through a “pakeha lens” it was nothing I haven’t heard before: “You’re a whakapapa Māori but you’re not kaupapa Māori”; “You’re a plastic Māori”; “You’re a born-again Māori”. It just comes with the territory of being a Māori woman who doesn’t always fit the left’s comfortable stereotype.

Problem is, I don’t think Kelvin is the only Labour minister who thinks what he said. The others might be smarter at hiding it, but they also worship identity politics.

They believe that who you are can matter more than what you do or say. How do I know this? That attitude is all through the policies they promote. Oranga Tamariki, the area I was asking Kelvin about when he made his comments, is just one example. – Karen Chhour

Oranga Tamariki was happy to take Mary from a loving home, the only place she’d ever had security and stability, and place her back with family members who were known to abuse her.

In fairness to Oranga Tamariki, it was following the law, something called Section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act. Section 7AA means the chief executive of Oranga Tamariki has to consider the Treaty when making decisions.

Sure, 7AA may be well-intentioned. But it creates a conflict between protecting the best interests of the child and race-based factors enshrined in 7AA. This conflict has the potential to cause real harm to our children. – Karen Chhour

Since my Member’s Bill was drawn, I have been called a racist. If anything, the opposite is true. My Bill will make Oranga Tamariki colour-blind. It will have to focus on all of the factors that a child needs, instead of placing race at the centre of their decision-making.

When this Bill comes up for the first reading in Parliament, the predictable and tiresome responses will come from the Labour Party, the Māori Party, and the Greens.

I ask them, before they vote this down, to think about Mary and what was best for her. A family who loved and cared for her? Or returning to her abusers?

Mary’s foster parents traced their family tree back far enough that they could find enough of a link to say they were Māori. This twist also shows how bizarre the law is, Mary’s foster parents are the same people, but something that happened centuries before they were born made it okay for them to parent.

Mary still lives with them. She has come out of her shell, she is doing well at school, she has a home for life where she is safe and is thriving. Thank goodness for that branch they found on the family tree, or Mary’s story might have been very different.

I can only hope that my Bill gets a fair hearing because another child might not be so lucky. – Karen Chhour 

For a doctor, the worst thing that could happen to them is that a patient suffers because they don’t get to see them in time. It’s completely outside their hands, which is where the stress comes from. And so, of course, they try to work harder and harder to get to see more and more patients, and that’s where they make mistakes. And that’s the second worst nightmare for a doctor: that they actually make a mistake and a patient suffers. – Dr Deborah Powell

They’re stressed and their morale is really low. They feel the patients’ pain. They understand, but they’re powerless… That’s the sentiment for all health practitioners, but it’s probably worse for doctors because they know if they don’t get to someone, that person might die. That is a huge burden to carry. – Dr Deborah Powell

The population of New Zealand really values its health system and they value the health workforce, but in financial terms not quite so much. Yes, health is expensive, but that’s what it is. I’m not saying we should have an open chequebook – but we shouldn’t be constantly holding budgets down. – Dr Deborah Powell

We have insufficient resident doctors coming out of medical school. We need another 200 at least. It takes years to train a doctor. So again, we should have been onto this years ago. It’s just a failure to train enough and be forward-thinking. – Dr Deborah Powell

We now have a workforce crisis on our hands. We were watching it develop, so we had been lobbying for years. And we had to wait for the crisis to hit us before we actually did something. And that’s a recurring theme, I’m afraid. When you get a crisis someone will finally do something, but it’s five years too late. – Dr Deborah Powell

The lesson for other conservative parties should be clear. Values drive policy, not the other way around, because values endure.

The evidence around the world is that right-wing parties are learning the wrong lessons from populism. Some may outlast the shelf life of a lettuce. But they risk disappearing faster than that packet of mixed spice that’s been sitting in your cupboard for years.- Josie Pagani

Self made men or women are to be admired and in this particular case you would hope, bring with them a level of reassurance that they actually know what they are doing when it comes to finances.

But none of that has really been covered. He has been treated like an oddity and someone not like us. The problem with people like us is most of us couldn’t run a country, nor would we want to. So why are we so obsessed about the neighbour, the vicar, or the postman being the Prime Minister? They’d be a disaster.

Surely his credentials by way of fiscal success indicate he might have a clue. And while money isn’t the be-all and end-all, is does sort of pay the bills. That’s what we want, isn’t it?

Money is an outworking of endeavour. Rishi Sunak’s endeavour was clearly successful. Don’t we want successful people running the place or running anything?

He’s got a lot of money. That’s good. – Mike Hosking

Oxfam reports are like those email scams that put in deliberate typos and grammatical errors so that only the most credulous people believe them, so they don’t have to waste time with people who’ll wise up part-way through. – Eric Crampton

That is to say, after ten years of schooling, only a third of young New Zealanders can write coherently; only half possess basic computational skills; and only two-thirds can cope adequately with a level of written communication fundamental to success in adult life.

These numbers represent a scarcely believable tale of professional failure across New Zealand’s education system. What it reveals is a society that is rapidly losing the ability (if it hasn’t already lost it) to keep itself going – let alone improve itself – on the basis of its own human resources. – Chris Trotter 

For decades, we have been telling ourselves that the best way to make our country wealthier, fairer, and happier was by educating its young people to the highest possible international standard. We looked at countries with world-beating education systems – and test results – like Singapore and Finland, and assumed that theirs was the level of performance to which our own educational experts aspired.

Clearly, that was an unwarranted assumption. New Zealand’s education system – once celebrated as one of the most successful in the world – is in free-fall. By all the recognised international comparators, we are failing – and failing fast. So bad have things become that it is increasingly difficult to find a sufficient number of willing and able participants to make our international test-results robust enough, statistically, to stand comparison. In a telling sign of the times, this dearth of suitable participants is being presented by some school principals as a signal that it is time for New Zealand to abandon international comparisons altogether. – Chris Trotter 

Across academia, in the teacher unions, and increasingly at the chalk-face, the whole notion of education being an international enterprise, in which young New Zealanders must be able to participate (and compete) with confidence, is being rejected. In its place, “progressive” educators are erecting a system geared to rectifying the cultural and social inequities arising out of New Zealand’s colonial past.

With increasing vehemence, international standards are rejected as “Eurocentric” – or even “white supremacist” – weapons for obliterating the unique insights of indigenous cultures. The bitter letter-to-the-Listener struggle over the merits of “Western Science” versus “Mātaurānga Māori”, was but the tip of the ontological iceberg currently ripping a massive hole, albeit well below the waterline of public perception, in New Zealand’s education system.

The extent to which this debate has progressed is revealed in the responses to the shocking performance revealed in the trial-run NCEA assessment tests. According to a post on the RNZ website, “independent evaluators” are concerned that: “New literacy and numeracy tests could lower NCEA achievement rates among Māori and Pacific students.” – Chris Trotter 

In part, this failure is explained by the unwillingness of the more privileged sectors of our society to state with brutal clarity that breaking free of the dismal cycle of “lows” will only ever be achieved by aiming and scoring “high”. Parents must be told that there will be no special pleading; no softening of standards; no blaming of history. Their children must pass the tests, and they must help them pass the tests. The New Zealand state can build schools, and it can train teachers, but it cannot instill a determination in young Māori and Pasifika to be educated to the fullest extent of their powers. – Chris Trotter 

Having, over a lifetime observing the way modern tribes operate in this part of the world, I am led to believe that the current distortion of our history is being given legitimacy simply because it suits Maoridom in its battle for self determination – some would say control of their own destiny.
In fact, the very basis for our programme of reconciliation and compensation Is designed with tribal history as part of the justification of future state funded settlements. But the history being used in these claims against the Crown is a selective version of what actually happened.  – Clive Bibby

Parliament: an ironic place where contradictions abound. At first glance stately and formal, but under the surface we know skulduggery abounds. A place of quiet importance and hushed propriety, yet if you’ve ever seen Question Time (or a Caucus meeting), it gives a disrupted kindergarten a run for its money.- Jonathan Ayling

Frankly, it’s difficult to argue against the claim that official documents should be accessible to the general public. In fact, it’s such a good idea there are already annual ‘Plain Language Awards’ celebrating the public service department which uses the clearest language. But that’s not really what’s up for debate in Boyack’s Bill. Rather, it’s a Government funded structure to employ ‘Plain Language Officers’ (could someone write a ‘use-more-original-names’ Bill?) to peer over the shoulder of each public servant, making sure that their language is not convoluted (that means “tricky”, if it wasn’t plain.) This is the more sinister element of this legislation, and with irony again rearing its ugly head again, Boyack, the sponsor of the Bill, is entirely ignorant to it.

Does this seem a bit elaborate (that means “convoluted”)? Let me put it plainly: given the way this Government has tried to control information, speech, and expression, do we really want a ‘language officer’ signing off on every piece of public comms? What happens when the Government does what I just did there without anyone noticing? Take away the ‘plain’ aspect, and just make it a ‘language officer’… is this sounding a little more Ministry of Truth-esque? Public servants need to be able to give free and frank advice to their political overlords and more importantly, to speak openly with the public; erasing certain words from their vocabulary is a step in the wrong direction.

Is that clear? To control language is to control the ideas we can communicate. – Jonathan Ayling

Just because it is in practice good to write plainly doesn’t mean we need legislation creating a role to enforce this. And just because the intention of the ‘plain language officer’ isn’t inherently censorious, that doesn’t mean it won’t end up silencing provocative speech. – Jonathan Ayling

Despite what some might say, the public service is not simply a conglomeration of higher beings sitting in great ivory towers in Wellington micromanaging the country through sophisticated decrees. (To put it plainly now) they’re normal people, like us, and can be expected to speak on the same level as the rest of the nation in a way we can all perfectly understand, on their own. Like so many other attempts at restricting and controlling speech, this Bill has proven to be another hopeless solution in desperate search of a problem.

To echo a suggestion from Duncan Garner- perhaps it would be a much better use of Government resources to appoint common-sense officers, perhaps even honesty officers or transparency officials!

(If you skimmed to the bottom of the article for the plain explanation in simple words, you can’t put it better than Chris Penk: ‘this Bill is not good. In fact, it is bad.’) – Jonathan Ayling

Just a few years ago, it would have been totally unremarkable for a woman to set clear boundaries over who can lay their hands on her body, especially in a hospital setting. Yet today, thanks to the rise of trans ideology, this perfectly normal request is considered beyond the pale – so much so that a woman can be refused life-saving surgery for making it. This is the dark path the mantra of ‘transwomen are women’ has taken us down. – Raquel Rosario Sanchez

If nothing else, Sunak’s rise is a clear sign that Britain is a successful multiracial democracy, where it is possible for Britons of any ethnic background to reach the highest levels of political life.  – Rakib Ehsan

Predictably, however, Sunak’s coronation has been greeted by the kind of toxic identity politics that now dominates our political discourse. Many ‘anti-racists’ who would normally advocate for ethnic-minority ‘representation’ are now essentially saying that Rishi Sunak doesn’t count. Others have, perversely, tried to present Sunak’s rise as an indictment of Britain – as a sign of our lingering structural racism. Most of these responses have been tortured and confused. – Rakib Ehsan

Those who would normally celebrate diversity and representation are clearly struggling to do so when it comes to Rishi Sunak. Seemingly because Sunak does not subscribe to their identitarian script. This is a script that is as baseless as it is divisive. It is one that views Britain as a country that has historically done more harm than good in the world – and which, thanks to its colonial past, is irredeemably racist.

These ‘anti-racists’ believe that all British institutions – social, economic, political and legal – are deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities. And anyone belonging to an ethnic, racial or religious minority who dares to question this view is presented as somehow inauthentic. Critical opinions are considered to be ‘white’ opinions and the minorities who express them are presumed to be doing so purely for personal advancement.

Those ethnic-minority Britons who say favourable things about Britain or who challenge the woke identitarian outlook are often singled out for abuse by the woke left. In recent years, when ethnic-minority politicians have taken up high-ranking positions in Tory governments, they have been branded as ‘racial gatekeepers’ and traitorous turncoats. – Rakib Ehsan

Ultimately, Sunak’s skin colour should have no bearing on how we judge his premiership. Race is a poor guide to someone’s politics. But when the identitarians say Sunak does not ‘represent’ them, it is not because they have grasped this point. They are not about to adopt a colourblind approach to politics. It is just that Sunak has upset their expectations of what views a non-white politician should hold. And so he can be cast out. The identitarians are still very much wedded to the toxic idea that your race should determine your views.

Besides, Sunak is right not to follow the woke script. The truth is that Britain is one of the most successful multiracial democracies in the world. Britain’s robust anti-discrimination protections and its respect for religious freedoms make it one of the best places to live as a minority. Far from struggling under the weight of systemic racism, many of Britain’s ethnic-minority communities are thriving and are even outperforming the white mainstream. This is not the mean-spirited, racist hellhole that activists make it out to be.

No doubt the success of Rishi Sunak will continue to scramble the minds of Britain’s race obsessives, as they struggle to process any challenge to their worldview. The rest of us would do well to ignore Sunak’s skin colour and concentrate on his policies. – Rakib Ehsan

Britain has pioneered a new kind of economy, having long since abandoned manufacturing as a way of paying its way in the world: a service economy without service. Indeed, the very word service raises hackles in Britain, for it implies hierarchy, the servant who provided it being by definition subordinate to the person for whom the service is performed; and in these prickly democratic, or rather radically egalitarian, times, such subordination is anathema. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is a curious fact that public address announcements in English made in foreign countries, even by foreigners, are now much clearer and more pleasing on the ear than those made in Britain, where the shrieking voice of a person whom I always think of as Ms. Slut-Harridan is much in vogue, probably because there is no suggestion of education, cultivation, politeness, refinement, or any of those other qualities that the British now so detest and find so threatening and reproachful, in her voice. – Theodore Dalrymple

This winter, millions of British citizens, including children, will be tipped, or dumped, into energy poverty severe enough to risk permanent damage to their health. Cold, damp houses provide the perfect breeding ground for mould that not only causes respiratory distress, but renders houses essentially unlivable once established.

One Left-leaning newspaper ran the story outlining the danger, but without a word about why this crisis has emerged: because the woke moralisers of the “environmental” movement helped to create it.

The narcissists of compassion – callow, self-aggrandising, incompetent politicians, their celebrity lackeys, Machiavellian journalists – have insisted ever more loudly over the last five decades that no cost was, and is, too great for others to bear in the pursuit of blind service to “the planet.”  – Jordan Peterson

Virtue-signalling utopians committed to globalisation claim we are destroying the planet with cheap energy. But are they truly and deeply committed to the environmental sustainability so loudly and insistently demanded, or are they merely hell-bent, in the prototypically Marxist manner, in taking revenge on capitalism?

It appears to be the latter. Why otherwise would the mavens of the environmental movement oppose nuclear power, despite its optimal “carbon footprint”?- Jordan Peterson

The mentality among the eco-extremists is as follows: if we have to doom the poor to destroy the system that made the rich, so be it. You just can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

Here is one fact to remember, while we so madly and ineffectively rush to renewables. 

Research has recently indicated that two decades of intense support for such undertakings has hiked the proportion of energy provided by such means from 13-14 per cent to an utterly underwhelming 15.7 per cent. Unfortunately the liberal Left see – Jordan Peterson

Remember: when the aristocracy catches cold, the peasants die of pneumonia. If such extreme measures have become necessary in the richest countries, what in God’s name is going to happen in the poorer ones? When the shortages strike, the poor will inevitably and necessarily turn to less green resources: many, even in Germany, are already stockpiling firewood and coal for the winter, leading to acute shortages. How is incentivising people to cut down and burn trees and use coal in their fireplaces going to help reduce the dreaded “atmospheric carbon load”?  – Jordan Peterson

Perhaps we’ll be able to comfort ourselves, here in the West, with the thought that the food we take for granted will still be available at our tables. But, wait: the crops that nourish our populations cannot be grown without fertiliser (loathed by green folk) and, more specifically, without ammonia. And what, pray tell, is ammonia derived from? Could it be…natural gas? And how many people are dependent for their daily bread on the industrial generation and consequent wide availability of ammonia? Only three or four billion…

The World Bank itself has recently indicated that 222 million people are already experiencing the threat of starvation (described oh-so-nicely as “food insecurity”). The Communists managed to kill 100 million in the last century with their utopian delusions; we’ve barely begun to implement the “save the planet” nightmare, and we’ve already placed twice that number at risk.  – Jordan Peterson

The masses will have to “tighten their belts” to forestall an even worse future catastrophe. The elite academics, think-tanks and corporate consultants, and the politicians who subsidise their intellectual pretensions, will not be particularly affected by such tightening – “privileged” as they are. But the actual poor? To such an elite, they must be sacrificed now to save tomorrow’s hypothetical poor.

222 million people is, no doubt, an underestimate: as the “food insecurity” gets more severe, more countries will place restrictions on food exports. That will harm the international supply lines we all depend on. Then, when the consequences of that manifest themselves, increasingly desperate politicians will begin to nationalise and centralise food distribution (as the French and Germans have already done on the energy front) and cut their farmers off at the knees, who will in turn stop growing food – not out of spite, but because of dire economic impossibility. Then we will have engendered the kind of feedback loop that can really spiral out of control. It will be poor people who die (first, at least), but as we have all been taught by the malevolent eco-moralisers: the planet has too many people on it anyway.

Think about this, while you shiver all too soon in your cold, damp and increasingly expensive and now sub-standard lodgings. You and your family may well have been deemed an expendable excess. – Jordan Peterson

In the psychological and educational arenas, too, we demoralise young people, feeding them a constant diet of concretised apocalypse, focusing particularly on tempering or even obliviating the laudable ambition of boys, hectoring them into believing that their virtue is nothing but the force that oppresses the innocent and despoils the virginal planet. And, if that doesn’t work – and it does – then there’s always the castration awaiting the gender-dysphoric. And you oppose such initiatives at substantial personal risk. 

But we can reassure ourselves with the fact that a beneficent government is going to set up warm spots in public libraries and museums this winter so that freezing, starving old people can huddle together to keep warm while their grandchildren cough up their lungs in their frigid, damp, and mouldy flats. – Jordan Peterson

We could begin by dropping our appalling attitude of moral superiority toward the developing world. We could admit instead that the rest of the planet’s inhabitants have the right and the responsibility to move toward the abundant material life that we have enjoyed, despite ourselves, for the last century and which has been so entirely dependent on industrial activity and fossil fuel usage.  

We could work diligently and with purpose to drive energy and food prices down to the lowest level possible, so that we can ease the burden on the poor, and open up their horizons of possibility, so that they become concerned (as they inevitably and properly will) with long-term sustainability instead of acting desperately and destructively in pursuit of their next meal. In such circumstances – in the race of such mandatory privations and manipulations – it’s obvious that the last thing our tyrannical virtue-signalling governments should be doing is directing their demented attention toward regulating what people serve at their tables. But because meat has also been deemed yet something else that is “destroying the planet,” the woke narcissists of compassion are already insisting that people eat less of it. Plants and bugs for you and your children, peasants. And the sooner you get accustomed to it (or else) the better.  –

We could concentrate on an intelligent plan of stewardship instead of anti-human “environmentalism” along the lines of the plans outlined by multi-faceted and diligent experts such as Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, who pointed out years ago that we have a multitude of crises facing us and not just one (the hypothetically apocalyptic danger of “carbon”), and that we could spend the money we are wasting killing poor people in a much more intelligent and judicious manner, devoting some resources, for example, to ensuring a stable food supply to poor children in the developing world, treating malaria – something we can do and cheaply – and delivering fresh water where it is truly needed. – Jordan Peterson

We could work out our concerns with sustainability through consensus and in the spirit of voluntary association and free play instead of relying on top-down edicts, justified in principle by our misplaced existential terror and carrying with them the moral hazard of the accrual of unjustified and dangerous centralised authority. We could distribute to everyone their requisite responsibility as sovereign actors and can bring them on board with the power of a common vision: one of life more abundant; enough high-quality food for everyone; enough energy so that slavery becomes a thing of the past; enough purpose so that nihilism and decadence no longer beckon; enough reciprocity so that we live in true peace; the generous provision of education and opportunity to everyone in the world; the conviction (to say it again) that policy based on compulsion is misguided and counterproductive.

We could thereby have our cake and eat it too, and so could everyone else, and we could work toward that in a mutual spirit of productive generosity and fair play in competition and cooperation. Or we can let the world go to hell in a handbasket, blame that disintegration on the very enemies we identified as causal in the first place (those damned capitalists!), and fail to clean up our own souls as we persecute the imaginary wrong-doers responsible for the destruction of our planet. – Jordan Peterson

The rate of change is accelerating. Our ability to do almost everything is doubling, faster and faster. As our ability to communicate and to compute accelerates, the consequences of our inner disunity and insufficiency become ever more serious. As we become individually more powerful, in other words, we must take on more responsibility. Or else. –

In the psychological and educational arenas, too, we demoralise young people, feeding them a constant diet of concretised apocalypse, focusing particularly on tempering or even obliviating the laudable ambition of boys, hectoring them into believing that their virtue is nothing but the force that oppresses the innocent and despoils the virginal planet. And, if that doesn’t work – and it does – then there’s always the castration awaiting the gender-dysphoric. And you oppose such initiatives at substantial personal risk. 

But we can reassure ourselves with the fact that a beneficent government is going to set up warm spots in public libraries and museums this winter so that freezing, starving old people can huddle together to keep warm while their grandchildren cough up their lungs in their frigid, damp, and mouldy flats.

In such circumstances – in the race of such mandatory privations and manipulations – it’s obvious that the last thing our tyrannical virtue-signalling governments should be doing is directing their demented attention toward regulating what people serve at their tables. But because meat has also been deemed yet something else that is “destroying the planet,” the woke narcissists of compassion are already insisting that people eat less of it. Plants and bugs for you and your children, peasants. – Jordan Peterson

Let’s turn our attention to the claim that animal husbandry and the meat it produces cheaply enough for everyone to afford is unsustainable, for a moment, because we haven’t yet dispensed with enough moralising and authoritarian stupidity.

Remember what happened the last time that governmental agencies applied their tender mercy to determining what the people they serve should consume? We were offered the much-vaunted food pyramid, telling us to eat 6-11 servings of grains and carbohydrates a day, with protein and fat at the pinnacle – something to be indulged in with comparative rarity, if indeed necessary at all.

That all turned out to be wrong, and not just a little wrong, but so wrong that it might as well have been not just wrong but a veritable anti-truth: something as wrong as it could possibly get. – Jordan Peterson

So the “health benefits” of a pure vegetarian and vegan diet are dubious at best. But what of the argument that animal husbandry is killing the planet? Well, the American Environmental Protection Agency estimates that all farming produces only 11 per cent of greenhouse gases in the US (transportation produces 27 per cent). Livestock accounts for 3 per cent. And plant-based agriculture? Five per cent. According to the National Academy of Sciences, if we eradicated all animal-based agriculture, we’d reduce greenhouse gases by a mere 2.6 per cent. And it’s no simple matter, by the way – and perhaps impossible – to manage a diet that is sustainable in the medium-to-long-term by merely dining on plants. – Jordan Peterson

What might we do, instead, if we chose to be genuinely wise, instead of inflicting want and privation upon the world’s poor, while failing utterly and disastrously to save the planet?

We could begin by assuming, here in the West, that all those frightened into paralysis and enticed into tyranny by their apprehension of the pending apocalypse have bitten off more than they can properly chew; have taken on a dragon much more fire-breathing and dire than they are heroic; have failed entirely to contend with the moral hazard that comes in assuming that the faddish emergency of their overheated imaginations emergency entitles them to the use of power and compulsion.  – Jordan Peterson

It’s time for all of us, but especially the self-righteous moralisers, to get our individual acts together, to take on some real moral responsibility, instead of falsely broadcasting unearned virtue far and wide and so cheaply and carelessly.

It’s time to drop the prideful intellectualism so overweening that we are willing to use compulsion and force to get our way – always for the sake of the general good. It’s time to drop the envy that makes us criticise and demonise anyone who has more than us, driven by the presumptions that such abundance must be the consequence of the application of arbitrary power and the result of theft – while what we have obtained, even though it is more than many possess, was merely garnered by the force of goodwill and morality. 

It’s time to shed the inexcusably pathological presumption among the elite that only corrupt power rules (everyone except them) and to express some gratitude for the traditions of the past and the near-miraculous infrastructure we have been granted. 

It’s time to take on the abandoned civic responsibility that has been justified through an unearned cynicism and return necessary authority to the local levels that moderate top-down tyranny. – Jordan Peterson

Finally, it’s time to say no in some absolute and fundamental sense (and without hesitation) to all those who dare to propose that dooming perhaps a billion people to starvation and penury is justified by the potential consequences of failing to do so. So no one gets to say with impunity: “the planet has too many people on it.”

Too many people have already been sacrificed in the last hundred years on the altar of future utopias. Enough, truly, is enough. – Jordan Peterson

We have a moral problem in this country. Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a cowardice problem.

One of the reasons the other side is winning the culture wars – and no one should be in any doubt that they are – is that too few conservatives and genuine liberals (as opposed to authoritarian neo-Marxists who have hijacked the term) have the guts to stand up and declare themselves. – Karl du Fresne

The people who comment know what’s going on. They realise that liberal democracy and capitalism are under unprecedented attack. They are thoughtful and perceptive in identifying the threats posed by the cult of identity politics and they know what’s necessary to counter it.

They understand that we are in an ideological war to protect and preserve the values of the free, tolerant society we grew up in. – Karl du Fresne

The people driving the culture wars have no such qualms. Confident in the knowledge that their world view is shared by the institutions of power and influence – government, the bureaucracy, academia, schools, the media, the arts, even the corporate sector – they promulgate their divisive, corrosive messages without fear.

They are winning by default because too many people on the other side keep their heads down and their identity secret. People whose political instincts are essentially conservative may not be outnumbered, but they are certainly outgunned.

It’s a given that conservatism often equates with passivity and apathy. The vast mass of people who are broadly happy with the status quo will never compete with the ideological zeal of the social justice warriors, and it would be idle to expect them to. But I’m not talking here about the masses who are primarily concerned with raising a family, paying the mortgage and watching rugby; I’m talking about those who are deeply worried about the radical re-invention of New Zealand society and who recognise the need to oppose it. They’re the people who need to raise their heads above the parapet. – Karl du Fresne

The emergence of the FSU is a heartening sign that resistance to authoritarian censorship is slowly gaining momentum, but there’s a long way to go. In the meantime, it would help if more people demonstrated their support for free speech by openly and unapologetically exercising it. The more who step forward, the more they give courage to others. It’s called critical mass. – Karl du Fresne

Meanwhile, businesses and households are right to be terrified about what lies ahead.
Over 100,000 households are going to come off fixed mortgages in the next year, and face a tripling of their monthly interest payments.

At the same time, house prices are now picked to fall by more than a quarter off the peak.

A family who bought a $1 million house at the peak with a $250,000 deposit will lose all their savings and have to pay three times as much interest on the $750,000 they borrowed. – Matthew Hooton

Inflation is now endemic in the New Zealand domestic economy and employees and their unions will rightly demand at least 7 per cent pay rises just to stand still.

But 7 per cent is just the start. – Matthew Hooton

China did not make New Zealand its best little friend in the west a generation ago out of benevolence, but to infiltrate, influence and undermine the Five Eyes intelligence alliance through its smallest, weakest and most naive member. – Matthew Hooton

The immediate economic risks to New Zealand are stark enough. Add in the medium-term risks and the images of the Prime Minister playing in the snow on what can only be considered a jolly represent a serious political miscalculation.

The next election should be a watershed moment in New Zealand history. Like 1935, 1972, 1984 and 1990, serious decisions about economic and foreign policy need to be made. – Matthew Hooton

This week marks five years since Jacinda Ardern became New Zealand’s 40th prime minister. In modern British political terms, such a period might now be referred to as an era. In New Zealand, too, it feels just like that: a very long time. – Oliver Hartwich 

Instead of simply allocating funds to various government departments, the state now aims for something higher: it aspires to uplift its citizens in an almost spiritual manner. Whether it succeeds in that quest is a different question, but the very idea of the New Zealand state has changed under Ardern.

What has not changed are some negative trends that have plagued New Zealand for many years before her: the country’s sluggish productivity, its declining education system, its infrastructure deficits, its ridiculous house prices. In each of these areas, the problems have continued or indeed worsened.

Ardern’s record is one of deep change in the nature of the New Zealand state and its relationship to citizens. On the country’s most pressing social and economic problems, Ardern has not achieved any improvement. On many measures, the country is actually worse off than it was when she became Prime Minister.

The fact that Ardern’s record on the ground remains poor has been doubly masked: by the aforementioned constitutional changes, which are popular in parts of the electorate and the commentariat, and by Ardern’s superb communication skills. – Oliver Hartwich 

What has really brought this political upheaval to a head across Europe, however, is the energy crisis, driven by a belief that they could be energy independent using only wind and solar generation and decarbonising their economies. Unfortunately, their ambition was well ahead of practical reality, and they consequently became overly dependent on Russian gas and the good will of Vladimir Putin. Putin is not the source of their energy woes; he merely accelerated their energy crisis. – Stuart Smith

For too long the world has taken cheap and reliable energy for granted, but there is a close relationship between GDP, energy and life expectancy; something we should not forget. Wind and solar will of course play an important role in the energy sector but it will not be the nirvana that many claim.-

Despite the claims from environmentalists, we are far more dependent on gas than many realise: many homes are reliant on gas and many industries are underpinned by gas, most often with no economically viable alternative.
We could make more of the opportunity that our local gas industry offers us by utilising the methanol produced by Methanex to lower our local shipping industry’s emissions. Methanol is a much cleaner burning fuel than diesel and has lower CO2 emissions as well; that is why shipping giant Maersk has just ordered six new ships that will run on methanol. – Stuart Smith

There’s so much regulation coming at us and costs just keep going up. I wonder whether it will get to the point where it’s not possible to make a living here and then there won’t be farm left here for them to take over.  – Ben Dooley

From what I’ve worked out it will cost us about $1.70 a sheep in the first year and about $5 a head by 2030. Combined with paying that tax and limit setting on the amount of fertiliser you can use, which is the next thing coming, it might not be financially viable to be here. – Ben Dooley

Without primary industries in general, but particularly pastoral agriculture, we are in very big trouble as to how to pay for all the imports of goods that we cannot produce here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Solving the methane issue would be a real big deal. – Keith Woodford

Pulling all of this evidence together, the big picture is that there are no magic technology bullets that can drastically alter the reality that ruminants emit methane for a good reason. This methane is the outcome of evolutionary processes that produce animals that are fit for the grassland environment in which they live naturally.

However, that does not mean that no progress can be made in terms of emitting less methane per unit of meat and milk output. Indeed, the last 30 years have produced an amazing but seldom told New Zealand story as to how methane emissions per kg of sheep meat have reduced by about 30%. Dairy emissions per kg of Milksolids (fat plus protein) have reduced by about 20%.

The way these spectacular efficiency improvements have been achieved is by the breeding of more productive animals and incorporating these animals within improved farming systems. Fortunately, improved biological efficiency has also led to efficiency improvements relating to methane emissions. – Keith Woodford

We are engaged in a decades-long conscious-uncoupling from our imperial past and towards some uncertain future firmly anchored in an imagined pre-colonial world, where the inhabitants of these shaky isles lived in harmony with nature and one another. – Damien Grant

There is some revisionism going, on but historical narratives are often built on self-deception. Those currently living around the Nile have as valid a claim on the pyramids as the Slavic inhabitants of North Macedonia have on the exploits of Alexander the Great.

Details and facts can be left to historians and pedants while we rush forwards to a glorious past. – Damien Grant

The British Empire is an easy target, especially if you gain your understanding of history from the New Zealand school system or social media memes. Both equally reliable.

But let’s take a longer look at the Empire’s legacy before we tear it from our cultural soil.

The British Empire was remarkable. Only the Romans have cast a more potent historical shadow. – Damien Grant

English is the lingua-franca both because of its ability to absorb foreign words, like lingua-franca, and the extent of the Empire’s reach resulted in English being the second language of half the world.

The Empire carried more than the language of the Bard and smallpox to the far corners of humanity. They brought ideas.

Some were rooted in a belief in the racial and cultural superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, but there were other enlightenment ideals that represent the best of humanity.

The separation of church and state, the importance of an independent judiciary, the freedom of ideas, the sovereignty of the individual and the value of democracy. Some, it pains me to say, originated in Paris rather than London or Glasgow. – Damien Grant

The success of anti-slavery politician William Wilberforce is often hailed as a legacy the Empire can be proud of, and rightly so, but this is to miss the significance of his achievement in securing the abolition of slavery in the Empire in 1833.

Wilberforce prevailed because he was drawing on enlightenment ideas of humanity. – Damien Grant

The abolition of slavery was not due to one man’s advocacy, but to an evolution of ideas that also gave us democracy and the legal principles of habeas corpus and ultra vires.

For all the Empire’s failings, it installed in those lands where her writ ran concepts and systems of government that have remained long after the last red-coat slinked off-shore.

Such is the power of these ideals that where they were violated, such as in South Africa, Pakistan and Fiji, the state has never been able to completely eradicate them.

They lurk, like gorse, in the hearts and minds of the populace and, when given an opportunity, reassert themselves. – Damien Grant

 Sunak will succeed or fail based on his merits and achievements, his decisions and the vicissitudes of fortune. His race and religion are cause for comment but neither an obstacle nor an advantage.

We can change the names of our cities, abandon the monarchy and eschew as many Shakespearian nightmares as decency will allow.

We can discard the worst elements of our imperial legacy, repair the damage caused by Treaty breaches and betrayals, and apologise for the mistakes made in a previous era.

But let us preserve the idea that the value of a person is a function of their ability, achievements and character, and nothing else. – Damien Grant

Voters don’t reward incumbent governments when they feel poor. Already, some will feel poor on paper as they watch their property value drop. Already, some feel poor in reality as they fork out more and more for rising mortgage rates. And shortly, many more will feel poor as nearly half the country’s mortgages roll over in the next few months and the mortgage interest payments double or triple.

From co-governance to incompetence there is a lot denting Labour’s chances at the next election, but this is probably the worst: homeowners’ mild sense of panic at rising mortgage rates and falling house prices.- Heather du Plessis Allan

Getting ahead of social problems like crime will save money in the long term, but far more important than that, it means fewer victims in the broadest sense of the term.

How we do that we can debate and argue all we like, but there ought to be no debate that prevention is what we absolutely must do. – Jarrod Gilbert

The ideologies of diversity and inclusion, decolonisation, intersectionality (a web of oppressions), gender and critical race theory have spread too deep and wide, leaking like dye and soaking the fabric of society with their toxic hue.

Woke progressives often speak of “re-educating” those who disagree with them. But the sad truth is that if we are to save the soul of the West, we will need not so much to “re-educate” as to persuade our opponents that they are wrong. – Zoe Strimpel 

For children, father absence is associated with poverty, material hardship, abuse and neglect, lower cognitive capacity, substance use, poorer physical and mental health and criminal offending. But estranged fathers can also suffer materially and emotionally. The mortality rate of fathers paying child support is significantly higher than the norm. – Lindsay Mitchell

The long march of the left through our institutions is now paying off handsomely as their graduates scale the commanding heights of big business and big government. – Brianna McKee

The Arderns of the world are made in the image of their creators – entrenched left-wing lecturers, administrators, and bureaucrats who fill universities across the Western world, particularly Australia.

These individuals have turned universities into institutions that limit free speech via a culture that is antagonistic to viewpoint diversity. This directly opposes the historical mission of higher education.

The true mission of a university is to impart knowledge and hone the mind through debate and challenge, yet groupthink and cancel culture have been rife on campus for years. – Brianna McKee

Increasingly, universities are limiting speech by institutionalising ideology. Indigenous relations, Climate Change, and gender equality litter the policy lists of the higher education sector.

There is no better indication that free-thinking intellectuals are losing the battle than the fact that the number of policies instituted by universities has increased exponentially in recent years, jumping from 136 in 2018 to 281 in 2022. Many of these new policies directly promote social justice causes. – Brianna McKee

By promoting only one side of a controversial issue, universities attach a value judgment to it and suggest it is the superior position to hold.

This closes debate and crushes viewpoint diversity. A university cannot be dedicated to an ideology and simultaneously open to challenging perspectives.

The latest tactic of university-trained elites, like Ardern, is to claim an alleged influx of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ when thought goes against their opinion. – Brianna McKee

Unprecedented prosperity, opportunity, education, tolerance, and welfare are hallmarks of Western Civilisation and are the products of freedom of speech, thought, and association.

The fall of most great societies take place as they turn against, or fail to value, the things that made them great. – Brianna McKee

Each day more Jacindas are rolling off the university production line. Warm, genteel, and empathetic right up until the moment they want you silenced, cancelled, or fired from your job.

The Enlightenment mission of universities has been turned on its head. Tyranny has indeed had a makeover and every day our graduates exit university more closed and small-minded than ever before. – Brianna McKee

The government is quite happy to pay $280 a person to get you out of your car and onto a slow train, with a hopelessly inconveniently schedule, to drop you off at a station where you don’t want to be, at a time of the day that does not suit you.

That certainly does sound like Labour Party policy! – Frank Newman

The truth is that “far-Right” is an entirely arbitrary term, used to disparage any politician or party whose policies the left-leaning commentariat dislikes – or perhaps more precisely, fears.– Karl du Fresne

“Far-Right” is often used in connection with the equally damning word “populist”. But a populist politician, by definition, is one who appeals to the people. Isn’t that the essence of democracy?

Here, I suspect, is the core of the problem. “Populist” is used as a derogatory term because the progressive elite, deep down, don’t trust democracy and don’t think ordinary people, ignorant proles that they are, can be relied on to make the right choices.

For the same reason, the political elite want to control the public conversation by regulating what we are allowed to say or hear. Uninhibited political debate is dangerous. People might get the wrong ideas – hence the moral panic over disinformation.

Do the journalists and academics who so freely use the misleading term “far Right” realise that the world has moved on from the days when it described fringe nationalist groups with little hope of electoral success? Possibly not.

I think they’re in denial. They don’t want to admit that the so-called far Right has moved to the political centre, and that this is an entirely natural and predictable reaction to stifling left-wing authoritarianism. – Karl du Fresne

People who know they are forcing a majority of the people to accept policies demanded by a minority, will always, under pressure, fall back on the blunt interrogatives of political power: Who has it, and who is willing to use it?

That’s why it is so easy to finish a sentence that begins, “As a governor”, with the words: “it is my will that prevails – not yours.” Easy, but a perilously long way from New Zealand’s egalitarian political traditions. – Chris Trotter

That 16 per cent of the population will get to decide exclusively what is best for the remaining 84 per cent in the management of water and water infrastructure — built up over many generations by ratepayers and taxpayers, both Māori and non-Māori alike — is outrageously divisive and entirely undemocratic. – Graham Adams

The solution is a political one. No amount of polite protest will change the fact that the only solution is to remove the Labour Party from government. That opportunity presents itself next year. Co-governance is shaping up to be a very important election issue.- Graham Adams

Realistically, no amount of arm waving and foot stomping to the Panel is going to make any difference. Nanaia Mahuta has set a course on co-governance and the Future for Local Government report is part of that agenda, as detailed in He Puapua.

The solution is a political one. No amount of polite protest will change the fact that the only solution is to remove the Labour Party from government. That opportunity presents itself next year. Co-governance is shaping up to be a very important election issue. – Frank Newman

We’re seeing, for example, that companies are trying to dierentiate themselves on CO2 emissions per kilogram of product. But the significance of this indicator is very limited, because the value of a food is largely determined by the nutrients it contains. This indicator takes no account of this. Mineral water, for example, can have a low CO2 emissions level, but you can’t live on it. There are no or hardly any nutrients in it. That’s why there’s no point to comparing the CO2 emissions per kilogram of a soft drink to that of milk. Or of bananas to meat. – Stephan Peters

Comparisons based on a single nutrient like protein are too limited. You can’t base a healthy diet on protein alone. We need a combination of many dierent nutrients to stay healthy. By quantifying the most important nutrients in a product, you can attain a new ecological footprint. The so-called Nutrient Rich Food (NRF) scores are one example. A product’s contribution to the daily requirements of the consumer can be calculated based on a summation of the nutritional benefits of that product. Products with a high NRF score have a lot of added value for our health. This also means that for products with low NRF scores, we have to eat more of them, which often means more unwanted calories and a higher footprint. By using the NRF scores in the ecological footprint of foods, you can connect ecological footprint to a product’s health benefits. This sometimes provides a different picture than you would expect from the ecological footprint per kilogram – Stephan Peters

When you combine the ecological footprint with the NRF scores, these plant-based substitutes show a less positive picture. Of course there are many nuances here, but this makes clear that nutritional value and (micro)nutrients have to be included when comparing products in terms of sustainability. – Stephan Peters

Extremism is bound to thrive when dissent is suppressed by members of a pharisaical caste that takes upon itself the right to determine what others may read and hear. – Karl du Fresne

The reasons for Local Government appearing to be so dysfunctional all over the country – starts and finishes around a council table. Quite some years ago there was little or no obvious political affiliations as councillors put aside their back grounds and or political beliefs. Recent past elections have seen overtly Green and Labour candidates standing for election which draws into question exactly who they represent and whether the oath of office is little more than a meaningless formality as they take their place around the council table. The battle lines are therefore drawn before debate is enacted as predictable attitudes soon manifest themselves. It’s called predetermination and that is a root cause of council acrimony. To make matters worse, councils are now compelled to accept unelected representatives (Maori) to promote a singular point of view alongside those who must act in the wider interests of the region/district. The oath of office -sworn by councillors – is not required of the Maori appointees. The call for more diversity and broader representation is a nonsense. Given the size of councils balance sheet, it is knowledge, judgment and experience that matters – not age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or street address. – Gerry Eckhoff

Trust and integrity of process are the hall marks of a well-functioning democracy. There can be no place for those who seek authority and power for their own sake. The situations in China and Russia, where the seedlings of democracy are crushed under the tyranny of false authority and weaponry – must serve as a reminder to us all that our freedoms start – not just with local government but with those who also serve – by challenge and protest. – Gerry Eckhoff

None of the significant changes undermining democracy and our Kiwi way of life, that are being introduced through He Puapua have received a mandate from the public. The restructuring of health, polytechnics, and water services are all illegitimate policy changes designed to pass control to the tribal elite. None have public approval, and all should be repealed by the next government.

In this climate of division created by Jacinda Ardern, key institutions are being corrupted from their original purpose of serving all New Zealanders as equals, to prioritising and privileging those of Maori descent. Under her leadership, democracy is being replaced by apartheid. – Muriel Newman

Of all the forms of pollution that harm this world, that of noise seems to gain the least attention, perhaps because we have no one to blame for so much of it but ourselves, preferring as we do to concentrate on harms for which we can blame others. – Theodore Dalrymple

The English have always taken their pleasures sadly, but now they take them first noisily, then antisocially, then forgetfully. Several times I have heard young people claim to have had a wonderful time the night before, the evidence for which is that they can remember nothing whatever of it. On this view of things, death is the final, eternal nightclub. – Theodore Dalrymple

Who’s taking any notice of the laws? Answer – no one. They couldn’t give a crap.

 And why would they? There are no consequences in this country for anything anymore so why fear authority or rules or laws? Even ram raiders get a wraparound hug and a meeting rather than any kind of law enforcement.

Being young means being off the hook. Kids know it, their mates know it, the parents know it. So why are we surprised when they don’t follow the rules?  – Kate Hawkesby 

There’s more youth in trouble than there is aid. And despite all the best efforts of Youth Aid and their valiant attempts at restorative justice and rehabilitation, we have a major problem in this country with disenfranchised youth. – Kate Hawkesby 

I despair that we are now just in a cycle of youth trouble equals Youth Aid, and that’s it. The forgotten word here is – consequences. – Kate Hawkesby 

There is a sense however that Ardern is attempting to expand the legitimate need for surveillance of a very small group of potentially dangerous individuals to also cover people whose beliefs simply run counter to government policy or to the norms of woke culture.

That suspicion was reinforced by the TVNZ documentary Web of Chaos which looked at the internet’s influence on modern-day life and included what the producers described as “a deep dive into the world of disinformation”. Whilst the documentary made some good points, there were some odd moments, including when the Director of the Disinformation Project made the astonishing claim that Kiwi mothers with interests in children’s clothes, healthy cooking and interior design were being drawn into “white nationalist ideals”. – Thomas Cranmer

We are an important liberal power at a time when illiberal forces in Moscow and Beijing are flexing their brutal and authoritarian muscles on the battlefields of Ukraine, the streets of Hong Kong and across the narrow water of Taiwan.

We have to take the risk of voicing our doubts about decolonisation. It should be open for discussion, open for interrogation. We need to break the spell. – Nigel Biggar

New Zealand sheep farmers have been singled out to bear the brunt of our country’s efforts to stop the planet warming. Our government’s chosen metric is to measure progress by annual emissions. When applied to constant or diminishing emissions of short-lived gasses such as methane, this results in perverse outcomes. – Dave Read

I love farming because it offers unlimited opportunity to use my intellectual and physical skills. I am proud to produce a product that is very close to organic. Our system is on a different planet when compared to feed-lot animals that are fed grain, grown under an industrial farming system awash with fossil fuel. – Dave Read

I produce the same amount of meat from less pasture, and therefore less methane. Since 1990, I have planted willows and poplars for erosion control and now have over 6,000 that will cover 100ha when they are all mature.

Trees are the current feel-good factor, but actually, retiring land to plant is only made economically possible by efficiency gains on the remainder. Conversely, whole farms changed to pine forests are wiping out food production entirely. – Dave Read

I have walked to every corner of the farm and feel an intimate connection to this land. Returning from elsewhere, I get to within 100km of home and feel the land reaching out towards me. When the land suffers under drought or flood, I feel it as a pain in my own body. And I love trees, but when I see whole farms planted in a monoculture of pines, I feel sick to my stomach.

Right now, I feel like a contentious objector must have during the first world war. I am being reviled as an environmental vandal. The news feels like propaganda. – Dave Read

When I do the math, the UN target for ruminant stock works out to a 4.7 per cent reduction for New Zealand. This is under half New Zealand’s target, but no editor will print this fact because ‘readers don’t want complicated maths’, ‘you are not a climate expert’, ‘it would undermine the consensus achieved’.

I am forced to watch sustainable food production (my life’s work) destroyed even though it is expected that 1.4 billion people will be protein-deficient by 2050. I lie awake in the early hours, composing yet another submission to be filed and ignored by group of professional listeners in Wellington (the seat of our government). The road that used to be quiet at 4am roars with logging trucks carrying logs from trees planted in the 90s during the last wave of land-use change. Transport carries on warming the planet; people drive to the store when they could walk; they fly to Sydney for shopping weekends instead of buying local.

Meanwhile my sector, the only sector of New Zealand no longer warming the planet, is being gutted. – Dave Read

Climate change is hugely important. But it just isn’t a substantial prudential risk for the financial system.

There are far bigger financial risks out there. For example, a Reserve Bank that spends too much time playing with its frog-exaggerator when an inflation monster is running wild.  – Eric Crampton

Constant tweaks to immigration settings have contributed to complexity and confusion for migrants and officials. The Government abandoning targets for processing visa applications has led to fewer decisions being made. Immigration NZ’s antiquated legacy processes and teething problems with its new online systems have also played a role. And then there has been the Government’s clunky approach to dealing with pandemic-related backlogs.

Yet these issues are all symptoms rather than the cause. The root of the problem is the Government’s distrust of immigration. It stems from a belief that productivity improvements will come from restricting the supply of migrant labour. Unfortunately, that belief is not founded on economic evidence. And it risks tarnishing our longstanding record as a favoured destination for skilled migrants. – Roger Partridge 

As New Zealand firms and workers battle rising interest rates, a cost of living crisis and geopolitical uncertainty, it is time our Government ended the self-inflicted harm of restrictive immigration settings. – Roger Partridge 

Well-functioning cities should mean higher real wages for workers and better entertainment options. So why are New Zealand’s cities shrinking?

Our cities just do not seem to be working well and that comes down to poor policy decisions.  – Oliver Hartwich

When zoning and consenting make it too hard to build in places where people want to live, work and play, land prices inflate in surprising ways. Turning inner suburbs into museum pieces blocks the dynamic change that lets cities thrive. And banning new subdivisions at the city’s fringes makes the land under downtown apartments more expensive than it should be. – Oliver Hartwich

Councils need incentives to zone ample land for development. It is vital to finance infrastructure well. Then zoning will not introduce artificial scarcity. More competitive land markets unleash opportunities.  – Oliver Hartwich

But don’t expect a vote for NZ First to deliver anything transformational.  From 1996-1998 NZ First was a brake on a National Government continuing with free market liberal reforms, but not a stop. Similarly, from 2005-2008 and from 2017-2020 it was a brake on Labour Governments continuing with growth of the welfare state, but put a foot on the accelerator of economic nationalist interventions.  It was not a brake on Maori nationalism, because the policies now being advanced by the Government had their genesis in 2017-2020 (or earlier in the case of He Puapua).– Liberty Scott:

Surely, in the interests of “partnership”, the rights of private landowners should be honoured or is this another example of everyone being equal, but Māori are more equal than others.- Frank Newman

My view is that bad accidents are the result of a couple of things. Exceedingly bad luck, in other words you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. It isn’t your fault and no amount of advertising and road rules would have stopped it.

And idiots. Whether by madness, booze, drugs, criminal activity, poor cars, or insane behaviour. It’s the stuff that is  preventable, but only if the fool behind the wheel was behaving differently.

Those sort of people are not reached by ads on telly and cops that aren’t on the road. So, back to the question; when we get to the end of the year in a month or so and the toll is up yet again, one of the worst yet again, what then? Another ad agency ?    – Mike Hosking

There are three things that are needed immediately if we are to tackle the huge and growing pile of unmet need in our health system. We need more people in the health workforce, we need more facilities, and we need targets and goals for the facilities we already have. – Steven Joyce

Our Health Minister looks more and more like a tired one-trick pony. His only initiative was to rearrange the bureaucracy and slap a new coat of paint on it, then stand back to wait for it solve the world’s problems.

He ignores that it is infeasible a bureaucracy in Wellington, roundly derided by most who work in the health system, should suddenly be the solution because it is now called “Te Whatu Ora”. Particularly as it exhausted itself changing all the deckchairs around and few people within it yet seem to know how the new entity works. – Steven Joyce

Our health sector needs new thinking, not hidebound technocracy. It needs to be led by someone new with energy and enthusiasm, who is prepared to roll sleeves up and lead from the front.

Someone who stands up for patients and their families, visibly backs the doctors, nurses and other professionals and is prepared to take on entrenched interests like the health unions and medical school duopolies. We don’t need a tired paper pusher. He needs to go. – Steven Joyce

 The effect of three of the judgments in this case is to introduce Maori customs of uncertain definition and unknowable consequences as they existed in 1840 as a third arm of the common law of New Zealand. These customs are collectively labelled “Tikanga.” The way in which they have  been infiltrated into the common law is unprecedented.– Anthony Willy 

This excursion into Maori customs raises a number of questions: What is “Tikanga?” A search of the meaning of the word in the Maori dictionary yields fifteen possible definitions all of which amount to doing the right thing in the circumstances. None of the meanings have anything thing to do with the law as it has been understood and  practiced in New Zealand since 1840.  Every society throughout time has its customs as a means of surviving both its environment and from the attentions of others. Maori tribes were no different but the world in which persons of Maori extraction now live is unrecognisable for those who lived here in 1840 when they accepted British sovereignty and all that entailed. Obviously, the law must change and adapt to changing circumstances but it is extraordinary to suppose that this should be done by importing concepts some of which are no more than are to be found in any developing society but have no unique contemporary relevance to the lives of New Zealand citizens. One might as well say that attention to good manners and consideration for others should form part of the common law. – Anthony Willy 

 Willie Jackson the Minister for Broadcasting and who appears to lead the Maori caucus in government and who has probably read the writings of Williams J. knows all this. He has recently rejected a report from who knows whom proposing co government in New Zealand because it is too radical. He now has barely six weeks left in the Parliamentary cycle to introduce new legislation dealing with that deeply unpopular proposition making it unlikely it will ever see the light of day. It is astonishing that the  majority of the judges in our highest court would do his work for him by elevating Maori customs to become an equal source of law alongside the common law, and the statutes enacted by Parliament. That is the most unprecedented and blatant descent by three out of five members of our highest Court into matters of crucial social and political import. These judges leave a poison challis for their successors with unknowable malign social consequences. It will now be left to Parliament by legislation to reinstate the commonality of Judge made law. – Anthony Willy 

Our preference has always been for commercial pragmatism and fact-based analysis to lead solutions, rather than any politically-motivated or interest-driven proposals. Our vision involves enhancing existing assets, while investing in supporting infrastructure such as new rail connections and coastal shipping – Julia Hoare

It is our belief that current legislation and policy does not encourage nor facilitate investment even when it is environmentally sound and nationally significant. The consenting process is complex, time consuming and costly. It hinders adoption of new technology with its economic and environmental benefits, ensures we are always playing catch up with capacity and stops existing assets from being used to their full potential. – Julia Hoare

Parliament did not legislate for a tax increase large enough to break Treasury’s tax calculator. Nobody proposed it. Nobody campaigned on it.

It never went to Select Committee for deliberation. No tax experts analysed the distributional consequences of it or its affordability. It never received Royal Assent. Parliament simply failed to undo that which Adrian Orr gifted it, at our expense. – Eric Crampton

Failing to inflation-adjust tax thresholds, since April 2021, pushed some 40,000 people from the 10.5% bracket into the 17.5% bracket, about 187,000 people from the 17.5% bracket into the 30% bracket, 161,000 people from the 30% bracket into the 33% rate, and about 18,000 people from the 33% rate into the new top 39% rate.

As consequence, the government collected about $1.3 billion extra in tax – though both the figures on the numbers of people and revenue effects come with a heavy caveat from Treasury. Changes this large cause changes in behaviour, and those behavioural shifts are not in Treasury’s simple model. –

When inflation’s effects over a little more than a year are enough to break Treasury’s tax calculator, something has got to give. At this point the question shouldn’t be whether to adjust the tax bands for inflation, but how best to do it – and how to avoid this ever happening again.

Whatever your views on the appropriate size of government, a few basic principles should apply.

The government should not normally spend more than it is prepared to take in tax revenue. Careful accounting needs to be applied, so that long-lived infrastructure can be appropriately debt-financed and paid off by users over its lifetime. But operating revenue and operating expenditure should balance.

If a government wants to reduce the amount of tax it collects, it should reduce the amount it spends.

And if a government wants to increase the amount that it spends, it should have to explicitly legislate for the taxes needed to fund that spending – rather than let inflation do the work. – Eric Crampton

 Bracket creep is a stealthy and dishonest form of taxation. Worse, it can easily lead to the impression that Parliament wants the Reserve Bank to ignore its remit and let inflation run hot.

Inflation indexing tax thresholds isn’t just good tax policy. When inflation is no longer a tidy little earner for central government, we might worry less about whether the Reserve Bank is really committed to fighting it. – Eric Crampton

I wrote a book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, which was published in July 2021. The idea behind the book is also simple: biological sex is fixed, it is binary. And transgender ideology — which replaces sex with subjective claims of ‘gender identity’ in law and policies — does serious harm. To anyone not blinded by this dogma, the argument is obvious. You cannot let men claim to be women just because they feel like it and thereby gain entry to women’s toilets, women’s changing rooms, women’s refuges, women’s jails. It puts women at increased risk of male violence. It is not acceptable. – Helen Joyce

And what I discovered was this: during the past two decades, ‘trans rights’ have morphed into a totalitarian project the aim of which is to make the very concept of biological sex unsayable. It has been pernicious, and extraordinarily so. Almost every civil-rights organisation, including Amnesty, Liberty and Stonewall, now insists that a man truly can become a woman simply by saying he is one. ‘Trans women are women — no debate,’ that’s their slogan. The rest of us must shut up. – Helen Joyce

This radical transactivism has erased and endangered women, pushed us out of our own spaces and destroyed protections from male violence that we fought so hard for. – Helen Joyce

That was when I understood the full horror of what is happening. In the name of a warped ideology masquerading as a civil-rights movement, doctors are potentially endangering children who may be gay or mentally ill. How did we get here?

Young adults have certainly changed since my student days. Many now see themselves and the world through the lens of gender, sexual and racial identity, placing great store by ever more specific self-descriptions (they might, for example, be a ‘queer non-binary asexual person of colour’).

The objective reality of our shared human nature is sidelined, in favour of what each individual feels or claims about themselves.  It is childish, and dangerously so. – Helen Joyce

If you had coal in the 19th Century you were rich, if you had oil and gas in the 20th Century you were rich and if you have water then you’re rich in the 21st Century.

It gives you options and frankly successive governments haven’t been able to appropriately resolve the tension that has existed in the community around how to manage water. – Todd Muller

I’m hearing a sense of hopelessness around the future, and whether it’s worth staying in the sector is extremely palpable. The big change for me that I’ve never seen before is that the message is being articulated by younger farmers.

You will always get in a group, individuals who are perhaps resisting change, and normally they tend to be people who are more senior than younger, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen it the other way where the anger, frustration and hopelessness is very much the message I’m getting from younger farmers. – Todd Muller

Here it’s like a cumulative sense of obligation and criticism and a lack of acknowledgement of everything that’s been done on farm. How complex farm systems are and how interactive they are in terms of their farm animals, various farm practices, the interaction on the environment and trying to measure and mitigate that.

Trying to work all that out across a myriad of issues, from water quality, to soil, to winter grazing, to climate – they feel overwhelmed actually and that’s hugely striking and quite shocking when the faces who are telling me that are under 40. – Todd Muller

There’s a real sense that no one’s in their corner, that nothing they do on farm is ever good enough. It doesn’t matter if they’ve done plantings, riparian strips, put in more effluent ponds or set aside bush because it’s the right thing to do.

Nothing seems to be acknowledged or rewarded or supported – you’ve still got some clipboard warrior from MfE (Ministry for Environment) coming out, or local government saying, ‘That’s wrong and here’s the penalty’. – Todd Muller

Part of it is actually accepting that some of this is going to take some time, and I know there are always the critics of the agriculture sector who immediately run to the pulpit and say the sector has always sought to kick the can down the road.

I fundamentally reject that, and I think the people who say that have never been on a farm and never seen the work farmers have done individually and cumulatively across water quality, soil improvement, reducing erosion, fresh water – they just don’t see all that effort. – Todd Muller

That’s why I’m so critical of the Government’s response to He Waka Eke Noa … they’ve decided they’ve got a better view on how it should be managed, and it doesn’t surprise me the sector is up in arms.

I’m not signalling in any way that because farmers are so angry, no action is required to continue to look to improve freshwater, improve measurement and mitigation of emissions. But there’s a way of doing it that brings the sector along with you and there’s a way of doing it that makes them feel like second-class citizens, and that’s how they feel at the moment. – Todd Muller

There’s a whole heap of additional work that could be done with the sector around efficient capture of additional sequestration. The Ministry for Environment and MPI constantly talk about how difficult all this stuff is, well yeah it is difficult, but it has to happen. You can’t run to the taxation lever, which this Government wants to do with vigour, and kick the can down the road. – Todd Muller

I’ve been involved with the sector for 25 years, and just seeing the vehemence of the reaction makes it clear the Government has lost the farmers here completely. – Todd Muller

He clearly has the better of Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor in any Cabinet conversation they have on these things because the balance is always skewed toward David Parker’s view of the world, which is frankly, he thinks farmers have got away with it for too long, and in my view that’s an outrageous position to hold. – Todd Muller

Indeed, we are at a difficult crossroads in New Zealand, where we are being pushed into accepting a new order and a new name for our country that has not undergone a referendum. It seems to me a form of bullying. Of course, Māori and other indigenous people across many countries were oppressed for several centuries but often were not themselves kind to others and indeed gained much from colonialism. The world has made great progress over the last half-century but we are undoing that progress very rapidly. – David Lillis

He Puapua is one of the most alarming documents I have ever read. It will sow the seeds of discontent and division for decades to come. We must oppose the current ideology while embracing equality and the rights of minorities, and commit ourselves to assisting all people on the basis of disadvantage rather than of race. We are not a bicultural society but instead a multicultural society that today includes people from all parts of the world.

On the question of the demarcation of science and indigenous or traditional knowledge – most probably it is true that many scientists know little of indigenous or traditional knowledge and may undervalue the genuine wisdom to be found there. Some Māori and others have made this point forcibly and quite correctly. But proponents of indigenous or traditional knowledge often betray an even greater ignorance of science. – David Lillis

Towards the end of the meeting two Māori women stood up and called for decolonisation of science. Is science colonial and, if so, how exactly are we to decolonise it and whose science are we to decolonise? We can understand where they are coming from in relation to past oppression and their need to resurrect pride in their culture, language and traditional knowledge. However, I and many others have grave concerns about the He Puapua report, which recommends that mātauranga Māori (Māori traditional knowledge) be valued equally and resourced equally to “Western science”. Indigenous people, including Māori, and other minorities make valuable contributions in many areas in which science and technology play a part. Surely, all traditional knowledge ought to be valued and preserved but no traditional knowledge of any cultural group, anywhere in the world, should be taught as science until tested and shown to be valid through the methods of science. Nor is there the slightest justification for resourcing traditional knowledge equally to science, however valuable that knowledge may have been in the past. – David Lillis

However, assertions to the effect that indigenous science is equally valid and equally important as “Western science” are very worrying (for example, Henry, 2022). In specific cases they can be as valid but, unfortunately, mostly they are not, and the notion of “Western science” is demonstrably mistaken.

It is not a criticism of traditional knowledge or of the communities or societies that produced it that such knowledge cannot compare with the centuries of advances and investments that lie behind the modern physical and life sciences; for example, randomised controlled trials in medicine, molecular and atomic physics, evolutionary biology and developments in energy and climate science. We have duty of care to define clearly what sits within the ambit of science and that which lies beyond, just as we have a critical obligation to exercise the utmost rigour when we test the efficacy of newly-proposed cancer drugs and other treatments.

The idea that in any country traditional knowledge should be regarded as fully the equal of science and be resourced equally is astounding and, as a person who trained originally in physics and mathematics, and who worked in research evaluation for Government (for funding decision-making), I find it deeply disturbing that people buy into it, however well-meaning they may be. Similarly, incorporation of traditional knowledge into any national science curriculum is potentially very detrimental to the education of young people. – David Lillis

Every citizen should have equal opportunity of access to education, healthcare and to political and economic power. Here in New Zealand we include Asians, people from North Africa and the Middle-East, people of European origin and, of course, Māori and everyone else.

A second lesson is that we can take affirmative action by removing a Government that is causing damage to its people. Perhaps in New Zealand we can still do something about the current absurdity. We have a duty of care to our country to remain kind, embracing and inclusive – but to stand firm against a Government that may be well-meaning but that has lost its way. – David Lillis

The core role of the public service is to provide New Zealanders with essential services focused on achieving better outcomes and delivering for all Kiwis. Whether it be healthcare, education, transport or infrastructure, New Zealanders should get value for the taxes which they pay to the Crown.

Government is currently spending $1.8 billion of taxpayers hard earned money every year on 14,000 extra bureaucrats, and that’s without mentioning the staggering amount spent on expensive consultants and working groups. The public service in New Zealand has ballooned to unprecedented levels. Yet, we seem to have worse outcomes as a result. – Stuart Smith 

 More churn means more costs, and the lack of continuity puts strain on workflow and projects.  Adding to that, the Crown accounts released earlier this month show that the government’s tax revenue increased from $76 billion to $108 billion in five years. That is an average of $15,000 more in tax for every household in New Zealand. 

With all the extra revenue and all the extra government officials and public servants, I struggle to understand how and why New Zealand’s public services are not functioning as they should. – Stuart Smith 

The question is, why are we getting worse outcomes? Frankly, it’s because this government is focused on the wrong things. – Stuart Smith 

If New Zealanders are paying high levels of tax, they should get services that deliver for them and their families. We should not be content with mediocrity, we should be ambitious and focused on giving Kiwis the best opportunities and best services possible. I’m confident that a National Government will be able to manage the economy competently and deliver outcomes that rival some of the best in the world. – Stuart Smith 

Oh dear. What an embarrassment. The Prime Minister’s advisers wrote her a conference speech which summarized why this government has become unfit to govern. Since it was based on a misunderstanding of the Covid-19 shock and, as a consequence, the types of changes we need to make to get things back on track.  – Robert MacCulloch

 The Great Depression is widely acknowledged to be a demand-side shock, set off by the 1929 stock market crash. Consumption and investment slumped. It gave rise to Keynesian economics, the view that maintaining demand, running budget deficits and establishing a welfare state could help mitigate the effects. Which was all true!

But the Covid-19 shock was entirely different. It was a supply-side shock: people couldn’t go to work due to the virus, so the supply of labor crumbled. Now there are all sorts of other supply-chain issues.

Adverse demand shocks cause inflation to fall.  Adverse supply shocks cause inflation to rise.

Now we know why this government stuffed up monetary policy. They thought they were dealing with a demand shock which needed to be dealt with by money printing, but all that did was cause inflation. – Robert MacCulloch

The PM must be getting woeful economic advice to write a speech saying the way out of a supply shock is not to address the root cause of cost pressures but instead to embark on 1929-style welfare expansionism.

By the way, the creation of a welfare state was a great victory back in the 1930s. But it was already in place when Covid-19 hit and a century before Ardern came to office. Her government have not furthered the cause of the development of the welfare state. Instead its legacy has been to run-down our health-care system.

If Ardern thinks we’re living in Great Depression times and wants to create a welfare state, she should have run for office in 1935 and not 2023. – Robert MacCulloch

Sure, there are plenty of opinions and comments published every day on the internet and elsewhere that are not accurate. They’re not hateful. They’re not terrorism. But they’re not accurate. There’s also plenty that is accurate, or just to confuse us all, accurate in the views of some people but not in the eyes of others.

The great majority of that material is opinion. Some opinions are well informed. Others less so. We all have them. And we have all been entitled to have them. Opinions and the debate they generate form the basis of better decisions and better outcomes. But who decides what is right and what is wrong?  – Bruce Cotterill

As I understand it, there are already laws that deal with extremism and harmful content. And so the question needs to be asked: will our new hate speech legislation seek to go further? If so, how far?

There are plenty of people who agree with any given government. There are usually plenty who disagree with that same government. Democracies around the world are better off for such diversity of views. Is our Prime Minister suggesting that ultimately, someone should decide that one side is right and another is wrong? – Bruce Cotterill

The trouble with hate speech laws and disinformation claims is this. Who decides what’s right? What is information versus opinion? What is an accurate opinion versus an inaccurate one? And if you eventually shut down one side of an argument or discussion, how are we to know where the alternative view might have led us if it was allowed to be pursued? – Bruce Cotterill

Freedom to speak. Freedom to publish. Freedom to congregate. Freedom to protest. Freedom to participate in matters of government. These freedoms quite rightly apply equally to those who disagree with us, as well as those who agree. They are all important cornerstones of democracy as we know it.

Every society needs balanced, constructive and reasoned debate. The fact that this newspaper publishes opinions and comment that are divergent and sometimes opposite is a good thing. Such commentary informs discussion and debate. Debate leads to accountability and better outcomes.

Constructive and well-reasoned argument is essential. It paves the way for better outcomes. But if we seek to shut down such discussion, where does it lead? When does “disinformation” become watered down to “disagreement”? When does any amount of criticism become an unacceptable challenge to authority? When will we be asked to leave our “point of view” behind? – Bruce Cotterill

The freedoms we enjoy provide for a range of views to be expressed, listened to and challenged. Sure, in doing so we are also enabling the fringe views, or sometimes the extreme views, and maybe even the intolerable ones. But they are a tiny minority of cases when compared to the many thousands of other voices we hear every day.

To block mainstream debate because of those few voices is to curb one of the greatest freedoms that we have — the freedom to think for ourselves, inform our views and express our opinions. – Bruce Cotterill

It would be a great shame if just some of those very freedoms were taken away at a time when Europe is once again at war. Freedom is worth talking about, arguing for, debating, and defending. – Bruce Cotterill

Voters clearly have given the one-fingered salute to Labour’s cost-of-living packages and perhaps there’s nothing Labour can do right now but hope next year gets better and people forget about inflation. But, right now, it’s described like this: the phone is off the hook.

It’s because Labour appears to put ideology, unfinished business, pet projects, and settling scores ahead of tested and fair, economically sensible policy. Why, for instance, during Covid has it spent so much money on health reforms that no-one can see the immediate benefits of.

And why waste hundreds of millions on screwing RNZ and TVNZ? It’s a merger no-one believes in and no-one thinks will work. And, at $600 million and counting, we simply can’t afford it. – Duncan Garner 

Despite the name, FPAs will bind all employers and employees in the occupation/industry, whether or not they want to be bound by the FPA or they participated in bargaining for the FPA. It will be illegal to contract out of an FPA, even if an employer and an employee both want to. – Edwards Law

The FPA process is likely to be complex and time-consuming for employers and employees. Given the employer side will need to represent potentially hundreds of employers of varying size and scale, it may be difficult for employers to reach an agreement amongst themselves, let alone with the employees. All of this could mean more costs for businesses in New Zealand, and maybe, higher prices for consumers as a result. – Edwards Law

For better or worse, FPAs are here, and we will soon see the first industries/occupations beginning the process to implement an FPA. It is widely expected that hospitality, cleaning, and security guards will be the first industries to begin bargaining for an FPA. Only time will tell if FPAs will achieve their goal of improving working conditions and productivity in New Zealand, or if they will instead be the final straw for many employers already under pressure. – Edwards Law

Ardern will be remembered as a Prime Minister who collected windfall votes in that year’s election and — like a feckless and foolish Lotto winner — recklessly squandered the vast amount of political capital they gave her on divisive projects like co-governance and decolonisation she had never campaigned on and had no mandate for. 

She will mostly be seen as a leader who disgracefully betrayed the trust that voters placed in her. – Graham Adams

It’s a real shame that they think Te Ao Māori is too narrow for the views that I expound, which are based on a free society, which I think is the best place for people to thrive and prosper over time.

Now they may think that you can’t be Māori and have those views, or you are a useless Māori, or not an advocate for Māori, but I would say to them that their disagreement is not with my Māoriness but with my views. – David Seymour

What I think is dangerous is the idea, we are talking past each other and no longer committed to some old values which have got New Zealand as far as it’s come.” – David Seymour

We have democracy and human rights on the one hand and this idea of a Tiriti-centric Aotearoa with Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti on the other and it is incompatible. If anyone says it dangerous or dog whistling to discuss that then I would put it back to them that they are endangering New Zealand by suppressing that discussion.

Apartheid is a system where people have a different set of political rights based on their ancestry, which happened in South Africa to a much more dramatic extent. – David Seymour

Ethnostate is a state where your citizenship or your rights are connected with your whakapapa, your ancestry and we have a government that is formalising that into law – David Seymour

How is one more kid who is hungry going to school with a full tummy because a distant relative is sitting around a co-governance table? – David Seymour

Do you really think that everything Europeans bought to New Zealand was bad or would it be more honest to say, that there have been good and bad on both sides and the real question is how do we go forward – David Seymour

Throwing cash like this fixes things for about 5 minutes then the pain returns. It’s not a solution, but thinking it is a solution is why Labour is on 32 percent. – Heather du Plessis-Allan 

Ardern had no answer for why bank profits were a bad thing, falling back to the old trope of “social licence”, which is essentially an ill-defined extra level of behaviour – over and above the legislated and regulated laws of the land – that commercial enterprises are somehow supposed to undertake to earn said licence. – Luke Malpass

Ultimately bank profits are a distraction for the issues facing New Zealand and a bit of vague bank-bashing won’t long distract the public from the one, real-life, indicator that rules them all: inflation. – Luke Malpass

The unpleasant aspects of health care in Britain are universally acknowledged, are well-known, and a cause of wonderment to all Western Europeans.  I have come to the conclusion, however, that it is precisely these aspects that appeal so strongly to the British. How else is fairness to be guaranteed, other than by ensuring that everyone is humiliated and made to feel that he is privileged to receive anything at all? – Theodore Dalrymple

That’s this Government in a nutshell, though. Some headlines, bit of noise, some advertising, a bit of hiring and some “transition” work. But the reality and the grunt work, where is it? – Mike Hosking

When you go back through 80 years of history of this party, it’s at its best when it’s a national National Party … that’s when we’ve been really strong. – Christopher Luxon

I will argue our end hard, but I can disagree without being disagreeable in a personal sense – Christopher Luxon

Perhaps the problem with New Zealand’s education system is that it was once world-class. An outstanding reputation sticks long past its use-by date. – Oliver Hartwich

New Zealand has experienced a continuous decline in its Pisa results over two decades and we don’t know how far we still have to fall before bottoming out.

Meanwhile, we fool ourselves by pretending we are still doing well. Thanks to the ‘flexibility’ of our NCEA assessment system, more and more students graduate with a certificate. Today, roughly 80 percent of our students leave school with NCEA Level 2, up from 60 percent two decades ago.

However, we know these NCEA results are meaningless, and not just because of the simultaneous declines in international tests like Pisa. Our own domestic analysis of basic literacy and numeracy should have been enough to wake us from any complacency. – Oliver Hartwich

This year, when the Ministry of Education finally assessed what was really going on, the results were as predictable as they were depressing. Reading tests were passed by just two-thirds of the 15-year-old students participating, and numeracy tests by just over half. Writing was even worse, with only one-third passing.

When an education system “performs” at such atrocious levels, it is justified to talk about a crisis. More than that, it is a national disgrace.

It is even more scandalous because the drop in achievement is unequally distributed. To put it bluntly, the poorer your family, the less likely you are to succeed at school. – Oliver Hartwich

If a wrecking ball had been run through the education system as it was in the 1990s to yield such results, there would have been an outcry. But because the decline has occurred slowly, that outcry has never happened.

Instead, parents concerned for their children’s education have done their best to make up for the decline in the education system. – Oliver Hartwich

New Zealand parents have noticed that schools are not quite what they used to be. But instead of going on the barricades, those who can do their best to fix the failings of our public education system privately.

Today, we have reached a point at which most parents can no longer make up for the education system’s deficiencies. Many parents do not have the time or the means to do so. Besides, young parents may never have experienced for themselves what a good education is like. – Oliver Hartwich

Practically everything in the system cries out not just for reform, but for revolution.

We need better teacher training and a better career structure for teachers. We need a deep, knowledge-rich curriculum. We need a better assessment system. We need proper monitoring systems for school performance. We need an overhaul of the education bureaucracy. And we need all of this at once.

If a war had wiped out our entire education system, the task could not be more daunting. – Oliver Hartwich

The challenge for the current generation of politicians is to have the courage to admit just how bad our education system has become. And then they need to have the courage to discard what is wrong and start again. – Oliver Hartwich

The coalition was concerned with one issue only: protecting the principle of free speech and the right of New Zealanders to be exposed to ideas and opinions regardless of whether people happened to agree with them.

This, after all, is the very heart of democracy. Democratic government depends on the contest of ideas, and the contest of ideas in turn depends on people being able to engage openly in free expression and debate. Free speech is where democracy starts. I would argue that it’s even more fundamental than the right to vote, because people’s ability to cast an informed vote depends on them first being able to participate in free and open debate about political issues and ideas. – Karl du Fresne

Note that the law doesn’t just refer to the freedom to speak; it gives equal weight to our right to seek and hear alternative views. There’s nothing in the Act that says opinions and ideas must be approved by people in power, such as the mayor of Auckland, before we can be safely allowed to hear them. – Karl du Fresne

The problem with so-called hate speech laws is that they could impose unreasonable and undemocratic limitations on public discussion of legitimate political issues. Hurtful is different from hateful. Someone might feel insulted or offended by a statement but that doesn’t mean it’s intended to incite hatred or harm, and the courts have traditionally been liberal in recognising people’s right to express opinions that upset others – with good reason, because judges are reluctant to interfere with the fundamental right to free speech. – Karl du Fresne

As an aside, I was astonished to learn recently that according to the New Zealand Police website, a hate crime is an offence perceived by the victim to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards a person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or age. So it’s down to victims to decide whether they’ve been the subject of a hate crime. This goes far beyond what the law says and shows that the police have already been well and truly politicised. – Karl du Fresne

The Free Speech Union campaigned vigorously against a law change – 20,000 submissions to Parliament, 80 percent of them opposed – and the government quietly consigned the proposal to the too-hard basket.

Job done, the union thought. But now we have a new justice minister, Kiri Allen, and suddenly hate speech laws are back on the agenda. Not only that, but the prime minister recently delivered an address at the United Nations in which she talked about the need to combat threats from so-called disinformation – a word that seems to mean whatever the user wants it to mean.

All this points to the possibility of the government seeking to control the dissemination of information and opinion that it disapproves of, perhaps even relating to issues such as climate change, Covid vaccination, transgenderism and immigration. – Karl du Fresne

The Minister of Māori Development, Willie Jackson, recently declared that “Democracy has changed… This is not a majority democracy.”

He is right. Aotearoa has changed its understanding of democratic norms, and we are establishing different political and economic rights based on a person’s whakapapa. – Damien Grant

He Puapua is remarkable in its scope and ambition. It has Orwellian statements such as, by 2040, “All New Zealanders will embrace and respect Māori culture as an integral part of national identity…”, and has some grandiose plans that defy political reality.

It lapses into Cultural Revolutionary rhetoric and over-reaches, but it reflects the thinking of a large swathe of the Wellington cultural elite. – Damien Grant

The effect is a shifting of political power away from the process of voting for political office holders to manage the state’s assets, and towards a new political caste. The changes are not restricted to the water assets. – Damien Grant

Most have accepted, in this new order, a health and increasingly a welfare system that responds on race and not need is acceptable; or they do not care enough to speak out.

Adults are created by our childhoods and mine, like most of my generation, was raised on very different cultural gruel that those who are coming of age today.

Our children have been raised in classrooms that placed an emphasis on te reo Māori over TE Lawrence, and Kupe before Kipling. – Damien Grant

There remains in conservative circles a belief that the tide can be turned back, that an omnibus piece of legislation or major reform agenda can roll back a regime that has been decades in the making.

This will not happen. Although some programmes, such as Three Waters, may falter, the direction of travel is set.

Andrew Breitbart, an iconoclastic conservative thinker and agitator, famously declared that politics is downstream from culture, and on this issue, the cultural landscape has shifted permanently. – Damien Grant

The risk of cancellation at Williams College, where I have taught for 12 years, and at top colleges and universities throughout this country, is not theoretical. My fellow scientists and I are living it. What is at stake is not simply our reputations, but our ability to pursue truth and scientific knowledge.

If you had asked me about academic freedom five years ago, I would have complained about the obsession with race, gender and ethnicity, along with safetyism on campus (safe spaces, grade inflation, and so on). But I would not have expressed concerns about academic freedom.

We each have our own woke tipping point—the moment you realize that social justice is no longer what we thought it was, but has instead morphed into an ugly authoritarianism. For me that moment came in 2018, during an invited speaker talk, when the religious scholar Reza Aslan stated that “we need to write on a stone what can and cannot be discussed in colleges.” Students gave this a standing ovation.  Having been born under dictatorship in Brazil, I was alarmed. – Luana Maroja

The restriction of academic freedom comes in two forms: what we teach and what we research.

Let’s start with teaching. I need to emphasize that this is not hypothetical. The censorious, fearful climate is already affecting the content of what we teach.

One of the most fundamental rules of biology from plants to humans is that the sexes are defined by the size of their gametes—that is, their reproductive cells. Large gametes occur in females; small gametes in males. In humans, an egg is 10 milliontimes bigger than a sperm. There is zero overlap. It is a full binary. 

But in some biology 101 classes, teachers are telling students that sexes—not gender, sex—are on a continuum. At least one college I know teaches with the “gender unicorn” and informs students that it is bigoted to think that humans come in two distinct and discrete sexes.  – Luana Maroja

In psychology and public health, many teachers no longer say male and female, but instead use the convoluted “person with a uterus.” I had a colleague who, during a conference, was criticized for studying female sexual selection in insects because he was a male. Another was discouraged from teaching the important concept of “sexual conflict”—the idea that male and female interests differ and mates will often act selfishly; think of a female praying mantis decapitating the head of the male after mating—because it might “traumatize students.” I was criticized for teaching “kin selection”—the the idea that animals tend to help their relatives. Apparently this was somehow an endorsement of Donald Trump hiring his daughter Ivanka. – Luana Maroja

While the history of science does contain baseless and shameful assertions about race, we know that it is true that human populations, say over distinct geographic areas, have differences in allele frequency. Many of these differences are deeper than just skin color and relevant to health and well-being. Imagine the consequences of this lack of knowledge in medicine. After all, many genetic diseases vary between populations, for example, sickle-cell anemia among African-Americans, cystic fibrosis in Europeans, and Tay-Sachs disease among Jews.

But it has become taboo in the classroom to note any disparities between groups that are not explained as the result of systemic bias. – Luana Maroja

The language purity that this ideology requires is also distressing. It gets in the way of spontaneity and good teaching. At Williams, for example, our teaching assistants were told at a DEI training session that the word “guys” is a microaggression. So students learn that inoffensive words are harmful. This leads to a snowball effect, where ever more insignificant words or gestures can be taken as proof of bigotry. Many professors I know will freeze in class when realizing they were praising the work of a “colonialist” such as Darwin or Newton. Others will avoid mentioning historical figures if they are white and male.  – Luana Maroja

The prestigious journal Nature Human Behavior just announced in a recent editorial: “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.” They are not referring to the importance of protecting individuals participating in research. They are saying that the study of human variation is itself suspect. So they advocate avoiding research that could “stigmatize individuals or human groups” or “promotes privileged, exclusionary perspectives.”

The censors and gatekeepers simply assume—without evidence—that human population research is malign and must be shut down. The costs of this kind of censorship, both self-imposed and ideologically based, are profound. Student learning is impaired and important research is never done. The dangers of closing off so many avenues of inquiry is that science itself becomes an extension of ideology and is no longer an endeavor predicated on pursuing knowledge and truth. – Luana Maroja

Yes, a spreading web of ignorance and credulity that will doom some Māori to illness or death. Applauding the spread of the tohunga is like applauding the spread of faith healing. Indeed, that’s much of what the tohunga do! – Jerry Coyne

Do things differently! But hang on, this is a government that is overseeing a health system that now reports that patients are choosing to die rather than suffer the tribulations of a hospital waiting list. How’s that for doing things differently? – John Porter

The Government is spending $30 million on an investigation into renewable energy projects including a hydro scheme at Lake Onslow in Central Otago.

If the scheme proceeds it would be the largest hydro project in New Zealand’s history and could cost more than $4 billion. Knowing this Government’s inability to accurately cost projects, you have to say $8 billion not $4 billion! – John Porter

And then MBIE advise, “…proof that the project would lower wholesale electricity prices is not necessary for Onslow to proceed”. Does this sound more like ideological thinking rather sound economic thinking?

I haven’t even touched on how greenhouse gas emissions from geothermal power production, while generally low, are emitters of CO2 and studies overseas show some are on par with emissions from coal fired power plants! – John Porter

Labour’s new “Landmark New Zealand Energy Strategy” sounds awfully like so many other Labour strategies: huge on aspiration; minimal planning and negligible delivery! – John Porter

Collectively, our local and Central Government politicians could have avoided all the unnecessary sacrifice of our prime grazing land on the idealogical altar of emissions reductions targets. 

It has been known ever since the government set its zero emissions target by 2030 that this could relatively easily be achieved by limiting the planting of trees to what has been historically known as class 7 land.

The truth is, we don’t need to plant a single hectare of our most profitable country with anything other than the best pasture species especially at a time when the produce from that farm land is delivering returns we have never seen in my lifetime.  – Clive Bibby

Violent and inappropriate language does, indeed, appear to be a real problem in the US. In this country, however, on both sides of the political divide, people tend to express their views strongly but generally within the bounds of propriety. There have always been people who express extreme views and social media perhaps helps them. But they are the exception rather than the rule.

It would be a tragedy for this country if, influenced by overseas excesses, we were to legislate for hate speech. Such legislation could have a chilling effect on debate here on all manner of issues.

I agree with people who say that, if passed, the law could be used to attack those who may hold unpopular positions. Given the increase in wokery in society, there would be innumerable complaints to the police and also the possibility of private prosecutions. – Chris Finlayson

The most effective way of rebutting positions you disagree with is to master the arguments of your opponents and engage in a robust and civil debate.

May the best person win the argument. It is contrary to fundamental principles of freedom of expression and to a liberal democracy to have a law that could stop the full and frank exchange of views. – Chris Finlayson

I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started. I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that’s not true. There’s a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism. I spend a lot of time in countries all over Africa, and they’re like, Eh, we wouldn’t mind a little more globalization actually. – Bono

Capitalism is a wild beast. We need to tame it. But globalization has brought more people out of poverty than any other -ism. If somebody comes to me with a better idea, I’ll sign up. I didn’t grow up to like the idea that we’ve made heroes out of businesspeople, but if you’re bringing jobs to a community and treating people well, then you are a hero. That’s where I’ve ended up. God spare us from lyricists who quote themselves, but if I wrote only one lyric that was any good, it might have been: Choose your enemies carefully because they ill define you. Turning the establishment into the enemy — it’s a little easy, isn’t it? – Bono

The real danger to our democracy is the deliberate distortion of these historical facts that would, if allowed to take root, set our development back for no good reason.

We must insist that the complete record (warts and all) is included in any state sanctioned revision of our history curriculum. Failure to do so will result in a division from which we may never recover.

If it is not the full truth – it is a lie. –  Clive Bibby 

Protectionism [i..e, shielding local industry from foreign competition by the likes of protective tariffs] necessarily imposes larger costs on the rest of the home-country economy.

Protectionism’s harm to consumers is obvious. Having to pay more to buy the outputs of ‘successfully’ protected firms, consumers must reduce their purchases of other goods and services or reduce their savings. 

To grasp this economic reality is to realise also the harm that protectionism inflicts on other home-country firms and workers. Every input that protectionism diverts into protected firms is an input diverted away from other productive uses. Non-protected firms thus have less access to raw materials, tools, intermediate goods, and labour. Their outputs fall. 

Further, because workers in non-protected firms have fewer or lower-quality tools and inputs with which to work, these workers’ productivity falls. And falling productivity means falling wages.

Looking only at the alleged ‘success’ of protected firms and then confidently concluding that protectionism is a boon to the entire country, [one] reasons as would an apologist for successful thieves – an apologist who points to the thieves’ bustling business in larceny, and to the thieves’ high ‘earnings,’ and then confidently concludes that thievery is a boon to the entire country. – Don Boudreaux

Monetary policy operates on a time delay, so often it appears the sensible decisionmaker is a killjoy, taking away the punchbowl just as the economic party is getting started. That’s not a popular approach at any gathering.

Back when monetary policy was left to politicians, the temptation to goose the economy beyond its capacity at election time was often too great. Political cycles made economic cycles worse, with magical rip-roaring times prior to election day, and big hangovers a year or so afterwards as resurgent inflation had to be tamed. That’s why New Zealand was a world leader in removing the monetary policy remit from politicians and placing it in the hands of an independent entity.

And it’s worked well. So well that with the help of the price stabilising effects of trade globalisation, a generation or two has been able to largely forget about inflation and central bank governors. Until that is, the last three years.

The economic response to the pandemic has reminded everyone of the power wielded by central bankers. The extreme monetary loosening and belated monetary tightening have created big swings in prices, asset values, and economic activity. There have been stark winners and losers, none more so than those who were encouraged to get out and buy houses when prices were high, only to see their equity evaporate before their eyes now, and their mortgage costs soar. – Steven Joyce

It doesn’t help that Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s response to the review was it was evidence the Bank “got the big decisions right” when that’s clearly not the case. Say what you like about the notwithstandings, extenuating circumstances, and who else also got it wrong, but inflation this far outside the required band, (including food inflation now in excess of 10 per cent), and the need for sudden rapid increases in interest rates is not “getting it right”. – Steven Joyce

Because of the bank’s importance and independence, the appointment of the governor is supposed to be a non-partisan decision that both sides of politics can live with. For whatever reason, it is clear that for the opposition parties and many independent commentators that is not currently the case.

A sensible Finance Minister concerned for the independence of the institution would have either appointed a new governor or reappointed the current one for a shorter term. It would have been entirely reasonable to make a two-year extension, say, until the current crisis is passed, and then appoint a new governor for the next stage of the bank’s evolution and the next economic cycle. – Steven Joyce

It is Robertson who appointed Orr and the buck stops with him on Orr’s reappointment. It is also Robertson who implicitly and explicitly extended the bank’s remit to focus on housing, employment, climate change, Māori issues, and the economy generally. As Finance Minister he has never once publicly said the bank should focus on price stability alone and leave the rest to the Government.

This in itself is endangering the political independence of the bank. The more it is inserted into activities outside macroeconomic policy, the more reasonable it is for people to take a political position on what it is doing and saying. – Steven Joyce

It has been convenient for Robertson to set the bank up with a broader brief. It has enabled him to crank up spending and make policy decisions that arguably hold the economy back, while abdicating economic responsibility for those decisions and charging the bank with looking after the downstream effects.

However, we are currently experiencing a salutary reminder of the reach and importance of monetary policy and the critical but circumscribed role of an independent central bank in a successful economy.

The Finance Minister should be taking steps to reinforce the bank’s focus, its independence, and the broad-based support for it as an apolitical institution. At the moment he risks undermining it. – Steven Joyce

Pandemic preparedness, at least for a virus with similar properties to Sars-CoV-2, should be regarded as a failure if a country requires a lockdown in the first six to 12 months. – Philip HIll

If everyone was wearing high quality masks in all indoor situations, that also stops the virus. We just didn’t have enough tools initially – we didn’t have the mask use; we didn’t have the test and trace up to scratch at that point. It’s definitely something you’d want to avoid in the future.

Taiwan were phenomenally ready … You need all these systems ready to go, with all the tools you need. – Michael Baker

Our baseline position is not very good. So we need to take that into consideration when we plan for the next pandemic … To assume it will be fine, and it will all work out, would be a mistake. – Anja Werno 

If we don’t have a vaccine readily available, and we don’t have enough information about its specific characteristics, and it looks like it’s very virulent, with a high case fatality, I think sometimes lockdowns should be considered. But I think they are an option of last resort.

I don’t think the government or the public wants to go through all that again unless we absolutely have to. – Chris Bullen

The social cost of a lockdown should also not be underestimated. There should be no spin about us being prepared when we are not. We can be good enough if we want to. – Philip Hill

How many times this year have you heard advocates of green energy decrying the fact that consumers have been ripped off by our failure to shift to renewables even more quickly? Yet we really don’t have an alternative to gas to make up for shortfalls in wind and solar. We could try to store renewable energy, but storage, in the form of batteries, say, or pumped-storage hydro-electric stations or some other emerging technology, is incredibly expensive. It costs around three or four times more to store a unit of electricity than it does to generate it in the first place. – Ross Clark

At present, consumers are not directly exposed to these kind of price surges, because they are absorbed by retail suppliers of electricity. But it is the intention that in the future consumers will be charged variable rates for electricity via their smart meters.

That, then, is the future to which we can look forward: not one where the lights necessarily go out, but where we are forced to pay through the nose if we want to keep them on in unfavourable weather conditions. The price of green energy is a form of terrible segregation, where the rich will have access to light and heat, and those who need it most, the poor, will shiver in the dark. – Ross Clark

Did you know that men’s legs, which tend to have better muscle definition than women’s, are often used to advertise hosiery? It seems men really do make the best women sometimes. – Jo Bartosch

Ordinarily, I would refrain from making personal comments about the appearance of a teenager of either sex. And as a middle-aged, slowly sagging midget with a fashion sense that would put a home-educated child to shame, I am well aware that I have never been and will never be beauty-pageant material. But beauty queens are usually judged, at least in part, on their looks. It is part of the deal. So you cannot help but notice that the winner of this particular contest bears a striking resemblance to an undercooked, lumpy sausage, with his fleshy moobs squashed into a gown. – Jo Bartosch

The idea of women and girls parading around while sweaty-palmed judges score them is certainly creepy and anachronistic. Nonetheless, the women entered the Miss Greater Derry pageant in good faith and deserved a fair chance. They were denied a prize that rightfully belonged to one of them. Brían sashayed off not only with the tiara, but also with a university scholarship and sponsorship opportunities. The other contestants had no choice but to clap along at the mockery made of their efforts. The spectacle served as a powerful reminder that, in today’s America, failing to show due deference to the trans overlords (or trans overladies?) is potentially career-ending.

This pattern is being replicated across public life. From sports to politics to science, wherever schemes are established to increase female participation, entitled men in stilettos are marching in to mark them as their territory. And if proof were ever needed that transwomen are men, it can be witnessed in the fawning, gushing behaviour of the wider world towards them. Overweight women are not entered into beauty pageants at all, let alone crowned. – Jo Bartosch

As WoLF’s chair, Lierre Keith, tells me: ‘You can roll your eyes about it being a beauty pageant, but the principle is the same whether it’s a pageant, a homeless shelter, a hospital ward or a prison. Women are saying no to men, as we have a right to.’ This is about ‘men claiming to be women and claiming a right to our spaces’, she says. The idea that womanhood is a costume that can be stepped into by men is the very essence of dick-swinging entitlement.

Much to the chagrin of proudly hairy-legged feminists like me, there are probably more Miss America fans and aspiring contestants than there are critics raging at the patriarchal beauty standards such contests promote. Given this, the plus side of plus-size men like Brían waltzing in and sweeping up women’s prizes is that more women will be forced to put political differences aside and recognise what unites us. The threat trans ideology poses to women’s spaces and opportunities could hardly be any clearer. So, I would like to say a sincere ‘well done’ to Miss Greater Derry – he might just end up inspiring women everywhere. Just not in the way he imagined. – Jo Bartosch

As a mother I used to worry about a lot of things but I learnt to let Sammy go and live his life. Mums, love your babies, just accept them and love them exactly as they are. The most important thing is the love you give your child, they are not here forever, make the most of it. Hug them and love them. – Lisa Finnemore

The real test is yet to come, however, when the Black Ferns next play an international.

Will New Zealand rugby back the team by scheduling a test at Eden Park in primetime again? Or will it blink?

But that’s next year. This year we’ve got a team to thank for a wonderful few weeks of rugby and sportsmanship.

Rugby was indeed the winner on the day.  – Tracy Watkins

If the bank executives were scratching their bald spots wondering how a review can be thematic, they have a new term to digest. Social License. Last week the Prime Minister decried the level of bank profits and asked: “…in the current environment, does it speak to a level of social licence?” She then continued in a nice bit of Maoist resonance, to state; “It doesn’t always take government intervention for that kind of self-reflection to occur. It’s time the banks operating in New Zealand did that very thing.”

The term social license has no philosophical or ideological underpinnings. It lacks even the dignity of its own Wikipedia page.-  Damien Grant

The criticism that the banks are currently earning abnormal profits is not true. The central bank keeps data going back to 1991 and it shows that the return on equity has consistently been around the 13% mark, where it is now. The only difference is that banks have grown larger and as their capital base grows so does total profit.

If you wanted to restrain bank profits you would need to deregulate the sector and allow more entrants to hang out their shingle. Competition, not regulation, is the only way to permanently improve customer service and lower profits.

Reaching for something as nebulous and undefined as a term with no meaning is perfect for our first post-modern Prime Minister. The banks cannot comply with their social license because there is no criteria from which a compliance officer can measure compliance.

Its application shifts governance away from the rule of law and towards the rule of man because, like obscenity, you know it when you see it, but you cannot define it. – Damien Grant

According to the Reserve Bank, trading banks made nearly seven billion in the last twelve months. The Prime Minister has not detailed what is an appropriate level of bank profitability but as she ponders this perhaps she can run the slide rule over the harm caused by that other bank that dominates our financial sector like a massive kauri tree in a forest; the Reserve Bank. – Damien Grant

If the financial community has lost faith in Orr, and I believe they have, they will not accept his statements that he is serious about price stability. To convince the public Orr will need to drive up unemployment and business failures in a way a credible governor would not. In the nomenclature favoured by the Prime Minister, he will need to do that because he has lost his social license.

Of course, if you can lose this ethereal quality by acting in such a way that damages the living standards of your fellow citizens in a persistent fashion over many years, well, Prime Minister, it might not just be the banks who need to engage in a bit of self-reflection. – Damien Grant

During the troubled reign of the current governor we have seen inflation become endemic. Asset prices have accelerated to such an extent that a generation is locked out of homeownership. Businesses and workers are grappling with the uncertainty and hardship created by an inflationary spiral that now requires a harsh recession to bring under control. Orr’s mistakes in pricing the bonds during his fifty-three billion collar money printing splurge has cost the taxpayers over nine billion dollars.

These actions are causing real suffering for kiwis, in contrast with the mostly accounting profits being made by the banks.

If trading banks, operating within the law are risking their social license how does a central bank governor who has failed in his single most important duty, price stability, retain his?  – Damien Grant

These meetings are a gathering of the great and the good in the climate change world. Some will fly to Egypt in their private jets to lecture us all on using public transport, oblivious to their own hypocrisy at using the highest emitting form of transport possible.
Regardless, I hope they have the foresight to focus on real, achievable solutions: that is policies that are realistic and not ahead of technological solutions. We only have to look to Europe and the UK to see the damage done by a premature expectation that they could close down their thermal power stations and rely on wind and solar to keep the lights on. – Stuart Smith

In the energy sector they talk about the trilemma. The energy trilemma refers to affordable, reliable and environmentally sustainable energy.

The difference between life in the developed world, as we enjoy in New Zealand, and life in the third world is having ready access to reliable and affordable energy. We forget that at our peril.

Wind and solar energy do have a vital role to play. Of course they do! But we haven’t yet reached sufficient levels of technological advancement in New Zealand to be burning our bridges just yet and shutting down our non-renewable generation and still expect the lights will stay on. – Stuart Smith

Our government’s attempt to tax our farmers in the name of climate change is a great example of a policy moving ahead of available technology. Why? Farmers currently have no practical tools to mitigate their emissions, and drastically reducing agricultural production in the name of climate change would put us in breach of the Paris Accord.

We should acknowledge the environmental progress that we have made. Yes, we have more to do, but food security and access to affordable, reliable energy must not be put at risk by climate change policies. We can have both, but it will take leadership. – Stuart Smith

It is being in the public eye and being a bit of a polarising personality that has taught me my biggest lessons. I worked out you don’t die of embarrassment. Sometimes it just feels like you might and just putting one foot in front of the other and keeping moving will mean that it will pass.

I learnt that you can’t personalise other people’s opinions and sometimes their hate. They have their own stuff going on and I don’t have to take it on board. I learnt that you can couch your inner voice to be positive and not negative. It takes work and now, instead of sinking, I can see the signs and head it off earlier. I can bounce.

I have learnt to kick Mildred to the curb. She is the nasty voice on my shoulder that nags and doubts me. I have no room for Mildred, so I send her packing quick-smart.

I have also learnt thanks to people like Sir John Kirwan and Mike King and reinforced in Michelle and Maia’s book that it’s okay to not always be okay. Sometimes you just need to find space and reach out to your mum or daughter or husband or best friend and just breath through it.  – Paula Bennett

At any rate, it is curious that so many of those who claim to oppose fascism these days resemble fascists both in their manner and their dress. Black is their favorite color, and they shout to drown out the sound of all voices other than their own. In addition to repetition, their rhetorical method is intimidation. Often, it works. – Theodore Dalrymple

What is most alarming about all this is that a very noisy but tiny minority has been able with surprising ease to overturn, and indeed reverse, a tradition of free speech and enquiry. Our society has proved surprisingly susceptible or vulnerable to the activism of monomaniacs of many kinds. The problem is that an issue is all in all to the monomaniacs, but to the rest of us it is merely one thing among many others, not even, or far from, the most important. – Theodore Dalrymple

Generalizations about animal agriculture hide great regional differences and often lead to diet guidelines promoting shifts away from animal products that are not feasible for the world’s poor. For instance, the highly publicized 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission reportrecommended a largely plant-based diet whose cost, based on retail prices from 2011, was estimated to exceed the total household per capita incomes of more than 1.5 billion people. The urgent food, nutrition, and economic needs of hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia should not be sacrificed to pay for methane that was largely emitted elsewhere. – Jimmy Smith

Across Africa, and indeed much of the developing world, farm animals are much more than cellophane-wrapped meat or bottled milk. The farming of cows, goats, pigs, and poultry is essential to people’s livelihoods—and therefore purchasing power, which in turn determines household food security at a time of increasing global insecurity. In countries that face high levels of malnutrition and poverty, livestock provide families with food, jobs, income, draught power, and a sense of cultural identity. – Jimmy Smith

Like every continent, Africa must strive to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. But African countries must also reduce malnutrition, create decent livelihoods for their people, and promote environmental stewardship. The continent has the opportunity through livestock to achieve all this.

Improving livestock productivity in Africa goes hand in hand with reducing agricultural emissions and protecting food security from the impacts of climate change. As the delegates and activists gather in Egypt, they must remember that both outcomes are vital for humanity’s long-term well-being. Villainizing livestock will achieve neither. – Jimmy Smith

The survey confirms what most news consumers already know – as a whole, journalists are biased. Not only do they have a strong left-wing bias, but about a third of the industry is also hard-core in their left-wing beliefs.

That would not be of concern if the journalists kept their personal views to themselves and saw their role as non-biased neutral observers. While that may have been their role in years gone by, journalists now see their role is to change the opinion of their audience.  – Frank Newman

What is quite clear is the growing disconnect between what journalists produce and what the public wants to consume. That is visible in their declining audience and reflected in a noticeable mistrust of the mainstream media.

The audience that is looking for media coverage that is balanced and fair is increasingly turning to new channels for news and political commentary. It is therefore hardly surprising that the legacy media is becoming its own echo chamber with a dwindling audience.

The challenge for the media sector is how it remains relevant. The logical response is to return to the more traditional values as espoused in the virtuous principles of the Broadcasting Standards Authority and the Media Council. That will, however, be difficult for an industry that is now highly populated with extreme socialists intent on re-educating their audience towards their form of left-wing ideology. – Frank Newman

For a while now, Orr has been ridiculed by some as a symbol of woke.

It’s been obvious how hard he’s tried to make the Reserve Bank cool. He’s given speeches on climate change and speeches on embracing te ao Māori.

In fact, in at least its last three annual reports, the RBNZ has made more mentions of “carbon” or “climate” than “inflation” or “price stability”. Just a reminder, inflation is the bank’s job. The climate is someone else’s. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Finance Minister Grant Robertson didn’t help. He also tried to make the bank cool. He appointed a board of directors who specialised in a lot of things that weren’t necessarily boring old economics. Things like “managing people” and “culture”. Critics noticed that and that was also mocked. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

His select committee appearance at Parliament last week might’ve been a low point. He blamed our inflation on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, parroting a Labour Party line. He would know that the truth is our inflation was out of control at least eight months before the invasion. The invasion was in late February this year. Our inflation was 5.9 per cent by December last year. It was 3.3 per cent (outside the 1-3 per cent band) by June last year.

Unfortunately for Orr and everyone who shares his ideological commitment to getting distracted from your day job, he’s reinforced exactly what the opponents of woke stuff have long feared, which is that you can’t do your day job properly if you start getting distracted by wanting to appear cool to the users of Twitter. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Adrian Orr frequently presents as so thin-skinned that he must be approached with extreme caution to avoid what could usefully be termed a “Vesuvius” moment.

In my view, it is well past time that Orr grew a hard shell, faced up to probing questions with frankness and more respect for his interlocutors, and combined that with the necessary gravitas to take the inflation fight public and instill confidence so that Kiwis are united behind what should be a single-focus endeavour.

Right now Orr presents as an inept manager who has struggled to retain the confidence of the “markets” at a time when it is essential that there is broad consensus on the measures necessary to tame inflation. – Fran O’Sullivan

But it’s a fat lot of good blaming Orr alone for the “poverty effect”, which is in fact being felt through much of “the West” as central bankers try to crunch soaring inflation through raising interest rates yet maintain “sustainable employment” — a frankly ridiculously balancing act that would test the most adroit high-wire exponent.

This current state of affairs suits politicians and the financial sector alike. Each are absolved from encouraging the unsustainable “wealth effect” in the first place in New Zealand to alleviate the impact of the Covid pandemic. This was manifest here by a huge escalation in asset prices and cheap money to sustain employment. – Fran O’Sullivan

Because of the dire worker shortages, employers are already bending over backwards to give employees competitive wages, greater flexibility, and additional benefits.

There is a risk that the standardised approach may adversely impact employees who already have a flexible agreement that suits their individual needs.

It’s also a bad time in our economic cycle to be increasing wages. Unless New Zealand’s wage inflation starts to decrease, the Reserve Bank of NZ will continue to increase borrowing rates – hurting first-home buyers and low-income households the most. – Matt Cowley

Spending money does not, on its own, fix problems. It matters how that money is spent.

Perhaps you think that is obvious. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem so obvious to the government. – Michael Johnston

There has been widespread commentary from the leaders of ECE bodies on the urgent need to address teacher supply.

Without more teachers, the new funding, even if it’s just offsetting the effects of inflation, will increase pressure on an already strained ECE sector. That will mean longer waiting lists and reductions in quality. – Michael Johnston

We should trust ECE centres to make pragmatic recruitment decisions and release them from red tape. This approach wouldn’t even cost anything. In fact, it would likely save money.

Sometimes the best solution to a problem is also the cheapest. – Michael Johnston

I sometimes feel as though we have abdicated our responsibility as grown-ups because I know what it was like to be young.
I thought I knew everything. Now, I look back, I’m like, I knew nothing. I was wrong in many of my sort of fierce positions.

And, I was fortunate that when I was young, there were adults who were willing to tell me, you’re actually really not right about that. Here’s what you should think about differently. That’s not happening now. –Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Can we all agree on compassion?

Can we all agree that not everyone means harm? Can we all agree that people can learn and people change? You know, just sort of basic things that we seem to have forgotten. –Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Co-governance appears to be a hill that this Labour Government is prepared to die on.

But as I also said on Friday, co-governance should be the least of your worries if you’re concerned with creeping socialism.

The Three Waters reform suggested is property theft and that’s the reason that Phil Goff was against it and had to be bought off.

This Government wants to seize assets paid for by ratepayers, amalgamate them and then borrow off them, so that funding for water stays off the Governments and Councils books. It’s blatant nationalisation by a left wing government

It’s like needing to do urgent repairs on the house but you have no money.  So you take your neighbour’s house and use it as equity to borrow money to fix your place. It’s just wrong.- Andrew Dickens

I don’t agree with accusations I am ‘phobic’ towards anyone, and I would stress that what we need at this time is not name-calling but constructive, nuanced and robust dialogue with a view to better help vulnerable children experiencing difficult questions and distress around identity,” she said.

I and many other practitioners have real concerns with the growing number of children being encouraged to believe they have been born in the wrong body and need to medically change their bodies to align with their inner thoughts and feelings in order to resolve psychological distress.

I respect and empathise with those who believe differently, but I stand by my professional opinion and approach as I believe it to be best practice, and in the best interests of children. – Marli de Klerk

But as we’ve said a number of times now, with all due respect our beliefs will not be changing. Christian beliefs have been held by people around the world for thousands of years because they bring life, hope and flourishing and continue to be just as relevant and valuable today.

”We know not everyone will agree with our beliefs. We respect their right to hold and express their beliefs. We just ask that respect is offered in return. – Paul Shakes 

Have you noticed that when Jacinda’s government is forced to make concessions under public pressure they never sacrifice co-governance? Maori domination of the revised hospital structure was defended tenaciously. With Three Waters, Nanaia Mahuta will fiddle around the edges of the legislation, but co-governance is still there in the middle, an immovable obstacle. Advancing it is central to Nanaia’s being; it has become her raison d’etre. After a lengthy, undistinguished political career, she can at last see her long-desired Tainui tribal takeover on the horizon, and she doesn’t want to give an inch. Jacinda Ardern and her low-level caucus understand so little about Maori affairs that most of them can’t see what Nanaia is doing right under their noses. They won’t lift a finger to prevent her tribal takeover bid. – Michael Bassett

To this government, co-governance means that non-Maori, who constitute more than 83% of New Zealand’s population, would possess 50% of the authority in the country, and be democratically elected. Forget about one-person, one-vote: some, as Napoleon the Pig said in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “are more equal than others”. The other 50% will be made up from only 17% of the population who are Maori. “It’s time to re-think democracy”, Minister of Maori Affairs Willie Jackson tells us. And, there’s nothing in any legislative proposal for co-governance to ensure Maori would be democratically elected by all Maori voters. Instead, they will be selected in the old tribal way: by a handful of self-appointed aristocrats. But co-governance will be more than that. Whichever becomes the dominant tribe will exercise much wider power. Nanaia intends to make sure that that tribe is Tainui. That explains the appointment of the Mahutas and Ormsbys to so many positions, irrespective of their merits, or lack of them. Their job is to ensure that when push comes to shove, Tainui does the pushing and the shoving at the behest of the King Movement, with that loudmouth, Tuku Morgan, yes, he of the $89 pair of silk underpants paid for by the taxpayer, playing a key role. –Michael Bassett

It should not be any minister’s role to advance personal tribal interests. Getting family members appointed other than on merit is beyond the pale. New Zealand is a democracy; our constitution provides for one person-one vote. Willie Jackson should be firmly reminded of this fact. Any scheme which endeavours to entrench racial or tribal privilege in any administrative arm of government should immediately be rejected.

It is clear that Labour’s cabinet has failed to enforce these basic rules. Promoting tribalism under the guise of co-governance should be stopped in its tracks. Now! In addition to all the other changes needed to the Three Waters legislation, co-governance must be dropped. – Michael Bassett

What the country didn’t hear very much – if anything – about were the contributions of other hui attendees. A cynic might suggest that the suppression of this material was deemed necessary by the hui organisers because if the average citizen was made aware of its existence there would be an outcry. Most New Zealanders do not see it as a role of their government to “guide” the thinking of the nation towards the radical, ideologically-driven goals of a tiny, unelected, elite of bureaucrats, academics and activists.- Chris Trotter

Ms Ardern’s and her government’s radicalisation is fast becoming electorally problematic. Precisely because radical ideas, practically by definition, are polarising, they tend to make those who espouse them politically defensive and hostile to criticism. Those citizens who oppose state-sponsored radicalism, mark themselves as “enemies of the people”.

“No Media Access” is only the beginning. – Chris Trotter

We need to bottle up Ruby Tui and spread her far and wide around New Zealand because, by being positive, so much can and will be achieved. – Duncan Garner

Just because I don’t fit someone else’s stereotype of what a Māori looks or acts like, doesn’t mean that is not who I am. – James Meager

You’ve got to protect women’s spaces. I just worry about a lot of the battles that have been very hard won for women, like for racial equality, being reversed but at the same time, trans people have a right to be treated with dignity and not to be discriminated against. – Peter Hain 

You can’t run a country and have a future when you have 40 percent of your kids attending school, that’s just not going to cut it. It’s a moral failure.  It’s a social failure. It’s an economic crisis. So we have to all, Government schools and parents, be really accountable for getting our kids to school. That’s what matters most in our education system. –  Christopher Luxon 

Only 15 percent of road deaths happen because of speed only.  Which means 85 percent of crashes happen below the speed limit or because the drivers are boozed or drugged up.

85 percent.

So Waka Kotahi’s big solution to getting the road toll down completely ignores the fact that 85 percent of the road toll will probably be unaffected. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

The worst thing about this is that it gives transport officials an excuse to not do the things that would actually make a difference.

They’re doing this so they don’t have to put in media barriers that would actually be effective at stopping cars crossing the centre line and smacking into other cars head on.

And that wouldn’t just stop head on crashes from speeding cars, but from everything else as well. Tired drivers, distracted drivers, drunk drivers, drugged drivers. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

What’s frustrating is that those facts are not what are being debated; instead, we’ve got an argument dictated by emotion.

Which means we’ll probably all end up having to drive more slowly, while hundreds of people still die on the roads each year because speed isn’t really the biggest problem. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

A metaphor for the current state of Western societies is that of a tail wagging a dog. A mere appendage has become the most important or powerful part of the animal.

Another apt metaphor for those societies is that of perpetual guerrilla war, waged by tiny ideologically armed minorities against a huge but bloated army, the majority of the population. The ideological guerrillas are nimble, rapid, persistent, and, above all, fanatical. They’re fighting an enemy that’s slow, torpid, complacent, and without real belief in itself. Although initially weak, the guerrillas believe themselves destined to win. – Theodore Dalrymple

First, a proposition is adumbrated that initially appears preposterous to most citizens. Then, arguments in its favor, using all the sophistry available to people who attended university, are relentlessly propagandized. Finally, success is achieved when the preposterous proposition has become widely accepted as an unassailable orthodoxy, at least by the intellectual class, denial of or opposition to which is characterized as extremist, even fascist, in nature.

This process is possible because the struggle, as in a guerrilla war, is asymmetric.- Theodore Dalrymple

Strength of belief doesn’t guarantee that a cause is good, very far from it; but it does mean that those who struggle on its behalf will do so with all their heart.

The absurdity of modern ideological enthusiasms is evident, but while those who promote them make them the focus of their existence and the whole meaning of their lives, better-balanced people try to get on with their lives as normal. No one wants to spend his life arguing, let alone fighting, against sheer idiocy, and thus, sheer idiocy wins the day. – Theodore Dalrymple

We should make no bones about the fact that lying about the truth of issues for political and personal advantage is a great badness. It is even worse with defenceless children targeted by activists using fear tactics to enlist their support – as with the ‘climate change emergency’ nonsense. And if there is a distinction between badness and sheer evil, it reaches its apex now in regard to two other issues.

Predominant is the lying by hierarchies persuading youngsters they can choose to become male or female. This canard strikes at the very personhood, the mental and emotional stability of particularly vulnerable individuals. Yet Professor Robert Winston, scientist and surgeon, is undeniably correct, asserting, ‘I will say this categorically. You cannot change your sex… it is there in every single cell of your body.’ The physical mutilation of children, disregarding this, can be regarded as criminal, its consequences devastating for so many.

With the apparent passing of the age of reason comes the insidious nastiness of identity politics, with individuals believing themselves superior if they have a Maori ancestor. With Jacinda Ardern’s government instructing all government departments to prioritise impenetrable Maori phraseology in their communications – renaming our institutions so their actual function becomes unintelligible – the deliberate promotion of divisive racism is well underway. Yet the worth of individuals has no relation to their ethnic background. And who can possibly defend instructions to all government departments to teach ‘white privilege’, with the aim of inducing guilt and shame among non-Maori children in schools – supposedly because of some imaginary privilege they have from being descended from Europeans? – Amy Brooke

Rather, the signage is a call to the first duty of the citizen: be anxious.  Only if you are truly anxious do you need the protection of our bureaucratic shepherds. – Theodore Dalrymple

Te Whatu Ora’s actions suggest that, at least for the moment, it is more focused on the structure and planning of a national public health service, than supporting previously agreed regional priorities. If these delays are indicative of the way Te Whatu Ora will approach regional matters in the future, the new system looks like it will be far more unresponsive to meeting regional needs than the cumbersome district health board system it replaced.

Previously, there was a legitimate argument about the inherent inequity of the old population-based funding model for health services, which meant the bigger population centres always got the largest slice of the cake, often at the expense of the regions. A nationally based funding model such as Te Whatu Ora was intended to provide more equitable outcomes, across the country –something people in Otago/Southland, and other regional centres, will now surely be questioning in the light of last week’s decisions. – Peter Dunne

The Government has not yet won its argument that upgrading water services across the country can only work with the new co-management provisions. Many remain suspicious the Government is using this legislation to address wider issues simply because this may be its last opportunity. A wider and more open process of public consultation would allow the opportunity for a better-informed public debate.

But by using its large majority, the Government is merely ensuring the bill will be more far more politically divisive than is necessary. Moreover, this bill is but the first of three intended to reform the structure of water delivery. That, plus National’s and ACT’s repeated commitments to repeal the governance provisions, makes the situation even more fraught and uncertain. – Peter Dunne

Health reforms that appear to negate the capacity to reflect regional priorities in the development of national public health services, and water services reforms that leave the central issues of concern unaddressed, while establishing new uncertainties about their scope and application may well prove the devil is indeed always in the detail. However, creating new uncertainties on top of already contentious unfolding plans – however merited the original policy intent – is not good politics.

And it will be political management, not well-meaning intent, that will ultimately determine their success or failure.   – Peter Dunne

They are trying to create safetyism, a world where nothing bad happens, and they see liberty as a challenge to that when, actually, liberty is the thing that protects us all. – Kemi Badenoch

I see myself very much as a classical liberal. Because we keep moving, socially, in a particular direction […] the people who take the progressive line will assume that me trying to maintain the conservative line makes me a culture warrior. I don’t know, I’m just trying to do the right thing. – Kemi Badenoch

Back in the day there was a pact between elected politicians and those who put them in office.  They did our bidding.  They exercised power in our interests.  They were, in other words, “accountable”.  They limited their actions to doing things for the benefit of the people.  They showed restraint.  They were answerable to the people’s houses of parliament.  They had to front the electorate periodically to get our permission to continue in office.

The democratic system (aka “responsible government” and representative democracy) required two things in order to function properly.  Properly motivated politicians and informed voters.  Now we have neither, and this is why the system is so broken. – Roger Franklin 

Perhaps even worse, today’s voters are low information, superficial and ill-motivated to inform themselves about public policy.  They are, in the late American economist Anthony Downs’ term, “rationally ignorant”.  They have decided to focus on themselves and their toys, and have chosen to let the state do its own thing, even when it harms them personally and harms their fellow citizens.  For they have signed away their stake in the political system.  They are a combination of midwits – those just smart enough to be dangerous – and total buffoons oblivious to what is going on in the world and what is driving it.

Being superficial and driven by how they “feel” about issues of the moment, today’s citizens are prepared to emote their way to public policy, clutching at, and accepting at face value empty cliches and propaganda like “climate emergency”, “love is love”, “follow the science”, “black lives matter”, “we are all in this together”, “stop the spread”, “flatten the curve” and the rest, and all the while believing earnestly (or at least casually) that these slogans have actual meaning based on truth, research and analysis.

Policy-as-emoting is a creature of the post-modern age.  It fits perfectly with a shallow, politically illiterate, morally vacuous Me Generation that mistakes “feeling” for thinking, or worse, for being.  In such a regime, the patently absurd becomes mainstream belief, almost overnight. – Roger Franklin 

If, perchance, evidence counter to their world view comes their way, they will simply look in the other direction in order to avoid having illusions dented.  Leaps of faith that are poo-pooed among the traditionally religious are easily absorbed by the emoting class.  If you accept that truth can simply be defined away, or morphed into “my truth” and “your truth”, you will all the more easily accept that, for example, crushing traditional marriage is simply “all about love”, that giving up our petrol-fuelled cars will stop droughts and floods, that giving offence to “victims” must be outlawed no matter what the ramifications for free speech, that robust policy itself (aka science) is a whitey/male social construct. 

There is another, more familiar phrase that describes the motivation for at least some of what we are describing here as policy-as-emoting.  This is virtue-signalling, the supporting of a particular policy because doing so make us look good, or at least makes us not look bad (now defined routinely as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or patriarchal).  Virtue-signalling can be effected by both politicians and by voters.  It has become a core part of the great modern pact between the governing class and the governed. 

It creates convenient hate-figures to be derided and scorned.  It is front-and-centre of our new media and university-based clerisy.  It doesn’t require any policy evaluation or review for it to be justified in the minds of its adherents.  – Roger Franklin 

The very term “progressive” is indicative of our self-deception.  Policy-as-emoting just feels right.  Whenever we see the ‘right side of history’ invoked as a justification for a policy, we should be extremely worried.  There is moral vanity afoot with little regard either for people’s real interests or for facts.

Hence, we get policies that are themselves merely slogans.  “Clean energy”, which is not clean and provides no reliable, practical energy.  “Climate reparations” to pay former colonies for the civilisation and all its trappings that Britain (and others) gave them. – Roger Franklin 

 “Net zero” — who even knows what it means, or can say what it will entail?  Who among those who blather on about it could crisply define and justify the term, other than with yet more cliches and slogans based on lies?  Who better, then, to be giving advice to “global leaders” at COP27 than tik-tok-dancing teenaged girls?

The willingness of the governed class to allow the polity to be run on misinformation and ephemera has allowed the epidemic of governments addressing non-problems with non-solutions, at massive cost.  Governments and major political parties naturally welcome the new reality of democracy.  They simply love it.  It gives them an essentially free ride and endless get-out-of-jail-free cards and creates the opportunity for them up to indulge their own agendas, absent even the most limited scrutiny.  The new pact between government and citizenry goes like this – we will make your lives comfortable and convenient, with a veneer of prosperity, if you lazily give us unfettered power and let us keep it.  Don’t worry.  We have got this!   – Roger Franklin 

With us comfortable and looking the other way, the state can indulge in the five standard forms of policy that are either not in the public interest or are actively against it:

♦ Vanity projects (unneeded light rail, stadiums, Olympic Games bids);

♦ Ideological projects (nationalisation, privatisation, renewable energy, mass migration, wokedom, state child care, the republic, the voice, removal of statues);

♦ Crony projects (the apartment boom, privatisation, public-private partnerships);

♦ Projects that enhance politicians’ power (programmable currencies, especially Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), The Biosecurity Act of 2015, track-and-trace technology to enable carbon footprint tracking, facial recognition, big data, various means of citizen surveillance, cancel culture-enhancing actions, nudge units, propaganda, military-style policing of the kind now routinely seen in Victoria and medical mandates)

♦ Mistaken projects (lockdowns, masks, new urbanism, first home owners’ schemes, the NDIS).

Only the fifth type of public policy might be said to be the result of good motivation on the part of decision-makers.  The others are bound to be self-regarding and harmful to the public interest. – Roger Franklin 

All five types of policy failure are the result of second-rate and/or ill-motivated politicians and ignorant or lazy citizens.  And, to make it worse, we fail to realise that any of these things matter.  That printing money endlessly is not a good idea.  That foreign wars in which we have no legitimate interest yet which we are more-than-willing to join may bring us the ultimate harm.  That outsourcing parenting to the state will ruin our children.  That abandoning support for traditional marriage and family formation will dissolve civil society within a few generations.  That failing to be fiscally continent will have ramifications.  That killing coal will also kill our economies.  That encouraging the momentarily gender-confused young to have their bits chopped off or added to will not inevitably bring them happiness or fulfilment, long-term.  That giving the indigenous a “voice” will solve nothing for the Aborigines who actually need help. 

Yes, policy failures matter. – Roger Franklin 

By choosing to walk away from our democratic responsibilities, by surrendering our freedoms without blinking, by handing extreme power to politicians (without recourse, even through the legal system, to remedies), by settling for comfort and faux-wealth instead of being tough on those we elect, by gullibly trusting those who we ridiculously believe have our best interests at heart, we have abandoned to right to call our system democratic in any meaningful sense.  Marriages of convenience are never wise. – Roger Franklin 

Maybe this is how the world ends, not with a whimper but a shambles. Sharm El Sheikh is an appropriate place to hold a climate conference; the whole place is a climate warning. It’s an Egyptian Las Vegas with a casino and the world’s largest artificial lagoon. The city’s carbon emissions must be enormous.– Richard Prebble

COP27′s new initiative is to create a fund for loss and damage. It is like the passengers on the Titanic demanding compensation for any water damage to their luggage rather than insisting the ship misses the iceberg. Any compensation will never be more than a gesture. It was disappointing to see New Zealand supporting this nonsense but then our Government loves gestures.

The message from COP27 is if we are relying on the politicians there is no way global warming will be limited to 1.5C. – Richard Prebble

The whole world is applying its mind to climate change. Imagine how many clever ideas there are.

If we are going to beat global warming it will by human ingenuity. – Richard Prebble

It cannot be a boot camp that just punishes kids.  That’s only going to make them angrier.

But, it can work if it’s a place away from bad parents, where kids are taught some discipline and consequence, where they have rules not allowing them to roam the streets in the middle of the night, where they have counsellors to help them learn new behaviour and deal with past trauma, where they have school, and where they have support when they do go home to those parents.

And look, that is in National’s proposal. They are proposing to include schooling, counselling, drug and alcohol treatment, mentoring, and cultural support, and a case worker assigned to the family for ongoing support.

It’s probably worth giving it a go, isn’t it?

Because what else have we got?

Clearly, what few consequences there are for these kiddie ram-raiders are not enough, because it just keeps happening.  – Heather du Plessis-Allan

 The tactic of the bully is to shun the victim into silence. The bully targets one person, recruits others to cheerlead and then attacks. They count on the fact that the victim is shocked and cannot immediately fight back. The bully hones in on what they know to be beloved of the victim – their career, their family, their freedom of expression – and takes these things away. – Rosie Kay

Mental strength to fight the bullies is essential, but what can be even harder to take than the bully is the collective silence that surrounds your victimisation. At school, I still feel the betrayal of friends who turned a blind eye, and the teachers who did nothing. Those were different days, I think, we are all so much more bullying aware.

But look at what is happening to women who dare to speak up for women’s rights. We are being bullied, ostracised, our livelihoods destroyed, and our reputations and careers threatened. Instead of standing up and supporting these women, there is a collective silence and even a collective de-platforming. More than the bullying, this level of cowardice from everyone else in your career fields chips away at your trust in the decency of people and the strength of collective good.

We see it in our political parties, we see it in the arts, we see it in universities, we see it across so many aspects of society. – Rosie Kay

But we are strong, intelligent women, and we are often at the height of our powers, and we feel compelled to speak out and to seek the truth and to protect women and girls now and into the future. There is nothing transphobic about the protection and safeguarding of women in vulnerable spaces, in prisons, in sports and in hospitals, and it shouldn’t take courage to say so. – Rosie Kay

We need more people in positions of power to start to stand up and respect the rights of women and to ignore the nasty bully tactics of extremists who dare to silence and oppress our best and brightest women. We cannot allow a generation of brilliant women to be lost.

At its heart, we need to really think about what kind of principles do we hold true and strong for us a society. – Rosie Kay

In it, my basic premise, quite apart from all the incredible new developments of info-wars, grey zones and human augmentation, was to ask; what do we ask our soldiers to fight for and to defend, if freedom and civilisation and democracy is not at the heart of our collective society?  Can we, with the spirit of enlightenment still within us, argue that the quality of freedom is a universally good one? That as humans we are happier, more fulfilled, stronger, safer, when we have freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience? For the quality of ‘offence’ is far, far trickier to define. Qualities of offence are time specific, place specific and shift and warp through cultures. The debate on art, culture and freedom of expression is not one of ‘culture wars’; it speaks to the very core of our democratic principles and our ability to think, to debate, to question and to express. The arts are not, and never have been, a luxury; they are the very frontline of the human mind and deal with our dreams, fantasies, nightmares and our darkest impulses. Shut them down or censor them, and what kind of civilisation is left? – Rosie Kay

But the presence of these young people at what are supposed to be serious UN shindigs probably says more about the UN than it does about them. There seems to be a keen desire on the part of elite environmentalists to use young people as a kind of stage army on the climate issue – a tool of emotional blackmail to harry world leaders into the eco-austerity that Guterres and Co already favour. – Tom Slater

As frankly silly as this whole spectacle is, the cult of climate youth certainly tells us a few things about the state of the environmental movement more broadly.

First up, there’s the simplistic moralism of it all – the childlike reduction of energy and climate policy to a matter of right and wrong, to one of believing The Science or ignoring it for corrupt or self-serving reasons. The notion that maybe, just maybe, political leaders – particularly those from developing nations – might want to prioritise their citizens’ living standards over costly green virtue-signalling seems to have been dismissed out of hand.

Indeed, for all the talk of young people being ‘on the front lines of climate action’ the world over, you can’t help but notice that these handpicked youth ‘leaders’ tend to be from well-to-do families in developed Western nations – young people who are sufficiently materially comfortable to have the time to worry about the end of the world.

Then there are the religious echoes of this whole charade. Through initiatives like Guterres’ Youth Advisory Group, supranational environmentalism seems to have developed a pipeline of would-be child saints, to be brought out to preach doom to the already converted. – Tom Slater

And finally there’s the contempt all this actually shows for young people. Taking young people seriously does not mean pretending that they know everything. What’s more, I dare say there would be little room on that little advisory group for young people who take a different view on climate. This is an exercise in pumping young people full of doom-laden propaganda, then inviting them up on stage to repeat it while wagging a knowing finger.

This is not inspiring or progressive or empowering of young people. It’s weird and patronising and all to the end of pushing an anti-human and anti-growth agenda – one that will screw over young people in the long-run. In short, environmentalists, how dare you? – Tom Slater

One weird thing that can come as a surprise when you lose people is that real life doesn’t stop. All the same usual trivial crap keeps coming and you have to keep dealing with it, even though on the inside you are hollow and sore. You can still have a laugh, too, as we all did at the wake last Friday at a Working Men’s Club where the price of a round of drinks – two pints and a large white wine for £9 – took you right back to the nineties (which let’s face it, is where many of us often wish we could be).

Grief is a bully, that keeps on showing up and getting in the way of your life, and life is a bully that keeps on showing up and getting in the way of your grief. Neither life nor grief care how you feel or that you might not have time for them right now. They don’t want to know what other stuff you have going on. They don’t give you space or respite.- Milli Hill

Being bullied can make you bitter. The bullies themselves pack a visceral punch; short and sharp, it knocks the wind out of you. But this doesn’t hurt as much or last as long as the silence of the bystanders – those whose legs you see when you have been knocked to the ground or shoved under the bus; very much in the vicinity, very much aware of your suffering, very much still standing. The rational part of your mind can understand they are silent to protect themselves. A deeper part feels they are unforgivable. – Milli Hill

We teach our children to talk about bullying, to speak out and support each other and get help. But in the meantime, one of the worst epidemics of bullying any of us have ever witnessed is taking place daily on social media, as woman after woman is ostracised, defamed, deplatformed and pilloried for speaking up for women’s rights. Whether you agree or disagree with their views shouldn’t affect your judgement that what is happening to them is disproportionate and unfair. It’s bullying. And to say that this is a problem between gender critical feminists and trans activists is also wildly reductionist. There is disproportionate pillorying of women going on within feminism itself.

And there is disproportionate pillorying of women going on completely outside the feminist discourse.  – Milli Hill

Everyone agrees they said something racist, and, under the current rules, this means they deserve for their lives to be destroyed, and if you speak up for them, you’re a racist too.

What is the end-game of those meting out these show trials and public executions? Have they noticed that the majority of people in the virtual dock are female, and if so, does this bother them? Do they feel that justice is truly being served? Do they feel the world will become a better place once every wrong thinker has been ‘educated’ or dispatched? How will they feel if one of the recipients of these attacks actually takes their own life? Will this still be just and fair in their opinion? Perhaps this has already happened, perhaps this kind of behaviour has been the final straw for someone whose name I do not know. Being bullied by a large group of people, on social media where unlimited numbers can watch and participate, and having your reputation, career, livelihood, friendships and life as you know it completely destroyed is not something that is easy to survive. –

Nobody, even those who’s views we find repellant, deserves to have their life destroyed. – Milli Hill

I firmly believe that the way we vote in the next general election will have a huge impact on our lives, our children’s lives and, quite possibly, our grandchildren’s lives.

The next election will determine the character and integrity of how we are governed and what rights we will have.

There will be a not so simple choice between voting for a democracy or allowing democracy to perish by voting for the party that is demolishing democracy and replacing it with an ethnocracy. – John Porter

It sickens me to read claims that my representations on behalf of women and girls for fairness on the sporting field are twisted in such a way to expose me to vicious and vexatious accusations of homophobia.

My belief in protecting girls and women from the unfair consequences of competition against biological males should be seen for precisely what it is. –

There are extremists who wrap themselves up in the proud flag of the LGB movement, coming after me and many other women, even other gays and lesbians who do not agree with the addition of the TQA+, by using this cover to legitimise completely baseless attacks.

Because of their rainbow camouflage, the sight of this banner has triggered me, but in no way does that emotional response reflect my view of the millions of people who celebrate their rights under the same flag. – Katherine Deves

What should be the symbol of genuine pride, has become distressing because of its misuse.

Consistent with the time-honoured custom of politics, the worst enemies are found within your own ranks. – Katherine Deves

One of the saddest ironies of this debate is that those who are gay or lesbian were highly probable to have been gender non-conforming growing up.

But today, these are largely the children and young people most likely to be convinced by media and social media they are “trans”, “non-binary” or “born in the wrong body”.

Despite ample evidence demonstrating almost all children with distress about their natal sex resolve this during puberty, experimental medical interventions rather than “watchful waiting” are being baked into law and policy as the solution.

We are sterilising a generation of gay and lesbian children by turning them into profit-centres. – Katherine Deves

What is the “trans community”?

Because I fail to see what a distressed same-sex attracted teenage girl with a GoFundMe for a bilateral mastectomy has in common with a middle aged man who has decided to publicly flaunt his cross-dressing fetish full-time.

My position has always been about the sex-based rights of women and girls and the safeguarding of children.

Sex self-ID laws and policies mean men and boys can now simply self-declare they are a woman or girl, giving him the right to intrude into spaces such as toilets, change rooms, shelters and prisons, compete in the female sports category, avail himself of woman-specific services and resources including those for lesbians, and win awards, competitions, contracts and scholarships created for the benefit of females.

Anyone with an ounce of common sense recognises that this state of affairs is profoundly unfair at best and dangerous at worst. – Katherine Deves

I will rest my case on the percolation of the truth that continues to emerge in defiance of virtue-signalling ideology and ignorance. – Katherine Deves

One of the things that appalls me about young billionaires (and erstwhile young billionaires) such as Bankman-Fried is their absence of taste. What is the point of being so rich if you look and dress as he looks and dresses? No doubt the look of false indigence that billionaires adopt is intended to deflect from their vast wealth, all of them being left-wing in everything but their finances, but it undermines as well as flatters public taste and detracts from civilized life. – Theodore Dalrymple 

But let us return to the question of hair and its relation not only to genius but to goodness. Nineteenth-century gurus—Tolstoy, Ruskin, William Morris, Bernard Shaw, and no doubt others—had long, straggly beards of an appearance of the nests of the less aesthetically fastidious species of birds. It was their beards that stood guarantor of these men’s wisdom; no one with a beard such as theirs could be any less than profound.

It is easy to make the logical mistake of supposing that if wise men have straggly beards, then men with straggly beards must be wise. – Theodore Dalrymple 

Now, of course it is true that some geniuses have had wild hair—Beethoven, for example, or Einstein—but the majority have not. Power grows out of the barrel of a gun, said Mao Tse-tung (or however we are supposed to spell his name these days, my automatic spell-check on my computer not allowing me the spelling I grew up with); but cleverness does not grow out of disordered hair. A brush and comb are not completely incompatible with thought. – Theodore Dalrymple 

A conference in Glasgow this weekend, entitled ‘Education Not Indoctrination’, will take a critical look at the way schools are being used to inculcate woke values in our children, often against the wishes of parents. It is being organised by Hands Up Scotland, a group of parents and educators concerned about the politicisation of Scottish schools, in association with the Academy of Ideas, where I am science and technology director. Yet the event almost didn’t happen because staff at the original venue refused to work on it. This is a good example of how ‘cancel culture’ works today. – Rob Lyons

As the blurb for Saturday’s event notes, schools are at the centre of the woke agenda. There’s the continued promotion of critical race theory in the classroom. There’s the Scottish government’s new sex-education curriculum, which will expose very young children to overtly sexualised material. There’s a new LGBTQ+ vocabulary (cisgender, transgender, bisexual, non-binary and genderfluidity) already being taught in primary schools. And there’s the Scottish government’s guidance on ‘Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools’, which advises teachers not to question a child’s desire to transition.

In short, the views of a tiny minority, supported by the Scottish government, are being foisted on children, often in defiance of the wishes of parents. Profound changes are happening in Scottish education. And it is important that we get a chance to debate them.

But not everyone agrees this should be up for debate, it seems. – Rob Lyons

In a statement to The Times, the venue owners, Agile City, claimed that: ‘There was no attempt to stop the event happening or shut down the discussion; it’s just not something we can host in our venue.’ Yet it’s not entirely accurate to suggest there was no attempt to shut down discussion. The very act of pulling the booking at such short notice meant that the event might well have had to be cancelled.

Fortunately, a sympathetic venue – the Tron Church in Glasgow city centre – has stepped in, and the event will go ahead. It seems that Christians are now more open to political debate than many right-on liberals.

What the whole affair reveals is the brittleness of woke thinking. It is one thing to be passionate about particular issues. It is another to think that the mere airing of a different point of view is a threat, in and of itself. This is No Platforming taken to another level – it is an attempt to clamp down on debate itself.

This Civic House case also reveals another driver of cancel culture – the sense of entitlement among woke members of staff in cultural and political institutions. – Rob Lyons

We need spaces to have civilised debate about important and controversial issues, free from the threat of cancellation. Thankfully, ‘Education Not Indoctrination’ will now go ahead. But that should never have been in question in the first place. –  Rob Lyons

In New Zealand, we talk a lot about big-ticket projects such as cycleways and convention centres. But we don’t focus nearly enough on infrastructure security. That’s a problem.

Infrastructure is not just a game of getting things done. Success means getting projects done well, and part of that means investing in necessary protection. – Matthew Birchall

Electricity is another area worth keeping an eye on. New Zealand is fortunate to have an ample supply of power sourced from wind farms and hydroelectric dams. But renewables can also be unreliable. When the wind is blowing and the dams are full, New Zealand is well-positioned to meet demand.

The problem arises when demand surges during winter and generation fails to keep up. When that happens, those still July days suddenly begin to lose their appeal. And it is in this context that coal and gas play an important role in keeping the power on. The 2021 blackouts. – Matthew Birchall

While the government has promised that all of New Zealand’s electricity will be generated from renewables by 2030, there is a strong argument to be made for continued use of gas and coal to shore up supply. At the very least, the move to renewables makes the question of secure electricity supply all the more salient. Wind, after all, has a bad habit of fluctuating.

However, the greatest risk to New Zealand’s infrastructure security may originate in cyber space. If a rogue actor hacked New Zealand’s power grid, telecoms network or water utilities, the country would be thrown into chaos. These assets are so essential to day-to-day life that society cannot function without them.

Experts speak of a cascade effect when critical infrastructure is destabilised. When one link in the chain goes down, the rest follow. –

Matthew Birchall

After all, if we don’t ensure that our kit is in good nick today, then we will have to pay more to maintain it tomorrow.  – Matthew Birchall

As “the greatest moral challenge of our times”, the dogmas of the climate change cult are no longer limited by any secular need for evidence or data

If climate change policy was ever based on “the science”, then that basis has long been overwhelmed by politics and tribal groupthink. It is now the very badge of a progressive left-wing worldview. In both USA and Australia, climate change alarm is the single greatest differentiator between the left and the right of politics.  – Barry Brill

The “climate justice” narrative is a post-modern cultural phenomenon, intertwined in endless mysterious ways with race and gender and other categories of perceived Marx-like oppression. Belief in the climate change credo is a sine qua non for every left-leaning politician (or journalist) – in the English-speaking world and further afield.

While an ideology for some, it is a quasi-religion for others. As long ago as 2003, author  Michael Crighton declared that mankind’s greatest challenge was to distinguish reality from fantasy, in the context of environmentalism becoming a religion. Regrettably, over the ensuing 20 years, faith in climate change has moved inexorably to fill the large vacuum left by the rapid decline of Christianity. – Barry Brill

Just as Torquemada declared war in the 15th century on those who could not believe in the teachings of the Vatican’s Holy See, Prime Minister Ardern has declared war in the 21st century on those who can not believe in the teachings of the United Nations’ IPCC.

The Inquisition used the old weapons of the thumbscrew, the rack, and the burning of books. Ms Ardern is a proud cheer-leader for the use of the “new weapons” of hate-speech laws, de-platforming, and cancel culture. – Barry Brill

Roll over Josef Goebbels: your stunted canvas was but a single nation. Now we have the entire globalist population of the planet united behind the most ambitious propaganda campaign in history – with limitless funding and with no tether to any known system of ethics. – Barry Brill

We at the New Zealand Initiative are aware of an ill-founded view that we are somewhat critical of our much-beloved government. Of course, this “alternative view” has no merit.

Take, for example, Labour’s 3 November list of its 100 achievements since November 2021. On one count 71 of the 100 involved government spending more of our money on this or that.

Top of the list was putting a targeted cost of living payment on its credit card. Good thinking. After all, inflation is up because Government drew so heavily on the RBNZ’s ATM in responding to COVID. The remedy for too much government spending yesterday is obvious – more spending today.

The magical thing about the 71 spending items on this list is that they are all good. No one is harmed. Every item is beneficial. Why, otherwise, would it make the list? Why is it magic? Well anytime you or I spend our money we give up something – the chance to spend it on something else. We have to think about that.

Government is different. It can and does create more money out of nothing. Today’s government borrowing, like tomorrow’s inflation, is the next government’s problem. What did future generations ever do for us? There is more. Another 21 items in the list use regulations to spend other people’s money. – Dr Bryce Wilkinson

The list includes many things that a different government would also have achieved, for example, finishing Transmission Gully and free trade agreements.

Given this feature, we should acknowledge Labour’s modesty in excluding sunshine and fresh air from its list of achievements. They are free lunches too. – Dr Bryce Wilkinson

The Human Rights Commission says it’s “very disappointing” that the government isn’t going ahead with law changes that would curb New Zealanders’ right to free speech.

Let me repeat that, just in case you didn’t get the irony. An agency ostensibly set up to protect our rights is upset that the government isn’t introducing new laws that would restrict them. What better evidence could there be of the commission’s highly selective interpretation – you might say perversion – of its own name? – Karl du Fresne 

The government’s retreat from its original intention is clearly a blow and a setback to the HRC, which is so obsessed with identity politics and the supposed menace of hate speech that it completely ignores its bigger responsibility to protect New Zealanders’ freedom of expression. – Karl du Fresne 

You’d think the commission’s own name was a bit of a giveaway, but no; its interpretation of the phrase “human rights” is selective, self-serving and unfailingly woke. Rather than concern itself with upholding and promoting New Zealanders’ rights generally, it directs its energies toward protecting us from racism, islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia and white supremacy. These endanger all of us, according to chief human rights pooh-bah Paul Hunt, arguably the most useless bureaucrat on the government’s payroll (in fact worse than useless, since the effect of his job, if not the purpose, is to promote a sense of division and drive wedges into the community).

To put it another way, the commission thinks it’s okay in a democracy to sacrifice the free-speech rights of the majority in order to protect supposedly vulnerable minority groups. It justifies this by arguing that restrictions on speech are needed to counter “violent extremism”. This is worryingly similar to the spurious pretexts – such as public order and public safety – routinely cited by authoritarian regimes that want to control what people think and say. Iran and Xi Jinping’s China come to mind. 

Reconciling free speech with the interests of minority groups calls for a balancing act, but the commission doesn’t even attempt it. It solves the problem by simply ignoring the free speech side of the equation altogether. – Karl du Fresne 

The commission is a $13 million-plus per annum deadweight on the economy – money that could more usefully be spent on any number of worthy projects. Teaching dogs to ride bikes, for example. – Karl du Fresne 

Even without knowing the contents of the revised bill, haste is something we should be concerned about. It’s a pace of activity that is usually reserved for matters that the Government wants dealt with immediately; either because it is vital for the national interest or it is so unpalatable that they want to shut down the debate as quickly as possible. It would seem that the latter was their only justification.

I’m told by a highly regarded former MP that for a matter of this nature, it’s a pace that is unusually rushed, and in the context of Parliament’s rules, technically inappropriate.

Not that we can do too much about that. Let’s face it, this Government has been in an “inappropriate” hurry on Three Waters from the start. Despite the changes not yet being signed into law, they have already recruited a heap of people and leased high-quality and expensive office space in Auckland at least and possibly elsewhere. Every step has been action ahead of the democratic process. – Bruce Cotterill

Imagine 88,000 submissions. Ignored. Just think for a moment of the emotion and passion that people had for the End of Life Choice Bill. And yet that received just less than half of the number of submissions that Three Waters did. And those submitters have been ignored. –Bruce Cotterill

We should be ropable that this is happening. And we should be stomping mad that neither of our top-rating TV news channels ran the story of the bill’s passing on their 6pm bulletins on Thursday evening. What the hell is going on here NZ?

This is major constitutional reform, involving the deliberate confiscation of assets from ratepayers and the councils that represent them, to a government and a policy that will be controlled by iwi-based or tribal interests. The consultation process around it has been minimal and most of us would say what little consultation has occurred has been ignored. – Bruce Cotterill

So we see, finally, after all this time, what Three Waters has been about all along. It’s not about brown sludge coming out of your taps. In fact, it’s not about water at all. It’s about an asset grab of not only the water assets we thought, but also for a slice of our hydro schemes and for the highly contentious foreshore and seabed. By the time the third and final reading comes around, you can bet that the country’s parkland will no longer be an option. It will be included.

Perhaps the inclusion of the foreshore and the parkland will get us animated and angry.

We should be staggered that this legislation, delivering major constitutional change, is sleepwalking its way through Parliament via an aggressive majority government, while it appears that there is nothing that opposition politicians can do about it. – Bruce Cotterill

It would be tempting to throw in the towel. And yet, despite everything that has happened, Three Waters should continue to be a central election issue in 2023. Those parties currently in opposition must run a campaign to totally repeal this legislation and if elected they must do so promptly.

And we may as well brace ourselves for it now. Taking things away from people is always much harder than giving them out. Repealing this law will be messy and disruptive and difficult. But it must happen.

That’s why we have elections. When governments become this corrupt, they and the laws they created must go. – Bruce Cotterill

Of course the key issue of this report is that it recommends that mana whenua sit on local councils, with full voting rights.  These representatives would have the same power as elected councillors, except of course, residents/ratepayers would have no power to remove them (except for those few that may be involved in mana whenua processes to select their councillors).

I don’t think much of liberal democracy, as it is not very effective at protecting individual rights, but it does have one useful function, in that it provides an effective process to remove politicians if enough people are fed up with them.  This proposal destroys this for mana whenua representative.  It institutes the principle that you can be taxed, regulated and governed by people you have NO say in being selected or being removed. – Liberty Scott

However there is no possible way that the New Zealand Labour Party wants to let people live their own lives as they see fit in such a way. The review of local government is about growing local government, it is the idea that wellbeing comes not from what individuals, families, colleagues, friends, communities, businesses and societies do, but from what government does – and the main tools of government are ones of coercion by taxation (and dishing out financial favours to preferred individuals and groups) and regulation. Liberty Scott

There is a desperate need for a review of local government that will decide what roles and responsibilities it should have and what ones should be taken away from it, and that would do much more to enhance wellbeing, by enabling more housing to be built, more businesses to be developed, more competition in retail and the economy, the environment and society to grow with local government being barely visible. It may manage some parks, have a fast, efficient planning permitting function, deal with neighbourhood noise and pollution complaints, and ensure rubbish is collected.

In the meantime though, the idea that elected politicians should be replaced by mana whenua representatives with MORE power to increase rates, establish new taxes and pass bylaws (and ban property development) is just a form of petty nationalist authoritarianism eating away at an already flawed system. – Liberty Scott

The intelligence of the New Zealand population increased during the 20^th century. Nutrition played its part but so too did education. Young people were taught the abstract knowledge of academic subjects and in the process developed secondary intelligence.  Since the 1990s, the emptying out of prescribed academic knowledge from the national curriculum is likely to reverse the trend.  It’s a sobering thought that the population in the 21^st century may be less intelligent than our 20th century predecessors. – Elizabeth Rata

It is abstraction (or separation) from the everyday world of experience which gives academic knowledge both its intelligence-building power and its difficulty.  Because academic subjects are necessarily difficult they need to be taught by expert teachers. For their part, children must bring hard work and effort to the job. Parental support is vital for this mammoth task of intelligence building. There are no short-cuts for anyone involved.

So what makes academic knowledge the ‘intelligence builder’?  By ‘intelligence’ I mean an individual’s secondary thinking–the thinking that is self-consciously rational and very different from primary commonsense intelligence.  Humans have lived for millennia with the primary thinking needed for survival.  It remains essential today as we pick up the everyday socio-cultural knowledge of the family and community.  We must have this primary thinking ability but we can in fact do without complex abstract knowledge and its generating secondary intelligence. We can do as our ancestors did, rely on knowledge acquired from observation and experience and bounded by the limits of primary thinking. The question is – do we want to? – Elizabeth Rata

A well-designed national curriculum of prescribed academic knowledge is the only way to ensure that all New Zealand children are taught the knowledge that builds secondary intelligence.  It is the intelligence needed for a modern democratic society. This is the case because democracy is itself an abstract idea – built on networks of abstractions such as freedom, equality and citizenship.

The alternative is returning to the pre-modern world of our ancestors. The tribal world managed successfully using primary thinking. This is because kinship relations are material not abstract – we can literally ‘see’ our relations.  In contrast, democracy is justified by abstract ideas and abstract relationships – the main one is that of citizenship. For us to understand these abstractions, we must have secondary intelligence. – Elizabeth Rata

We need to keep in mind why freedom of speech is so important. Freedom of speech is a right recognised domestically (in the Bill of Rights Act 1990) and internationally (in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). The starting point for any new legislation should be that. We have the freedom to say what we want unless there is a compelling and pressing reason for the state to curtail it by threatening criminal punishment.

Free speech has been a vital tool for the least powerful in society. – Marcus Roberts

Even if we are satisfied that there is a compelling reason to restrict our right to free speech, the restriction needs to be as narrow and as clear as possible. It’s not good enough to leave the contours of which speech counts as hate speech to the “you’ll-know-it-when-you-see-it” test. Tossing it to the courts to determine the boundaries as they go is also no answer.

Even if the courts do find in favour of a defendant (and thus, by their decision, help set the contours of the legislation), Liam Hehir has convincingly argued that the process is the punishment. Winning a legal battle can be as ruinous as losing one for an individual. Yet, win or lose, the state will never face financial, much less personal, ruin.

With so much at stake, let us hope that the Government’s proposed hate speech amendments adhere to first principles. If it doesn’t, the hate speech vs free speech battle risks collateral damage of much more than what you may (or may not) say.  – Marcus Roberts

You chose to have these kids, you have to wake up at 7am, get your kids to school at 8am. You have now got subsidised free lunches, free breakfasts, subsidised period products, subsidised school uniforms. There are no excuses. What we have in New Zealand is a culture of excuses. –  Christopher Luxon

Age is not an immutable characteristic. Treating children differently to adults is not the same as treating people differently based on race or sex. And 18 years is the generally agreed-upon age at which a child becomes an adult.

For most New Zealanders, the idea of 16 and 17-year-olds voting defies common sense. Large majorities of people surveyed reject the idea. Letting kids vote is less popular than letting prisoners vote.

Of course, there is increasingly little room for common sense in New Zealand’s appellate courts. Not, at least, when the opportunity for the promotion of liberal opinion is concerned. Our justices are no longer so shy of broad political questions that touch upon subjects not usually reducible to legal reasoning. – Liam Hehir 

The court has, therefore, set the agenda on an inextricably political question.

It is a rarer and rarer thing for our justices to refuse involvement in political questions when it comes to the preoccupations of the chattering classes. The best that can be hoped for is a reluctant refusal to grant relief paired with some obiter dicta about where the court’s sympathy lies. Those comments crack the door open just that little bit further, of course, and provide something for the next case to build upon.

This is not all the fault of the courts. Judges are only human and there is nothing more human than being tempted to use the tools at your disposal to achieve the outcome you want. Some blame lies with the elected politicians who have given the judiciary these tools or, at least, have permitted their use.

Ambiguous laws promote judicial activism. They create a permission structure for the judiciary to exercise personal discretion to the act interpretation. – Liam Hehir 

Law faculties would absolutely hate this as, would of course, the judiciary. But the time has long since passed where the democratically accountable branches of the government flex a bit of muscle. And if the courts are bent on drifting into politics then they can hardly complain about politics drifting into the courts. – Liam Hehir 

All I’m doing is calling parents to responsibility to say ‘Hey, listen, it’s in your interest that we want your children to do better than you did’ … education is the biggest thing that creates social mobility and opportunity. – Christopher Luxon

As the Kremlin’s spokesman tells us – somewhat improbably – that regime change was never Vladimir Putin’s goal, the debate on whether Russia and Ukraine should be negotiating gets another bounce.

Depressing – but necessary – to bear in mind that a settlement will rest more on power than on justice.

Some other lessons from the conflict also seem to be getting neglected.

First, that the success of Ukraine’s resistance is due to the courage and commitment of a smallish group of mostly young men. A group who in general weren’t getting good press or much encouragement before all this kicked off.

Secondly, the steady flow of Western self-congratulation seems overdone. – Point of Order :

Thirdly, this is a war with a system, rather than a country. – Point of Order

And as a Russian and an insider, he provides a vivid picture of the creation from the security apparatus of a governing class that is a law unto itself.

During Putin’s twenty two years in power, it has systematically eliminated the bases of civil society: security of property and the fruits of labour; reliable justice and restraints on state power; fair competition for the right to govern; the opportunity and ability to organise, express and disseminate alternatives.  – Point of Order

The contrast with China is stark.  Deng Xiaoping also toiled for nearly twenty years but in a different direction.  He sought to convince the workers and peasants that the Communist party would respect the fruits of their labour – just as long as they did not challenge its governance (and hence the significance of President Xi’s recent signals that he might renegotiate the bargain).

This suppression of independent activity – social and entrepreneurial – would now appear to be Russia’s chief source of political and economic weakness.

It should clarify that the principal enemy is the Russian governing class, rather than the Russian people.

And that we all win if the Russian people can be helped to turn round the course of the last twenty two years.

Don’t forget then, that in all that time the only people who have come near to inflicting a political defeat on that class are a handful of American (and British) trained Ukrainian men.

So it might be a good idea to be very clear what you are negotiating about, before starting. – Point of Order

This Labour Government constantly confuses spending money with outcomes. If money was the answer to solving the many issues facing the sector, then Kiwis’ would have timely access to services, better facilities, and see an overall improvement to the country’s mental wellbeing.

Unfortunately that is not the case and mental health in New Zealand has never been in a worse state. What Kiwis’ are experiencing is longer wait times to essential services, overcrowding, a worsening state to mental health facilities, and serious workforce shortages facing the sector

Measurable outcomes are what matter for individuals, and their families, who are desperately seeking help. Not wasted money and broken promises- Matt Doocey 

Penological liberals, then, whether they realize it or not, are effectively in favor of violence against women.- Theodore Dalrymple

With their claws savagely embedded in the throats of most of New Zealand’s news media (so to speak) racist commentators are really having a great time distorting and rewriting the history of our once fair country of New Zealand. 

They appear to have learnt that if you tell the BIG LIE often enough and loud enough, people will come to believe it and of course once should be enough for innocent children, that is if they can be induced actually to go to school.  If statistics are to be believed for once, it appears that truancy is at a record high in New Zealand schools, highest apparently among children of part-Maori descent and lowest among Chinese.  – Bruce Moon 

Perverse incentives facing councils seemed to underlie many of the problems with the existing resource management system.

Nothing in the RMA forced councils to set restrictive district plans, though it did make it difficult to modify existing ones. Nevertheless, district plans often made it very difficult to build apartments and townhouses in inner suburbs near the amenities where a lot of people want to live, or new subdivisions and lifestyle blocks on the edges of cities.

When cities can neither grow up nor out in response to changes in demand for housing, prices adjust instead.

The reason for restrictive district plans is simple. When cities grow, central government enjoys the increase in income tax, company tax, and GST. But councils experience urban growth as a cost to be mitigated, rather than a benefit to be sought. And councils at or near their debt limits have extreme difficulty in funding and financing the infrastructure necessary to support it. – Eric Crampton

The National Planning Framework will need to provide very strong direction to regional planning committees to prioritise flexible urban land markets over other objectives.

But the game of whack-a-mole in which central government legislates against each new way that councils find to obstruct growth seems likely to continue – unless councils are made to welcome urban growth by sharing in its benefits. For example, councils could receive grants from central government reflecting a share of the increased tax take that growth provides to central government.

Without that kind of change to the incentives councils face, any wine that eventually pours from the new planning bottles may taste remarkably, and depressingly, familiar. – Eric Crampton

For all of the posing and posturing, most of the arguments to extend (or not extend) the size of the electorate to include 16 and 17yos come with a big tinge of self-interest around power.  It’s been proclaimed that it is “discriminatory” that they don’t get a chance to vote, but almost every argument extended to this can be applied to 15, 14 or even some 13 and 12yos.  Paying taxes doesn’t give visitors or tourists a vote, and plenty who pay little to no taxes get to vote.

No, it’s an exercise in emotionally laden performance from those in politics who get an advantage from having more fungible brains to convince to give them power. It’s hardly a surprise that there is strong leftwing support for the idea, because it is widely perceived that most younger people (certainly the more politically active ones) are leftwing, because they are lured by the idea of more government, which can make good stuff compulsory, cheaper or free, and bad stuff banned or more expensive. This is, after all, the predominant philosophical bent pushed through state education and much of the media. – Liberty Scott

 If there were to be an age when an individual is an adult, in terms of powers to contract, to be treated as an adult in the justice system, and to not have age based restrictions on what you can and can’t do with your body, then that should be the age of adulthood.  At present it is a mix of 16 and 18, but few on the left think 16yos should face the same judicial treatment as 18yos, and almost none think they should be able to buy alcohol, be prostitutes and even buy tobacco. 

There is a curious cultural disjunction between those who want younger teenagers to vote, and demand they be given “a voice” for their often ill-informed, inconsistent views (and they have no monopoly on that), but also think they need “protection” from the consequences of their actions.  They aren’t old enough to handle being intoxicated, to face adult court and prison if they initiate force against others,  and although it is often cited that they can “have sex”, it’s a serious criminal offence if anyone takes photos of them doing so or even possesses them, even with their consent.  So many who want to give them the vote also deem them vulnerable.  So which is it? – Liberty Scott

So let’s not pretend this is about young people having a “stake in their future” because the politicians eager for their votes don’t think young people can make competent decisions on what they ingest or what photos are taken of them.

If politicians want to argue that 16 should be the age of being an adult, then all well and good, let it be and let them accept the consequences for what this means, and they can vote.

Otherwise it’s just a call for “more votes for my side, to help me do what I want to you all” – Liberty Scott

Time has been called on overhauling ‘hate speech laws’ in New Zealand. After sitting in Labour’s manifesto for years, and two Ministers of Justice failing to build support for the proposals, maybe they’ve seen the light: legislation is no antidote to hate. – Jonathan Ayling

The basic issue still remains: silencing opinion, even condemnable opinions (which do not amount to incitement to violence, which is already illegal), doesn’t deal with a lack of social cohesion.

And if hate speech laws don’t work for other ‘vulnerable communities’, we need to rethink the entire venture. The question, ‘if this group, why not that group’ is legitimate. If hate speech laws do work to protect vulnerable communities, like religious groups, then why won’t the Minister commit to including other vulnerable groups too? It’s because she herself has admitted they could make the situation worse.  – Jonathan Ayling

The fact of the matter is hate speech laws (even if they’re just extending protected classes by one group) make things worse.

The government must stand for Kiwis’ right to express their opinions in speech and do away with the notion that gagging voices resolves complex issues. Sections 61 and 131 of the Human Rights Act should be repealed entirely and simple incitement to violence outlawed as speech beyond the pale of free expression. Until then, we’re making social cohesion worse by hand-picking which groups we’re allowed to be derogatory about, and which we can’t. This is hardly a winning strategy for unity. – Jonathan Ayling

It goes without saying that we don’t want religious groups lumped into monolithic groups without any nuance or insight. But is this change really going to stop that? – Jonathan Ayling

It’s time better solutions were given a chance, solutions that elevate dialogue, reason, and counter-speech. Hate speech is a problem, but the problem is the hate, not the speech. As the American journalist Jonathan Rauch claims, ‘Trying to fix the hate by silencing the speech is like trying to fix climate change by breaking all the thermometers.’

Today’s announcement is a good start, but we need to look at whether hate speech laws have any place in our law. Ultimately, they’re a fool’s errand that actually make the situation worse. – Jonathan Ayling

Yes there are some superbly informed smart and diligent 16 year olds, but there are equally many who are completely out to lunch, totally ill informed, barely turning up to school, or in some cases, just out ram raiding.

Now when they do stuff like that – they’re ‘children’ – cue the heartstrings – who can’t possibly be punished or sent to boot camp or put in ankle bracelets, because they’re ‘children’.

There is also the argument trotted out every time a young person does do something wrong, that cognitively their brains haven’t fully developed yet. But when it comes to getting them to tick a box for a party and a candidate – suddenly they’re now cognitively proficient informed adults?

It’s a mixed message. – Kate Hawkesby

Is it also discriminatory to use age as an excuse not to pay them benefits, or to use their age as a tool to means test them against their parents income for allowances? Do we lower the drinking age too, now that 16 is so responsible? Is 16 the new benchmark?

Anyone who has raised 16 year olds knows that it’s still very young, and I just don’t know why we keep wanting to make childhood shorter and shorter for our young people.

They already have to grow up so fast, now we expect them to know about taxes and laws and politics too? Can they not just enjoy their youth while they still have it? – Kate Hawkesby

You can’t know how the world works surely until you’ve actually experienced it? Paid rent or a mortgage, left home, gotten out into the real world, earned your own money, paid your own taxes – lived a little.

It’s not up to us though, or the Supreme Court, it’s up to Parliament, and it won’t get the 75 percent support required so it’s going nowhere.

But nor should it, if Parliament’s going to devote time and energy to anything to do with young people right now it should be getting the 60 percent of kids not attending back into school and addressing the surge in youth crime.

Surely that’s more pressing right now than whether they can vote or not? – Kate Hawkesby

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the government was delighted with this week’s ruling from the Supreme Court that excluding sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds from the right to vote was inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act. Not because of the weight of the legal argument, nor the morality of the cause, but simply because the ruling provided the government with a huge distraction from all the other problems confronting it at present. – Peter Dunne

But rather than waiting six months to make its response known, the government waited barely six hours, so gleeful was it at the distraction the Court had provided. The Prime Minister did not even wait for the Labour Caucus to meet, before announcing the government’s response. Legislation to lower the voting age to 16 will be drafted immediately, she promised, and introduced to Parliament as soon as possible.

That immediately ensured all the right headlines and focus for the next couple of days at least, during which time the Reserve Bank is expected to lift interest rates by the biggest amount yet, further hitting already struggling household budgets. The cynicism of the decision is highlighted by the fact that for the voting age for Parliamentary elections to be lowered, a minimum 75% of Parliament (90 MPs) must vote in favour. When she made her announcement the Prime Minister said she did not know whether all Labour MPs, let alone MPs from other parties supported the move, which she hoped would be determined by a conscience vote. Her promised legislation was therefore nothing but smoke and mirrors. – Peter Dunne

The current outcome could not be better for her – thanks to National and ACT, nothing will change, but the Prime Minister will be able to keep empathising with young, upcoming voters about how much she “personally” supports their cause, even though, like so much else, she cannot deliver it. More importantly, by doing so, she potentially locks in their support for when they are eligible to vote. So, the government’s response is far more about securing its political advantage, than addressing the principle raised by the Supreme Court of whether it is right to exclude 16–17-year-olds from being able to vote. – Peter Dunne

 If a lowered voting age for local body elections proves to be successful in terms of increasing turnout and engagement, then consideration could be given to reducing the age for general elections. The most likely date for that to happen would be the 2029 general election, by which time most of the current crop of politicians will have moved on.

But that is all too far in the future for the government to be concerned about at present. All it knows, is that right now the Supreme Court has presented it with a wonderful diversionary opportunity of which it must take full advantage. Given there is little else flowing its way at present, it is hardly surprising it will milk the issue for all it can over the next little while, secure in the knowledge that nothing is actually going to change. – Peter Dunne

The fact a majority of the working group decided the right to issue binding Te Mana o Te Wai statements should be extended to include coastal and geothermal water brings to mind David Lange’s quip about panel-beaters being allowed to design an intersection. – Graham Adams 

I have to say that this is the most despicable, the most dishonest, and the most dishonourable piece of legislation I have had the misfortune to speak to in this House. This is a deplorable way of stealing assets off communities — assets that have been bought and paid for over generations…

“This is despicable, and I want to say that the people of this country deserve better. – Maureen Pugh

It is widely accepted that to avoid catastrophic climate change we must extract carbon from the atmosphere as well as reduce emissions. That is, we need negative emissions technologies. Indigenous people created such technology over thousands of years, manifested in Amazonian terra preta (black soils) and carbon-rich black soils in West Africa. These soils were likely created accidentally through charcoal being added with food scraps and other waste into infertile soils, turning them into enduringly fertile, carbon-rich black soils. While most soil carbon is lost to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, charcoal endures as a permanent soil carbon store.  – Peter Winsley

Contrary to some perceptions, on a population-adjusted basis indigenous societies are not more environmentally benign than modern, industrialised ones. Both Māori and Pakeha wasted resources when they were abundant and developed sustainable practices only when resources became depleted. In pre-European times Māori were responsible directly or indirectly for the loss of about half New Zealand’s forest cover, and the extinction of over forty bird species.

In modern times, some Māori groups have given priority to commercial interests over environmental protection. For example, in 2013 government mooted an ocean sanctuary surrounding the Kermadec Islands. However, Māori interests opposed this, arguing that the proposed sanctuary breached possible future fishing rights. – Peter Winsley

Where environmental management can go badly wrong is when privileged business, tribal or sectarian interests exploit legal or political processes for rent-seeking purposes. What was once the “Three Waters” reforms has now become “Five Waters” due to some late backroom amendments to draft legislation. The Five Waters legislation if enacted will set up a racialist system to manage New Zealand’s water resources. It will make corruption and nepotism possible on a monumental scale. However, on the positive side it will teach people lessons about not taking democracy and institutional integrity for granted.

It is often contended that economic growth is environmentally damaging. However, the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis suggests that environmental degradation increases at early economic development stages. However, when income reaches a certain level local environments improve. For example, air and water quality is now far better in modern cities than it was 100 years ago. Today, London is no longer threatened by industrial “pea souper” fogs, and the Thames is swimmable. In Wellington, biodiversity is flourishing due to pest control and the Zealandia wildlife sanctuary that we can afford to pay for. – Peter Winsley

Resources such as oil and gas fields concentrate economic and political power in specific places with benefits captured quite narrowly. In contrast, decentralised industries such as distributed energy (wind, solar) and farming diffuse power. Many technological responses to climate change are consistent with a more distributed energy system and a more equitable economy and society. This is what we should be aiming for, rather than perpetuating untruths about colonialism, and dismissing whole swathes of humanity as being dependent on ongoing genocide. – Peter Winsley

Tension in the farming ranks is palpable; discontent with central Government policies is intense; frustration regarding inexorable cost increases is a dark cloud, and given the recent profits recently announced by the banking sector followed by spiraling interest rates, accusations of price-gouging by the trading banks are now emerging.

In terms of returns for primary produce, given the market-related signals reflecting an easing in price levels for beef, lamb and dairy products, the mood of caution within the simmering cauldron of the rural sector is sobering, and food for reflection. – Brian Peacocke

I think that for farming to advocate for itself, it’s not only advocating for what’s annoying and frustrating them, but there’s also a huge need for us as an agriculturally strong community to continue to share both the gains and the commitment of the agricultural community to farming well both for themselves, the community, and the future. – Jenny Shipley

When we were farming, many were just farming to survive. Now, I see farmers all over the place investing not only in best practice for themselves, but I do see a lot of change. I think the voice of that needs to be shared across the community much more broadly so that the urban New Zealand population both values agriculture and understands that it’s moving in response to many of the concerns that urban communities have.  – Jenny Shipley

I think that urban-rural split has always been a risk in New Zealand and it’s one we can’t afford to give airtime too. Because, frankly, if you just thought that even in the COVID period, if we had not had a strong agricultural sector during the last three years when the global economy had been disrupted, New Zealand’s position economically would be far more dire than it is at the moment.

Tourism collapsed, a number of other productive areas were compromised and yet agriculture was able to carry a huge proportion of the earnings, as it’s always done. But thankfully, on a strong commodity cycle at this particular time, and again, I think we should name the value of agricultural exports. The effort agriculture puts into the New Zealand economy to support our way of life, in a broad, holistic sense – not a them and us sense.

We’re in this together, being the best we can be at home and selling the best we can abroad in a best practice sense. I think if we keep sharing that over and over again, there’ll be a better understanding between rural and urban communities.  – Jenny Shipley

Often we say, well, we consulted, or we sent out a document and gave them a chance to comment. I think that for people to genuinely become supporters of a regime, they have to have a deep sense of ownership. They need to be able to see themselves in whatever is proposed as opposed to seeing something being imposed on them, which they don’t or can’t relate to.  

So the test of high-quality engagement and consultation has got to be that measure of – can the people we’re representing see themselves in the proposed solutions or are we just saying, well, regardless of what you think, you’ve got to be there in five or ten years’ time. That’s not easy to do. I think in New Zealand’s circumstances, whether it’s agriculture or Maori – Pakeha relations, or any of the other demanding spaces, we’ve just got to put the time and work into it.  – Jenny Shipley

The Kellogg Programme is fantastic. I’d encourage any community to keep identifying young leaders and to promote them into those Programmes. Often people think, these people are too young. I must have been, I don’t know, 32 or thereabouts when I went into Kellogg. Often at that stage, you haven’t identified your leadership purpose and your particular intentions as to how you will use your leadership skills. But others often see leadership potential in those young people.

There’s no question that our political environment, our economic and social environment, need younger people coming through all the time in order for us to be able to shape the future successfully. I would encourage people to look for those chances and look for individuals who they can sponsor or promote and make sure they support them. Because often these are the young people, male and female, who have got kids and are trying to run a farm and all that. So the programmes themselves are a big commitment, but it’s worth it.   – Jenny Shipley

Consultation is not a promise of change and never has been.

New Zealand has traditionally been known as the land of the long white cloud. Now, it seems, it is destined to become the land of the tall green pine. – Rural News

This passage, which the word creepy doesn’t adequately describe, is very revealing of the moral sensibility—or lack of it—of our time. The courts in Canada have recognized a perfectly true fact about human development, that it doesn’t take place at the same pace in every individual, and has drawn from this undoubted fact the unjustified conclusion that placing legal age limits is therefore unacceptably arbitrary. This is an argument that has helped to produce and inflame the egotism and individualism without individuality of our times. – Theodore Dalrymple

According to this argument, however, the law had no right to fix an age of consent, as fixing it at any age would be arbitrary. What is claimed, therefore, is the right of everyone to set his own rules and decide everything for himself. He doesn’t accept that living in society entails acceptance of rules that, in a world of continua rather than of absolutely discrete categories, it’s necessary just to accept rules that are neither wholly defensible in rational terms nor that one hasn’t made for oneself. – Theodore Dalrymple

I can envisage circumstances in which I would like to be put down painlessly. I wouldn’t much care to be professionally entrusted, let alone required, to do it for others. Therein lies a paradox. – Theodore Dalrymple

Instead of opening up to desperately needed skilled workers, Labour’s immigration settings have essentially raised the drawbridge and made New Zealand a fortress. – Erica Stanford

The Government’s immigration policies have been a total disaster, and Kiwis are paying the price with higher inflation and higher interest rates. – Erica Stanford

Businesses are struggling with the restrictive system for work visas and the complicated system for bringing in skilled migrants, which is making it hard for firms to access the skills they need.

Among the business community there is confusion about NZ’s policy making on immigration which does not seem to recognise the importance of migration to this country.

Business requires open, simple, permissive immigration settings to meet the challenge of severe skill shortages and reduce economic and social harm – Catherine Beard

This decision takes us places.

It means that if you want to have age-based entitlements then you have to show that the age is really relevant. There has to be some specific feature of a certain age, which doesn’t apply at another age, but which applies for everyone.

We use age as a proxy for a bundle of entitlements because testing individual competence or attributes can be intrusive and cumbersome. The court gave this principle no shrift at all, and in doing so it has struck a blow against a fundamental principle of modern social democracy: the progressive principle of universal entitlement. – Josie Pagani

The only way to reconcile the Supreme Court’s new principle is to means-test Super. If entitlement at an age depends on objective reasons for choosing that age, then if you are sickly or poor, you should get a pension but if you have KiwiSaver, no Super for you. Stop saving now. – Josie Pagani

If you’re 16, parents still have an obligation to house, feed and protect you. The state has the authority to step in if parents fail. Third parties, like companies, governments and political parties, are regulated from exploiting teenagers. Make them adults and the responsibility to provide and protect withers and dies.

The real issue is about when childhood ends and with it the protections in law for children.

Voting at 16, and all the other entitlements that would come between 16 and 18, are the rights of adults.

Voting makes children into adults.

I want to protect children from worrying about taxes, responsibilities and the need to provide for others. – Josie Pagani

The prohibition on discrimination on the basis of age exists because a 60-year-old should not be denied a job in favour of a less qualified 30-year-old. It does not substitute for an argument about when adulthood begins.

In its decision the Supreme Court records a breezy observation that, ‘’it is clear that the line [of adulthood] has to be drawn somewhere’’. To resolve where to draw the line, the court then rehearsed a claim from an academic that there is little evidence to support 18 as a ‘’suitable proxy for maturity and competency to vote’’.

In quoting this evidence, it has done subtle but brutal damage to our democracy. Competence, maturity and intelligence should never, ever, be judicially contemplated as a qualification to vote. – Josie Pagani

Voting is the right of all adults. The only issue to determine is ‘’are you an adult?’’

By discussing whether votes attach to competence, the court has ensured that, one day, some class of people will be declared not competent. This is not progressive. – Josie Pagani

The dissenting judge said the majority has reduced the rights of everyone over 18 by slightly altering the composition of the voting electorate.

I would argue it also affected the rights of under-18s to transition out of childhood without having the responsibilities of adulthood imposed too soon. – Josie Pagani

No-one knows what is meant by co-governance. Or, more accurately, there is no agreement about what is meant by this term. – Hilary Calvert

If the Government is promoting co-governance it should be clear about what it is.

This is particularly important if it may have the effect of ceding the authority vesting in the democratically elected government to any organisations which are or could be 50% appointed and the other 50% elected by the entire population. And where there must be an ability to resolve a deadlock of views by granting some undisclosed person or people a right to exercise a casting vote.

The Government, including the most relevant ministers, is either unsure or it is attempting to comfort those who are unsure whether to embrace co-governance by telling different audiences different things. – Hilary Calvert

Surely when there are proposals to change something as fundamental as our democracy we should all be part of the conversation. It is not good enough to leave the concept of co-governance to mean different things to different people who are signing up to or accepting the concept.

We should all be discussing how it can be that Te Tiriti can mean equal control of everything in public ownership in New Zealand. And who has the casting vote. And what we do about some being appointed and some elected. And how our legal system can be fundamentally messed around with by suggesting that you can leave someone with ownership without control. And how the Declaration of Indigenous Rights can be interpreted to give all of a population 50% control and 17% of the population 50% control.

We also should talk about whether democracy means for us one person one vote. – Hilary Calvert

Now is the time to be talking about what co-governance actually means and how the Government wants to impose it on New Zealand. – Hilary Calvert

The Government was right to pull back from extending our laws around controlling what people say about each other in case social peace is threatened.

However Minister Mahuta has said that opposition to the Government’s proposed fresh water reforms “seemed to be driven not about economics or effectiveness but racist tropes about co-governance”.

Driving discussion about such issues underground by labelling concerns as racist tropes is more likely to threaten social peace and encourage more extreme views.

We do well if we retain the ability to listen to and understand the fears and hopes we have about the future of our democracy and what it means to be a New Zealander in an inclusive and enriching society. – Hilary Calvert

Most of the commonly-raised arguments are unconvincing.

For example, although 16- and 17-year-olds are affected by the laws passed by Parliament, this does not provide an argument for lowering the voting age to 16 and no further. After all, a newborn will feel the effects of today’s political decisions for longer than a 17-year-old.

Similarly, the argument that 16 is more in line with the legal age of majority is not true. As the Court of Appeal noted, the “age of responsibility varies greatly under New Zealand law”, and there are many areas where the age of maturity is generally deemed to be 18, like contract law, making wills, getting married, and the criminal justice system, to name a few.  – Marcus Roberts

The evidence, however, is out there. It suggests that throughout our teenage years, our brains are inherently imbalanced.

While the part of our brain concerned with rapid, automatic processing matures around puberty, the part which allows us to think in the abstract, weigh moral dilemmas, and control our impulses does not mature until our mid-to-late 20s.

This imbalance means that teenagers are more susceptible to peer pressure (even without direct coercion), are more likely to focus on immediate benefits and underestimate long-term consequences, and are less able to resist social and emotional influences.

The odds are against us when making the decisions required at the voting booth in our teenage years. This evidence might even justify raising the voting age to 25, but at the very least, it suggests that an 18-year-old is more mature and more competent than a 16-year-old. – Marcus Roberts

The “please explain” is because the criteria they set is hopeless, the delivery is virtually non-existent and the overarching aspect is because they are soft on crime and apologists for criminals.

Because none of them have ever run a small business, they don’t have a clue about the role they play in the community, about the graft and risk involved and therefore the unconscionable position they have been placed in by a Government.

We have a Government that still inexplicably defends all of this as either a complex issue or something that isn’t their fault, and refuses to defend their citizens from the ever-growing tide of lawlessness that they have directly created. – Mike Hosking

A modern-day monetary Moses, this week Orr had made his six-weekly descent from the Mount Doom of the Reserve Bank to issue the latest OCR decision and his set of commandments.

The OCR decision was not pretty and the commandments included thou shalt not ask for a pay rise, thou shalt not buy nice Christmas presents for people, thou shalt swap the Christmas turkey for a humble, cheap chicken, thou shalt have a nice staycation.

Orr’s own gift was high mortgage rates and a recession for 2023 – a cruel-to-be-kind present. He wrapped it in an apology, saying the bank’s monetary policy committee was very sorry about the whole state of affairs indeed. – Claire Trevett

It would be hard to tell which group is filled with most dread by Orr’s bitter medicine: the Government for the impact on mortgage rates as election year looms, retailers for his “have a sensibly spending Christmas” sign-off, or the 80 per cent of mortgage holders who have to refix in the near future. – Claire Trevett

Labour is now confronted with an election-year hell – and so are voters. – Claire Trevett

One week does not an election loss make. The crime wave may well improve.

The pronouncements from Mount Doom, on the other hand, will not be getting any more cheerful for some time yet. – Claire Trevett

Many thinking New Zealanders would like more debate on these issues.

Surely it is at the point where there should be a Royal Commission to examine our constitutional arrangements? – Fran O’Sullivan

You know, I made a living out of being a very open, happy sort of guy on the telly, but I was fibbing to people in a way because I was ‘Jack the lad’ on TV and then would go home and from time to time cry myself off to sleep or whatever it is.

And so we have a responsibility in the public roles that we have to own this stuff and let others know that no one’s immune and everybody’s got stuff going on, and we always will. – Matt Chisholm

I embraced it. I got into it. I played my footy, I loved my farming, I did all those things. But I also was a bit of a sensitive guy and concealed that for a long time, and it wasn’t until I’d got a bit older and a bit longer on the tooth that I thought, actually, no, I don’t wanna drink booze three nights a week, and drive myself into the ground that way. – Matt Chisholm

[Honesty] has cost me work opportunities. It’s cost me the odd relationship. But this is what I think – you get to a stage in life, and you think, right, do I be open and honest about this? And I think, yes, I will, and that is because it’ll help more people. It is the right thing to do because even though it might cost me and it might set me back – and I’m learning that as I go – but it’ll help more people than it’ll negatively affect me. – Matt Chisholm

Finance Minister Grant Robertson padded Budget 2022 with $2.05 billion from the remnants of the Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund contrary to his undertakings that the enormous pot of emergency money be limited to direct, pandemic-related spending and over the Treasury’s objections.

The Government took $1.05b from the fund and “reprioritised” the money to spend on the “cost of living payment” and extended cost reductions for motorists, both rushed into existence in light of surging inflation and polling that suggested a related ebb in the Labour Party’s popularity. – Kate MacNamara

Using the contingency as the Government has means they can spend more in the short term only, ie in the lead-up to the election. When the funding runs out they will have created an unfunded cost pressure. – Tony Burton

This set of facts makes a mockery of the Minister’s claims that he stuck to his operating allowance in this year’s Budget. In fact, he showed a reckless disregard for the fiscal discipline needed to keep pressure off inflation – Nicola Willis 

Arguably, most westerners just don’t take religion seriously enough to kill and die for it anymore. But free speech may also have contributed to the truce.

Over several centuries, growing acceptance of free speech made it more and more possible for Catholics and Protestants to talk through their differences. Over the same time period, the incidence of armed conflict between them diminished.

Unfortunately, our ability to speak freely on religious matters may be at risk. – Michael Johnston

As hurtful as it is to be a target of hateful comments, there are sound reasons not to criminalise those who make them.

For one thing, ridiculing religious ideas themselves arguably insults those who believe them too. So scornful remarks about religious beliefs could easily run afoul of Allen’s new laws.

For another, the new legislation, if passed, might actually increase the likelihood of violence motivated by or against religion. People who don’t feel free to voice their hateful thoughts may be more likely to act on them.

But there is an even better reason to maintain the ability to freely express ideas, even awful ones. Untrammelled expression, as bruising as it can sometimes be, tends to bring people together in the long run.

Protestants and Catholics once regarded one another as heretics. They sought to censor one another on pain of death. Now, following a long period during which peaceful dialogue has been possible, it is not unknown for them to worship together.

Our legislators would do well to reflect on that. – Michael Johnston

There are still the same number of mental health beds as there were in 2019.

Despite numerous speeches and pledges. Despite billions of dollars spent. And despite years of government activism.

Mental health patients sleep on mattresses on the floors of our hospitals. Those in the greatest need and desperation have not even the dignity of a bed.

These stories are hard to bear. They contrast sharply with New Zealand’s self-image as a kinder country. – Oliver Hartwich 

There is Weber’s ethics of conviction, and the Prime Minister shows much of that. And then there is Weber’s ethics of responsibility, which is measured in outcomes. The Government’s record on that front is abysmal.

Before I hear one more grand vision from this Government, I would love to see them tackle at least one problem satisfactorily.

The way the Government is going, I will probably wait a long time. – Oliver Hartwich 

The Prime Minister’s willingness to gaslight the nation about Five Waters is disturbing.

It takes a large dollop of brazenness — and perhaps desperation — to deny reality quite as readily as Jacinda Ardern was willing to do last Tuesday, but the Prime Minister did not resile from the task.

When Newstalk ZB’s Barry Soper asked her why the three waters (fresh water, storm water and waste water) had suddenly become five waters (with the late addition of coastal and geothermal water) in the amended Water Services Entities Bill, Ardern flatly denied that was the case.

Denying observable facts is typical of very young children before they understand that bending the truth beyond breaking point is an art that requires at least a modicum of plausibility to avoid ending up deeply and shamefully embarrassed. – Graham Adams

While this might be seen as an amusingly naive ploy in a child anxious to avoid the consequences of being caught red-handed, such behaviour is plainly alarming in an adult — and especially when that adult happens to be the Prime Minister. – Graham Adams

By denying that adding coastal and geothermal water will boost the number of categories of water covered by the bill to five, Ardern was gaslighting the nation in a way that makes a quote from George Orwell’s 1984 entirely apposite: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

The Prime Minister has always had difficulty dealing straightforwardly with dissent or criticism and is clearly allergic to admitting she is wrong — let alone getting around to apologising. She is also not above making stuff up to defend the indefensible.

However, denying that a clause in legislation means what any reasonably intelligent person — or lawyer — would accept its meaning to be is a new and worrying expression of that deep character flaw. – Graham Adams

When you are immersed in the business of politics, as she is, accusing others of “politicking” is absurd — yet she does it without any apparent awareness of how risible it is. – Graham Adams

When you ride a very high horse, as the Prime Minister does, falling off can be painful and spectacular.

As the wheels of her government continue to wobble alarmingly — as they are in education, health, crime, and cost of living, to name just a few of the disasters Ardern is presiding over — watching how she reacts to the relentless criticism inevitable in an election year will bring its own horrified fascination, both for supporters and opponents alike. – Graham Adams

When I was young, kids appeared before a magistrate (a District Court Judge before 1978) sufficiently rarely that questions were raised about the young person’s family, and inadequate parental supervision. Sometimes the magistrate would rebuke the parents if a child had been wagging school, or had been out late and was unsupervised. Remedial action was usually fairly swift: parents took steps to look after their children lest there was further police action.

Over the last fifty years there has there been a steady movement away from holding parents to account for the children they bring into the world. Why all the hooha when National’s Christopher Luxon recently suggested it was time for parents of perennial young trouble-makers to be held to account? The short answer is that politicians, especially those of a left persuasion, fear voter backlash not just from the parents and the kids once they reach voting age, but from the significant industry that now farms the country’s underclass. Gradually a perception has been allowed to emerge that problems are always someone else’s responsibility to deal with, never the family’s. Yet that is where the heart of the problem lies. – Michael Bassett

Requirements that men should support the children they fathered decreased, particularly when birth mothers could refuse to name their children’s fathers. Under all these pressures, the underclass mushroomed. Quite quickly many children had no family link with anyone working for a living. The 100,000 recipients of Job-Seeker Benefits, with no experience, nor intention of working make up the bulk of a self-perpetuating stratum of modern New Zealand society. It costs the taxpayer hugely in benefits, Kainga Ora subsidies, criminal activity, police and prison time. Most of the ram raiding, knife-wielding, gun-toting young offenders come from this modern, politically-created social group.

Springing up alongside this growing disaster has been a cluster of public and private agencies that are meant to be wrestling the social tragedy into a more tolerable shape. Social welfare officers – God knows what their latest Maori label is – Kainga Ora officials who seem more scared of the underclass than it is of them, and low-level bureaucrats are all intent on safe-guarding their jobs. They feel threatened by any alternative suggestions about how to deal with, let alone diminish, today’s social problems. To you and me, a bit of tough love is fundamental to straightening out lives where bewildered and angry people lack the necessary education and life experience ever to hold down a job.

But the likes of Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson, who themselves never held responsible jobs before entering Parliament, always dismiss such ideas. – Michael Bassett

But Ardern and Robertson quickly denounce anything other than their own policies of muddle along; alternatives are “proven failures” or “futile”. Getting tough on school attendance might prevent children from going to tangis, said Ardern in what must surely have been her stupidest observation as Prime Minister. And the ministry averts its gaze from the growing number of outrages being perpetrated by today’s Kiwi underclass. The scourge of Hamilton ram-raiding and events like the Sandringham stabbing of a shop-keeper in the heart of the Prime Minister’s own electorate, get no more than a wringing-of-the-hands response and toothy expressions of sympathy from her.

Meanwhile, enormous sums keep on being spent on expanding Three (or is it now Five?) waters, centralizing Health and Education and lavishly funding “consultants”. This government has no respect for working people. Peter Fraser and Norman Kirk would not be able to recognize them, and Norman Kirk would have doubled back from the DPB many years ago. – Michael Bassett

When the Rugby Union does its review of why the Black Ferns are world champions and why the All Blacks are not, I know what they will not consider; how we are educating boys.

David Kirk, the captain of an All Black team, wrote a thoughtful rugby book, so it did not sell.

In it he said he thought the All Blacks got their edge from fathers teaching their sons the fundamentals of the game from a very young age. – Richard Prebble

The percentage of New Zealand domestic university students who are men has reached an all-time low of 39 percent. While our statistics for our failure in Maori and Pacifica education are readily available, gender statistics are much harder to find, just like America. Try doing an Internet search for boys’ education and see what I mean.

The Education Department goes so far as to post that there is no crisis and to claim boys and girls can be taught the same way. This government did a big review of all aspects of education. I could find no mention of boys’ education.  – Richard Prebble

There is a grade gap. In the seventies when we have School Certificate there was no gap. Now boys are far more likely to drop out early, fail to achieve any grades in NCEA, male enrollment at university is falling and women are far more likely to graduate. – Richard Prebble

Women are successfully entering and even dominating previous male professions. We have not rethought what it means to be a male.

While women do have an advantage in the careers that require empathy it does not mean that many men don’t also have empathy. He cites the shortage of nurses. It is worldwide. Many men could have a very satisfying career in nursing. As men dominate among patients in areas like drug and alcohol addictions, we need more male nurses. Yet as a profession for men it is still looked down on. I suspect until we change our attitude we will never have enough nurses.

We have to be willing to see if things we have done to help girls have affected boys. The international educationalist Joseph Driessen says adding literacy into NCEA math to help girls worked but as boys often struggle with literacy it lowered boys’ marks. Math is a requirement of a range of occupations boys do well at. – Richard Prebble

For boys’ education, let us acknowledge that while many boys succeed too many are failing. It is not an attack on girls’ education to acknowledge girls and boys develop at different rates and learn in different ways.  – Richard Prebble

When you go from a 2.5 percent interest rate to a 6.5 percent interest rate and even higher, that is huge amounts of pain. How do you find $600 extra after tax to be able to deal with that and just pay the interest cost? – Christopher Luxon

We implore them once again, fix it. If this economy doesn’t get workers we’re going to have New Zealanders paying the price every time they pay at the eftpos terminal and every time they make a mortgage payment – get it sorted. – Nicola Willis 

We now have a government with an absolute majority which is incompetent in all facets of government except for driving, without the consent of the people, its ideological misconception of the meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi as expressed in He Puapua.

The Water Services Entities Bill is perhaps the most egregious example of the implementation of the false premise that the Treaty signed in 1840 mandated co governance in all aspects of the governance of New Zealand.  – Graeme Reeves 

I want to bring your attention to another matter. That is the Orwellian indoctrination of the Civil Service and the bureaucrats who administer the departments of state.  – Graeme Reeves 

There is no accountability to the shareholders.

In fact, section 15 of the Bill makes it clear that the shareholders have no powers to do anything other than to hold shares.

The shareholdings are nothing more than a deception and a dishonest representation politically motivated to allow the government to maintain that the territorial authority’s co -own the entities when in fact none of the attributes of ownership exist. – Graeme Reeves 

Satisfaction of the Maori specific criteria are entirely subjective and will depend, to use a legal expression, on the length of the Chancellor’s foot which is not satisfactory.

In my opinion, this Bill is in itself racist, and it’s passing will be a gargantuan mistake which will change the course of race relations in New Zealand for the worse. – Graeme Reeves 

Well, we made it through the pandemic alive, and now we’re going broke.

Happy bloody Christmas, Adrian Orr.

If you were dreaming of a lavish summer holiday, or bulging festive stockings after the grind of Covid lockdowns, the Reserve Bank’s own Scrooge has news for you. Winter’s coming and Christmas is cancelled. –   Andrea Vance 

There have been a number of such cases where it appears that the judiciary has looked at the equity of the case and worked backwards to find the result that suits the popular mood. – Damien Grant

Many readers will find no issue with this state of affairs because the high regard we hold judges in contrasts with how we regard our MPs; and for good reason.

The process to obtain a judicial warrant requires decades of legal excellence, personal integrity and a reputation for diligence and prudence. The calibre of those who enter Parliament can be seen by how few maintain any professional life once the voters tire of their antics.

Yet the creeping expansion of judicial authority has occurred without significant public comment or civic engagement.

Like Elizabeth Baigent three decades past, we have woken up to find officers of the state running amok in areas we did not expect to find them, exercising authority we did not grant them, and no clear means of removing them. – Damien Grant

What a week. The Government would like us to be talking about whether 16 and 17-year-olds can vote. It is one of those issues that people generally have an opinion on and it’s a distraction from the major issues that have gone on this week.

They can’t pass legislation to strengthen our laws around youth crime but miraculously they can find time to bring legislation to Parliament on whether 16 and 17-year-olds can vote. They will say they had to.  – Paula Bennett

The Government looks like a deer in headlights, desperately deciding where to run to divert attention from the absolute mess we have seen this week. – Paula Bennett

As we hear this week that we are heading into a recession – and one that is predicted to last a long time – the Government would like us to be talking about whether 16 and 17-year-olds can vote. There is a lot that those 16 and 17-year-olds need. To feel safe in our beautiful country. To have hope that they may be able to buy a home one day. A bed in a mental health unit if they need it. Next year let’s hope they get a new government with the right priorities. – Paula Bennett

The die is looking increasingly cast for this Government. In a range of crucial policy areas they have resolutely refused to change course in response to changed circumstances, despite people jumping up and down and telling them they are sailing on to the rocks. Now they are in the process of reaping the consequences of their intransigence. And at this late stage it seems there is precious little they can do about it.

The economy is a case in point. Grant Robertson’s refusal to alter his spending plans, his lack of interest in a more welcoming immigration policy to unstick the labour market, his failure to hold back his colleagues’ tsunami of increasing regulation, and his unwillingness to require discipline on government-mandated wage increases, have all contributed to a glum economic prognosis. – Steven Joyce

Crime is another example. This government has spent years building a reputation for being soft. They doth protest but emptying the prisons, stopping police chases, softening sentences and generally showing more interest in criminals than victims leads to a sense of lawlessness and a growing list of personal tragedies.

And so on. Health, same story. Education as well. All a case of people arriving in government with a pre-conceived and rigid set of beliefs, often harking back to the 1970s, and then resolutely refusing to respond to the evidence in front of them until it is too late.

One of the biggest messes they have made, and continue to make, is in transport infrastructure. Its hard to fathom just how big a stuff-up this has become, and how difficult it will be to put it back together again. – Steven Joyce

 We’ve lost five years to paper pushing.

Now, in the face of a mounting road toll and pretty much no progress on a highway building plan, the government has resorted to the old saw of lowering speed limits, not on particular sections of road, but across the whole lot.

Ignoring that many of our road deaths occur out of driver impatience, or by people already flouting the current rules, the government has decided to punish everyone in terms of travel times and speeds, at the expense of productivity and getting home on time.

And yes it is the government. They are hiding behind NZTA but no agency advances these sorts of plans without government approval.

The only sure way to drive down our road toll is by relentlessly improving the quality of our roads. That means continuing to boost the capacity and safety of our busiest regional highways, and building more forgiving features into the not so busy ones. – Steven Joyce

There is no getting away from the fact the country has lost at least six years in building transport infrastructure and mega millions of dollars because of an ideologically driven junking of pre-existing plans. – Steven Joyce

The job for the next government will be to quickly resume a programme of transport investment focused on actual transport use rather than the fevered ideas of politicians and planners, one that is prioritised ruthlessly on actual benefits to actual users, and is funded over a decade or more so that contractors have confidence to invest in getting it built.

As with so much, it is too late for this Government and frankly beyond its wit to change tack. – Steven Joyce

But the thing I’ve realised is if you always do the right thing for the right reasons, then good things will happen.– Erica Stanford 

Science deals with the natural world but matauranga is rooted in the supernatural. Science has plenty of evidence to prove that humanity evolved from apes by Darwinian natural selection. Maori believe the god Tane created people.

Science aims to make universal laws, such as Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, Ohm’s laws of electricity, and Hubble’s law of cosmic expansion. These laws apply in New Zealand as they do on distant galaxies. Matauranga is limited to local situations and local events, and has produced no universal laws.

Writing about matauranga, leading Maori thinker Aroha Te Paraeke Mead writes (2007) that “Maori are the only ones who should be controlling all aspects of its retention, transmission and protection”. By contrast, science is in public hands. Anybody can contribute to it and every word or calculation is open to world-wide challenge and criticism. But challenge matauranga and you’ll be branded a racist, and say goodbye to your funding, promotion, and perhaps your job. – Bob Brockie

The differences between world science and matauranga are so great that they cannot be reconciled. – Bob Brockie

Parroting Foucault and Derrida, councillors of our Royal Society assert that science is “based on ethnocentric bias and outmoded dualisms (and the power relations embedded in them) ” and they want “to place the Treaty of Waitangi centrally and bring alongside that, inequality and diversity issues holistically”.

But the Treaty is a political document with no scientific content. It has no place in science.

The Society was once the bastion of science in New Zealand. It now champions woke anti-science and paradoxically punishes professors who defend science. Matauranga would best be taught in history or religious studies, certainly not in science. – Bob Brockie

We have one part of the system fully-funded and overseen in an apparently coherent way by the Ministry of Health (assisted suicide and euthanasia), and the other sector that doesn’t even have a strategic plan in place, that is inequitably funded, and has no coherent overview of how to develop the service,.

Why don’t we have the exact focus on palliative care, so anyone making the biggest decision of life can make an equitable, informed choice? – Dr Bryan Betty

Everyone is affected by death and dying. That is part of health. Good dying and having equitable choice is a fundamental part of the healthcare system we set up. It has to be given space and focus at this point. – Dr Bryan Betty

What Labour and Greens have done is vote for to entrench a clause relating to something which is merely a public policy issue, and have done so without bipartisan support. This is repugnant behaviour. – David Farrar

Super-majority entrenchment will only remain respected if it is used solely for constitutional protections, and for laws that were passed with over-whelming bipartisan support.

In this current case, the Government is actually using it almost as a PR stunt, as it deal with not privatising the Three Waters assets. This is a bogeyman created entirely by the Government. They are the only ones talking privatisation. Not a single Council has ever proposed selling off their water infrastructure. – David Farrar

We make our parliament “supreme” in the sense that a bare majority of its MPs can enact any law they want on any subject they want. However, we temper that power somewhat by saying that a future bare majority of MPs, perhaps elected by future voters, can revisit any of those laws and change them to reflect what they now think best.

This approach is rooted in ongoing democratic accountability. Electing MPs entrusts them with overall law-making power, which we then evaluate at subsequent election. If we disapprove of how that power has been used, we can pick another lot of MPs, who can use their law-making powers to fix things up. Should the majority viewpoint change, then the law can easily change along with it. Parliament’s law-making power is vast, but it is always contingent. – Andrew Geddis

For those lacking the appetite for a 10,000-word academic article, basically it was a political deal to stop MPs from any party being tempted to game these electoral rules in ways that might help them stay in power. Because, if our system of parliamentary supremacy over the law depends on MPs being freely and fairly elected by the voters, you want to make sure that our elections are free and the rules under which they get elected are fair!

This particular entrenchment provision has been scrupulously abided by in the subsequent 66 years.  – Andrew Geddis

Why does this matter? Well, first note the 60% threshold for future change. That number doesn’t reflect a principled decision on the appropriate level of parliamentary support for change. It just happens to be the current number of MPs from the Green and Labour Parties who were prepared to support Sage’s amendment. Because, parliament’s rules say that an entrenchment provision in a bill must be supported by at least the same number of MPs as it requires for future amendments. Had 70% of MPs supported including the entrenchment provision, the threshold would have been set at this level.

Second, and perhaps more important, note what this entrenchment protection applies to. Certainly, future ownership of water matters. Whether it lies in public or private hands is a really important question of policy. However, it is still just a question of policy.

It’s different from the provisions entrenched in the Electoral Act, which go to core matters regarding the fairness of the process that chooses who governs the country. We can’t really trust a bare majority of MPs, elected as they are and so eager to win and keep political power, to make rules here. Or, at least, there will always be the suspicion that any rules they make will reflect that bare majority’s personal, partisan interests instead of their best considered view of the right thing to do. – Andrew Geddis

Why, then, should we say that future MPs can only act to make it easier to privatise water where a super-majority of 60% of them want to do so? What makes this one particular policy issue of such importance that it requires a different, much harder parliamentary law-making process than any other?

The point being, what happened on Wednesday was a potentially momentous broadening out of an existing wrinkle in our system of parliamentary governance. Since 1956, our law has said that some key bits of our electoral system are so at risk of partisan gaming that we can’t trust a bare majority of MPs to decide them. Now, the amended three waters legislation also says that there is a basic policy issue that is so overwhelmingly important as to justify today’s MPs placing handcuffs on tomorrow’s MPs when dealing with it.

If that is indeed the case, what other sorts of issues might a supermajority of MPs think rise to that level? And, in this brave new world, what happens to our system of parliamentary law-making, based as it is on the assumption that the view of the current majority is always subject to revision by the future’s?- Andrew Geddis

The real danger is it opens up possibilities of entrenchment on other matters. It’s not beyond imagination that a National-ACT Government may in the future decide to entrench a three strikes law on the basis that being safe is important policy.

We start this set of shenanigans about using it for those types of policy matters that don’t have that widespread support. We get the sort of game playing which is unlikely to end well – Dean Knight

It is constitutionally concerning and exceptional for a policy matter like this to be entrenched, and for it to be formally dropped-in at such a late stage, so it didn’t have the time … for a debate about whether we want to change our constitution to allow for this type of thing.

“Using this sort of the entrenchment as handcuffs, in a slightly cheeky way … risks upsetting the traditions and expectations around entrenchment, whether it’s enforceable, whether there are conventions that you just can’t repeal them anyway, those sorts of things. – Dean Knight

If waterways and freshwater in this country were unequivocally recognised in New Zealand law as the life blood of the land, which cannot be owned by human beings but only held in trust for future generations to enjoy, then flawed legal devices such as ‘entrenchment’ would not be needed, and the spectre of ‘privatisation’ would vanish. – Dame Anne Salmond 

OK. Watch out for what you wish for.

You’ve done it, you’ve broken the convention, you’ve shown there’s a different way of doing things. See you at the election – if you’re not in the majority at the next election, don’t cry when it gets done to you. – Andrew Geddis 

It is a fundamental principle of our representative democracy that the current Parliament should not be able to bind its successors. The use of entrenchment to protect a piece of law from being changed or repealed via a simple parliamentary majority goes against this fundamental principle. By entrenching a current government’s policy preference, we either reduce the ability of future governments to legislate or, more likely; we undermine the current importance that we grant to entrenched constitutional provisions. – Maxim Institute

Our informal constitution relies on conventions and norms to continue functioning. These norms only work when all in and around power continue to uphold them. It is concerning that those in Government saw little wrong in introducing this entrenching provision and have sought to defend it. It is also worrying that there was little reaction to the provision from the Opposition or wider media at the time it was made. Legal academics have driven the pushback to this provision, and it is heartening that there is still room for the academy to function as the “critic and conscience of society.” – Maxim Institute

Mention woke indoctrination in schools and most people might imagine something like a pink-haired, nonbinary teacher forcing children to take the knee for Black Lives Matter. If you look on TikTok, you will find no shortage of such teachers gleefully revealing how they sneak Pride flags, LGBTQ+ books and BLM posters into the classroom. Certainly, there are plenty of activist teachers working in schools, who see pupils as a captive audience. Yet as worrying as such examples may be, they are merely the tip of the iceberg. – Joanna Williams

These ideas have gained ground precisely because it is not just pink-haired TikTok teachers who are intent on promoting a one-sided, politically motivated view of the world. It is also the academics who write the school curriculum and textbooks. It is the university educationalists who train each new generation of teachers. It is the journalists and campaigners outside of schools who agitate for their own pet issues to gain a hearing in the classroom. And it is the people who stock the school library and put together online resources for teachers and children alike. The upshot is that when it comes to English, history, geography and even maths, the curriculum itself has become politicised.

Discussions of gender identity and ideas that emerge from critical race theory are not just a sneaky addition to the ‘proper’ curriculum. They are now central to what and how children are taught. In many schools, books featuring transgender characters are used in literature classes not because of the quality of the writing, but because of the issues about identity that such texts raise. Similarly, slavery and empire feature on the history curriculum not so much because of their important place in human history, but more as a means of discussing current concerns with race and racism. And all of this is in addition to the assemblies, form periods, PSHE classes and RSE lessons that provide a forum for promoting the woke outlook. In these kinds of lessons, social engineering really is the main point. – Joanna Williams

The attitudes young adults are likely to have encountered while at school stand in contrast to the Enlightenment values that have shaped Western societies for the past two centuries. The Policy Exchange report adds to a growing body of evidence showing that young people are more sceptical about the importance of free speech, democracy and tolerance than older age groups. It shows that those aged 18 to 25 are evenly split on whether the gender-critical academic Kathleen Stock should have been defended by her university when she came under attack from trans activists. They are also split on whether Harry Potter author JK Rowling should have been dropped by her publisher for her comments on trans issues. In contrast, older adults are more likely to value freedom of expression over censorship. And while 38 per cent of young adults agree with the idea of removing Winston Churchill’s statue from Parliament Square because he held racist views, among adults as a whole this figure falls to just 12 per cent.

Education and indoctrination have become blurred, and the impact of this is now being felt beyond the school gates. We need to tackle this problem head-on. Sadly, it is no longer enough to say that teachers should simply stick to teaching when the curriculum itself is so politicised. Instead, we need a wider debate about the purpose of schools. And parents need to be given much clearer information about exactly what their children are being taught. We need teachers to be more ambitious when it comes to conveying subject knowledge, less keen on promoting their own political views and wise enough to know the difference between the two. – Joanna Williams

As big a figure as he was, his aura was never greater than when he had to use a wheelchair because of the effects of motor neurone disease (MND). He was never stronger than when his body was breaking down, never more commanding of worldwide respect than when he’d lost the ability to speak and could only communicate via a voice app operated with his eyes darting around a screen of letters.

His relentless energy in fighting an illness without cure was awe-inspiring. He said the only drug available to him was positivity – and he gorged merrily on it. The many millions of pounds he raised for research through his My Name’5 Doddie Foundation, the money donated to families who were suffering as his family were suffering, the lives he made better along the way. His legacy could circumnavigate the rugby world many times over. – Tom English

His attitude was rooted in grim realism. This thing had befallen him and he had better “crack on” as he put it. “I have never, ever thought ‘Why me?’ It was, ‘Right, let’s get this sorted… it’s like with rugby. If you don’t get in the team, do you give up your jersey or do you fight?” – Tom English

In New Zealand over the last five years (including, but not limited to, the Government’s Covid response) the tide has gone out on the New Zealand education system. I doubt that there is a single, even semi-informed, observer who could claim any more that we have a world-class system. – Alwyn Poole

The crisis already exists but has been covered up for a long time. It is now widely known that our education system is a mess and many schools are simply not fit for purpose.

Some key indicators are that: Even our Level 2 NCEA graduates often lack functional numeracy and literacy. We have in excess of 8500 students not enrolled in any school as of July. Our full attendance for Term 2 was less than 40% across all deciles and just 23% for decile 1 students. We have 12% of our students graduating with less than Level 1 NCEA (33% for Māori students in South Auckland). The gaps across socio-economic levels are the worst in the developed world. Our ethnic gaps are also horrendous with Asian students getting University Entrance for leavers at 67%, back to Māori at 18%. – Alwyn Poole

Labour keeps stating that this decline started under National. Under National there was a slight downward trend in attendance. Labour drove the school attendance bus off the cliff.  – Alwyn Poole

Who will take responsibility? The Ministry of Education, whose email footnote states: “We shape an education system that delivers equitable and excellent outcomes”? NZ’s school attendance is behind all the key countries we compare ourselves with (including 15 percentage points behind Australia).

When principals complain about the new credits for functional literacy and numeracy they need to remember that they can be achieved at any time from Year 10 to Year 13. Are they really saying they can’t help students achieve functional literacy and numeracy in five years? The sitting students will have had 12,000 hours of funded schooling each by then. – Alwyn Poole

Where they are right is that there needs to be major change in both parenting and schooling. – Alwyn Poole

As a nation we need massive education and support for pregnant women/partners regarding care for their children in-utero, including a huge programme to counter foetal alcohol spectrum disorder and other harms. We need it to be imperative that parents are the first (and most important) teachers for ages 0–5, including health, reading, numeracy, movement, music, languages. 

Then it is time for all parents across NZ to ask the hard questions about school leadership, school quality, teacher quality and to demand a LOT better. Parents fund the schooling and it is their children. They deserve better, but they need to be prepared to help. – Alwyn Poole

Our primary school teaching and learning needs overhauling and a lot of the busy work and downtime needs to go. Primary teacher qualifications in English, Maths and Science need significant upgrading.

The Education Review Office says schools should make attending more “enjoyable” (aka fun). How about – inspirational, aspirational, high quality, demanding?

When the tide is out it is the very best time to make things right. – Alwyn Poole

The MIQ system was shockingly designed, fundamentally flawed and ended up in court with a loss for the Government.

It was a foray into repression and fury that was never really needed and a very good example of what this Government has become famous for – dreaming up a plan then cocking it up.

The famous got access to The Wiggles and Jacinda Ardern’s favourite DJs while people were locked out and forced to watch loved ones die, loved ones get married via zoom and that mad lottery of getting up at all hours and watching as you yet again got a number that would not get you anywhere close to getting a room and into the country.

Charlotte Bellis, remember her? The pregnant journalist who bullied her way in by embarrassing Chris Hipkins into submission – the whole thing was a grotesque mess. – Mike Hosking

Governments have to run on their record. Last term, Labour successfully locked down the country. Then they overdid the lockdowns. This term what has Labour achieved?

Labour inherited a strong economy and an excellent set of books. Labour promised to be fiscally prudent. Covid was used as an excuse to wriggle out of that pledge.

Labour did inherit issues in housing, health and education. After five years the issues are worse. Tens of thousands of households are going to struggle to service 8 per cent mortgages. Health services are failing. The Government’s priority is a Māori Health Authority. Meanwhile, 98 per cent of pupils graduating from decile 10 schools would fail NCEA literacy. – Richard Prebble

It feels like karma. Labour’s re-election was helped by the Reserve Bank at one stage printing a billion dollars a week to pump up the economy. To correct the inflation caused by that money printing the Reserve Bank is helping defeat Labour.

No one would want to campaign on Labour’s record. All Labour can do is try to convince us that National and Christopher Luxon would be worse. It is possible but hard to imagine. – Richard Prebble

Labour must press ahead with its unpopular Three Waters. Labour is fighting a two-front election campaign. National and Act on one front. The Māori Party on the second front. Labour cannot abandon co-government without also abandoning the Māori seats.

The next 12 months are going to be very dangerous. We have no written constitution restraining Labour. The only sanction on any government is the knowledge that they will be accountable in an election. This is why three years may be too short for a good government but too long for a bad one.

Ministers can read the polls. Labour will ignore the Reserve Bank’s advice.

Ministers will go on borrowing and spending. Labour intends to leave inflation as the next government’s problem. Paying back the borrowing is another problem for a future government. It is called laying a minefield. – Richard Prebble

Luxon and Act’s David Seymour had better factor into their plans the likelihood of many unexploded bombs. The health system appears close to a systematic failure. The briefing for the incoming ministers in many portfolios will make a very grim reading.

There is an even greater danger. MPs who think they are dog tucker can be tempted to try to defeat the outcome of the election.

It is fundamental to democracy that one parliament cannot bind future parliaments.

Not anymore. In the Three Waters bill that critics say privatises billions of dollars of ratepayers’ assets into effective ownership by tribal entities, Green MP Eugenie Sage has an amendment. The amendment requires a 60 per cent vote by future parliaments to privatise the assets. Go figure. Intellectual rigour is not prized in the Green caucus. Under urgency, Labour supported the Green Party amendment.  – Richard Prebble

In 168 years of the New Zealand Parliament, no government has ever attempted to entrench its policies.  – Richard Prebble

Labour and the Greens have committed a constitutional outrage. It is an attack on democracy. Even if the reaction forces a U-turn it shows Labour and the Greens are willing to abuse their power.

Lame duck governments are dangerous. – Richard Prebble

THE MORE THE VOTERS DISCOVER about Labour’s Three Waters, the less they like it. No matter, this Government has clearly decided that, if it is to be destroyed, then Three Waters is the hill upon which it will die. That being the case – and the still-unfolding Entrenchment Crisis leaves little room for doubt – then the only real question to be answered is: Why? What is it about the Three Waters project that renders it impervious to rational reconsideration

When a group of people refuse to accept they have made a poor choice – even as it threatens to destroy them – then it is a reasonably safe bet that they are in the grip of dangerously delusional thinking. Cult-like thinking, some might even suggest. But is it credible to suggest that a mainstream political party could fall victim to delusional thinking on such a scale? Is Labour really crazy enough to put its long-term survival at risk? – Chris Trotter

What idea is big enough to derange the Labour Party into courting electoral suicide? The answer would appear to involve a radical revision of New Zealand history. Something along the lines of the colonisation of Aotearoa being a heinous historical crime. In this narrative, the colonial state is identified as the institution most responsible for the criminal dispossession of Aotearoa’s indigenous Māori population. Labour’s big idea is to facilitate a revolutionary reconstitution of the New Zealand state.

Now, where would Labour get an idea like that? Putting to one side Labour’s Māori caucus, whose interest in such an historical project is entirely understandable, how could Labour’s Pakeha MPs have picked up such a self-destructive notion? Well, the university graduates in Labour’s caucus (which is to say nearly all of them) are highly likely to have come across arguments for “decolonisation” at some point in their studies. The lawyers among them would certainly have encountered and absorbed “the principles of the Treaty”. So, too, would those coming to the Labour Party from the state sector. – Chris Trotter

The version of New Zealand history conveyed to those attending these workshops is remarkably consistent: colonisers = baddies; the heroic Māori who resisted the colonisers’ ruthless predations = goodies. Only by giving full effect to te Tiriti o Waitangi can the wrongs of the past be righted: only then will equity and justice prevail.

Many of those attending Treaty workshops will have been invited to “check their privilege” and “confront their racism”. This can be a harrowing experience for many Pakeha, leaving them with a strong inclination to keep silent and step aside whenever those on the receiving end of “white privilege” are encouraged to step forward and speak out. In the most extreme cases, Pakeha are actively discouraged from sharing their opinions, lest their higher education and superior facility with the English language overawe and “silence” those denied such privileges.

When Labour’s Māori caucus (the largest ever after the 2020 general election) sought to take full advantage of the party’s absolute parliamentary majority to advance their Treaty-centric agenda, it is entirely possible they found themselves pushing on an open door. – Chris Trotter

It is, perhaps, unsurprising that Labour’s Māori caucus has found the party’s Pakeha majority so easy to cajole into backing what, from its perspective, is an entirely legitimate constitutional agenda. Led by Nanaia Mahuta and Willie Jackson, the Māori caucus has taken full advantage of the fact that their Pakeha colleagues’ lack of constitutional conviction has never been a match for their own passionate intensity.

Three Waters may be the hill Labour dies on, but when the victors survey the field of battle, the only corpses they’ll find will be Pakeha. Each one clutching the “Big Idea” for which their party has paid the ultimate price. – Chris Trotter

While tinkering around the house is an enjoyable pastime that can also yield some improvements, it is not a productive approach to government policy-making, and rarely leads to the best of outcomes. – Leeann Watson

New Zealand’s political environment seems to be stuck in an unfortunate position, because of the three-year election cycle, where we tend not to bother on the big things, and we instead focus on tinkering with the little things– the quick wins and the headline grabbers. And when we do focus on the big things, we do it in a way that is rushed, and often not with a long-term view in mind. We’ve digressed from a Parliament that is solely focused on creating better outcomes for New Zealanders, and identifying problems before we attempt to fix them. – Leeann Watson

One of the big pieces of legislation that has been plaguing the business community this year is Fair Pay Agreements. In my previous column, I wrote about these in more depth, and I will repeat the point we hear from Canterbury businesses ad nauseam. Why has a complicated and convoluted piece of legislation that will make it more difficult for businesses to operate been introduced to solve a problem that does not exist? New Zealand enjoys some of the best employment relations in the developed world, with flexibility and agility that we cannot lose. So what are we fixing?

One of the pieces of legislation that was introduced in urgency last week was one that will require all businesses in New Zealand to elect a health and safety representative, including the small business that might employ three people, which now has to invest in training for their staff, at a time where the economy is under significant pressure. Previously, small businesses did not need to worry about this unless they were a high-risk industry, such as forestry or mining, so, again, what is the problem we are trying to solve? Are small businesses really that unsafe?

The business community is losing faith in our policymakers’ ability to define problems and create meaningful and fair solutions. We are stuck in a Catch-22 type situation, because the complex problems that need to be addressed – rising levels of crime, investment in infrastructure, reforming aspects of our public system that are not delivering successful outcomes – all require a long-term approach. And the level and extent of reform needed to fix them, is prohibited by election cycles. – Leeann Watson

Reform is a word that has lost its true meaning. Reform is bold. Reform is about pulling things apart and reassembling something that is faster, better and more efficient than it was originally. The reform we have seen of late has not fit that definition at all.

Let’s consider the reform of the health system. A new name and a restructure is not a reform. It is a new name and a restructure. The same entity still exists, and it is still delivering the same outcomes and, in some cases, maybe worse than before. The components might look different, or be slotted in a slightly different place, but it is still the same. It hasn’t gained anything new, or lost anything clunky that is preventing it from delivering better outcomes for New Zealanders. As has been the case in Christchurch this year, cancelling all non-urgent appointments because the system is about to collapse under pressure is just not acceptable. A new name is not going to fix that. – Leeann Watson

At a time when we desperately need to be investing and focusing our attention on equipping the future workforce, we are seeing the merger of entities – some of which are performing quite well on their own. The headlines, instead, indicate it is fraught with scandals, resignations, and our future workforce, and our younger generation, are no better off because of it.

That’s not to mention the changes in almost every other aspect of the public sector that are occurring, including Three Waters. Is changing everything, all the time, all at once, really the best method? Should we not be focusing on the most pressing issues first and doing it properly, with a view of creating better outcomes over the long term rather than quick wins? – Leeann Watson

 Christchurch aside, where new infrastructure was required immediately due to the earthquakes, elsewhere in New Zealand we seem to take the approach that it is not until a road is constantly congested, and motorists (read: voters) are unhappy, that we make decisions to invest and expand. We should be starting projects decades before they are needed. Not after they’re needed. But that doesn’t win votes.

There is a growing and quite compelling case that our current electoral system is limiting the ability for successive Governments to be bold and to engage in actual reform, and not just tinker with minor alterations and the headline-grabbing policy wins that sound great on paper and are good for the polls, rather than the tough actions that solve problems, and leave New Zealand in a better position.

As we head into the barbeque season before an election year and the inevitable political debates amongst family and friends occur, maybe it’s time to focus on the system and not the political personalities, and consider, whether it may not necessarily be the political parties alone that are not delivering to their best extent, but rather a political system that is not hindering the ability to deliver long term outcomes – and a public service as a whole that would benefit from a new operating model that enables agility, innovation, a growth mindset and is focused on execution versus tinkering. – Leeann Watson

This new fog canon measure is too late – they know it, we know it.

Worse yet, the PM tried to deflect all blame from her Government by saying that there’d be a delay on said fog cannons – due to a global shortage. This turns out to be an outright lie.

Newstalk ZB Drive host Heather du Plessis Allan smelt a rat straight away and last night called a fog cannon supplier to fact check the PM on this one. No surprises in his response.. he said to her, ‘I see the Queen of Spin is at it again..’

He said the facts are, there is no global shortage of fog cannons, the supply issue is due to the Government not placing any orders for them. They’ve dropped the ball, again. – Kate Hawkesby

So the delay is the Government’s fault, it’s on them. Remind anyone of the vaccine rollout?

This is a government of inaction and indecision. Unless it’s Three Waters legislation of course, that appears to be able to be rammed through no holds barred. But this fog canon supply shortage claim – or should I say lie, is akin to the same lie the PM trotted out yesterday, that the Government’s new increased support for dairy business owners is not based on the death of Janak Patel. – Kate Hawkesby

The Government wants to pretend it’s considerate, organized and proactive enough not to wait for a death, in order to act, but that’s simply not true. Spinning us lies is just not working anymore; this Government has a credibility problem.

The PM has a credibility problem. Included in her post Cab was the other audacious claim that they’ve been tough on crime.

She “rejected” criticism her Government was soft on crime. She “rejected” that the Government had acted too slowly, she “rejected” the idea that it took Patel’s death for the Government to act. – Kate Hawkesby

I can tell you this for nothing, rejecting this stuff doesn’t make it go away. It is a crisis for every single victim and every family member of victims in these burglaries and raids.

But the other real crisis we’re in at the moment is a spin crisis. There’s too much of it coming from the Pulpit of Truth.

We’re drowning in it; we’re exhausted from being fed it. I do worry about all those who just accept it without question though, or have checked out because they don’t even care anymore.

We should care; we are being fed a steady diet of BS, from a government that has no idea what the words accountability or responsibility mean. – Kate Hawkesby

In his great book titled Russia in 1839, the Marquis de Custine called the Tsar “eagle and insect.” He was eagle because he soared high above the country over which he ruled, completely alone, taking it all in at a glance, but he was insect because there was nothing too small or trivial for him to interfere with: he or his power burrowed into the very fabric of society as a termite burrows into the fabric of a wooden house. There was no escaping him.

This is the image I have in my mind of the operation of the adherents of Woke ideology. They have a grand vision, at least implicitly, both about the nature of the society in which they live and what should replace it. Insufficient, incoherent, or absurd as their vision might be, it actuates them. As human history demonstrates, intellectual insufficiency is no bar to effectiveness in the search for power; indeed it might be an advantage insofar as more scrupulous searchers after truth and goodness are riven by doubt.

On the other hand, nothing is too small for their attention. Being visionaries, they can infuse their slightest actions with the most grandiose theoretical significance. This gives them self-importance and confidence that they are doing what once might have been called God’s work. Triviality is thus reconciled with transcendence. They are part of the movement of History with a capital H, whose right side they both define and bring forward by their actions. – Theodore Dalrypmple

The eagle is sharp-eyed while the adherent of Woke ideology has cataracts. When the house crumbles to dust because of the action of the termites, it is not because they desired such a denouement: it was, rather, a natural consequence of their conduct. The destruction wrought by the adherents of Woke ideology is a good deal more deliberate.  – Theodore Dalrypmple

I have been proud to be part of the New Zealand health sector. When I started in GP I didn’t feel the need to have private health insurance. The health system, while it had its limitations, generally worked well. I would do everything I could to manage the patient in the community and when I needed help I could refer the patient on and they would be seen. I was so proud of the initial government response to Covid, one that prioritised public safety, that I applied for citizenship.

How things have changed. The health system is fundamentally broken and I can’t see how it is going to be fixed. Patients who need to be managed in secondary care aren’t, instead being pushed back into primary care. Patients going to Emergency are not getting the imaging they require on presentation; they are given pain relief and told to see their GP in the morning and get referred for an ultrasound. The patient then needs to pay to see me (and I usually have to double-book them to see them promptly). Unless they are one of the chosen few eligible for community-funded radiology that ultrasound will cost them $280 and will require a four week wait.

Good medical practice prioritises early intervention for children with developmental delays. The Child Development Service, which does the majority of assessments for autism, global developmental delay and other conditions, has a waitlist of over 12 months. Even if a family has the resources to go private, I have no one to refer to. – Dr Corinne Glenn

Every consult becomes more and more complex as patients get sicker waiting for care. Patients have to wait longer for an appointment so by the time they come there are multiple issues to deal with. Follow-up is hard as patients struggle to pay for repeat appointments. We don’t have the medications that are bog-standard in other parts of the world. We have only recently funded some diabetes medications (empagliflozin and dulaglutide) that are second line treatments elsewhere. The special authority criteria are so strict there are many who can’t access them.

Please don’t mention mental health. Again, I am really confident managing a range of mental health conditions. However good mental health management requires a team. Access to counsellors, and sometimes a psychiatrist. There is no one I can refer to. Funded counselling is very scarce and limited to the most needy. Most people can’t afford to pay $160-170 an hour to see a psychologist and even if they can, I can’t find one with open books. If I have a patient in crisis in my rooms and I need to call the Crisis Team, I wait on hold for 30-40 minutes. The patient has normally left the room by then and my other patients are left waiting.

No new antidepressants have been funded for years. GPs are often accused of jumping straight to medication – but often it is the only affordable option I have to offer patients. – Dr Corinne Glenn

So much of my time is spent battling to get patients the care they need. As soon as a patient comes in I am desperately looking at their demographic: do they have a community services card? What quintile is their address in? If they don’t have a community services card and live in a quintile 3 street I have no chance of getting them counselling or imaging that they don’t have to pay for (and usually can’t).

I used to be able to have some friendly banter with my practice team during the day. Now I sit in my room through breaks, trying to catch up on the neverending mounds of paperwork. ACC requests for information. Ministry of Social Development disability forms. Letters for Kainga Ora for a place without stairs for my patient with severe arthritis. I work most evenings and for two hours on a Sunday. One Friday evening at 5.30 I logged out of the patient management system. By Saturday afternoon when I logged back in I had 105 inbox documents waiting to be checked. Dinner table conversation is taken up with stories of patients I can’t help. Sometimes I can share a win, however those are getting fewer by the week. – Dr Corinne Glenn

Some days I am filled with rage at the injustice of it all. Some days I am just tired and sad. I am proud of the work that I do, but I am no longer proud of the system I work in.

I have sold my house and put in my notice. I fly back to Australia on Boxing Day. I have a new job lined up – it really wasn’t hard to find one. GPs are just as scarce as they are here. The Australian system is different. It has its pros and cons. All I know is that I can’t stay here.

The New Zealand health system is broken, and it has broken me. – Dr Corinne Glenn

We’re told that the fundamental problem is poverty. Well guess what? The only sure path out of poverty begins with education. Lotto isn’t going to do it, and nor is social welfare.

I understand that some of us ordinary folk might have difficulty with the extraordinarily complex idea (not!) of taking kids out of a toxic environment and giving them a chance to learn skills and develop attitudes that will change their lives for the better. The media, though, has no excuse.

Whatever one thinks of National’s “boot camp” proposal for recidivist young offenders — my view is that it offers a promising start, but is only one ingredient of a proper solution — it is surely worth discussing, and considering, without the hysterics displayed by many. – Peter Jackson

For a start, who says taking kids who are well on the way to becoming career criminals out of the environment that has damaged them so and putting them where, for the first time in their lives, they have the chance to fulfil their potential is punitive? Have I missed something here?

As I read it, these “boot camps” (a derogatory term that is designed to disparage the policy before it even gets off the ground) will have nothing to do with punishment. If you’re going to bandy about words like brutal and punitive, then obviously you know something I don’t. – Peter Jackson

Sixty per cent of kids aren’t attending school regularly. The Government’s less than lofty goal is to reduce that to 30 per cent over the next couple of years. And you don’t have to be an expert to understand how kids who are under-educated are likely to fare as adults.

We’re told that the fundamental problem is poverty. Well guess what? The only sure path out of poverty begins with education.

Lotto isn’t going to do it, and nor is social welfare. There is no reason, apart from poor parenting and misguided politicians, why every child in this country shouldn’t have a shot at succeeding, in whatever it is that they want to do. And for some, National’s proposal will be a godsend. – Peter Jackson

I do have a proviso. There seems to be little point in giving young people a glimpse of what the world could offer them, if, at the end of the programme, they are sent back to the same dysfunctional families that they came from. While the kids are away, their families will need to be “rehabilitated”. It is totally unrealistic to expect a young teenager to come home, with a whole new outlook on life, not to be dragged back down by drug and alcohol abuse, violence, dishonesty and whatever else made them the way they were in the first place.

We also need to restore education to the pedestal it should be sitting on. All you need to know about where we’ve gone wrong is encapsulated in the current drive to make school so interesting and exciting that kids will want to be there. Do sane, rational people actually believe this stuff?

There is a reason why primary and secondary schooling are called compulsory education. It is compulsory, and parents who don’t send their kids to school are breaking the law. More to the point, they are likely sentencing their children to lives of misery. – Peter Jackson

Is it possible that we’ll see the defeat of the Russian Army and the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party in the same year? Authoritarians can only squeeze their people so far, and liberal democracy, for all its greedy bankers and silly pronouns, still has the moral upper hand. Yet one feels impotent in the face of such evil. – Tim Stanley

Foreign tyrants are leviathans with feet of clay, and our own government should not limit our liberties in order to supposedly protect us against them. – Pierre Lemieux

If we exclude possible wars, there is only one reason why residents of a free, or more or less free, country should feel economically threatened by a foreign authoritarian state. It is that the subjects of the latter will have limited opportunities to trade, both among themselves and internationally, and will thus be poorer. And it is more beneficial to have trading partners, either as suppliers or customers, who are richer than poorer. – Pierre Lemieux

It is true that leviathans like the Russian, Chinese, or North Korean states finance themselves out of the total production of all their subjects. Especially with nuclear weapons, they represent a security risk for other individuals in the world; I think that they would even be dangerously to an anarchic society if such a society ever exists. But trying to become like “them” in order to protect us against them provides only an illusion of security.

Protectionism is one big step in this fool’s errand, at least when an actual war is not raging. – Pierre Lemieux

Terrorist charges need to be used for terrorist activity, not regulating material that has nothing to do with terrorism. Watering down such a significant term runs the risk of seeing Kiwis legally branded ‘terrorists’ without ever performing any terrorist act, or even accessing material which promotes terrorism. 

The act of terrorism comes with appropriately harsh penalties. By extending terrorism related charges to individuals who possess certain ‘objectionable material’, these significant penalties may be placed on those who have simply accessed censored material, despite it being unrelated to terrorism.

Legislation already allows for individuals in possession of material which advocates or inspires terrorism to be charged under terrorism laws. Extending this further to material that is entirely unrelated to terrorism is a law ripe for abuse.

New Zealand already has a strict censorship regime. It’s not hard to imagine the incredible harm which could occur to speech rights and other liberties if this amendment was used as a precedent to justify the prohibition of other material under terrorism legislation. –  Jonathan Ayling

If we put a lot of new resources into altering our health services quality approaches for one issue it would remove very precious resources from somewhere else. Also it’s very likely to escalate not de-escalate … we cannot create a service to the loudest voice – it would make our equity issues worse, I fear. –  Professor Nikki Turner

Who is doing the most damage to the economy? Is it Grant Robertson with the printing, spending, cost of living crisis and upcoming recession?  Or is it Michael Wood with his refusal to supply the country with an amount of labour to actually meet demand?  – Mike Hosking 

As badly as they have cocked up the economy there are a tremendous number of variables at play

Whereas in immigration it’s clean and clear cut – you choose what sort of visas you offer and you choose the number of people you allow in on those visas. – Mike Hosking 

Our issue appears to be an astonishing refusal to offer a solution, when a solution is so easily and readily available.

Is it pig headedness that prevents him moving? He throws $60 million at bus drivers and yet doesn’t let more bus drivers in.

He argues as to whether we have a nursing shortage, given he thinks nurses are coming into the country in the numbers we need, when they are not.

What makes it really maddening is he says he is listening, when he isn’t.  – Mike Hosking 

Even the RSE part, which they have moved on, isn’t solved.

The processing is an issue, the accreditation is an issue, the fees are an issue, the wage levels are an issue and the criteria is an issue. – Mike Hosking 

So surely in the end of year prize for the minister who did his worst and provided the most damage to New Zealand Inc, no one has beaten Michael Phillip Wood of Mt Roskill. – Mike Hosking 

This Labour government has long sought to portray itself as the contemporary inheritor of Norman Kirk’s and the Third Labour Government’s mantles. It may now be closer to doing so than at any point in its tenure. But it is not likely to be for the reasons it wishes. – Peter Dunne

While Labour went to the last election with a Three Waters reform programme, the unpopular details of the four water entities that form the heart of this legislation, were revealed afterwards. Its electoral mandate for these reforms is thin, making the entrenchment all the more galling. – Thomas Coughlan

It should not be controversial for a government to both protect us from being attacked and having our stuff stolen, while also championing a justice system that doesn’t just punish and deter, but also rehabilitates and reintegrates for the good of society (not just the individual).

The Government’s inability to be clear about justice and crime has the same cause as many of its familiar flaws: It never did enough deep thinking in opposition.  – Josie Pagani

Instead of thinking about where its critics have a point and responding with better arguments, criticism of this Government is ‘’refuted’’ and ‘’rejected’’. People with different ideas are wrong. The Government is righteous, opponents are bad. Alternative interpretations are ‘’misinformation’’. – Josie Pagani

To reject the reality of the everyday people experience is rarely a winning political strategy.

Most of us understand that crime feels serious now. We are not brainwashed – we see what is happening around us, to our friends and in our communities. Drugs easily available. Bikes and cars stolen in broad daylight. More gang members. – Josie Pagani

If the Government wants to fix problems, it has to start by acknowledging the problem exists. Then be frank about the causes. – Josie Pagani

There is a principle in international law called the Responsibility to Protect that is derived from the basic requirement of every state towards its citizens. It starts with the responsibility to prevent crime. When that fails, the state has a responsibility to protect us. And if you are a victim, a responsibility to rebuild.

This is a simple template for any government.

A shared sense of the burden of crime helps communities heal. Denying there is a problem, and displaying defensiveness about its causes, undermines our sense of community and common identity. It creates a crack in which anti-social behaviour flourishes. – Josie Pagani

I think one of the great travesties of this Government, when we eventually look back on their long line of failures, will be what happened to mental health.

Don’t get me wrong, no government from what I can see, has ever got mental health right, it’s forever been a sector in dire straits, under resourced and woefully misunderstood.

But mental health itself has only become bigger and worse as the years has gone by, and arguably peaking as a real crisis now, post the pandemic.

And yet, the Government that promised to fix it – has not. Not even close. So much for the Wellbeing Budget.  – Kate Hawkesby

The wait times are actually so bad that most sensible people seek to avoid ED entirely if they can. One of our kid’s broke a toe the other day and the first thing I said was – don’t go to an emergency department.

That’s how bad it is, and has been a for a while actually. Now when accidents happen or kids are sick, parents are stopping to question whether it’s worth going to an ED, given they know they won’t get seen for several hours, given the hospitals are so snowed under and under resourced.

It’s a crying shame that in a first world country, our healthcare system has come to this. – Kate Hawkesby

GPs say they’re beyond frustrated, but what can you do? That appears to be what every nurse, doctor, orderly and hospital worker is asking these days, what can they do?

It just doesn’t feel right that when it comes to ill health physical or mental, that you have to stop and think about what resources you can actually tap into, and once you’ve done that, what might actually be available to you.

Worse yet, is a Health Minister who won’t acknowledge it’s a crisis in the first place, when all those of us experiencing it at any level, know that clearly it is. – Kate Hawkesby

Going to school either matters or it doesn’t. Schools, teachers and the Ministry of Education say that it does, and outcome/attendance data certainly supports that view. You would think then it would be all hands- on- deck to maximise students coming to school in these fractured times.

So, I have been somewhat stunned to hear from a range of families where schools have taken 12 or more teacher only days (TODs) this year. All children are marked present for these days which is, in effect, forced absenteeism. The TODs are also rarely coordinated so a working parent, with three children at different schools, could have had up to 36 days to revamp their lives for. I am hearing of working people who have used up all of their annual leave through the impact of TODs. Some schools retort that “they are not a baby-sitting service”. No one expects them to be – just that when schools are “open” and during term time children should be able to go and be well taught.

Add to that the full-on round of paid union meetings at present …

Is it any wonder that so many children/families are seeing school as an option – not an imperative? – Alwyn Poole

And this is where Willis has the rub on Jacinda Ardern, who can’t speak to any of this with confidence. If pushed, Ardern will suggest we’re in line with the rest of the world and will blame other ‘mitigating factors’ including supply-chain challenges, the invasion of Ukraine, and the hangover of a global pandemic.

However, Ardern has also lost one of her greatest attributes – she is no longer an authentic communicator. She is replacing facts with forceful speaking. If she’s not 100% sure, she answers with faux authority while nodding furiously and wildly gesturing with her arms, then pointing to the next journalist to swiftly move the conversation along.

It is clear to anyone who works in communication that Ardern does not revisit some of her performances in the media. If she did, she would see the insincerity of her over-acting. She doesn’t present – she performs. And her style erodes not only the public’s trust, but also her relatability.

If Ardern doesn’t put in some long hours addressing this over the summer, she has no hope of winning next year’s election. Ardern’s unchecked leadership in a single-party government has not served her well. She appears flippant and dismissive. She is not the leader she was when she was re-elected in 2020. – Rachel Smalley

The election will be won and lost on the economy, and Willis’s voice needs to be stronger. If she’s positioned alongside Luxon, the National offering suddenly looks smarter, broader, and safer. And remember, David Seymour will be part of the equation too.

If the country is emerging from a shallow-dip recession (and that’s at best) who do you want to lead our economic recovery? Luxon, Willis, and Seymour? Or Ardern and Robertson? Didn’t Robertson’s unchecked spending lead us down this path in the first place?

Labour can take only one strategy into this election – the party will focus solely on Ardern’s leadership. There is no ministerial bench strength. There is no list of policy wins. And there are few, if any, improved outcomes across many of the key social indicators. – Rachel Smalley

Pessimists would point out that New Zealand’s constitutional settings are under threat. The attacks may appear to be legal. Nevertheless, they undermine the spirit of our liberal order and are incompatible with it.

A Minister’s employment of a relative may have been legal, but it does not look good. It may be legal to rush two dozen bills through Parliament under urgency. Covid funds may have been legally allocated to other causes.

It may even have been technically legal to try to entrench a section of the Three Waters Bill.

But the question is not so much about legality in all these cases. The question is whether these instances are compatible with the spirit of a liberal parliamentary democracy.

Under that constitutional spirit, crown ministers should avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interest. Parliament should have a chance to consider legislation properly if it cares about parliamentary democracy. – Oliver Hartwich

One of the prerequisites of the liberal state is the spirit of democracy.

There are things politicians should never do, even if they are legal. Because once they do them, they undermine the acceptance of our liberal democracy as a guiding principle. And once the foundation of democracy is eroded, a country will struggle even to maintain the formal rules of the democratic game. – Oliver Hartwich

When, over the last weekend, news broke that the Government had tried to bind future governments to its Three Waters legislation, it caused an outrage in the social media.

Constitutional lawyers, commentators and political activists joined the debate. They came from all sides of the political spectrum. They were liberal, they were left-wing and they were right-wing. And they were united in their condemnation of the Government’s actions because they were incompatible with the constitutional spirit.

This is a source of hope for our democracy. We still have enough democrats supporting the rules of the game, even when they sometimes run counter to our own party-political interests.

This is a glimmer of light in a generally depressing situation where we have recently seen far too many violations of the democratic spirit.

New Zealand has a good democratic system. With the right democratic spirit, our country will blossom as a true liberal democracy.  – Oliver Hartwich

The simplest of questions: how is it possible the Government tries to gerrymander the Constitution and the way we run the country, without the Prime Minister knowing about it, and if that’s true, which I find almost impossible to believe, how does a Prime Minister get that out of touch?

Or if she did know, how is it possible that you find Three Waters, a policy that has been poison from day one, so magnetically important that you would see your Government fall because of it?

A policy that wasn’t campaigned on.

A policy rejected by councils and people up and down the country.

A policy that started with three waters then got switched to five, once again out of select committee — the same select committee that had more than 80,000 submissions, most of whom rejected it.

A policy you are so hung up on you’d enrage every constitutional law expert in the country to try and get through? – Mike Hosking

The sum total is every day this week, the Government has seen an avalanche of bad news, upset, anger, protest and disbelief, from one end of the country to the other, and I haven’t even got to the recession yet.

All governments have bad weeks, all governments eventually run out of puff, but a year out, this one is setting new records in setting fire to itself. – Mike Hosking

Rongoā is traditional Māori medicine, including herbal medicine made from plants, physical techniques such as massage, and spiritual healing.

This makes it an “alternative treatment”,  but in this country it is a Beehive-blessed and state-subsidised alternative treatment.  – Point of Order

Maori traditional healers are the only alternative-treatment providers directly receiving public health dollars. – Point of Order

I’m sorry that people listened to what we said and then acted on that and now find themselves in a position they don’t want to be in – Philip Lowe 

WHILE WE MAY be reasonably confident that the attack on New Zealand’s constitution will be repelled, it should never have happened. That it was legal scholars who sounded the alarm over the entrenchment of a section of the Three Waters legislation, should cause all 120 of our parliamentarians to hang their heads in shame. Their collective failure to grasp what Green MP Eugenie Sage was doing points to a woeful lack of political and constitutional awareness among those whose first and most important duty is to protect the integrity of our democratic system.

Had a similar effort to screw the constitutional scrum been attempted even ten years ago, the perpetrator would have been red-carded immediately. Not even Rob Muldoon, who was not above the odd instance of constitutional skulduggery, would ever have contemplated a stunt like Ms Sage’s. He would have known that his National Party colleagues would have intervened decisively to prevent him bringing their party into such disrepute. – Chris Trotter

That privatisation is so very clearly “one of these things [that] is not like the others” in no way dissuaded the three women of Three Waters from undermining the integrity of New Zealand’s sixty-six-year-old, unanimously enacted, entrenchment provisions – along with the parliamentary consensus that had rendered them sacrosanct for so long.

The beauty of this country’s unwritten constitution is its simplicity and flexibility. It is not beholden to unelected judges, and vouchsafes to all citizens the right to overturn with their votes what arrogant politicians have set up with their own. The only right our constitution sets in stone, is the right of citizens to participate in the government of their country. Those who seek to remove the power of the people’s representatives to amend and/or repeal the laws, are not their friends – they are their enemies. – Chris Trotter

It was a hugely ambitious project, and delivered huge results for New Zealand. 87% of homes can now have fibre connections, Telecom got split into Spark and Chorus, and it was all done within budget. Steven Joyce and Amy Adams oversaw an incredibly competent and vital project, which stands in huge contrast to today’s Government that promised light rail to be completed by 2020, and now are saying they may approve a business case by 2025. – David Farrar

I can’t tell you to be kind, that was ruined for me when it was condescendingly rammed down our throats for months. So how about we try being patient, think about what others are going through and give them a thanks and a smile. – Paula Bennett

The question isn’t why Tame doesn’t sneakily rinse his colleagues for insider gossip on the merger, it’s why doesn’t the Government and the board deliver greater transparency for everyone. – Thomas Coughlan 

When an interviewer is in the chair – if independence means anything – they’re acting on behalf of the public, not their organisation. If TVNZ doesn’t want the unredacted business case to be given to National, well, that’s a problem for them, not their journalist.- Thomas Coughlan 

It’s not Tame’s job to help or hinder the entity, it’s to probe why the Government is doing what it’s doing – Jackson’s repeated bizarre insinuations about editorial independence left viewers none the wiser on this point and raised serious questions about whether he had the capability to be the minister of the entity he is so keen on creating. – Thomas Coughlan 

Public media must bite the hand that feeds – this morning, Tame devoured Jackson whole. If the new entity can’t deliver equal levels of impartiality, viewers and listeners might be tempted to sate their appetite for accountability elsewhere. – Thomas Coughlan 

There is a doctrine under employment law which is analogist to the situation confronting the Labour Government.

Under employment law when there is a loss of trust and  confidence in the relationship between and employer and an employee, caused by the behaviour of an employee, there are grounds for a justifiable dismissal.

That is because trust and confidence goes to the core of the relationship and without it there is no longer a viable relationship. 

The 6^th Labour Government led by Jacinda Ardern is not only incompetent but also deceitful.  – Graeme Reeves

In addition, without the consent of the people of New Zealand the Government has embarked on an unheralded and unprecedented surreptitious destruction of New Zealand’s constitution by conferring disproportionate power on an unelected minority ethnic group based on a fallacious interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi which incorrectly holds that the Treaty created an equal partnership (50/50) between Maori, however defined, and non- Maori. – Graeme Reeves

All of the above suggests to me the New Zealand electorate has finally lost its trust and confidence in the 6^th Labour Government.

The Government should immediately announce that it recognises that it has lost the trust and confidence of the New Zealand electorate and that it will call an early election in the first quarter of 2023, and simultaneously announce that it will not pass any further non supply related legislation until it has had its mandate renewed by the people of New Zealand in a general election. – Graeme Reeves

Constitutions are sets of rules and conventions about how rules are made. They’re the metarules of the game.

Bluffing, misleading, and sharp play are all expected in in-period politics.

But lying about constitutional changes snuck through under urgency is the kind of thing that threatens the constitutional order. – Eric Crampton

This kind of reckless disregard is the least bad explanation for what happened. If this is what happened, then Ardern should immediately have fired Mahuta for failing to make caucus aware of what was going on in her area of policy responsibility. Either Mahuta never understood it, or managed to fail to explain it to her colleagues.

Either way, the result was a cast Labour vote for entrenching a piece of policy. The Minister must be fired.

The worse version would be if Ardern did understand. In that case the Prime Minister would have at least tacitly supported this kind of play. It is difficult to consider a government legitimate that engages in this kind of play. 

Would you keep at the poker table people who made a habit of scribbling changes to the rules onto the rule-sheet while nobody was looking? Or would politely ask them to leave the table and have a think? – Eric Crampton

If you’re under the illusion that the kind of furious tribal politics that afflicts the United States and Britain hasn’t crept onto our shores, then the shenanigans surrounding this political debacle are surely proof. – Janet Wilson

No-one likes to admit they’re wrong. But in this case the political face-saving surrounding entrenchment means that the Gordian knot tightens further. – Janet Wilson

More puzzling is why the Government is hell-bent on spending all its political capital on a policy that people just don’t like, with a recent Taxpayers Union-Curia poll showing that 60% of voters were against it.

However, one thing’s for sure: forget the failure of KiwiBuild, or frontline health staff in crisis while the Government spends $11 billion centralising healthcare with little to show for it.

The Three Waters legal saga may be solved, but it will entrench a legacy of this Government’s bumbling inability to turn its vision into reality. – Janet Wilson

Either the Government knew what was happening – which is bad – or they didn’t, which is even worse.

If Three Waters was already emblematic of much that many voters don’t like about the government, the entrenchment debacle – the clause has been panned as undemocratic, and unconstitutional – has only likely solidified opinions.- Tracy Watkins

This beggars belief from a government that has taken the “no surprises” rule to such extreme lengths that even the most inconsequential Official Information Act requests are required to be sent to ministers’ desks as a deliberate stalling tactic.

But if true – if it really is believable for an MP and a minister to fly solo on what legal experts are calling a “dangerous constitutional precedent” – what on earth does that tell us about the state of decision-making in the Beehive?

Is anyone even in charge any more? – Tracy Watkins

If a hotly contentious clause in a deeply unpopular piece of legislation isn’t exactly what the no surprises rule is supposed to cover, what is? – Tracy Watkins

Labour would love to turn the argument about Three Waters into a debate over the privatisation of water assets. It might be a political red herring, but it feeds into their ideological blind spot about them and the Greens being the good guys and National being the bad guys. – Tracy Watkins

So rather than admit it might be out of step with public opinion on Three Waters, or gangs, or crime, or the parlous state of the health system, or the cost of living, the Government plays political games, and does things like plant mini hand grenades for its opponents, should they happen to get into office.

There’s a name for that – third-termitis, which is when ministers get too arrogant, when there are too many political sideshows and the Government starts blaming the messenger rather than the message for its slide in the polls.

Is this a sign it’s come early? – Tracy Watkins

This morning’s newspapers carried a full-page open letter from 42,576 signatories pointing out how undemocratic is one aspect of the Government’s three waters legislation.

The Government’s Bill confiscates local communities’ investment in water assets without compensation, and wrecks their future governance.

The letter focuses on the veto power the Government’s Bill gives to an unelected and unaccountable elite. The Bill gifts them 50% of the votes on issues that need a 75% majority to be implemented. This provision invites, even compels, extortionate demands.

The same contempt for one-person-one vote is manifest in the Government’s replacement legislation for the Resource Management Act. – Bryce Wilkins

The Government’s arrogance and deceit in all this is breath-taking and deeply destructive.

The nation’s constitutional experts have acknowledged a public duty to speak up about the undermining of our democracy. Hopefully, having found their voice once, they will continue to do so. – Bryce Wilkins

 The purpose of pretending there are more than two sexes is to support those who have assumed non-traditional gender roles. In other words, those who question the binary nature of sex are doing so because they’re trying to make nature itself conform to an ideology that accepts the non-binary nature of gender. The conflation is deliberate, an example of what I call the “reverse appeal to nature”: “what is good must be what is natural.” But as Richard Feynman said about the Challenger space shuttle disaster, “reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

And, in the end, there’s no reason to misrepresent science: people of different genders can be supported and respected without having to distort the nature of biological sex. – Jerry Coyne

Three Waters is a trojan horse for a major shift in the way we run the country. And the entrenchment idea was a trojan horse, within that trojan horse.

Wait till you see what they want to do with He Puapua.- Tim Dower 

What is it we are supposed to make of the revelation that the Prime Minister, having told us she didn’t know about her party’s attempt to entrench aspects of the Three Waters law, turned out to be in the very meeting where it was discussed?

A couple of simple questions.

Firstly, where is the media on this? The story had scant coverage – why is that? Is it not a story? Can the media who ignored it, which is most of them, seriously argue it doesn’t deserve a lot more coverage than it got?

Why did the Prime Minister tell us she didn’t know about it? Not only does that appear not to be true, but also made her look like she didn’t know what was going on in her own party. A party that went to Parliament and tried to entrench a bit of law that was so outside the norm it alarmed every constitutional expert in the country. – Mike Hosking

They seem by the way to have settled on the term “novel”. It was a novel approach. “We knew it was a novel thing to look at”.

Novel is used to try and replace other words like scandal and dishonest. And then if she knew about it, which it appears she did, given Nanaia Mahuta said it was discussed and Jacinda Ardern confirmed she was there, is it possible she was asleep.

I jest.

But if she knew about it, but said she didn’t until it gets exposed, what does that say about her integrity? –  Mike Hosking

A Government is trying to up end the way we conduct Parliament, the law and elections. And what do we get?

Little, if anything.

And if we question the Prime Minister’s integrity, that also then brings in their promise to be the most open, honest and transparent Government ever — a line surely now so farcical, it will go down in political history. – Mike Hosking

Crime seems to be the top topic, which by the way is an astonishing thing all by itself given the cost of living crisis. Historically the economy, the economy, it’s the economy stupid – is your driving force. So how bad must crime be perceived to top the economy?

But what about our leader? If you can’t trust the person running the country, what does that do to your vote? – Mike Hosking

RNZ is already seen as leaning sharply to the left. Many people to the right of the political centre have given up on it for that reason. Remarkably, we have come to regard this as a natural and acceptable state of affairs, but it’s not. A broadcasting organisation that all New Zealanders are obliged to support with their taxes has a corresponding moral and ethical obligation to serve people of every political shade.– Karl du Fresne

Research shows that genes and pre- and post-natal environmental factors influence sexual orientation. The simplest evidence comes from studies of monozygotic twins, which are genetically identical, and dizygotic twins, which are not. When sexual orientation is compared, similarity of sexual orientation is higher in pairs of monozygotic twins than in pairs of dizygotic twins, showing that genes play a role.

But genetics is not the sole determinant, because not all pairs of monozygotic twins have the same orientation.

This is why I believe it to be morally wrong to discriminate against people because of who they are.

At the heart of the issue is the distinction between ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect’. To tolerate the views of others means that one is not obliged to agree with them, still less ban or ‘deplatform’ them, no matter how ignorant one considers their views. And one is most certainly not obliged to respect views one considers obnoxious, such as the Radical Islamic teaching that death should be the punishment for apostasy, adultery, or homosexuality. In a liberal society nobody has the right to require respect for all beliefs and practices. On the contrary, we have a right, and indeed on occasions a duty, to mock them. – Martin Hanson

 I believe that no one should be forced to publicly endorse a political view they do not hold. – Martin Hanson

I would go further, for even if I were one of the rainbow community, I like to think that though I would wear a rainbow jersey voluntarily, I would most definitely refuse to do so under duress. Compulsory conformity is the way to totalitarianism.

Historically, homosexuals have been punished and discriminated against for their sexuality, but I think it’s fair to say that apart from rearguard action from conservative religions, the battle is effectively over.

So, perhaps it is time to regard people who are the products of religious brainwashing as victims rather than perpetrators.

Whichever way you look at it, it’s clear that ‘diversity’ doesn’t appear to include diversity of thought.- Martin Hanson

If the Government was smart, it would ditch the TVNZ-RNZ merger.– Heather du Plessis-Allan

This is heading the way of Three Waters big time.

1. It’s unpopular, only 22 percent of people want it.
2. It smacks of a hidden agenda, because there’s no plausible explanation for why we need this merger. What’s the problem we’re trying to fix? It’s being rammed through urgently because they’re trying to get it done by March 1^st next year.
3. And it’s going to cost a lot of money, $40 million at last count, during a cost of living crisis.

Labour can’t afford another Three Waters if they want to secure the next election. They should be looking for a way to get out of this.

Either that or take Willie off the job. It’s clearly too big for him. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

TRUST. Nothing is more important to a government than the trust of the governed. With trust, there is very little that a government cannot accomplish. Without it, durable political accomplishments are much less likely. Jacinda Ardern’s government is currently teetering on the brink of forfeiting a crucial percentage of the electorate’s trust – more than enough to cost it the next election.

Trust, of course, cuts both ways. It is equally critical, in political terms, that a government trusts the people to at least the same extent as the people trust the government. Indeed, nothing erodes the voters’ trust faster than evidence their own government considers them untrustworthy.

At the heart of the political uncertainties enveloping the concept of co-governance is the Labour Government’s all-too-obvious lack of trust in the Pakeha majority. – Chris Trotter

A government untroubled by the political ramifications of such an investigation would not have kept its existence hidden from its coalition partner. A government willing to trust the New Zealand electorate would not have kept the working group’s report – He Puapua – under wraps. On the contrary, it would have welcomed the lively political debate which the unedited Report’s voluntary release would undoubtedly have generated.

But, as we all know, trust was lacking. Not only was the re-elected Labour Government anxious to keep the document secret, but those Māori with a deep interest in constitutional reform – including Moana Jackson – similarly manifested a strong aversion to debating He Puapua’s recommendations openly in the public square. – Chris Trotter

That Māori have myriad reasons to withhold their trust from Pakeha is undisputed by those with even a rudimentary understanding of New Zealand history. To refuse trust as a matter of policy, however, cannot hope to bring Māori and Pakeha close enough to jointly determine a mutually rewarding future for Aotearoa-New Zealand. For that to happen, both peoples need to trust each other enough to embrace new and untried solutions.

The Prime Minister should withdraw her objection to the creation of a co-governed Upper House. Let New Zealanders witness in public the Treaty debates that, hitherto, have only taken place in private. If there is wisdom and generosity to be found in the processes of co-governance, then let their virtues be seen by Māori and Non-Māori alike.

Trust them, and New Zealanders will, almost always, make the right choice. – Chris Trotter

From the Labour Party’s formation in 1916 until the early 1970s people knew what it stood for. It supported a strong voice for people in workplaces and through their local government and Parliamentary representatives. It was a colour-blind, class-oriented party. It believed in equality of opportunity. It was innovative in international affairs and social policy. – Peter Winsley

The irony is that Labour, supported by the Greens, is now on the cusp of passing probably the worst legislation enacted in New Zealand since 1975 (or perhaps ever). If enacted, the Water Services EntitiesBill will effectively transfer control over New Zealand’s waters (including geothermal and coastal as well as freshwaters) to tribal interests. This will create at best a deadweight loss to the economy and at worse rent-seeking, ticket clipping and nepotism on a monumental scale.

Managing water assets, infrastructure and services requires hydrologists, geologists, engineers, trades people, microbiologists, financial managers and a host of other capabilities. Māori input is necessary and valuable. However, the Bill implies that tribal Māori alone have unique knowledge and expertise that can meet the key challenges in water management. It assumes that tribal leaders will act in the interests of all New Zealanders. – Peter Winsley

How did we get to this point under a Labour Government? Social class politics evolved from the 1970s into today’s identity politics. The Parliamentary benches are now more diverse than ever before in gender, race, ethnicity, tribal, religious and other terms. They are not however diverse in social class. Most MPs are from the professional and management classes, are home owners with high incomes as well as high net worth. Few Labour MPs have built a business with all the travails this involves. Some have graduated from student political roles to jobs in or clustered around Parliament without ever having to make a product or deliver services that people in markets want to buy.

Up to the 1980s te Tiriti settlements involved reparations for historical injustices. However, especially since the 1987 Lands case, the focus has shifted to one of a supposed ‘partnership’ between Māori and the Crown. The Māori activist voice has moved from socio-economic concerns to wider identarian, political and constitutional ambitions.

The scope of te Tiriti issues has widened far beyond the intent of the signatories in 1840. “Presentism” involves interpreting te Tiriti as a modern rather than an 1840 document. For example, in 1840 ‘taonga’ meant tangible physical property such as a spear, a fishing net or a waka. It did not remotely mean, for example, language, intellectual and cultural ‘property’, broadcasting spectrum or water. – Peter Winsley

The Water Services Entities Bill has triggered rigorous scrutiny. Independent financial analyses have highlighted weaknesses in the government’s assumptions, the naivety of its debt financing proposals, and the failure to consider lower cost alternatives, including the more effective use of regulation – see Castalia: Five big problems with three waters.

The lack of effective governance structures and reporting mechanisms to ensure accountability will likely lead to performance failings and create fiscal risk. The Entities’ debts will ultimately become public liabilities. It is possible that the Water Services Entities will be a financial disaster of economy-wide significance. – Peter Winsley

The real control over what happens with water will sit with a few tribal leaders. Te Mana o te Wai statements exclusively provided by iwi and hapu will cover all water use matters. These statements are binding on everyone exercising duties and functions under the Act.

The Water Services Entities process has been shambolic, dishonest and unprofessional. At one stage a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) was submitted to entrench in law a provision in the Bill that would require 60% of votes to change or repeal. Strong criticism from constitutional lawyers and the Law Society saw the Labour government back off this proposal. – Peter Winsley

Taken overall, the Bill gives tribes effective control of water in New Zealand. This has never been in the Labour Party’s election manifesto and New Zealanders have never voted for it. Enactment of the Water Services Entities Bill will besmirch New Zealand’s reputation as a democracy with quality institutions. However, it will teach the need for eternal vigilance to safeguard democracy. It may also force the Labour Party to reflect on what it stands for. – Peter Winsley

I saw my physio a few weeks ago, with a long list of complaints related to all this movement I now do. “Exercise is dumb,” I said. “It just causes injuries.”

Sure, he said – but not doing it is way worse. Dammit.- Megan Whelan

If more money being thrown at problems was the answer, our country would be the model for the rest of the world to follow. We are sliding backwards in so many areas of our life that revisiting examples of even moderate success (with so-called boot camps) is surely better than the undeniable certainty of failure by doing nothing.– Gerry Eckhoff

One of the most astonishing things about the woke is their high boredom threshold. They seem to have the same thoughts about the same subjects, expressed in the same language, all their waking lives. They never tire or let their vigilance down. They look at Raphael or Botticelli and see only social injustice. They are terrible bores.

The explanation of their persistence, which resembles that of flies on a corpse, is that truth, which holds no interest for them, is not their object, but power, the cynosure of every ambitious mediocrity’s eyes. To change the metaphor slightly, the lunatics have taken over the asylum or, in the case of the museums, the philistines. – Theodore Dalrymple

The woke will not be satisfied until every cultural institution is examined microscopically for the moral purity of those who founded it, according to their latest and current moral certitudes—which, of course, may change, usually in the direction of more stringency and stridency. There is no such institution that can pass their test. – Theodore Dalrymple

Increasingly, there is a tendency for the guardians of cultural treasures to hate what they are supposed to preserve. Many librarians, for example, loathe books and can’t wait to replace them with nice, clean computer terminals. When they can’t destroy them altogether, they love to disfigure them.

We were appalled (rightly) when the Taliban blew up the statues of Buddha in Bamiyan and ISIS destroyed Palmyra, but we have our own Taliban, the woke, eager to experience the joys of destruction in the name of absolute good—as defined by themselves. – Theodore Dalrymple

Winston Peters, aged 77, would be 80 in the next parliament. There is a role for eighty year olds but, as President Biden demonstrates, it is not in politics. – Richard Prebble 

New Zealand First insisted the Reserve Bank’s remit be changed from being focused solely on inflation. It was that change that encouraged the bank to print billions of inflationary dollars.

The bank says government spending is a cause of inflation. New Zealand First’s Provincial Growth Fund that created very few jobs is a prime example of reckless government spending. – Richard Prebble 

There are some ponds politicians should never fish.

In the words of a wise ninety-year-old “do not let the shit-stirrer back on the bus”. – Richard Prebble 

In yet another sign that the people that are supposed to know what they are doing, don’t, the Funding for Lending programme came to an end yesterday.

It was cheap money from the Reserve Bank to the retail banks to get cash out into the economy.

And in another of those “whoops, with the benefit of hindsight we would have done it differently” comments, they now say that they should have put more flexibility into the programme. – Mike Hosking

It reminds me of the wage subsidy programme by the Government. They swore black and blue that all that mattered was to get money out there to save jobs. And as a headline, as a broad concept, it wasn’t a bad idea.

But what about the detail? What about the flexibility?

How hard would it have been for the Reserve Bank to say “this is the deal for now but given none of us has a clue how this all unfolds, we retain the right to change things if matters require us to”. – Mike Hosking

Surely someone at some point thought about that?

Equally, the Government’s wage subsidy – should you in future not actually need the help, should over the next financial year you turn out to be profitable, you will need to pay back some, or all, of the money.

Not every business was going to suffer. Some businesses were going to do well.

Once again, how hard would it have been to hand the money out with a rider?

How many meetings were held where a bit of basic common sense was clearly completely absent?

And as a result, how many billions have been funnelled out for no good reason for the next generations to have to try and pay back, because the people with the power and the responsibility never took the job seriously enough? Or if they did, never had the skills to execute it properly? – Mike Hosking

The pressure on Jacinda Ardern to sack Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta is building. But Mahuta is too powerful within the Labour Party to get rid of easily.

The Three Waters reforms have become one of the Labour Government’s greatest liabilities. While there is widespread consensus on the need for significant reform of water infrastructure, including from opposition political parties and local government, the specific reforms the Government have dogmatically pursued remain unconvincing to most, if not downright offensive to many.

Poll after poll has shown that the public are opposed to the reforms. While everyone wants to see water fixed, the Minister has presented a reform programme that has been botched from the start. Mahuta has failed to convince the public of all the contentious elements of the reforms – from co-governance element through to legal entrenchment of the anti-privatisation provisions. – Bryce Edwards 

The entrenchment drama has really made clear that Mahuta is a power unto herself in the Labour Government, and beyond reproach by Ardern. Although murkiness remains over exactly how and why Labour ended up pushing through the constitutionally objectionable and anti-democratic entrenchment provisions for Three Waters, there is now little doubt that Mahuta was driving the change.

Mahuta’s demeanor in the aftermath of the entrenchment scandal will be infuriating her colleagues. After all, she has been publicly blaming everyone else in the party but herself for the botch up.

The chain of events over the entrenchment is now becoming a bit clearer, with the obvious conclusion that Mahuta caused this problem for Labour, and seemingly defied the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and breached the Cabinet Manual – normally all sackable offences. – Bryce Edwards 

It appears that Mahuta, as the Minister responsible for getting the legislation passed, and working with Green MP Eugenie Sage, then choose not to inform any of her colleagues of what was planned and what this would mean. By design or otherwise, it appears that she neglected to inform the Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins who is the Leader of the House, and Attorney General David Parker that she was arranging for the Government to vote in the anti-democratic entrenchment provision that Cabinet had decided against.

Since then, Ardern has given cover to Mahuta by explaining to the public that it was a “mistake” made collectively by “the team” rather than Mahuta. But Mahuta herself has spurned that spin and thrown both the PM and other colleagues under the bus by speaking out publicly with a different story.

Mahuta has made it very clear that the vote wasn’t a misunderstanding, as the Prime Minister has tried to suggest, but a conscious attempt to bolster the reforms. She also pointed out that the entrenchment issue had actually been discussed at a caucus meeting. What’s more, she pointed out that Labour MPs had plenty of forewarning of the Green Party’s entrenchment amendment, suggesting that her colleagues, and especially those on the related select committee, should have read the material produced about the bill outlining the details of the entrenchment issue.  – Bryce Edwards 

The Local Government Minister has also made clear that she knew of the constitutional objections to what they were doing – Bryce Edwards 

There is a reluctance by some commentators and journalists to discuss a major factor in stopping Mahuta from being sacked – Labour’s very large and powerful Māori caucus. The fifteen-strong Māori caucus – and six out of the 20 Cabinet Ministers – is the biggest ever in Labour. Insiders say that they have incredibly strong leverage over Ardern and her fellow ministers.

Mahuta is one of the leaders of the Māori caucus, alongside Willie Jackson. Some commentators paint a picture of Ardern as being held hostage to the agendas of the senior Māori leaders. – Bryce Edwards 

There should be no doubt that Mahuta’s reputation is at an all-time low. She was supposed to be one of the stars of Labour’s historically-powerful government this term, but has instead become one of the villains. She started the term with accolades for her new role as Minister of Foreign Affairs, but has performed relatively poorly in that role, as well as in her Local Government portfolio. – Bryce Edwards 

A bigger problem is that the Three Waters reforms continue to impact Labour’s reputation and popularity very negatively, threatening to help sink the government at the next election. Two polls out this week, showed that the party had sunk to historic lows in support. First the 1News-Kantar poll on Monday put Labour on only 33 per cent support, which was the lowest the poll had recorded for the party since coming to power in 2017. And then on Wednesday the Roy Morgan poll gave a more shocking figure of 25 per cent support.

It’s worth pointing out that Roy Morgan had the most accurate poll results in the lead up to the last election. And the 25 per cent result is probably the lowest that any government has polled since the early 1990s when Ruth Richardson’s radical neoliberal economic reforms dragged down Jim Bolger’s National Government. Notably, Bolger’s eventual response was to sack Richardson. However, Ardern is in a bind, and due to the power of Labour’s Māori caucus, both Three Waters and Nanaia Mahuta look set to continue as an albatross around Labour’s neck. – Bryce Edwards 

There are no plausible scenarios to emerge from this that are good for the Government. Labour MPs may have decided to vote for the entrenchment, against advice, and have only backtracked because of the outcry. Or, as heavily suggested by Ardern, they voted for an entrenchment clause they didn’t fully understand.

The most charitable scenario – that Labour MPs, ill-informed or confused, somehow voted in error – does not absolve them of responsibility.

If the last scenario were the case, fault would in effect lie with Mahuta, for either failing to properly inform her colleagues of the 60% threshold and that it would succeed with Labour’s support, or failing to understand this herself.

Alternatively, Ardern and other senior MPs simply weren’t paying attention, and in the rush of lawmaking overlooked an incoming issue their caucus had ignorantly resolved to move on. – Thomas Manch

 No one person made the mistake, the Labour caucus as a whole has stuffed up, either through hubris or ignorance.

Ardern and her Cabinet were clearly inattentive to the problem, and, when it comes to the question of accountability – a realistic ask when a Government has attempted to change New Zealand’s constitutional settings by “mistake” – the non-explanation doesn’t hold water. – Thomas Manch

The response also gives the appearance, for good reason, that Mahuta is being protected from blame. A very unfortunate perception given how Three Waters reform is perceived by a portion of the public. – Thomas Manch

The problem for Labour is that after two terms of it busily protecting the status quo and crapping on the very people it still claims to represent, a whole lot of folk will next year give it the middle digit. The rest of us won’t vote, dreaming of the day when a new political party emerges that truly represents our interests. – Against the Current 

Standing alongside the Finnish Prime Minister, Ardern perhaps dreamt for a few minutes that she had somehow been transported to Finland’s magnificent Parliament in Helsinki where she could happily trumpet her imaginary democratic credentials without a backlash.

It has been observed that a peculiar transformation overtakes her when she travels overseas. At home she is usually very reluctant to defend democracy when asked, but once her plane touches down in a foreign country she becomes very keen to pose as its champion in front of adoring audiences. – Graham Adams

It is clear that what Ardern calls clarification is nothing more than legislative sleight of hand that means perfectly clear clauses have now been replaced with more obscure additions that require forensic skills and cross-referencing to decipher.

This is reprehensible behaviour by the government that shows contempt for voters’ right to be told openly and frankly what laws are being passed and what they mean. – Graham Adams

In fact, Ardern’s tenure as Prime Minister will be remembered largely for her attempt to transform New Zealand into an ethno-state in which Māori ancestry confers electoral and institutional privilege. –

In the distortion of democracy that Ardern endorses, Māori are given special rights and greater representation on the basis of a radical — and hotly contested — view of the Treaty of Waitangi implying a 50:50 partnership with the Crown.

The entrenchment debacle has further exposed just how little Ardern cares about democratic and constitutional tradition. And she is certainly not repentant. – Graham Adams

Few governments have ended a year as embarrassed as this one. This week the Prime Minister had to correct a constitutional outrage committed in a rush to pass a Three Waters bill before Christmas, and explain editorial independence to the minister in charge of merging public radio and television.

Both these projects are signature items for a government that wants to be a government of change. Both offend the golden rule, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. We drink from taps without a qualm, councils are quick to fix rare blockages in drains and sewers, RNZ and TVNZ don’t need each other.

When the reasons given for a reform are unconvincing, people naturally suspect a hidden motive. The real purpose of Three Waters is suspected to be Māori control of a resource the Waitangi Tribunal says they own, but the motive for the broadcasting merger remains a mystery. – John Roughan

Were any in the caucus awake? It’s hard to believe there was no discussion of an “entrenching” clause, requiring a 60 per cent majority in Parliament if the entities were ever to be privatised. More likely there was a discussion, a foolish one, too embarrassing to admit, about how the clause would put National on the spot? – John Roughan

Privatisation is a red herring the Government has tried to use several times to divert attention from the real reason for sustained public opposition to its seizure of water assets. The supreme irony is that privatisation is not very different from what the Government is doing with them.

There is more than one way to deprive the public of effective control of a public service. Māori tribal authorities are independent and fiercely “private” organisations. Three Waters is giving them as much say over water services as any business acquiring at least a half share in a public asset. – John Roughan

What ultimately matters is not whether a service is run by public officials, company directors or tribal elites, but whether they can be punished if need be, by the paying public using either money or ballot papers. The water entities will not be accountable to customers or voters.

After the local body elections, Ardern told us we’d face crippling water rates if the Government didn’t proceed with this reform. We should have politely replied that we think we have the right to decide what we need and that facing the costs helps us decide. Furthermore, we don’t trust off-budget borrowing that must be secured against us.

And finally, now that Three Waters is becoming law despite the weight of public feeling against it, we still have one vote we can use. – John Roughan

Royal status rests on the connection between privilege and obligation.  It’s about otherwise ordinary people doing what they are supposed to do, rather than what they might want to do.

Without that, it’s hard for the monarchy to symbolise the connection between peoples and the rights and wrongs of their shared history, or even, on a good day, to embody a country. – Point of Order

A third of our young people emerge from school barely able to read. Could that be because we confuse teaching – or, at least, the appearance thereof – with learning?

NCEA pass rates are rising while New Zealand’s performance in international tests like PISA continues to tank. Perhaps that’s because we confuse grade advancement with education.

Our public service is packed to the gunwales with university graduates. Yet our public systems – heath, immigration, not to mention education itself – seem to be falling apart. Maybe that’s because we confuse diplomas and degrees with competence. – Michael Johnston

Thinking is hard. But the future of open society depends on citizens who can think independently and take responsibility for their moral decisions.

The last two decades have seen an appalling decline in educational standards. Equally concerning is a decline in independent mindedness. – Michael Johnston

Some of our politicians worry about the perils of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ emanating from dubious online sources. They would like to regulate online content. But events in the last week or so suggest that some of those same politicians are part of the problem.

I’m with Postman and Weingartener. If we equip young people with bullsh*t detectors, they won’t have to rely on the government to be the arbiter of truth. – Michael Johnston

The most dangerous and destructive kind of foolishness is that of intelligent and educated people. There’s nothing so absurd, Cicero said, but that some philosopher hasn’t said it: And worse still, there’s no philosophy so absurd that it hasn’t found followers among the upper echelons of society who want to impose it on everyone else.

The desire for change and novelty at any price is part of human psychology. The truth limps and bores; fantasy runs and leaps and fascinates. People desire sensation for its own sake. Moreover, the prospect of a perfect society without unhappiness scintillates like a mirage in the desert: It’s never reached, but people believe that it’s there nonetheless. – Theodore Dalrymple

Of course, men are born into particular circumstances that aren’t of their choosing: It’s inscribed in the nature of things that this must be so. I didn’t choose English as my native language, among a thousand other circumstances that I didn’t choose. But the fact that I was born to speak English didn’t determine what I was to say in it. Freedom isn’t freedom from circumstances. – Theodore Dalrymple

Well, it’s certainly true that the past can exert a baleful effect on the present, no one could deny it. But can it be true that all we inherit from the past is the weight of nightmares on our brains? This is a view of history that’s favored by those who seek absolute power, claiming to save humanity from its total misery.

Only a few seconds of reflection should be sufficient to show that this view of history is absurd. Everything we do, everything we enjoy, is the fruit of the past efforts of humanity. There’s no need to labor the point: We didn’t invent the alphabet, the wheel, the electric light, or even the boiling of an egg, for ourselves. If we were born into a place with no human history whatsoever, we shouldn’t survive long enough even to be miserable. – Theodore Dalrymple

LOOKING BACK over the five years this government has been in office, it’s hard not to feel depressed. Given the mess the Baby Boomers made of New Zealand between 1984 and 1990, it was assumed that the first Generation X government would, at least, know what not to do. Having learned their trade at the feet of Helen Clark and Michael Cullen, Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins should have been immune to the allure of grand ideological schemes; and known better than to make promises they couldn’t keep.

Under-promise, and over-deliver.” That was Helen Clark’s mantra for the 15 years she led (that is to say utterly dominated) the Labour Party. – Chris Trotter

By under-promising and over-delivering, a Labour government could present itself as both sensible and competent. Not much might be on offer, but if you said you were going to deliver – and you did – then your voters weren’t just grateful, they were impressed. The days of big dreams might be over, but Clark’s clear-headed grasp of her own and her party’s limitations, made it possible for some of the people’s smaller dreams to come true.

What was it that persuaded Jacinda Ardern to exactly reverse Helen Clark’s formula? Even with the winds of history at your back, over-promising the electorate is a silly thing to do. No government should ever attempt to defy Murphy’s Law, especially in circumstances where its supposed servants feel morally obliged to wreck any attempt to change the status-quo. If anything can go wrong with an unorthodox left-wing government’s policy, its neoliberal public servants are bound to make damn sure it will. – Chris Trotter

And yet, Ardern and Robertson did nothing but raise expectations. New Zealand was going to be “transformed”. Kindness and wellbeing were going to replace neoliberalism’s watchwords of “effectiveness” and “efficiency”. Poverty, itself, was in the Prime Minister’s cross-hairs. After 30 years of the dismal science’s overcast skies, the sun was poised to break through. It was going to be a beautiful day! Labour’s whole front-bench seemed to be on Ecstasy.

But just as Labour’s big promises were on the point of being revealed as hollow, effectively scuppering the Government’s chances of re-election, big events intervened to restore its fortunes. It is hard to come up with a better example of ill winds blowing a floundering government so much good. – Chris Trotter

Over the next two years, convinced they were ten-feet-tall and bulletproof, Ardern’s government proved itself unsafe at any speed.

At the heart of Labour’s political delinquency was its conviction that the events of 2019 and 2020 had conferred upon the party’s leadership an unchallengeable moral authority. That the groups it was marginalising and (in their own eyes) persecuting: conservative Pakeha males; the militantly unvaccinated; traditional feminists; fundamentalist Christians; believers in freedom of expression; supporters of the National and Act parties; homeowning Baby Boomers; just might, together, add up to a majority of the electorate, did not slow them down.

Indeed, the refusal of these deplorables to acknowledge the Government’s moral superiority made its members very angry. – Chris Trotter

More rational, but equally problematic, was Labour’s Māori Caucus’ determination to take advantage of the party’s parliamentary majority to quicken the pace of decolonisation and indigenisation. This was necessary, they told their Pakeha colleagues, if the party was serious about forging a credible partnership between Māori and the Crown. Unwilling to risk accusations of racism, most of Labour’s caucus acquiesced. Any misgivings they may have harboured about co-governance, Three Waters, He Puapuaand the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, remained unacknowledged and unvoiced.

Only Labour’s steady decline in the opinion polls offers the slightest hope that the almost manic quality of its parliamentarians’ behaviour might be recognised for what it so clearly is: electorally suicidal. If not, then Roger Hall’s description of the Labour Party in his 1977 stage play, Middle Age Spread, may yet be applied to the bizarre mixture of febrility and fortitude that characterised Jacinda Ardern’s manic ministry: – Chris Trotter

What is it that makes this Government so obsessed with burning all its rapidly diminishing stock of political capital on half a dozen expensive structural reforms that do nothing much for anybody?

There they went again this week. Making a bigger pig’s ear of the Three (or five) Waters reform and the supremely unloved TVNZ-Radio New Zealand merger. Given the unpopularity of both these restructures then that is a rare skill. – Steven Joyce

Attempting to entrench the Three Waters structure was not just a mistake but it was an insult to the intelligence of voters and anybody who’s ever worked in or near government.

There are only two possibilities that led to Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta being able to whip the Labour caucus to vote for the entrenchment clause. She either did it with the tacit support of her senior colleagues, or she didn’t. If she did have their support despite the cabinet decision, then they are being less than frank, and the members of cabinet who weren’t in on it have been betrayed. If she didn’t, she is out of control and should indeed be relieved of her cabinet post. – Steven Joyce

The suggestion that the Prime Minister was asleep when the decision was made doesn’t wash. There are way too many people around any Prime Minister to avoid ordinary stuff slipping through “by mistake”, let alone something as constitutionally contentious as this. Alarm bells will have been ringing all over the Beehive, and Attorney General David Parker is clear that he was one of those ringing them. His public distancing from the melee is interesting in itself. He’s obviously decided he’s not going down with this particular ship.

So we are left with the Prime Minister’s explanation of what went on — or who is incapable of sacking one of her senior ministers who defied a cabinet decision. Neither option is edifying. – Steven Joyce

Willie Jackson’s trainwreck interview with Jack Tame on Q+A last Sunday was thick with innuendo that the TVNZ-RNZ merger was designed to deliver a powerful publicly-funded media voice that would agree with the political leanings of its master. It was either incredibly loose or revealing, depending on your politics, and did absolutely nothing to ease the path of this reform.

It’s not just the Minister who does not seem to be able to come up with a good reason for the merger he inherited. The Prime Minister declared, with what obviously seemed like a good argument when she thought of it, that the national broadcaster would go broke without the merger. No it won’t. The Government funds it, and every year it can choose how much more to fund it. Unless the Government is going broke, which would be a somewhat bigger story, then the Prime Minister got it wrong.

We are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars more re-learning the lessons of history with this latest misguided merger. It’s only 40 years ago the monolithic broadcasting structure was broken into separate radio and television operations as the two platforms did not have much in common. They still do not. – Steven Joyce

Now we are to go back the old unaccountable days, presumably so we can experience the joy of picking it all apart again in due course. – Steven Joyce

A broadcasting reform nobody wants, a water reform that is more about co-governance than better water services, a polytechnic reform that does nothing but add another layer of bureaucracy, a health reform which has so far done nothing any different — the list goes on.

You probably missed the Government quietly limbering up this week to merge all the crown research institutes back together again and recreate the old, unresponsive, monolithic Department of Scientific and Industrial Research — last seen sometime in the early 90s. More money, more consultants, and another trip backwards in results. – Steven Joyce

It takes a special level of political ineptitude to make voters want to cart a government out because of who runs the water pipes.

I suppose if you confiscate assets, force participation, give an unelected minority the greatest say on everything related to water, try to bind subsequent Parliaments to your view, and foist the whole shooting match on people without even taking it to an election then you get what you ask for.

All this adds up to billions of dollars wasted, and for what exactly? There’s always a dividend for those heavyweight rent-seekers in the Labour Party — the Māori caucus and the unions — but nothing about how these reforms will deliver better results for the public. – Steven Joyce

This orgy of structural reform is creating organisations that serve the people that run them, not the people that consume their services. They come from a time when an organisation was all about the hierachical structure, rather than the end customer.

They are simply a recreation of the bad old days of the public sector.

This very expensive trip down memory lane needs to stop. Thankfully it is looking more and more likely it might. – Steven Joyce

Singapore’s literacy rate is 97% while New Zealand’s is a woeful 64%.

Simply put, a broken education system means each new generation is less capable than the last and the nation’s productivity, innovation and earning power all drop precipitously.

The result is less money for hospitals, infrastructure, law and order and other markers of a first-world economy. – Paul Adams

New Zealand’s tall-poppy syndrome is a key cultural blind spot, but many countries have a similar problem.

Our weakness is more subtle and more corrosive than that – it’s complacency. Our “she’ll be right” and “close enough” attitude means New Zealand isn’t performing at its full potential.

The Singaporean attitude is 180 degrees of this laidback Kiwi mindset. Over there, you must earn your way to the top, striving for excellence is championed and complacency is degrading.

There will be those who argue Kiwi complacency is a good thing, that we don’t want to be part of the rat race, but the response to this is simple: don’t expect first class healthcare, education, law and order or social welfare, and do expect your best and brightest to leave. – Paul Adams

The lack of vision among New Zealand’s elected officials, across both parties, is a badge of shame. Add to that a three-year electoral cycle that creates short-term thinking and energy-draining political turf wars, and there is no time for getting things done.

On the other hand, Singapore’s government is united by a single vision for its future. Yes Singapore’s “managed democracy” makes long-term planning easier, but it still offers plenty of lessons for New Zealand about the importance of consistency and unanimity.

Supporting the long term planning, Singapore has a world-class public service, many of whom are sent to the world’s best universities.

Singaporeans don’t just work hard; they pick their best to work the hardest.

Singapore makes no excuses about bonding these individuals: they are required to repay the society that afforded them such golden opportunities. – Paul Adams

New Zealand just isn’t getting enough capital to fuel the rockets our companies need for growth. This could have been so different if Robert Muldoon hadn’t cancelled Norman Kirk’s proposed superannuation scheme in the 1970s.

Had we avoided such petty partisanship, New Zealand might now have the equivalent of Singapore’s state-owned investment company Temasek, which was seeded in 1974 with $300 million and now boasts a whopping $400 billion in managed funds.

The investment possibilities for Kiwi companies would be incredible.

Add into this mix the intractable problem of convincing Kiwis that there are other asset classes besides real estate, and the reason for this country’s shallow capital pools are obvious and troubling. – Paul Adams

Immigration is a poor cousin ministry and has never been seen as a strategic lever.

Our national conversation on immigration has been variously obsessed with disturbing racial overtones and house price growth. – Paul Adams

Back in New Zealand, even if a foreign worker can travel to this country, it regularly takes more than six months for Immigration NZ to get its act together and issue a work visa.

In a post-Covid world, this policy might as well be a giant banner that screams, “Go Away.” – Paul Adams

According to the OECD’s Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA), in the year 2000, New Zealand’s students proudly ranked third in reading, third in mathematics and sixth in science literacy.

By 2018, Kiwi students had declined to sixth, nineteenth and seventh, respectively. – Paul Adams

The causes of this decline are multifactorial and complex, but part of the blame is that the Ministry of Education and one of our major political parties have been captured by the teachers’ union, the NZEI.

While many teachers are highly capable, as a parent of four children it is increasingly hard to believe that the public education system is acting in the best interests of our children or the country. – Paul Adams

My takeaway from Singapore was that it is getting harder to call New Zealand a first-world country.

The issues I’m flagging can’t be blamed strictly on Covid-19. That’s lazy thinking. They’ve been metastasising for decades, right in front of our eyes.

Solving these problems will require long-term thinking and sustained bi-partisan effort. The question is: do we have the energy and courage to shrug off the complacency and do what’s necessary? – Paul Adams

Finally, it is at best puzzling, and at worst concerning, that the terms of reference appear to expressly preclude inquiry into mistakes made in particular situations. That is because the terms of reference explicitly state that “how and when strategies or other measures were implemented or applied in particular situations” are out of scope.

On a literal interpretation, that means there will be no inquiry into particular delays in testing border staff (as occurred in July 2020), or the particular approach to the procurement of the Pfizer vaccine in the second half of 2021, or indeed to particular failings in contact tracing.

Professor Blakely may prefer an inquiry conducted along these lines. But, unless the terms of reference are broadened, the Royal Commission will not deliver all the lessons the country should learn from the Covid-19 ordeal. And it will not provide the form of reconciliation needed to heal an increasingly divided nation.- Roger Partridge 

The Three Waters entrenchment saga has given us — for the first time — an insight into Cabinet. And we’ve seen division.

Senior members of Cabinet clearly did not agree on entrenchment. – Heather du Plessis Allan 

Divisions in Cabinet are not unusual. What is unusual is Cabinet ministers being blindsided by a colleague doing the opposite of what they’d decided. –  Heather du Plessis Allan 

Labour refuses to explain whether Mahuta accidentally or deliberately failed to tell her caucus colleagues.

It suggests they’re embarrassed by whatever the explanation is. –  Heather du Plessis Allan 

There has been at least one other insight into tensions. A strategic leak before last year’s Budget let it be known there were massive tensions between the Māori caucus and Housing Minister Megan Woods over her refusal to free up money for Māori housing. She freed it up two weeks later.

This hints at tensions between Labour’s outsized Māori caucus and senior Cabinet members. Friction would be understandable. At 15 members, the Māori caucus is big enough to throw its weight around and demand policy wins.

But those policy wins have come at a political price. Three Waters is Labour’s biggest own goal since Kiwibuild.

The Māori wards on councils, the two permanent mana whenua seats on Ecan and the now-ditched changes to Rotorua’s local democracy caused flares of public upset. –  Heather du Plessis Allan 

National likely knows full well the PM won’t sack Mahuta. Mainly because the PM can’t. It’s unlikely the Māori caucus would tolerate a public demotion of one of its leaders.

Which means National has loads more hammering ahead of it, making the PM look weak for being unable or unwilling to discipline Mahuta.

And that lack of discipline from the PM only further hints the division is real. The Māori caucus may be too powerful for even the PM to control. –  Heather du Plessis Allan 

Make no mistake: no matter what Labour says now about the results of the Hamilton West byelection it will be – and should be – very worried about it.

Because if that byelection does turn out to be a sign of what is to come in 2023, Labour is in line for a walloping. – Claire Trevett

As for National, it is the second byelection win under Luxon’s belt in just one year as a leader. National needed the win more than Labour did in practical terms. It gives them one extra MP – and with that comes a smidgen of extra Parliamentary resourcing.

More importantly, it is a Māori MP. – Claire Trevett

One of the factors of the byelection that it is hoped will come through in 2023 is the decency with which the campaign happened. Dansey turned up in person at Potaka’s function to congratulate him, saying she was at least pleased that the electorate had tangata whenua representation. It was the end of what seemed to be a respectful campaign by decent candidates. – Claire Trevett

But economic inequality is only one contributor to the worrying decline in social cohesion that Edwards wrote about this week. At least equally insidious, although far harder to measure, is the pernicious effect of identity politics.

This encourages us to think of ourselves not as a community with shared interests, values and aspirations but as a collection of minority groups with disparate and often conflicting goals. – Karl du Fresne 

Identity politics promotes a neo-Marxist view of society as inherently divided between the privileged – for which read white and male – and a plethora of aggrieved groups struggling against oppression and disadvantage. These include women (even though they make up half of Parliament and occupy the country’s three most powerful positions), Maori, immigrant communities, religious minorities, people with disabilities or illnesses (including some that are avoidable, such as obesity) and those asserting non-mainstream sexual identities.

We are told these perceived disadvantages are the result of structural imbalances of power that can be remedied only by a radical reconstruction of society. It’s effectively a zero-sum game in which power must be transferred from those who are perceived as having it to those who feel excluded. This creates conditions in which society runs the risk of going to war with itself.

Even traditional liberal democratic values that most of us thought were unassailable are under attack. – Karl du Fresne 

These trends have been evident for years but have greatly accelerated under the Labour Party government, the more so since Labour was given power to govern alone in 2020. The government itself is a symbol of the ascendancy of identity politics, with a powerful Maori caucus that functions as a virtual government within a government.  – Karl du Fresne 

A striking feature of many of the loudest voices promoting identity politics and rebuking New Zealanders for their supposed failings is that their accents identify them as arrivals from other countries. For saying this I will be labelled as a xenophobe, but I welcome the fact that New Zealand is now home to multiple ethnicities. Multiculturalism has greatly enriched and enlivened our society.

What I resent is the disproportionate influence wielded in New Zealand affairs by vociferous, highly assertive relative newcomers – in academia, the bureaucracy and politics – who see New Zealand as a perfect ideological blank space on which they can leave their imprint. I suspect they can’t believe their luck in stumbling on a country with a population that’s either too passive, too naive or simply too distracted by other things – jobs, mortgages, sport, bringing up kids – to realise their country is being messed with. We have always been suckers for articulate, confident voices from overseas; it’s part of our national inferiority complex. – Karl du Fresne 

Social division has been promoted and magnified, deliberately or otherwise, by media outlets that relentlessly focus on issues that highlight perceived differences and supposed inequities.

The mainstream news media formerly served as an important agent of social cohesion by providing a public space in which issues could be civilly explored and debated. They have largely abandoned that role in favour of one where they constantly promote ideological agendas and hector readers, viewers and listeners with their own radical, unmandated vision of what New Zealand should be like.

In the process they have alienated much of their core audience, betrayed their trust and driven them to online channels that serve only to accentuate, and in some cases exploit, the deepening stress fractures in New Zealand society.

The result is that what was previously a unified and, by world standards, generally contented country is now a sour, rancorous babel of competing voices. Distrust, fear, resentment and sullen anger have displaced the broad consensus that sustained New Zealand for decades regardless of which political party was in power. Where all this could lead is impossible to say and frightening to contemplate. – Karl du Fresne 

Winter is upon us, courtesy of the Arctic blast unleashed by the Troll from Trondheim. We will soon find out whether we can keep the lights and heating on, or whether Britain is about to be plunged into a nightmare of energy rationing, rolling blackouts, three-day weeks and untold human misery.

The proximate cause of our present crisis is Vladimir Putin’s despicable invasion of Ukraine, and the resultant reduction in global gas supplies. Yet the Government must shoulder its share of the blame: it prioritised reducing carbon emissions above all else, and neglected keeping prices low or ensuring availability and security of supplies. This winter may turn out to be a dry run for a much greater, self-inflicted disaster, a harbinger of a new normal of permanently insufficient, costly energy supplies that could jeopardise our way of life, upend our politics and trigger a popular rebellion.

We are nearing a turning point for democratic support for environmentalism. – Paul Homewood

Thanks to technology and markets, it ought to be possible to decarbonise without ruining our society and economy, but 14 years on the revolution is proceeding just about as disastrously as anybody could have imagined. In typical British fashion, our political class has taken all the easy decisions first, and none of the tough ones. The blunders, the groupthink, the demented short-termism and the mind-boggling bureaucratic incompetence have amounted to one of the greatest national scandals of the past few decades.

It’s easy to stop extracting fossil fuels or to boast about the decline of our carbon-emitting manufacturing sector, especially when we simply switch to importing goods, oil and gas from abroad, congratulating ourselves on our brilliance. We didn’t bother to construct gas-storage facilitiesor stress-test supply chains for geopolitical risk. We built offshore wind farms and solar but Britain also needed its own Pierre Messmer, the Gaullist who launched France’s huge nuclear programme. Instead, we got Nick Clegg: in a humiliating video from 2010, he rejects increasing nuclear capacity because it would have taken until 2021 or 2022 to come online.

The real world consequences are catastrophic. When the wind stops blowing and the solar panels are covered in snow, when all our cars are electric and boilers replaced by heat pumps, where will energy come from? Demand for electricity will surge, but there won’t be enough supply. The grid will implode. It may one day be possible to store electricity in giant batteries, but not today. Public rage if and when it all goes wrong will make Brexit look like a walk in the park. – Paul Homewood

Political parties have been lulled into a false sense of complacency: the public want to be greener, but not at the cost of suffering extreme material regression. Voters are worried about climate change and wish to decarbonise, but only a tiny minority are fully paid-up to the most extreme, fanatical, anti-human, anti-capitalist version of the environmentalist doctrine. Human nature hasn’t suddenly changed: we still want to enjoy economic growth, to live better, longer, richer lives. We want to own goods and travel freely. Few of us want to be poor and cold and miserable. We don’t aspire to return to a feudal lifestyle, with our overlords dictating how we can live our lives.

Until now, green virtue has come easily and cheaply. Everybody hates littering and waste. It’s not hard to recycle, or to shift to reusable bags. It’s a different matter when people begin to be truly inconvenienced (idiots sitting down on motorways) or forced to buy expensive new cars: the anger is immediate. Wait until voters are told they can’t fly to Spain, that meat will be taxed, or that power cuts will be the new normal to comply with net zero: there will be a populist explosion.

Politicians everywhere are over-reaching, having drawn an incorrect lesson from Covid, namely that we will be willing to give up on our jobs, prosperity and freedoms in the name of a climate emergency. – Paul Homewood

A side effect of individualistic meritocracy, which I otherwise support, is that those who rise to the top become entitled and look down upon everybody else. As Young put it, “by imperceptible degrees an aristocracy of birth has turned into an aristocracy of talent”. The result is the return of anti-capitalist, neo-feudal attitudes: the elites nudge and compel the masses to do what is good for them, safe in the knowledge that the powerful will retain their privileges, their exclusive “Zil” traffic lanes, their private jets.

It won’t wash. The politicians have a choice: make greenery consumer-friendly, harnessing technology to preserve the public’s quality of life, or face a calamitous democratic uprising. – Paul Homewood

Any advances on 4 Waters?

Ah, the rather imposing lady with the tattoo on her chin has bid 5 Waters.

Any further bids? Are we all done?

Going once……going twice…… Gone!

Out of public hands forever and now under the control of a small group of “private investors” who will no doubt cherish this magnificent asset as not only a thing of beauty but also a once-in-a-lifetime guaranteed investment.

Many congratulations, madam.

Indeed, congratulations to all the bidders who do appear to have been working as a syndicate to secure this unique opportunity.  – Derek Mackie 

The capital centre is tired, pipes are bursting, rates are sky-rocketing, residents are scratchy at an incoherent public transport plan, and its council has been plagued with dysfunction for a quarter of a century.

Faced with these problems, it has moved into ‘content creation’. Because there’s nothing a dose of good PR can’t fix.  – Andrea Vance

Communications has its place in local democracy – for telling people when to put the bins out, or explaining why they’ve replaced all the car parks with plant-pots (crime prevention, apparently).

But, when the country is laser-focused on public spending, and nervous about soaring household bills, this sassy online persona isn’t charming. It’s just insulting ratepayers to pay people to create cute in-jokes for their pals, pout and dress-up as a banana.

As a branding exercise, that TikTok account does send a message, but not the one these clueless creatives intended. It is a powerful reminder of everything that is wrong with our current system – the corporatisation of councils that rendered local democracy all but meaningless. – Andrea Vance

Try asking your own councillor to help you with a problem in your community. At best, they can write an email or make a phone call to bureaucrats on your behalf – generally to be met with the same intransigence and indifference that you originally experienced.

That’s because those officials are focused on protecting the interests of their employer – the council – not the community. – Andrea Vance

We are all being managed by chief executives, instead of represented by councillors. And now we are starting to wear the true costs of those three-decade-old reforms. – Andrea Vance

The Government’s ongoing raid on remaining local power through a programme of centralisation (Three Waters, fluoridating water supplies, and more local government reforms which puts and emphasis on shift from managing infrastructure to “supporting community wellbeing”) will further undermine local democracy.

There was much debate this year about improving council election turnout, and improving the calibre of candidates.

Putting some real power behind that vote – and our toothless councillors is the best way to get citizens participating again. It guarantees more meaningful engagement than a few hundred likes for the marketing intern’s cat video. – Andrea Vance

In political discourse and in the media, major storms and floods typically get presented as signs of impending doom, accompanied by invocations to the environment and calls to respect Mother Nature. Only catastrophes seem to grab our attention, though, and it’s rarely mentioned that warming would also bring some benefits, such as expanded production of grains in previously frozen regions of Canada and Russia. Nor do we hear that people die more often of cold weather than of hot weather. Isolated voices criticize the alarm over global warming, considering it a pseudoscientific thesis, the true aim of which is to thwart economic modernization and free-market growth and to extend the power of states over individual choices. – Guy Sorman

Scientific research should be based on skepticism, on the constant reconsideration of accepted ideas: at least, this is what I learned from my mentor, the ultimate scientific philosopher of our time, Karl Popper. What could lead climate scientists to betray the very essence of their calling? The answer, Curry contends: “politics, money, and fame.” Scientists are human beings, with human motives; nowadays, public funding, scientific awards, and academic promotions go to the environmentally correct. Among climatologists, Curry explains, “a person must not like capitalism or industrial development too much and should favor world government, rather than nations”; think differently, and you’ll find yourself ostracized. “Climatology is becoming an increasingly dubious science, serving a political project,” she complains. In other words, “the policy cart is leading the scientific horse.”

This has long been true in environmental science, she points out. The global warming controversy began back in 1973, during the Gulf oil embargo, which unleashed fear, especially in the United States, that the supply of petroleum would run out. The nuclear industry, Curry says, took advantage of the situation to make its case for nuclear energy as the best alternative, and it began to subsidize ecological movements hostile to coal and oil, which it has been doing ever since. The warming narrative was born. – Guy Sorman

Curry is skeptical about any positive results that might follow from environmental treaties—above all, the 2016 Paris Climate Accord. By the accord’s terms, the signatory nations—not including the United States, which has withdrawn from the pact—have committed themselves to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in order to stabilize the planet’s temperature at roughly its present level. Yet as Curry elaborates, even if all the states respected this commitment—an unlikely prospect—the temperature reduction in 2100 would be an insignificant two-tenths of a degree. And this assumes that climate-model predictions are correct. If there is less future warming than projected, the temperature reductions from limiting emissions would be even smaller.

Since the Paris Climate Accord was concluded, no government has followed through with any serious action. – Guy Sorman

 “We’re always being told that we are reaching a point of no return—that, for instance, the melting of the Arctic ice pack is the beginning of the apocalypse,” Curry says. “But this melting, which started decades ago, is not leading to catastrophe.” Polar bears themselves adapt and move elsewhere and have never been more numerous; they’re less threatened by the melting, she says, than by urbanization and economic development in the polar region. Over the last year or so, moreover, the planet has started cooling, though “no one knows whether it will last or not, or whether it will put all the global-warming hypotheses in question.” According to Curry, the truly dramatic rupture of the ice pack would come not from global-warming-induced melting but from “volcanic eruptions in the Antarctic region that would break up the ice, and these cannot be predicted.” Climatologists don’t talk about such eruptions because their theoretical models can’t account for the unpredictable. – Guy Sorman

In her view, research should be diversified to encompass study of the natural causes of climate change and not focus so obsessively on the human factor. She also believes that, instead of wasting time on futile treaties and in sterile quarrels, we would do better to prepare ourselves for the consequences of climate change, whether it’s warming or something else. Despite outcries about the proliferation of extreme weather incidents, she points out, hurricanes usually do less damage today than in the past because warning systems and evacuation planning have improved. That suggests the right approach.

Curry’s pragmatism may not win acclaim in environmentalist circles or among liberal pundits, though no one effectively contests the validity of her research or rebuts the data that she cites about an exceedingly complex reality. But then, neither reality nor complexity mobilizes passions as much as myths do, which is why Judith Curry’s work is so important today. She is a myth-buster. – Guy Sorman

No longer do we live in Victorian times. Over the last half-century we have become a very multicultural society and the relevant population statistics were given in my last article (Lillis, 2022). Asians, Pacific people and Middle Eastern, Latin American and African people now make up approximately 40% of our total population, or more than two-and-a-half times those who self-identify as Māori (Ehinz, 2022). Every person must count as equally important as everyone else and deserves both equal social, economic and political decision-making power and equal opportunity to achieve success and lead a fulfilling life. 

Is it truly sensible, in the twenty-first century, to value traditional knowledge and resource it equally to modern science? If we have Māori providing for Māori, then shall we have the same for Pacific people and immigrants from Ethiopia and Somalia? Why should our public service become bicultural and support self-determination for one group and not others? Why should our law, policy, processes and entities support a bicultural, but not a multicultural, joint sphere of governance and management of resources, taonga (treasures) and Crown lands? Why must we have a bicultural, mātauranga-informed, but not a multiculturally-informed state service? Why should one cultural and ethnic group co-govern and/or co-design and deliver services, but not Asian people or immigrants from Iraq, Eastern Europe, Latin America or Afghanistan?  – David Lillis 

Right now our secondary education system is being revised and matauranga Māori is being woven into our national science curriculum in a way that defies logic. It will make New Zealand a laughing stock and lead to loss of confidence in our education system, both across the world and at home. No mauri, or indeed any other “life force” that features within the mythology of any cultural or ethnic group, exists within inanimate things and therefore including such a concept in any national science curriculum is extraordinarily naive, betrays wilful neglect of duty on the part of those responsible, and compromises the education of future learners. There should be no place for political or ideological doctrine within the curriculum. Only objective politics and history are permissible and then only in social studies, anthropology and history class.

We need to match the quality of our education with that of leading nations, particularly OECD nations. We must provide education that enables New Zealand students to compete in the domestic and international marketplaces and we want New Zealand secondary and tertiary qualifications to be respected internationally and to remain portable to other countries. To achieve such objectives, we can teach and value traditional knowledge but must at all costs keep it out of our science curriculum. At present our education is set to become a world-leading mediocrity and we should bear in mind that, behind the statistics, our failures will have many human faces. – David Lillis 

We will not make the desired progress if every dissenting opinion is cast in negative light and if insults are taken where none are intended. All of us must learn to accept constructive criticism without unnecessary outrage. We must expose hate, racism, prejudice and bias wherever they appear, but invoking the straw men of racism and hate is especially unhelpful when we are genuine in wanting a better world for everyone. Equally, we will not make progress if our media presents only one acceptable political perspective and crushes everything else. – David Lillis 

The balance of political expectations post-Covid seems to have become unhinged – which in turn could become fatal for some of the current political coalitions.

From the political economist’s perspective, it looks like political orthodoxy has got too far out of line with economic reality.

Perhaps the surprising thing is that it’s taken this long – or needed a high-impact trigger like the Covid-policy response – to get to this stage. – Point of Order

So it’s not a bad time to recap the list of things you can’t take to the limit in political economy.  For example: you can’t have:

• a big civil service, which is also highly paid;
• a public health service without queues;
• affordable housing without flexible standards and easy development (or perhaps a shift in taxation to the well-housed);
• strong economic growth without market forces and creative destruction;
• peace, without defence spending and occasionally offering lives to collective security;
• the privileging of some groups beyond what the majority deems fair;
• extensive Covid restrictions without tangible real costs;
• artificially low interest rates without inflation;
• energy and transport fuels that are both decarbonised and affordable;
• low taxes without growing debt; and
• people richer than you to always pay for stuff. – Point of Order

I have been wondering for some time now what happened to the Labour Party that I have supported all my life.

I am 72, which means I was voting Labour before the current Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, was even born.

When she was elevated to the top job, I travelled the world bathing in the glow of her international reputation. Her initial response to the Covid pandemic was the envy of the world. Reasoned, compassionate and effective. That was the message so many of her supporters, me included, proudly shared with our international colleagues who marvelled at what was happening in our small corner of the world.

My answer to them was simple – the world needs more leaders like ours. But somewhere things changed and I wondered where it had all gone wrong. – Sir Ian Taylor

I have no idea who is advising the Prime Minister at the moment, but surely that article, on sale in supermarkets across the country where ordinary Kiwis come face to face with the cost of living crisis every week, was as tone-deaf as it possibly could have been.

The pictures of the Prime Minister accompanying the article clearly demonstrated that the crisis was not something that was at the forefront in the thinking of whoever approved those pictures. Under other circumstances, the pictures might have been viewed as aspirational, but in the context of the very real cost of living crisis, they simply flew in the face of the thousands of Kiwi parents who are struggling every week to find ways to simply clothe and feed their children. –  Sir Ian Taylor

In the article, the Prime Minister extolled the importance of being together as a family – especially in challenging times.

Well, times didn’t get more challenging than they did at the height of the Covid pandemic. Imagine how those hundred of thousands of Kiwi citizens who found themselves locked out of their country by a totally unfit-for-purpose MIQ system, felt seeing the PM finally acknowledging that being together as a family was important.

Being there when a loved one was dying. Being there for the birth of your child. Being there because you were now an illegal overstayer holed up in a foreign country with no money and no way to earn it.

The stories that were shared with me during my fruitless attempts to engage with the Prime Minister’s office over ways we could use new technologies to start bringing our fellow Kiwis home, safely, will remain with me forever. –  Sir Ian Taylor

We will be measuring the costs long after today’s politicians are retired on their taxpayer-funded superannuation schemes. And that brings me to the Royal Commission on Covid.

The convenient statement that it will not be looking to blame anyone begs the question. Why not? That’s called accountability and there is nothing to prevent that accountability being measured by the circumstances under which decisions were made.

Everyone accepts that these were challenging times when decisions had to be made fast. But that should not be a blanket to protect against incompetence or an unwillingness to adapt as circumstances changed.

One question for the Royal Commission to ask is – what happened during the 16-month period between the first lockdown, which we all accept was the right thing to do, and the second one that saw Aucklanders having to carry the burden of a multimillion-dollar economic impact under level 4 lockdown, conditions that were identical to the ones put in place a year and a half earlier?

Had we learned nothing at all during that time? It appears we hadn’t.

Instead, we sat on our laurels. Bathed in the afterglow of the praise being heaped on us from around the world. And then we watched as the world sailed by. –  Sir Ian Taylor

There are many people outside the government who worked at the cliff-face to try to provide answers to a Government that seemed increasingly devoid of them. They probably should not hold their breath in the hope their opinions might be sought over the next year and a half the commission is going to take.-

When the Labour government became the first under MMP to win complete control of the House, I really believed that at last there was a party in power that would use that privilege to show the compassion, leadership, collaboration and transparency that was needed to address some of the major issues around the growing social and economic divide that was facing Aotearoa New Zealand.

Instead, transparency has disappeared, the economic and social divide has grown and the dangers of a party led by ingrained and inflexible ideologies have come to the fore.

And into this gap has stepped Willie Jackson and Nanaia Mahuta. –  Sir Ian Taylor

What the five Māori MPs in Cabinet (and 15 Māori MPs in the Labour caucus) need to reflect on is the damage they are doing to those who argue that Māori have an increasingly important and constructive contribution to make to the future of Aotearoa New Zealand. I believe the majority of Kiwi share that view, but the increasingly inflexible, we know best, we are owed this, stand some of our Māori ministers are taking has opened the doors for those who don’t.

This is a future we can all grow together. It is a future we need to pursue, with dignity, for the benefit of our mokopuna. That was the Labour Party I used to know. –  Sir Ian Taylor

https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO2212/S00084/think-the-baby-transfusion-case-was-only-about-vaccinated-blood-try-again.htm

When, 10 months ago, the world learnt that Russian tanks had rolled into Ukraine, there was disbelief and immediate condemnation of Russia’s audacity in the face of international outrage. All countries were at that point forced to choose sides. It was a moment for all nations to stand up and to be counted, but for those nations that value democracy, respect national sovereignty and borders, and uphold the international rule of law, the choice was simple. New Zealand is one of those countries. Confronted with brutality or diplomacy, autocracy or democracy, darkness or light, there was nothing to discuss except how to individually and collectively support Ukraine.

This conflict is described as a war between Ukraine and Russia, but it is far bigger than that. It is a moral as well as a physical battle. It is, frankly, an existential threat to Ukraine, a war that Ukraine cannot and will not lose.

President Zelenskyy, your courageous leadership and moral certitude has been inspiring to us all. You have been our generation’s Winston Churchill, and since those Russian tanks crossed Ukraine’s border, you have been unwavering in your determination that Ukraine will win this war that it did not want and that it did not start. – Christopher Luxon

You said that Ukrainians would fight for Ukraine. You said that they would be willing to die for their country, and in laying down their lives for what they believed in and on behalf of their fellow Ukrainians, they have proved you right. In fighting for Ukraine, they have fought for the democratic values and national sovereignty that so many countries and people all around the world share and believe in, but the burden of that fight has fallen primarily on Ukraine.

Ten months ago, Ukrainian men and women who were accountants and cooks and teachers and mechanics became, almost overnight, soldiers. Their courage, their commitment, and their resilience has amazed and humbled the world. Their sacrifice compels other countries to help. We cannot stand back; we must stand up.

None of us, especially a small country like New Zealand, wants to believe that might is right. We want to believe that moral courage is just as important. But this war has proved that when you have to fight for what you believe in, you need an army, weapons, ammunition, and friends to help defend your interests. This war has again highlighted the shortcomings of the United Nations, whose purpose is noble, but whose impact is weak. This international group could not prevent one authoritarian power launching a war on its neighbour.

Every country, I think, has learnt that it is a mistake to think that they themselves or their friends can do without firepower. We might wish it to be different, but to support a collective response, we all must be able to contribute. –

When the history of this war is written, the greatest condemnation will be for Vladimir Putin. The greatest admiration will be for you, President Zelenskyy, and your courageous leadership. The greatest gratitude will be for the people of Ukraine. Daily, we see images of indiscriminate attacks on civilians that leave broken and burning villages, cities, homes, and schools, and the death of every single Ukrainian is a tragedy.

The greatest regret of this war will be the terrible loss of life that has left tens of thousands of Ukrainian families bereft. But one day, peace will come again to Ukraine. We can’t see how or when, but it will come, and at that point the international community will need to rally to support a reconstruction programme, because while the loss of life is the most terrible toll, the loss of homes and communities and critical infrastructure is also incalculable. I feel confident, even from the Opposition, in saying that New Zealand will be part of that rebuilding effort. I cannot imagine circumstances where we would not be.

But for now, in the most bitter winter for Ukraine, and on behalf of the New Zealand National Party, I send to you our deepest condolences, our tremendous respect, and great admiration. This war is cruel, it is immoral, and it is wrong, but for as long as Russia continues to fight, Ukraine must continue to fight, and we and the rest of the world must continue to back you.

We in New Zealand hope and pray that this war ends soon, and until it does, my pledge is that the New Zealand National Party, like the rest of New Zealand, will stand with you. Kia kaha. – Christopher Luxon

It is seldom, said Hume, that we lose our liberty all at once: rather, it is nibbled away as a mouse nibbles cheese. Perhaps the same might be said of the rule of law, especially in countries such as Britain where it has been long established and people take it for granted, as if it were a natural rather than an achieved phenomenon.

One of the enemies of the rule of law is sentimentality. Both a jury and now a judge have found that if protesters break the law for what the jury or the judge considers a supposedly good cause, they can be rightfully acquitted in the name of freedom of protest. – Theodore Dalrymple

In other words, the judge saw his role not as enforcing the law as it (quite reasonably) stood, but as licensing certain people to be exempted from its provisions. It was his job to decide what a good or a bad cause was, and how good a cause had to be before protestors might illegally inconvenience their fellow-citizens with impunity. By claiming to be “moved” by the criminals’ evidence, he was removing the blindfold from the statue of justice and putting weights in her balance: one law for the people he liked and another for those that he didn’t.

The Lancet is in accord with this view of the law, which is no law at all. Probably a good proportion of the intelligentsia is in accord with it too, which means that the hold on its mind of the rule of law, by which all people are held to the same standard, is very loose if it exists at all. In the long run, if this trend continues, the result can only be a war of each against all. – Theodore Dalrymple

The scale of this transfer of power and wealth through co-governance is eye-watering. It amounts to an effective mass privatisation of key New Zealand assets, as control is stripped from the public and passed into the hands of some of the biggest private businesses in the country. Instead of elected officials being in charge and acting in the public interest unaccountable tribal representatives will be driven by self-interest.

It is astonishing hypocrisy from Labour – a party that not only rails against privatisation and the accumulation of private wealth but feigns to value democracy and individual rights.

But after two years of the Ardern Government, we have now learned that they have no respect for New Zealand’s core values of freedom and democracy. With their jack boots, they have trampled over our traditional culture as they attempt to divide our society and crush our spirit.

But Kiwis are not for crushing. We may be slow to react to acts of aggression from government, which we generally consider to be working in our best interests, but when a line is crossed, we will not take it lying down.

So why is Jacinda Ardern losing the support of voters?

The simple reason is that she cannot be trusted. Of her litany of lies, some stand head and shoulders above the rest. – Muriel Newman

The reality is that Jacinda Ardern has a delusional view of how the rest of us should live. She clearly has no regard for our rights as free citizens, or our traditions as a representative democracy: ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.

With the power of the state at her fingertips, she is dangerous.

It’s no wonder that Kiwis are disillusioned and no longer trust the Prime Minister.

That’s why she’s falling in the polls.

The sooner she leaves office, the safer New Zealand will be. – Muriel Newman

Labour’s loss in the Hamilton West by-election capped off a tough and disappointing year for the government. Some have put it down to the specific circumstances of the by-election or to low voter turnout, but the result was consistent with the overall political trends of the last year. To that extent, Labour’s defeat was no great surprise, so cannot be dismissed as having no bearing on next year’s possible election outcome the way some are pretending.

Governments rarely lose seats at by-elections – this is only the fourth time since 1967 this has happened. But in two of the three previous instances, the government of the day went on to win the next general election, meaning there is still much to play for, for all parties. – Peter Dunne

This long, slow polling decline strongly suggests the Government has simply lost touch with voters, and that its primary task now is one of reconnection. It is especially telling that the March cost-of-living package, the Budget’s family assistance announcements, and the improved access to childcare announced at last month’s Labour Party conference have all failed to halt the ongoing slippage in Labour’s support. These were all measures friendly to Labour’s base, but they have yielded no political dividend. – Peter Dunne

The polls suggest voters stopped listening from about March, so it is hard to see a way out of the Government’s dilemma. Until people are prepared to engage once more, neither new policies nor existing policies abandoned are likely to have much impact. Similarly, as history has shown, a Cabinet reshuffle will make little difference to the Government’s ongoing fortunes.

All governments build up political baggage that eventually overwhelms them. This government is no different as the scars of Three Waters and now MIQ, reignited by the Chief Ombudsman’s damning report, show.

In the face of declining poll fortunes and these unpleasant memories, Labour’s best chance for 2023 rests with being able to put these behind it, something it seems unwilling to do so far, and present a bold, new positive face for the future. A makeover is very difficult to do convincingly after five years in government, especially when the trend to a change of government is solidifying.

Next year promises to be “interesting”.  – Peter Dunne

Having worked briefly in South Africa at the height of apartheid, I’m surprised by the degree to which the mentality of apartheid seems to have infected the intelligentsia of the United States. The analogy is by no means exact, and there are significant differences between the two countries, of course, but the obsession with race as a politically important consideration in policy-making is increasingly similar.

Recently, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) carried an opinion piece justifying racial discrimination in the selection of medical students. It didn’t say so in as many words, but it argued that the academic standard required of what it called minoritized students should be lower than that of white students (and presumably South Asian and Chinese ones as well, the latter being the wrong kind of minority and not in need of positive discrimination). – Theodore Dalrymple

It’s true, for example, that many of the students from “minoritized” backgrounds will have overcome, or tried to overcome, disadvantages that “majoritized” students haven’t had to face, and therefore, to achieve results even approximately like those of their more fortunate peers, could be taken to indicate superior determination and strong character. To give them some credit for the disadvantages they’ve suffered is therefore not ungenerous in spirit. The problem lies in deciding exactly how much credit to give, to whom, and on what criteria. Where race is taken by itself as a proxy for all other disadvantages (which white or Asian students may also suffer as individuals), the policy is racist in the most literal sense. – Theodore Dalrymple

The medical profession needs people of many different types, and doctors should be imaginatively aware of ways of life different from their own, especially in countries such as the United States where ways of life are so various. Early encounters with people of experiences very different from their own probably conduces to such an awareness, much in the way that travel broadens the mind, or at least is supposed to do so.

However, it’s far from certain that racial quotas are the best way to achieve the much-vaunted diversity. Even without quotas, student bodies would be diverse, in the sense meant; to argue that quotas are essential in order to offset the prejudicial effects of a system without them is insulting, no doubt unintentionally, either to those who select medical students, who are assumed to be prejudiced, or to the applicants themselves, who are assumed to need a bureaucratic helping hand in order to be able to compete. On this view, being “minoritized” is like having a handicap in golf, though one which can’t be overcome by mere practice. – Theodore Dalrymple

It goes on to argue that “minoritized” doctors will be preferred by “minoritized” patients, because they’ll understand such patients better and sympathize with them more. This, of course, assumes that human solidarity passes principally by race, which is precisely what the doctrinaires of apartheid always said. In any case, the assumption that patients always prefer doctors of their own background is false.

When I was practicing, young Muslim women specifically didn’t want a Muslim doctor because they believed, rightly or wrongly I was never able to discover, that they wouldn’t keep their confidences but rather would pass them on to their families. The loyalty of the Muslim doctors, these patients thought, was more to their community than to patients as individuals. It doesn’t matter whether or not this was a justified view; what matters is that it was the view.

More important than special situations such as this, however, is the assumption that in order to understand or sympathize with their patients, doctors must share their background with them. This is to deny the power of human beings’ imagination to enter into anyone’s experience but their own. If this were really so, there would be no point to literature, one function of which is precisely to broaden the reader’s imaginative sympathies. And the logical conclusion of this view would be that we should all have to be our own doctors since everyone’s experience is unique.

How far are we to take the idea that the medical profession as a body must reflect the ethnic and demographic composition of the general population so that it’s able to sympathize with all members of that population? – Theodore Dalrymple

I recall an eminent professor of surgery who was brilliantly able to tailor his explanations to the intellectual and cultural level of his patients, all without the slightest hint of condescension, talking down, or lying to those who would’ve been unable to grasp the greater complexities of their condition. This ability was the result of his natural ability, long experience, and enduring interest in the well-being of his patients. He was appreciated by all types and condition of people, to whom he had an equal ethical commitment, and all of whom (justifiably) placed their trust in him to do his best for them.

This, surely, is the ideal to be aimed at, not the enclosure of doctors into demographically balkanized communities in which only like may treat like. In any case, selective matching of doctors to the populations they serve can be done only on a few characteristics, chief among which, in the philosophy of the author of the JAMA article, is race. This, whether he wants it to be or not, or whether he knows it or not, is an attribution of importance to race in human affairs with which Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd himself would’ve heartily agreed. – Theodore Dalrymple

It was a weird scene last week as the Prime Minister granted time in what looked like her Christmas grotto to the parliamentary gallery journalists.

It looked festive but at the same time ever so slightly tragic. The tree was decorated but not lavishly — so just a bit too much tree and not enough bauble, kind of like the country right now. The idea is there, it’s just been a bit messed up. – Mike Hosking 

The trouble of late for her is she has lost her confidence, and you can see it every time she is on the telly.  Ardern is mostly covering the cold, hard truth that this has been a disastrous year.

Capped off last weekend with the predictable byelection loss in Hamilton West, this has been the year where a number of ugly shortcomings have been badly exposed.

The Three Waters entrenchment saga, obviously, is the star of the show. Either way, Ardern comes out looking dreadful. She either knew and therefore lied about not knowing; or didn’t know, hence she should’ve sacked Nanaia Mahuta for attempted sabotage. – Mike Hosking 

However, because she lacks any real authority in the Māori caucus, she didn’t. So yet again she has to suck it up and try her best to make out that it’s not as big a shambles as it clearly was. – Mike Hosking 

The reality is they haven’t taken too much on, they’ve just not delivered anything — so it’s all piled up and makes them look like they can’t deliver, which of course they can’t. Fortunately, for most of us, a lot of the stuff they haven’t delivered we didn’t want anyway, so when it gets dropped it will be a relief, and one more thing the Nats don’t have to undo as of November.

Ardern declared that some of the programme that would be jettisoned was not because it was ideological nonsense but because they wanted to “make the economy a priority”. A Government making the economy a priority shouldn’t of course need stating, given it should be 1, 2 and 3 on the priority list on any given day anyway.

Sadly, the way she phrased it, once again just seemed to reiterate that they can really only concentrate on one thing at a time, and given economies make or break governments it’s probably wise to spend a bit of time on it, especially given they’ve wrecked it so badly the Reserve Bank thinks we are headed for a recession.

That, sadly, is what next year will boil down to, whether they’re prioritising it or not. – Mike Hosking 

Forget all the rest of the madness, the Fair Pay agreements, the new taxes, Three Waters, the income insurance, He Pua Pua, the TVNZ/RNZ merger, the labour crisis, the wage/price spiral, school absenteeism, the poverty figures, the ram raids and general violence, the emergency housing debacle, the light rail not started, taxing farmers, the trade deficit (I’m worn out writing it all down) – the economy is what makes or breaks all governments, and the grand irony here is the collaboration between Grant Robertson and Adrian Orr to print a blizzard of money so great it would bury us in election year cannot be lost on those of us who questioned the tactic for the past two years.

So, basically, they will lose next year because they’ve wrecked the joint — even Winston Peters won’t touch them.

They will work hard telling you it isn’t so, but as much as they may hope the sun shines over the summer break and we forget all about it, the die is cast. – Mike Hosking 

This is a council that’s full of people who are non-religious, religious, of different ethnicities and I intend to run a secular council here which respects everybody and I will not be veering from that. – Craig Jepson

THE QUESTION dividing Kaipara’s electors, and the rest of New Zealand, is one of political legitimacy and cultural power. Whose protocols should prevail: the standing orders of the local council; or, the tikanga of the local iwi?

In strictly legal terms, the standing orders of the Kaipara District Council, as interpreted by the elected head of the council – Mayor Craig Jepson – must prevail. The order of business, and the manner in which that business is conducted, is for him – and for him alone – to determine.

Except, in the rolling maul that is New Zealand’s racial politics, the letter of the law no longer counts for very much. As events in Kaipara have proved, it’s all about who can mobilise the most outrage – especially in the news media and online.- Chris Trotter

At the heart of the controversy lies Ms Paniora’s attempt to begin the first meeting of the newly-elected Kaipara District Council with a karakia, or prayer. According to standing orders, it is the Mayor who has the responsibility for opening the Council’s inaugural meeting. This he was attempting to do when Ms Paniora interrupted the proceedings with a request to recite a karakia, and upon being refused permission, protested, and had to be brought to order by the Mayor.

Ms Paniora justified her interruption of the proceedings by claiming that the Mayor was acting in defiance of tikanga (custom and practice). Mayor Jepson responded by taking a firm stand on the secular character of political authority in New Zealand – a doctrine derived from the liberal-democratic insistence upon the separation of Church and State: – Chris Trotter

Given that New Zealand is one of the most secular nations on earth, with fewer than half the population evincing religious belief, the Mayor would appear to be on solid ground. Rather than privilege one councillor’s religion over everybody else’s, his solution, to have no prayers at all, struck many New Zealanders as eminently sensible.

In the ears of many Māori, however, Mayor Jepson’s words struck an unmistakably “racist” note. In their estimation, it is not for Pakeha, no matter what political office they may hold, to prevent a young Māori woman from upholding tikanga by initiating a hui (meeting) with a karakia seeking God’s blessing upon the proceedings. Jepson’s actions kindled an angry response from Māori (and not a few Pakeha) across the country. Who did he think he was?

Well, he probably thought he was the legally recognised leader of the Kaipara community. The 4,228 votes he received from the electors of the Kaipara District, representing 50.5 percent of the 8,366 votes cast, earned him the title, status, and powers of Mayor.

Once, that title would have merited the respect of the news media, but – no more. The mainstream news media remained steadfastly silent on the subject of Mayor Jepson’s political legitimacy, and his legal authority as Chair of the Council. It similarly refused to address the question posed by the Mayor concerning the appropriateness, or otherwise, of injecting religion into what are generally understood to be secular proceedings. All that seemed to matter was that he had silenced a young Māori ward councillor at her first meeting – an action which most of the news media’s reporting strongly implied was racist in both intent and effect. – Chris Trotter

That none of these numbers were taken all that seriously is attributable to the widely held view among Māori, and some Pakeha, that New Zealand’s liberal-democratic system is a relic of colonisation, rendering it both oppressive and morally repugnant. Accordingly, in the mainstream news media’s reporting of the Kaipara controversy the political weight of the protagonists has been determined, almost entirely, by their ethnicity. That Māori have taken offence at the behaviour of a Pakeha politician is deemed to be resolvable only by the latter’s more-or-less total capitulation to the former.

That Mayor Jepson has announced a compromise solution to the contretemps, whereby each councillor will, in turn, be given the opportunity, before the formal opening of Council meetings, to invite his or her fellow councillors to join them in a meditation, prayer, or incantation of their own choosing, has been represented as too little, too late. In matters of this sort only the most complete abasement before the tikanga of the mana whenua (local wielders of power) will do. – Chris Trotter

What the country has been witnessing in Kaipara is a struggle for political legitimacy and cultural power. Intended, or not, Ms Paniora’s bid to recite a karakia in the opening seconds of the newly-elected council’s first meeting constituted a test to see whose ways would prevail in the Kaipara District. The ways of the inheritors of the Anglosphere’s liberal-democratic system of government, with its historical suspicion of social hierarchies and religious sentiments, and its secular faith in the egalitarian rules of orderly deliberation? Or, the ways of Te Ao Māori: imbued with spirituality, guided by tikanga, and executed by those with the mana to both convince, and to command? – Chris Trotter

“The only poll that matters is the poll on Election Day”. What did Hamilton West tell us? What opinion polls cannot tell. Will those responding to pollsters vote?

The answer is, no they will not vote. The Hamilton West turnout was just 29.76 per cent – unheard of for a bellwether seat.

Commenters who have never run an election campaign say the low poll means the result is meaningless. The significance of Hamilton West is the low turnout.

How parties lose elections is their voters stay at home. – Richard Prebble

Labour’s ground game has collapsed. It does not matter how good Labour’s voter ID system is, without volunteers it is useless.

The media reports there were just 40 campaign workers when Ardern visited Labour’s campaign headquarters. Many of them would have been paid officials.

Without the volunteers Labour cannot turn out the voters in South Auckland that it needs to win a general election. – Richard Prebble

The minor parties polled very badly. The minor party vote collapses when voters want to change the government.

But the by-election’s most significant message is that Labour has lost its greatest electoral asset. “Jacinda Mania” saved Labour in 2017. Ardern did not win but did enough for Winston Peters to make her Prime Minister.

In 2020 Ardern did win the election. Voters told pollsters they were voting for Ardern. Few people knew or cared what was in Labour’s manifesto. They believed Ardern had saved us from Covid. They trusted Ardern. Voters thought she would keep the country free of Covid.

It was a false hope. – Richard Prebble

As voters voted for Ardern and not Labour, voters are holding the PM responsible.

Two years ago Ardern was the preferred Prime Minister of 60 per cent of voters. Now she is the choice of just 29 per cent. It is an unprecedented fall. When Helen Clark lost to John Key, Clark was still the preferred prime minister of 44 per cent of the electorate. –

Luxon attending a public meeting and meeting voters on the streets is campaigning.

Ardern knew if she had campaigned it would have been counterproductive. The anti-vaxxers would have protested. Her presence would have motivated hostile electors to vote.

For two elections all a Labour candidate had to do was be photographed with Ardern and have the leader do a walkabout.

Their only good news is Ardern is polling ahead of Luxon. Her polling is falling, his is rising. The gap is just six per cent.

As the Opposition leader gets more equal coverage in election year his support will rise. Voters already think Luxon is more economically competent. Hamilton West confirmed he can campaign. She cannot. Ardern is electorally toxic. Next year Luxon will overtake Ardern as preferred PM.

When both the leader and the party trail in the polls they go on to lose the election. – Richard Prebble

Freedom of expression has been pushed to the margins. Although, with a few exceptions, the Government has not actively or outwardly restricted freedom of expression it has nevertheless narrowed the scope of what may be considered acceptable.

The narrowing of scope has been led by the Prime Minister, Ms. Jacinda Ardern. Ms. Ardern is a trained communicator in that she holds a degree of Bachelor of Communication Studies (BCS) in politics and public relations.

Public relations is the practice of managing and disseminating information from an individual or an organization – in her case the Government – to the public in order to influence their perception. Ms. Ardern has done this very successfully. But in managing and disseminating the Government message she has been very careful to ensure that contrary views, criticism and contradiction are pushed to the sideline, so that those views are diminished and devalued and are of no account.- David Harvey

As expectations and the standard of living increase, so will the number of fundamental human rights.

The provision of tangible benefits as of right not only creates a psychological dialectic between ingratitude when a right is fulfilled and grievance when it is not, but it imposes forced labour on everyone in order to pay for the fulfilment of those supposed rights, which are not free gifts of nature but have to be provided by human activity. – Theodore Dalrymple

A coalition of the self-pitying is so powerful because reasons to feel sorry for oneself are legion and always plausible, and therefore they are numerous. Why, even the most fortunate can, with a little effort, make themselves out to be victims. Mankind, at least modern mankind, is united by self-pity.

Those who make a career of appealing to this protean emotion enjoy a great rhetorical advantage, for practically all of us, myself included, would claim to be on the side of the underdog, at least in theory, and would feel shame in openly sympathising more with the rich, powerful and successful. – Theodore Dalrymple

I am a typical sentimentalist in that I am more attracted to people who are failures in life than to successes. I do not think that this is wholly attributable to the more flattering comparison with myself that failures allow me to make: it is rather that they stimulate a melancholy, both pleasing and painful, that renders their company grateful to me. Moreover, the reasons for failure (at least in people whom one thinks could have been successes if they had been more fixated upon it) are more complex, more multi-dimensional, than those for success. In short, failures are more interesting than successes. – Theodore Dalrymple

To return to the disconnection between personal feelings of sympathy, pity and so forth on the one hand, and public policy on the other. I accept that on occasion abstract arguments from the dismal science (political economy) may be used to justify personal meanness or disinclination to give to those less fortunately placed than oneself, but that does not mean that the arguments are always wrong.

It is easy and tempting to confuse these two realms, and advantageous too if one is running for office. Many people are confused by the confusion, such that the word solidarité in France, for example, now means redistribution of resources by bureaucratic means rather than individual action consequent upon any actual feelings, though the word nevertheless retains the connotation of those feelings.

No doubt the confusion of the two spheres has always existed: it is difficult, if not impossible, to look down the two ends of a telescope at the same time. But it seems to me that our epoch is particularly propitious for the confusion because of the decline in religion, or rather belief in the truth of the historical claims upon which religion is based. – Theodore Dalrymple

The Sermon on the Mount enjoins us not to judge, and from this commandment stems the untruth (for example) that addiction to heroin has no moral aspect whatever and is straightforwardly a disease like any other. This is untrue and obviously untrue, but so anxious are we not to be censorious that we abandon judgment altogether. Judgment, however, is like Nature in Horace’s Epistle: though you drive it out with a pitchfork, yet it will return. We must judge when not to judge, and remember that blame does not preclude sympathy unless we think of human beings as not only perfectible but already perfect except for their circumstances. – Theodore Dalrymple

Bad constitutional processes are necessarily worse than bad policy processes.

Constitutions, whether written or unwritten, are our basic rules about how we make laws and elect representatives. Constitutional change deserves extensive deliberation and widespread consensus.

Sneaking through a constitutional change, under urgency, on a Supplementary Order Paper, with barely a mention, is its own unique kind of bad. It disowned important parts of our constitutional heritage.

But the constitutional issue was not the only problem. Section 116 of the Three Waters legislation, which Minister Nanaia Mahuta sought to entrench, will still cause problems. It apparently prohibits water services entities from divesting ownership, even for stranded or obsolete assets, and devolving control of water service infrastructure to firms with greater expertise.  – Eric Crampton

Blocking valuable options is a bad idea. – Eric Crampton

Minister Mahuta did violence to our constitutional traditions while attempting to entrench Section 116. It was the most important problem with that section. But it was not the only problem. – Eric Crampton

The Treasury has released a new report to accompany its Living Standards Framework.

The framework is a salad of abstract concepts like ‘’knowledge’’, ‘’voice’’ and ‘’subjective wellbeing’’ attractively arranged in columns and bubbles with no development of logical relationships between them. Nor any use of old-fashioned analytic tools such as whole sentences.

Attempting to give meaning to the framework, the Treasury has published a discussion of ‘’12 Domains of Wellbeing’’. I count 44 in the framework, but perhaps maths is not in Treasury‘s toolkit either.

Anyway, the nation’s leading economic agency is trying to define ‘’advantage’’ and ‘’disadvantage’’, how to measure them and understand the causes, and ‘’the normative challenge of assessing whether advantage and disadvantage is cause for concern’’.

In summary, the Treasury finds that ‘’life is better for some people than for others’’. Crikey! Who knew?

It adds, “Life has got better over time in some ways but worse in others”. That sentence is so banal that I can’t be bothered coming up with a sarcastic barb. – Josie Pagani

‘’Wellbeing’’ is the descent of politics into diplomacy and bureaucratic blancmange. Who could disagree with ‘’wellbeing’’?

Well, me. ‘’Wellbeing’’ does public policy by replacing choices and priorities at the heart of politics with fog. Instead of looking around us and seeing obvious problems to fix, we get: Depends what you mean by ‘’disadvantaged’’. – Josie Pagani

Politics should be about priorities. Mine would be inequality. Housing, healthcare (including dental care, mental health) and education for everyone. An economy that delivers well-paid working class jobs. – Josie Pagani

I expect policy advice to highlight the costs and benefits of alternatives, to strip bare tradeoffs, and present practical menus of options. I expect sophisticated evaluation of whether policies are achieving what they are meant to.

When advice instead hides choices behind wellbeing mush, no political constituency is ever built for underlying ideas. If no-one can disagree with ‘’wellbeing’’ then no-one can ever win an argument for it either.

The idea of ‘’wellbeing’’ as a political project has emerged from the takeover of our social institutions by an educated middle class that thinks it’s being progressive. Instead it signals its elite status.

All of our major economic, social and cultural institutions are dominated by this class – political parties, publicly funded posts and media (yes, including me).

It has led to the celebritisation of politics and the exclusion of meaningful ideology (in the sense of a coherent system of ideas). Everyday working people are invisible.

Ironic when we’ve come to appreciate the importance of diversity in our institutions, of gender and ethnicity, but not class, lived experience or political ideology.

For most of the 20th century, public institutions were strikingly egalitarian in an economic sense. Classes mixed in churches, RSAs and rugby clubs, and so shared many social interests. There were cruel inequalities, though, between genders and races, and a stifling orthodoxy. So those social institutions withered. – Josie Pagani

The promise of merit is that the Pasifika daughter of a minimum-wage worker should have the same life opportunity as the Pākehā son of a banker.

But what these Wellbeing papers reveal is a special club of merit, where members know the secret handshakes. If you’re not fluent in the cultural preferences of the educated class, you don’t belong.

The second, deeper, problem is that by definition not all of us are meritorious. Most of us are average. We are just going about our lives. Those of us who are not winners need to be seen too.

I suppose wellbeing is trying to find a language to understand this mysterious phenomenon of people whose periodic ‘’disadvantage’’ is a ‘’cause for concern’’.

I have a better alternative: make our public institutions genuinely representative, so the priorities and language of working people will surface on their own.

This mush is the opposite of progressive. Tough choices are obscured behind fifty shades of bureaucratic beige. That makes for an amusing column. Less amusing, it stops us making decisions at all. – Josie Pagani

The Climate Cult worships two green idols – electric vehicles and wind-solar energy. This is part of a futile UN scheme promoting “Net Zero Emissions” which aims to cool the climate of the world by waging war on CO2 plant food.

Green worship is the state religion of all western nations. It is promoted by billionaires with other agendas, and endlessly repeated by the UN, the bureaucracy, all government media, state education and most big business leaders.

The promotion of electric cars and trucks will cause a great increase in the demand for electricity to replace diesel, petrol and gas. – Viv Forbes

Soon after the last coal power plant is demolished, in a snap of still, cold, cloudy weather the lights will go out, electric trains will stop, and battery-powered food deliveries to the cities will falter. There will be uproar in Parliaments, and all Green/Teal/ALP governments will fall. The ABC will blame “climate change”.

Energy Realists will take over. They will immediately place orders for dozens of modular nuclear power plants.

But this energy reality will come too late. Long lines of city dwellers with bicycles, wheel-barrows and old diesel utes will flee from the hungry cities.

Some of these power refugees may get jobs harvesting potatoes and onions with digging forks, milking cows by hand, or plucking and cleaning chooks.

Re-powering and re-building will take decades.

All this for zero climate benefits – the world has passed the peak of this interglacial and the next long glacial cycle is edging closer. – Viv Forbes

Perceptions can erode trust and confidence so the Public Service must have high standards when procuring services on behalf of New Zealanders,” said Mr Hughes.

Poorly managed perceived conflicts of interest can be just as damaging to public trust and confidence as poorly managed actual conflicts of interest. – Peter Hughes 

How we manage those conflicts matters.

It can either build trust in our public service or it can erode it, so it is fundamental that we get this right. And that is what we will do. – Peter Hughes 

Western culture is in decline, mired in a web of nihilism, as evidenced by Western discourse, upticks in rudeness, and a general lack of innovation. This dearth of decency has resulted in a culture devoid of respect for individuals, even among ordinary people. A form of public shaming would socially pressure individuals to act with respect and decency in public, at minimum, if not help cultivate respect for people. This version of shaming specifically does not include social media blasts, “doxing”, or “cancel culture,” as these actions are not about encouraging better behavior, but intimidating people or trolling opportunities. They are not aimed at improving public discourse, and are not what I’m advocating. I propose a shared set of principles and facts enforced by social cohesion, to encourage responsible behavior and strongly discourage bad public behavior. Those who breach the boundaries would be denied service or access to businesses or socially ostracized. Understandably, shaming is a highly disputed concept. – Elizabeth Johnson

Public sensibilities about how all people should be treated have, rightly, evolved towards more just laws and conventions. From severing limbs, to public whippings, to being shut out from society, public shaming can be draconian and dangerous, particularly under religious rule. We know shame can trigger depression and other detrimental mental health events. Low self-esteem and depression have long shared a link, though we still don’t know whether low self-esteem is a precursor to depression or a component of it. Self-esteem is critical to an individual’s sense of agency, and shaming tends to diminish self-esteem. Wouldn’t advocating public shaming take society backwards, to a more cruel time?

On a social level, is public delinquency not the price of free expression? Should democratic societies not simply endure nonsensical tirades, occasional outbursts, and arguments made in bad faith? What of the possibility of people taking shaming too far? While society must remain receptive to new, novel, and counterintuitive ideas, the burden lies on those advancing new ideas to provide proof or evidence of those novel claims. Social shaming is not dependent on the government prohibiting speech, but on peers holding peers to social standards. Finally, most importantly, wouldn’t any form of shaming be the majority tyrannizing social minorities, as Tocqueville warned?

While the majority could tyrannize the minority, we know the minority, even to an individual, holds a vested power. – Elizabeth Johnson

A healthy society rejects noxious behavior swiftly and consistently. Actions taken in public, especially involving strangers, must be respectful and responsible. Society must simply demand greater respect for and from the individual. Those unwilling to behave should be denied the opportunity to participate in public privileges. – Elizabeth Johnson

The company has a standard for the appearance of people representing them, and they enforce that standard. Likewise, hospitals and care units are posting signs with a patient and visitor code of conduct, which “spells out unacceptable behavior such as yelling, swearing, spitting, and making offensive remarks about race, ethnicity, or religion.” Violators are warned and may be removed from the premises. These are the sorts of standards our businesses and public spaces should continue to enforce. Those called out publicly for violating these norms should be uncomfortable, as the purpose is to discourage such behavior.

At the turn of the century, G.K. Chesterton wrote, “It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.” Regardless of the century, shaming reminds us of the social responsibilities we all share in maintaining a respectable collective discourse. Social shaming maintains a social code and cohesion without involving the legal system. These are “rules” informing daily life, but not rising to the level of illegal activity. Shaming is a method useful in preventing further decline of the Western world, perhaps even reversing the decline.

While shaming sounds harsh, it remains a valuable cultural custom. We have laws prohibiting violence and lewd acts. We need to widely encourage conventions preventing public delinquency and rudeness. Used like this, shaming acts as a guardrail, helping to keep society on the asphalt moving forward. – Elizabeth Johnson

It’s bizarre. I mean, Kim Kardashian is more selfie-shy than these two. And she made a sex tape.

Moreover, much of it pre-dates the alleged campaign of hate and misinformation against them. It’s almost as though, right from the start, they had a certain narrative they wanted to shape — and that documenting everything fed into their narcissistic little plan.

Because that’s how Harry and Meghan appear to many of us: the ultimate narcissists in an age of narcissism.

They’re the Duke and Duchess of Influencers — arrogant enough to believe their every spit and cough matter; and shameless enough to do whatever it takes to monetise it. – Sarah Vine

To me this will be remembered as the year that this appalling, tyrannical and racist Government got found out.

As I’ve observed the efforts of our Government over the last couple of years, I’ve seen a group of people who are distracted by things that are less important to the needs of the country and its people, instead of focusing on the tough stuff that we need to get on with.

Those distractions include a desire to be seen leading on the international stage. Some call it virtue signalling. Taking a position on climate change or cracking down on freedom of speech, and the global headlines that go with it. We seem to be fixated on ideology, historical grievances, and even mythology. All leading to an apparent desire to change the way we do things.

As a result, it’s the year that we finally lost trust in many of our core institutions. These include our belief that the health system, our education institutions, our police and indeed our government, were actually there to help us and to carry out a set of initiatives and obligations that are designed to help us become better. – Bruce Cotterill

We are failing on so many fronts, and the list of things to do is so long, that the distractions somehow seem easier to deal with, for both the Government and the media who seek to cover them.

Just think, it’s a lot easier to throw a billion dollars at overseas climate change issues than it is to spend that billion dollars cleaning up our own harbours, which are currently unswimmable due to the presence of faecal matter.

If we were able to put the distractions to one side for a moment, we should recall that this Government campaigned on improved housing, child poverty, transparency and kindness. Each of those issues have seen the Government fail massively. – Bruce Cotterill

And as we review the current state of the nation, elsewhere we might look to law and order, where the behaviour of our gangs and the ongoing widespread distribution of drugs continues to decimate families and communities. It seems we’ve learned that it’s easy to get the prison population down. Just let more criminals onto the streets. The problem with that is that crime grows, goes unpunished and good law abiding people become victims.

Youth Crime, particularly the new night-time sport of ram raiding to order has resulted in scenes more akin to South Africa than New Zealand. – Bruce Cotterill

Our reputation for quality education is in tatters. When 40 per cent of kids aren’t going to school and a third of those that are going can’t read, write or do maths to a suitable level you know you have a problem. This week’s news that some primary teachers suffer from “maths anxiety” which makes it difficult for them to teach maths should prompt us to say “enough”! Tomorrow’s Schools didn’t work. It’s time to get back to the basics that yesterday’s schools taught so well.

To be fair, the education shambles is not one government’s doing. It’s taken a generation to ruin our once world-class education system and it will take a generation at least to turn it around fully. But we need to get on with it. – Bruce Cotterill

In the meantime the distractions have taken up plenty of time.

They include centralising health and tertiary education for no good reason. They include changing the teaching curriculum for reasons that are idealist at best, and just plain wasteful at worst.

As a result of 2022, we should be questioning the performance of our key institutions such as the Reserve Bank and the Supreme Court. – Bruce Cotterill

And let’s remember that both the Governor and the Finance Minister are mutually culpable for one of our greatest disgraces of the last five years. That of encouraging first-home buyers into an overheated property market based on cheap money that was only ever going to become more expensive in the near term. The fallout of this particular calamity is yet to hit us. But it will. And some of those young people who dared to act on their dreams will have to start again. That particular disaster was every bit as avoidable, and will be every bit as sad, as many of the saddest MIQ stories.

And as for the Supreme Court. They’ve made a couple of decisions this year that have made some commentators suggest that they are taking an activist approach, and in doing so, setting law in advance of Parliament, the country’s natural lawmakers. We should be questioning their behaviour and their future role. –

For my money, our heroes of the year are our farmers. They continue to grow food more sustainably than ever, and are more environmentally friendly than any of their overseas counterparts.

The fact that our Government, desperate to be recognised and approved by their “global networks” of do-gooders, continue to place legislative barriers in front of them, is a great shame and another distraction. And yet, it is the farmer who continues, day in and day out, to farm the land and tend his flock for the benefit of the country’s export dollars.

At a time when our tourism industry — once our top income earner — continues to suffer immensely from the draconian treatment it received on every front during and immediately after Covid, our farmers are all we’ve got in terms of major export receipts. I’m hoping the next government sees them for what they are and makes their life as easy as they deserve. – Bruce Cotterill

But sadly, the wins are outnumbered by the losses. The productivity outrun by distraction. Distractions that include Three Waters, the media merger, health system centralisation, tertiary centralisation, and meaningless climate change initiatives. As we park ambulances at the bottom of the cliffs of education, healthcare, mental health and law and order, the work completed on the distractions is not going to change things for the better. Many will make things worse, in this writer’s opinion.

So what do we do about it? Just like the maths teacher. We need to get back to basics.

We vote the buggers out, repeal the last three years and start again.

If only it were so simple. – Bruce Cotterill

In some ways this is nothing new, with successive governments over the decades meddling in our sector through farm subsidies, uneven environmental rules, employee wage negotiations, market intervention etc.

This time around the impacts are significant both in the scale of land-use change and the lasting impact on rural communities, and ultimately New Zealand. – Murray Taggart

Pleasingly there is acceptance of the split gas approach and agriculture staying out of the ETS, however there is a long way to go before we can confidently say we have sensible, practical regulation in the emissions space – Murray Taggart

What is a woman? The answer to this question has become a highly contentious political issue. It lies at the heart of a rights conflict that has turned toxic, between those who believe someone’s self-declared gender identity should override biological sex for the purposes of single-sex services and sports and those who think biological sex remains a relevant concept in law and society. – The Observer 

The respectful compromise would be to introduce a form of legal self-identification for gender identity for trans people while clarifying that this does not change someone’s sex for the purposes of the Equality Act. A clear distinction between gender identity and biological sex in law would balance the legitimate rights of trans people and those of women, protecting both groups against discrimination but establishing beyond doubt that it is lawful to provide female-only services for women as a matter of privacy, dignity and safety. But in Scotland and Westminster, self-described progressive politicians have proved too gutless to advocate balance and compromise. It is marginalised women – in prison, in domestic abuse services, and who require intimate care as a result of disability – who will bear the consequences of their cowardice. – The Observer 

There has been considerable media speculation in recent days that Labour may be preparing to shelve its social insurance scheme idea. Politics aside, there are good reasons for ditching such a poorly thought-out proposal. Not the least of these is new analysis showing that most low- and middle-income New Zealanders in the scheme would at best receive modest benefits. – Michael Fletcher

 As Inland Revenue has advised, most of the employer levy will eventually be passed on to workers via reduced wage increases, reducing strained family incomes by nearly 3 percent in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. 

A lot of people, including the self-employed, many migrants, and some precarious workers, will not be eligible. For those who are, the scheme sounds generous – anyone who loses their job because of redundancy or illness will qualify for 80 percent of their lost wages for up to six months. That in itself is a problem because it sets up a two-tier welfare system with higher rates – one might think of it as Koru club welfare for insurance recipients, compared to other beneficiaries in cattle class.

What the “80 percent” promise also overlooks is that the scheme would be introduced on top of an already existing set of welfare and social assistance programmes. And it turns out that the extra those additional taxes would buy eligible workers in the event that they lose their job – the net gain over and above welfare entitlements – is far, far smaller for low- and middle-income workers and families. – Michael Fletcher

For three out of four of the low-income family types, the net additional benefit from the scheme is between $3,300 and $4,900. When you take into account the total annual levies paid, these families would need to lose a job – and be unemployed for the entire six months – every two to four years to recoup their and their employers’ levies and break even. The gains are somewhat higher for middle income families, but still the payouts don’t match the levies paid unless the family loses a job every 2.6 to 4.7 years.

At the top end of the income spectrum the scheme is a much rosier proposition. In particular, couple families where both earn $130,000 per annum or more, would receive almost $39,000 if one of them loses a job and is unemployed for six months. In most cases, these are the families that least need the support of a scheme like what Labour is proposing.  – Michael Fletcher

We can still honour our heritage and ancestors without carrying their baggage. The city-dwellers do not understand the mental and physical strength it takes to get out of the bed in the dark every morning and brave the elements for your herd and the country,– Sophie Cookson

The reality is New Zealand is a turnaround, and it needs to turn around. And when you’re doing that, you have to be really upfront with people about the reality of the situation that we are in and what we face, as well as have hope – and not just hope in some kumbaya sense – but hope because you have a proper plan that you can get New Zealand to a different and a much better place. – Christopher Luxon

We need to win next year in order for us to be able to solve problems for New Zealanders and to be able to get this country to realise all the potential that it has. – Christopher Luxon

If the royal family had been expecting to meet a broadsword-wielding knight on the field of battle, what they instead got was an ale fume-wafting, wobbling chevalier on a mule. – Daniela Elser

If you think that associating modern science with oppression of a stigmatized group has no effect on the science itself, just remember what’s happening in New Zealand!  The fealty to the indigenous people—the Māori—is in the process of killing off modern science by conflating it with “local ways of knowing”, as well as with tradition, superstition, legend, and religion. Scientists in the U.S., too, are impeded, though not as strongly. If you dig up human remains on lands claimed by indigenous people, federal law dictates that you have to give those remains back for reburial, even if there’s no clear genealogical connection between the remains and the group who claims them. Professors have had their research curtailed because of this.  If you teach that there are only two sexes, you are liable to be fired or at least have your classes taken away from you. – Jerry Coyne

For Labour these past weeks have been a miasma of muddled thinking that highlighted the power divisions within caucus, leaving Jacinda Ardern running behind the narrative, being forced to explain.

If it wasn’t the dirty little deal behind the entrenchment clause of Three Waters, which was hastily abandoned, then it was Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson appearing to threaten TVNZ’s editorial independence, when he was being questioned on that very matter, then it was this week’s complete immigration settings U-turn, a key policy piece it had advocated for this term. – Janet Wilson

Labour must come up with a mix of policies that put money into punters’ pockets, not take it out in the form of a much larger tax take, as HYEFU revealed.

Will it be forced to swallow the proverbial dead rodent and match National’s tax cuts with cuts of its own? Or would that further fuel inflation?

Or will intransigence and obstinacy decree that it uses the government coffers to continue to invest in projects that the electorate doesn’t want and is beginning to get incandescently angry about?

It’s a hopeful sign that the prime minister says the Government will take a rolling approach to the economic challenges next year, because triage is going to be needed to stop the economic bleeding.

But if the growing gap between what Labour says and what it does continues to widen, then the harbinger of the last three polls, predicting Labour’s loss, will become a reality.  – Janet Wilson

It’s a bit rich coming from a Labour government that had no policy three months out from an election in 2017, formed 232-plus working groups, and clearly has got nothing done over the last five years. – Christpoher Luxon

What the protest did highlight is that the tribal left is the mirror image of the tribal right. It might support different political parties and have different catchphrases but it displays the same intolerance for any political action that threatens the interests of the political status quo. It displays the same arrogance and self righteousness. More worryingly still, it has displayed a readiness to use the powers of the State to crush any dissent it does not approve of. – Against the Current

The “indigenous way of knowing” is, as I’ve described here many times, Mātauranga Māori (MM) a mixture of ideology, superstition, religion, tradition, and yes, even some empirical knowledge gleaned by trial and error—things like when and how to harvest local food.  – Jerry Coyne

For some time, the NZ government, and many secondary school teachers (and university professors) have decreed that MM should not only become much more a part of secondary-school education, but should be taught as coequal with modern science (what’s called “Western science”) in science class. That is, there should be as much teaching of MM in these classes as there is modern science. Since the scientific content of MM is thin, and restricted to “practical knowledge”, and because MM lacks the methodology of modern science, this “equality” is a recipe for disaster.

And on some level I thought it wouldn’t really happen. New Zealand happens to be a great country full of lovely people, and I didn’t believe they’d ruin science education this way. But I didn’t reckon how woke the country has become, largely because the government, under the uber-woke Jacinda Ardern, has decided to cater full-on to the demands of the indigenous Māori people and their many “colonialist” European supporters.

Of course MM, as an important part of New Zealand history and culture, should be taught as part of national history, anthropology, and sociology (Māori comprise 16.5% of the total population). But only in one’s wildest dreams can you see MM as coequal to modern science. Teaching it as such will do a disservice to all the inhabitants of NZ, including the Māori, who will not only learn very much science, but will be confused by the very notion of what “science” includes. Many Kiwis object vehemently to these educational plans, but the wokeness of the country is such that they dare not question the policy. Teachers and objectors are demonized, called “racists” and “colonialists” and some faculty have even been punished for speaking up. In fact, even the spineless Royal Society of New Zealand has taken the position that MM is in no way inferior to modern science, with the latter having its “limits”.  – Jerry Coyne

35% national pass rates in writing, and 56% in numeracy, are not, to my mind, fantastic. (I don’t have any data on science.)  Regardless, valuable as indigenous knowledge is for teaching a country’s history and sociology, making “ways of knowing” coequal to the only modern “way of knowing we have”—science—is going to suck New Zealand down the drain. But this is what happens when you decide that showing your virtue—and making your virtue into national educational policy—depends on elevating “indigenous ways of knowing” to the status of modern science. – Jerry Coyne

Co-governance, I think, is an alien term to New Zealand because it suggests we are a divided society and somehow we are going to bring them together in something called co-governance. – Jim Bolger

What we need to be saying is ‘how do we incorporate our full and complete history into our decision-making. How do we make certain that Māori history, which is clearly distinct and different from European or English history, is considered alongside European and English history?

It’s much more embracing than the divisive one of co-governance – you’ve got five, I’ve got five. It’s almost like a rugby match with even teams, and whoever wins, wins. – Jim Bolger

This is my concern as a mature New Zealander, is that we are dividing New Zealand as we have never seen it before. – Jim Bolger

I think there is becoming an intolerance in the rest of the population which I find disturbing. People talk to me about it and they are angry. They think it has gone miles too far.

I don’t believe that most Māori want sovereignty or separate representation or 50 per cent on Three Waters or Five Waters. What they want is a fair go and I think they are entitled to a fair go.  – Sir Douglas Graham

There was nothing to push back against other than some obiter dicta from some of the judges about ‘partnership’. You can’t pass a statute saying it is not a partnership, – Sir Douglas Graham

The concept of partnership has got legs which it doesn’t deserve. –

So it has got away. I don’t think anybody is explaining what it means or where it takes us or the raison d’etre for the whole thing. – Sir Douglas Graham

The Crown is not in partnership with Māori in running the country and it would be totally unacceptable in my view if this concept were to be pursued. It implies some sort of joint management with veto rights vested in each party. That cannot be the case. – Sir Douglas Graham

Now it is a talisman for everything and I think that is most unfortunate because it has perpetuated the theory ‘poor old Māori need a helping hand the whole time, it’s all a breach of Treaty rights and colonialism. – Sir Douglas Graham

My parents’ generation went through 15 years of two world wars and a depression. Most people got wiped out, either shot or lost their shirt. But they never moaned about it from then on. Life’s like that. You have your good times and your bad times.

Some shocking things were done and they needed to be corrected and acknowledged. But to keep going on and on was the very thing I tried to get rid of, frankly – looking in the past, harbouring grievances. It will just hold them back. – Sir Douglas Graham

What are the outcomes they’re working to, how are they reporting against them, how much money’s been spent to achieve those outcomes? Are they on track or not and then ultimately against that whole $150b [total taxpayer money] what have we got for that? What was the Government trying to achieve? What have we achieved? How much money’s been spent? Are we on track?

So, a lot of those questions you just cannot answer, you know. I’m the Auditor-general, I probably have 300 or 400 accountants in my organisation and we can’t piece that information together, so what chances does the Parliament or public have to do that? – John Ryan 

I don’t need a hip replacement, but I’d like to know the health system in 10 years’ time, when I might need one, is going to be able to do it. –  John Ryan 

I think the more open they are about reporting, the more transparent they are about their performance the more Parliament and the public can engage in the detail with them about what’s the challenge and what we can do about it…

Reporting seems quite a cold word. It’s actually about the dialogue that comes at the end of that where we can more understand how things are going. – John Ryan 

In a democracy the underlying principle is an equal value vote accorded every citizen, regardless of their intellectual differences, contribution to society, ethnicity, and so on.

It’s hard to think of a more disgraceful abuse of this principle than according 50% of governance to an ethnic group that makes up a mere 2% of the population, that is citizens with 50% or more of Maori ethnicity.

Being fashionably trendy about fictitious maori wonderfulness will be the principal reason (among many others) the government will be decimated in the next election. – Sir Bob Jones

With the year drawing to a close and Christmas almost upon us the sounds that seem to sum up the season are less jingling bells and carols, more the cough of Covid and an enormous, exhausted sigh of relief.

The conversations at Christmas gatherings are less about the pre-Christmas rush and more about the country’s collective weariness; it seems so many of us are stumbling towards the finish line in 2022, battered and more than a little bent. To steal from William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming, we feel like pretty rough beasts who this year can do little more than slouch towards Bethlehem. Though maybe ‘crawl’ is a better word.

Why so rough this year? The truth is that this year – 2022 – has been the real ‘Year of Covid’ in New Zealand. – Tim Watkin

All of which makes it a difficult time for the government. The electorate that has fought to hard and felt like world-beaters at the start of the year is in a very different mood now. It’s a mood that wants to put the past behind it and move on. That means any incumbent party will be swimming against the tide heading into election year.

To go back to Yeats, Labour will be asking if indeed “the centre cannot hold” and if election year will be swamped by those (“the worst”?) who “are full of passionate intensity” for conspiracies and sideshows. They will be wondering whether Covid’s grip will remain as firm in election year. As the poem says, “things fall apart” and who knows that better than politicians, especially after a year like this. – Tim Watkin

Parodists have it rough these days, since so much of modern life and culture resembles the Babylon Bee. The latest evidence is that Stanford University administrators in May published an index of forbidden words to be eliminated from the school’s websites and computer code, and provided inclusive replacements to help re-educate the benighted. 

Call yourself an “American”? Please don’t. Better to say “U.S. citizen,” per the bias hunters, lest you slight the rest of the Americas. “Immigrant” is also out, with “person who has immigrated” as the approved alternative. It’s the iron law of academic writing: Why use one word when four will do?

You can’t “master” your subject at Stanford any longer; in case you hadn’t heard, the school instructs that “historically, masters enslaved people.” And don’t dare design a “blind study,” which “unintentionally perpetuates that disability is somehow abnormal or negative, furthering an ableist culture.” Blind studies are good and useful, but never mind; “masked study” is to be preferred. Follow the science.

“Gangbusters” is banned because the index says it “invokes the notion of police action against ‘gangs’ in a positive light, which may have racial undertones.” Not to beat a dead horse (a phrase that the index says “normalizes violence against animals”), but you used to have to get a graduate degree in the humanities to write something that stupid. – Wall Street Journal

The list took “18 months of collaboration with stakeholder groups” to produce, the university tells us. We can’t imagine what’s next, except that it will surely involve more make-work for more administrators, whose proliferation has driven much of the rise in college tuition and student debt. For 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrative staff.

The list was prefaced with (to use another forbidden word) a trigger warning: “This website contains language that is offensive or harmful. Please engage with this website at your own pace.”

Evidently it was all too much for some at the school to handle. On Monday, after the index came to light on social media, Stanford hid it from public view. Without a password, you wouldn’t know that “stupid” made the list. – Wall Street Journal

A celebrity, a friend of mine once said to me, was someone of whom he had never heard. My friend lives a little like a hermit in retreat from the modern world, but for most people, celebrities are like burglars: you don’t have to go to them, they come to you—inescapably, via all sorts of media.

I am, like my friend, indifferent to celebrities, and many of them who are household names are completely unknown to me. – Theodore Dalrymple

A French neighbor told me that he was contented though modest; I suggested that he should have said contented because modest.

The social media have no doubt increased the avidity for celebrity in the general population. There’s a lot of money to be made from it, and influencers can suddenly become very rich and famous without any obvious talent or qualification. Of course, for every influencer who succeeds, there are a thousand or more would-be influencers who fail: But success is visible; failure (though far more prevalent) is hidden.

Celebrity is a phenomenon simultaneously of great depth and great shallowness. It’s deep because it tells us something important about mass psychology; it’s shallow for the same reason it tells us how trivial or frivolous are many of our thoughts. – Theodore Dalrymple

I presume that evidence exists that such advertising by celebrities actually works; it’s when you think about why it should work that your heart begins to sink. After all, asking an American footballer for his advice on blockchain investments is probably as sensible as asking the local barfly who has propped up a bar for the past 25 years for his opinion on the latest advances in cardiac surgery. It’s true that experts aren’t always right, but specialist knowledge and experience still count for quite a lot, for all the inevitable incompleteness of human understanding.

The idea of sympathetic magic illuminates the phenomenon of celebrity endorsement of products of whose virtues or defects the celebrities can have no special knowledge. Sympathetic magic is the use of an object associated with someone either to influence him or to become in some desired respect like him. It can go as far as cannibalism: eating part of someone in order to add his to one’s own potency, for example. I need hardly add that this is all very primitive and, you might have thought, out of place in a society as dependent as ours on sophisticated technology. But the primitive is like the magma under the surface of the Earth; it keeps breaking through however unwanted or destructive it may be. – Theodore Dalrymple

Children must be protected from making permanent legal declarations about their gender which may lead to irreversible elective interventions, including surgery. Lowering the minimum age from 18 to 16 and introducing a system of self-identification will put more children and young people on this path.

Our concerns are amplified by the intervention of the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, which has described the Bill as ‘unsafe’ and likely to harm young people.

Women’s organisations also have recorded their own concerns about the Bill, principally that the proposed reforms will increase risks to the safety of women and girls by men self-declaring as female and accessing women-only spaces. There are also real concerns that the proposals will mean a female healthcare practitioner will no longer be guaranteed for women and girls, even when it is requested.

The freedom to hold the reasonable view that sex and gender are given and immutable and disagree with the idea of gender as fluid and separable from biological sex should be upheld. Particularly for those who work in education, healthcare, the prison service, or as marriage celebrants who, from both reasonable and religious perspectives, hold an understanding of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. – Bishops’ Conference of Scotland

Show me any relationship … that helps build a better relationship when you cut people off or you spend your life yelling and screaming at them. How does that really change anything? 

The reality is you get progress in any relationship and actually progress on important things from climate change and trade to whatever when you have a good working relationship not when you’re standing at ten paces and shouting with each other. – Sir John Key

In 2010, Parliament legislated to increase the price of cigarettes 10 per cent a year plus inflation. In March 2010, the average pack of 25 cigarettes cost $13.46. Today that pack costs $38.30.

The cost of cigarettes has triggered a crime wave.

Crime is going to get a lot worse. – Richard Prebble

The sale of tobacco will still be legal in New Zealand provided its nicotine free.

Drinkers drink for the alcohol. Smokers smoke for the nicotine.

It is daydreaming to believe that when tobacco is nicotine-less and cigarettes taste like sawdust smokers will kick the habit.

When the only way to get a real smoke is from illegal tobacco, that is what smokers will buy. Organised crime will not stop their criminality at the supply of illegal tobacco. Prohibition corrupts society. – Richard Prebble

Reducing the price of cigarettes would reduce child poverty. Tax cigarettes so they are not cheap but not so expensive they are worth robbing for.

Reducing the tax would end ram raids.

The decision to reduce the number of outlets able to sell tobacco to 600 is Labour’s casual discrimination against rural New Zealand. It is 18km to our nearest supermarket. It would devastate our community if our dairy closes.

Politicians make poor decisions when they first create the advertising slogan and then try to get the policy to fit. Officials and ministers set an “aspirational goal”. Then they set a target date far enough ahead so they cannot be held responsible.- Richard Prebble

The Health Department has admitted New Zealand will not be smoke-free by 2025. Instead of admitting the goal was never realistic Labour has doubled down.

Without the absurd Smokefree 2025 goal, the Government could have pointed out smoking is going the same way as chewing tobacco. Labour could have even eased back on the tax. Instead, Labour is introducing prohibition.

Do not believe that as a non-smoker this does not affect you. Today it is Lake Rotoma and my caravan. Next it will be your neighbourhood. Labour has legislated to make New Zealand the Chicago of the South Pacific. – Richard Prebble

According to a recent paper in The Lancet, deaths attributable to excess heat in England and Wales between 2000 and 2019 numbered 791, while those attributable to excess cold numbered 60,573—80 times as many. Nor is Britain the only country in which the threat to health from cold is much greater than that from heat. A previous paper in the same journal found this to be a worldwide phenomenon. What is certain is that restrictive policies with regard to energy resources and exploration such as those followed by successive British governments, cowed by middle-class ecological warriors and perhaps influenced in another way by special interest groups, will lead in the near future to many preventable deaths, if they are not already doing so. –  Theodore Dalrymple

National has publicly said we will not privatise water assets, and the reason why is simple. These assets belong to councils and their ratepayers. This Government is happy to seize them from councils, but National will not. – Stuart Smith

In 2022, free speech in the West has been under attack from two sides: from Islamist extremists who occasionally try to kill people whose words offend them, and from woke culture warriors who constantly seek to cancel those whose opinions they find offensive.

The threats are different: one seeks to take your life, the other to take your livelihood and public standing. But these two strains of intolerance, the Islamists and the illiberal liberals, have formed an unholy alliance to wage jihad against free speech. – Mike Hume

A handful of Islamist terrorists have gained confidence from the weakness of support for free speech in the West. They are parasites, feeding off the spinelessness of our allegedly liberal establishment. – Mike Hume

But we should all be angry about what has been done to free speech in 2022. The underlying message of debates about everything from trans rights to Twitter is that ‘too much’ free speech is dangerous, that people are too free to speak their minds. In reality, that state of affairs exists nowhere on Earth.

Our phoney liberal luminaries have refused to stand up for Rushdie and defend free speech against its mortal enemies and have sought to censor those whose opinions they deem blasphemous – all while insisting that cancel culture does not really exist. Little wonder that free speech, the lifeblood of a civilised society, has been on life support through 2022. – Mike Hume

Five-year-olds setting off in New Zealand, irrespective of their circumstances, should have an experience of public services that enables them to have a shot at the New Zealand dream. – Christopher Luxon

Part of being an MP was to take that vision and identify how best to reform the law and Government policies, programmes and spending to do better for people and the planet.

That’s the problem for Green Party MPs: they enter Parliament espousing a vision for  the planet so lofty that  only a limited number of voters relate to it.

Trapping rats, stoats and possums is well and good, but the average  voter has to earn the daily crust, pay the rent, cloth and educate the family, before thinking  of “better care for the  oceans”, important  though that be for the future of the planet.

Similarly, “changing the way we farm” is an important Green objective, even though it means  a  lower income both for the ordinary farmer and for NZ Inc. – Point of Order

Today we contend that our democracy will be strengthened by the departure of MPs who have cast their votes in support of legislation that erodes it. – Point of Order

There are seminal moments when aspiring politicians finally look as if they have the makings of being a prime minister.

For National leader Christopher Luxon this came on the last day of Parliament for 2022 when he rose to his feet and delivered a powerful statesmanlike response to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who had earlier addressed MPs in the debating chamber through a virtual link from Kiev. – Fran O’Sullivan

Until that point, Luxon had appeared like a one-trick pony, consumed by the need to improve New Zealand’s economic performance and the cost of living crisis, which he had successfully imprinted on the public as a scourge that the Labour Government needed to do something about — to the point where Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Finance Minister Grant Robertson (after denying a crisis existed) moved to adopt some of his own language and took action to ameliorate the financial impact on ordinary New Zealanders. – Fran O’Sullivan

But much of his credibility as National’s leader has been built on the tight discipline he has imposed on his caucus and an almost Singaporean approach to policy development, which was obvious from when he had led Ardern’s Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council before he quit as Air New Zealand CEO to enter politics.

He recognises that forming a successful Government to tackle major economic and social challenges, a deglobalising world and climate change depends on him first developing a strong and cohesive team in which the electorate has confidence.

The Prime Minister has greater verbal finesse and emotional power and a reputation as an international stateswoman far beyond these shores. But on December 14, it was Luxon who impressed more so than Ardern. – Fran O’Sullivan

In Parliament, it was Luxon who adopted the Prime Minister’s own language by using words like “moral courage” and criticising the United Nations.

It was also Luxon who described the conflict as being bigger than a war between Russia and Ukraine. “It is a moral as well as a physical battle” … an “existential threat to Ukraine” … “a conflict between brutality or diplomacy, autocracy and democracy”. – Fran O’Sullivan

It is still early days for Luxon’s leadership but his compelling performance on the last day of Parliament demonstrates that Ardern cannot afford to cede territory to him — particularly that on which she has built her own reputation. – Fran O’Sullivan

Concerns I have of the organisation are: there are too few social workers within the frontline; the policies and procedures written for the organisation have too many gaps and are ignored by staff at times; the legislation seems to be ignored; and the hierarchy are too quick to place the blame at the feet of the social workers when things go wrong. – A longtime Oranga Tamariki employee

For a long time practice has been driven by key performance indicators such as you might have in a factory. This will never work with a role that involves contact with humans and building of relationships. I am not saying this would give carte blanche to keeping a case open, but there needs to be recognition of how many unique children can be effectively worked with and kept on a case load to ensure their needs can be identified and their safety assured. – A longtime Oranga Tamariki employee

Most of the difficulty for me came from the absolute lack of resources available to keep tamariki and rangatahi safe and free from ongoing harm, where we had no option but to try and cobble together a safe place for them made up of rotating caregivers and motel units.

The amount of paperwork and requests that have to be completed to see if there is a one per cent chance of getting a better outcome, whilst leaving the office at the end of the day and wondering if the young person would be dead the next day, was the burden of social workers, but also of their supervisors, practice leader and manager. – A longtime Oranga Tamariki employee

The profession of social worker is one of hope and as social workers we have an obligation to be hope providers.

Unfortunately it seems this very simple role is not supported by an organisation who are critical of the role of social workers and I question whether those in the higher echelons even understand what social workers do. To blame and shame appears to be the culture.

The values of the organisation do not seem to extend to those working within the organisation and I liken working within Oranga Tamariki to being in a whānau impacted by family harm, where the youngest social workers are at risk of significant harm and who are learning the ways of the oldest. – A longtime Oranga Tamariki employee

There were nearly 300 water engineer positions advertised on recruitment website Seek last month. The high demand for these specialist engineers bodes ill for the government’s Three Waters reform, which will rely heavily on experts the country currently doesn’t have in the required numbers.

The shortage mirrors the situation in other construction fields. Time and again, staff shortages have affected major infrastructure projects in New Zealand. It’s a chronic problem that needs addressing urgently. – Suzanne Wilkinson and Rod Cameron

We have already identified that many government projects are delayed or postponed because of unfilled skills gaps in the construction sector. Without adequate long-term planning and good data, when huge projects like Three Waters disrupt the industry, skills shortages are the predictable outcome. – Suzanne Wilkinson and Rod Cameron

These radical Māori Activists, Separatists, Supremacists or whatever you call them are fanatical about their agendas and are dedicated to playing a long game. Their goal is to divide New Zealand and separate Māori from other New Zealanders and rule over them, they believe that is their right.

It’s hard to comprehend how someone could believe they are entitled to rule over other ethnicities, to own the beaches, or even the sky as some tried, and I think Kiwis have also failed to comprehend the genuine threat posed by people with that world view. They are fanatics who have put their interests so far ahead of other New Zealanders that their mindset is aggressively narcissistic, they either don’t care or can’t comprehend how their agenda harms other New Zealanders, and their reflex action to anyone who opposes their agenda is to threaten and abuse and play the race card.

When confronted with this level of narcissistic aggression, there is no choice but to actively defend your rights as they are incessantly looking for ways to promote their agendas to elevate themselves above other New Zealanders. – John Franklin

New Zealand has not been just a Māori and European country for a century, we are a multicultural democracy and have significant populations of New Zealanders with Chinese, Indian and Polynesian ancestry. Unfortunately, Māori activists refuse to accept that all New Zealanders are equal, they don’t want equality or democracy where they are limited to one vote each.

There is no doubt that Te Reo and Māori culture needs to be supported, it’s an important part of New Zealand’s multicultural history but I also have no doubt that Māori can keep their culture and language alive without it being our Official language or forcing it down non-Māori’s throats. – John Franklin

If you need any more proof that the Ardern Labour government is out of control, then look no further than MP Duncan Webb’s Private Members’ Bill[i] that seeks to inject its woke socialist agenda into corporate governance with possibly disastrous long term ramifications for shareholders, investors and the wider economy.

The Companies (Directors Duties) Amendment Bill meddles with the fundamental principle of company law that directors must act in good faith and in the best interests of the company[ii] (ie the owners) by “making clear that when a director determines what is in the best interests of the company that he or she may take into account recognised environmental, social and governance factors”[iii].

As may be expected, the “recognised factors” bolster the Left’s socialist manifesto: – Sarah Taylor

The Bill which nods to directors that they can or should implement their pet radical agendas could seriously impact the wider economy as it would affect not only ordinary business corporations but would apply to directors of Kiwisaver PIE funds and other large funds governed by the Financial Markets Conduct Act 2013[iv]. – Sarah Taylor

We need to look no further than to our government Superfund managers. There has been little, if any, critical commentary concerning recent moves by the $55bn (and shrinking) fund which has divested itself of long-term exposure to fossil fuel reserves as part of a “sustainability” push. Given the sheer impracticality of zero carbon, Chief investment officer Stephen Gilmore’s confidence that fund’s performance will not be adversely affected [x]is on face value half-baked if not wilfully ignorant. But this half-baked approach, which will cost both future retirees and taxpayers dearly, is already being followed by large private sector PIE investment funds implementing climate, diversity, inclusion and equity agendas.

Importantly, such fund managers can weaponise large investor capital pools under management to hijack company boards with the intention of forcing conversion to the “green economy” such as halting oil or coal extraction, leaving minority shareholders with little or no redress. – Sarah Taylor

Specific mention of the Treaty also introduces massive fishhooks for minority shareholders and creditors of the thousands of iwi controlled companies which might introduce maori co-governance, advisory boards, cultural affirmation hires and tikanga practices.

Non-iwi controlled companies, publically named and shamed for lack of adherence to the Treaty or diversity, are also likely submit to the woke onslaught. – Sarah Taylor

The Companies (Directors Duties) Amendment Bill is a wolf in sheep’s clothing with possibly disastrous long term ramifications for shareholders, investors and the wider economy. National and ACT should put this Bill near the top of their list for repeal in 2023. – Sarah Taylor

One of the most disturbing aspects of race-based politics is the difficulty many citizens have in taking racially-driven change seriously. This is particularly the case when the manner in which racial matters have been defined and discussed changes abruptly. Assumptions upon which people have come to rely are deemed mistaken, even dangerous, and they are required to embrace a whole new set of assumptions.
Unsurprisingly, the ethnic groups targeted by these new assumptions will be profoundly affected by such dramatic shifts in moral and political judgement. If it is an ethnic minority being singled-out, then many of its members will become fearful. But, if the assumptions of the majority are being challenged, then many of its members will become extremely angry. Most citizens, however, will struggle to take such shifts seriously. Those making them will be branded extremists, and dismissed accordingly. – Chris Trotter

The evolution of racial politics in New Zealand has arrived at its own moment of radically altered assumptions. The notion that the colonial state, and the institutions it bequeathed to the nation of New Zealand, are insulated from serious challenge, both by the passage of historical time, and the shared beliefs and values of Māori and Pakeha, is itself being challenged.

An elite coalition of Māori nationalists, backed by sympathetic Pakeha intellectuals located strategically in New Zealand’s judicial, state, academic and media apparatus, has launched an ambitious attempt to “decolonise” the thinking of its Pakeha population, and “indigenise” the cultural, educational, administrative, and economic institutions of “Aotearoa”. This revolutionary constitutional reconfiguration, like the deconstruction of Jim Crow in the American South, is to be carried out with the consent of the white population, if possible; or without it, if necessary.

The key question raised by this strategy is whether or not enough New Zealanders can be convinced of the need for revolutionary constitutional change to overwhelm – either democratically or physically – the objections of those determined to preserve the status quo. – Chris Trotter

A race-driven revolution in New Zealand will succeed only if those promoting it are committed, and seen to be committed, to building a future in which what you are is of less importance that who you are. In Nazi Germany and the American South, what you were, Jew or Aryan, White or Black, was all that mattered. If New Zealand is a nation in which the assumptions of racial equality still hold sway, then any attempt to privilege the ethnic origins of its citizens over their common humanity must end in failure. If, however, a decisive majority of New Zealanders reject racial equality, then the serious consequences of the revolutionary, race-based constitution that is sure to follow will not be slow in manifesting themselves. – Chris Trotter

At the moment most of the New Zealand population continues to work on the assumption that Māori and Pakeha see each other as equals not adversaries. If they think about co-governance at all, they assume that it is simply a matter of giving Māori a stronger voice in matters that matter to them. Very few Pakeha appreciate that being “decolonised” and “indigenised” is something that will be done to them, in order to change them. When they finally work that out, things could get ugly. – Chris Trotter

We all know, only too well, that Jacinda Ardern is spoilt for choice when it comes to blunderers, incompetents and wastrels to staff her cabinet. In fact, you could say, “Her cup runneth over!”- John Porter

These days, millions of people in Ukraine and the world celebrate Christmas. The appearance of the Son of God gave people hope for salvation, faith in the victory of goodness and mercy.

Unfortunately, all the holidays have a bitter aftertaste for us this year. And we can feel the traditional Spirit of Christmas differently. Dinner at the family table cannot be so tasty and warm. There may be empty chairs around it. And our houses and streets can’t be so bright. And Christmas bells can ring not so loudly and inspiringly. Through air raid sirens, or even worse – gunshots and explosions. And all this together can pose a bigger threat. It is a disappointment. Of the higher forces and their power, of goodness and justice in the world. Loss of hope. Loss of love. Loss of myself…

But isn’t this what evil and darkness, which have taken up arms against us, want in their essence?

We have been resisting them for more than three hundred days and eight years. And will we allow them to achieve what they want?

In this battle, we have another powerful and effective weapon. The hammer and sword of our spirit and consciousness. The wisdom of God. Courage and bravery. Virtues that incline us to do good and overcome evil.

The main act of courage is endurance and completion of one’s work to the end, despite everything. The truth illuminates our path. We know it. We defend it. Our truth is a struggle for freedom. Freedom comes at a high price. But slavery has an even higher price.

Our path is illuminated by faith and patience. Patience and faith. These are twin forces. As it was said, “he who rules and controls his own spirit, is better than he who captures a city.” To endure does not mean to accept the circumstances. Patience is watching to make sure that we don’t let any doubt or fear into our minds. It is faith in one’s own strength.

Evil has no weapon stronger than the armor given to us by God. Evil smashes against this armor like a stone wall. We have seen this more than once. We endured at the beginning of the war. We endured attacks, threats, nuclear blackmail, terror, missile strikes. Let’s endure this winter because we know what we are fighting for.

We go forward through the thorns to the stars, knowing what awaits us at the end of the road. God is a just Judge who rewards good and punishes evil. Which side we are on is obvious. Who is who in this battle is obvious. There are at least seven proofs of this – they are known – “A proud look, a lying tongue, And hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, Feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, And he that soweth discord among brethren.” We oppose all this. Being a role model for others. The faithful, that is, those who really believe, must be a light to the rest of the world. For more than three hundred days, Ukrainians have been striving for this, proving it, serving as an example to others. We are not righteous, not holy, but we are definitely fighting for good and fighting for the light, with faith in Bible prophecy:

“Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill made low. The crooked roads shall become straight, the rough ways smooth. The people who walk in darkness will see a bright light. The light will shine on those who live in the land of death’s shadow. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given!”

We believe that tears will be replaced by joy, hope will come after despair, and death will be defeated by life.

Today and all future winter holidays we meet in difficult circumstances. Someone will see the first star in the sky over Bakhmut, Rubizhne, and Kreminna today. Along thousands of kilometers of the front line. Someone is on the road, on the way – from the Ukrainian-Polish border to Kherson region or Zaporizhzhia. Someone will see it through the bullet holes of his or her own home. Someone will celebrate the holiday in other people’s homes, but strange people’s homes – homes of Ukrainians who gave shelter to Ukrainians. In Zakarpattia, Bukovyna, Lviv region, Ivano-Frankivsk region and many other regions. Someone will hear Shchedryk in another language – in Warsaw, Berlin, London, New York, Toronto and many other cities and countries. And someone will meet this Christmas in captivity, but let them remember that we are also coming for our people, we will return freedom to all Ukrainian men and women.

Wherever we are, we will be together today. And together we will look at the evening sky. And together we will remember the morning of February 24. Let’s remember how much we have passed. Let’s remember Azovstal, Irpin, Bucha, Kramatorsk, Snake Island, Chornobayivka, Izium, Kherson. We make a wish. One for all. And we will feel joy. One for all. And we will understand the truth. One for all. About the fact that no kamikaze drones are capable of extinguishing the Christmas Dawn. We will see its glow even underground in a bomb shelter. We will fill our hearts with warmth and light. No Kinzhal missile can hurt them. They will break against our steel spirit. And our struggle will continue without stopping. It is not threatened by planned or emergency blackouts. And we will never feel a shortage of courage and indomitability.

We have experienced a lot of bitter news and will deservedly receive good news. We will sing Christmas carols – cheerier than ever – louder than the sound of a generator. We will hear the voices and greetings of relatives – in our hearts – even if communication service and the Internet are down. And even in total darkness – we will find each other – to hug each other tightly. And if there is no heat, we will give a big hug to warm each other.

We will celebrate our holidays! As always. We will smile and be happy. As always. The difference is one. We will not wait for a miracle. After all, we create it ourselves.

Christ is born! Let’s praise Him!  – President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

One of the reasons I think I feel so much for the Ukranians and their predicament is because they are the underdog. They are the weedy kid in the schoolyard being monstered by the bully. They didn’t ask for this. This isn’t an internal civil war, like so many are. This is a war of territorial aggression by a bigger power. There should be no place for such military imperialism in the 21st century. Ukrainians just wanted the quiet life, a chance to grow up peacefully and provide for their families. They weren’t threatening anybody.

Thank goodness America and Europe have stood up so far to support them. There is no shame in that. We ourselves live in a country which has never had the means to defend itself without outside help. – Steven Joyce

My hope for 2023 is that Ukraine is victorious. That it is able to push the aggressor back behind his own borders sufficiently that he won’t attack his neighbours again. That all the people who have given their lives in the defence of their country and its right to exist don’t die in vain. That every freedom-loving democracy maintains its resolve, and provides enough support to the Ukranians to enable them to complete their mission.

That includes us. Our help so far has been too meagre.

Anything less than full-throated support for Ukraine means Putin, or whichever KGB clone eventually replaces him, will feel emboldened to try this criminal stunt again.

If Ukraine is able to send the Russian army and their assorted henchmen packing, even if nothing else positive happens, 2023 will have been a good year. For the world, for people who value freedom and independence, and for any small country that risks being monstered by a bigger one.

Slava Ukraine and slava all Ukrainians. This Kiwi is thinking of you all this holiday period. – Steven Joyce

Now in Sturgeon’s Scotland the rights of rape victims come a distant second place to rapists’ hurt feelings. This is what the ‘right side of history’ looks like. Scotland has become a warning to the world. Virtue-signalling rots the brain – and the soul. – Tom Slater 

The laptop elites. The pyjama classes. It’s hard to know what to call the new establishment. Those upper-middle-class graduates who make up the knowledge economy. Who think tweeting is a job. Who have faithfully imbibed every woke mantra, from ‘Trans women are women’ to ‘Wear your mask!’. Who are waited on hand and foot by the precariat of Deliveroo and Amazon. Who loathe the old economy – the one that actually makes things – for its unsightly footprint on the planet. And who loved lockdown. Six months making sourdough bread for your Instagram Stories while still getting paid for whatever it is you do for a job? What’s not to like?

Whatever we call them, there’s no doubting these folk had a rude awakening in 2022. For this was a year of almost constant rumbling and revolting against the laptop elites by farmers, deliverymen, truckers – you know, people who make food and maintain infrastructure and make it possible for the pyjama people to get online and share their pronouns. The reality of working-class anger rudely intruded into the fantasy lives of the elites this year, and it was brilliant. – Brendan O’Neill

Yes, numerous local factors shaped that uprising. But much of the immiseration of the Sri Lankan people was the warped handiwork of the virtue-signallers of global institutions. Their unhinged eco-myopia, their belief that societies the world over must make sacrifices to the god of Net Zero, was especially pernicious for Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka was pressured to become a Net Zero nation. It banned the import of chemical fertilisers in order to make its farming practices more ‘organic’. This was a borderline psychotic policy in a nation where 90 per cent of farmers use fertiliser. The impact was predictably dire. Rice production fell by 43 per cent. Inflation hit a 47-month high. It was proof of how witlessly cruel laptop environmentalism can be. When the anti-industrial prejudices of unworldly global elites are elevated above the needs of workers in the developing world, the result is more poverty and hunger. The Sri Lankan revolt was as much against the insanities of Net Zero as against their own out-of-touch rulers. –Brendan O’Neill

Everywhere one looked in 2022, ordinary people were agitating against the New Normal. Against the world of less, inflicted on us by cosseted elites and their policies of over-long lockdowns and Net Zero. These were stirring populist statements, and it surely surprised no one that they took place outside the structures of the old left. A left that’s more obsessed with pronouns than production has nothing remotely useful to say to the global working class. This year, we witnessed a revolution of the real, an intrusion of concrete matters of production, transportation and living standards into the post-truth zones inhabited by elites who think biology is a myth, industry is death and farming is a plague. May the fightback of reality continue in 2023. – Brendan O’Neill

Right now, if they’re lucky enough not to be among the increasing number of food-insecure Kiwis, New Zealanders across our fair land are about to indulge in an annual marathon of food foraging and preparation, ending with Sunday’s Christmas feast.

This marathon involves the inevitable queues, at supermarkets, butchers, and pick-your-own-berries farms, followed by a frenzy of glazing, egg-beating and roasting before kith and kin sit down to eat.

Which provides the perfect opportunity to consider how our attitudes to food, and specifically the size and weight of those who consume it, are killing us, literally.

Because inherent in the food we eat is a modern-day morality tale centred on judgment and persecution. – Janet Wilson

Obesity differed across ethnic groups, with 71.3% of Pasifika people considered obese, 50.8% of Māori, 31.9% of Pākehā and 18.5% of Asians. The survey found those living in the most deprived areas were 1.6 times more likely to be obese than those living in the least deprived.

You may be reading those statistics and having your own Louise Wallace moment but here’s the thing – that judgment translates into negative attitudes, which means that the obese don’t lose weight and those of so-called ‘normal weight’ are more likely to become obese. – Janet Wilson

The antidote to the diet industry (now transformed into the wellness industry), and to assigning food groups into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories, is the concept of Health At Every Size (HAES). This recognises that your weight doesn’t necessarily determine how healthy you are. It encourages healthy, mindful eating that doesn’t have a forbidden food list, alongside movement you enjoy.

It also acknowledges that genetics influences weight, as does height, skin colour and body type. – Janet Wilson

So this Christmas, let’s abandon any notions of how size equates to personal worth. Avoid commenting on anyone’s size or shape.

Because the food we eat is designed to bring us together, not tear us apart.

And food is one place where politics simply doesn’t belong. – Janet Wilson

Rearranging the deckchairs may be politically expedient but will not fix the problem. – Merran Davis

When I called on Minister Chris Hipkins to appoint a commissioner, I said I was concerned they would appoint people like themselves. They did and worse – they appointed themselves into a growing echo chamber of dysfunction.

It is galling people can perform so poorly, as multiple public reports have shown, yet not be held to account.  

Particularly those who have had multiple lucrative public sector appointments in education and local government contexts and built their reputations on them. – Merran Davis

To be successful, Te Pūkenga needs strong governance and leadership, not people in Teflon suits who get multiple chances to make major mistakes while the sector continues to suffer.

There is a very high human and financial cost to failed transformation which never recovers through subsequent fixes and needs significant additional resources.

With cynicism at an all-time high and confidence an all-time low in the sector, Minister Hipkins must acknowledge he got it wrong and get different people around the table, or his legacy will be the politician who failed vocational education and New Zealand for generations to come. –Merran Davis

Becoming a minister in election year is a suicidal appointment. – Richard Prebble

“Yes Minister” is not a comedy, it’s a tragedy. The civil service has its own agenda.

In election year civil servants can easily delay a project they do not like. The civil service has been known to take advantage of a green minister to advance their pet projects. – Richard Prebble

There is never a bad time to sack a poor minister. – Richard Prebble

Here is the problem. Reshuffling the responsibilities of junior ministers like the Minister for the Community and Voluntary sector, who is Priyanca Radhakrishnan, will not change anything. She is not responsible for Labour’s low polling. She can’t be. She has done nothing.

Jacinda Ardern is not going to sack the senior ministers who are responsible for inflation, runaway government expenditure, rising crime and co-governance.

We the voters will have to do a real cabinet reshuffle by sacking them all. – Richard Prebble

I choose to forgive her, because I believe compassion and forgiveness is justice in itself.

It’s another form of justice. – Abdirashid Farah Abdi

A year into this, I know I didn’t get diabetes because I am fat, despite what men on Twitter like to say. There are dozens of factors that combined to this outcome, including my genetics, my lifestyle, and my hormones. I also know that none of those things have anything to do with my character or worth – and gosh, that really is self care. – Megan Whelan

It shows that while a walk might be suitable for all ages, people need to have respect for the land. – Sergeant Tory Press

Why did we spend last summer in the trenches, and this summer in the sunshine?

It’s not because we weren’t prepared last summer; in fact, the opposite is true. The simple answer is that last summer the Prime Minister’s messaging was all about fighting Covid. This summer, her spin is to play it down and live la dolce vita by the seaside.

The financial and personal costs of Covid misjudgement are staggering. The question is; why would this Government be better at handling anything else? –  Brooke van Velden

Three wood burners? So, not living in the 76 m2 of the average British new build then?

And that’s the bit that should perturb. Antinomianism. Absolutely none of these people who insist upon “protecting” nature and restricting building ever actually live in the floorspaces they insist the proles are to be allowed. This isn’t specific to George either. And the solution is only going to come when everyone in the planning process, from PM to Parish Councillor, every planning bureaucrat, is forced to live, with their entire families, in the sort of shite they insist is good enough for everyone else. – Tim Worstall

If 2022 has been the year of the “woman”, it is a tale with two different final chapters: one hopeful, one less so. The first is set in a distant country, where an archaic, theocratic regime threatens to be toppled by women throwing down their hijabsand demanding their emancipation. The second plays out in a more familiar setting but in an unfamiliar language; a Western nation where the word “woman” itself no longer has any meaning, its definition rewritten to include “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”.

This is the paradox of the past 12 months: the existence of women is being questioned in the very place where female emancipation has come furthest, while in places where women remain shackled to medieval notions of honour and chastity, true feminism is at its strongest. – Ayaan Hirsi Ali 

Those who would divorce “woman” from its biological implications often present their ideas as innocuous. They are, we are told, simply champions of “inclusion”. But their ideology is hardly uncontroversial, and surrendering to it is not harmless. – Ayaan Hirsi Ali 

A word of clarification. I am immensely sympathetic to the plight of transgender people and believe they ought to have the same moral and legal rights as everyone else. To be against militant trans activists’ gender ideology is not to be transphobic. Rather, it is simply to agree, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie succinctly put it, that “trans women are trans women”. Adichie was savaged for this and other statements evincing wrongthink, but acknowledging that trans women are distinct from women, that there are potential conflicts between their rights, and that gender ideology opens the door to abusive men masquerading as women, should not be controversial. Standing up for the rights of transgender people should not mean pretending sex does not exist altogether.

Indulging in this fantasy can have perverse, and dangerous, repercussions — both at home and abroad. – Ayaan Hirsi Ali 

Is it really a coincidence that, in the same year the West forgot what it means to be a woman, we decided it was acceptable to turn our backs on women in those countries? The above is what happens when a society stops caring what it means to be a woman; when a centuries-old fight for emancipation becomes relegated to semantics. Of course, this takes a different form in Kenya, Iran and Afghanistan. But there still seem to me to be similarities between today’s gender activists and theocratic subjugators. Both believe, on the basis of a contentious ideology, that they have a monopoly on truth. And both, in a sense, are champions of the subjective over the objective: in one case, particular religious beliefs are said to tell us how society should be run — and in the other, mere feelings are said to abolish material reality.

This is why gender ideology advocates are a threat not just to women but to Western ideals, too. Western culture prides itself on the achievements of the Enlightenment and science — in other words, on objectivity. It was on an objective basis that previous generations of feminists staked their claim: their plight was based on an appeal to reason. Now, so-called “progressives” — another term that has been redefined into meaninglessness — stake their claim on subjective feelings and happily ignore or dismiss its material effects. – Ayaan Hirsi Ali 

If the spirit of true feminism is to be reclaimed, we need more JK Rowlings and fewer Ketanji Brown Jacksons.

It is not just feminism and the rights of women that are at stake here: so, too, are the best ideals of the West itself. If 2022 is the year of the “woman”, let’s hope 2023 will be the year when we can delete those quotation marks. – Ayaan Hirsi Ali 

Quotes of the month

The government is quite happy to pay $280 a person to get you out of your car and onto a slow train, with a hopelessly inconveniently schedule, to drop you off at a station where you don’t want to be, at a time of the day that does not suit you.

That certainly does sound like Labour Party policy! – Frank Newman

The truth is that “far-Right” is an entirely arbitrary term, used to disparage any politician or party whose policies the left-leaning commentariat dislikes – or perhaps more precisely, fears.– Karl du Fresne

“Far-Right” is often used in connection with the equally damning word “populist”. But a populist politician, by definition, is one who appeals to the people. Isn’t that the essence of democracy?

Here, I suspect, is the core of the problem. “Populist” is used as a derogatory term because the progressive elite, deep down, don’t trust democracy and don’t think ordinary people, ignorant proles that they are, can be relied on to make the right choices.

For the same reason, the political elite want to control the public conversation by regulating what we are allowed to say or hear. Uninhibited political debate is dangerous. People might get the wrong ideas – hence the moral panic over disinformation.

Do the journalists and academics who so freely use the misleading term “far Right” realise that the world has moved on from the days when it described fringe nationalist groups with little hope of electoral success? Possibly not.

I think they’re in denial. They don’t want to admit that the so-called far Right has moved to the political centre, and that this is an entirely natural and predictable reaction to stifling left-wing authoritarianism. – Karl du Fresne

People who know they are forcing a majority of the people to accept policies demanded by a minority, will always, under pressure, fall back on the blunt interrogatives of political power: Who has it, and who is willing to use it?

That’s why it is so easy to finish a sentence that begins, “As a governor”, with the words: “it is my will that prevails – not yours.” Easy, but a perilously long way from New Zealand’s egalitarian political traditions. – Chris Trotter

That 16 per cent of the population will get to decide exclusively what is best for the remaining 84 per cent in the management of water and water infrastructure — built up over many generations by ratepayers and taxpayers, both Māori and non-Māori alike — is outrageously divisive and entirely undemocratic. – Graham Adams

The solution is a political one. No amount of polite protest will change the fact that the only solution is to remove the Labour Party from government. That opportunity presents itself next year. Co-governance is shaping up to be a very important election issue.- Graham Adams

Realistically, no amount of arm waving and foot stomping to the Panel is going to make any difference. Nanaia Mahuta has set a course on co-governance and the Future for Local Government report is part of that agenda, as detailed in He Puapua.

The solution is a political one. No amount of polite protest will change the fact that the only solution is to remove the Labour Party from government. That opportunity presents itself next year. Co-governance is shaping up to be a very important election issue. – Frank Newman

We’re seeing, for example, that companies are trying to dierentiate themselves on CO2 emissions per kilogram of product. But the significance of this indicator is very limited, because the value of a food is largely determined by the nutrients it contains. This indicator takes no account of this. Mineral water, for example, can have a low CO2 emissions level, but you can’t live on it. There are no or hardly any nutrients in it. That’s why there’s no point to comparing the CO2 emissions per kilogram of a soft drink to that of milk. Or of bananas to meat. – Stephan Peters

Comparisons based on a single nutrient like protein are too limited. You can’t base a healthy diet on protein alone. We need a combination of many dierent nutrients to stay healthy. By quantifying the most important nutrients in a product, you can attain a new ecological footprint. The so-called Nutrient Rich Food (NRF) scores are one example. A product’s contribution to the daily requirements of the consumer can be calculated based on a summation of the nutritional benefits of that product. Products with a high NRF score have a lot of added value for our health. This also means that for products with low NRF scores, we have to eat more of them, which often means more unwanted calories and a higher footprint. By using the NRF scores in the ecological footprint of foods, you can connect ecological footprint to a product’s health benefits. This sometimes provides a different picture than you would expect from the ecological footprint per kilogram – Stephan Peters

When you combine the ecological footprint with the NRF scores, these plant-based substitutes show a less positive picture. Of course there are many nuances here, but this makes clear that nutritional value and (micro)nutrients have to be included when comparing products in terms of sustainability. – Stephan Peters

Extremism is bound to thrive when dissent is suppressed by members of a pharisaical caste that takes upon itself the right to determine what others may read and hear. – Karl du Fresne

The reasons for Local Government appearing to be so dysfunctional all over the country – starts and finishes around a council table. Quite some years ago there was little or no obvious political affiliations as councillors put aside their back grounds and or political beliefs. Recent past elections have seen overtly Green and Labour candidates standing for election which draws into question exactly who they represent and whether the oath of office is little more than a meaningless formality as they take their place around the council table. The battle lines are therefore drawn before debate is enacted as predictable attitudes soon manifest themselves. It’s called predetermination and that is a root cause of council acrimony. To make matters worse, councils are now compelled to accept unelected representatives (Maori) to promote a singular point of view alongside those who must act in the wider interests of the region/district. The oath of office -sworn by councillors – is not required of the Maori appointees. The call for more diversity and broader representation is a nonsense. Given the size of councils balance sheet, it is knowledge, judgment and experience that matters – not age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or street address. – Gerry Eckhoff

Trust and integrity of process are the hall marks of a well-functioning democracy. There can be no place for those who seek authority and power for their own sake. The situations in China and Russia, where the seedlings of democracy are crushed under the tyranny of false authority and weaponry – must serve as a reminder to us all that our freedoms start – not just with local government but with those who also serve – by challenge and protest. – Gerry Eckhoff

None of the significant changes undermining democracy and our Kiwi way of life, that are being introduced through He Puapua have received a mandate from the public. The restructuring of health, polytechnics, and water services are all illegitimate policy changes designed to pass control to the tribal elite. None have public approval, and all should be repealed by the next government.

In this climate of division created by Jacinda Ardern, key institutions are being corrupted from their original purpose of serving all New Zealanders as equals, to prioritising and privileging those of Maori descent. Under her leadership, democracy is being replaced by apartheid. – Muriel Newman

Of all the forms of pollution that harm this world, that of noise seems to gain the least attention, perhaps because we have no one to blame for so much of it but ourselves, preferring as we do to concentrate on harms for which we can blame others. – Theodore Dalrymple

The English have always taken their pleasures sadly, but now they take them first noisily, then antisocially, then forgetfully. Several times I have heard young people claim to have had a wonderful time the night before, the evidence for which is that they can remember nothing whatever of it. On this view of things, death is the final, eternal nightclub. – Theodore Dalrymple

Who’s taking any notice of the laws? Answer – no one. They couldn’t give a crap.

 And why would they? There are no consequences in this country for anything anymore so why fear authority or rules or laws? Even ram raiders get a wraparound hug and a meeting rather than any kind of law enforcement.

Being young means being off the hook. Kids know it, their mates know it, the parents know it. So why are we surprised when they don’t follow the rules?  – Kate Hawkesby 

There’s more youth in trouble than there is aid. And despite all the best efforts of Youth Aid and their valiant attempts at restorative justice and rehabilitation, we have a major problem in this country with disenfranchised youth. – Kate Hawkesby 

I despair that we are now just in a cycle of youth trouble equals Youth Aid, and that’s it. The forgotten word here is – consequences. – Kate Hawkesby 

There is a sense however that Ardern is attempting to expand the legitimate need for surveillance of a very small group of potentially dangerous individuals to also cover people whose beliefs simply run counter to government policy or to the norms of woke culture.

That suspicion was reinforced by the TVNZ documentary Web of Chaos which looked at the internet’s influence on modern-day life and included what the producers described as “a deep dive into the world of disinformation”. Whilst the documentary made some good points, there were some odd moments, including when the Director of the Disinformation Project made the astonishing claim that Kiwi mothers with interests in children’s clothes, healthy cooking and interior design were being drawn into “white nationalist ideals”. – Thomas Cranmer

We are an important liberal power at a time when illiberal forces in Moscow and Beijing are flexing their brutal and authoritarian muscles on the battlefields of Ukraine, the streets of Hong Kong and across the narrow water of Taiwan.

We have to take the risk of voicing our doubts about decolonisation. It should be open for discussion, open for interrogation. We need to break the spell. – Nigel Biggar

New Zealand sheep farmers have been singled out to bear the brunt of our country’s efforts to stop the planet warming. Our government’s chosen metric is to measure progress by annual emissions. When applied to constant or diminishing emissions of short-lived gasses such as methane, this results in perverse outcomes. – Dave Read

I love farming because it offers unlimited opportunity to use my intellectual and physical skills. I am proud to produce a product that is very close to organic. Our system is on a different planet when compared to feed-lot animals that are fed grain, grown under an industrial farming system awash with fossil fuel. – Dave Read

I produce the same amount of meat from less pasture, and therefore less methane. Since 1990, I have planted willows and poplars for erosion control and now have over 6,000 that will cover 100ha when they are all mature.

Trees are the current feel-good factor, but actually, retiring land to plant is only made economically possible by efficiency gains on the remainder. Conversely, whole farms changed to pine forests are wiping out food production entirely. – Dave Read

I have walked to every corner of the farm and feel an intimate connection to this land. Returning from elsewhere, I get to within 100km of home and feel the land reaching out towards me. When the land suffers under drought or flood, I feel it as a pain in my own body. And I love trees, but when I see whole farms planted in a monoculture of pines, I feel sick to my stomach.

Right now, I feel like a contentious objector must have during the first world war. I am being reviled as an environmental vandal. The news feels like propaganda. – Dave Read

When I do the math, the UN target for ruminant stock works out to a 4.7 per cent reduction for New Zealand. This is under half New Zealand’s target, but no editor will print this fact because ‘readers don’t want complicated maths’, ‘you are not a climate expert’, ‘it would undermine the consensus achieved’.

I am forced to watch sustainable food production (my life’s work) destroyed even though it is expected that 1.4 billion people will be protein-deficient by 2050. I lie awake in the early hours, composing yet another submission to be filed and ignored by group of professional listeners in Wellington (the seat of our government). The road that used to be quiet at 4am roars with logging trucks carrying logs from trees planted in the 90s during the last wave of land-use change. Transport carries on warming the planet; people drive to the store when they could walk; they fly to Sydney for shopping weekends instead of buying local.

Meanwhile my sector, the only sector of New Zealand no longer warming the planet, is being gutted. – Dave Read

Climate change is hugely important. But it just isn’t a substantial prudential risk for the financial system.

There are far bigger financial risks out there. For example, a Reserve Bank that spends too much time playing with its frog-exaggerator when an inflation monster is running wild.  – Eric Crampton

Constant tweaks to immigration settings have contributed to complexity and confusion for migrants and officials. The Government abandoning targets for processing visa applications has led to fewer decisions being made. Immigration NZ’s antiquated legacy processes and teething problems with its new online systems have also played a role. And then there has been the Government’s clunky approach to dealing with pandemic-related backlogs.

Yet these issues are all symptoms rather than the cause. The root of the problem is the Government’s distrust of immigration. It stems from a belief that productivity improvements will come from restricting the supply of migrant labour. Unfortunately, that belief is not founded on economic evidence. And it risks tarnishing our longstanding record as a favoured destination for skilled migrants. – Roger Partridge 

As New Zealand firms and workers battle rising interest rates, a cost of living crisis and geopolitical uncertainty, it is time our Government ended the self-inflicted harm of restrictive immigration settings. – Roger Partridge 

Well-functioning cities should mean higher real wages for workers and better entertainment options. So why are New Zealand’s cities shrinking?

Our cities just do not seem to be working well and that comes down to poor policy decisions.  – Oliver Hartwich

When zoning and consenting make it too hard to build in places where people want to live, work and play, land prices inflate in surprising ways. Turning inner suburbs into museum pieces blocks the dynamic change that lets cities thrive. And banning new subdivisions at the city’s fringes makes the land under downtown apartments more expensive than it should be. – Oliver Hartwich

Councils need incentives to zone ample land for development. It is vital to finance infrastructure well. Then zoning will not introduce artificial scarcity. More competitive land markets unleash opportunities.  – Oliver Hartwich

But don’t expect a vote for NZ First to deliver anything transformational.  From 1996-1998 NZ First was a brake on a National Government continuing with free market liberal reforms, but not a stop. Similarly, from 2005-2008 and from 2017-2020 it was a brake on Labour Governments continuing with growth of the welfare state, but put a foot on the accelerator of economic nationalist interventions.  It was not a brake on Maori nationalism, because the policies now being advanced by the Government had their genesis in 2017-2020 (or earlier in the case of He Puapua).– Liberty Scott:

Surely, in the interests of “partnership”, the rights of private landowners should be honoured or is this another example of everyone being equal, but Māori are more equal than others.- Frank Newman

My view is that bad accidents are the result of a couple of things. Exceedingly bad luck, in other words you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. It isn’t your fault and no amount of advertising and road rules would have stopped it.

And idiots. Whether by madness, booze, drugs, criminal activity, poor cars, or insane behaviour. It’s the stuff that is  preventable, but only if the fool behind the wheel was behaving differently.

Those sort of people are not reached by ads on telly and cops that aren’t on the road. So, back to the question; when we get to the end of the year in a month or so and the toll is up yet again, one of the worst yet again, what then? Another ad agency ?    – Mike Hosking

There are three things that are needed immediately if we are to tackle the huge and growing pile of unmet need in our health system. We need more people in the health workforce, we need more facilities, and we need targets and goals for the facilities we already have. – Steven Joyce

Our Health Minister looks more and more like a tired one-trick pony. His only initiative was to rearrange the bureaucracy and slap a new coat of paint on it, then stand back to wait for it solve the world’s problems.

He ignores that it is infeasible a bureaucracy in Wellington, roundly derided by most who work in the health system, should suddenly be the solution because it is now called “Te Whatu Ora”. Particularly as it exhausted itself changing all the deckchairs around and few people within it yet seem to know how the new entity works. – Steven Joyce

Our health sector needs new thinking, not hidebound technocracy. It needs to be led by someone new with energy and enthusiasm, who is prepared to roll sleeves up and lead from the front.

Someone who stands up for patients and their families, visibly backs the doctors, nurses and other professionals and is prepared to take on entrenched interests like the health unions and medical school duopolies. We don’t need a tired paper pusher. He needs to go. – Steven Joyce

 The effect of three of the judgments in this case is to introduce Maori customs of uncertain definition and unknowable consequences as they existed in 1840 as a third arm of the common law of New Zealand. These customs are collectively labelled “Tikanga.” The way in which they have  been infiltrated into the common law is unprecedented.– Anthony Willy 

This excursion into Maori customs raises a number of questions: What is “Tikanga?” A search of the meaning of the word in the Maori dictionary yields fifteen possible definitions all of which amount to doing the right thing in the circumstances. None of the meanings have anything thing to do with the law as it has been understood and  practiced in New Zealand since 1840.  Every society throughout time has its customs as a means of surviving both its environment and from the attentions of others. Maori tribes were no different but the world in which persons of Maori extraction now live is unrecognisable for those who lived here in 1840 when they accepted British sovereignty and all that entailed. Obviously, the law must change and adapt to changing circumstances but it is extraordinary to suppose that this should be done by importing concepts some of which are no more than are to be found in any developing society but have no unique contemporary relevance to the lives of New Zealand citizens. One might as well say that attention to good manners and consideration for others should form part of the common law. – Anthony Willy 

 Willie Jackson the Minister for Broadcasting and who appears to lead the Maori caucus in government and who has probably read the writings of Williams J. knows all this. He has recently rejected a report from who knows whom proposing co government in New Zealand because it is too radical. He now has barely six weeks left in the Parliamentary cycle to introduce new legislation dealing with that deeply unpopular proposition making it unlikely it will ever see the light of day. It is astonishing that the  majority of the judges in our highest court would do his work for him by elevating Maori customs to become an equal source of law alongside the common law, and the statutes enacted by Parliament. That is the most unprecedented and blatant descent by three out of five members of our highest Court into matters of crucial social and political import. These judges leave a poison challis for their successors with unknowable malign social consequences. It will now be left to Parliament by legislation to reinstate the commonality of Judge made law. – Anthony Willy 

Our preference has always been for commercial pragmatism and fact-based analysis to lead solutions, rather than any politically-motivated or interest-driven proposals. Our vision involves enhancing existing assets, while investing in supporting infrastructure such as new rail connections and coastal shipping – Julia Hoare

It is our belief that current legislation and policy does not encourage nor facilitate investment even when it is environmentally sound and nationally significant. The consenting process is complex, time consuming and costly. It hinders adoption of new technology with its economic and environmental benefits, ensures we are always playing catch up with capacity and stops existing assets from being used to their full potential. – Julia Hoare

Parliament did not legislate for a tax increase large enough to break Treasury’s tax calculator. Nobody proposed it. Nobody campaigned on it.

It never went to Select Committee for deliberation. No tax experts analysed the distributional consequences of it or its affordability. It never received Royal Assent. Parliament simply failed to undo that which Adrian Orr gifted it, at our expense. – Eric Crampton

Failing to inflation-adjust tax thresholds, since April 2021, pushed some 40,000 people from the 10.5% bracket into the 17.5% bracket, about 187,000 people from the 17.5% bracket into the 30% bracket, 161,000 people from the 30% bracket into the 33% rate, and about 18,000 people from the 33% rate into the new top 39% rate.

As consequence, the government collected about $1.3 billion extra in tax – though both the figures on the numbers of people and revenue effects come with a heavy caveat from Treasury. Changes this large cause changes in behaviour, and those behavioural shifts are not in Treasury’s simple model. –

When inflation’s effects over a little more than a year are enough to break Treasury’s tax calculator, something has got to give. At this point the question shouldn’t be whether to adjust the tax bands for inflation, but how best to do it – and how to avoid this ever happening again.

Whatever your views on the appropriate size of government, a few basic principles should apply.

The government should not normally spend more than it is prepared to take in tax revenue. Careful accounting needs to be applied, so that long-lived infrastructure can be appropriately debt-financed and paid off by users over its lifetime. But operating revenue and operating expenditure should balance.

If a government wants to reduce the amount of tax it collects, it should reduce the amount it spends.

And if a government wants to increase the amount that it spends, it should have to explicitly legislate for the taxes needed to fund that spending – rather than let inflation do the work. – Eric Crampton

 Bracket creep is a stealthy and dishonest form of taxation. Worse, it can easily lead to the impression that Parliament wants the Reserve Bank to ignore its remit and let inflation run hot.

Inflation indexing tax thresholds isn’t just good tax policy. When inflation is no longer a tidy little earner for central government, we might worry less about whether the Reserve Bank is really committed to fighting it. – Eric Crampton

I wrote a book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, which was published in July 2021. The idea behind the book is also simple: biological sex is fixed, it is binary. And transgender ideology — which replaces sex with subjective claims of ‘gender identity’ in law and policies — does serious harm. To anyone not blinded by this dogma, the argument is obvious. You cannot let men claim to be women just because they feel like it and thereby gain entry to women’s toilets, women’s changing rooms, women’s refuges, women’s jails. It puts women at increased risk of male violence. It is not acceptable. – Helen Joyce

And what I discovered was this: during the past two decades, ‘trans rights’ have morphed into a totalitarian project the aim of which is to make the very concept of biological sex unsayable. It has been pernicious, and extraordinarily so. Almost every civil-rights organisation, including Amnesty, Liberty and Stonewall, now insists that a man truly can become a woman simply by saying he is one. ‘Trans women are women — no debate,’ that’s their slogan. The rest of us must shut up. – Helen Joyce

This radical transactivism has erased and endangered women, pushed us out of our own spaces and destroyed protections from male violence that we fought so hard for. – Helen Joyce

That was when I understood the full horror of what is happening. In the name of a warped ideology masquerading as a civil-rights movement, doctors are potentially endangering children who may be gay or mentally ill. How did we get here?

Young adults have certainly changed since my student days. Many now see themselves and the world through the lens of gender, sexual and racial identity, placing great store by ever more specific self-descriptions (they might, for example, be a ‘queer non-binary asexual person of colour’).

The objective reality of our shared human nature is sidelined, in favour of what each individual feels or claims about themselves.  It is childish, and dangerously so. – Helen Joyce

If you had coal in the 19th Century you were rich, if you had oil and gas in the 20th Century you were rich and if you have water then you’re rich in the 21st Century.

It gives you options and frankly successive governments haven’t been able to appropriately resolve the tension that has existed in the community around how to manage water. – Todd Muller

I’m hearing a sense of hopelessness around the future, and whether it’s worth staying in the sector is extremely palpable. The big change for me that I’ve never seen before is that the message is being articulated by younger farmers.

You will always get in a group, individuals who are perhaps resisting change, and normally they tend to be people who are more senior than younger, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen it the other way where the anger, frustration and hopelessness is very much the message I’m getting from younger farmers. – Todd Muller

Here it’s like a cumulative sense of obligation and criticism and a lack of acknowledgement of everything that’s been done on farm. How complex farm systems are and how interactive they are in terms of their farm animals, various farm practices, the interaction on the environment and trying to measure and mitigate that.

Trying to work all that out across a myriad of issues, from water quality, to soil, to winter grazing, to climate – they feel overwhelmed actually and that’s hugely striking and quite shocking when the faces who are telling me that are under 40. – Todd Muller

There’s a real sense that no one’s in their corner, that nothing they do on farm is ever good enough. It doesn’t matter if they’ve done plantings, riparian strips, put in more effluent ponds or set aside bush because it’s the right thing to do.

Nothing seems to be acknowledged or rewarded or supported – you’ve still got some clipboard warrior from MfE (Ministry for Environment) coming out, or local government saying, ‘That’s wrong and here’s the penalty’. – Todd Muller

Part of it is actually accepting that some of this is going to take some time, and I know there are always the critics of the agriculture sector who immediately run to the pulpit and say the sector has always sought to kick the can down the road.

I fundamentally reject that, and I think the people who say that have never been on a farm and never seen the work farmers have done individually and cumulatively across water quality, soil improvement, reducing erosion, fresh water – they just don’t see all that effort. – Todd Muller

That’s why I’m so critical of the Government’s response to He Waka Eke Noa … they’ve decided they’ve got a better view on how it should be managed, and it doesn’t surprise me the sector is up in arms.

I’m not signalling in any way that because farmers are so angry, no action is required to continue to look to improve freshwater, improve measurement and mitigation of emissions. But there’s a way of doing it that brings the sector along with you and there’s a way of doing it that makes them feel like second-class citizens, and that’s how they feel at the moment. – Todd Muller

There’s a whole heap of additional work that could be done with the sector around efficient capture of additional sequestration. The Ministry for Environment and MPI constantly talk about how difficult all this stuff is, well yeah it is difficult, but it has to happen. You can’t run to the taxation lever, which this Government wants to do with vigour, and kick the can down the road. – Todd Muller

I’ve been involved with the sector for 25 years, and just seeing the vehemence of the reaction makes it clear the Government has lost the farmers here completely. – Todd Muller

He clearly has the better of Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor in any Cabinet conversation they have on these things because the balance is always skewed toward David Parker’s view of the world, which is frankly, he thinks farmers have got away with it for too long, and in my view that’s an outrageous position to hold. – Todd Muller

Indeed, we are at a difficult crossroads in New Zealand, where we are being pushed into accepting a new order and a new name for our country that has not undergone a referendum. It seems to me a form of bullying. Of course, Māori and other indigenous people across many countries were oppressed for several centuries but often were not themselves kind to others and indeed gained much from colonialism. The world has made great progress over the last half-century but we are undoing that progress very rapidly. – David Lillis

He Puapua is one of the most alarming documents I have ever read. It will sow the seeds of discontent and division for decades to come. We must oppose the current ideology while embracing equality and the rights of minorities, and commit ourselves to assisting all people on the basis of disadvantage rather than of race. We are not a bicultural society but instead a multicultural society that today includes people from all parts of the world.

On the question of the demarcation of science and indigenous or traditional knowledge – most probably it is true that many scientists know little of indigenous or traditional knowledge and may undervalue the genuine wisdom to be found there. Some Māori and others have made this point forcibly and quite correctly. But proponents of indigenous or traditional knowledge often betray an even greater ignorance of science. – David Lillis

Towards the end of the meeting two Māori women stood up and called for decolonisation of science. Is science colonial and, if so, how exactly are we to decolonise it and whose science are we to decolonise? We can understand where they are coming from in relation to past oppression and their need to resurrect pride in their culture, language and traditional knowledge. However, I and many others have grave concerns about the He Puapua report, which recommends that mātauranga Māori (Māori traditional knowledge) be valued equally and resourced equally to “Western science”. Indigenous people, including Māori, and other minorities make valuable contributions in many areas in which science and technology play a part. Surely, all traditional knowledge ought to be valued and preserved but no traditional knowledge of any cultural group, anywhere in the world, should be taught as science until tested and shown to be valid through the methods of science. Nor is there the slightest justification for resourcing traditional knowledge equally to science, however valuable that knowledge may have been in the past. – David Lillis

However, assertions to the effect that indigenous science is equally valid and equally important as “Western science” are very worrying (for example, Henry, 2022). In specific cases they can be as valid but, unfortunately, mostly they are not, and the notion of “Western science” is demonstrably mistaken.

It is not a criticism of traditional knowledge or of the communities or societies that produced it that such knowledge cannot compare with the centuries of advances and investments that lie behind the modern physical and life sciences; for example, randomised controlled trials in medicine, molecular and atomic physics, evolutionary biology and developments in energy and climate science. We have duty of care to define clearly what sits within the ambit of science and that which lies beyond, just as we have a critical obligation to exercise the utmost rigour when we test the efficacy of newly-proposed cancer drugs and other treatments.

The idea that in any country traditional knowledge should be regarded as fully the equal of science and be resourced equally is astounding and, as a person who trained originally in physics and mathematics, and who worked in research evaluation for Government (for funding decision-making), I find it deeply disturbing that people buy into it, however well-meaning they may be. Similarly, incorporation of traditional knowledge into any national science curriculum is potentially very detrimental to the education of young people. – David Lillis

Every citizen should have equal opportunity of access to education, healthcare and to political and economic power. Here in New Zealand we include Asians, people from North Africa and the Middle-East, people of European origin and, of course, Māori and everyone else.

A second lesson is that we can take affirmative action by removing a Government that is causing damage to its people. Perhaps in New Zealand we can still do something about the current absurdity. We have a duty of care to our country to remain kind, embracing and inclusive – but to stand firm against a Government that may be well-meaning but that has lost its way. – David Lillis

The core role of the public service is to provide New Zealanders with essential services focused on achieving better outcomes and delivering for all Kiwis. Whether it be healthcare, education, transport or infrastructure, New Zealanders should get value for the taxes which they pay to the Crown.

Government is currently spending $1.8 billion of taxpayers hard earned money every year on 14,000 extra bureaucrats, and that’s without mentioning the staggering amount spent on expensive consultants and working groups. The public service in New Zealand has ballooned to unprecedented levels. Yet, we seem to have worse outcomes as a result. – Stuart Smith 

 More churn means more costs, and the lack of continuity puts strain on workflow and projects.  Adding to that, the Crown accounts released earlier this month show that the government’s tax revenue increased from $76 billion to $108 billion in five years. That is an average of $15,000 more in tax for every household in New Zealand. 

With all the extra revenue and all the extra government officials and public servants, I struggle to understand how and why New Zealand’s public services are not functioning as they should. – Stuart Smith 

The question is, why are we getting worse outcomes? Frankly, it’s because this government is focused on the wrong things. – Stuart Smith 

If New Zealanders are paying high levels of tax, they should get services that deliver for them and their families. We should not be content with mediocrity, we should be ambitious and focused on giving Kiwis the best opportunities and best services possible. I’m confident that a National Government will be able to manage the economy competently and deliver outcomes that rival some of the best in the world. – Stuart Smith 

Oh dear. What an embarrassment. The Prime Minister’s advisers wrote her a conference speech which summarized why this government has become unfit to govern. Since it was based on a misunderstanding of the Covid-19 shock and, as a consequence, the types of changes we need to make to get things back on track.  – Robert MacCulloch

 The Great Depression is widely acknowledged to be a demand-side shock, set off by the 1929 stock market crash. Consumption and investment slumped. It gave rise to Keynesian economics, the view that maintaining demand, running budget deficits and establishing a welfare state could help mitigate the effects. Which was all true!

But the Covid-19 shock was entirely different. It was a supply-side shock: people couldn’t go to work due to the virus, so the supply of labor crumbled. Now there are all sorts of other supply-chain issues.

Adverse demand shocks cause inflation to fall.  Adverse supply shocks cause inflation to rise.

Now we know why this government stuffed up monetary policy. They thought they were dealing with a demand shock which needed to be dealt with by money printing, but all that did was cause inflation. – Robert MacCulloch

The PM must be getting woeful economic advice to write a speech saying the way out of a supply shock is not to address the root cause of cost pressures but instead to embark on 1929-style welfare expansionism.

By the way, the creation of a welfare state was a great victory back in the 1930s. But it was already in place when Covid-19 hit and a century before Ardern came to office. Her government have not furthered the cause of the development of the welfare state. Instead its legacy has been to run-down our health-care system.

If Ardern thinks we’re living in Great Depression times and wants to create a welfare state, she should have run for office in 1935 and not 2023. – Robert MacCulloch

Sure, there are plenty of opinions and comments published every day on the internet and elsewhere that are not accurate. They’re not hateful. They’re not terrorism. But they’re not accurate. There’s also plenty that is accurate, or just to confuse us all, accurate in the views of some people but not in the eyes of others.

The great majority of that material is opinion. Some opinions are well informed. Others less so. We all have them. And we have all been entitled to have them. Opinions and the debate they generate form the basis of better decisions and better outcomes. But who decides what is right and what is wrong?  – Bruce Cotterill

As I understand it, there are already laws that deal with extremism and harmful content. And so the question needs to be asked: will our new hate speech legislation seek to go further? If so, how far?

There are plenty of people who agree with any given government. There are usually plenty who disagree with that same government. Democracies around the world are better off for such diversity of views. Is our Prime Minister suggesting that ultimately, someone should decide that one side is right and another is wrong? – Bruce Cotterill

The trouble with hate speech laws and disinformation claims is this. Who decides what’s right? What is information versus opinion? What is an accurate opinion versus an inaccurate one? And if you eventually shut down one side of an argument or discussion, how are we to know where the alternative view might have led us if it was allowed to be pursued? – Bruce Cotterill

Freedom to speak. Freedom to publish. Freedom to congregate. Freedom to protest. Freedom to participate in matters of government. These freedoms quite rightly apply equally to those who disagree with us, as well as those who agree. They are all important cornerstones of democracy as we know it.

Every society needs balanced, constructive and reasoned debate. The fact that this newspaper publishes opinions and comment that are divergent and sometimes opposite is a good thing. Such commentary informs discussion and debate. Debate leads to accountability and better outcomes.

Constructive and well-reasoned argument is essential. It paves the way for better outcomes. But if we seek to shut down such discussion, where does it lead? When does “disinformation” become watered down to “disagreement”? When does any amount of criticism become an unacceptable challenge to authority? When will we be asked to leave our “point of view” behind? – Bruce Cotterill

The freedoms we enjoy provide for a range of views to be expressed, listened to and challenged. Sure, in doing so we are also enabling the fringe views, or sometimes the extreme views, and maybe even the intolerable ones. But they are a tiny minority of cases when compared to the many thousands of other voices we hear every day.

To block mainstream debate because of those few voices is to curb one of the greatest freedoms that we have — the freedom to think for ourselves, inform our views and express our opinions. – Bruce Cotterill

It would be a great shame if just some of those very freedoms were taken away at a time when Europe is once again at war. Freedom is worth talking about, arguing for, debating, and defending. – Bruce Cotterill

Voters clearly have given the one-fingered salute to Labour’s cost-of-living packages and perhaps there’s nothing Labour can do right now but hope next year gets better and people forget about inflation. But, right now, it’s described like this: the phone is off the hook.

It’s because Labour appears to put ideology, unfinished business, pet projects, and settling scores ahead of tested and fair, economically sensible policy. Why, for instance, during Covid has it spent so much money on health reforms that no-one can see the immediate benefits of.

And why waste hundreds of millions on screwing RNZ and TVNZ? It’s a merger no-one believes in and no-one thinks will work. And, at $600 million and counting, we simply can’t afford it. – Duncan Garner 

Despite the name, FPAs will bind all employers and employees in the occupation/industry, whether or not they want to be bound by the FPA or they participated in bargaining for the FPA. It will be illegal to contract out of an FPA, even if an employer and an employee both want to. – Edwards Law

The FPA process is likely to be complex and time-consuming for employers and employees. Given the employer side will need to represent potentially hundreds of employers of varying size and scale, it may be difficult for employers to reach an agreement amongst themselves, let alone with the employees. All of this could mean more costs for businesses in New Zealand, and maybe, higher prices for consumers as a result. – Edwards Law

For better or worse, FPAs are here, and we will soon see the first industries/occupations beginning the process to implement an FPA. It is widely expected that hospitality, cleaning, and security guards will be the first industries to begin bargaining for an FPA. Only time will tell if FPAs will achieve their goal of improving working conditions and productivity in New Zealand, or if they will instead be the final straw for many employers already under pressure. – Edwards Law

Ardern will be remembered as a Prime Minister who collected windfall votes in that year’s election and — like a feckless and foolish Lotto winner — recklessly squandered the vast amount of political capital they gave her on divisive projects like co-governance and decolonisation she had never campaigned on and had no mandate for. 

She will mostly be seen as a leader who disgracefully betrayed the trust that voters placed in her. – Graham Adams

It’s a real shame that they think Te Ao Māori is too narrow for the views that I expound, which are based on a free society, which I think is the best place for people to thrive and prosper over time.

Now they may think that you can’t be Māori and have those views, or you are a useless Māori, or not an advocate for Māori, but I would say to them that their disagreement is not with my Māoriness but with my views. – David Seymour

What I think is dangerous is the idea, we are talking past each other and no longer committed to some old values which have got New Zealand as far as it’s come.” – David Seymour

We have democracy and human rights on the one hand and this idea of a Tiriti-centric Aotearoa with Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti on the other and it is incompatible. If anyone says it dangerous or dog whistling to discuss that then I would put it back to them that they are endangering New Zealand by suppressing that discussion.

Apartheid is a system where people have a different set of political rights based on their ancestry, which happened in South Africa to a much more dramatic extent. – David Seymour

Ethnostate is a state where your citizenship or your rights are connected with your whakapapa, your ancestry and we have a government that is formalising that into law – David Seymour

How is one more kid who is hungry going to school with a full tummy because a distant relative is sitting around a co-governance table? – David Seymour

Do you really think that everything Europeans bought to New Zealand was bad or would it be more honest to say, that there have been good and bad on both sides and the real question is how do we go forward – David Seymour

Throwing cash like this fixes things for about 5 minutes then the pain returns. It’s not a solution, but thinking it is a solution is why Labour is on 32 percent. – Heather du Plessis-Allan 

Ardern had no answer for why bank profits were a bad thing, falling back to the old trope of “social licence”, which is essentially an ill-defined extra level of behaviour – over and above the legislated and regulated laws of the land – that commercial enterprises are somehow supposed to undertake to earn said licence. – Luke Malpass

Ultimately bank profits are a distraction for the issues facing New Zealand and a bit of vague bank-bashing won’t long distract the public from the one, real-life, indicator that rules them all: inflation. – Luke Malpass

The unpleasant aspects of health care in Britain are universally acknowledged, are well-known, and a cause of wonderment to all Western Europeans.  I have come to the conclusion, however, that it is precisely these aspects that appeal so strongly to the British. How else is fairness to be guaranteed, other than by ensuring that everyone is humiliated and made to feel that he is privileged to receive anything at all? – Theodore Dalrymple

That’s this Government in a nutshell, though. Some headlines, bit of noise, some advertising, a bit of hiring and some “transition” work. But the reality and the grunt work, where is it? – Mike Hosking

When you go back through 80 years of history of this party, it’s at its best when it’s a national National Party … that’s when we’ve been really strong. – Christopher Luxon

I will argue our end hard, but I can disagree without being disagreeable in a personal sense – Christopher Luxon

Perhaps the problem with New Zealand’s education system is that it was once world-class. An outstanding reputation sticks long past its use-by date. – Oliver Hartwich

New Zealand has experienced a continuous decline in its Pisa results over two decades and we don’t know how far we still have to fall before bottoming out.

Meanwhile, we fool ourselves by pretending we are still doing well. Thanks to the ‘flexibility’ of our NCEA assessment system, more and more students graduate with a certificate. Today, roughly 80 percent of our students leave school with NCEA Level 2, up from 60 percent two decades ago.

However, we know these NCEA results are meaningless, and not just because of the simultaneous declines in international tests like Pisa. Our own domestic analysis of basic literacy and numeracy should have been enough to wake us from any complacency. – Oliver Hartwich

This year, when the Ministry of Education finally assessed what was really going on, the results were as predictable as they were depressing. Reading tests were passed by just two-thirds of the 15-year-old students participating, and numeracy tests by just over half. Writing was even worse, with only one-third passing.

When an education system “performs” at such atrocious levels, it is justified to talk about a crisis. More than that, it is a national disgrace.

It is even more scandalous because the drop in achievement is unequally distributed. To put it bluntly, the poorer your family, the less likely you are to succeed at school. – Oliver Hartwich

If a wrecking ball had been run through the education system as it was in the 1990s to yield such results, there would have been an outcry. But because the decline has occurred slowly, that outcry has never happened.

Instead, parents concerned for their children’s education have done their best to make up for the decline in the education system. – Oliver Hartwich

New Zealand parents have noticed that schools are not quite what they used to be. But instead of going on the barricades, those who can do their best to fix the failings of our public education system privately.

Today, we have reached a point at which most parents can no longer make up for the education system’s deficiencies. Many parents do not have the time or the means to do so. Besides, young parents may never have experienced for themselves what a good education is like. – Oliver Hartwich

Practically everything in the system cries out not just for reform, but for revolution.

We need better teacher training and a better career structure for teachers. We need a deep, knowledge-rich curriculum. We need a better assessment system. We need proper monitoring systems for school performance. We need an overhaul of the education bureaucracy. And we need all of this at once.

If a war had wiped out our entire education system, the task could not be more daunting. – Oliver Hartwich

The challenge for the current generation of politicians is to have the courage to admit just how bad our education system has become. And then they need to have the courage to discard what is wrong and start again. – Oliver Hartwich

The coalition was concerned with one issue only: protecting the principle of free speech and the right of New Zealanders to be exposed to ideas and opinions regardless of whether people happened to agree with them.

This, after all, is the very heart of democracy. Democratic government depends on the contest of ideas, and the contest of ideas in turn depends on people being able to engage openly in free expression and debate. Free speech is where democracy starts. I would argue that it’s even more fundamental than the right to vote, because people’s ability to cast an informed vote depends on them first being able to participate in free and open debate about political issues and ideas. – Karl du Fresne

Note that the law doesn’t just refer to the freedom to speak; it gives equal weight to our right to seek and hear alternative views. There’s nothing in the Act that says opinions and ideas must be approved by people in power, such as the mayor of Auckland, before we can be safely allowed to hear them. – Karl du Fresne

The problem with so-called hate speech laws is that they could impose unreasonable and undemocratic limitations on public discussion of legitimate political issues. Hurtful is different from hateful. Someone might feel insulted or offended by a statement but that doesn’t mean it’s intended to incite hatred or harm, and the courts have traditionally been liberal in recognising people’s right to express opinions that upset others – with good reason, because judges are reluctant to interfere with the fundamental right to free speech. – Karl du Fresne

As an aside, I was astonished to learn recently that according to the New Zealand Police website, a hate crime is an offence perceived by the victim to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards a person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or age. So it’s down to victims to decide whether they’ve been the subject of a hate crime. This goes far beyond what the law says and shows that the police have already been well and truly politicised. – Karl du Fresne

The Free Speech Union campaigned vigorously against a law change – 20,000 submissions to Parliament, 80 percent of them opposed – and the government quietly consigned the proposal to the too-hard basket.

Job done, the union thought. But now we have a new justice minister, Kiri Allen, and suddenly hate speech laws are back on the agenda. Not only that, but the prime minister recently delivered an address at the United Nations in which she talked about the need to combat threats from so-called disinformation – a word that seems to mean whatever the user wants it to mean.

All this points to the possibility of the government seeking to control the dissemination of information and opinion that it disapproves of, perhaps even relating to issues such as climate change, Covid vaccination, transgenderism and immigration. – Karl du Fresne

The Minister of Māori Development, Willie Jackson, recently declared that “Democracy has changed… This is not a majority democracy.”

He is right. Aotearoa has changed its understanding of democratic norms, and we are establishing different political and economic rights based on a person’s whakapapa. – Damien Grant

He Puapua is remarkable in its scope and ambition. It has Orwellian statements such as, by 2040, “All New Zealanders will embrace and respect Māori culture as an integral part of national identity…”, and has some grandiose plans that defy political reality.

It lapses into Cultural Revolutionary rhetoric and over-reaches, but it reflects the thinking of a large swathe of the Wellington cultural elite. – Damien Grant

The effect is a shifting of political power away from the process of voting for political office holders to manage the state’s assets, and towards a new political caste. The changes are not restricted to the water assets. – Damien Grant

Most have accepted, in this new order, a health and increasingly a welfare system that responds on race and not need is acceptable; or they do not care enough to speak out.

Adults are created by our childhoods and mine, like most of my generation, was raised on very different cultural gruel that those who are coming of age today.

Our children have been raised in classrooms that placed an emphasis on te reo Māori over TE Lawrence, and Kupe before Kipling. – Damien Grant

There remains in conservative circles a belief that the tide can be turned back, that an omnibus piece of legislation or major reform agenda can roll back a regime that has been decades in the making.

This will not happen. Although some programmes, such as Three Waters, may falter, the direction of travel is set.

Andrew Breitbart, an iconoclastic conservative thinker and agitator, famously declared that politics is downstream from culture, and on this issue, the cultural landscape has shifted permanently. – Damien Grant

The risk of cancellation at Williams College, where I have taught for 12 years, and at top colleges and universities throughout this country, is not theoretical. My fellow scientists and I are living it. What is at stake is not simply our reputations, but our ability to pursue truth and scientific knowledge.

If you had asked me about academic freedom five years ago, I would have complained about the obsession with race, gender and ethnicity, along with safetyism on campus (safe spaces, grade inflation, and so on). But I would not have expressed concerns about academic freedom.

We each have our own woke tipping point—the moment you realize that social justice is no longer what we thought it was, but has instead morphed into an ugly authoritarianism. For me that moment came in 2018, during an invited speaker talk, when the religious scholar Reza Aslan stated that “we need to write on a stone what can and cannot be discussed in colleges.” Students gave this a standing ovation.  Having been born under dictatorship in Brazil, I was alarmed. – Luana Maroja

The restriction of academic freedom comes in two forms: what we teach and what we research.

Let’s start with teaching. I need to emphasize that this is not hypothetical. The censorious, fearful climate is already affecting the content of what we teach.

One of the most fundamental rules of biology from plants to humans is that the sexes are defined by the size of their gametes—that is, their reproductive cells. Large gametes occur in females; small gametes in males. In humans, an egg is 10 milliontimes bigger than a sperm. There is zero overlap. It is a full binary. 

But in some biology 101 classes, teachers are telling students that sexes—not gender, sex—are on a continuum. At least one college I know teaches with the “gender unicorn” and informs students that it is bigoted to think that humans come in two distinct and discrete sexes.  – Luana Maroja

In psychology and public health, many teachers no longer say male and female, but instead use the convoluted “person with a uterus.” I had a colleague who, during a conference, was criticized for studying female sexual selection in insects because he was a male. Another was discouraged from teaching the important concept of “sexual conflict”—the idea that male and female interests differ and mates will often act selfishly; think of a female praying mantis decapitating the head of the male after mating—because it might “traumatize students.” I was criticized for teaching “kin selection”—the the idea that animals tend to help their relatives. Apparently this was somehow an endorsement of Donald Trump hiring his daughter Ivanka. – Luana Maroja

While the history of science does contain baseless and shameful assertions about race, we know that it is true that human populations, say over distinct geographic areas, have differences in allele frequency. Many of these differences are deeper than just skin color and relevant to health and well-being. Imagine the consequences of this lack of knowledge in medicine. After all, many genetic diseases vary between populations, for example, sickle-cell anemia among African-Americans, cystic fibrosis in Europeans, and Tay-Sachs disease among Jews.

But it has become taboo in the classroom to note any disparities between groups that are not explained as the result of systemic bias. – Luana Maroja

The language purity that this ideology requires is also distressing. It gets in the way of spontaneity and good teaching. At Williams, for example, our teaching assistants were told at a DEI training session that the word “guys” is a microaggression. So students learn that inoffensive words are harmful. This leads to a snowball effect, where ever more insignificant words or gestures can be taken as proof of bigotry. Many professors I know will freeze in class when realizing they were praising the work of a “colonialist” such as Darwin or Newton. Others will avoid mentioning historical figures if they are white and male.  – Luana Maroja

The prestigious journal Nature Human Behavior just announced in a recent editorial: “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.” They are not referring to the importance of protecting individuals participating in research. They are saying that the study of human variation is itself suspect. So they advocate avoiding research that could “stigmatize individuals or human groups” or “promotes privileged, exclusionary perspectives.”

The censors and gatekeepers simply assume—without evidence—that human population research is malign and must be shut down. The costs of this kind of censorship, both self-imposed and ideologically based, are profound. Student learning is impaired and important research is never done. The dangers of closing off so many avenues of inquiry is that science itself becomes an extension of ideology and is no longer an endeavor predicated on pursuing knowledge and truth. – Luana Maroja

Yes, a spreading web of ignorance and credulity that will doom some Māori to illness or death. Applauding the spread of the tohunga is like applauding the spread of faith healing. Indeed, that’s much of what the tohunga do! – Jerry Coyne

Do things differently! But hang on, this is a government that is overseeing a health system that now reports that patients are choosing to die rather than suffer the tribulations of a hospital waiting list. How’s that for doing things differently? – John Porter

The Government is spending $30 million on an investigation into renewable energy projects including a hydro scheme at Lake Onslow in Central Otago.

If the scheme proceeds it would be the largest hydro project in New Zealand’s history and could cost more than $4 billion. Knowing this Government’s inability to accurately cost projects, you have to say $8 billion not $4 billion! – John Porter

And then MBIE advise, “…proof that the project would lower wholesale electricity prices is not necessary for Onslow to proceed”. Does this sound more like ideological thinking rather sound economic thinking?

I haven’t even touched on how greenhouse gas emissions from geothermal power production, while generally low, are emitters of CO2 and studies overseas show some are on par with emissions from coal fired power plants! – John Porter

Labour’s new “Landmark New Zealand Energy Strategy” sounds awfully like so many other Labour strategies: huge on aspiration; minimal planning and negligible delivery! – John Porter

Collectively, our local and Central Government politicians could have avoided all the unnecessary sacrifice of our prime grazing land on the idealogical altar of emissions reductions targets. 

It has been known ever since the government set its zero emissions target by 2030 that this could relatively easily be achieved by limiting the planting of trees to what has been historically known as class 7 land.

The truth is, we don’t need to plant a single hectare of our most profitable country with anything other than the best pasture species especially at a time when the produce from that farm land is delivering returns we have never seen in my lifetime.  – Clive Bibby

Violent and inappropriate language does, indeed, appear to be a real problem in the US. In this country, however, on both sides of the political divide, people tend to express their views strongly but generally within the bounds of propriety. There have always been people who express extreme views and social media perhaps helps them. But they are the exception rather than the rule.

It would be a tragedy for this country if, influenced by overseas excesses, we were to legislate for hate speech. Such legislation could have a chilling effect on debate here on all manner of issues.

I agree with people who say that, if passed, the law could be used to attack those who may hold unpopular positions. Given the increase in wokery in society, there would be innumerable complaints to the police and also the possibility of private prosecutions. – Chris Finlayson

The most effective way of rebutting positions you disagree with is to master the arguments of your opponents and engage in a robust and civil debate.

May the best person win the argument. It is contrary to fundamental principles of freedom of expression and to a liberal democracy to have a law that could stop the full and frank exchange of views. – Chris Finlayson

I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started. I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that’s not true. There’s a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism. I spend a lot of time in countries all over Africa, and they’re like, Eh, we wouldn’t mind a little more globalization actually. – Bono

Capitalism is a wild beast. We need to tame it. But globalization has brought more people out of poverty than any other -ism. If somebody comes to me with a better idea, I’ll sign up. I didn’t grow up to like the idea that we’ve made heroes out of businesspeople, but if you’re bringing jobs to a community and treating people well, then you are a hero. That’s where I’ve ended up. God spare us from lyricists who quote themselves, but if I wrote only one lyric that was any good, it might have been: Choose your enemies carefully because they ill define you. Turning the establishment into the enemy — it’s a little easy, isn’t it? – Bono

The real danger to our democracy is the deliberate distortion of these historical facts that would, if allowed to take root, set our development back for no good reason.

We must insist that the complete record (warts and all) is included in any state sanctioned revision of our history curriculum. Failure to do so will result in a division from which we may never recover.

If it is not the full truth – it is a lie. –  Clive Bibby 

Protectionism [i..e, shielding local industry from foreign competition by the likes of protective tariffs] necessarily imposes larger costs on the rest of the home-country economy.

Protectionism’s harm to consumers is obvious. Having to pay more to buy the outputs of ‘successfully’ protected firms, consumers must reduce their purchases of other goods and services or reduce their savings. 

To grasp this economic reality is to realise also the harm that protectionism inflicts on other home-country firms and workers. Every input that protectionism diverts into protected firms is an input diverted away from other productive uses. Non-protected firms thus have less access to raw materials, tools, intermediate goods, and labour. Their outputs fall. 

Further, because workers in non-protected firms have fewer or lower-quality tools and inputs with which to work, these workers’ productivity falls. And falling productivity means falling wages.

Looking only at the alleged ‘success’ of protected firms and then confidently concluding that protectionism is a boon to the entire country, [one] reasons as would an apologist for successful thieves – an apologist who points to the thieves’ bustling business in larceny, and to the thieves’ high ‘earnings,’ and then confidently concludes that thievery is a boon to the entire country. – Don Boudreaux

Monetary policy operates on a time delay, so often it appears the sensible decisionmaker is a killjoy, taking away the punchbowl just as the economic party is getting started. That’s not a popular approach at any gathering.

Back when monetary policy was left to politicians, the temptation to goose the economy beyond its capacity at election time was often too great. Political cycles made economic cycles worse, with magical rip-roaring times prior to election day, and big hangovers a year or so afterwards as resurgent inflation had to be tamed. That’s why New Zealand was a world leader in removing the monetary policy remit from politicians and placing it in the hands of an independent entity.

And it’s worked well. So well that with the help of the price stabilising effects of trade globalisation, a generation or two has been able to largely forget about inflation and central bank governors. Until that is, the last three years.

The economic response to the pandemic has reminded everyone of the power wielded by central bankers. The extreme monetary loosening and belated monetary tightening have created big swings in prices, asset values, and economic activity. There have been stark winners and losers, none more so than those who were encouraged to get out and buy houses when prices were high, only to see their equity evaporate before their eyes now, and their mortgage costs soar. – Steven Joyce

It doesn’t help that Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s response to the review was it was evidence the Bank “got the big decisions right” when that’s clearly not the case. Say what you like about the notwithstandings, extenuating circumstances, and who else also got it wrong, but inflation this far outside the required band, (including food inflation now in excess of 10 per cent), and the need for sudden rapid increases in interest rates is not “getting it right”. – Steven Joyce

Because of the bank’s importance and independence, the appointment of the governor is supposed to be a non-partisan decision that both sides of politics can live with. For whatever reason, it is clear that for the opposition parties and many independent commentators that is not currently the case.

A sensible Finance Minister concerned for the independence of the institution would have either appointed a new governor or reappointed the current one for a shorter term. It would have been entirely reasonable to make a two-year extension, say, until the current crisis is passed, and then appoint a new governor for the next stage of the bank’s evolution and the next economic cycle. – Steven Joyce

It is Robertson who appointed Orr and the buck stops with him on Orr’s reappointment. It is also Robertson who implicitly and explicitly extended the bank’s remit to focus on housing, employment, climate change, Māori issues, and the economy generally. As Finance Minister he has never once publicly said the bank should focus on price stability alone and leave the rest to the Government.

This in itself is endangering the political independence of the bank. The more it is inserted into activities outside macroeconomic policy, the more reasonable it is for people to take a political position on what it is doing and saying. – Steven Joyce

It has been convenient for Robertson to set the bank up with a broader brief. It has enabled him to crank up spending and make policy decisions that arguably hold the economy back, while abdicating economic responsibility for those decisions and charging the bank with looking after the downstream effects.

However, we are currently experiencing a salutary reminder of the reach and importance of monetary policy and the critical but circumscribed role of an independent central bank in a successful economy.

The Finance Minister should be taking steps to reinforce the bank’s focus, its independence, and the broad-based support for it as an apolitical institution. At the moment he risks undermining it. – Steven Joyce

Pandemic preparedness, at least for a virus with similar properties to Sars-CoV-2, should be regarded as a failure if a country requires a lockdown in the first six to 12 months. – Philip HIll

If everyone was wearing high quality masks in all indoor situations, that also stops the virus. We just didn’t have enough tools initially – we didn’t have the mask use; we didn’t have the test and trace up to scratch at that point. It’s definitely something you’d want to avoid in the future.

Taiwan were phenomenally ready … You need all these systems ready to go, with all the tools you need. – Michael Baker

Our baseline position is not very good. So we need to take that into consideration when we plan for the next pandemic … To assume it will be fine, and it will all work out, would be a mistake. – Anja Werno 

If we don’t have a vaccine readily available, and we don’t have enough information about its specific characteristics, and it looks like it’s very virulent, with a high case fatality, I think sometimes lockdowns should be considered. But I think they are an option of last resort.

I don’t think the government or the public wants to go through all that again unless we absolutely have to. – Chris Bullen

The social cost of a lockdown should also not be underestimated. There should be no spin about us being prepared when we are not. We can be good enough if we want to. – Philip Hill

How many times this year have you heard advocates of green energy decrying the fact that consumers have been ripped off by our failure to shift to renewables even more quickly? Yet we really don’t have an alternative to gas to make up for shortfalls in wind and solar. We could try to store renewable energy, but storage, in the form of batteries, say, or pumped-storage hydro-electric stations or some other emerging technology, is incredibly expensive. It costs around three or four times more to store a unit of electricity than it does to generate it in the first place. – Ross Clark

At present, consumers are not directly exposed to these kind of price surges, because they are absorbed by retail suppliers of electricity. But it is the intention that in the future consumers will be charged variable rates for electricity via their smart meters.

That, then, is the future to which we can look forward: not one where the lights necessarily go out, but where we are forced to pay through the nose if we want to keep them on in unfavourable weather conditions. The price of green energy is a form of terrible segregation, where the rich will have access to light and heat, and those who need it most, the poor, will shiver in the dark. – Ross Clark

Did you know that men’s legs, which tend to have better muscle definition than women’s, are often used to advertise hosiery? It seems men really do make the best women sometimes. – Jo Bartosch

Ordinarily, I would refrain from making personal comments about the appearance of a teenager of either sex. And as a middle-aged, slowly sagging midget with a fashion sense that would put a home-educated child to shame, I am well aware that I have never been and will never be beauty-pageant material. But beauty queens are usually judged, at least in part, on their looks. It is part of the deal. So you cannot help but notice that the winner of this particular contest bears a striking resemblance to an undercooked, lumpy sausage, with his fleshy moobs squashed into a gown. – Jo Bartosch

The idea of women and girls parading around while sweaty-palmed judges score them is certainly creepy and anachronistic. Nonetheless, the women entered the Miss Greater Derry pageant in good faith and deserved a fair chance. They were denied a prize that rightfully belonged to one of them. Brían sashayed off not only with the tiara, but also with a university scholarship and sponsorship opportunities. The other contestants had no choice but to clap along at the mockery made of their efforts. The spectacle served as a powerful reminder that, in today’s America, failing to show due deference to the trans overlords (or trans overladies?) is potentially career-ending.

This pattern is being replicated across public life. From sports to politics to science, wherever schemes are established to increase female participation, entitled men in stilettos are marching in to mark them as their territory. And if proof were ever needed that transwomen are men, it can be witnessed in the fawning, gushing behaviour of the wider world towards them. Overweight women are not entered into beauty pageants at all, let alone crowned. – Jo Bartosch

As WoLF’s chair, Lierre Keith, tells me: ‘You can roll your eyes about it being a beauty pageant, but the principle is the same whether it’s a pageant, a homeless shelter, a hospital ward or a prison. Women are saying no to men, as we have a right to.’ This is about ‘men claiming to be women and claiming a right to our spaces’, she says. The idea that womanhood is a costume that can be stepped into by men is the very essence of dick-swinging entitlement.

Much to the chagrin of proudly hairy-legged feminists like me, there are probably more Miss America fans and aspiring contestants than there are critics raging at the patriarchal beauty standards such contests promote. Given this, the plus side of plus-size men like Brían waltzing in and sweeping up women’s prizes is that more women will be forced to put political differences aside and recognise what unites us. The threat trans ideology poses to women’s spaces and opportunities could hardly be any clearer. So, I would like to say a sincere ‘well done’ to Miss Greater Derry – he might just end up inspiring women everywhere. Just not in the way he imagined. – Jo Bartosch

As a mother I used to worry about a lot of things but I learnt to let Sammy go and live his life. Mums, love your babies, just accept them and love them exactly as they are. The most important thing is the love you give your child, they are not here forever, make the most of it. Hug them and love them. – Lisa Finnemore

The real test is yet to come, however, when the Black Ferns next play an international.

Will New Zealand rugby back the team by scheduling a test at Eden Park in primetime again? Or will it blink?

But that’s next year. This year we’ve got a team to thank for a wonderful few weeks of rugby and sportsmanship.

Rugby was indeed the winner on the day.  – Tracy Watkins

If the bank executives were scratching their bald spots wondering how a review can be thematic, they have a new term to digest. Social License. Last week the Prime Minister decried the level of bank profits and asked: “…in the current environment, does it speak to a level of social licence?” She then continued in a nice bit of Maoist resonance, to state; “It doesn’t always take government intervention for that kind of self-reflection to occur. It’s time the banks operating in New Zealand did that very thing.”

The term social license has no philosophical or ideological underpinnings. It lacks even the dignity of its own Wikipedia page.-  Damien Grant

The criticism that the banks are currently earning abnormal profits is not true. The central bank keeps data going back to 1991 and it shows that the return on equity has consistently been around the 13% mark, where it is now. The only difference is that banks have grown larger and as their capital base grows so does total profit.

If you wanted to restrain bank profits you would need to deregulate the sector and allow more entrants to hang out their shingle. Competition, not regulation, is the only way to permanently improve customer service and lower profits.

Reaching for something as nebulous and undefined as a term with no meaning is perfect for our first post-modern Prime Minister. The banks cannot comply with their social license because there is no criteria from which a compliance officer can measure compliance.

Its application shifts governance away from the rule of law and towards the rule of man because, like obscenity, you know it when you see it, but you cannot define it. – Damien Grant

According to the Reserve Bank, trading banks made nearly seven billion in the last twelve months. The Prime Minister has not detailed what is an appropriate level of bank profitability but as she ponders this perhaps she can run the slide rule over the harm caused by that other bank that dominates our financial sector like a massive kauri tree in a forest; the Reserve Bank. – Damien Grant

If the financial community has lost faith in Orr, and I believe they have, they will not accept his statements that he is serious about price stability. To convince the public Orr will need to drive up unemployment and business failures in a way a credible governor would not. In the nomenclature favoured by the Prime Minister, he will need to do that because he has lost his social license.

Of course, if you can lose this ethereal quality by acting in such a way that damages the living standards of your fellow citizens in a persistent fashion over many years, well, Prime Minister, it might not just be the banks who need to engage in a bit of self-reflection. – Damien Grant

During the troubled reign of the current governor we have seen inflation become endemic. Asset prices have accelerated to such an extent that a generation is locked out of homeownership. Businesses and workers are grappling with the uncertainty and hardship created by an inflationary spiral that now requires a harsh recession to bring under control. Orr’s mistakes in pricing the bonds during his fifty-three billion collar money printing splurge has cost the taxpayers over nine billion dollars.

These actions are causing real suffering for kiwis, in contrast with the mostly accounting profits being made by the banks.

If trading banks, operating within the law are risking their social license how does a central bank governor who has failed in his single most important duty, price stability, retain his?  – Damien Grant

These meetings are a gathering of the great and the good in the climate change world. Some will fly to Egypt in their private jets to lecture us all on using public transport, oblivious to their own hypocrisy at using the highest emitting form of transport possible.
Regardless, I hope they have the foresight to focus on real, achievable solutions: that is policies that are realistic and not ahead of technological solutions. We only have to look to Europe and the UK to see the damage done by a premature expectation that they could close down their thermal power stations and rely on wind and solar to keep the lights on. – Stuart Smith

In the energy sector they talk about the trilemma. The energy trilemma refers to affordable, reliable and environmentally sustainable energy.

The difference between life in the developed world, as we enjoy in New Zealand, and life in the third world is having ready access to reliable and affordable energy. We forget that at our peril.

Wind and solar energy do have a vital role to play. Of course they do! But we haven’t yet reached sufficient levels of technological advancement in New Zealand to be burning our bridges just yet and shutting down our non-renewable generation and still expect the lights will stay on. – Stuart Smith

Our government’s attempt to tax our farmers in the name of climate change is a great example of a policy moving ahead of available technology. Why? Farmers currently have no practical tools to mitigate their emissions, and drastically reducing agricultural production in the name of climate change would put us in breach of the Paris Accord.

We should acknowledge the environmental progress that we have made. Yes, we have more to do, but food security and access to affordable, reliable energy must not be put at risk by climate change policies. We can have both, but it will take leadership. – Stuart Smith

It is being in the public eye and being a bit of a polarising personality that has taught me my biggest lessons. I worked out you don’t die of embarrassment. Sometimes it just feels like you might and just putting one foot in front of the other and keeping moving will mean that it will pass.

I learnt that you can’t personalise other people’s opinions and sometimes their hate. They have their own stuff going on and I don’t have to take it on board. I learnt that you can couch your inner voice to be positive and not negative. It takes work and now, instead of sinking, I can see the signs and head it off earlier. I can bounce.

I have learnt to kick Mildred to the curb. She is the nasty voice on my shoulder that nags and doubts me. I have no room for Mildred, so I send her packing quick-smart.

I have also learnt thanks to people like Sir John Kirwan and Mike King and reinforced in Michelle and Maia’s book that it’s okay to not always be okay. Sometimes you just need to find space and reach out to your mum or daughter or husband or best friend and just breath through it.  – Paula Bennett

At any rate, it is curious that so many of those who claim to oppose fascism these days resemble fascists both in their manner and their dress. Black is their favorite color, and they shout to drown out the sound of all voices other than their own. In addition to repetition, their rhetorical method is intimidation. Often, it works. – Theodore Dalrymple

What is most alarming about all this is that a very noisy but tiny minority has been able with surprising ease to overturn, and indeed reverse, a tradition of free speech and enquiry. Our society has proved surprisingly susceptible or vulnerable to the activism of monomaniacs of many kinds. The problem is that an issue is all in all to the monomaniacs, but to the rest of us it is merely one thing among many others, not even, or far from, the most important. – Theodore Dalrymple

Generalizations about animal agriculture hide great regional differences and often lead to diet guidelines promoting shifts away from animal products that are not feasible for the world’s poor. For instance, the highly publicized 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission reportrecommended a largely plant-based diet whose cost, based on retail prices from 2011, was estimated to exceed the total household per capita incomes of more than 1.5 billion people. The urgent food, nutrition, and economic needs of hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia should not be sacrificed to pay for methane that was largely emitted elsewhere. – Jimmy Smith

Across Africa, and indeed much of the developing world, farm animals are much more than cellophane-wrapped meat or bottled milk. The farming of cows, goats, pigs, and poultry is essential to people’s livelihoods—and therefore purchasing power, which in turn determines household food security at a time of increasing global insecurity. In countries that face high levels of malnutrition and poverty, livestock provide families with food, jobs, income, draught power, and a sense of cultural identity. – Jimmy Smith

Like every continent, Africa must strive to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. But African countries must also reduce malnutrition, create decent livelihoods for their people, and promote environmental stewardship. The continent has the opportunity through livestock to achieve all this.

Improving livestock productivity in Africa goes hand in hand with reducing agricultural emissions and protecting food security from the impacts of climate change. As the delegates and activists gather in Egypt, they must remember that both outcomes are vital for humanity’s long-term well-being. Villainizing livestock will achieve neither. – Jimmy Smith

The survey confirms what most news consumers already know – as a whole, journalists are biased. Not only do they have a strong left-wing bias, but about a third of the industry is also hard-core in their left-wing beliefs.

That would not be of concern if the journalists kept their personal views to themselves and saw their role as non-biased neutral observers. While that may have been their role in years gone by, journalists now see their role is to change the opinion of their audience.  – Frank Newman

What is quite clear is the growing disconnect between what journalists produce and what the public wants to consume. That is visible in their declining audience and reflected in a noticeable mistrust of the mainstream media.

The audience that is looking for media coverage that is balanced and fair is increasingly turning to new channels for news and political commentary. It is therefore hardly surprising that the legacy media is becoming its own echo chamber with a dwindling audience.

The challenge for the media sector is how it remains relevant. The logical response is to return to the more traditional values as espoused in the virtuous principles of the Broadcasting Standards Authority and the Media Council. That will, however, be difficult for an industry that is now highly populated with extreme socialists intent on re-educating their audience towards their form of left-wing ideology. – Frank Newman

For a while now, Orr has been ridiculed by some as a symbol of woke.

It’s been obvious how hard he’s tried to make the Reserve Bank cool. He’s given speeches on climate change and speeches on embracing te ao Māori.

In fact, in at least its last three annual reports, the RBNZ has made more mentions of “carbon” or “climate” than “inflation” or “price stability”. Just a reminder, inflation is the bank’s job. The climate is someone else’s. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Finance Minister Grant Robertson didn’t help. He also tried to make the bank cool. He appointed a board of directors who specialised in a lot of things that weren’t necessarily boring old economics. Things like “managing people” and “culture”. Critics noticed that and that was also mocked. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

His select committee appearance at Parliament last week might’ve been a low point. He blamed our inflation on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, parroting a Labour Party line. He would know that the truth is our inflation was out of control at least eight months before the invasion. The invasion was in late February this year. Our inflation was 5.9 per cent by December last year. It was 3.3 per cent (outside the 1-3 per cent band) by June last year.

Unfortunately for Orr and everyone who shares his ideological commitment to getting distracted from your day job, he’s reinforced exactly what the opponents of woke stuff have long feared, which is that you can’t do your day job properly if you start getting distracted by wanting to appear cool to the users of Twitter. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Adrian Orr frequently presents as so thin-skinned that he must be approached with extreme caution to avoid what could usefully be termed a “Vesuvius” moment.

In my view, it is well past time that Orr grew a hard shell, faced up to probing questions with frankness and more respect for his interlocutors, and combined that with the necessary gravitas to take the inflation fight public and instill confidence so that Kiwis are united behind what should be a single-focus endeavour.

Right now Orr presents as an inept manager who has struggled to retain the confidence of the “markets” at a time when it is essential that there is broad consensus on the measures necessary to tame inflation. – Fran O’Sullivan

But it’s a fat lot of good blaming Orr alone for the “poverty effect”, which is in fact being felt through much of “the West” as central bankers try to crunch soaring inflation through raising interest rates yet maintain “sustainable employment” — a frankly ridiculously balancing act that would test the most adroit high-wire exponent.

This current state of affairs suits politicians and the financial sector alike. Each are absolved from encouraging the unsustainable “wealth effect” in the first place in New Zealand to alleviate the impact of the Covid pandemic. This was manifest here by a huge escalation in asset prices and cheap money to sustain employment. – Fran O’Sullivan

Because of the dire worker shortages, employers are already bending over backwards to give employees competitive wages, greater flexibility, and additional benefits.

There is a risk that the standardised approach may adversely impact employees who already have a flexible agreement that suits their individual needs.

It’s also a bad time in our economic cycle to be increasing wages. Unless New Zealand’s wage inflation starts to decrease, the Reserve Bank of NZ will continue to increase borrowing rates – hurting first-home buyers and low-income households the most. – Matt Cowley

Spending money does not, on its own, fix problems. It matters how that money is spent.

Perhaps you think that is obvious. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem so obvious to the government. – Michael Johnston

There has been widespread commentary from the leaders of ECE bodies on the urgent need to address teacher supply.

Without more teachers, the new funding, even if it’s just offsetting the effects of inflation, will increase pressure on an already strained ECE sector. That will mean longer waiting lists and reductions in quality. – Michael Johnston

We should trust ECE centres to make pragmatic recruitment decisions and release them from red tape. This approach wouldn’t even cost anything. In fact, it would likely save money.

Sometimes the best solution to a problem is also the cheapest. – Michael Johnston

I sometimes feel as though we have abdicated our responsibility as grown-ups because I know what it was like to be young.
I thought I knew everything. Now, I look back, I’m like, I knew nothing. I was wrong in many of my sort of fierce positions.

And, I was fortunate that when I was young, there were adults who were willing to tell me, you’re actually really not right about that. Here’s what you should think about differently. That’s not happening now. –Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Can we all agree on compassion?

Can we all agree that not everyone means harm? Can we all agree that people can learn and people change? You know, just sort of basic things that we seem to have forgotten. –Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Co-governance appears to be a hill that this Labour Government is prepared to die on.

But as I also said on Friday, co-governance should be the least of your worries if you’re concerned with creeping socialism.

The Three Waters reform suggested is property theft and that’s the reason that Phil Goff was against it and had to be bought off.

This Government wants to seize assets paid for by ratepayers, amalgamate them and then borrow off them, so that funding for water stays off the Governments and Councils books. It’s blatant nationalisation by a left wing government

It’s like needing to do urgent repairs on the house but you have no money.  So you take your neighbour’s house and use it as equity to borrow money to fix your place. It’s just wrong.- Andrew Dickens

I don’t agree with accusations I am ‘phobic’ towards anyone, and I would stress that what we need at this time is not name-calling but constructive, nuanced and robust dialogue with a view to better help vulnerable children experiencing difficult questions and distress around identity,” she said.

I and many other practitioners have real concerns with the growing number of children being encouraged to believe they have been born in the wrong body and need to medically change their bodies to align with their inner thoughts and feelings in order to resolve psychological distress.

I respect and empathise with those who believe differently, but I stand by my professional opinion and approach as I believe it to be best practice, and in the best interests of children. – Marli de Klerk

But as we’ve said a number of times now, with all due respect our beliefs will not be changing. Christian beliefs have been held by people around the world for thousands of years because they bring life, hope and flourishing and continue to be just as relevant and valuable today.

”We know not everyone will agree with our beliefs. We respect their right to hold and express their beliefs. We just ask that respect is offered in return. – Paul Shakes 

Have you noticed that when Jacinda’s government is forced to make concessions under public pressure they never sacrifice co-governance? Maori domination of the revised hospital structure was defended tenaciously. With Three Waters, Nanaia Mahuta will fiddle around the edges of the legislation, but co-governance is still there in the middle, an immovable obstacle. Advancing it is central to Nanaia’s being; it has become her raison d’etre. After a lengthy, undistinguished political career, she can at last see her long-desired Tainui tribal takeover on the horizon, and she doesn’t want to give an inch. Jacinda Ardern and her low-level caucus understand so little about Maori affairs that most of them can’t see what Nanaia is doing right under their noses. They won’t lift a finger to prevent her tribal takeover bid. – Michael Bassett

To this government, co-governance means that non-Maori, who constitute more than 83% of New Zealand’s population, would possess 50% of the authority in the country, and be democratically elected. Forget about one-person, one-vote: some, as Napoleon the Pig said in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “are more equal than others”. The other 50% will be made up from only 17% of the population who are Maori. “It’s time to re-think democracy”, Minister of Maori Affairs Willie Jackson tells us. And, there’s nothing in any legislative proposal for co-governance to ensure Maori would be democratically elected by all Maori voters. Instead, they will be selected in the old tribal way: by a handful of self-appointed aristocrats. But co-governance will be more than that. Whichever becomes the dominant tribe will exercise much wider power. Nanaia intends to make sure that that tribe is Tainui. That explains the appointment of the Mahutas and Ormsbys to so many positions, irrespective of their merits, or lack of them. Their job is to ensure that when push comes to shove, Tainui does the pushing and the shoving at the behest of the King Movement, with that loudmouth, Tuku Morgan, yes, he of the $89 pair of silk underpants paid for by the taxpayer, playing a key role. –Michael Bassett

It should not be any minister’s role to advance personal tribal interests. Getting family members appointed other than on merit is beyond the pale. New Zealand is a democracy; our constitution provides for one person-one vote. Willie Jackson should be firmly reminded of this fact. Any scheme which endeavours to entrench racial or tribal privilege in any administrative arm of government should immediately be rejected.

It is clear that Labour’s cabinet has failed to enforce these basic rules. Promoting tribalism under the guise of co-governance should be stopped in its tracks. Now! In addition to all the other changes needed to the Three Waters legislation, co-governance must be dropped. – Michael Bassett

What the country didn’t hear very much – if anything – about were the contributions of other hui attendees. A cynic might suggest that the suppression of this material was deemed necessary by the hui organisers because if the average citizen was made aware of its existence there would be an outcry. Most New Zealanders do not see it as a role of their government to “guide” the thinking of the nation towards the radical, ideologically-driven goals of a tiny, unelected, elite of bureaucrats, academics and activists.- Chris Trotter

Ms Ardern’s and her government’s radicalisation is fast becoming electorally problematic. Precisely because radical ideas, practically by definition, are polarising, they tend to make those who espouse them politically defensive and hostile to criticism. Those citizens who oppose state-sponsored radicalism, mark themselves as “enemies of the people”.

“No Media Access” is only the beginning. – Chris Trotter

We need to bottle up Ruby Tui and spread her far and wide around New Zealand because, by being positive, so much can and will be achieved. – Duncan Garner

Just because I don’t fit someone else’s stereotype of what a Māori looks or acts like, doesn’t mean that is not who I am. – James Meager

You’ve got to protect women’s spaces. I just worry about a lot of the battles that have been very hard won for women, like for racial equality, being reversed but at the same time, trans people have a right to be treated with dignity and not to be discriminated against. – Peter Hain 

You can’t run a country and have a future when you have 40 percent of your kids attending school, that’s just not going to cut it. It’s a moral failure.  It’s a social failure. It’s an economic crisis. So we have to all, Government schools and parents, be really accountable for getting our kids to school. That’s what matters most in our education system. –  Christopher Luxon 

Only 15 percent of road deaths happen because of speed only.  Which means 85 percent of crashes happen below the speed limit or because the drivers are boozed or drugged up.

85 percent.

So Waka Kotahi’s big solution to getting the road toll down completely ignores the fact that 85 percent of the road toll will probably be unaffected. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

The worst thing about this is that it gives transport officials an excuse to not do the things that would actually make a difference.

They’re doing this so they don’t have to put in media barriers that would actually be effective at stopping cars crossing the centre line and smacking into other cars head on.

And that wouldn’t just stop head on crashes from speeding cars, but from everything else as well. Tired drivers, distracted drivers, drunk drivers, drugged drivers. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

What’s frustrating is that those facts are not what are being debated; instead, we’ve got an argument dictated by emotion.

Which means we’ll probably all end up having to drive more slowly, while hundreds of people still die on the roads each year because speed isn’t really the biggest problem. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

A metaphor for the current state of Western societies is that of a tail wagging a dog. A mere appendage has become the most important or powerful part of the animal.

Another apt metaphor for those societies is that of perpetual guerrilla war, waged by tiny ideologically armed minorities against a huge but bloated army, the majority of the population. The ideological guerrillas are nimble, rapid, persistent, and, above all, fanatical. They’re fighting an enemy that’s slow, torpid, complacent, and without real belief in itself. Although initially weak, the guerrillas believe themselves destined to win. – Theodore Dalrymple

First, a proposition is adumbrated that initially appears preposterous to most citizens. Then, arguments in its favor, using all the sophistry available to people who attended university, are relentlessly propagandized. Finally, success is achieved when the preposterous proposition has become widely accepted as an unassailable orthodoxy, at least by the intellectual class, denial of or opposition to which is characterized as extremist, even fascist, in nature.

This process is possible because the struggle, as in a guerrilla war, is asymmetric.- Theodore Dalrymple

Strength of belief doesn’t guarantee that a cause is good, very far from it; but it does mean that those who struggle on its behalf will do so with all their heart.

The absurdity of modern ideological enthusiasms is evident, but while those who promote them make them the focus of their existence and the whole meaning of their lives, better-balanced people try to get on with their lives as normal. No one wants to spend his life arguing, let alone fighting, against sheer idiocy, and thus, sheer idiocy wins the day. – Theodore Dalrymple

We should make no bones about the fact that lying about the truth of issues for political and personal advantage is a great badness. It is even worse with defenceless children targeted by activists using fear tactics to enlist their support – as with the ‘climate change emergency’ nonsense. And if there is a distinction between badness and sheer evil, it reaches its apex now in regard to two other issues.

Predominant is the lying by hierarchies persuading youngsters they can choose to become male or female. This canard strikes at the very personhood, the mental and emotional stability of particularly vulnerable individuals. Yet Professor Robert Winston, scientist and surgeon, is undeniably correct, asserting, ‘I will say this categorically. You cannot change your sex… it is there in every single cell of your body.’ The physical mutilation of children, disregarding this, can be regarded as criminal, its consequences devastating for so many.

With the apparent passing of the age of reason comes the insidious nastiness of identity politics, with individuals believing themselves superior if they have a Maori ancestor. With Jacinda Ardern’s government instructing all government departments to prioritise impenetrable Maori phraseology in their communications – renaming our institutions so their actual function becomes unintelligible – the deliberate promotion of divisive racism is well underway. Yet the worth of individuals has no relation to their ethnic background. And who can possibly defend instructions to all government departments to teach ‘white privilege’, with the aim of inducing guilt and shame among non-Maori children in schools – supposedly because of some imaginary privilege they have from being descended from Europeans? – Amy Brooke

Rather, the signage is a call to the first duty of the citizen: be anxious.  Only if you are truly anxious do you need the protection of our bureaucratic shepherds. – Theodore Dalrymple

Te Whatu Ora’s actions suggest that, at least for the moment, it is more focused on the structure and planning of a national public health service, than supporting previously agreed regional priorities. If these delays are indicative of the way Te Whatu Ora will approach regional matters in the future, the new system looks like it will be far more unresponsive to meeting regional needs than the cumbersome district health board system it replaced.

Previously, there was a legitimate argument about the inherent inequity of the old population-based funding model for health services, which meant the bigger population centres always got the largest slice of the cake, often at the expense of the regions. A nationally based funding model such as Te Whatu Ora was intended to provide more equitable outcomes, across the country –something people in Otago/Southland, and other regional centres, will now surely be questioning in the light of last week’s decisions. – Peter Dunne

The Government has not yet won its argument that upgrading water services across the country can only work with the new co-management provisions. Many remain suspicious the Government is using this legislation to address wider issues simply because this may be its last opportunity. A wider and more open process of public consultation would allow the opportunity for a better-informed public debate.

But by using its large majority, the Government is merely ensuring the bill will be more far more politically divisive than is necessary. Moreover, this bill is but the first of three intended to reform the structure of water delivery. That, plus National’s and ACT’s repeated commitments to repeal the governance provisions, makes the situation even more fraught and uncertain. – Peter Dunne

Health reforms that appear to negate the capacity to reflect regional priorities in the development of national public health services, and water services reforms that leave the central issues of concern unaddressed, while establishing new uncertainties about their scope and application may well prove the devil is indeed always in the detail. However, creating new uncertainties on top of already contentious unfolding plans – however merited the original policy intent – is not good politics.

And it will be political management, not well-meaning intent, that will ultimately determine their success or failure.   – Peter Dunne

They are trying to create safetyism, a world where nothing bad happens, and they see liberty as a challenge to that when, actually, liberty is the thing that protects us all. – Kemi Badenoch

I see myself very much as a classical liberal. Because we keep moving, socially, in a particular direction […] the people who take the progressive line will assume that me trying to maintain the conservative line makes me a culture warrior. I don’t know, I’m just trying to do the right thing. – Kemi Badenoch

Back in the day there was a pact between elected politicians and those who put them in office.  They did our bidding.  They exercised power in our interests.  They were, in other words, “accountable”.  They limited their actions to doing things for the benefit of the people.  They showed restraint.  They were answerable to the people’s houses of parliament.  They had to front the electorate periodically to get our permission to continue in office.

The democratic system (aka “responsible government” and representative democracy) required two things in order to function properly.  Properly motivated politicians and informed voters.  Now we have neither, and this is why the system is so broken. – Roger Franklin 

Perhaps even worse, today’s voters are low information, superficial and ill-motivated to inform themselves about public policy.  They are, in the late American economist Anthony Downs’ term, “rationally ignorant”.  They have decided to focus on themselves and their toys, and have chosen to let the state do its own thing, even when it harms them personally and harms their fellow citizens.  For they have signed away their stake in the political system.  They are a combination of midwits – those just smart enough to be dangerous – and total buffoons oblivious to what is going on in the world and what is driving it.

Being superficial and driven by how they “feel” about issues of the moment, today’s citizens are prepared to emote their way to public policy, clutching at, and accepting at face value empty cliches and propaganda like “climate emergency”, “love is love”, “follow the science”, “black lives matter”, “we are all in this together”, “stop the spread”, “flatten the curve” and the rest, and all the while believing earnestly (or at least casually) that these slogans have actual meaning based on truth, research and analysis.

Policy-as-emoting is a creature of the post-modern age.  It fits perfectly with a shallow, politically illiterate, morally vacuous Me Generation that mistakes “feeling” for thinking, or worse, for being.  In such a regime, the patently absurd becomes mainstream belief, almost overnight. – Roger Franklin 

If, perchance, evidence counter to their world view comes their way, they will simply look in the other direction in order to avoid having illusions dented.  Leaps of faith that are poo-pooed among the traditionally religious are easily absorbed by the emoting class.  If you accept that truth can simply be defined away, or morphed into “my truth” and “your truth”, you will all the more easily accept that, for example, crushing traditional marriage is simply “all about love”, that giving up our petrol-fuelled cars will stop droughts and floods, that giving offence to “victims” must be outlawed no matter what the ramifications for free speech, that robust policy itself (aka science) is a whitey/male social construct. 

There is another, more familiar phrase that describes the motivation for at least some of what we are describing here as policy-as-emoting.  This is virtue-signalling, the supporting of a particular policy because doing so make us look good, or at least makes us not look bad (now defined routinely as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or patriarchal).  Virtue-signalling can be effected by both politicians and by voters.  It has become a core part of the great modern pact between the governing class and the governed. 

It creates convenient hate-figures to be derided and scorned.  It is front-and-centre of our new media and university-based clerisy.  It doesn’t require any policy evaluation or review for it to be justified in the minds of its adherents.  – Roger Franklin 

The very term “progressive” is indicative of our self-deception.  Policy-as-emoting just feels right.  Whenever we see the ‘right side of history’ invoked as a justification for a policy, we should be extremely worried.  There is moral vanity afoot with little regard either for people’s real interests or for facts.

Hence, we get policies that are themselves merely slogans.  “Clean energy”, which is not clean and provides no reliable, practical energy.  “Climate reparations” to pay former colonies for the civilisation and all its trappings that Britain (and others) gave them. – Roger Franklin 

 “Net zero” — who even knows what it means, or can say what it will entail?  Who among those who blather on about it could crisply define and justify the term, other than with yet more cliches and slogans based on lies?  Who better, then, to be giving advice to “global leaders” at COP27 than tik-tok-dancing teenaged girls?

The willingness of the governed class to allow the polity to be run on misinformation and ephemera has allowed the epidemic of governments addressing non-problems with non-solutions, at massive cost.  Governments and major political parties naturally welcome the new reality of democracy.  They simply love it.  It gives them an essentially free ride and endless get-out-of-jail-free cards and creates the opportunity for them up to indulge their own agendas, absent even the most limited scrutiny.  The new pact between government and citizenry goes like this – we will make your lives comfortable and convenient, with a veneer of prosperity, if you lazily give us unfettered power and let us keep it.  Don’t worry.  We have got this!   – Roger Franklin 

With us comfortable and looking the other way, the state can indulge in the five standard forms of policy that are either not in the public interest or are actively against it:

♦ Vanity projects (unneeded light rail, stadiums, Olympic Games bids);

♦ Ideological projects (nationalisation, privatisation, renewable energy, mass migration, wokedom, state child care, the republic, the voice, removal of statues);

♦ Crony projects (the apartment boom, privatisation, public-private partnerships);

♦ Projects that enhance politicians’ power (programmable currencies, especially Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), The Biosecurity Act of 2015, track-and-trace technology to enable carbon footprint tracking, facial recognition, big data, various means of citizen surveillance, cancel culture-enhancing actions, nudge units, propaganda, military-style policing of the kind now routinely seen in Victoria and medical mandates)

♦ Mistaken projects (lockdowns, masks, new urbanism, first home owners’ schemes, the NDIS).

Only the fifth type of public policy might be said to be the result of good motivation on the part of decision-makers.  The others are bound to be self-regarding and harmful to the public interest. – Roger Franklin 

All five types of policy failure are the result of second-rate and/or ill-motivated politicians and ignorant or lazy citizens.  And, to make it worse, we fail to realise that any of these things matter.  That printing money endlessly is not a good idea.  That foreign wars in which we have no legitimate interest yet which we are more-than-willing to join may bring us the ultimate harm.  That outsourcing parenting to the state will ruin our children.  That abandoning support for traditional marriage and family formation will dissolve civil society within a few generations.  That failing to be fiscally continent will have ramifications.  That killing coal will also kill our economies.  That encouraging the momentarily gender-confused young to have their bits chopped off or added to will not inevitably bring them happiness or fulfilment, long-term.  That giving the indigenous a “voice” will solve nothing for the Aborigines who actually need help. 

Yes, policy failures matter. – Roger Franklin 

By choosing to walk away from our democratic responsibilities, by surrendering our freedoms without blinking, by handing extreme power to politicians (without recourse, even through the legal system, to remedies), by settling for comfort and faux-wealth instead of being tough on those we elect, by gullibly trusting those who we ridiculously believe have our best interests at heart, we have abandoned to right to call our system democratic in any meaningful sense.  Marriages of convenience are never wise. – Roger Franklin 

Maybe this is how the world ends, not with a whimper but a shambles. Sharm El Sheikh is an appropriate place to hold a climate conference; the whole place is a climate warning. It’s an Egyptian Las Vegas with a casino and the world’s largest artificial lagoon. The city’s carbon emissions must be enormous.– Richard Prebble

COP27′s new initiative is to create a fund for loss and damage. It is like the passengers on the Titanic demanding compensation for any water damage to their luggage rather than insisting the ship misses the iceberg. Any compensation will never be more than a gesture. It was disappointing to see New Zealand supporting this nonsense but then our Government loves gestures.

The message from COP27 is if we are relying on the politicians there is no way global warming will be limited to 1.5C. – Richard Prebble

The whole world is applying its mind to climate change. Imagine how many clever ideas there are.

If we are going to beat global warming it will by human ingenuity. – Richard Prebble

It cannot be a boot camp that just punishes kids.  That’s only going to make them angrier.

But, it can work if it’s a place away from bad parents, where kids are taught some discipline and consequence, where they have rules not allowing them to roam the streets in the middle of the night, where they have counsellors to help them learn new behaviour and deal with past trauma, where they have school, and where they have support when they do go home to those parents.

And look, that is in National’s proposal. They are proposing to include schooling, counselling, drug and alcohol treatment, mentoring, and cultural support, and a case worker assigned to the family for ongoing support.

It’s probably worth giving it a go, isn’t it?

Because what else have we got?

Clearly, what few consequences there are for these kiddie ram-raiders are not enough, because it just keeps happening.  – Heather du Plessis-Allan

 The tactic of the bully is to shun the victim into silence. The bully targets one person, recruits others to cheerlead and then attacks. They count on the fact that the victim is shocked and cannot immediately fight back. The bully hones in on what they know to be beloved of the victim – their career, their family, their freedom of expression – and takes these things away. – Rosie Kay

Mental strength to fight the bullies is essential, but what can be even harder to take than the bully is the collective silence that surrounds your victimisation. At school, I still feel the betrayal of friends who turned a blind eye, and the teachers who did nothing. Those were different days, I think, we are all so much more bullying aware.

But look at what is happening to women who dare to speak up for women’s rights. We are being bullied, ostracised, our livelihoods destroyed, and our reputations and careers threatened. Instead of standing up and supporting these women, there is a collective silence and even a collective de-platforming. More than the bullying, this level of cowardice from everyone else in your career fields chips away at your trust in the decency of people and the strength of collective good.

We see it in our political parties, we see it in the arts, we see it in universities, we see it across so many aspects of society. – Rosie Kay

But we are strong, intelligent women, and we are often at the height of our powers, and we feel compelled to speak out and to seek the truth and to protect women and girls now and into the future. There is nothing transphobic about the protection and safeguarding of women in vulnerable spaces, in prisons, in sports and in hospitals, and it shouldn’t take courage to say so. – Rosie Kay

We need more people in positions of power to start to stand up and respect the rights of women and to ignore the nasty bully tactics of extremists who dare to silence and oppress our best and brightest women. We cannot allow a generation of brilliant women to be lost.

At its heart, we need to really think about what kind of principles do we hold true and strong for us a society. – Rosie Kay

In it, my basic premise, quite apart from all the incredible new developments of info-wars, grey zones and human augmentation, was to ask; what do we ask our soldiers to fight for and to defend, if freedom and civilisation and democracy is not at the heart of our collective society?  Can we, with the spirit of enlightenment still within us, argue that the quality of freedom is a universally good one? That as humans we are happier, more fulfilled, stronger, safer, when we have freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience? For the quality of ‘offence’ is far, far trickier to define. Qualities of offence are time specific, place specific and shift and warp through cultures. The debate on art, culture and freedom of expression is not one of ‘culture wars’; it speaks to the very core of our democratic principles and our ability to think, to debate, to question and to express. The arts are not, and never have been, a luxury; they are the very frontline of the human mind and deal with our dreams, fantasies, nightmares and our darkest impulses. Shut them down or censor them, and what kind of civilisation is left? – Rosie Kay

But the presence of these young people at what are supposed to be serious UN shindigs probably says more about the UN than it does about them. There seems to be a keen desire on the part of elite environmentalists to use young people as a kind of stage army on the climate issue – a tool of emotional blackmail to harry world leaders into the eco-austerity that Guterres and Co already favour. – Tom Slater

As frankly silly as this whole spectacle is, the cult of climate youth certainly tells us a few things about the state of the environmental movement more broadly.

First up, there’s the simplistic moralism of it all – the childlike reduction of energy and climate policy to a matter of right and wrong, to one of believing The Science or ignoring it for corrupt or self-serving reasons. The notion that maybe, just maybe, political leaders – particularly those from developing nations – might want to prioritise their citizens’ living standards over costly green virtue-signalling seems to have been dismissed out of hand.

Indeed, for all the talk of young people being ‘on the front lines of climate action’ the world over, you can’t help but notice that these handpicked youth ‘leaders’ tend to be from well-to-do families in developed Western nations – young people who are sufficiently materially comfortable to have the time to worry about the end of the world.

Then there are the religious echoes of this whole charade. Through initiatives like Guterres’ Youth Advisory Group, supranational environmentalism seems to have developed a pipeline of would-be child saints, to be brought out to preach doom to the already converted. – Tom Slater

And finally there’s the contempt all this actually shows for young people. Taking young people seriously does not mean pretending that they know everything. What’s more, I dare say there would be little room on that little advisory group for young people who take a different view on climate. This is an exercise in pumping young people full of doom-laden propaganda, then inviting them up on stage to repeat it while wagging a knowing finger.

This is not inspiring or progressive or empowering of young people. It’s weird and patronising and all to the end of pushing an anti-human and anti-growth agenda – one that will screw over young people in the long-run. In short, environmentalists, how dare you? – Tom Slater

One weird thing that can come as a surprise when you lose people is that real life doesn’t stop. All the same usual trivial crap keeps coming and you have to keep dealing with it, even though on the inside you are hollow and sore. You can still have a laugh, too, as we all did at the wake last Friday at a Working Men’s Club where the price of a round of drinks – two pints and a large white wine for £9 – took you right back to the nineties (which let’s face it, is where many of us often wish we could be).

Grief is a bully, that keeps on showing up and getting in the way of your life, and life is a bully that keeps on showing up and getting in the way of your grief. Neither life nor grief care how you feel or that you might not have time for them right now. They don’t want to know what other stuff you have going on. They don’t give you space or respite.- Milli Hill

Being bullied can make you bitter. The bullies themselves pack a visceral punch; short and sharp, it knocks the wind out of you. But this doesn’t hurt as much or last as long as the silence of the bystanders – those whose legs you see when you have been knocked to the ground or shoved under the bus; very much in the vicinity, very much aware of your suffering, very much still standing. The rational part of your mind can understand they are silent to protect themselves. A deeper part feels they are unforgivable. – Milli Hill

We teach our children to talk about bullying, to speak out and support each other and get help. But in the meantime, one of the worst epidemics of bullying any of us have ever witnessed is taking place daily on social media, as woman after woman is ostracised, defamed, deplatformed and pilloried for speaking up for women’s rights. Whether you agree or disagree with their views shouldn’t affect your judgement that what is happening to them is disproportionate and unfair. It’s bullying. And to say that this is a problem between gender critical feminists and trans activists is also wildly reductionist. There is disproportionate pillorying of women going on within feminism itself.

And there is disproportionate pillorying of women going on completely outside the feminist discourse.  – Milli Hill

Everyone agrees they said something racist, and, under the current rules, this means they deserve for their lives to be destroyed, and if you speak up for them, you’re a racist too.

What is the end-game of those meting out these show trials and public executions? Have they noticed that the majority of people in the virtual dock are female, and if so, does this bother them? Do they feel that justice is truly being served? Do they feel the world will become a better place once every wrong thinker has been ‘educated’ or dispatched? How will they feel if one of the recipients of these attacks actually takes their own life? Will this still be just and fair in their opinion? Perhaps this has already happened, perhaps this kind of behaviour has been the final straw for someone whose name I do not know. Being bullied by a large group of people, on social media where unlimited numbers can watch and participate, and having your reputation, career, livelihood, friendships and life as you know it completely destroyed is not something that is easy to survive. –

Nobody, even those who’s views we find repellant, deserves to have their life destroyed. – Milli Hill

I firmly believe that the way we vote in the next general election will have a huge impact on our lives, our children’s lives and, quite possibly, our grandchildren’s lives.

The next election will determine the character and integrity of how we are governed and what rights we will have.

There will be a not so simple choice between voting for a democracy or allowing democracy to perish by voting for the party that is demolishing democracy and replacing it with an ethnocracy. – John Porter

It sickens me to read claims that my representations on behalf of women and girls for fairness on the sporting field are twisted in such a way to expose me to vicious and vexatious accusations of homophobia.

My belief in protecting girls and women from the unfair consequences of competition against biological males should be seen for precisely what it is. –

There are extremists who wrap themselves up in the proud flag of the LGB movement, coming after me and many other women, even other gays and lesbians who do not agree with the addition of the TQA+, by using this cover to legitimise completely baseless attacks.

Because of their rainbow camouflage, the sight of this banner has triggered me, but in no way does that emotional response reflect my view of the millions of people who celebrate their rights under the same flag. – Katherine Deves

What should be the symbol of genuine pride, has become distressing because of its misuse.

Consistent with the time-honoured custom of politics, the worst enemies are found within your own ranks. – Katherine Deves

One of the saddest ironies of this debate is that those who are gay or lesbian were highly probable to have been gender non-conforming growing up.

But today, these are largely the children and young people most likely to be convinced by media and social media they are “trans”, “non-binary” or “born in the wrong body”.

Despite ample evidence demonstrating almost all children with distress about their natal sex resolve this during puberty, experimental medical interventions rather than “watchful waiting” are being baked into law and policy as the solution.

We are sterilising a generation of gay and lesbian children by turning them into profit-centres. – Katherine Deves

What is the “trans community”?

Because I fail to see what a distressed same-sex attracted teenage girl with a GoFundMe for a bilateral mastectomy has in common with a middle aged man who has decided to publicly flaunt his cross-dressing fetish full-time.

My position has always been about the sex-based rights of women and girls and the safeguarding of children.

Sex self-ID laws and policies mean men and boys can now simply self-declare they are a woman or girl, giving him the right to intrude into spaces such as toilets, change rooms, shelters and prisons, compete in the female sports category, avail himself of woman-specific services and resources including those for lesbians, and win awards, competitions, contracts and scholarships created for the benefit of females.

Anyone with an ounce of common sense recognises that this state of affairs is profoundly unfair at best and dangerous at worst. – Katherine Deves

I will rest my case on the percolation of the truth that continues to emerge in defiance of virtue-signalling ideology and ignorance. – Katherine Deves

One of the things that appalls me about young billionaires (and erstwhile young billionaires) such as Bankman-Fried is their absence of taste. What is the point of being so rich if you look and dress as he looks and dresses? No doubt the look of false indigence that billionaires adopt is intended to deflect from their vast wealth, all of them being left-wing in everything but their finances, but it undermines as well as flatters public taste and detracts from civilized life. – Theodore Dalrymple 

But let us return to the question of hair and its relation not only to genius but to goodness. Nineteenth-century gurus—Tolstoy, Ruskin, William Morris, Bernard Shaw, and no doubt others—had long, straggly beards of an appearance of the nests of the less aesthetically fastidious species of birds. It was their beards that stood guarantor of these men’s wisdom; no one with a beard such as theirs could be any less than profound.

It is easy to make the logical mistake of supposing that if wise men have straggly beards, then men with straggly beards must be wise. – Theodore Dalrymple 

Now, of course it is true that some geniuses have had wild hair—Beethoven, for example, or Einstein—but the majority have not. Power grows out of the barrel of a gun, said Mao Tse-tung (or however we are supposed to spell his name these days, my automatic spell-check on my computer not allowing me the spelling I grew up with); but cleverness does not grow out of disordered hair. A brush and comb are not completely incompatible with thought. – Theodore Dalrymple 

A conference in Glasgow this weekend, entitled ‘Education Not Indoctrination’, will take a critical look at the way schools are being used to inculcate woke values in our children, often against the wishes of parents. It is being organised by Hands Up Scotland, a group of parents and educators concerned about the politicisation of Scottish schools, in association with the Academy of Ideas, where I am science and technology director. Yet the event almost didn’t happen because staff at the original venue refused to work on it. This is a good example of how ‘cancel culture’ works today. – Rob Lyons

As the blurb for Saturday’s event notes, schools are at the centre of the woke agenda. There’s the continued promotion of critical race theory in the classroom. There’s the Scottish government’s new sex-education curriculum, which will expose very young children to overtly sexualised material. There’s a new LGBTQ+ vocabulary (cisgender, transgender, bisexual, non-binary and genderfluidity) already being taught in primary schools. And there’s the Scottish government’s guidance on ‘Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools’, which advises teachers not to question a child’s desire to transition.

In short, the views of a tiny minority, supported by the Scottish government, are being foisted on children, often in defiance of the wishes of parents. Profound changes are happening in Scottish education. And it is important that we get a chance to debate them.

But not everyone agrees this should be up for debate, it seems. – Rob Lyons

In a statement to The Times, the venue owners, Agile City, claimed that: ‘There was no attempt to stop the event happening or shut down the discussion; it’s just not something we can host in our venue.’ Yet it’s not entirely accurate to suggest there was no attempt to shut down discussion. The very act of pulling the booking at such short notice meant that the event might well have had to be cancelled.

Fortunately, a sympathetic venue – the Tron Church in Glasgow city centre – has stepped in, and the event will go ahead. It seems that Christians are now more open to political debate than many right-on liberals.

What the whole affair reveals is the brittleness of woke thinking. It is one thing to be passionate about particular issues. It is another to think that the mere airing of a different point of view is a threat, in and of itself. This is No Platforming taken to another level – it is an attempt to clamp down on debate itself.

This Civic House case also reveals another driver of cancel culture – the sense of entitlement among woke members of staff in cultural and political institutions. – Rob Lyons

We need spaces to have civilised debate about important and controversial issues, free from the threat of cancellation. Thankfully, ‘Education Not Indoctrination’ will now go ahead. But that should never have been in question in the first place. –  Rob Lyons

In New Zealand, we talk a lot about big-ticket projects such as cycleways and convention centres. But we don’t focus nearly enough on infrastructure security. That’s a problem.

Infrastructure is not just a game of getting things done. Success means getting projects done well, and part of that means investing in necessary protection. – Matthew Birchall

Electricity is another area worth keeping an eye on. New Zealand is fortunate to have an ample supply of power sourced from wind farms and hydroelectric dams. But renewables can also be unreliable. When the wind is blowing and the dams are full, New Zealand is well-positioned to meet demand.

The problem arises when demand surges during winter and generation fails to keep up. When that happens, those still July days suddenly begin to lose their appeal. And it is in this context that coal and gas play an important role in keeping the power on. The 2021 blackouts. – Matthew Birchall

While the government has promised that all of New Zealand’s electricity will be generated from renewables by 2030, there is a strong argument to be made for continued use of gas and coal to shore up supply. At the very least, the move to renewables makes the question of secure electricity supply all the more salient. Wind, after all, has a bad habit of fluctuating.

However, the greatest risk to New Zealand’s infrastructure security may originate in cyber space. If a rogue actor hacked New Zealand’s power grid, telecoms network or water utilities, the country would be thrown into chaos. These assets are so essential to day-to-day life that society cannot function without them.

Experts speak of a cascade effect when critical infrastructure is destabilised. When one link in the chain goes down, the rest follow. –

Matthew Birchall

After all, if we don’t ensure that our kit is in good nick today, then we will have to pay more to maintain it tomorrow.  – Matthew Birchall

As “the greatest moral challenge of our times”, the dogmas of the climate change cult are no longer limited by any secular need for evidence or data

If climate change policy was ever based on “the science”, then that basis has long been overwhelmed by politics and tribal groupthink. It is now the very badge of a progressive left-wing worldview. In both USA and Australia, climate change alarm is the single greatest differentiator between the left and the right of politics.  – Barry Brill

The “climate justice” narrative is a post-modern cultural phenomenon, intertwined in endless mysterious ways with race and gender and other categories of perceived Marx-like oppression. Belief in the climate change credo is a sine qua non for every left-leaning politician (or journalist) – in the English-speaking world and further afield.

While an ideology for some, it is a quasi-religion for others. As long ago as 2003, author  Michael Crighton declared that mankind’s greatest challenge was to distinguish reality from fantasy, in the context of environmentalism becoming a religion. Regrettably, over the ensuing 20 years, faith in climate change has moved inexorably to fill the large vacuum left by the rapid decline of Christianity. – Barry Brill

Just as Torquemada declared war in the 15th century on those who could not believe in the teachings of the Vatican’s Holy See, Prime Minister Ardern has declared war in the 21st century on those who can not believe in the teachings of the United Nations’ IPCC.

The Inquisition used the old weapons of the thumbscrew, the rack, and the burning of books. Ms Ardern is a proud cheer-leader for the use of the “new weapons” of hate-speech laws, de-platforming, and cancel culture. – Barry Brill

Roll over Josef Goebbels: your stunted canvas was but a single nation. Now we have the entire globalist population of the planet united behind the most ambitious propaganda campaign in history – with limitless funding and with no tether to any known system of ethics. – Barry Brill

We at the New Zealand Initiative are aware of an ill-founded view that we are somewhat critical of our much-beloved government. Of course, this “alternative view” has no merit.

Take, for example, Labour’s 3 November list of its 100 achievements since November 2021. On one count 71 of the 100 involved government spending more of our money on this or that.

Top of the list was putting a targeted cost of living payment on its credit card. Good thinking. After all, inflation is up because Government drew so heavily on the RBNZ’s ATM in responding to COVID. The remedy for too much government spending yesterday is obvious – more spending today.

The magical thing about the 71 spending items on this list is that they are all good. No one is harmed. Every item is beneficial. Why, otherwise, would it make the list? Why is it magic? Well anytime you or I spend our money we give up something – the chance to spend it on something else. We have to think about that.

Government is different. It can and does create more money out of nothing. Today’s government borrowing, like tomorrow’s inflation, is the next government’s problem. What did future generations ever do for us? There is more. Another 21 items in the list use regulations to spend other people’s money. – Dr Bryce Wilkinson

The list includes many things that a different government would also have achieved, for example, finishing Transmission Gully and free trade agreements.

Given this feature, we should acknowledge Labour’s modesty in excluding sunshine and fresh air from its list of achievements. They are free lunches too. – Dr Bryce Wilkinson

The Human Rights Commission says it’s “very disappointing” that the government isn’t going ahead with law changes that would curb New Zealanders’ right to free speech.

Let me repeat that, just in case you didn’t get the irony. An agency ostensibly set up to protect our rights is upset that the government isn’t introducing new laws that would restrict them. What better evidence could there be of the commission’s highly selective interpretation – you might say perversion – of its own name? – Karl du Fresne 

The government’s retreat from its original intention is clearly a blow and a setback to the HRC, which is so obsessed with identity politics and the supposed menace of hate speech that it completely ignores its bigger responsibility to protect New Zealanders’ freedom of expression. – Karl du Fresne 

You’d think the commission’s own name was a bit of a giveaway, but no; its interpretation of the phrase “human rights” is selective, self-serving and unfailingly woke. Rather than concern itself with upholding and promoting New Zealanders’ rights generally, it directs its energies toward protecting us from racism, islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia and white supremacy. These endanger all of us, according to chief human rights pooh-bah Paul Hunt, arguably the most useless bureaucrat on the government’s payroll (in fact worse than useless, since the effect of his job, if not the purpose, is to promote a sense of division and drive wedges into the community).

To put it another way, the commission thinks it’s okay in a democracy to sacrifice the free-speech rights of the majority in order to protect supposedly vulnerable minority groups. It justifies this by arguing that restrictions on speech are needed to counter “violent extremism”. This is worryingly similar to the spurious pretexts – such as public order and public safety – routinely cited by authoritarian regimes that want to control what people think and say. Iran and Xi Jinping’s China come to mind. 

Reconciling free speech with the interests of minority groups calls for a balancing act, but the commission doesn’t even attempt it. It solves the problem by simply ignoring the free speech side of the equation altogether. – Karl du Fresne 

The commission is a $13 million-plus per annum deadweight on the economy – money that could more usefully be spent on any number of worthy projects. Teaching dogs to ride bikes, for example. – Karl du Fresne 

Even without knowing the contents of the revised bill, haste is something we should be concerned about. It’s a pace of activity that is usually reserved for matters that the Government wants dealt with immediately; either because it is vital for the national interest or it is so unpalatable that they want to shut down the debate as quickly as possible. It would seem that the latter was their only justification.

I’m told by a highly regarded former MP that for a matter of this nature, it’s a pace that is unusually rushed, and in the context of Parliament’s rules, technically inappropriate.

Not that we can do too much about that. Let’s face it, this Government has been in an “inappropriate” hurry on Three Waters from the start. Despite the changes not yet being signed into law, they have already recruited a heap of people and leased high-quality and expensive office space in Auckland at least and possibly elsewhere. Every step has been action ahead of the democratic process. – Bruce Cotterill

Imagine 88,000 submissions. Ignored. Just think for a moment of the emotion and passion that people had for the End of Life Choice Bill. And yet that received just less than half of the number of submissions that Three Waters did. And those submitters have been ignored. –Bruce Cotterill

We should be ropable that this is happening. And we should be stomping mad that neither of our top-rating TV news channels ran the story of the bill’s passing on their 6pm bulletins on Thursday evening. What the hell is going on here NZ?

This is major constitutional reform, involving the deliberate confiscation of assets from ratepayers and the councils that represent them, to a government and a policy that will be controlled by iwi-based or tribal interests. The consultation process around it has been minimal and most of us would say what little consultation has occurred has been ignored. – Bruce Cotterill

So we see, finally, after all this time, what Three Waters has been about all along. It’s not about brown sludge coming out of your taps. In fact, it’s not about water at all. It’s about an asset grab of not only the water assets we thought, but also for a slice of our hydro schemes and for the highly contentious foreshore and seabed. By the time the third and final reading comes around, you can bet that the country’s parkland will no longer be an option. It will be included.

Perhaps the inclusion of the foreshore and the parkland will get us animated and angry.

We should be staggered that this legislation, delivering major constitutional change, is sleepwalking its way through Parliament via an aggressive majority government, while it appears that there is nothing that opposition politicians can do about it. – Bruce Cotterill

It would be tempting to throw in the towel. And yet, despite everything that has happened, Three Waters should continue to be a central election issue in 2023. Those parties currently in opposition must run a campaign to totally repeal this legislation and if elected they must do so promptly.

And we may as well brace ourselves for it now. Taking things away from people is always much harder than giving them out. Repealing this law will be messy and disruptive and difficult. But it must happen.

That’s why we have elections. When governments become this corrupt, they and the laws they created must go. – Bruce Cotterill

Of course the key issue of this report is that it recommends that mana whenua sit on local councils, with full voting rights.  These representatives would have the same power as elected councillors, except of course, residents/ratepayers would have no power to remove them (except for those few that may be involved in mana whenua processes to select their councillors).

I don’t think much of liberal democracy, as it is not very effective at protecting individual rights, but it does have one useful function, in that it provides an effective process to remove politicians if enough people are fed up with them.  This proposal destroys this for mana whenua representative.  It institutes the principle that you can be taxed, regulated and governed by people you have NO say in being selected or being removed. – Liberty Scott

However there is no possible way that the New Zealand Labour Party wants to let people live their own lives as they see fit in such a way. The review of local government is about growing local government, it is the idea that wellbeing comes not from what individuals, families, colleagues, friends, communities, businesses and societies do, but from what government does – and the main tools of government are ones of coercion by taxation (and dishing out financial favours to preferred individuals and groups) and regulation. Liberty Scott

There is a desperate need for a review of local government that will decide what roles and responsibilities it should have and what ones should be taken away from it, and that would do much more to enhance wellbeing, by enabling more housing to be built, more businesses to be developed, more competition in retail and the economy, the environment and society to grow with local government being barely visible. It may manage some parks, have a fast, efficient planning permitting function, deal with neighbourhood noise and pollution complaints, and ensure rubbish is collected.

In the meantime though, the idea that elected politicians should be replaced by mana whenua representatives with MORE power to increase rates, establish new taxes and pass bylaws (and ban property development) is just a form of petty nationalist authoritarianism eating away at an already flawed system. – Liberty Scott

The intelligence of the New Zealand population increased during the 20^th century. Nutrition played its part but so too did education. Young people were taught the abstract knowledge of academic subjects and in the process developed secondary intelligence.  Since the 1990s, the emptying out of prescribed academic knowledge from the national curriculum is likely to reverse the trend.  It’s a sobering thought that the population in the 21^st century may be less intelligent than our 20th century predecessors. – Elizabeth Rata

It is abstraction (or separation) from the everyday world of experience which gives academic knowledge both its intelligence-building power and its difficulty.  Because academic subjects are necessarily difficult they need to be taught by expert teachers. For their part, children must bring hard work and effort to the job. Parental support is vital for this mammoth task of intelligence building. There are no short-cuts for anyone involved.

So what makes academic knowledge the ‘intelligence builder’?  By ‘intelligence’ I mean an individual’s secondary thinking–the thinking that is self-consciously rational and very different from primary commonsense intelligence.  Humans have lived for millennia with the primary thinking needed for survival.  It remains essential today as we pick up the everyday socio-cultural knowledge of the family and community.  We must have this primary thinking ability but we can in fact do without complex abstract knowledge and its generating secondary intelligence. We can do as our ancestors did, rely on knowledge acquired from observation and experience and bounded by the limits of primary thinking. The question is – do we want to? – Elizabeth Rata

A well-designed national curriculum of prescribed academic knowledge is the only way to ensure that all New Zealand children are taught the knowledge that builds secondary intelligence.  It is the intelligence needed for a modern democratic society. This is the case because democracy is itself an abstract idea – built on networks of abstractions such as freedom, equality and citizenship.

The alternative is returning to the pre-modern world of our ancestors. The tribal world managed successfully using primary thinking. This is because kinship relations are material not abstract – we can literally ‘see’ our relations.  In contrast, democracy is justified by abstract ideas and abstract relationships – the main one is that of citizenship. For us to understand these abstractions, we must have secondary intelligence. – Elizabeth Rata

We need to keep in mind why freedom of speech is so important. Freedom of speech is a right recognised domestically (in the Bill of Rights Act 1990) and internationally (in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). The starting point for any new legislation should be that. We have the freedom to say what we want unless there is a compelling and pressing reason for the state to curtail it by threatening criminal punishment.

Free speech has been a vital tool for the least powerful in society. – Marcus Roberts

Even if we are satisfied that there is a compelling reason to restrict our right to free speech, the restriction needs to be as narrow and as clear as possible. It’s not good enough to leave the contours of which speech counts as hate speech to the “you’ll-know-it-when-you-see-it” test. Tossing it to the courts to determine the boundaries as they go is also no answer.

Even if the courts do find in favour of a defendant (and thus, by their decision, help set the contours of the legislation), Liam Hehir has convincingly argued that the process is the punishment. Winning a legal battle can be as ruinous as losing one for an individual. Yet, win or lose, the state will never face financial, much less personal, ruin.

With so much at stake, let us hope that the Government’s proposed hate speech amendments adhere to first principles. If it doesn’t, the hate speech vs free speech battle risks collateral damage of much more than what you may (or may not) say.  – Marcus Roberts

You chose to have these kids, you have to wake up at 7am, get your kids to school at 8am. You have now got subsidised free lunches, free breakfasts, subsidised period products, subsidised school uniforms. There are no excuses. What we have in New Zealand is a culture of excuses. –  Christopher Luxon

Age is not an immutable characteristic. Treating children differently to adults is not the same as treating people differently based on race or sex. And 18 years is the generally agreed-upon age at which a child becomes an adult.

For most New Zealanders, the idea of 16 and 17-year-olds voting defies common sense. Large majorities of people surveyed reject the idea. Letting kids vote is less popular than letting prisoners vote.

Of course, there is increasingly little room for common sense in New Zealand’s appellate courts. Not, at least, when the opportunity for the promotion of liberal opinion is concerned. Our justices are no longer so shy of broad political questions that touch upon subjects not usually reducible to legal reasoning. – Liam Hehir 

The court has, therefore, set the agenda on an inextricably political question.

It is a rarer and rarer thing for our justices to refuse involvement in political questions when it comes to the preoccupations of the chattering classes. The best that can be hoped for is a reluctant refusal to grant relief paired with some obiter dicta about where the court’s sympathy lies. Those comments crack the door open just that little bit further, of course, and provide something for the next case to build upon.

This is not all the fault of the courts. Judges are only human and there is nothing more human than being tempted to use the tools at your disposal to achieve the outcome you want. Some blame lies with the elected politicians who have given the judiciary these tools or, at least, have permitted their use.

Ambiguous laws promote judicial activism. They create a permission structure for the judiciary to exercise personal discretion to the act interpretation. – Liam Hehir 

Law faculties would absolutely hate this as, would of course, the judiciary. But the time has long since passed where the democratically accountable branches of the government flex a bit of muscle. And if the courts are bent on drifting into politics then they can hardly complain about politics drifting into the courts. – Liam Hehir 

All I’m doing is calling parents to responsibility to say ‘Hey, listen, it’s in your interest that we want your children to do better than you did’ … education is the biggest thing that creates social mobility and opportunity. – Christopher Luxon

As the Kremlin’s spokesman tells us – somewhat improbably – that regime change was never Vladimir Putin’s goal, the debate on whether Russia and Ukraine should be negotiating gets another bounce.

Depressing – but necessary – to bear in mind that a settlement will rest more on power than on justice.

Some other lessons from the conflict also seem to be getting neglected.

First, that the success of Ukraine’s resistance is due to the courage and commitment of a smallish group of mostly young men. A group who in general weren’t getting good press or much encouragement before all this kicked off.

Secondly, the steady flow of Western self-congratulation seems overdone. – Point of Order :

Thirdly, this is a war with a system, rather than a country. – Point of Order

And as a Russian and an insider, he provides a vivid picture of the creation from the security apparatus of a governing class that is a law unto itself.

During Putin’s twenty two years in power, it has systematically eliminated the bases of civil society: security of property and the fruits of labour; reliable justice and restraints on state power; fair competition for the right to govern; the opportunity and ability to organise, express and disseminate alternatives.  – Point of Order

The contrast with China is stark.  Deng Xiaoping also toiled for nearly twenty years but in a different direction.  He sought to convince the workers and peasants that the Communist party would respect the fruits of their labour – just as long as they did not challenge its governance (and hence the significance of President Xi’s recent signals that he might renegotiate the bargain).

This suppression of independent activity – social and entrepreneurial – would now appear to be Russia’s chief source of political and economic weakness.

It should clarify that the principal enemy is the Russian governing class, rather than the Russian people.

And that we all win if the Russian people can be helped to turn round the course of the last twenty two years.

Don’t forget then, that in all that time the only people who have come near to inflicting a political defeat on that class are a handful of American (and British) trained Ukrainian men.

So it might be a good idea to be very clear what you are negotiating about, before starting. – Point of Order

This Labour Government constantly confuses spending money with outcomes. If money was the answer to solving the many issues facing the sector, then Kiwis’ would have timely access to services, better facilities, and see an overall improvement to the country’s mental wellbeing.

Unfortunately that is not the case and mental health in New Zealand has never been in a worse state. What Kiwis’ are experiencing is longer wait times to essential services, overcrowding, a worsening state to mental health facilities, and serious workforce shortages facing the sector

Measurable outcomes are what matter for individuals, and their families, who are desperately seeking help. Not wasted money and broken promises- Matt Doocey 

Penological liberals, then, whether they realize it or not, are effectively in favor of violence against women.- Theodore Dalrymple

With their claws savagely embedded in the throats of most of New Zealand’s news media (so to speak) racist commentators are really having a great time distorting and rewriting the history of our once fair country of New Zealand. 

They appear to have learnt that if you tell the BIG LIE often enough and loud enough, people will come to believe it and of course once should be enough for innocent children, that is if they can be induced actually to go to school.  If statistics are to be believed for once, it appears that truancy is at a record high in New Zealand schools, highest apparently among children of part-Maori descent and lowest among Chinese.  – Bruce Moon 

Perverse incentives facing councils seemed to underlie many of the problems with the existing resource management system.

Nothing in the RMA forced councils to set restrictive district plans, though it did make it difficult to modify existing ones. Nevertheless, district plans often made it very difficult to build apartments and townhouses in inner suburbs near the amenities where a lot of people want to live, or new subdivisions and lifestyle blocks on the edges of cities.

When cities can neither grow up nor out in response to changes in demand for housing, prices adjust instead.

The reason for restrictive district plans is simple. When cities grow, central government enjoys the increase in income tax, company tax, and GST. But councils experience urban growth as a cost to be mitigated, rather than a benefit to be sought. And councils at or near their debt limits have extreme difficulty in funding and financing the infrastructure necessary to support it. – Eric Crampton

The National Planning Framework will need to provide very strong direction to regional planning committees to prioritise flexible urban land markets over other objectives.

But the game of whack-a-mole in which central government legislates against each new way that councils find to obstruct growth seems likely to continue – unless councils are made to welcome urban growth by sharing in its benefits. For example, councils could receive grants from central government reflecting a share of the increased tax take that growth provides to central government.

Without that kind of change to the incentives councils face, any wine that eventually pours from the new planning bottles may taste remarkably, and depressingly, familiar. – Eric Crampton

For all of the posing and posturing, most of the arguments to extend (or not extend) the size of the electorate to include 16 and 17yos come with a big tinge of self-interest around power.  It’s been proclaimed that it is “discriminatory” that they don’t get a chance to vote, but almost every argument extended to this can be applied to 15, 14 or even some 13 and 12yos.  Paying taxes doesn’t give visitors or tourists a vote, and plenty who pay little to no taxes get to vote.

No, it’s an exercise in emotionally laden performance from those in politics who get an advantage from having more fungible brains to convince to give them power. It’s hardly a surprise that there is strong leftwing support for the idea, because it is widely perceived that most younger people (certainly the more politically active ones) are leftwing, because they are lured by the idea of more government, which can make good stuff compulsory, cheaper or free, and bad stuff banned or more expensive. This is, after all, the predominant philosophical bent pushed through state education and much of the media. – Liberty Scott

 If there were to be an age when an individual is an adult, in terms of powers to contract, to be treated as an adult in the justice system, and to not have age based restrictions on what you can and can’t do with your body, then that should be the age of adulthood.  At present it is a mix of 16 and 18, but few on the left think 16yos should face the same judicial treatment as 18yos, and almost none think they should be able to buy alcohol, be prostitutes and even buy tobacco. 

There is a curious cultural disjunction between those who want younger teenagers to vote, and demand they be given “a voice” for their often ill-informed, inconsistent views (and they have no monopoly on that), but also think they need “protection” from the consequences of their actions.  They aren’t old enough to handle being intoxicated, to face adult court and prison if they initiate force against others,  and although it is often cited that they can “have sex”, it’s a serious criminal offence if anyone takes photos of them doing so or even possesses them, even with their consent.  So many who want to give them the vote also deem them vulnerable.  So which is it? – Liberty Scott

So let’s not pretend this is about young people having a “stake in their future” because the politicians eager for their votes don’t think young people can make competent decisions on what they ingest or what photos are taken of them.

If politicians want to argue that 16 should be the age of being an adult, then all well and good, let it be and let them accept the consequences for what this means, and they can vote.

Otherwise it’s just a call for “more votes for my side, to help me do what I want to you all” – Liberty Scott

Time has been called on overhauling ‘hate speech laws’ in New Zealand. After sitting in Labour’s manifesto for years, and two Ministers of Justice failing to build support for the proposals, maybe they’ve seen the light: legislation is no antidote to hate. – Jonathan Ayling

The basic issue still remains: silencing opinion, even condemnable opinions (which do not amount to incitement to violence, which is already illegal), doesn’t deal with a lack of social cohesion.

And if hate speech laws don’t work for other ‘vulnerable communities’, we need to rethink the entire venture. The question, ‘if this group, why not that group’ is legitimate. If hate speech laws do work to protect vulnerable communities, like religious groups, then why won’t the Minister commit to including other vulnerable groups too? It’s because she herself has admitted they could make the situation worse.  – Jonathan Ayling

The fact of the matter is hate speech laws (even if they’re just extending protected classes by one group) make things worse.

The government must stand for Kiwis’ right to express their opinions in speech and do away with the notion that gagging voices resolves complex issues. Sections 61 and 131 of the Human Rights Act should be repealed entirely and simple incitement to violence outlawed as speech beyond the pale of free expression. Until then, we’re making social cohesion worse by hand-picking which groups we’re allowed to be derogatory about, and which we can’t. This is hardly a winning strategy for unity. – Jonathan Ayling

It goes without saying that we don’t want religious groups lumped into monolithic groups without any nuance or insight. But is this change really going to stop that? – Jonathan Ayling

It’s time better solutions were given a chance, solutions that elevate dialogue, reason, and counter-speech. Hate speech is a problem, but the problem is the hate, not the speech. As the American journalist Jonathan Rauch claims, ‘Trying to fix the hate by silencing the speech is like trying to fix climate change by breaking all the thermometers.’

Today’s announcement is a good start, but we need to look at whether hate speech laws have any place in our law. Ultimately, they’re a fool’s errand that actually make the situation worse. – Jonathan Ayling

Yes there are some superbly informed smart and diligent 16 year olds, but there are equally many who are completely out to lunch, totally ill informed, barely turning up to school, or in some cases, just out ram raiding.

Now when they do stuff like that – they’re ‘children’ – cue the heartstrings – who can’t possibly be punished or sent to boot camp or put in ankle bracelets, because they’re ‘children’.

There is also the argument trotted out every time a young person does do something wrong, that cognitively their brains haven’t fully developed yet. But when it comes to getting them to tick a box for a party and a candidate – suddenly they’re now cognitively proficient informed adults?

It’s a mixed message. – Kate Hawkesby

Is it also discriminatory to use age as an excuse not to pay them benefits, or to use their age as a tool to means test them against their parents income for allowances? Do we lower the drinking age too, now that 16 is so responsible? Is 16 the new benchmark?

Anyone who has raised 16 year olds knows that it’s still very young, and I just don’t know why we keep wanting to make childhood shorter and shorter for our young people.

They already have to grow up so fast, now we expect them to know about taxes and laws and politics too? Can they not just enjoy their youth while they still have it? – Kate Hawkesby

You can’t know how the world works surely until you’ve actually experienced it? Paid rent or a mortgage, left home, gotten out into the real world, earned your own money, paid your own taxes – lived a little.

It’s not up to us though, or the Supreme Court, it’s up to Parliament, and it won’t get the 75 percent support required so it’s going nowhere.

But nor should it, if Parliament’s going to devote time and energy to anything to do with young people right now it should be getting the 60 percent of kids not attending back into school and addressing the surge in youth crime.

Surely that’s more pressing right now than whether they can vote or not? – Kate Hawkesby

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the government was delighted with this week’s ruling from the Supreme Court that excluding sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds from the right to vote was inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act. Not because of the weight of the legal argument, nor the morality of the cause, but simply because the ruling provided the government with a huge distraction from all the other problems confronting it at present. – Peter Dunne

But rather than waiting six months to make its response known, the government waited barely six hours, so gleeful was it at the distraction the Court had provided. The Prime Minister did not even wait for the Labour Caucus to meet, before announcing the government’s response. Legislation to lower the voting age to 16 will be drafted immediately, she promised, and introduced to Parliament as soon as possible.

That immediately ensured all the right headlines and focus for the next couple of days at least, during which time the Reserve Bank is expected to lift interest rates by the biggest amount yet, further hitting already struggling household budgets. The cynicism of the decision is highlighted by the fact that for the voting age for Parliamentary elections to be lowered, a minimum 75% of Parliament (90 MPs) must vote in favour. When she made her announcement the Prime Minister said she did not know whether all Labour MPs, let alone MPs from other parties supported the move, which she hoped would be determined by a conscience vote. Her promised legislation was therefore nothing but smoke and mirrors. – Peter Dunne

The current outcome could not be better for her – thanks to National and ACT, nothing will change, but the Prime Minister will be able to keep empathising with young, upcoming voters about how much she “personally” supports their cause, even though, like so much else, she cannot deliver it. More importantly, by doing so, she potentially locks in their support for when they are eligible to vote. So, the government’s response is far more about securing its political advantage, than addressing the principle raised by the Supreme Court of whether it is right to exclude 16–17-year-olds from being able to vote. – Peter Dunne

 If a lowered voting age for local body elections proves to be successful in terms of increasing turnout and engagement, then consideration could be given to reducing the age for general elections. The most likely date for that to happen would be the 2029 general election, by which time most of the current crop of politicians will have moved on.

But that is all too far in the future for the government to be concerned about at present. All it knows, is that right now the Supreme Court has presented it with a wonderful diversionary opportunity of which it must take full advantage. Given there is little else flowing its way at present, it is hardly surprising it will milk the issue for all it can over the next little while, secure in the knowledge that nothing is actually going to change. – Peter Dunne

The fact a majority of the working group decided the right to issue binding Te Mana o Te Wai statements should be extended to include coastal and geothermal water brings to mind David Lange’s quip about panel-beaters being allowed to design an intersection. – Graham Adams 

I have to say that this is the most despicable, the most dishonest, and the most dishonourable piece of legislation I have had the misfortune to speak to in this House. This is a deplorable way of stealing assets off communities — assets that have been bought and paid for over generations…

“This is despicable, and I want to say that the people of this country deserve better. – Maureen Pugh

It is widely accepted that to avoid catastrophic climate change we must extract carbon from the atmosphere as well as reduce emissions. That is, we need negative emissions technologies. Indigenous people created such technology over thousands of years, manifested in Amazonian terra preta (black soils) and carbon-rich black soils in West Africa. These soils were likely created accidentally through charcoal being added with food scraps and other waste into infertile soils, turning them into enduringly fertile, carbon-rich black soils. While most soil carbon is lost to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, charcoal endures as a permanent soil carbon store.  – Peter Winsley

Contrary to some perceptions, on a population-adjusted basis indigenous societies are not more environmentally benign than modern, industrialised ones. Both Māori and Pakeha wasted resources when they were abundant and developed sustainable practices only when resources became depleted. In pre-European times Māori were responsible directly or indirectly for the loss of about half New Zealand’s forest cover, and the extinction of over forty bird species.

In modern times, some Māori groups have given priority to commercial interests over environmental protection. For example, in 2013 government mooted an ocean sanctuary surrounding the Kermadec Islands. However, Māori interests opposed this, arguing that the proposed sanctuary breached possible future fishing rights. – Peter Winsley

Where environmental management can go badly wrong is when privileged business, tribal or sectarian interests exploit legal or political processes for rent-seeking purposes. What was once the “Three Waters” reforms has now become “Five Waters” due to some late backroom amendments to draft legislation. The Five Waters legislation if enacted will set up a racialist system to manage New Zealand’s water resources. It will make corruption and nepotism possible on a monumental scale. However, on the positive side it will teach people lessons about not taking democracy and institutional integrity for granted.

It is often contended that economic growth is environmentally damaging. However, the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis suggests that environmental degradation increases at early economic development stages. However, when income reaches a certain level local environments improve. For example, air and water quality is now far better in modern cities than it was 100 years ago. Today, London is no longer threatened by industrial “pea souper” fogs, and the Thames is swimmable. In Wellington, biodiversity is flourishing due to pest control and the Zealandia wildlife sanctuary that we can afford to pay for. – Peter Winsley

Resources such as oil and gas fields concentrate economic and political power in specific places with benefits captured quite narrowly. In contrast, decentralised industries such as distributed energy (wind, solar) and farming diffuse power. Many technological responses to climate change are consistent with a more distributed energy system and a more equitable economy and society. This is what we should be aiming for, rather than perpetuating untruths about colonialism, and dismissing whole swathes of humanity as being dependent on ongoing genocide. – Peter Winsley

Tension in the farming ranks is palpable; discontent with central Government policies is intense; frustration regarding inexorable cost increases is a dark cloud, and given the recent profits recently announced by the banking sector followed by spiraling interest rates, accusations of price-gouging by the trading banks are now emerging.

In terms of returns for primary produce, given the market-related signals reflecting an easing in price levels for beef, lamb and dairy products, the mood of caution within the simmering cauldron of the rural sector is sobering, and food for reflection. – Brian Peacocke

I think that for farming to advocate for itself, it’s not only advocating for what’s annoying and frustrating them, but there’s also a huge need for us as an agriculturally strong community to continue to share both the gains and the commitment of the agricultural community to farming well both for themselves, the community, and the future. – Jenny Shipley

When we were farming, many were just farming to survive. Now, I see farmers all over the place investing not only in best practice for themselves, but I do see a lot of change. I think the voice of that needs to be shared across the community much more broadly so that the urban New Zealand population both values agriculture and understands that it’s moving in response to many of the concerns that urban communities have.  – Jenny Shipley

I think that urban-rural split has always been a risk in New Zealand and it’s one we can’t afford to give airtime too. Because, frankly, if you just thought that even in the COVID period, if we had not had a strong agricultural sector during the last three years when the global economy had been disrupted, New Zealand’s position economically would be far more dire than it is at the moment.

Tourism collapsed, a number of other productive areas were compromised and yet agriculture was able to carry a huge proportion of the earnings, as it’s always done. But thankfully, on a strong commodity cycle at this particular time, and again, I think we should name the value of agricultural exports. The effort agriculture puts into the New Zealand economy to support our way of life, in a broad, holistic sense – not a them and us sense.

We’re in this together, being the best we can be at home and selling the best we can abroad in a best practice sense. I think if we keep sharing that over and over again, there’ll be a better understanding between rural and urban communities.  – Jenny Shipley

Often we say, well, we consulted, or we sent out a document and gave them a chance to comment. I think that for people to genuinely become supporters of a regime, they have to have a deep sense of ownership. They need to be able to see themselves in whatever is proposed as opposed to seeing something being imposed on them, which they don’t or can’t relate to.  

So the test of high-quality engagement and consultation has got to be that measure of – can the people we’re representing see themselves in the proposed solutions or are we just saying, well, regardless of what you think, you’ve got to be there in five or ten years’ time. That’s not easy to do. I think in New Zealand’s circumstances, whether it’s agriculture or Maori – Pakeha relations, or any of the other demanding spaces, we’ve just got to put the time and work into it.  – Jenny Shipley

The Kellogg Programme is fantastic. I’d encourage any community to keep identifying young leaders and to promote them into those Programmes. Often people think, these people are too young. I must have been, I don’t know, 32 or thereabouts when I went into Kellogg. Often at that stage, you haven’t identified your leadership purpose and your particular intentions as to how you will use your leadership skills. But others often see leadership potential in those young people.

There’s no question that our political environment, our economic and social environment, need younger people coming through all the time in order for us to be able to shape the future successfully. I would encourage people to look for those chances and look for individuals who they can sponsor or promote and make sure they support them. Because often these are the young people, male and female, who have got kids and are trying to run a farm and all that. So the programmes themselves are a big commitment, but it’s worth it.   – Jenny Shipley

Consultation is not a promise of change and never has been.

New Zealand has traditionally been known as the land of the long white cloud. Now, it seems, it is destined to become the land of the tall green pine. – Rural News

This passage, which the word creepy doesn’t adequately describe, is very revealing of the moral sensibility—or lack of it—of our time. The courts in Canada have recognized a perfectly true fact about human development, that it doesn’t take place at the same pace in every individual, and has drawn from this undoubted fact the unjustified conclusion that placing legal age limits is therefore unacceptably arbitrary. This is an argument that has helped to produce and inflame the egotism and individualism without individuality of our times. – Theodore Dalrymple

According to this argument, however, the law had no right to fix an age of consent, as fixing it at any age would be arbitrary. What is claimed, therefore, is the right of everyone to set his own rules and decide everything for himself. He doesn’t accept that living in society entails acceptance of rules that, in a world of continua rather than of absolutely discrete categories, it’s necessary just to accept rules that are neither wholly defensible in rational terms nor that one hasn’t made for oneself. – Theodore Dalrymple

I can envisage circumstances in which I would like to be put down painlessly. I wouldn’t much care to be professionally entrusted, let alone required, to do it for others. Therein lies a paradox. – Theodore Dalrymple

Instead of opening up to desperately needed skilled workers, Labour’s immigration settings have essentially raised the drawbridge and made New Zealand a fortress. – Erica Stanford

The Government’s immigration policies have been a total disaster, and Kiwis are paying the price with higher inflation and higher interest rates. – Erica Stanford

Businesses are struggling with the restrictive system for work visas and the complicated system for bringing in skilled migrants, which is making it hard for firms to access the skills they need.

Among the business community there is confusion about NZ’s policy making on immigration which does not seem to recognise the importance of migration to this country.

Business requires open, simple, permissive immigration settings to meet the challenge of severe skill shortages and reduce economic and social harm – Catherine Beard

This decision takes us places.

It means that if you want to have age-based entitlements then you have to show that the age is really relevant. There has to be some specific feature of a certain age, which doesn’t apply at another age, but which applies for everyone.

We use age as a proxy for a bundle of entitlements because testing individual competence or attributes can be intrusive and cumbersome. The court gave this principle no shrift at all, and in doing so it has struck a blow against a fundamental principle of modern social democracy: the progressive principle of universal entitlement. – Josie Pagani

The only way to reconcile the Supreme Court’s new principle is to means-test Super. If entitlement at an age depends on objective reasons for choosing that age, then if you are sickly or poor, you should get a pension but if you have KiwiSaver, no Super for you. Stop saving now. – Josie Pagani

If you’re 16, parents still have an obligation to house, feed and protect you. The state has the authority to step in if parents fail. Third parties, like companies, governments and political parties, are regulated from exploiting teenagers. Make them adults and the responsibility to provide and protect withers and dies.

The real issue is about when childhood ends and with it the protections in law for children.

Voting at 16, and all the other entitlements that would come between 16 and 18, are the rights of adults.

Voting makes children into adults.

I want to protect children from worrying about taxes, responsibilities and the need to provide for others. – Josie Pagani

The prohibition on discrimination on the basis of age exists because a 60-year-old should not be denied a job in favour of a less qualified 30-year-old. It does not substitute for an argument about when adulthood begins.

In its decision the Supreme Court records a breezy observation that, ‘’it is clear that the line [of adulthood] has to be drawn somewhere’’. To resolve where to draw the line, the court then rehearsed a claim from an academic that there is little evidence to support 18 as a ‘’suitable proxy for maturity and competency to vote’’.

In quoting this evidence, it has done subtle but brutal damage to our democracy. Competence, maturity and intelligence should never, ever, be judicially contemplated as a qualification to vote. – Josie Pagani

Voting is the right of all adults. The only issue to determine is ‘’are you an adult?’’

By discussing whether votes attach to competence, the court has ensured that, one day, some class of people will be declared not competent. This is not progressive. – Josie Pagani

The dissenting judge said the majority has reduced the rights of everyone over 18 by slightly altering the composition of the voting electorate.

I would argue it also affected the rights of under-18s to transition out of childhood without having the responsibilities of adulthood imposed too soon. – Josie Pagani

No-one knows what is meant by co-governance. Or, more accurately, there is no agreement about what is meant by this term. – Hilary Calvert

If the Government is promoting co-governance it should be clear about what it is.

This is particularly important if it may have the effect of ceding the authority vesting in the democratically elected government to any organisations which are or could be 50% appointed and the other 50% elected by the entire population. And where there must be an ability to resolve a deadlock of views by granting some undisclosed person or people a right to exercise a casting vote.

The Government, including the most relevant ministers, is either unsure or it is attempting to comfort those who are unsure whether to embrace co-governance by telling different audiences different things. – Hilary Calvert

Surely when there are proposals to change something as fundamental as our democracy we should all be part of the conversation. It is not good enough to leave the concept of co-governance to mean different things to different people who are signing up to or accepting the concept.

We should all be discussing how it can be that Te Tiriti can mean equal control of everything in public ownership in New Zealand. And who has the casting vote. And what we do about some being appointed and some elected. And how our legal system can be fundamentally messed around with by suggesting that you can leave someone with ownership without control. And how the Declaration of Indigenous Rights can be interpreted to give all of a population 50% control and 17% of the population 50% control.

We also should talk about whether democracy means for us one person one vote. – Hilary Calvert

Now is the time to be talking about what co-governance actually means and how the Government wants to impose it on New Zealand. – Hilary Calvert

The Government was right to pull back from extending our laws around controlling what people say about each other in case social peace is threatened.

However Minister Mahuta has said that opposition to the Government’s proposed fresh water reforms “seemed to be driven not about economics or effectiveness but racist tropes about co-governance”.

Driving discussion about such issues underground by labelling concerns as racist tropes is more likely to threaten social peace and encourage more extreme views.

We do well if we retain the ability to listen to and understand the fears and hopes we have about the future of our democracy and what it means to be a New Zealander in an inclusive and enriching society. – Hilary Calvert

Most of the commonly-raised arguments are unconvincing.

For example, although 16- and 17-year-olds are affected by the laws passed by Parliament, this does not provide an argument for lowering the voting age to 16 and no further. After all, a newborn will feel the effects of today’s political decisions for longer than a 17-year-old.

Similarly, the argument that 16 is more in line with the legal age of majority is not true. As the Court of Appeal noted, the “age of responsibility varies greatly under New Zealand law”, and there are many areas where the age of maturity is generally deemed to be 18, like contract law, making wills, getting married, and the criminal justice system, to name a few.  – Marcus Roberts

The evidence, however, is out there. It suggests that throughout our teenage years, our brains are inherently imbalanced.

While the part of our brain concerned with rapid, automatic processing matures around puberty, the part which allows us to think in the abstract, weigh moral dilemmas, and control our impulses does not mature until our mid-to-late 20s.

This imbalance means that teenagers are more susceptible to peer pressure (even without direct coercion), are more likely to focus on immediate benefits and underestimate long-term consequences, and are less able to resist social and emotional influences.

The odds are against us when making the decisions required at the voting booth in our teenage years. This evidence might even justify raising the voting age to 25, but at the very least, it suggests that an 18-year-old is more mature and more competent than a 16-year-old. – Marcus Roberts

The “please explain” is because the criteria they set is hopeless, the delivery is virtually non-existent and the overarching aspect is because they are soft on crime and apologists for criminals.

Because none of them have ever run a small business, they don’t have a clue about the role they play in the community, about the graft and risk involved and therefore the unconscionable position they have been placed in by a Government.

We have a Government that still inexplicably defends all of this as either a complex issue or something that isn’t their fault, and refuses to defend their citizens from the ever-growing tide of lawlessness that they have directly created. – Mike Hosking

A modern-day monetary Moses, this week Orr had made his six-weekly descent from the Mount Doom of the Reserve Bank to issue the latest OCR decision and his set of commandments.

The OCR decision was not pretty and the commandments included thou shalt not ask for a pay rise, thou shalt not buy nice Christmas presents for people, thou shalt swap the Christmas turkey for a humble, cheap chicken, thou shalt have a nice staycation.

Orr’s own gift was high mortgage rates and a recession for 2023 – a cruel-to-be-kind present. He wrapped it in an apology, saying the bank’s monetary policy committee was very sorry about the whole state of affairs indeed. – Claire Trevett

It would be hard to tell which group is filled with most dread by Orr’s bitter medicine: the Government for the impact on mortgage rates as election year looms, retailers for his “have a sensibly spending Christmas” sign-off, or the 80 per cent of mortgage holders who have to refix in the near future. – Claire Trevett

Labour is now confronted with an election-year hell – and so are voters. – Claire Trevett

One week does not an election loss make. The crime wave may well improve.

The pronouncements from Mount Doom, on the other hand, will not be getting any more cheerful for some time yet. – Claire Trevett

Many thinking New Zealanders would like more debate on these issues.

Surely it is at the point where there should be a Royal Commission to examine our constitutional arrangements? – Fran O’Sullivan

You know, I made a living out of being a very open, happy sort of guy on the telly, but I was fibbing to people in a way because I was ‘Jack the lad’ on TV and then would go home and from time to time cry myself off to sleep or whatever it is.

And so we have a responsibility in the public roles that we have to own this stuff and let others know that no one’s immune and everybody’s got stuff going on, and we always will. – Matt Chisholm

I embraced it. I got into it. I played my footy, I loved my farming, I did all those things. But I also was a bit of a sensitive guy and concealed that for a long time, and it wasn’t until I’d got a bit older and a bit longer on the tooth that I thought, actually, no, I don’t wanna drink booze three nights a week, and drive myself into the ground that way. – Matt Chisholm

[Honesty] has cost me work opportunities. It’s cost me the odd relationship. But this is what I think – you get to a stage in life, and you think, right, do I be open and honest about this? And I think, yes, I will, and that is because it’ll help more people. It is the right thing to do because even though it might cost me and it might set me back – and I’m learning that as I go – but it’ll help more people than it’ll negatively affect me. – Matt Chisholm

Finance Minister Grant Robertson padded Budget 2022 with $2.05 billion from the remnants of the Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund contrary to his undertakings that the enormous pot of emergency money be limited to direct, pandemic-related spending and over the Treasury’s objections.

The Government took $1.05b from the fund and “reprioritised” the money to spend on the “cost of living payment” and extended cost reductions for motorists, both rushed into existence in light of surging inflation and polling that suggested a related ebb in the Labour Party’s popularity. – Kate MacNamara

Using the contingency as the Government has means they can spend more in the short term only, ie in the lead-up to the election. When the funding runs out they will have created an unfunded cost pressure. – Tony Burton

This set of facts makes a mockery of the Minister’s claims that he stuck to his operating allowance in this year’s Budget. In fact, he showed a reckless disregard for the fiscal discipline needed to keep pressure off inflation – Nicola Willis 

Arguably, most westerners just don’t take religion seriously enough to kill and die for it anymore. But free speech may also have contributed to the truce.

Over several centuries, growing acceptance of free speech made it more and more possible for Catholics and Protestants to talk through their differences. Over the same time period, the incidence of armed conflict between them diminished.

Unfortunately, our ability to speak freely on religious matters may be at risk. – Michael Johnston

As hurtful as it is to be a target of hateful comments, there are sound reasons not to criminalise those who make them.

For one thing, ridiculing religious ideas themselves arguably insults those who believe them too. So scornful remarks about religious beliefs could easily run afoul of Allen’s new laws.

For another, the new legislation, if passed, might actually increase the likelihood of violence motivated by or against religion. People who don’t feel free to voice their hateful thoughts may be more likely to act on them.

But there is an even better reason to maintain the ability to freely express ideas, even awful ones. Untrammelled expression, as bruising as it can sometimes be, tends to bring people together in the long run.

Protestants and Catholics once regarded one another as heretics. They sought to censor one another on pain of death. Now, following a long period during which peaceful dialogue has been possible, it is not unknown for them to worship together.

Our legislators would do well to reflect on that. – Michael Johnston

There are still the same number of mental health beds as there were in 2019.

Despite numerous speeches and pledges. Despite billions of dollars spent. And despite years of government activism.

Mental health patients sleep on mattresses on the floors of our hospitals. Those in the greatest need and desperation have not even the dignity of a bed.

These stories are hard to bear. They contrast sharply with New Zealand’s self-image as a kinder country. – Oliver Hartwich 

There is Weber’s ethics of conviction, and the Prime Minister shows much of that. And then there is Weber’s ethics of responsibility, which is measured in outcomes. The Government’s record on that front is abysmal.

Before I hear one more grand vision from this Government, I would love to see them tackle at least one problem satisfactorily.

The way the Government is going, I will probably wait a long time. – Oliver Hartwich 

The Prime Minister’s willingness to gaslight the nation about Five Waters is disturbing.

It takes a large dollop of brazenness — and perhaps desperation — to deny reality quite as readily as Jacinda Ardern was willing to do last Tuesday, but the Prime Minister did not resile from the task.

When Newstalk ZB’s Barry Soper asked her why the three waters (fresh water, storm water and waste water) had suddenly become five waters (with the late addition of coastal and geothermal water) in the amended Water Services Entities Bill, Ardern flatly denied that was the case.

Denying observable facts is typical of very young children before they understand that bending the truth beyond breaking point is an art that requires at least a modicum of plausibility to avoid ending up deeply and shamefully embarrassed. – Graham Adams

While this might be seen as an amusingly naive ploy in a child anxious to avoid the consequences of being caught red-handed, such behaviour is plainly alarming in an adult — and especially when that adult happens to be the Prime Minister. – Graham Adams

By denying that adding coastal and geothermal water will boost the number of categories of water covered by the bill to five, Ardern was gaslighting the nation in a way that makes a quote from George Orwell’s 1984 entirely apposite: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

The Prime Minister has always had difficulty dealing straightforwardly with dissent or criticism and is clearly allergic to admitting she is wrong — let alone getting around to apologising. She is also not above making stuff up to defend the indefensible.

However, denying that a clause in legislation means what any reasonably intelligent person — or lawyer — would accept its meaning to be is a new and worrying expression of that deep character flaw. – Graham Adams

When you are immersed in the business of politics, as she is, accusing others of “politicking” is absurd — yet she does it without any apparent awareness of how risible it is. – Graham Adams

When you ride a very high horse, as the Prime Minister does, falling off can be painful and spectacular.

As the wheels of her government continue to wobble alarmingly — as they are in education, health, crime, and cost of living, to name just a few of the disasters Ardern is presiding over — watching how she reacts to the relentless criticism inevitable in an election year will bring its own horrified fascination, both for supporters and opponents alike. – Graham Adams

When I was young, kids appeared before a magistrate (a District Court Judge before 1978) sufficiently rarely that questions were raised about the young person’s family, and inadequate parental supervision. Sometimes the magistrate would rebuke the parents if a child had been wagging school, or had been out late and was unsupervised. Remedial action was usually fairly swift: parents took steps to look after their children lest there was further police action.

Over the last fifty years there has there been a steady movement away from holding parents to account for the children they bring into the world. Why all the hooha when National’s Christopher Luxon recently suggested it was time for parents of perennial young trouble-makers to be held to account? The short answer is that politicians, especially those of a left persuasion, fear voter backlash not just from the parents and the kids once they reach voting age, but from the significant industry that now farms the country’s underclass. Gradually a perception has been allowed to emerge that problems are always someone else’s responsibility to deal with, never the family’s. Yet that is where the heart of the problem lies. – Michael Bassett

Requirements that men should support the children they fathered decreased, particularly when birth mothers could refuse to name their children’s fathers. Under all these pressures, the underclass mushroomed. Quite quickly many children had no family link with anyone working for a living. The 100,000 recipients of Job-Seeker Benefits, with no experience, nor intention of working make up the bulk of a self-perpetuating stratum of modern New Zealand society. It costs the taxpayer hugely in benefits, Kainga Ora subsidies, criminal activity, police and prison time. Most of the ram raiding, knife-wielding, gun-toting young offenders come from this modern, politically-created social group.

Springing up alongside this growing disaster has been a cluster of public and private agencies that are meant to be wrestling the social tragedy into a more tolerable shape. Social welfare officers – God knows what their latest Maori label is – Kainga Ora officials who seem more scared of the underclass than it is of them, and low-level bureaucrats are all intent on safe-guarding their jobs. They feel threatened by any alternative suggestions about how to deal with, let alone diminish, today’s social problems. To you and me, a bit of tough love is fundamental to straightening out lives where bewildered and angry people lack the necessary education and life experience ever to hold down a job.

But the likes of Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson, who themselves never held responsible jobs before entering Parliament, always dismiss such ideas. – Michael Bassett

But Ardern and Robertson quickly denounce anything other than their own policies of muddle along; alternatives are “proven failures” or “futile”. Getting tough on school attendance might prevent children from going to tangis, said Ardern in what must surely have been her stupidest observation as Prime Minister. And the ministry averts its gaze from the growing number of outrages being perpetrated by today’s Kiwi underclass. The scourge of Hamilton ram-raiding and events like the Sandringham stabbing of a shop-keeper in the heart of the Prime Minister’s own electorate, get no more than a wringing-of-the-hands response and toothy expressions of sympathy from her.

Meanwhile, enormous sums keep on being spent on expanding Three (or is it now Five?) waters, centralizing Health and Education and lavishly funding “consultants”. This government has no respect for working people. Peter Fraser and Norman Kirk would not be able to recognize them, and Norman Kirk would have doubled back from the DPB many years ago. – Michael Bassett

When the Rugby Union does its review of why the Black Ferns are world champions and why the All Blacks are not, I know what they will not consider; how we are educating boys.

David Kirk, the captain of an All Black team, wrote a thoughtful rugby book, so it did not sell.

In it he said he thought the All Blacks got their edge from fathers teaching their sons the fundamentals of the game from a very young age. – Richard Prebble

The percentage of New Zealand domestic university students who are men has reached an all-time low of 39 percent. While our statistics for our failure in Maori and Pacifica education are readily available, gender statistics are much harder to find, just like America. Try doing an Internet search for boys’ education and see what I mean.

The Education Department goes so far as to post that there is no crisis and to claim boys and girls can be taught the same way. This government did a big review of all aspects of education. I could find no mention of boys’ education.  – Richard Prebble

There is a grade gap. In the seventies when we have School Certificate there was no gap. Now boys are far more likely to drop out early, fail to achieve any grades in NCEA, male enrollment at university is falling and women are far more likely to graduate. – Richard Prebble

Women are successfully entering and even dominating previous male professions. We have not rethought what it means to be a male.

While women do have an advantage in the careers that require empathy it does not mean that many men don’t also have empathy. He cites the shortage of nurses. It is worldwide. Many men could have a very satisfying career in nursing. As men dominate among patients in areas like drug and alcohol addictions, we need more male nurses. Yet as a profession for men it is still looked down on. I suspect until we change our attitude we will never have enough nurses.

We have to be willing to see if things we have done to help girls have affected boys. The international educationalist Joseph Driessen says adding literacy into NCEA math to help girls worked but as boys often struggle with literacy it lowered boys’ marks. Math is a requirement of a range of occupations boys do well at. – Richard Prebble

For boys’ education, let us acknowledge that while many boys succeed too many are failing. It is not an attack on girls’ education to acknowledge girls and boys develop at different rates and learn in different ways.  – Richard Prebble

When you go from a 2.5 percent interest rate to a 6.5 percent interest rate and even higher, that is huge amounts of pain. How do you find $600 extra after tax to be able to deal with that and just pay the interest cost? – Christopher Luxon

We implore them once again, fix it. If this economy doesn’t get workers we’re going to have New Zealanders paying the price every time they pay at the eftpos terminal and every time they make a mortgage payment – get it sorted. – Nicola Willis 

We now have a government with an absolute majority which is incompetent in all facets of government except for driving, without the consent of the people, its ideological misconception of the meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi as expressed in He Puapua.

The Water Services Entities Bill is perhaps the most egregious example of the implementation of the false premise that the Treaty signed in 1840 mandated co governance in all aspects of the governance of New Zealand.  – Graeme Reeves 

I want to bring your attention to another matter. That is the Orwellian indoctrination of the Civil Service and the bureaucrats who administer the departments of state.  – Graeme Reeves 

There is no accountability to the shareholders.

In fact, section 15 of the Bill makes it clear that the shareholders have no powers to do anything other than to hold shares.

The shareholdings are nothing more than a deception and a dishonest representation politically motivated to allow the government to maintain that the territorial authority’s co -own the entities when in fact none of the attributes of ownership exist. – Graeme Reeves 

Satisfaction of the Maori specific criteria are entirely subjective and will depend, to use a legal expression, on the length of the Chancellor’s foot which is not satisfactory.

In my opinion, this Bill is in itself racist, and it’s passing will be a gargantuan mistake which will change the course of race relations in New Zealand for the worse. – Graeme Reeves 

Well, we made it through the pandemic alive, and now we’re going broke.

Happy bloody Christmas, Adrian Orr.

If you were dreaming of a lavish summer holiday, or bulging festive stockings after the grind of Covid lockdowns, the Reserve Bank’s own Scrooge has news for you. Winter’s coming and Christmas is cancelled. –   Andrea Vance 

There have been a number of such cases where it appears that the judiciary has looked at the equity of the case and worked backwards to find the result that suits the popular mood. – Damien Grant

Many readers will find no issue with this state of affairs because the high regard we hold judges in contrasts with how we regard our MPs; and for good reason.

The process to obtain a judicial warrant requires decades of legal excellence, personal integrity and a reputation for diligence and prudence. The calibre of those who enter Parliament can be seen by how few maintain any professional life once the voters tire of their antics.

Yet the creeping expansion of judicial authority has occurred without significant public comment or civic engagement.

Like Elizabeth Baigent three decades past, we have woken up to find officers of the state running amok in areas we did not expect to find them, exercising authority we did not grant them, and no clear means of removing them. – Damien Grant

What a week. The Government would like us to be talking about whether 16 and 17-year-olds can vote. It is one of those issues that people generally have an opinion on and it’s a distraction from the major issues that have gone on this week.

They can’t pass legislation to strengthen our laws around youth crime but miraculously they can find time to bring legislation to Parliament on whether 16 and 17-year-olds can vote. They will say they had to.  – Paula Bennett

The Government looks like a deer in headlights, desperately deciding where to run to divert attention from the absolute mess we have seen this week. – Paula Bennett

As we hear this week that we are heading into a recession – and one that is predicted to last a long time – the Government would like us to be talking about whether 16 and 17-year-olds can vote. There is a lot that those 16 and 17-year-olds need. To feel safe in our beautiful country. To have hope that they may be able to buy a home one day. A bed in a mental health unit if they need it. Next year let’s hope they get a new government with the right priorities. – Paula Bennett

The die is looking increasingly cast for this Government. In a range of crucial policy areas they have resolutely refused to change course in response to changed circumstances, despite people jumping up and down and telling them they are sailing on to the rocks. Now they are in the process of reaping the consequences of their intransigence. And at this late stage it seems there is precious little they can do about it.

The economy is a case in point. Grant Robertson’s refusal to alter his spending plans, his lack of interest in a more welcoming immigration policy to unstick the labour market, his failure to hold back his colleagues’ tsunami of increasing regulation, and his unwillingness to require discipline on government-mandated wage increases, have all contributed to a glum economic prognosis. – Steven Joyce

Crime is another example. This government has spent years building a reputation for being soft. They doth protest but emptying the prisons, stopping police chases, softening sentences and generally showing more interest in criminals than victims leads to a sense of lawlessness and a growing list of personal tragedies.

And so on. Health, same story. Education as well. All a case of people arriving in government with a pre-conceived and rigid set of beliefs, often harking back to the 1970s, and then resolutely refusing to respond to the evidence in front of them until it is too late.

One of the biggest messes they have made, and continue to make, is in transport infrastructure. Its hard to fathom just how big a stuff-up this has become, and how difficult it will be to put it back together again. – Steven Joyce

 We’ve lost five years to paper pushing.

Now, in the face of a mounting road toll and pretty much no progress on a highway building plan, the government has resorted to the old saw of lowering speed limits, not on particular sections of road, but across the whole lot.

Ignoring that many of our road deaths occur out of driver impatience, or by people already flouting the current rules, the government has decided to punish everyone in terms of travel times and speeds, at the expense of productivity and getting home on time.

And yes it is the government. They are hiding behind NZTA but no agency advances these sorts of plans without government approval.

The only sure way to drive down our road toll is by relentlessly improving the quality of our roads. That means continuing to boost the capacity and safety of our busiest regional highways, and building more forgiving features into the not so busy ones. – Steven Joyce

There is no getting away from the fact the country has lost at least six years in building transport infrastructure and mega millions of dollars because of an ideologically driven junking of pre-existing plans. – Steven Joyce

The job for the next government will be to quickly resume a programme of transport investment focused on actual transport use rather than the fevered ideas of politicians and planners, one that is prioritised ruthlessly on actual benefits to actual users, and is funded over a decade or more so that contractors have confidence to invest in getting it built.

As with so much, it is too late for this Government and frankly beyond its wit to change tack. – Steven Joyce

But the thing I’ve realised is if you always do the right thing for the right reasons, then good things will happen.– Erica Stanford 

Science deals with the natural world but matauranga is rooted in the supernatural. Science has plenty of evidence to prove that humanity evolved from apes by Darwinian natural selection. Maori believe the god Tane created people.

Science aims to make universal laws, such as Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, Ohm’s laws of electricity, and Hubble’s law of cosmic expansion. These laws apply in New Zealand as they do on distant galaxies. Matauranga is limited to local situations and local events, and has produced no universal laws.

Writing about matauranga, leading Maori thinker Aroha Te Paraeke Mead writes (2007) that “Maori are the only ones who should be controlling all aspects of its retention, transmission and protection”. By contrast, science is in public hands. Anybody can contribute to it and every word or calculation is open to world-wide challenge and criticism. But challenge matauranga and you’ll be branded a racist, and say goodbye to your funding, promotion, and perhaps your job. – Bob Brockie

The differences between world science and matauranga are so great that they cannot be reconciled. – Bob Brockie

Parroting Foucault and Derrida, councillors of our Royal Society assert that science is “based on ethnocentric bias and outmoded dualisms (and the power relations embedded in them) ” and they want “to place the Treaty of Waitangi centrally and bring alongside that, inequality and diversity issues holistically”.

But the Treaty is a political document with no scientific content. It has no place in science.

The Society was once the bastion of science in New Zealand. It now champions woke anti-science and paradoxically punishes professors who defend science. Matauranga would best be taught in history or religious studies, certainly not in science. – Bob Brockie

We have one part of the system fully-funded and overseen in an apparently coherent way by the Ministry of Health (assisted suicide and euthanasia), and the other sector that doesn’t even have a strategic plan in place, that is inequitably funded, and has no coherent overview of how to develop the service,.

Why don’t we have the exact focus on palliative care, so anyone making the biggest decision of life can make an equitable, informed choice? – Dr Bryan Betty

Everyone is affected by death and dying. That is part of health. Good dying and having equitable choice is a fundamental part of the healthcare system we set up. It has to be given space and focus at this point. – Dr Bryan Betty

What Labour and Greens have done is vote for to entrench a clause relating to something which is merely a public policy issue, and have done so without bipartisan support. This is repugnant behaviour. – David Farrar

Super-majority entrenchment will only remain respected if it is used solely for constitutional protections, and for laws that were passed with over-whelming bipartisan support.

In this current case, the Government is actually using it almost as a PR stunt, as it deal with not privatising the Three Waters assets. This is a bogeyman created entirely by the Government. They are the only ones talking privatisation. Not a single Council has ever proposed selling off their water infrastructure. – David Farrar

We make our parliament “supreme” in the sense that a bare majority of its MPs can enact any law they want on any subject they want. However, we temper that power somewhat by saying that a future bare majority of MPs, perhaps elected by future voters, can revisit any of those laws and change them to reflect what they now think best.

This approach is rooted in ongoing democratic accountability. Electing MPs entrusts them with overall law-making power, which we then evaluate at subsequent election. If we disapprove of how that power has been used, we can pick another lot of MPs, who can use their law-making powers to fix things up. Should the majority viewpoint change, then the law can easily change along with it. Parliament’s law-making power is vast, but it is always contingent. – Andrew Geddis

For those lacking the appetite for a 10,000-word academic article, basically it was a political deal to stop MPs from any party being tempted to game these electoral rules in ways that might help them stay in power. Because, if our system of parliamentary supremacy over the law depends on MPs being freely and fairly elected by the voters, you want to make sure that our elections are free and the rules under which they get elected are fair!

This particular entrenchment provision has been scrupulously abided by in the subsequent 66 years.  – Andrew Geddis

Why does this matter? Well, first note the 60% threshold for future change. That number doesn’t reflect a principled decision on the appropriate level of parliamentary support for change. It just happens to be the current number of MPs from the Green and Labour Parties who were prepared to support Sage’s amendment. Because, parliament’s rules say that an entrenchment provision in a bill must be supported by at least the same number of MPs as it requires for future amendments. Had 70% of MPs supported including the entrenchment provision, the threshold would have been set at this level.

Second, and perhaps more important, note what this entrenchment protection applies to. Certainly, future ownership of water matters. Whether it lies in public or private hands is a really important question of policy. However, it is still just a question of policy.

It’s different from the provisions entrenched in the Electoral Act, which go to core matters regarding the fairness of the process that chooses who governs the country. We can’t really trust a bare majority of MPs, elected as they are and so eager to win and keep political power, to make rules here. Or, at least, there will always be the suspicion that any rules they make will reflect that bare majority’s personal, partisan interests instead of their best considered view of the right thing to do. – Andrew Geddis

Why, then, should we say that future MPs can only act to make it easier to privatise water where a super-majority of 60% of them want to do so? What makes this one particular policy issue of such importance that it requires a different, much harder parliamentary law-making process than any other?

The point being, what happened on Wednesday was a potentially momentous broadening out of an existing wrinkle in our system of parliamentary governance. Since 1956, our law has said that some key bits of our electoral system are so at risk of partisan gaming that we can’t trust a bare majority of MPs to decide them. Now, the amended three waters legislation also says that there is a basic policy issue that is so overwhelmingly important as to justify today’s MPs placing handcuffs on tomorrow’s MPs when dealing with it.

If that is indeed the case, what other sorts of issues might a supermajority of MPs think rise to that level? And, in this brave new world, what happens to our system of parliamentary law-making, based as it is on the assumption that the view of the current majority is always subject to revision by the future’s?- Andrew Geddis

The real danger is it opens up possibilities of entrenchment on other matters. It’s not beyond imagination that a National-ACT Government may in the future decide to entrench a three strikes law on the basis that being safe is important policy.

We start this set of shenanigans about using it for those types of policy matters that don’t have that widespread support. We get the sort of game playing which is unlikely to end well – Dean Knight

It is constitutionally concerning and exceptional for a policy matter like this to be entrenched, and for it to be formally dropped-in at such a late stage, so it didn’t have the time … for a debate about whether we want to change our constitution to allow for this type of thing.

“Using this sort of the entrenchment as handcuffs, in a slightly cheeky way … risks upsetting the traditions and expectations around entrenchment, whether it’s enforceable, whether there are conventions that you just can’t repeal them anyway, those sorts of things. – Dean Knight

If waterways and freshwater in this country were unequivocally recognised in New Zealand law as the life blood of the land, which cannot be owned by human beings but only held in trust for future generations to enjoy, then flawed legal devices such as ‘entrenchment’ would not be needed, and the spectre of ‘privatisation’ would vanish. – Dame Anne Salmond 

OK. Watch out for what you wish for.

You’ve done it, you’ve broken the convention, you’ve shown there’s a different way of doing things. See you at the election – if you’re not in the majority at the next election, don’t cry when it gets done to you. – Andrew Geddis 

It is a fundamental principle of our representative democracy that the current Parliament should not be able to bind its successors. The use of entrenchment to protect a piece of law from being changed or repealed via a simple parliamentary majority goes against this fundamental principle. By entrenching a current government’s policy preference, we either reduce the ability of future governments to legislate or, more likely; we undermine the current importance that we grant to entrenched constitutional provisions. – Maxim Institute

Our informal constitution relies on conventions and norms to continue functioning. These norms only work when all in and around power continue to uphold them. It is concerning that those in Government saw little wrong in introducing this entrenching provision and have sought to defend it. It is also worrying that there was little reaction to the provision from the Opposition or wider media at the time it was made. Legal academics have driven the pushback to this provision, and it is heartening that there is still room for the academy to function as the “critic and conscience of society.” – Maxim Institute

Mention woke indoctrination in schools and most people might imagine something like a pink-haired, nonbinary teacher forcing children to take the knee for Black Lives Matter. If you look on TikTok, you will find no shortage of such teachers gleefully revealing how they sneak Pride flags, LGBTQ+ books and BLM posters into the classroom. Certainly, there are plenty of activist teachers working in schools, who see pupils as a captive audience. Yet as worrying as such examples may be, they are merely the tip of the iceberg. – Joanna Williams

These ideas have gained ground precisely because it is not just pink-haired TikTok teachers who are intent on promoting a one-sided, politically motivated view of the world. It is also the academics who write the school curriculum and textbooks. It is the university educationalists who train each new generation of teachers. It is the journalists and campaigners outside of schools who agitate for their own pet issues to gain a hearing in the classroom. And it is the people who stock the school library and put together online resources for teachers and children alike. The upshot is that when it comes to English, history, geography and even maths, the curriculum itself has become politicised.

Discussions of gender identity and ideas that emerge from critical race theory are not just a sneaky addition to the ‘proper’ curriculum. They are now central to what and how children are taught. In many schools, books featuring transgender characters are used in literature classes not because of the quality of the writing, but because of the issues about identity that such texts raise. Similarly, slavery and empire feature on the history curriculum not so much because of their important place in human history, but more as a means of discussing current concerns with race and racism. And all of this is in addition to the assemblies, form periods, PSHE classes and RSE lessons that provide a forum for promoting the woke outlook. In these kinds of lessons, social engineering really is the main point. – Joanna Williams

The attitudes young adults are likely to have encountered while at school stand in contrast to the Enlightenment values that have shaped Western societies for the past two centuries. The Policy Exchange report adds to a growing body of evidence showing that young people are more sceptical about the importance of free speech, democracy and tolerance than older age groups. It shows that those aged 18 to 25 are evenly split on whether the gender-critical academic Kathleen Stock should have been defended by her university when she came under attack from trans activists. They are also split on whether Harry Potter author JK Rowling should have been dropped by her publisher for her comments on trans issues. In contrast, older adults are more likely to value freedom of expression over censorship. And while 38 per cent of young adults agree with the idea of removing Winston Churchill’s statue from Parliament Square because he held racist views, among adults as a whole this figure falls to just 12 per cent.

Education and indoctrination have become blurred, and the impact of this is now being felt beyond the school gates. We need to tackle this problem head-on. Sadly, it is no longer enough to say that teachers should simply stick to teaching when the curriculum itself is so politicised. Instead, we need a wider debate about the purpose of schools. And parents need to be given much clearer information about exactly what their children are being taught. We need teachers to be more ambitious when it comes to conveying subject knowledge, less keen on promoting their own political views and wise enough to know the difference between the two. – Joanna Williams

As big a figure as he was, his aura was never greater than when he had to use a wheelchair because of the effects of motor neurone disease (MND). He was never stronger than when his body was breaking down, never more commanding of worldwide respect than when he’d lost the ability to speak and could only communicate via a voice app operated with his eyes darting around a screen of letters.

His relentless energy in fighting an illness without cure was awe-inspiring. He said the only drug available to him was positivity – and he gorged merrily on it. The many millions of pounds he raised for research through his My Name’5 Doddie Foundation, the money donated to families who were suffering as his family were suffering, the lives he made better along the way. His legacy could circumnavigate the rugby world many times over. – Tom English

His attitude was rooted in grim realism. This thing had befallen him and he had better “crack on” as he put it. “I have never, ever thought ‘Why me?’ It was, ‘Right, let’s get this sorted… it’s like with rugby. If you don’t get in the team, do you give up your jersey or do you fight?” – Tom English

In New Zealand over the last five years (including, but not limited to, the Government’s Covid response) the tide has gone out on the New Zealand education system. I doubt that there is a single, even semi-informed, observer who could claim any more that we have a world-class system. – Alwyn Poole

The crisis already exists but has been covered up for a long time. It is now widely known that our education system is a mess and many schools are simply not fit for purpose.

Some key indicators are that: Even our Level 2 NCEA graduates often lack functional numeracy and literacy. We have in excess of 8500 students not enrolled in any school as of July. Our full attendance for Term 2 was less than 40% across all deciles and just 23% for decile 1 students. We have 12% of our students graduating with less than Level 1 NCEA (33% for Māori students in South Auckland). The gaps across socio-economic levels are the worst in the developed world. Our ethnic gaps are also horrendous with Asian students getting University Entrance for leavers at 67%, back to Māori at 18%. – Alwyn Poole

Labour keeps stating that this decline started under National. Under National there was a slight downward trend in attendance. Labour drove the school attendance bus off the cliff.  – Alwyn Poole

Who will take responsibility? The Ministry of Education, whose email footnote states: “We shape an education system that delivers equitable and excellent outcomes”? NZ’s school attendance is behind all the key countries we compare ourselves with (including 15 percentage points behind Australia).

When principals complain about the new credits for functional literacy and numeracy they need to remember that they can be achieved at any time from Year 10 to Year 13. Are they really saying they can’t help students achieve functional literacy and numeracy in five years? The sitting students will have had 12,000 hours of funded schooling each by then. – Alwyn Poole

Where they are right is that there needs to be major change in both parenting and schooling. – Alwyn Poole

As a nation we need massive education and support for pregnant women/partners regarding care for their children in-utero, including a huge programme to counter foetal alcohol spectrum disorder and other harms. We need it to be imperative that parents are the first (and most important) teachers for ages 0–5, including health, reading, numeracy, movement, music, languages. 

Then it is time for all parents across NZ to ask the hard questions about school leadership, school quality, teacher quality and to demand a LOT better. Parents fund the schooling and it is their children. They deserve better, but they need to be prepared to help. – Alwyn Poole

Our primary school teaching and learning needs overhauling and a lot of the busy work and downtime needs to go. Primary teacher qualifications in English, Maths and Science need significant upgrading.

The Education Review Office says schools should make attending more “enjoyable” (aka fun). How about – inspirational, aspirational, high quality, demanding?

When the tide is out it is the very best time to make things right. – Alwyn Poole

The MIQ system was shockingly designed, fundamentally flawed and ended up in court with a loss for the Government.

It was a foray into repression and fury that was never really needed and a very good example of what this Government has become famous for – dreaming up a plan then cocking it up.

The famous got access to The Wiggles and Jacinda Ardern’s favourite DJs while people were locked out and forced to watch loved ones die, loved ones get married via zoom and that mad lottery of getting up at all hours and watching as you yet again got a number that would not get you anywhere close to getting a room and into the country.

Charlotte Bellis, remember her? The pregnant journalist who bullied her way in by embarrassing Chris Hipkins into submission – the whole thing was a grotesque mess. – Mike Hosking

Governments have to run on their record. Last term, Labour successfully locked down the country. Then they overdid the lockdowns. This term what has Labour achieved?

Labour inherited a strong economy and an excellent set of books. Labour promised to be fiscally prudent. Covid was used as an excuse to wriggle out of that pledge.

Labour did inherit issues in housing, health and education. After five years the issues are worse. Tens of thousands of households are going to struggle to service 8 per cent mortgages. Health services are failing. The Government’s priority is a Māori Health Authority. Meanwhile, 98 per cent of pupils graduating from decile 10 schools would fail NCEA literacy. – Richard Prebble

It feels like karma. Labour’s re-election was helped by the Reserve Bank at one stage printing a billion dollars a week to pump up the economy. To correct the inflation caused by that money printing the Reserve Bank is helping defeat Labour.

No one would want to campaign on Labour’s record. All Labour can do is try to convince us that National and Christopher Luxon would be worse. It is possible but hard to imagine. – Richard Prebble

Labour must press ahead with its unpopular Three Waters. Labour is fighting a two-front election campaign. National and Act on one front. The Māori Party on the second front. Labour cannot abandon co-government without also abandoning the Māori seats.

The next 12 months are going to be very dangerous. We have no written constitution restraining Labour. The only sanction on any government is the knowledge that they will be accountable in an election. This is why three years may be too short for a good government but too long for a bad one.

Ministers can read the polls. Labour will ignore the Reserve Bank’s advice.

Ministers will go on borrowing and spending. Labour intends to leave inflation as the next government’s problem. Paying back the borrowing is another problem for a future government. It is called laying a minefield. – Richard Prebble

Luxon and Act’s David Seymour had better factor into their plans the likelihood of many unexploded bombs. The health system appears close to a systematic failure. The briefing for the incoming ministers in many portfolios will make a very grim reading.

There is an even greater danger. MPs who think they are dog tucker can be tempted to try to defeat the outcome of the election.

It is fundamental to democracy that one parliament cannot bind future parliaments.

Not anymore. In the Three Waters bill that critics say privatises billions of dollars of ratepayers’ assets into effective ownership by tribal entities, Green MP Eugenie Sage has an amendment. The amendment requires a 60 per cent vote by future parliaments to privatise the assets. Go figure. Intellectual rigour is not prized in the Green caucus. Under urgency, Labour supported the Green Party amendment.  – Richard Prebble

In 168 years of the New Zealand Parliament, no government has ever attempted to entrench its policies.  – Richard Prebble

Labour and the Greens have committed a constitutional outrage. It is an attack on democracy. Even if the reaction forces a U-turn it shows Labour and the Greens are willing to abuse their power.

Lame duck governments are dangerous. – Richard Prebble

THE MORE THE VOTERS DISCOVER about Labour’s Three Waters, the less they like it. No matter, this Government has clearly decided that, if it is to be destroyed, then Three Waters is the hill upon which it will die. That being the case – and the still-unfolding Entrenchment Crisis leaves little room for doubt – then the only real question to be answered is: Why? What is it about the Three Waters project that renders it impervious to rational reconsideration

When a group of people refuse to accept they have made a poor choice – even as it threatens to destroy them – then it is a reasonably safe bet that they are in the grip of dangerously delusional thinking. Cult-like thinking, some might even suggest. But is it credible to suggest that a mainstream political party could fall victim to delusional thinking on such a scale? Is Labour really crazy enough to put its long-term survival at risk? – Chris Trotter

What idea is big enough to derange the Labour Party into courting electoral suicide? The answer would appear to involve a radical revision of New Zealand history. Something along the lines of the colonisation of Aotearoa being a heinous historical crime. In this narrative, the colonial state is identified as the institution most responsible for the criminal dispossession of Aotearoa’s indigenous Māori population. Labour’s big idea is to facilitate a revolutionary reconstitution of the New Zealand state.

Now, where would Labour get an idea like that? Putting to one side Labour’s Māori caucus, whose interest in such an historical project is entirely understandable, how could Labour’s Pakeha MPs have picked up such a self-destructive notion? Well, the university graduates in Labour’s caucus (which is to say nearly all of them) are highly likely to have come across arguments for “decolonisation” at some point in their studies. The lawyers among them would certainly have encountered and absorbed “the principles of the Treaty”. So, too, would those coming to the Labour Party from the state sector. – Chris Trotter

The version of New Zealand history conveyed to those attending these workshops is remarkably consistent: colonisers = baddies; the heroic Māori who resisted the colonisers’ ruthless predations = goodies. Only by giving full effect to te Tiriti o Waitangi can the wrongs of the past be righted: only then will equity and justice prevail.

Many of those attending Treaty workshops will have been invited to “check their privilege” and “confront their racism”. This can be a harrowing experience for many Pakeha, leaving them with a strong inclination to keep silent and step aside whenever those on the receiving end of “white privilege” are encouraged to step forward and speak out. In the most extreme cases, Pakeha are actively discouraged from sharing their opinions, lest their higher education and superior facility with the English language overawe and “silence” those denied such privileges.

When Labour’s Māori caucus (the largest ever after the 2020 general election) sought to take full advantage of the party’s absolute parliamentary majority to advance their Treaty-centric agenda, it is entirely possible they found themselves pushing on an open door. – Chris Trotter

It is, perhaps, unsurprising that Labour’s Māori caucus has found the party’s Pakeha majority so easy to cajole into backing what, from its perspective, is an entirely legitimate constitutional agenda. Led by Nanaia Mahuta and Willie Jackson, the Māori caucus has taken full advantage of the fact that their Pakeha colleagues’ lack of constitutional conviction has never been a match for their own passionate intensity.

Three Waters may be the hill Labour dies on, but when the victors survey the field of battle, the only corpses they’ll find will be Pakeha. Each one clutching the “Big Idea” for which their party has paid the ultimate price. – Chris Trotter

While tinkering around the house is an enjoyable pastime that can also yield some improvements, it is not a productive approach to government policy-making, and rarely leads to the best of outcomes. – Leeann Watson

New Zealand’s political environment seems to be stuck in an unfortunate position, because of the three-year election cycle, where we tend not to bother on the big things, and we instead focus on tinkering with the little things– the quick wins and the headline grabbers. And when we do focus on the big things, we do it in a way that is rushed, and often not with a long-term view in mind. We’ve digressed from a Parliament that is solely focused on creating better outcomes for New Zealanders, and identifying problems before we attempt to fix them. – Leeann Watson

One of the big pieces of legislation that has been plaguing the business community this year is Fair Pay Agreements. In my previous column, I wrote about these in more depth, and I will repeat the point we hear from Canterbury businesses ad nauseam. Why has a complicated and convoluted piece of legislation that will make it more difficult for businesses to operate been introduced to solve a problem that does not exist? New Zealand enjoys some of the best employment relations in the developed world, with flexibility and agility that we cannot lose. So what are we fixing?

One of the pieces of legislation that was introduced in urgency last week was one that will require all businesses in New Zealand to elect a health and safety representative, including the small business that might employ three people, which now has to invest in training for their staff, at a time where the economy is under significant pressure. Previously, small businesses did not need to worry about this unless they were a high-risk industry, such as forestry or mining, so, again, what is the problem we are trying to solve? Are small businesses really that unsafe?

The business community is losing faith in our policymakers’ ability to define problems and create meaningful and fair solutions. We are stuck in a Catch-22 type situation, because the complex problems that need to be addressed – rising levels of crime, investment in infrastructure, reforming aspects of our public system that are not delivering successful outcomes – all require a long-term approach. And the level and extent of reform needed to fix them, is prohibited by election cycles. – Leeann Watson

Reform is a word that has lost its true meaning. Reform is bold. Reform is about pulling things apart and reassembling something that is faster, better and more efficient than it was originally. The reform we have seen of late has not fit that definition at all.

Let’s consider the reform of the health system. A new name and a restructure is not a reform. It is a new name and a restructure. The same entity still exists, and it is still delivering the same outcomes and, in some cases, maybe worse than before. The components might look different, or be slotted in a slightly different place, but it is still the same. It hasn’t gained anything new, or lost anything clunky that is preventing it from delivering better outcomes for New Zealanders. As has been the case in Christchurch this year, cancelling all non-urgent appointments because the system is about to collapse under pressure is just not acceptable. A new name is not going to fix that. – Leeann Watson

At a time when we desperately need to be investing and focusing our attention on equipping the future workforce, we are seeing the merger of entities – some of which are performing quite well on their own. The headlines, instead, indicate it is fraught with scandals, resignations, and our future workforce, and our younger generation, are no better off because of it.

That’s not to mention the changes in almost every other aspect of the public sector that are occurring, including Three Waters. Is changing everything, all the time, all at once, really the best method? Should we not be focusing on the most pressing issues first and doing it properly, with a view of creating better outcomes over the long term rather than quick wins? – Leeann Watson

 Christchurch aside, where new infrastructure was required immediately due to the earthquakes, elsewhere in New Zealand we seem to take the approach that it is not until a road is constantly congested, and motorists (read: voters) are unhappy, that we make decisions to invest and expand. We should be starting projects decades before they are needed. Not after they’re needed. But that doesn’t win votes.

There is a growing and quite compelling case that our current electoral system is limiting the ability for successive Governments to be bold and to engage in actual reform, and not just tinker with minor alterations and the headline-grabbing policy wins that sound great on paper and are good for the polls, rather than the tough actions that solve problems, and leave New Zealand in a better position.

As we head into the barbeque season before an election year and the inevitable political debates amongst family and friends occur, maybe it’s time to focus on the system and not the political personalities, and consider, whether it may not necessarily be the political parties alone that are not delivering to their best extent, but rather a political system that is not hindering the ability to deliver long term outcomes – and a public service as a whole that would benefit from a new operating model that enables agility, innovation, a growth mindset and is focused on execution versus tinkering. – Leeann Watson

This new fog canon measure is too late – they know it, we know it.

Worse yet, the PM tried to deflect all blame from her Government by saying that there’d be a delay on said fog cannons – due to a global shortage. This turns out to be an outright lie.

Newstalk ZB Drive host Heather du Plessis Allan smelt a rat straight away and last night called a fog cannon supplier to fact check the PM on this one. No surprises in his response.. he said to her, ‘I see the Queen of Spin is at it again..’

He said the facts are, there is no global shortage of fog cannons, the supply issue is due to the Government not placing any orders for them. They’ve dropped the ball, again. – Kate Hawkesby

So the delay is the Government’s fault, it’s on them. Remind anyone of the vaccine rollout?

This is a government of inaction and indecision. Unless it’s Three Waters legislation of course, that appears to be able to be rammed through no holds barred. But this fog canon supply shortage claim – or should I say lie, is akin to the same lie the PM trotted out yesterday, that the Government’s new increased support for dairy business owners is not based on the death of Janak Patel. – Kate Hawkesby

The Government wants to pretend it’s considerate, organized and proactive enough not to wait for a death, in order to act, but that’s simply not true. Spinning us lies is just not working anymore; this Government has a credibility problem.

The PM has a credibility problem. Included in her post Cab was the other audacious claim that they’ve been tough on crime.

She “rejected” criticism her Government was soft on crime. She “rejected” that the Government had acted too slowly, she “rejected” the idea that it took Patel’s death for the Government to act. – Kate Hawkesby

I can tell you this for nothing, rejecting this stuff doesn’t make it go away. It is a crisis for every single victim and every family member of victims in these burglaries and raids.

But the other real crisis we’re in at the moment is a spin crisis. There’s too much of it coming from the Pulpit of Truth.

We’re drowning in it; we’re exhausted from being fed it. I do worry about all those who just accept it without question though, or have checked out because they don’t even care anymore.

We should care; we are being fed a steady diet of BS, from a government that has no idea what the words accountability or responsibility mean. – Kate Hawkesby

In his great book titled Russia in 1839, the Marquis de Custine called the Tsar “eagle and insect.” He was eagle because he soared high above the country over which he ruled, completely alone, taking it all in at a glance, but he was insect because there was nothing too small or trivial for him to interfere with: he or his power burrowed into the very fabric of society as a termite burrows into the fabric of a wooden house. There was no escaping him.

This is the image I have in my mind of the operation of the adherents of Woke ideology. They have a grand vision, at least implicitly, both about the nature of the society in which they live and what should replace it. Insufficient, incoherent, or absurd as their vision might be, it actuates them. As human history demonstrates, intellectual insufficiency is no bar to effectiveness in the search for power; indeed it might be an advantage insofar as more scrupulous searchers after truth and goodness are riven by doubt.

On the other hand, nothing is too small for their attention. Being visionaries, they can infuse their slightest actions with the most grandiose theoretical significance. This gives them self-importance and confidence that they are doing what once might have been called God’s work. Triviality is thus reconciled with transcendence. They are part of the movement of History with a capital H, whose right side they both define and bring forward by their actions. – Theodore Dalrypmple

The eagle is sharp-eyed while the adherent of Woke ideology has cataracts. When the house crumbles to dust because of the action of the termites, it is not because they desired such a denouement: it was, rather, a natural consequence of their conduct. The destruction wrought by the adherents of Woke ideology is a good deal more deliberate.  – Theodore Dalrypmple

I have been proud to be part of the New Zealand health sector. When I started in GP I didn’t feel the need to have private health insurance. The health system, while it had its limitations, generally worked well. I would do everything I could to manage the patient in the community and when I needed help I could refer the patient on and they would be seen. I was so proud of the initial government response to Covid, one that prioritised public safety, that I applied for citizenship.

How things have changed. The health system is fundamentally broken and I can’t see how it is going to be fixed. Patients who need to be managed in secondary care aren’t, instead being pushed back into primary care. Patients going to Emergency are not getting the imaging they require on presentation; they are given pain relief and told to see their GP in the morning and get referred for an ultrasound. The patient then needs to pay to see me (and I usually have to double-book them to see them promptly). Unless they are one of the chosen few eligible for community-funded radiology that ultrasound will cost them $280 and will require a four week wait.

Good medical practice prioritises early intervention for children with developmental delays. The Child Development Service, which does the majority of assessments for autism, global developmental delay and other conditions, has a waitlist of over 12 months. Even if a family has the resources to go private, I have no one to refer to. – Dr Corinne Glenn

Every consult becomes more and more complex as patients get sicker waiting for care. Patients have to wait longer for an appointment so by the time they come there are multiple issues to deal with. Follow-up is hard as patients struggle to pay for repeat appointments. We don’t have the medications that are bog-standard in other parts of the world. We have only recently funded some diabetes medications (empagliflozin and dulaglutide) that are second line treatments elsewhere. The special authority criteria are so strict there are many who can’t access them.

Please don’t mention mental health. Again, I am really confident managing a range of mental health conditions. However good mental health management requires a team. Access to counsellors, and sometimes a psychiatrist. There is no one I can refer to. Funded counselling is very scarce and limited to the most needy. Most people can’t afford to pay $160-170 an hour to see a psychologist and even if they can, I can’t find one with open books. If I have a patient in crisis in my rooms and I need to call the Crisis Team, I wait on hold for 30-40 minutes. The patient has normally left the room by then and my other patients are left waiting.

No new antidepressants have been funded for years. GPs are often accused of jumping straight to medication – but often it is the only affordable option I have to offer patients. – Dr Corinne Glenn

So much of my time is spent battling to get patients the care they need. As soon as a patient comes in I am desperately looking at their demographic: do they have a community services card? What quintile is their address in? If they don’t have a community services card and live in a quintile 3 street I have no chance of getting them counselling or imaging that they don’t have to pay for (and usually can’t).

I used to be able to have some friendly banter with my practice team during the day. Now I sit in my room through breaks, trying to catch up on the neverending mounds of paperwork. ACC requests for information. Ministry of Social Development disability forms. Letters for Kainga Ora for a place without stairs for my patient with severe arthritis. I work most evenings and for two hours on a Sunday. One Friday evening at 5.30 I logged out of the patient management system. By Saturday afternoon when I logged back in I had 105 inbox documents waiting to be checked. Dinner table conversation is taken up with stories of patients I can’t help. Sometimes I can share a win, however those are getting fewer by the week. – Dr Corinne Glenn

Some days I am filled with rage at the injustice of it all. Some days I am just tired and sad. I am proud of the work that I do, but I am no longer proud of the system I work in.

I have sold my house and put in my notice. I fly back to Australia on Boxing Day. I have a new job lined up – it really wasn’t hard to find one. GPs are just as scarce as they are here. The Australian system is different. It has its pros and cons. All I know is that I can’t stay here.

The New Zealand health system is broken, and it has broken me. – Dr Corinne Glenn

We’re told that the fundamental problem is poverty. Well guess what? The only sure path out of poverty begins with education. Lotto isn’t going to do it, and nor is social welfare.

I understand that some of us ordinary folk might have difficulty with the extraordinarily complex idea (not!) of taking kids out of a toxic environment and giving them a chance to learn skills and develop attitudes that will change their lives for the better. The media, though, has no excuse.

Whatever one thinks of National’s “boot camp” proposal for recidivist young offenders — my view is that it offers a promising start, but is only one ingredient of a proper solution — it is surely worth discussing, and considering, without the hysterics displayed by many. – Peter Jackson

For a start, who says taking kids who are well on the way to becoming career criminals out of the environment that has damaged them so and putting them where, for the first time in their lives, they have the chance to fulfil their potential is punitive? Have I missed something here?

As I read it, these “boot camps” (a derogatory term that is designed to disparage the policy before it even gets off the ground) will have nothing to do with punishment. If you’re going to bandy about words like brutal and punitive, then obviously you know something I don’t. – Peter Jackson

Sixty per cent of kids aren’t attending school regularly. The Government’s less than lofty goal is to reduce that to 30 per cent over the next couple of years. And you don’t have to be an expert to understand how kids who are under-educated are likely to fare as adults.

We’re told that the fundamental problem is poverty. Well guess what? The only sure path out of poverty begins with education.

Lotto isn’t going to do it, and nor is social welfare. There is no reason, apart from poor parenting and misguided politicians, why every child in this country shouldn’t have a shot at succeeding, in whatever it is that they want to do. And for some, National’s proposal will be a godsend. – Peter Jackson

I do have a proviso. There seems to be little point in giving young people a glimpse of what the world could offer them, if, at the end of the programme, they are sent back to the same dysfunctional families that they came from. While the kids are away, their families will need to be “rehabilitated”. It is totally unrealistic to expect a young teenager to come home, with a whole new outlook on life, not to be dragged back down by drug and alcohol abuse, violence, dishonesty and whatever else made them the way they were in the first place.

We also need to restore education to the pedestal it should be sitting on. All you need to know about where we’ve gone wrong is encapsulated in the current drive to make school so interesting and exciting that kids will want to be there. Do sane, rational people actually believe this stuff?

There is a reason why primary and secondary schooling are called compulsory education. It is compulsory, and parents who don’t send their kids to school are breaking the law. More to the point, they are likely sentencing their children to lives of misery. – Peter Jackson

Is it possible that we’ll see the defeat of the Russian Army and the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party in the same year? Authoritarians can only squeeze their people so far, and liberal democracy, for all its greedy bankers and silly pronouns, still has the moral upper hand. Yet one feels impotent in the face of such evil. – Tim Stanley

Foreign tyrants are leviathans with feet of clay, and our own government should not limit our liberties in order to supposedly protect us against them. – Pierre Lemieux

If we exclude possible wars, there is only one reason why residents of a free, or more or less free, country should feel economically threatened by a foreign authoritarian state. It is that the subjects of the latter will have limited opportunities to trade, both among themselves and internationally, and will thus be poorer. And it is more beneficial to have trading partners, either as suppliers or customers, who are richer than poorer. – Pierre Lemieux

It is true that leviathans like the Russian, Chinese, or North Korean states finance themselves out of the total production of all their subjects. Especially with nuclear weapons, they represent a security risk for other individuals in the world; I think that they would even be dangerously to an anarchic society if such a society ever exists. But trying to become like “them” in order to protect us against them provides only an illusion of security.

Protectionism is one big step in this fool’s errand, at least when an actual war is not raging. – Pierre Lemieux

Terrorist charges need to be used for terrorist activity, not regulating material that has nothing to do with terrorism. Watering down such a significant term runs the risk of seeing Kiwis legally branded ‘terrorists’ without ever performing any terrorist act, or even accessing material which promotes terrorism. 

The act of terrorism comes with appropriately harsh penalties. By extending terrorism related charges to individuals who possess certain ‘objectionable material’, these significant penalties may be placed on those who have simply accessed censored material, despite it being unrelated to terrorism.

Legislation already allows for individuals in possession of material which advocates or inspires terrorism to be charged under terrorism laws. Extending this further to material that is entirely unrelated to terrorism is a law ripe for abuse.

New Zealand already has a strict censorship regime. It’s not hard to imagine the incredible harm which could occur to speech rights and other liberties if this amendment was used as a precedent to justify the prohibition of other material under terrorism legislation. –  Jonathan Ayling

Quotes of the month

Let us not get bogged down in the need to achieve real benefit for Maori when we can instead deliver a bunch of virtue signalling nonsense that benefits only an elite class of Maori, who can slap each other on the back enjoying the success of bullying those who are trying to advocate for the vulnerable. – Casey Costello 

I wonder by whose measure the understanding of my “Maori world” is tested. After six years of advocating for equality of rights for ALL New Zealanders in my role with Hobson’s Pledge, the attacks on my right to speak as a Maori are truly water off a duck’s back. Unlike the Kelvins of this world, I don’t claim to speak for ALL Maori. I am not afraid of my views being challenged and I will debate the issues and demand accountability. I do not need to resort to name-calling and insults that belittle those who have a different point of view. – Casey Costello 

So we now expose the truth of the Labour Maori caucus agenda: we are not being divided just by whether we are Maori or non-Maori, that is too simple. For being Maori, although undefined, now requires you to meet the standard set by Labour. The qualification to join this exclusive club is no longer whakapapa, it is whether you agree with the elected and self-appointed elite. – Casey Costello 

This Labour Government has not achieved, in their five years in power, one positive shift in the dial for any measure of Maori outcomes. There have been no better education outcomes, no real reduction in homelessness and no increase in home ownership, no lifting out of poverty, no reduction in prison numbers, no enhancement to mental health………nothing. But rather than hanging their heads in shame or seeking better solutions, they double down, apparently believing the best form of defence is attack. Their failures are laid at the feet of systemic racism and colonisation.

What a perfect scenario: you can be the Government of ineptitude and abject failure but protected from any accountability for that failure – “it’s not our fault, it’s colonisation”. – Casey Costello 

It seems in New Zealand we are not championing the aspirational words of Martin Luther King in that we are not seeking to have our children valued on the content of their character but rather judged on the subjective measure assigned by Kelvin Davis. – Casey Costello 

It is looking ever more likely that the economic piper must indeed be paid, with the odds shortening on a worldwide recession in the next 12 months.

It still beggars belief that governments and central bankers didn’t realise what they were flirting with when they opened the fiscal and monetary spigots to such an unprecedented degree during the pandemic.

Or that they took no corrective action once it became apparent we had a supply shock rather than a demand shock. –  Steven Joyce 

We can’t control inflation with big wage increases and partying up at restaurants all the time.

The immediate cause of the inflation we have been seeing is, as always, too much money chasing too few goods and services. – Steven Joyce 

On the supply side, easing supply bottlenecks and the services sectors coming back on stream will help.

However, the big issue both in services and more widely is labour supply and gummed up borders. Plus, in our case, a Government that can’t philosophically or practically get out of its own way long enough to even have a decent crack at solving the problem. – Steven Joyce 

So where did we go so wrong?

I blame a trend I’ll call performative policymaking.

Over the last five to eight years there has been a worldwide tendency to make grand rhetorical gestures that instantly sound good, but with little regard for execution risk or consequences, especially economic consequences. – Steven Joyce 

Our own Government was an early adopter.

Who can forget the oil and gas ban that has directly led to burning more coal, KiwiBuild’s 100,000 homes, reportedly dreamt up in the back of a taxi? The plan to slash migration? Or Shane Jones’ one billion trees? – Steven Joyce 

There is a legitimate debate to be had about the size of the state and money being better off in the hands of the people that earned it rather than legions of bureaucrats.

Particularly in tight economic times and including in our country where a statist Government has significantly increased its own size as a proportion of society under the cover of Covid.

And no surprises which side I’m on. But you can’t be aspirational and half-arsed about it, and forget about balancing the books. – Steven Joyce 

Politicians have gotten used to being able to make feel-good announcements and rely on the short news cycles of the social media age to sweep away the need to deliver and be accountable.

But times are a-changing again.

Our political leaders are increasingly being faced with the return of political gravity and economic reality.  – Steven Joyce 

I think we are witnessing a new age of political realism dawning.

It will likely be tough for a while as we unwind all the consequences of this performative policy-making but the world will ultimately be the better for it. – Steven Joyce 

What it gives away is the degree to which people in Britain have come to believe that all money is the government’s and that what is left over for the people has been granted them by the government’s grace and favor. But the government cannot give money (or at least economic product) away; it can only refrain from taking it. – Theodore Dalrymple

Beyond the correct rate of taxation, however, lie the much deeper problems of the country. For years, regardless of who was in power, government policy has been to import cheap unskilled or semi-skilled labor, while paying large numbers of people to remain economically inactive, in the process placing great strain on housing and public services through overpopulation. The government has subsidized socially irresponsible behavior to the point at which, for people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, such behavior is more profitable than work; these people depend on the government for everything. Through its education system, Britain has performed miracles of inefficiency, resulting in a substantial population of expensively educated semi-literates, whose labor would be too expensive even if it were free. – Theodore Dalrymple

At $370 million, the Government is going to spend more to merge RNZ and TVNZ than the combined net worth of those entities. – Melissa Lee

I was honoured to have been asked to take up a position on the board of Māori Television, and assumed I was there because of the way a small team of clever, young, white people I worked with from Dunedin had started using the latest technologies to bring Māori stories, a Māori world view, to life across a wide range of platforms that now made up the media landscape.

But no – I didn’t have te reo – so I was quite clearly in Willie’s “useless Māori” category.

That didn’t really bother me because nothing Willie said could take away from my sense of who I was and where I came from. Especially because, at the time, I felt his contribution to the media landscape was more hui than doee.

But Willie is now Minister of Broadcasting and Media and he is charged with merging Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand into a future-focused broadcasting entity that has to face the huge challenges of the new online platforms that are decimating the old world of radio and television. The skillsets and experience needed for a role such as this have challenged some of the largest media organisations in the world, not to mention some of the most tech-savvy storytellers on the planet.

But, when I look at Willie’s CV, there is not a lot to suggest that this is a job he is particularly well qualified for.

He does have te reo – I have to give him that – but where is the detailed knowledge and vision for a future-focused entity that will deliver content that will engage viewers across the wide range of platforms that are now available to all?  – Sir Ian Taylor

There is no place for discrimination by Māori, for Māori who are dismissed as having a “vanilla lens on the Māori world view” simply because they do not have te reo, or who choose to embrace all sides of their whakapapa – my father was Scottish. – Sir Ian Taylor

Kō ngā tāhū ā o tapu wai inanahi, hei tauira ora mō āpōpō.

The footsteps laid down by our ancestors centuries ago, create the paving stones upon which we stand today.

To that we add: innovation is in your DNA, wear it with pride. – Sir Ian Taylor

It’s] pretty clear to me that you are either born a male of female, or else, there are some people who are born with both genders. I have no problem with other people choosing to be whoever they like to be.

Personally, I self-identify as a 27-year-old Slovakian model. – Judith Collins

That Davis and Jackson were quick to temper betrays their character. But it also speaks to a wider problem within the Labour tribe – who prefer invective to rational debate.

This is the anger of the pure believer towards the apostate. It is easier to suppress criticism by dismissing or marginalising the critics as ‘bad’ people (whether that be racist, over-privileged, transphobic, etc) rather than actually addressing the issues.

Ardern’s empathy and cool-headed compassion was not a construct – that is her nature. But it’s easy to be nice when you are winning. Now that the political landscape looks significantly less favourable, some of her MPs are becoming defensive. It is the wrong kind of anger to harness if they want to remain in Government. – Andrea Vance

Things happen in your life and unfortunately they can shape you in negative ways. I became very fearful, I was holding it within me. I actually, in my little kid brain, thought that if I was around drugs or the white powder that I was responsible for killing people because of what I’d seen.

I had this internal guilt, I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I had no safe spaces at that time so it ate away. But after talking about, accepting it and releasing that guilt and shame [I realised that] sometimes these things happen.

It left no what-ifs about it. If you don’t get on top of your drug problem, this is what happens. It’s a bad road. – Ruby Tui

What happens to us, especially what happens to us as children, doesn’t need to define who we are as adults. And it’s never too late to look into these things that happened to us.

It’s never too late to forgive ourselves. I had to forgive myself because I thought I was killing people, and I wasn’t.

We’re all human and we all have our dark stuff and our dark times. People are so scared of the dark but without those times you can’t appreciate the light. You learn things at rock bottom that you’ll never learn on mountaintops. – Ruby Tui

There’s nothing as inspiring as seeing your mum get out of a bad relationship and organise and reach out and get help. It just makes me feel like I can do anything. – Ruby Tui

A stoush between collectivist and individualist Māori is long overdue. It has simmered for a long time but this week boiled over when Kelvin Davis exposed his thinking for all and sundry to examine. He confirmed that a Māori world with its own set of values exists, and that anyone with even a smidgen of Māori heritage should get themselves into it. It wasn’t a kindly suggestion. It was a command. The cost of not complying? Derision and ostracism. It’s reminiscent of the treatment handed out to those who don’t want to be part of the Gloriavale commune.

The tribe is a communistic unit. The tribe takes precedence. It owns you. Its culture is all-encompassing. It provides strength in numbers, security and identity. But it is also stultifying and limiting depending on which lens it is viewed through. Ultimately, inevitably, whether at the micro or macro level, the question must be answered. Is your allegiance to the tribe, or is it to yourself and your chosen group of family and friends. – Lindsay Mitchel 

Mixed partnerships are more common than those with the same ethnicity. And each of these partnerships – many producing children – will face issues of concurrent cultures.

Increasingly, through media and public services, through health, justice and education, the Māori culture is being prioritised. To the point of being romanticized and lionized. Long-standing rules about the state being secular are broken to accommodate Māori spiritualism. Te reo – or knowledge of te ao – is de facto compulsory inasmuch as, if you don’t have it there are now careers that are barred to you. The Māori ‘team’ propelling this are on a roll. They are in ascendancy. They have gathered non-Māori into their tribe with astonishing success and seeming ease, though reflecting on the creeping compulsion maybe ‘ease’ is the wrong word. –  Lindsay Mitchel 

In the middle of last century sociologists observed Pakeha men who married Māori women tended to move into the tribe; Māori men who married non-Māori moved into the non-tribal society. Tension would have existed always but so did the freedom to choose.

What kind of society wants to remove that freedom? One in which the collective trumps the individual.

Forget all the hoo-ha about culture, values and Māori mysticism. Colonisation, oppression and racism. They are only trinkets to tempt followers of fashion.

What is happening is a clash between philosophies. Politics is the practical expression of philosophy.

So it isn’t surprising that the strong-arming to get with the Māori worldview programme is coming from the left (the Labour Māori caucus, Green and Māori Party MPs). And those resisting are coming from the right (National and ACT). What played out in parliament this week, and is still reverberating with non-politicians now entering the fray, is the age-old stoush between collectivism and individualism. It’s New Zealand’s cold war.

If we are going to be forced to take a side, and mounting evidence points to this eventuality no matter your ethnicity, think of the conflict in these terms.

Do you want to own your own life? –  Lindsay Mitchel 

 In public life we need more good people doing things and fewer strutting peacocks admiring their reflection in a wall of camera lenses.

Media attention is addictive and those who crave adulation are driven to ever-greater acts of absurdity. Those who get things done are often unseen and, in the case of Finlayson, unsung.  – Damien Grant

 In what is my favourite line of his book this criticism is airily dismissed: “The pettifogging concerns of professors of law did not worry me.”

Now, I am not qualified to arbitrate on the issues, but I endorse the robustness of the language and the withering contempt that goes along with it. Those that can, do, those that can’t, teach. –

This is a book written by someone who was in politics to do something, even if at times the reader gets a sense that the author wasn’t entirely sure what that something was.

But when the ministerial warrants came his way, he applied his mind, energies and a systematic, if at times inconsistent, set of principles to the task before him. –

If you wish to write a book after you leave office, make sure you have something to write about other than snarky barbs traded between colleagues. Although there is enough of that to keep things lively. Journalists would also do well to put down their phones and read it. –

 

So what if they are vulnerable, poor or uneducated or, dare I say it, ‘victims of colonisation’. Go tell that to the dairy owner when his business has been smashed and robbed for the fifth time this year, or when a baseball bat is swung at his head, or the security guard who just got bashed for it. How does that make it OK?

There are thousands upon thousands of kids in our country who have suffered those issues, and more, but they don’t stoop so low as to use it as an excuse to commit violent crime. The vast majority pick themselves up with a thing called ‘pride’ and ‘respect’ and crack on with life in society and are productive and have never committed the crimes the small minority do. – Darroch Ball

For goodness sake, any parent knows bringing up kids in a household needs boundaries and consequences. The further they push the boundaries, the harsher the consequences. It’s not a hard concept.

Give these kids what they need – care, genuine adult involvement, boundaries and, most importantly, consequences. And by consequences I mean something they won’t like. Not a slap on the wrist and not giving them ‘street cred’ with their mates. – Darroch Ball

Put money and resources into prevention all you want. But this is not binary. It can’t be at the sacrifice of punishment and accountability – which is what this current government seems to think.

Newsflash – it’s not working and the numbers of youth committing these violent crimes are growing for reason.

“If you keep doing what you’ve done you’re gonna keep getting what you’ve got.”

Time for change. – Darroch Ball

I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. Learn how to target, Labour. Find your audience, talk to them. Don’t tarnish our reputation with yet another media conference telling all and sundry that we’re terrible employers.

Give me strength. If National gets into Government, their first job is to rebuild Brand New Zealand and boy, they’ve got a bit of work to do.  – Rachel Smalley

Proof of how people vote undermines the secrecy of voting in a way that telling people how you voted does not. A society in which people regularly show – not just tell – others how they voted, is one that is just a little more open to pressuring and bribery of voters.

There are people in long-term relationships with partners who might tell them how to vote, but who will never actually know if their advice was taken, because we have the secret ballot. A secret ballot reinforced with rules about voting in private and bans on photography in voting places. (I know this also makes less sense with postal voting.) – Graeme Edgeler

Yesterday was one of the proudest days of my life. To be offered the role of CEO of the Essendon Football Club – who I have followed since I was a boy – was a profound honour,” Thorburn wrote.

However, today it became clear to me that my personal Christian faith is not tolerated or permitted in the public square, at least by some and perhaps by many. I was being required to compromise beyond a level that my conscience allowed. People should be able to hold different views on complex personal and moral matters, and be able to live and work together, even with those differences, and always with respect. Behaviour is the key. This is all an important part of a tolerant and diverse society.

Despite my own leadership record, within hours of my appointment being announced, the media and leaders of our community had spoken. They made it clear that my Christian faith and my association with a Church are unacceptable in our culture if you wish to hold a leadership position in society.

This grieves me greatly – though not just for myself, but for our society overall. I believe we are poorer for the loss of our great freedoms of thought, conscience and belief that made for a truly diverse, just and respectful community. – Andrew Thorburn

Today’s police could do with taking a leaf out of Robert Peel’s nine principles of policing, which form the basis of policing by consent. Principle five states that officers should be committed ‘to seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy

It’s a lesson worth heeding. If the police continue to pander to political lobby groups, public trust will continue to fall. – Carrie Clark

But the larger the group of employees covered by a Fair Pay Agreement, the less workable will be the outcomes for businesses needing terms and conditions tailored to their individual workplaces.

Even by the 1970s, cracks were emerging in the compulsory centralised wage bargaining system that had dominated New Zealand’s industrial relations for most of the 20^th century. It was proving insufficiently flexible to cope with the increasing sophistication of the New Zealand economy.

In New Zealand’s more complex 21^st-century economy, the one-size-fits-all approach to collective bargaining will be even more unworkable.

You can almost hear the armies of employment lawyers getting ready for battle. – Roger Partridge

Last week, during her address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern proved, once again, she is the very definition of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

While she poses as the smiling, doe-eyed, “compassionate” face of modern progressivism, beneath the soft veneer is a sneering intolerance for anyone who may challenge her. – Daisy Cousens 

However, what’s important is her use of the words “disinformation” and “misinformation”.

Those two words have been rendered almost meaningless in recent years, thanks to leftist leaders using them relentlessly to silence other points of view. – Daisy Cousens 

The purpose of this “mis-or-disinformation” branding was to outlaw dissent by shaming its proponents.

Such attempts to control the conversation are not unique to late 2020; the left have used terms such as “hate speech” and baseless accusations of bigotry to sully competing opinions for many years.

However, since nobody has ever been able to define “hate speech” et al, “mis and disinformation” has become the primary tool of the trade. – Daisy Cousens 

Beware the left-wing leader who accuses the other side of spreading mis-or-disinformation.

A non-alarmist approach to managing climate change is not mis-or-disinformation.

Perhaps if Ardern and her ilk had policies that were actually beneficial to the public, they wouldn’t be so trigger happy when they crack down on dissent. – Daisy Cousens 

That’s convenient, isn’t it? The pre-existing rules around fairness and balance in journalism that have worked for decades are suddenly in need of some tweaking, right as Stuff’s ‘Fire and Fury’ documentary is due to come before the Media Council for voiding its bowels all over a group of very disillusioned Kiwis and not bothering to speak to them.  – Ben Espiner

Dealing with nay-sayers and holdouts can definitely be frustrating, especially when the need for change seems urgent. But disagreement is part and parcel of the democratic process, not to mention something that’s protected by the fundamental liberal right of free expression. – James Kierstead

Our Government, unfortunately, perceives businesses to be big powerful employers with endless amounts of money – but the opposite is true.

Statistics NZ tell us that only 3 per cent of all New Zealand enterprises employ more than twenty staff while the other 97 per cent are either small employers or just self-employed Kiwi battlers desperately trying to get ahead as independent contractors. – Max Whitehead

A member of the British parliament called Rupa Huq was once a university teacher of sociology and criminology, and may therefore be assumed to have, ex officio, a firm grasp of unreality. Such a grasp is no handicap, of course, to a political career, indeed of late seems almost to be a precondition of one, to judge by the performance of many of our leaders. But some things are unforgivable, and Huq has just committed the unforgivable.

Speaking at a joint meeting of two pressure groups called British Future and the Black Equity Organisation, Huq said of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, that he was only “superficially a black man,” and that if you heard him speak on the radio, you would not have guessed that he was black. – Theodore Dalrymple

But what Huq’s comments suggested was that he wasn’t really a black man because (a) he is highly educated and (b) he does not speak as many denizens of a black ghetto speak. She was but a short step away from saying that the superficiality of his blackness was proved by his non-use of dope or crack, and his lack of a criminal record. If he had been deeply rather than only superficially black, he would have been out mugging old ladies. You can’t really get more racist than this. – Theodore Dalrymple

Now, however, we are plagued by what Stalin, referring to writers, called “engineers of souls” such as DiAngelo: those who will not leave us alone until all our thoughts and feelings are “correct” according to their own conceptions of what is right and proper, thus assuring themselves of a job forever, since our thoughts and feelings are never correct. They underestimate or even deny the possibility of self-control, which is the deepest enemy of the would-be purifiers of our souls. – Theodore Dalrymple

New Zealand’s foreign policy should be driven by our values, security, trade and a rational examination of our interests. When our foreign policy is promoting the celebrity status of a politician and her personal agenda the result damages New Zealand.- Richard Prebble

Across the country there is a growing sense of disconnection and disempowerment. So much needs to be done, but the democratic transmission-belts that are supposed to carry the needs and wants of the citizenry to the individuals and entities charged with delivering them, no longer seem to work.

Plans are made, and decisions are taken, but not by citizens: not even by the representatives of citizens. At both the national and the local level, unelected and increasingly unaccountable bureaucrats appear to have taken charge. Everywhere, New Zealanders see evidence of centralisation. Everywhere the checks and balances of democracy are being discarded. Elected councillors are expected to act as rubber stamps. Citizens are the stampees. – Chris Trotter

At the start of this year, New Zealand’s then justice minister Kris Faafoi was one of those quoting the nation’s high standings in the index, issuing a press release that again confused a corruption perception index with an actual corruption index. Now just 10 months later – and only three months since leaving the cabinet table – Faafoi has left parliament and started his own lobbying firm.

This is an appalling situation. A politician who was intimately involved in the conversations that shape our country now has a job trying to influence the way those conversations go, and is armed with the knowledge that only someone involved in those conversations would have – from the individual positions of other ministers to highly sensitive information from public servants.

And it speaks to our overall naivety as a country – a naivety that probably helps us on that corruption index. – Henry Cooke 

The rules should not allow him to be reading cabinet papers in June and then lobbying his former colleagues on the same matters in October. Other countries – ones that aren’t naive as us – have so-called “revolving door” policies to stop this very thing, forcing elected officials to cool down for some period of months or years before engaging in lobbying.

Opinions vary on how long these things should last, but at the very least an MP should not be able to start lobbying until the end of the parliamentary term in which they were elected. That would keep Faafoi off the blocks for a bit longer than a year. It would also allow people to lose their jobs at elections and immediately find new ones as lobbyists, which would be far from ideal, but it would be a start.

Yet the structural problem exists not just in our hard and fast rules. It’s also in Wellington’s culture. – Henry Cooke 

Those who leave politics do have a right to build a new career, and use the skills politics gave them in that new vocation. But the public has every right to be appalled when the turnaround is this quick, and the service on offer is not just the skills and knowledge of a seasoned political operative, but also the connections retained from someone’s time acting as a servant of the public.

I have hope we can do this, because I don’t think those survey results are really that far out. It’s true that you can’t bribe a cop to get out of a speeding ticket in New Zealand, and that you don’t need to pay off a border guard to get your goods into the country. Our big public institutions are generally aware of these kinds of risks and do their best to mitigate them with very clear rules and norms. It’s time parliament itself did the same. – Henry Cooke 

Probably the most corrupt and broken part of the New Zealand political system is the role of corporate lobbyists influencing policy decisions of governments on behalf of vested interests. This is a group of political insiders – usually former politicians, party staffers or senior Beehive officials – who work at the centre of power and then depart with inside knowledge and networks that they can leverage to help corporate clients influence government policy.

It’s known as a “revolving door” in which corporate interests can prosper through having insiders who move backwards and forwards in and out of the Beehive and other positions of influence. It’s a growth industry in Wellington.

The extraordinary thing is New Zealand is unique in having no regulations on this part of the policy process. – Bryce Edwards

Democratic countries don’t normally allow political insiders like Cabinet Ministers to shift straight into jobs with conflicts of interests. In every other similar country there is a mandatory “cooling off” period for political insiders after they leave their taxpayer-funded positions. Transparency International recommends a minimum of a two-year period. – Bryce Edwards

“Every child born in New Zealand, and every legal immigrant, has the same rights. Those are the rights of a citizen. Nobody should get an extra say because of who their great grandparents were. Nobody should have to be treated differently because of who they are, – Nicole McKee

All of the good political movements of the past four hundred years have been about ending discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex and sexuality to treat each person with the same dignity. We are the first country in history that’s achieved equal rights and has division as its official policy. – Nicole McKee

Having spent much of my professional life among convicts, I’m all in favor of attempts to reintegrate them into society once they leave prison. The slate cannot be wiped clean—no wiping of a slate can undo a crime once committed—but the writing on the slate shouldn’t act on the rest of a person’s life as a kind of severe chronic disabling disease.

As is so often the case in human affairs, there’s another side to the question. If I were an employer seeking someone in a position of trust (and practically all positions are those of trust), I should quite like to know if an applicant had been guilty of dishonesty. Other things being equal among applicants, I would probably prefer someone who had not been found guilty of a crime, though in some moods I might feel inclined from a sense of social duty or humanity to offer an ex-criminal a job. However, I would like the choice to be mine.  – Theodore Dalrymple

The energy crisis sees Europe now scrambling to reopen mothballed coal power plants and nurse aging nuclear power stations through the winter. They are scrambling to reopen coal mines and reverse fracking bans – but, unfortunately, finding and developing gas reserves takes time, and new gas energy will not come on stream this winter.

The sad fact is that people will die of the cold. In a normal year in the UK, there are 80 times more climate-related deaths due to cold than to heat; regrettably, this winter, it will be more.

Unfortunately, we have already started down the same policy path as Europe and it is crucial that we stop and learn from their mistakes, or we are doomed to repeat them. And at what cost? –  Stuart Smith

The great virtue of a free market is that it can cause tens of thousands of people to pursue promising technologies and promising ways to reduce carbon at their own expense. The market leads to discovery. Politicians, by contrast, think they know “the” answer, and they’re always wrong. – David R. Henderson

India is at 23 per cent of world milk production, and their ambition is to keep growing at 6 per cent per year to be at 43 per cent in 20 to 30 years.

They’ve got a carbon footprint per litre of milk that’s about 10 times what you get for a New Zealand litre of milk … And when questioned on what sustainability meant to them, they said: ‘a full belly’. That’s as far as they’re interested in sustainability going.

And so it really made me think if New Zealand’s place in the world is cutting our own production, cutting our own throats, or is it about taking our know-how and can-do attitude to other agricultural systems in the world. – Andrew Hoggard

Sheep and beef accounts for 92,000 workers in this country. 

If this leads to a straight 20% loss of workers, that’s 18 and a half thousand people. 

And then there’s the cost to the economy.  A 24% drop in net revenue means we could lose up to 2.88 billion a year in sheep and beef exports alone. That’s more our entire education system costs us every year. It’s a huge amount of money to pass up.

And it’s not going to stop climate change from happening. It runs the risk of making it worse. New Zealand farmers are the most efficient farmers in the world.  They produce the least carbon emissions per animal.

You take 20% of our meat out of the word, some other country is simply going to step in and take up the slack and they will not farm that meat as efficiently as us, so every animal of ours that they replace, they will put more emissions into the atmosphere than we would’ve.

This plan is an expensive exercise in stupidity. We are definitely making our country poorer and possibly making the planet hotter, for what? 

For bragging rights. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Nobody, least of all the farmers of this country, should be surprised by the government announcement this week of their immoral plan to drastically reduce the nation’s green house gas emissions for no other reason than the pursuit of a debatable objective that has been abandoned in almost all of the original IPCC supporting countries throughout the western world. Note we don’t include the major polluters of the world who also signed the Paris and Glasgow agreements while having no real intention of participating in this flawed response to the latest round of global warming. – Clive Bibby

Nothing forces politicians to do the proverbial back flip more, even when dealing with policies that have been regarded as sacrosanct when times allowed flexibility of choice, than being subjected to the reality of a rapidly changing world. 

Yet here in little old New Zealand, our government is so driven by its own death wish that it is willing to kill the beating heart that has made us the utopian dreamland where everyone wants to be. – Clive Bibby

FOUR ELECTIONS IN A ROW the centre-left romped home with the Auckland mayoralty. Four elections of postal voting. Four elections in which the logistical management of the ballot was contracted out to the private sector. Four elections won by white, male politicians over the age of 55 years. Four elections of entirely satisfactory results – at least from the perspective of the centre-left.

One defeat, however, is all that it has taken for the centre-left (and its more combustible fellow-travellers) to denounce the entire electoral process as a rort, and to strongly insinuate that the victorious mayoral candidate, Wayne Brown, is lacking in democratic legitimacy. If this is not a case of sour grapes on the part of the losers, then it is difficult to imagine what a case of sour grapes might look like!  – Chris Trotter 

A powerful sense of entitlement does, however, lie at the heart of the 2022 losers’ sour grapes. Not the entitlement derived from democratic principle, but the sense of entitlement ingrained in political activists who believe themselves to be on the right (that is to say left) side of history. This certainty concerning their own ideological rectitude exists in inverse proportion to their knowledge of the actual nuts-and-bolts of historical and political agency. – Chris Trotter 

Democracy isn’t cheap, and it isn’t easy – but it is simple. Don’t insist that the voters be given what they don’t want. Build your footpaths where the people walk. Never, ever, be a sore loser. And, always remember: vox Populi, vox Dei.

The voice of the people, is the voice of God. – Chris Trotter 

I want to talk (briefly) about a difficulty which has grown up in even talking about the problem – that is an ideology of supposed “antiracism” which is beginning to assume the dimensions of a religion or a cult under the influence of which people and institutions are casually and inaccurately labelled as “racist” without any evidentiary basis for the charge. I say an ideology of “supposed anti- racism” because the underlying assumption of this ideology appears to be that Aboriginal people must exist in a permanent state of victimhood, an assumption that is in fact deeply racist. Further, among those in thrall to this ideology, labelling someone or something “racist” seems in many cases to be an end in itself – not a prelude to remedial action, but a substitute for it. – Justice Judith Kelly

… it is important to call out false claims of individual racism and false claims of systemic racism – as it is to call out racism where it occurs. It is not helpful to see victimisation where it doesn’t exist. Apart from anything else, it detracts from the search for solutions.

Not all disadvantage is a result of racism. People (all of us) have enough problems as it is without inventing more. – Justice Judith Kelly

It is either a brave or stupid political party, that having received a clear signal from the electorate on its failure to deliver its transformation agenda, forges ahead with more change just days later.

And while Jacinda Ardern denied that the centre-right swing in the local government elections last week was a rejection of her Government’s failure to deliver on its Three Waters programme and identifiable progress on Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand, that’s exactly what the election of right-wing mayors in Auckland, Rotorua, Whanganui, Christchurch and Dunedin determined.

After all, with less than a year before another general election, and the hallowed trophy of a third term, there are hearts and minds, not to mention votes, to be won. – Janet WIlson

It’s also proof that the Government has lost touch with its voters when newspaper headlines tout that its emissions scheme will lead to higher food prices – the No 1 concern now – and it forges ahead anyway, happy to claim a world first with emissions pricing across the board.

There’s a good reason for that. Reasons wrapped up in the politics of self-interest and fraught emotions. Being first may give Brand NZ a shiny halo, but that’s not going to be much use when it collapses its largest industry. – Janet WIlson

It’s a brave or stupid political party that wants to swipe 20% off the sheep and beef industry when last year it was worth $9.1 billion in export earnings.

With farming bodies from Federated Farmers to Groundswell NZ enraged, it’s also relevant to ask if this proposal will go the way of Labour’s other transformation policies only to stall and wash up on the rocks of its own aspiration. – Janet WIlson

And if it does pass? That will deliver a double blow for Labour’s core constituency – low-income households – who are already struggling to feed themselves.

It’s a brave or stupid party that decides to implement policies that fail voters. – Janet WIlson

Speech should not be the subject of State interference solely because the message is unpleasant, discomforting, disfavoured or feared to be dangerous by the State. This is known as “content or viewpoint neutrality”. This approach prevents the State from regulating speech simply because the speech’s message, idea or viewpoint is unpleasant, discomforting, offensive, disfavoured or feared to be dangerous by government officials or community members. That approach – what could be called “viewpoint discriminatory” regulation – would attack individual liberty but also democratic principles. Officials could use it to suppress unpopular idea or information or manipulate public debate.

Censoring speech because it is disfavoured, no matter how deeply, violates the viewpoint neutrality principle. That principle is also violated when the State suppresses speech about public issues. This can include “hate speech” simply because its views might have a disturbing impact upon the emotions or psyches of some audience members. The State may not punish “hate speech” or speech with other messages simply because of its offensive, discomforting, disfavoured, disturbing or feared message.

Counterspeech is available to address such messages. Only when the speech crosses the threshold into the emergency test – that is when it directly, demonstrably and imminently causes certain specific, objectively ascertainable serious harms that cannot be averted by other than censorship – may the State intervene. – David Harvey 

One of the difficulties facing freedom of expression in New Zealand lies in the climate of fear that has generated over the period of the Covid pandemic. There has been fear about the consequences of the disease, fear if the various directives of the government are not complied with, and fear arising from the expression of contrary views.

Anti-vax sentiments have morphed into anti-government protests and those who express contrarian views have been accused of spreading misinformation and disinformation. All of these views are in the main disfavoured, disturbing or adding to the climate of fear. So much so that the former Chief Censor lent the weight of his office to a publication about misinformation and disinformation entitled the “The Edge of the Infodemic – Challenging Misinformation in Aotearoa”.

One wonders whether the Chief Censor of the time wished to see misinformation come within his ambit and be subject to classification or even being classed as objectionable. It is difficult to see how misinformation or disinformation could fall within the emergency test. Although it may be disfavoured, wrong-headed or disturbing it falls within the scope of viewpoint neutrality, best met with counterspeech. – David Harvey 

A recent demonstration of the overreaction of the public to forms of expression, the rise of the harmful tendency approach and the belief that the State should intervene is chilling and concerning. Rather than addressing the problem with counterspeech or some such similar demonstration, citizens required the Police to investigate incidents involving the flying of flags. – David Harvey 

Although these cases may seem insignificant or trivial in themselves there is a deeper level of concern. Are we becoming too precious about taking offence? Are we leaning towards a “harmful tendency” position? Is the answer to something with which we disagree to complain to the authorities or try to shut it down? That is not what freedom of expression in a democratic society is all about.

That these sentiments seem to be surfacing should be no surprise. The Government holds itself out as the sole source of truth and any disagreement is cast as misinformation or disinformation. Some elements of the media demonise contrary opinions and there seems to be a developing trend to silence or cancel opposing points of view simply because they are perceived to be disagreeable or offensive, rather than engaging with the issue.

The reason that is advanced for failing to engage with the issue is that to do so merely gives oxygen to a contrary point of view, but only by discussion and challenge can the holders of contrary views understand and perhaps even accept they are wrong.

We need to be more robust in the way that we deal with views with which we disagree. We must remember that those expressing such views have as much right to express their sentiments as we have to express ours. And we must remember that the only time speech should be censored is if there is a clear, immediate and present danger that it may cause harm. If the ideas that are the subject of speech are controversial, offensive or disfavoured the remedy lies in debate or persuasion and not the intervention of the State. – David Harvey 

The relationship between intelligence, education, knowledge, and good sense is far from straightforward. Bad and foolish—but allegedly sophisticated—ideas can beguile the educated, or important portions of the educated, for decades at a time. The Marxian labour theory of value was one such which held much of the European intelligentsia in thrall for a long time, despite its obvious untruth. They wanted it to be true, so for them it was true, and in the process, they often became learned in their own fundamental error. For them, the wish was father to the conviction.  – Theodore Dalrymple

But in the eyes of most people, the fact that the rich would benefit from the tax cuts more than the poor was enough in itself to condemn them, irrespective of their outcome for their economy as a whole: that is to say, even if they were to increase general prosperity, they would still be undesirable because they would have increased inequality.  – Theodore Dalrymple

A dog-in-the-manger attitude to the rich is now morally de rigueur, even among those whom the majority of their fellow citizens would consider rich. To hate the rich is, ex officio almost, to sympathise with the poor, and therefore be virtuous: but hatred and sympathy are not two sides of the same coin. Hatred not only goes deeper than sympathy but is easier to rouse and to act upon. It is quite independent of sympathy. Hatred of the rich in the name of equality was probably responsible for more death and destruction in the twentieth century than any other political passion. The category of the rich tends to expand as circumstances require: ‘Rich bastards,’ Lenin called the kulaks, the Russian peasants whose wealth would now be considered dire poverty, and which consisted of the possession of an animal or two, or a farm tool, more than other peasants possessed. What Freud called the narcissism of small differences (the psychological equivalent of marginal utility) means that grounds, however trifling, can always be found for hatred and envy.

This is not to say, I hope I do not need to add, that wealth is coterminous with virtue, that the rich always behave well, or that no wealth is illicit. We have probably all known in our time some rich bastards, but it is their conduct, not their wealth, that we should revile. 

An obsession with relative rather than absolute measurement of people’s situation can only foster discontent and envy, if not outright hatred. What matters it to me if someone is three or a thousand times wealthier than I, provided that his conduct or activity does me no harm? – Theodore Dalrymple

It is difficult to overstate the dangers when society begins to divide itself along tribal lines.  This problem is manifesting in New Zealand to a marked and accelerating degree, and shows no sign of abating. Every statistic is broken down by ethnicity, tribe is broken down by iwi, and iwi by hapu. While tribalism seems to be exponentially impacting almost everything in modern New Zealand, it has been a long time coming, and its ultimate results could cost us much of what we value. – Caleb Anderson 

What is interesting is that projection can also occur on a mass scale, and this is when it can become especially dangerous.   This is when whole groups opt to lay all of their ills at the feet of other groups, protestants at the feet of Catholics, atheists at the feet of Christians, eastern nations at the feet of western nations, socialists at the feet of capitalists, liberals at the feet of conservatives, urban at the feet of rural, intellectuals at the feet of the middle class, those who have not at the feet of those who have, indigenous people at the feet of colonizers etc. etc.  This is done with conviction and blind fervour, and we have plenty of similarly minded people to cheer us along, and psychologically stroke our egos. Tribalism provides the perfect opportunity to feel better by demonizing others.  A complex problem becomes simple, singular causality is the order of the day, and we have dodged the bullet.   – Caleb Anderson 

History contains many examples of leaders who have advanced their causes through division.  Prior to the emergence of constitutional government and universal suffrage, this was generally the way things were done.  In more recent times, the left, by infiltrating the media and academia, has made an art form of this.  And those who speak words of division, have a burgeoning audience of those who have decided (and have been helped to decide) that any burden of personal responsibility and change, is just too great to bear. The left has conveniently, and nonsensically, divided humanity into oppressor and oppressed classes, and then the oppressed class into an almost unlimited number of oppressed sub-groups.  If you are especially unlucky you qualify as oppressed on multiple grounds simultaneously (something called intersectionality).

The comparative successes of capitalism (notwithstanding its imperfections), and the growth of the middle class, has forced the left to find new “enemies”, be they white, male, middle class, conservative, rural  …  Each is apportioned a dollop of responsibility for the ailments of others and these ailments are laid exclusively at their feet.

While projection is an unconscious action, by and large, the left is well aware of what it is doing, in fact this is its strategy.  If you can divide, and get it right, you will rule.  The current pervasive and never-ending divisions of our population on the basis of ethnicity, as if nothing else mattered, giving loud voice to one group, and no voice to the other, constructing selective narratives of past and present, applying villainy and virtue, as if these were mutually exclusive domains of being, provides rich opportunities for leverage.

By its very nature tribalism contains the seeds of its own destruction.  Once one “enemy” is dispensed with, another needs to be found, because that’s how projection works.  Division continues unabated until there is literally no-one left to blame, and society has divested itself of everything of value.   – Caleb Anderson 

Borrowing the words of Carl Jung, you might say that New Zealand is being swept away by an outbreak of insanity, entirely unaware of where this could lead us.  We have traded the Judeo- Christian imperative of personal responsibility, for a dumbed-down collectivism, which has the potential to sweep away everything of value, and return us to the very dark age from which all of our ancestors emerged, and which, most scarily of all, still resides deep within the hearts of each one of us.  

If we forget where we have come from, most certainly we will return there, and we might not like what we find.  The west is facing multiple crises, but the real crisis the west faces is the absence of responsibility – Caleb Anderson 

It seems a very dangerous predicament when government requires people to lie and to feign agreement with false propaganda in order to contribute their training and experience to our country. It’s totalitarianism, in our case racist, socialist totalitarianism. Who wanted this? – A.E. Thompson

That raises the question; does the prime minister care about reducing emissions to address climate change, or does she want to reduce New Zealand’s emissions regardless of whether that reduction leads to an increase in global emissions? I suspect it is the latter.  – Stuart Smith 

When the National Party supported the so-called Zero Carbon legislation, we did so with a clear undertaking that we in government would take the following approach: a science-based approach; a focus on innovation and technology (rather than reducing consumption); long-term signals to the economy; New Zealand to act with international partners – not in isolation; [to] consider and manage wider economic impacts. Clearly, the Labour Government’s proposal does not align with at least the last two points, and we will all pay the price for this.

National takes a more rational approach. Yes, we must reduce our emissions; however, moving in isolation ahead of our trading partners will not reduce emissions to the atmosphere. Rather they will likely increase them as production shifts elsewhere to less efficient producers, not to mention decimating one of our major export sectors and impoverishing us all.

We simply should not let the prime minister’s personal ambition of leading the world in climate change compromise our best interests. – Stuart Smith 

This isn’t just environmentalism and it isn’t really railway enthusiasm (which I have some sympathy for, because I like trains), but is hatred of human beings.  Hatred not only of their freedom of choice, but also their lives.  – Liberty Scott

They wont stop protesting until it becomes too hard for them to do so, they will block more roads and demand “action” from whatever government is in power, regardless of the action being carried out for their cause.  Because what they want is applause and approval from the like-minded, their own little network of misanthropes, and most of all, media attention so they can be interviewed, endlessly.

This raises their social standing to have disrupted “evil” car “fascists” and drawn attention to a “righteous” cause (diverting taxpayers’ money to some train services). They’ll feel special and privileged, and hopefully get selected to go on the Green Party’s list.

I doubt ANY of them have ridden on the Northern Explorer, Coastal Pacific or TranzAlpine trains, ever! Because it’s not about trains.

It is, after all, performative, status-seeking, social misanthropy.  – Liberty Scott

 

– Breanna McKee

New Zealand farmers, located further away from most markets than any other producers, compete on a global market, a market heavily distorted by import quotas (restricting how much New Zealand farmers can sell), tariffs (taxing their products but not taxing domestic producers) and subsidies (undercutting the higher cost of production). If there were largely a free market for agriculture, similar to many manufactured goods, then inefficient producers (that use more energy and emit more CO2) would be out of business or would need to improve efficiency.  

However there is not.  – Liberty Scott 

The most generous view of this is it is futile. It buys virtue signalling from unproductive multi-national lobbyists like Greenpeace and enables Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw to claim they are “world leading”, but the savings in emissions get replaced by higher emissions from elsewhere. When New Zealand reduces production, others will sell to those markets instead, at a slightly higher price, but with higher emissions and less economic efficiency.  The least generous view of it is that it is economic treachery.  It harms a local industry to ineffectively achieve a policy objective. – Liberty Scott 

Sure, whatever New Zealand does on emissions will make ~0 impact on climate change, but if there is going to be action on emissions New Zealand has to join in, or it faces the likelihood of sanctions from several major economies. What matters though is this small economy does not kneecap its most productive and competitive sectors in order to virtue signal.  
Of course there are plenty who hate the farming sector, either because of what they produce and who they vote for, and the Green Party thinks agriculture should go all organic, produce LESS at HIGHER prices, and you can imagine the impact of this on the poor (but the Greens think they can tax the rich to pay for everyone).  They are very happy to spend the tax revenue collected, but treat it as a sunset industry.

So sure, agriculture needs to be included, but there needs to be a Government that doesn’t want to shrink the sector in which New Zealand has the greatest comparative advantage.  – Liberty Scott 

While we are a long way from having an officially approved national culture we’re not that so far away if a political environment has been encouraged by the Labour Government  that allows Creative NZ to think it’s entitled to defund a thirty year old high school Shakespeare festival because it doesn’t measure up to what it considers to be part of our so-called ’emerging culture’. Of course, Creative NZ has also decided what that ’emerging culture’ is as well.

The absurdity of this view is such that it actively seeks to delegitimise the work of the man widely considered to be the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s greatest dramatist. In the bizarre view of Creative NZ, Shakespeare’s body of work, which includes some of the greatest plays ever written, is nothing more than than a ‘canon of imperialism’. This, in itself, is a nonsensical argument because imperialism, as a feature of the emerging global capitalism, didn’t appear until the late nineteenth century. So Creative NZ’s view of Shakespeare’s work is also lacking in historical context and perspective. – Against the Current

IT IS DIFFICULT to see the Arts Council’s decision to defund Shakespeare as anything other than “propaganda of the deed”. In the current, unusually tense, cultural climate, the idea that a decision to refuse a $30,000 grant to an organisation responsible for introducing the art of William Shakespeare to a total of 120,000 (and counting) secondary school students might, somehow, pass unnoticed and unremarked is nonsensical. The notion that the Council’s decision was a carefully targeted ideological strike is further buttressed by the comments attached to its refusal. To describe these as incendiary hardly does them justice. – Chris Trotter

Putting to one side the self-evident reality that a festival involving thousands of young people in acting, directing, set-designing and painting, costuming, composing and providing incidental music to a host of independent theatrical productions, offers an unassailable prima facie case for being of great relevance to New Zealand’s “contemporary art context”: how should we decode the assessment document’s gnomic formulation: “Aotearoa in this time and place and landscape”?

Given that all state institutions are now required to ensure that their decisions reflect the central cultural and political importance of te Tiriti o Waitangi, as well as their obligation to give practical expression to the Crown’s “partnership” with tangata whenua, the advisory panel’s meaning is ominously clear. At this time, and in this place, the policy landscape has no place for artistic endeavours that draw attention to the powerful and enduring cultural attachments between New Zealand and the British Isles.

Expressed more bluntly, Creative New Zealand is serving notice on applicants for state funding that, unless their projects both acknowledge and enhance the tino rangatiratanga of Māori they will be deemed to have insufficient relevance to the “contemporary art context” to warrant public financial support.

This is even worse than it sounds.  – Chris Trotter

A “decolonising Aotearoa”. Here exposed is the unabashed ideological bias of the Arts Council and its assessors. There is a considerable head-of-steam building among some Māori (and their Pakeha supporters in the public service, academia and the mainstream news media) for a wholesale stripping-out of the political, legal and cultural institutions of the “colonial state”, and for their replacement by the customs and the practices of te ao Māori. At present, this is the agenda of the “progressive” elites only. Certainly, no such proposition has been placed before, or ratified by, the New Zealand electorate.

Not that these same elites would feel at all comfortable about important cultural judgements being placed in the hands of the uneducated masses. Indeed, it is likely that the decision-makers at the Arts Council are entirely persuaded that an important part of their mission is to so radically reshape the cultural landscape that the “decolonising of Aotearoa” comes to be seen as entirely reasonable. If re-educating this benighted Pakeha majority means limiting their own (and their children’s) access to the works of “an Elizabethan playwright” (a man who is, indisputably, among the greatest artists who ever lived) then so be it. – Chris Trotter

The panel of assessors is concerned that the festival’s sponsoring organisation, the Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand, is too “paternalistic”, and that the entire Shakespearian genre it is dedicated to promoting is “located within a canon of imperialism and missed the opportunity to create a living curriculum and show relevance”.

That’s an imperialistic “canon” with one “n” – not two! Alluded to here, presumably, is the entire theatrical menu of Western Civilisation: from Aristophanes to Oscar Wilde. (The English had no empire to speak of in Shakespeare’s time!) A cultural collection which, apparently, has no place in a “living curriculum” – from which, one can only deduce, Dead White Males have been ruthlessly purged. Only by excluding the cultural achievements of the past, the Arts Council seems to saying, can any artistic endeavour hope to “show relevance”.

To those who shake their heads in disbelief at this rejection of historical continuity, it is important to make clear just how hostile the post-modern sensibility is to the whole idea of a materially and imaginatively recoverable past – a past with the power to influence both the present and the future. The post-modernists hate the idea of History as both tether and teacher – fettering us to reality, even as it reveals the many ways our forebears have responded to the challenges of their time. When post-modernists talk about relevance, what they really mean is amnesia. Only an amnesiac can inhabit an eternal present – post-modernism’s ideal state-of-being.

Shakespeare and his works are downgraded and rejected precisely because his words and his plays connect us to the past – revealing the tragi-comic continuity of human existence. More than that, Shakespeare’s art is of a power that at once confirms and dissolves history. In his incomparable mastery of the English language he reminds us that we are more than male and female, rich and poor, Māori and Pakeha. What this “Elizabethan playwright” reveals to us, and hopefully will go on revealing to succeeding generations until the end of time, is the wonder and woe of what it means to be human. – Chris Trotter

Creative New Zealand should be about embracing all forms of art and all artists. It should be flexible, empathetic and responsive. It should have a well understood and fair system for allocating funds, with checks and balances throughout. It should operate under proper governmental oversight and public accountability.

But this is a far-off dream. Creative NZ missed the memo. – Terry Sheat 

CNZ has a prescriptive and inflexible view of what artistic endeavours are worthy of funding. To be funded, and funded fairly, you must fit within CNZ’s vision of what art should be in New Zealand. The Arts Council, which is supposed to be in control, is most likely being led around by its nose by CNZ and seems to be functioning as little more than a rubber stamp. Governmental oversight is non-existent. No one is held to account.

As well as de-funding, there is a gradual and insidious underfunding of CNZ’s non-preferred grant recipients. Many must suspect that they are already on the slippery slope. – Terry Sheat 

If I were to mark CNZ’s funding criteria and outcomes against the duties under the legislation, I would be forced to give them a failing grade. I wouldn’t give them funding. They are not delivering to the proper scope of their mission statement. Diversity is not diversity of “New Zealand art”, it is diversity of all art in New Zealand, with freedom of artistic expression for all. That is literally in the statute. – Terry Sheat 

But the problem is much more pervasive than just one funding round or a couple of disappointed applicants. The issue is at the core of the general stewardship of the health and well-being of the arts in Aotearoa New Zealand. CNZ appears to be busy funding new arts organisations in their own image to replace existing professional arts infrastructure, and then progressively de-funding those original organisations because they do not align with CNZ’s philosophy. It’s dangerous and self-fulfilling stuff.

Creative NZ should be a trusted and respected organisation with the full faith and backing of the wider arts community. It is not. It’s time for a public inquiry so that all affected parties and the public can have their views heard. – Terry Sheat 

In really simple terms, we take the golden goose of the economy, charge it more, and theoretically save the world. It’s a farce. As our costs go up, and we produce less, someone fills the gap, it’s called market economics.

The Government doesn’t understand that bit and perhaps more dangerously, they don’t want to.

They don’t like farmers or farming. They have been after them for the past five years and treat them like idiots and enviro-terrorists. The fact they are the best in the world never seems to have mattered. – Mike Hosking

I think demand was driven largely by expectation.

When people begin to hear about others in their circles being provided with motel accommodation for free they will start to respond. When people see modern state housing being built with attractive income-related rents they will want to get into one even if that means waiting in emergency housing for free for a period.- Lindsay Mitchell

 Labour is tanking in the polls and if the party does win next year, it won’t be with a majority. They’ll have to bring the Greens, Te Pāti Māori and possibly New Zealand First into a coalition to get across the line.

And that’s just a shambles. It will be paralysis by analysis. New Zealand First will block everything unless it involves more free stuff for Boomers, Te Pāti Māori will realise life was a whole lot easier in a coalition with the Nats and ACT,  and the Greens won’t agree to anything unless Labour throws in a free cycle-way or agrees to shoot dead another 200 dairy cows. – Rachel Smalley

Also….look at the policies they’re trying to get through. Three Waters, the emissions pricing plan for farmers, HealthNZ’s major overhaul….huge reforms and they’ll trigger huge issues.

So, if Labour wins a third term under Ardern, that’s going to be a hellish ride. Awful. All of the economic and social fallout from COVID will start peaking as well, the impact of the Government’s multi-billion dollar spend – and a good chunk of that was reckless – will start to rear its head. You’ve got the cost of living issues, high-interest rates and inflation will still be trotting along….and while Ardern is good at a number of things, I don’t think she’s good with the numbers. – Rachel Smalley

With respect , if you decide to cancel the greatest writer in English, or any language come to that, you sound like a f***ing idiot. And you make NZ-Aotearoa look bloody stupid– Sam Neill 

Lifting kids out of themselves, harnessing their own force to something that carries way beyond the mundane and transcends cultural boundaries rather than limiting or suppressing them.

“For heaven’s sake, we’re surely beyond parochialism in this inter-connected world. No one denies the benefits of developing our own stories, but this is ridiculous.- Michael Hurst 

It is a curious phenomenon today that our ruling elites twist themselves in knots to claim that they have protected, via government action, every human life from harm and every human right from being infringed. Yet they often extol a life of individual isolation cut off from every human tie that might demand some self-sacrifice.

Witness the undermining of marriage, the downgrading of having and raising children, and the contempt toward our shared national heritage that might otherwise glue strangers together toward common objectives. Academics as a whole are, of course, the worst, with frequent hatred of unchosen or solemn commitments often mirrored in their trainwreck personal lives. – Chris Sheehan 

My suspicion is that, at its heart, much progressivism is the incongruous dream of radical individuals coming together without having to sacrifice a skerrick of their treasured self-expression. Since this never happens, and many are actually disgusted by raw humanity, the next best thing is to use the levers of power to make it look like it is so.

Loving humanity through government is attractive precisely because it is so impersonal. I pay my taxes and the government sets up a program, run by paid professionals, who can deal with whatever problems beset large classes of sorry, oppressed individuals. I don’t have to deal with a single difficult person unless I am paid to do so under controlled conditions.

Government programs can be useful in their time if properly scrutinised. But to think they are a substitute for the thousand daily sacrifices made by those who build their lives on lasting commitments to other imperfect humans is to engage in the worst kind of folly. – Chris Sheehan 

“Every government intervention creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions,” observed the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. He was being generous by describing interventionism’s nasty side-effects as “unintended.” Some younger interventionists are naïve, and know not what they do, but the older, street-smart captains of progressive politics understand the harms their policies entail. For them, the adverse consequences are features, not bugs. The only downside is the risk of political retribution at the polls.   – Marlo Lewis

I am concerned that it is often not clear to the public or Parliament what outcomes are being sought by governments, how that translates into spending, and ultimately what is being achieved with the public money the Government spends – about $150 billion last year. – John Ryan

Whole-of-government performance reporting that links government spending to outcomes would help focus debate on the longer-term and on some of the more intractable issues we face as a country. And, of course, help answer for the public and Parliament how well governments are playing their role in addressing them. – John Ryan

In my view, a comprehensive review is needed of the arrangements that enable Parliament and the public to understand what governments are seeking to achieve, what is being spent, and what progress is being made. In exchange, this will help the public sector maintain an informed, trusting, and enduring connection with the public they ultimately are there to serve.

An outcome I think we would all support. – John Ryan

Truss and Kwarteng are not wrong in thinking the government taking over half of everything produced in the UK is hurting the British economy. 

Thanks to huge sacrifices in a Chinese experiment we know what happens when the government takes everything, people stop working. The result is famine. Thirty million Chinese starved to death in the Great Leap Forward.

Taxation does not only affect the incentive to be productive, it is costly. It costs money to collect tax. We have to fill out forms, keep records and hire accountants, just to pay tax. It is called the dead weight of tax. The greater share of GDP collected, the higher the cost. There comes a point when even if the rates of tax are increased it is so damaging to the economy the total revenue from taxation cannot increase. Tax rate increases can result in less revenue. – Richard Prebble

The economists were asked: “What is New Zealand’s dead weight of tax?” “What percentage of GDP can the government take before it affects the economy’s ability to pay?”

The government was at that time taking 34 per cent of GDP. Dr Sully and Dr Knox Lovell found the dead weight of tax was not 8 cents as Treasury thought but for every extra dollar of tax the cost was a staggering, $2.64. Their modelling indicated once the government was taking 20 per cent of GDP any further taxation reduced the economy’s ability to pay.

The Treasury hired an Australian economist, Ted Sieper, to review the research and disprove it. Sieper did his review and found that once government was collecting 15 per cent of GDP any further tax was counterproductive. Treasury’s response was to close down the project and ignore the results. – Richard Prebble

When the Lange government reduced the top rate of tax from 66 cents to 33 cents the new top rate raised far more revenue than Treasury’s model predicted. The projections of the Office of the Budget are never right. In part because the models fail to predict how incentives change behaviour. – Richard Prebble

The demand for free services is infinite. Governments must adopt the ideas of reformers like New Zealand’s Professor Robert McCulloch and Sir Roger Douglas and create patients’ health accounts. Then we will be incentivised to manage our health costs. Otherwise rising health costs will destroy our economies.

No country can afford to have government spending over 30 per cent of GDP. In New Zealand government’s share of GDP has risen from 35.64 per cent under Bill English to 42.94 per cent last year. Treasury predicts this will fall but, as we have noted, treasury predictions are rarely correct. –

Don’t focus on the dead, Prime Minister. Put your voice and energy behind the Iranian women who are dying in protests today. 

Be a woman who stands up for women. – Rachel Smalley

Kent’s warning is particularly apposite today, because we live increasingly in a world in which words and words alone are the measure of all things, especially vice and virtue. A good person is one who espouses the right opinions, and an even better one is someone who trumpets them. The converse is also true, that a bad person is one who does not have the right opinions, and an even worse one is someone who trumpets the wrong opinions.

This has a gratifying effect, for it dichotomises people into the kingdom of the damned and the kingdom of the saved: it is gratifying because man is a dichotomising animal who abjures complexity and ambiguity if he can, and loves scapegoats.

Another advantage of making opinion the measure of virtue and vice is that it frees man from the restraint and discipline that were traditionally necessary to be considered a virtuous person. Think and say the right things, and you are free in many spheres of existence that formerly were subject to rules. – Theodore Dalrymple

No doubt every philosophy of life has its anomalies, but what may be called the logocratic conception of virtue (the espousal of the right wordsas the measure of personal moral worth) is especially rich in them. Usually, this modern overemphasis on opinion both decries censoriousness and is highly censorious, particularly about the censoriousness of others: a meta-censoriousness, as it were.

Thus, a person who believes that it is wrong for someone voluntarily to drug himself to the point of intoxication, or who decries the various forms of self-mutilation that are now extolled as a liberation for self-expression, thereby reveals himself to be censorious and intolerant, tolerance now being taken to be a willingness to condemn nothing except condemnation itself, perhaps with the “celebration” of behaviour that deviates transgressively from former social norms. The expropriation of the expropriators has been replaced as a political desideratum by the censure of the censurers.

The fear of appearing censorious soon leads to fear of making moral judgments of any kind, but especially if they are of a straightforward, immemorial or conventional nature. – Theodore Dalrymple

But to return to Kent’s warning to Lear not to take words at face value or to assume that they bear only the most literal interpretation. As I have mentioned, this is a lesson to be relearnt today that is particularly apposite in a culture in which opinion is almost the sole touchstone of virtue. One of the consequences of this shallow conception of virtue is an almost inevitable inflation of expression: a verbal arms race in which extravagance of expression is taken as evidence in itself of the depth of feeling and therefore of virtue also. – Theodore Dalrymple

Resentment is the easiest lesson to teach and learn because no life is entirely without reason for it. This is because perfection is not of this world, at least where human existence is concerned. There is almost a natural propensity to resentment, insofar as it offers many sour comforts such as an explanation for failings and failures. No doubt there are some people who have, by exercising self-control, avoided the expression of resentment throughout their lives, but I surmise that there are almost none who have never felt it. And since resentment almost always contains a strong element of dishonesty by focusing on harms done and ignoring benefits received, inflation of language serves its end admirably. Everyone wants to be a victim, not in the sense that everyone has been a victim of something in his life, but a victim in a big way. Little slights therefore have to be magnified into gross, traumatic and lasting insults or worse, rather than a normal part of living in society. It is not surprising that an ever-greater number of people come to believe that they have been flayed alive—permanently. This is an attitude that no amount of success or privilege by comparison with others can assuage. In the midst of the greatest luxury, there is always room for resentment.

Inflation is as bad for language as it is for money. Keynes pointed out, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (published in 1919), that monetary inflation changes the balance of economic power in a society. Inflation of language changes the balance of political power in society. It is the Gonerils and the Regans who benefit from it while the Cordelias languish. Those who fail to master the arts of exaggeration, self-dramatisation and emotional incontinence (especially when combined with bureaucratese) are sidelined politically and derided culturally, leaving the world in control of specialists in discourse studies. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is true that the authoritarian-left is denying biology, but the deeper truth of the situation is perhaps even more concerning. The incoherence of the protesters’ responses and the fact that the walkout was scheduled in advance suggests something darker: the protesters are “read-only,” like a computer file that cannot be altered. They will not engage ideas — they will not even hear ideas — because their minds are already made up. They have been led to believe that exposure to information is in and of itself dangerous.

Scientists, philosophers, and scholars of all sorts have effectively been accused of thoughtcrimes before it is even known what we’re going to say. The very concept of thoughtcrime, as Orwell himself well understood, is the death knell to discourse, to discovery, to democracy. – Heather Heying

Yes, we need better science education and literacy1. But more important — more fundamental — we need to reinvigorate the concept of education itself. Those who are truly educated are also educable, which means taking in new information throughout your life, and being willing to re-investigate, and throw out, even your most cherished beliefs. If our schools and universities are not prepared to do this job, we must ask ourselves: where shall our next educational structures be built? – Heather Heying

Freethinkers of Portland State find ourselves confronted with a new secular religion, called “intersectionality.” This doctrine conceives of human beings in terms of a good-and-evil binary of “oppressed” and “oppressor,” reducing individuals to a collection of group identities rated within a hierarchy of “marginalization.”

Intersectionality’s true believers tend to be far less tolerant than traditional religious believers with their sophisticated apologetics. To intersectionalists, skepticism is an existential threat. To question their beliefs, I’ve been told, constitutes “debating someone’s right to exist.” – Andy Ngo

This Government is trying to claim progress on homelessness by making sure the reports it publishes focuses on the amount of money spent and the number of programmes started – not the actual outcomes.

Unfortunately for this Government, starting programmes and throwing money at them is not the same as improving outcomes for New Zealanders. – Chris Bishop

On every metric, housing has gotten worse. Rents are up $140 per week, thousands of households live in emergency housing motels, including nearly 4000 children, and the state house waitlist has increased by over 20,000 applicants since Labour came to office.

The Government now spends over $1 million per week on emergency housing and there has been a quadrupling in the number of families living in cars and tents since 2017.

If failure is the target, then the Government gets a gold star. – Chris Bishop

The private sector is facing the biggest assault from central and local government in living history.

It is now a constant that business, on the back of footing the bill directed by the government response to COVID is now to be the instrument of State to front the fight on equality and climate change. The free market led mixed economy that has provided decades of economic expansion and derivative wealth is fast becoming a command economy. This is the antithesis of your role as business leaders fronting competitive organizations driving profit, productivity and economic growth.

A new era of equal outcomes is dominating the territory previously held by promotion of ability. The State is no longer satisfied by a primary role of providing an even playing field and equality of opportunity. The face of business is now deemed more important than its substance. Business now carries the burden of social and economic engineering dangerously shifting to being an arm of the State, under the realm of this government.- Alistair Boyce

A strong free market liberal democracy is vital. By acquiescing to the ideological assault vulnerable small and medium business becomes gradually condemned to economic starvation. Ultimately the State inherits what’s left of productive capacities and then reconnects it with remaining economic expertise to rescue the inevitably failing experiment. The proliferation of business consultants is needed to bandage and artificially extend the compacting economic tumult.

Do not acquiesce. Be honest and lead the path to a productive growing economy based on New Zealand’s business led multiplier that drives our cities, towns and rural economies. Business of all sizes need the policies of practical reality and an even playing field to have a stable future. Say no to the coerced ‘Fair Pay Agreements’, ‘Emissions Trading Scheme’ and ‘National Income Insurance Scheme’ at every point. Do not allow dilution or negotiated compromise on obviously flawed legislation.

Changing or shaping by coalescing with government and State sector is short term expediency. Bold opposition is required followed by real change in government. – Alistair Boyce

Totalitarian centralized government is at odds with the sprawling socio economic reality of New Zealand’s sparsely populated country. The government sector needs to listen, learn and support the business environment to a goal of equitable growth based on ability, innovation, persistence and entrepreneurship. The low bar of satisfying perceived social equity is stifling confidence and growth.

At some point ineffective lobbying has to turn to outright condemnation.

I challenge and implore you-do not accept the false god of State domination on the back of climate change ideology to minimise and demonise your primary purpose. Any perceived threat to social license is ideologically driven by the State and media as opposed to socio-economic reality.

Please be proud of the economic growth achieved through the thrust of free market liberal democracy and demand it’s primacy. It has achieved growing measures of wealth and derivative independence for the marginalised and oppressed faster and more permanently than State interventions. Global economic growth and productivity has and will allow freedom and equality of opportunity. The market can be the natural curb to climate change albeit only in developed economies. Do not be embarrassed by these principles and this identity. – Alistair Boyce

The State can inhibit what you do best or encourage and promote it within the bounds of civil society, allowing creation of wealth. The State should concentrate on providing a fundamental equality of opportunity for all in equal measure.

Do not compromise to maintain spurious power within the State machine. Work to drive, control and shape the machine positively forward to drive growth and profit. Your independent spirit and resolve will earn respect as the protectorate of economic freedoms. – Alistair Boyce

Preserve stable Liberal Democracy at all costs. Our future depends on this as opposed to marginalising and alienating segments of society and economy through overt State expansion and centralisation.

If business has to continue operating on its knees it is half dead already.

Embrace your knowledge, ability and experience, stay true to business ideals and boldly engage with the State and government. – Alistair Boyce

The tests to initiate so-called Fair Pay Agreements are anti-democratic, forcing the process on workers who don’t want them – Paul Goldsmith

These mis-named agreements will reduce flexibility, choice and agility in our workplaces, at the very time when we need to be agile in a competitive world.

There are three hurdles for starting a Fair Pay Agreement: a mere 10 per cent of workers covered by a proposed agreement, or just 1000 workers, which is less than half a per cent of an occupation with 200,000 workers, or a loose public interest test that could apply even if nobody voted for it.

There is nothing ‘fair’ about Fair Pay Agreements, if a tiny fraction of workers can initiate bargaining and dictate terms for the majority. – Paul Goldsmith

Even if no one wants an agreement at all, bureaucrats in Wellington can force the bargaining process to begin anyway. Once started, there is no stopping it. – Paul Goldsmith

If the majority of workers do not want a Fair Pay Agreement, they should not be forced into a deal at the whim of the unions or because a bureaucrat decides that is what is best for them – Paul Goldsmith

We are pouring billions of dollars into an energy transition, health reforms, Three Waters. And our watchdogs are telling us we have no adequate way of knowing whether our efforts are making a difference, or assessing whether one set of initiatives is better than another.

We need better information about what is being attempted and what is being achieved, but, more importantly, better ways to make use of information about policy effectiveness. – Josie Pagani

The chronic inability to be precise about the objective of government initiatives has real-world effects beyond its linguistic crimes.

We saw a fresh example this past week when Creative New Zealand was called out over its decision to decline a funding application from the Shakespeare Globe Centre NZ​. Its own reviewer stated, to global ridicule, that the Bard’s work is located in a ‘’canon of imperialism’’.

Even if it were, Creative NZ is not there to fix the historic sins of imperialism. – Josie Pagani

Ironically, the point of Shakespeare is the improbable precision in his descriptions of universal experiences: ‘’wild goose chase’’ (Romeo and Juliet), ‘’eaten me out of house and home’’ (Henry IV), or ‘’cruel to be kind’’ (Hamlet).

Timeless expressions achieve their beauty through their matchless clarity. From clarity comes transparency, and from transparency emerges accountability and improvement.

A lack of clarity is not just drivel dressed in pretty words. It has a political purpose. Real power resides in the thickets. (Ahem: King Lear.) – Josie Pagani

I have previously advocated for initiatives like much stronger select committees, equipped with sufficient policy grunt to evaluate policy choices, and led by MPs whose career choice to be a legislator balances the choice of others to be executives.

There are legitimate debates to be had about how much money is spent by government in pursuit of goals, and what those goals should be. But no matter where you stand on that, we need far stronger institutions to track value for money, because then we can achieve so much more. – Josie Pagani

magine spending billions of dollars a year and not really knowing whether it makes a difference or not.

Welcome to the world of government. – Brent Edwards

Surely the Treasury must know how effective the spending is? No. It tracks where the money goes and ensures that it is spent according to the Budget appropriations, but not whether it had the desired effect. Inputs and outputs drive the fiscal system, not outcomes. – Brent Edwards

More broadly though, most people – whether they support high or low tax rates – would surely want to know whether the taxes they pay make a difference, not just to the environment but particularly in big spending portfolios such as health, education and social services. – Brent Edwards

Better information might also lead to more informed debates about the efficacy of one policy over another. Spending more is always a point politicians can make but the big question is whether their spending achieves anything? – Brent Edwards

So, this is not an argument about spending more or less. It is an argument about ensuring whatever amount is spent is as effective as it can be.

Upton, for instance, is not arguing for a reduction in spending on the environment. He does not believe the Government is spending too much protecting the country’s fragile environment. He simply wants to know whether that spending is effective or not.

When it comes to total government spending – now about $150b a year – shouldn’t we all?

The public deserve to know whether that spending is making a difference. – Brent Edwards

I hesitate to give advice, but I have to say that if you’re ever in a situation like the one in which my family found ourselves, do not forget to love, touch and look into the eyes of every other family member regularly. Early during our time in hospital, I started to think of us as five fingers of the same hand. Every finger is important, even the crooked and/or hairy ones. There is a temptation to only pay attention to the patient, especially if they’re a young child, but you ignore other family members at your peril. I can’t speak for my Henry, but I’m willing to bet he was happy that Leah and I took good care of the brothers he loved so much, and each other. – Rob Delaney

As to these yokels gluing themselves to walls or pavements or streets, my idea is that they should just be left there to fend for themselves! Give them a few days super-glued to a busy street and see how long before they beg for help.

They are idiots who destroy rather than build. Nothing is sacred for these hoons. But as their destructive antics become even more alarming, one fears for what lies ahead.

As a result of activists terrorising art galleries, we can expect to see the need for far more stringent security measures being put in place, with the costs to visitors going up and the ability to get close to some of these great works of art taken away from us. – Bill Muehlenberg

Conservatives, as the name implies, like to conserve. We like to preserve what is good in a culture. We like to maintain order amid chaos, and some beauty amongst ugliness.

But the radical Left simply wants to tear down and destroy. It is their way or the highway. And their way usually seems to gravitate towards bullying, intimidation, aggression, and destruction. – Bill Muehlenberg

The incapacity and lack of courage of the political class, no matter how lengthily or expensively educated, is a clue to the despair that many people now feel in Britain. Its incompetence and lack of probity, its absence of the most elementary understanding, compares unfavorably with the practical intelligence of the local plumber, carpenter, or electrician. No one has confidence that any replacement of Truss from within or without the Conservative Party will be for the better, only incompetent in some different way.

The wrong lessons will be drawn, of course, from the Truss debacle. If lower taxes (even if only in prospect) do not work, then higher ones must. The solution to Britain’s deep-seated problems now offered by almost the entire political class is to turn the country into a giant version of the National Health Service, the country’s socialized health-care system that has made paupers of almost the whole population, which is obliged to accept what it is given whether good, bad, or indifferent.

By her incompetence, Truss has given lower taxation a bad name. We now face a cycle of high taxation and expenditure, with low growth necessitating ever-higher taxation and expenditure. Much of the educated class already believes in the moral value of taxation irrespective of its effects. The British are now trapped into slavery to their state—a state more incompetent, and more corrupt, than its European equivalents or even than the European Union.

It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. An apparatchik class will prosper among the embers of the slowly expiring economy. Truss, whom no one will remember with affection, was not to blame for the problems of her country, but by her incapacity and utter lack of common sense, she has worsened those problems for years to come. That’s quite an achievement for 44 days in office. – Theodore Dalrymple

The headlines of the last week will tell you that our health system is indeed in crisis. The educational outcomes and achievements of our young people are at their lowest ever. Those headlines tell the story of a country in decline. – Bruce Cotterill

We know that 40 per cent of our kids are leaving school without the necessary literacy or numeracy skills to function in society. I asked an education specialist, a university professor on the topic, what “to function” meant. Her response? To fill out a form!

But the headlines continue. The police lost more than 300 rounds of ammunition in transit. Rotorua hospitality businesses slamming the Government’s approach to seasonal workers. Our immigration stats telling us there are more people leaving than arriving, and our universities saying that the best case scenario is to have international student numbers back to 50 per cent of pre-Covid levels by this time next year.

Sometimes I find myself asking … is this really happening in New Zealand? The answer, sadly, is yes. – Bruce Cotterill

The list above is a fraction of what is going wrong in New Zealand right now. To be fair to the Government, their focus is on something else. They are busy changing the social structure of the country to suit their leftist ideology.

Why you would restructure the health system during a health crisis is beyond me.

Tertiary education has been centralised too, with consequences so far that should send board members scrambling to review their directors’ insurance.

When we’re so short of people across every industry, why would we constrain immigration? When our finances are under so much pressure, why would you spend the equivalent of what it costs to build a regional hospital on the merger of two media outlets that are already government owned? The answer is that you do so if you want to control the narrative. – Bruce Cotterill

Interestingly, a small number of ministers get pushed forward to respond on the Government’s behalf.

These people now carry multiple roles. My observation is that their appointment is based more on their ability in public relations and communications than their ability to get things done. – Bruce Cotterill

I’ll admit, I think political leaders would be better equipped if they had real-life experiences in the workplace before going to a career in politics. Those experiences would provide core executive skills that enable a leader to effectively drive projects and processes, and to assemble management tools for their toolbox: planning skills, execution frameworks, people management capability and the ability to follow up effectively.

I also think we’d be better served by our politicians if they had a maximum term — say nine or 12 years. That way we wouldn’t have people whose entire career is spent inside the walls of the parliamentary system. – Bruce Cotterill

And so we have people who are good at communicating and spinning a story when a microphone is pushed in their face. They’re very good at telling us how many more nurses, teachers or police they’ve recruited. What they don’t tell you is how many have left. They can’t explain why we have the problems we have, nor can they shed any believable light on their proposed solutions.

And yet, in most of the critical operational functions of government, we are in bad shape. Good government would see the existing problems get smaller as new ones emerge. Not here. The problems are just getting bigger. And the attention of government and the ministers seem to be diverted away from the real issues.

The recent emissions policy is a case in point. New Zealand doesn’t need to be a world leader. We don’t need to set world firsts. Even the global elite of the climate change hierarchy state clearly that climate change policy should not come at the expense of food production.

And the reality is that it doesn’t matter what this country does on climate change policy; we are not going to make a difference to the global outcomes for the planet. And yet here we are, risking our biggest export industry, destroying farming families and reducing our own food supply because we think we want to lead the world. – Bruce Cotterill

Education will give these young people skills for life and a new perspective. The military provides discipline and the family environment that these young people could benefit from and perhaps hanker for.

Make it option if you like. A life of crime? Or a life.

But it’s almost as if our leaders have decided that the bad stuff doesn’t matter as long as they can cope with the PR fallout.

Instead, it seems that the time and effort goes into their pursuit of the social adjustments and ideological projects that they want to be remembered for. – Bruce Cotterill

We have seen the face of evil and it sold us sneakers. – Michael Johnston

The word ‘woman’ is rich with centuries of meaning, and has instant recognition. Technically, the definition in reputable dictionaries is adult human female, and is the same understanding that the general law of New Zealand has. In life, culture, and society it informs, conveys, encompasses, evokes, and involves more than we could ever get from the term ‘people with a cervix’. To use that term in place of ‘woman’ is reductive, demeaning, and unnecessarily convoluted. Neither does it arouse the same level of engagement from us as when we read the word ‘woman’. – Katrina Biggs

Plain language and inclusive language can be uncomfortable marriage partners. Plain language says that we should use the word ‘women’ for women, because that’s the word that conveys the most meaning and understanding in the shortest possible way. Inclusive language says we should use a term like ‘people with a cervix’ for women, because transgender females and transgender males prefer it, due to the word ‘woman’ potentially causing discomfort for them. This particular type of term to replace the word ‘woman’ is mainly used in health-related narratives concerning our bodies, as transpeoples’ biology and gender identity are at odds with each other.

Language helps us navigate the world by having rules. They ensure that we commonly understand both spoken and written narratives without first having to spend time deciphering or decoding them. Even when language evolves, there are still rules about how it is used. Inclusive language, as we know it in the context of using terms like ‘people with a cervix’, has no rules. Just like gender identities and neo-pronouns, a Google search does not find a concise and stable list of inclusive language terms. All three are mobile concepts, and completely unknown in many walks of life. Yet they are being used in place of language that has rules which enable widespread understanding for the greatest number of people the most amount of time.

Will the Plain Language law apply plain language rules to women, where we will once again be called women instead of ‘people with a cervix? Depending on how it’s applied, we may have a tool in the Plain Language law to fight against inclusive language – a harmless-sounding moniker on the surface, but with deep indignities, misunderstandings, non-engagement, and resentments arising from its’ use. This new law will be tracked with interest, and, feasibly, women will use the full force of it to take back our language. – Katrina Biggs

In our mind we just need to know what the story is here. Under the government proposal, sheep and beef farmers have the potential to be the most affected. Nobody wants that and HWEN would never support a proposal that makes the farming sector unviable – let’s be clear about that. – Andrew Morrison

We can’t have rural NZ decimated and we would never support that. We have worked in good faith in partnership and so now we have to quickly sort out why government has failed to deliver on some of our recommendations. – Andrew Morrison

Emissions pricing needs to be practical, pragmatic and fair for farmers, and there is still a lot that needs to be improved to make what the Government have announced workable. Remember that if farmers are asked to do something they need to see the logic of what they have been asked to do and benefits of it.

So we are trying to make sure that whatever is put in place is right and that farmers can say, that makes sense, and will get on with it. – Jim van der Poel

It’s gut wrenching to think we have a proposal by government that rips the heart out of the work we have done and to the families who farm the land. Feds is deeply unimpressed with government.- Andrew Hoggard

Now they’ll be selling up so fast you won’t even hear the dogs barking on the back of the ute as they drive off. The Government’s plan means the small towns, like Wairoa, Pahiatua, Taumaranui – pretty much the whole of the East Coast and central North Island and a good chunk of the top of the South – will be surrounded by pine trees quicker than you can say ‘ETS application’  – Andrew Hoggard

Just as the word homophobia has been stretched far beyond its original meaning (that is, a hatred or fear of homosexuals) and the accusation of racism is routinely hurled at anyone who challenges the cult of identity politics, so the claim of misogyny is frequently used as a smear against people who refuse to bow to feminist orthodoxy.- Karl du Fresne

All this tells us is that Parliament is slow to adjust to the times. It may have seemed quaint, but it was hardly misogynistic. – Karl du Fresne

It seems inconceivable that at a time of hyper-inflation and global unrest, any government would deliberately destabilise the agricultural sector by introducing policies that would increase costs to primary producers, reduce production, and fuel price increases. Yet that’s what Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government is planning to do. – Muriel Newman

That our Prime Minister wants the owners of ruminant livestock to pay a penalty for a by-product of a digestive process that is older than the dinosaurs, is madness personified.

Methane, an atmospheric trace gas, is part of an ancient natural cycle. Plants absorb carbon dioxide and using the green chlorophyll in their leaves combine it with water to trap the sun’s energy as food. When plant matter is eaten by ruminants, methane is produced, which breaks down into carbon dioxide and water vapour to continue the cycle.

Over three-quarters of the planet’s methane comes from natural sources such as wetlands, with the balance produced by landfills, rice paddies, and livestock. Since New Zealand has only one percent of the world’s farmed ruminants the actual contribution of Kiwi livestock to methane in the atmosphere is almost too small to measure.  – Muriel Newman

Agriculture is New Zealand’s biggest industry, generating more than 70 percent of our export earnings and about 12 percent of our gross domestic product.

The impact of Jacinda Ardern’s tax on the sector will be significant. Prices of home-grown protein – including milk, cheese, and meat – will undoubtedly rise as local production falls. And our crucial export returns will decline – by up to an estimated 5.9 percent for dairy, 21.4 percent for lamb, 36.7 percent for beef, and 21.1 percent for wool.

We can see the potential fallout by reminding ourselves of the consequences of a previous reckless decision by our Prime Minister when, without warning, she banned new offshore oil and gas exploration on the eve of a meeting of world leaders – so she could boast about her decisive climate change leadership.

That decision contributed to the closure of the Marsden Point Oil Refinery – with a loss of 240 local jobs and many hundreds more indirectly – leaving New Zealand dependent on imported fuel that we used to produce ourselves.

Paradoxically, the PM’s actions did not reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but increased them – as the Taranaki based methanol producer Methanex explained: – Muriel Newman

There are very real concerns about the fallout from Jacinda Ardern’s radical plan to tax livestock emissions without allowing farmers to balance their ledger by claiming credits for sequestering carbon dioxide through the plant matter on their farms – including woodlots, shelter belts, riparian planting, native bush, crops, and, of course, pasture.

As a result, the policy will have profound and widespread consequences, far beyond the damage to those farmers who are expected to be forced out of the industry.

Many of their farms are likely to end up in the hands of those seeking land for carbon farming. If that happens, not only will the soil be ruined for future pastoral use, but the resilience of our rural and provincial communities will be undermined through the loss of farming families and the downstream jobs they helped to sustain. Their departure will impact heavily on farm services, meat processing plants, local schools, and the other local businesses.

What’s even more irrational is that the forced exit of the world’s most emission-efficient farmers will increase global emissions as other less efficient nations increase production to fill the gap. – Muriel Newman

Given that a day’s worth of their increased emissions will totally swamp a year’s worth of the reductions the PM is planning to impose on our agricultural base, one has to wonder about the sanity of our decision-makers.

Surely common sense should prevail. Firstly, no New Zealand government should even consider dangerous Armageddon-style policies that will fundamentally disrupt the industries that have created our nation’s wealth. And secondly, all climate policies should be put on hold until the main emitters begin to curb their emissions. – Muriel Newman

It’s been two and a half bloody years or more of dumb regulation after dumb regulation after dumb regulation, and  for me, it’s just like, Nah, screw it, I’m done with being polite about it. – Andrew Hoggard

Yes, we want the research and development to happen, and we want the science and technology to be able to lower the emissions, but we need to be doing it in step, so pricing can’t get ahead of competitor countries, and we can’t put our food security at risk. – Penny Simmonds

Dumping milk onto floors. Hurling food onto walls. Refusing to eat. Gluing body parts. Throwing paint. Refusing to leave. Threatening to pee and poop in your pants. Screaming accusations. Are those the behaviors of a toddler’s temper tantrum? Yes. But they’re also the dominant tactics of today’s climate activists. – Michael Shellenberger, 

The activists who keep degrading precious works of art, and themselves, claim to be concerned about food and energy supplies, but in opposing oil, gas and fertilizerproduction they are actively reducing both. Over the last several months, I have described the demands of climate activists as fanatical and pointed to a large body of evidence suggesting that nihilism, narcissism, and feelings of personal inadequacy are the primary motives.

But nihilism, narcissism, and personal inadequacy alone do not explain why climate activists have chosen temper tantrum tactics. After all, the greatest protest movements of all time engaged in far more grown-up and dignified tactics. Think of the Salt March led by Gandhi, the Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Martin Luther King, and the anti-whaling protests of Greenpeace. – Michael Shellenberger, 

Where protesters in the past asked to be treated like adults, climate protesters today demand to be treated like children. Civil rights activists in the 1950s sat at lunch counters and demanded to be treated like full adults. Notably, it was racist counterprotesters who poured milkshakes over them. Today, it’s the protesters who are spilling milk and throwing food. – Michael Shellenberger, 

JK Rowling has written these great books about empowerment, about young children finding themselves as human beings. It’s about how you become a better, stronger, more morally centred human being. The verbal abuse directed at her is disgusting, it’s appalling.

I mean, I can understand a viewpoint that might be angry at what she says about women. But it’s not some obscene, uber-right-wing fascist. It’s just a woman saying, ‘I’m a woman and I feel I’m a woman and I want to be able to say that I’m a woman.’ And I understand where she’s coming from. Even though I’m not a woman. – Ralph Fiennes

Righteous anger is righteous, but often it becomes kind of dumb because it can’t work its way through the grey areas. It has no nuance. – Ralph Fiennes

When Kelvin Davis used Question Time to say that I view the world through a “pakeha lens” it was nothing I haven’t heard before: “You’re a whakapapa Māori but you’re not kaupapa Māori”; “You’re a plastic Māori”; “You’re a born-again Māori”. It just comes with the territory of being a Māori woman who doesn’t always fit the left’s comfortable stereotype.

Problem is, I don’t think Kelvin is the only Labour minister who thinks what he said. The others might be smarter at hiding it, but they also worship identity politics.

They believe that who you are can matter more than what you do or say. How do I know this? That attitude is all through the policies they promote. Oranga Tamariki, the area I was asking Kelvin about when he made his comments, is just one example. – Karen Chhour

Oranga Tamariki was happy to take Mary from a loving home, the only place she’d ever had security and stability, and place her back with family members who were known to abuse her.

In fairness to Oranga Tamariki, it was following the law, something called Section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act. Section 7AA means the chief executive of Oranga Tamariki has to consider the Treaty when making decisions.

Sure, 7AA may be well-intentioned. But it creates a conflict between protecting the best interests of the child and race-based factors enshrined in 7AA. This conflict has the potential to cause real harm to our children. – Karen Chhour

Since my Member’s Bill was drawn, I have been called a racist. If anything, the opposite is true. My Bill will make Oranga Tamariki colour-blind. It will have to focus on all of the factors that a child needs, instead of placing race at the centre of their decision-making.

When this Bill comes up for the first reading in Parliament, the predictable and tiresome responses will come from the Labour Party, the Māori Party, and the Greens.

I ask them, before they vote this down, to think about Mary and what was best for her. A family who loved and cared for her? Or returning to her abusers?

Mary’s foster parents traced their family tree back far enough that they could find enough of a link to say they were Māori. This twist also shows how bizarre the law is, Mary’s foster parents are the same people, but something that happened centuries before they were born made it okay for them to parent.

Mary still lives with them. She has come out of her shell, she is doing well at school, she has a home for life where she is safe and is thriving. Thank goodness for that branch they found on the family tree, or Mary’s story might have been very different.

I can only hope that my Bill gets a fair hearing because another child might not be so lucky. – Karen Chhour 

For a doctor, the worst thing that could happen to them is that a patient suffers because they don’t get to see them in time. It’s completely outside their hands, which is where the stress comes from. And so, of course, they try to work harder and harder to get to see more and more patients, and that’s where they make mistakes. And that’s the second worst nightmare for a doctor: that they actually make a mistake and a patient suffers. – Dr Deborah Powell

They’re stressed and their morale is really low. They feel the patients’ pain. They understand, but they’re powerless… That’s the sentiment for all health practitioners, but it’s probably worse for doctors because they know if they don’t get to someone, that person might die. That is a huge burden to carry. – Dr Deborah Powell

The population of New Zealand really values its health system and they value the health workforce, but in financial terms not quite so much. Yes, health is expensive, but that’s what it is. I’m not saying we should have an open chequebook – but we shouldn’t be constantly holding budgets down. – Dr Deborah Powell

We have insufficient resident doctors coming out of medical school. We need another 200 at least. It takes years to train a doctor. So again, we should have been onto this years ago. It’s just a failure to train enough and be forward-thinking. – Dr Deborah Powell

We now have a workforce crisis on our hands. We were watching it develop, so we had been lobbying for years. And we had to wait for the crisis to hit us before we actually did something. And that’s a recurring theme, I’m afraid. When you get a crisis someone will finally do something, but it’s five years too late. – Dr Deborah Powell

The lesson for other conservative parties should be clear. Values drive policy, not the other way around, because values endure.

The evidence around the world is that right-wing parties are learning the wrong lessons from populism. Some may outlast the shelf life of a lettuce. But they risk disappearing faster than that packet of mixed spice that’s been sitting in your cupboard for years.- Josie Pagani

Self made men or women are to be admired and in this particular case you would hope, bring with them a level of reassurance that they actually know what they are doing when it comes to finances.

But none of that has really been covered. He has been treated like an oddity and someone not like us. The problem with people like us is most of us couldn’t run a country, nor would we want to. So why are we so obsessed about the neighbour, the vicar, or the postman being the Prime Minister? They’d be a disaster.

Surely his credentials by way of fiscal success indicate he might have a clue. And while money isn’t the be-all and end-all, is does sort of pay the bills. That’s what we want, isn’t it?

Money is an outworking of endeavour. Rishi Sunak’s endeavour was clearly successful. Don’t we want successful people running the place or running anything?

He’s got a lot of money. That’s good. – Mike Hosking

Oxfam reports are like those email scams that put in deliberate typos and grammatical errors so that only the most credulous people believe them, so they don’t have to waste time with people who’ll wise up part-way through. – Eric Crampton

That is to say, after ten years of schooling, only a third of young New Zealanders can write coherently; only half possess basic computational skills; and only two-thirds can cope adequately with a level of written communication fundamental to success in adult life.

These numbers represent a scarcely believable tale of professional failure across New Zealand’s education system. What it reveals is a society that is rapidly losing the ability (if it hasn’t already lost it) to keep itself going – let alone improve itself – on the basis of its own human resources. – Chris Trotter 

For decades, we have been telling ourselves that the best way to make our country wealthier, fairer, and happier was by educating its young people to the highest possible international standard. We looked at countries with world-beating education systems – and test results – like Singapore and Finland, and assumed that theirs was the level of performance to which our own educational experts aspired.

Clearly, that was an unwarranted assumption. New Zealand’s education system – once celebrated as one of the most successful in the world – is in free-fall. By all the recognised international comparators, we are failing – and failing fast. So bad have things become that it is increasingly difficult to find a sufficient number of willing and able participants to make our international test-results robust enough, statistically, to stand comparison. In a telling sign of the times, this dearth of suitable participants is being presented by some school principals as a signal that it is time for New Zealand to abandon international comparisons altogether. – Chris Trotter 

Across academia, in the teacher unions, and increasingly at the chalk-face, the whole notion of education being an international enterprise, in which young New Zealanders must be able to participate (and compete) with confidence, is being rejected. In its place, “progressive” educators are erecting a system geared to rectifying the cultural and social inequities arising out of New Zealand’s colonial past.

With increasing vehemence, international standards are rejected as “Eurocentric” – or even “white supremacist” – weapons for obliterating the unique insights of indigenous cultures. The bitter letter-to-the-Listener struggle over the merits of “Western Science” versus “Mātaurānga Māori”, was but the tip of the ontological iceberg currently ripping a massive hole, albeit well below the waterline of public perception, in New Zealand’s education system.

The extent to which this debate has progressed is revealed in the responses to the shocking performance revealed in the trial-run NCEA assessment tests. According to a post on the RNZ website, “independent evaluators” are concerned that: “New literacy and numeracy tests could lower NCEA achievement rates among Māori and Pacific students.” – Chris Trotter 

In part, this failure is explained by the unwillingness of the more privileged sectors of our society to state with brutal clarity that breaking free of the dismal cycle of “lows” will only ever be achieved by aiming and scoring “high”. Parents must be told that there will be no special pleading; no softening of standards; no blaming of history. Their children must pass the tests, and they must help them pass the tests. The New Zealand state can build schools, and it can train teachers, but it cannot instill a determination in young Māori and Pasifika to be educated to the fullest extent of their powers. – Chris Trotter 

Having, over a lifetime observing the way modern tribes operate in this part of the world, I am led to believe that the current distortion of our history is being given legitimacy simply because it suits Maoridom in its battle for self determination – some would say control of their own destiny.
In fact, the very basis for our programme of reconciliation and compensation Is designed with tribal history as part of the justification of future state funded settlements. But the history being used in these claims against the Crown is a selective version of what actually happened.  – Clive Bibby

Parliament: an ironic place where contradictions abound. At first glance stately and formal, but under the surface we know skulduggery abounds. A place of quiet importance and hushed propriety, yet if you’ve ever seen Question Time (or a Caucus meeting), it gives a disrupted kindergarten a run for its money.- Jonathan Ayling

Frankly, it’s difficult to argue against the claim that official documents should be accessible to the general public. In fact, it’s such a good idea there are already annual ‘Plain Language Awards’ celebrating the public service department which uses the clearest language. But that’s not really what’s up for debate in Boyack’s Bill. Rather, it’s a Government funded structure to employ ‘Plain Language Officers’ (could someone write a ‘use-more-original-names’ Bill?) to peer over the shoulder of each public servant, making sure that their language is not convoluted (that means “tricky”, if it wasn’t plain.) This is the more sinister element of this legislation, and with irony again rearing its ugly head again, Boyack, the sponsor of the Bill, is entirely ignorant to it.

Does this seem a bit elaborate (that means “convoluted”)? Let me put it plainly: given the way this Government has tried to control information, speech, and expression, do we really want a ‘language officer’ signing off on every piece of public comms? What happens when the Government does what I just did there without anyone noticing? Take away the ‘plain’ aspect, and just make it a ‘language officer’… is this sounding a little more Ministry of Truth-esque? Public servants need to be able to give free and frank advice to their political overlords and more importantly, to speak openly with the public; erasing certain words from their vocabulary is a step in the wrong direction.

Is that clear? To control language is to control the ideas we can communicate. – Jonathan Ayling

Just because it is in practice good to write plainly doesn’t mean we need legislation creating a role to enforce this. And just because the intention of the ‘plain language officer’ isn’t inherently censorious, that doesn’t mean it won’t end up silencing provocative speech. – Jonathan Ayling

Despite what some might say, the public service is not simply a conglomeration of higher beings sitting in great ivory towers in Wellington micromanaging the country through sophisticated decrees. (To put it plainly now) they’re normal people, like us, and can be expected to speak on the same level as the rest of the nation in a way we can all perfectly understand, on their own. Like so many other attempts at restricting and controlling speech, this Bill has proven to be another hopeless solution in desperate search of a problem.

To echo a suggestion from Duncan Garner- perhaps it would be a much better use of Government resources to appoint common-sense officers, perhaps even honesty officers or transparency officials!

(If you skimmed to the bottom of the article for the plain explanation in simple words, you can’t put it better than Chris Penk: ‘this Bill is not good. In fact, it is bad.’) – Jonathan Ayling

Just a few years ago, it would have been totally unremarkable for a woman to set clear boundaries over who can lay their hands on her body, especially in a hospital setting. Yet today, thanks to the rise of trans ideology, this perfectly normal request is considered beyond the pale – so much so that a woman can be refused life-saving surgery for making it. This is the dark path the mantra of ‘transwomen are women’ has taken us down. – Raquel Rosario Sanchez

If nothing else, Sunak’s rise is a clear sign that Britain is a successful multiracial democracy, where it is possible for Britons of any ethnic background to reach the highest levels of political life.  – Rakib Ehsan

Predictably, however, Sunak’s coronation has been greeted by the kind of toxic identity politics that now dominates our political discourse. Many ‘anti-racists’ who would normally advocate for ethnic-minority ‘representation’ are now essentially saying that Rishi Sunak doesn’t count. Others have, perversely, tried to present Sunak’s rise as an indictment of Britain – as a sign of our lingering structural racism. Most of these responses have been tortured and confused. – Rakib Ehsan

Those who would normally celebrate diversity and representation are clearly struggling to do so when it comes to Rishi Sunak. Seemingly because Sunak does not subscribe to their identitarian script. This is a script that is as baseless as it is divisive. It is one that views Britain as a country that has historically done more harm than good in the world – and which, thanks to its colonial past, is irredeemably racist.

These ‘anti-racists’ believe that all British institutions – social, economic, political and legal – are deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities. And anyone belonging to an ethnic, racial or religious minority who dares to question this view is presented as somehow inauthentic. Critical opinions are considered to be ‘white’ opinions and the minorities who express them are presumed to be doing so purely for personal advancement.

Those ethnic-minority Britons who say favourable things about Britain or who challenge the woke identitarian outlook are often singled out for abuse by the woke left. In recent years, when ethnic-minority politicians have taken up high-ranking positions in Tory governments, they have been branded as ‘racial gatekeepers’ and traitorous turncoats. – Rakib Ehsan

Ultimately, Sunak’s skin colour should have no bearing on how we judge his premiership. Race is a poor guide to someone’s politics. But when the identitarians say Sunak does not ‘represent’ them, it is not because they have grasped this point. They are not about to adopt a colourblind approach to politics. It is just that Sunak has upset their expectations of what views a non-white politician should hold. And so he can be cast out. The identitarians are still very much wedded to the toxic idea that your race should determine your views.

Besides, Sunak is right not to follow the woke script. The truth is that Britain is one of the most successful multiracial democracies in the world. Britain’s robust anti-discrimination protections and its respect for religious freedoms make it one of the best places to live as a minority. Far from struggling under the weight of systemic racism, many of Britain’s ethnic-minority communities are thriving and are even outperforming the white mainstream. This is not the mean-spirited, racist hellhole that activists make it out to be.

No doubt the success of Rishi Sunak will continue to scramble the minds of Britain’s race obsessives, as they struggle to process any challenge to their worldview. The rest of us would do well to ignore Sunak’s skin colour and concentrate on his policies. – Rakib Ehsan

Britain has pioneered a new kind of economy, having long since abandoned manufacturing as a way of paying its way in the world: a service economy without service. Indeed, the very word service raises hackles in Britain, for it implies hierarchy, the servant who provided it being by definition subordinate to the person for whom the service is performed; and in these prickly democratic, or rather radically egalitarian, times, such subordination is anathema. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is a curious fact that public address announcements in English made in foreign countries, even by foreigners, are now much clearer and more pleasing on the ear than those made in Britain, where the shrieking voice of a person whom I always think of as Ms. Slut-Harridan is much in vogue, probably because there is no suggestion of education, cultivation, politeness, refinement, or any of those other qualities that the British now so detest and find so threatening and reproachful, in her voice. – Theodore Dalrymple

This winter, millions of British citizens, including children, will be tipped, or dumped, into energy poverty severe enough to risk permanent damage to their health. Cold, damp houses provide the perfect breeding ground for mould that not only causes respiratory distress, but renders houses essentially unlivable once established.

One Left-leaning newspaper ran the story outlining the danger, but without a word about why this crisis has emerged: because the woke moralisers of the “environmental” movement helped to create it.

The narcissists of compassion – callow, self-aggrandising, incompetent politicians, their celebrity lackeys, Machiavellian journalists – have insisted ever more loudly over the last five decades that no cost was, and is, too great for others to bear in the pursuit of blind service to “the planet.”  – Jordan Peterson

Virtue-signalling utopians committed to globalisation claim we are destroying the planet with cheap energy. But are they truly and deeply committed to the environmental sustainability so loudly and insistently demanded, or are they merely hell-bent, in the prototypically Marxist manner, in taking revenge on capitalism?

It appears to be the latter. Why otherwise would the mavens of the environmental movement oppose nuclear power, despite its optimal “carbon footprint”?- Jordan Peterson

The mentality among the eco-extremists is as follows: if we have to doom the poor to destroy the system that made the rich, so be it. You just can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

Here is one fact to remember, while we so madly and ineffectively rush to renewables. 

Research has recently indicated that two decades of intense support for such undertakings has hiked the proportion of energy provided by such means from 13-14 per cent to an utterly underwhelming 15.7 per cent. Unfortunately the liberal Left see – Jordan Peterson

Remember: when the aristocracy catches cold, the peasants die of pneumonia. If such extreme measures have become necessary in the richest countries, what in God’s name is going to happen in the poorer ones? When the shortages strike, the poor will inevitably and necessarily turn to less green resources: many, even in Germany, are already stockpiling firewood and coal for the winter, leading to acute shortages. How is incentivising people to cut down and burn trees and use coal in their fireplaces going to help reduce the dreaded “atmospheric carbon load”?  – Jordan Peterson

Perhaps we’ll be able to comfort ourselves, here in the West, with the thought that the food we take for granted will still be available at our tables. But, wait: the crops that nourish our populations cannot be grown without fertiliser (loathed by green folk) and, more specifically, without ammonia. And what, pray tell, is ammonia derived from? Could it be…natural gas? And how many people are dependent for their daily bread on the industrial generation and consequent wide availability of ammonia? Only three or four billion…

The World Bank itself has recently indicated that 222 million people are already experiencing the threat of starvation (described oh-so-nicely as “food insecurity”). The Communists managed to kill 100 million in the last century with their utopian delusions; we’ve barely begun to implement the “save the planet” nightmare, and we’ve already placed twice that number at risk.  – Jordan Peterson

The masses will have to “tighten their belts” to forestall an even worse future catastrophe. The elite academics, think-tanks and corporate consultants, and the politicians who subsidise their intellectual pretensions, will not be particularly affected by such tightening – “privileged” as they are. But the actual poor? To such an elite, they must be sacrificed now to save tomorrow’s hypothetical poor.

222 million people is, no doubt, an underestimate: as the “food insecurity” gets more severe, more countries will place restrictions on food exports. That will harm the international supply lines we all depend on. Then, when the consequences of that manifest themselves, increasingly desperate politicians will begin to nationalise and centralise food distribution (as the French and Germans have already done on the energy front) and cut their farmers off at the knees, who will in turn stop growing food – not out of spite, but because of dire economic impossibility. Then we will have engendered the kind of feedback loop that can really spiral out of control. It will be poor people who die (first, at least), but as we have all been taught by the malevolent eco-moralisers: the planet has too many people on it anyway.

Think about this, while you shiver all too soon in your cold, damp and increasingly expensive and now sub-standard lodgings. You and your family may well have been deemed an expendable excess. – Jordan Peterson

In the psychological and educational arenas, too, we demoralise young people, feeding them a constant diet of concretised apocalypse, focusing particularly on tempering or even obliviating the laudable ambition of boys, hectoring them into believing that their virtue is nothing but the force that oppresses the innocent and despoils the virginal planet. And, if that doesn’t work – and it does – then there’s always the castration awaiting the gender-dysphoric. And you oppose such initiatives at substantial personal risk. 

But we can reassure ourselves with the fact that a beneficent government is going to set up warm spots in public libraries and museums this winter so that freezing, starving old people can huddle together to keep warm while their grandchildren cough up their lungs in their frigid, damp, and mouldy flats. – Jordan Peterson

We could begin by dropping our appalling attitude of moral superiority toward the developing world. We could admit instead that the rest of the planet’s inhabitants have the right and the responsibility to move toward the abundant material life that we have enjoyed, despite ourselves, for the last century and which has been so entirely dependent on industrial activity and fossil fuel usage.  

We could work diligently and with purpose to drive energy and food prices down to the lowest level possible, so that we can ease the burden on the poor, and open up their horizons of possibility, so that they become concerned (as they inevitably and properly will) with long-term sustainability instead of acting desperately and destructively in pursuit of their next meal. In such circumstances – in the race of such mandatory privations and manipulations – it’s obvious that the last thing our tyrannical virtue-signalling governments should be doing is directing their demented attention toward regulating what people serve at their tables. But because meat has also been deemed yet something else that is “destroying the planet,” the woke narcissists of compassion are already insisting that people eat less of it. Plants and bugs for you and your children, peasants. And the sooner you get accustomed to it (or else) the better.  –

We could concentrate on an intelligent plan of stewardship instead of anti-human “environmentalism” along the lines of the plans outlined by multi-faceted and diligent experts such as Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, who pointed out years ago that we have a multitude of crises facing us and not just one (the hypothetically apocalyptic danger of “carbon”), and that we could spend the money we are wasting killing poor people in a much more intelligent and judicious manner, devoting some resources, for example, to ensuring a stable food supply to poor children in the developing world, treating malaria – something we can do and cheaply – and delivering fresh water where it is truly needed. – Jordan Peterson

We could work out our concerns with sustainability through consensus and in the spirit of voluntary association and free play instead of relying on top-down edicts, justified in principle by our misplaced existential terror and carrying with them the moral hazard of the accrual of unjustified and dangerous centralised authority. We could distribute to everyone their requisite responsibility as sovereign actors and can bring them on board with the power of a common vision: one of life more abundant; enough high-quality food for everyone; enough energy so that slavery becomes a thing of the past; enough purpose so that nihilism and decadence no longer beckon; enough reciprocity so that we live in true peace; the generous provision of education and opportunity to everyone in the world; the conviction (to say it again) that policy based on compulsion is misguided and counterproductive.

We could thereby have our cake and eat it too, and so could everyone else, and we could work toward that in a mutual spirit of productive generosity and fair play in competition and cooperation. Or we can let the world go to hell in a handbasket, blame that disintegration on the very enemies we identified as causal in the first place (those damned capitalists!), and fail to clean up our own souls as we persecute the imaginary wrong-doers responsible for the destruction of our planet. – Jordan Peterson

The rate of change is accelerating. Our ability to do almost everything is doubling, faster and faster. As our ability to communicate and to compute accelerates, the consequences of our inner disunity and insufficiency become ever more serious. As we become individually more powerful, in other words, we must take on more responsibility. Or else. –

In the psychological and educational arenas, too, we demoralise young people, feeding them a constant diet of concretised apocalypse, focusing particularly on tempering or even obliviating the laudable ambition of boys, hectoring them into believing that their virtue is nothing but the force that oppresses the innocent and despoils the virginal planet. And, if that doesn’t work – and it does – then there’s always the castration awaiting the gender-dysphoric. And you oppose such initiatives at substantial personal risk. 

But we can reassure ourselves with the fact that a beneficent government is going to set up warm spots in public libraries and museums this winter so that freezing, starving old people can huddle together to keep warm while their grandchildren cough up their lungs in their frigid, damp, and mouldy flats.

In such circumstances – in the race of such mandatory privations and manipulations – it’s obvious that the last thing our tyrannical virtue-signalling governments should be doing is directing their demented attention toward regulating what people serve at their tables. But because meat has also been deemed yet something else that is “destroying the planet,” the woke narcissists of compassion are already insisting that people eat less of it. Plants and bugs for you and your children, peasants. – Jordan Peterson

Let’s turn our attention to the claim that animal husbandry and the meat it produces cheaply enough for everyone to afford is unsustainable, for a moment, because we haven’t yet dispensed with enough moralising and authoritarian stupidity.

Remember what happened the last time that governmental agencies applied their tender mercy to determining what the people they serve should consume? We were offered the much-vaunted food pyramid, telling us to eat 6-11 servings of grains and carbohydrates a day, with protein and fat at the pinnacle – something to be indulged in with comparative rarity, if indeed necessary at all.

That all turned out to be wrong, and not just a little wrong, but so wrong that it might as well have been not just wrong but a veritable anti-truth: something as wrong as it could possibly get. – Jordan Peterson

So the “health benefits” of a pure vegetarian and vegan diet are dubious at best. But what of the argument that animal husbandry is killing the planet? Well, the American Environmental Protection Agency estimates that all farming produces only 11 per cent of greenhouse gases in the US (transportation produces 27 per cent). Livestock accounts for 3 per cent. And plant-based agriculture? Five per cent. According to the National Academy of Sciences, if we eradicated all animal-based agriculture, we’d reduce greenhouse gases by a mere 2.6 per cent. And it’s no simple matter, by the way – and perhaps impossible – to manage a diet that is sustainable in the medium-to-long-term by merely dining on plants. – Jordan Peterson

What might we do, instead, if we chose to be genuinely wise, instead of inflicting want and privation upon the world’s poor, while failing utterly and disastrously to save the planet?

We could begin by assuming, here in the West, that all those frightened into paralysis and enticed into tyranny by their apprehension of the pending apocalypse have bitten off more than they can properly chew; have taken on a dragon much more fire-breathing and dire than they are heroic; have failed entirely to contend with the moral hazard that comes in assuming that the faddish emergency of their overheated imaginations emergency entitles them to the use of power and compulsion.  – Jordan Peterson

It’s time for all of us, but especially the self-righteous moralisers, to get our individual acts together, to take on some real moral responsibility, instead of falsely broadcasting unearned virtue far and wide and so cheaply and carelessly.

It’s time to drop the prideful intellectualism so overweening that we are willing to use compulsion and force to get our way – always for the sake of the general good. It’s time to drop the envy that makes us criticise and demonise anyone who has more than us, driven by the presumptions that such abundance must be the consequence of the application of arbitrary power and the result of theft – while what we have obtained, even though it is more than many possess, was merely garnered by the force of goodwill and morality. 

It’s time to shed the inexcusably pathological presumption among the elite that only corrupt power rules (everyone except them) and to express some gratitude for the traditions of the past and the near-miraculous infrastructure we have been granted. 

It’s time to take on the abandoned civic responsibility that has been justified through an unearned cynicism and return necessary authority to the local levels that moderate top-down tyranny. – Jordan Peterson

Finally, it’s time to say no in some absolute and fundamental sense (and without hesitation) to all those who dare to propose that dooming perhaps a billion people to starvation and penury is justified by the potential consequences of failing to do so. So no one gets to say with impunity: “the planet has too many people on it.”

Too many people have already been sacrificed in the last hundred years on the altar of future utopias. Enough, truly, is enough. – Jordan Peterson

We have a moral problem in this country. Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a cowardice problem.

One of the reasons the other side is winning the culture wars – and no one should be in any doubt that they are – is that too few conservatives and genuine liberals (as opposed to authoritarian neo-Marxists who have hijacked the term) have the guts to stand up and declare themselves. – Karl du Fresne

The people who comment know what’s going on. They realise that liberal democracy and capitalism are under unprecedented attack. They are thoughtful and perceptive in identifying the threats posed by the cult of identity politics and they know what’s necessary to counter it.

They understand that we are in an ideological war to protect and preserve the values of the free, tolerant society we grew up in. – Karl du Fresne

The people driving the culture wars have no such qualms. Confident in the knowledge that their world view is shared by the institutions of power and influence – government, the bureaucracy, academia, schools, the media, the arts, even the corporate sector – they promulgate their divisive, corrosive messages without fear.

They are winning by default because too many people on the other side keep their heads down and their identity secret. People whose political instincts are essentially conservative may not be outnumbered, but they are certainly outgunned.

It’s a given that conservatism often equates with passivity and apathy. The vast mass of people who are broadly happy with the status quo will never compete with the ideological zeal of the social justice warriors, and it would be idle to expect them to. But I’m not talking here about the masses who are primarily concerned with raising a family, paying the mortgage and watching rugby; I’m talking about those who are deeply worried about the radical re-invention of New Zealand society and who recognise the need to oppose it. They’re the people who need to raise their heads above the parapet. – Karl du Fresne

The emergence of the FSU is a heartening sign that resistance to authoritarian censorship is slowly gaining momentum, but there’s a long way to go. In the meantime, it would help if more people demonstrated their support for free speech by openly and unapologetically exercising it. The more who step forward, the more they give courage to others. It’s called critical mass. – Karl du Fresne

Meanwhile, businesses and households are right to be terrified about what lies ahead.
Over 100,000 households are going to come off fixed mortgages in the next year, and face a tripling of their monthly interest payments.

At the same time, house prices are now picked to fall by more than a quarter off the peak.

A family who bought a $1 million house at the peak with a $250,000 deposit will lose all their savings and have to pay three times as much interest on the $750,000 they borrowed. – Matthew Hooton

Inflation is now endemic in the New Zealand domestic economy and employees and their unions will rightly demand at least 7 per cent pay rises just to stand still.

But 7 per cent is just the start. – Matthew Hooton

China did not make New Zealand its best little friend in the west a generation ago out of benevolence, but to infiltrate, influence and undermine the Five Eyes intelligence alliance through its smallest, weakest and most naive member. – Matthew Hooton

The immediate economic risks to New Zealand are stark enough. Add in the medium-term risks and the images of the Prime Minister playing in the snow on what can only be considered a jolly represent a serious political miscalculation.

The next election should be a watershed moment in New Zealand history. Like 1935, 1972, 1984 and 1990, serious decisions about economic and foreign policy need to be made. – Matthew Hooton

This week marks five years since Jacinda Ardern became New Zealand’s 40th prime minister. In modern British political terms, such a period might now be referred to as an era. In New Zealand, too, it feels just like that: a very long time. – Oliver Hartwich 

Instead of simply allocating funds to various government departments, the state now aims for something higher: it aspires to uplift its citizens in an almost spiritual manner. Whether it succeeds in that quest is a different question, but the very idea of the New Zealand state has changed under Ardern.

What has not changed are some negative trends that have plagued New Zealand for many years before her: the country’s sluggish productivity, its declining education system, its infrastructure deficits, its ridiculous house prices. In each of these areas, the problems have continued or indeed worsened.

Ardern’s record is one of deep change in the nature of the New Zealand state and its relationship to citizens. On the country’s most pressing social and economic problems, Ardern has not achieved any improvement. On many measures, the country is actually worse off than it was when she became Prime Minister.

The fact that Ardern’s record on the ground remains poor has been doubly masked: by the aforementioned constitutional changes, which are popular in parts of the electorate and the commentariat, and by Ardern’s superb communication skills. – Oliver Hartwich 

What has really brought this political upheaval to a head across Europe, however, is the energy crisis, driven by a belief that they could be energy independent using only wind and solar generation and decarbonising their economies. Unfortunately, their ambition was well ahead of practical reality, and they consequently became overly dependent on Russian gas and the good will of Vladimir Putin. Putin is not the source of their energy woes; he merely accelerated their energy crisis. – Stuart Smith

For too long the world has taken cheap and reliable energy for granted, but there is a close relationship between GDP, energy and life expectancy; something we should not forget. Wind and solar will of course play an important role in the energy sector but it will not be the nirvana that many claim.-

Despite the claims from environmentalists, we are far more dependent on gas than many realise: many homes are reliant on gas and many industries are underpinned by gas, most often with no economically viable alternative.
We could make more of the opportunity that our local gas industry offers us by utilising the methanol produced by Methanex to lower our local shipping industry’s emissions. Methanol is a much cleaner burning fuel than diesel and has lower CO2 emissions as well; that is why shipping giant Maersk has just ordered six new ships that will run on methanol. – Stuart Smith

There’s so much regulation coming at us and costs just keep going up. I wonder whether it will get to the point where it’s not possible to make a living here and then there won’t be farm left here for them to take over.  – Ben Dooley

From what I’ve worked out it will cost us about $1.70 a sheep in the first year and about $5 a head by 2030. Combined with paying that tax and limit setting on the amount of fertiliser you can use, which is the next thing coming, it might not be financially viable to be here. – Ben Dooley

Without primary industries in general, but particularly pastoral agriculture, we are in very big trouble as to how to pay for all the imports of goods that we cannot produce here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Solving the methane issue would be a real big deal. – Keith Woodford

Pulling all of this evidence together, the big picture is that there are no magic technology bullets that can drastically alter the reality that ruminants emit methane for a good reason. This methane is the outcome of evolutionary processes that produce animals that are fit for the grassland environment in which they live naturally.

However, that does not mean that no progress can be made in terms of emitting less methane per unit of meat and milk output. Indeed, the last 30 years have produced an amazing but seldom told New Zealand story as to how methane emissions per kg of sheep meat have reduced by about 30%. Dairy emissions per kg of Milksolids (fat plus protein) have reduced by about 20%.

The way these spectacular efficiency improvements have been achieved is by the breeding of more productive animals and incorporating these animals within improved farming systems. Fortunately, improved biological efficiency has also led to efficiency improvements relating to methane emissions. – Keith Woodford

We are engaged in a decades-long conscious-uncoupling from our imperial past and towards some uncertain future firmly anchored in an imagined pre-colonial world, where the inhabitants of these shaky isles lived in harmony with nature and one another. – Damien Grant

There is some revisionism going, on but historical narratives are often built on self-deception. Those currently living around the Nile have as valid a claim on the pyramids as the Slavic inhabitants of North Macedonia have on the exploits of Alexander the Great.

Details and facts can be left to historians and pedants while we rush forwards to a glorious past. – Damien Grant

The British Empire is an easy target, especially if you gain your understanding of history from the New Zealand school system or social media memes. Both equally reliable.

But let’s take a longer look at the Empire’s legacy before we tear it from our cultural soil.

The British Empire was remarkable. Only the Romans have cast a more potent historical shadow. – Damien Grant

English is the lingua-franca both because of its ability to absorb foreign words, like lingua-franca, and the extent of the Empire’s reach resulted in English being the second language of half the world.

The Empire carried more than the language of the Bard and smallpox to the far corners of humanity. They brought ideas.

Some were rooted in a belief in the racial and cultural superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, but there were other enlightenment ideals that represent the best of humanity.

The separation of church and state, the importance of an independent judiciary, the freedom of ideas, the sovereignty of the individual and the value of democracy. Some, it pains me to say, originated in Paris rather than London or Glasgow. – Damien Grant

The success of anti-slavery politician William Wilberforce is often hailed as a legacy the Empire can be proud of, and rightly so, but this is to miss the significance of his achievement in securing the abolition of slavery in the Empire in 1833.

Wilberforce prevailed because he was drawing on enlightenment ideas of humanity. – Damien Grant

The abolition of slavery was not due to one man’s advocacy, but to an evolution of ideas that also gave us democracy and the legal principles of habeas corpus and ultra vires.

For all the Empire’s failings, it installed in those lands where her writ ran concepts and systems of government that have remained long after the last red-coat slinked off-shore.

Such is the power of these ideals that where they were violated, such as in South Africa, Pakistan and Fiji, the state has never been able to completely eradicate them.

They lurk, like gorse, in the hearts and minds of the populace and, when given an opportunity, reassert themselves. – Damien Grant

 Sunak will succeed or fail based on his merits and achievements, his decisions and the vicissitudes of fortune. His race and religion are cause for comment but neither an obstacle nor an advantage.

We can change the names of our cities, abandon the monarchy and eschew as many Shakespearian nightmares as decency will allow.

We can discard the worst elements of our imperial legacy, repair the damage caused by Treaty breaches and betrayals, and apologise for the mistakes made in a previous era.

But let us preserve the idea that the value of a person is a function of their ability, achievements and character, and nothing else. – Damien Grant

Voters don’t reward incumbent governments when they feel poor. Already, some will feel poor on paper as they watch their property value drop. Already, some feel poor in reality as they fork out more and more for rising mortgage rates. And shortly, many more will feel poor as nearly half the country’s mortgages roll over in the next few months and the mortgage interest payments double or triple.

From co-governance to incompetence there is a lot denting Labour’s chances at the next election, but this is probably the worst: homeowners’ mild sense of panic at rising mortgage rates and falling house prices.- Heather du Plessis Allan

Getting ahead of social problems like crime will save money in the long term, but far more important than that, it means fewer victims in the broadest sense of the term.

How we do that we can debate and argue all we like, but there ought to be no debate that prevention is what we absolutely must do. – Jarrod Gilbert

The ideologies of diversity and inclusion, decolonisation, intersectionality (a web of oppressions), gender and critical race theory have spread too deep and wide, leaking like dye and soaking the fabric of society with their toxic hue.

Woke progressives often speak of “re-educating” those who disagree with them. But the sad truth is that if we are to save the soul of the West, we will need not so much to “re-educate” as to persuade our opponents that they are wrong. – Zoe Strimpel 

For children, father absence is associated with poverty, material hardship, abuse and neglect, lower cognitive capacity, substance use, poorer physical and mental health and criminal offending. But estranged fathers can also suffer materially and emotionally. The mortality rate of fathers paying child support is significantly higher than the norm. – Lindsay Mitchell

The long march of the left through our institutions is now paying off handsomely as their graduates scale the commanding heights of big business and big government. – Brianna McKee

The Arderns of the world are made in the image of their creators – entrenched left-wing lecturers, administrators, and bureaucrats who fill universities across the Western world, particularly Australia.

These individuals have turned universities into institutions that limit free speech via a culture that is antagonistic to viewpoint diversity. This directly opposes the historical mission of higher education.

The true mission of a university is to impart knowledge and hone the mind through debate and challenge, yet groupthink and cancel culture have been rife on campus for years. – Brianna McKee

Increasingly, universities are limiting speech by institutionalising ideology. Indigenous relations, Climate Change, and gender equality litter the policy lists of the higher education sector.

There is no better indication that free-thinking intellectuals are losing the battle than the fact that the number of policies instituted by universities has increased exponentially in recent years, jumping from 136 in 2018 to 281 in 2022. Many of these new policies directly promote social justice causes. – Brianna McKee

By promoting only one side of a controversial issue, universities attach a value judgment to it and suggest it is the superior position to hold.

This closes debate and crushes viewpoint diversity. A university cannot be dedicated to an ideology and simultaneously open to challenging perspectives.

The latest tactic of university-trained elites, like Ardern, is to claim an alleged influx of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ when thought goes against their opinion. – Brianna McKee

Unprecedented prosperity, opportunity, education, tolerance, and welfare are hallmarks of Western Civilisation and are the products of freedom of speech, thought, and association.

The fall of most great societies take place as they turn against, or fail to value, the things that made them great. – Brianna McKee

Each day more Jacindas are rolling off the university production line. Warm, genteel, and empathetic right up until the moment they want you silenced, cancelled, or fired from your job.

The Enlightenment mission of universities has been turned on its head. Tyranny has indeed had a makeover and every day our graduates exit university more closed and small-minded than ever before. – Brianna McKee

FSU ranks universities on free speech

The Free Speech Union has ranked universities on their policies and practices for upholding free speech :

The Free Speech Union has released the first Annual Universities Ranking Report, taking a critical look at the policies and practices of New Zealand’s universities with regards to free speech, and “grading” them on whether they suppress or encourage academic freedom and free expression on campus, says Jonathan Ayling, spokesperson for the Free Speech Union.

“As an institution, the University is critical for introducing, challenging, and disseminating ideas in New Zealand culture and society. It has a traditional and statutory role as ‘critic and conscience’ of society and the Free Speech Union is determined to showcase universities that bear this responsibility, and to hold them to account when they don’t.

“The report analyses the policies and reported practices of universities, alongside the perceptions of their own academic staff (as shown in the Annual Free Speech Union Academic Survey) to determine where speech is most free on campus. It has been reviewed by the Free Speech Union Academic Advisory Council and presents a thorough overview of the state of free speech at universities.

“It is apparent which institutions uphold their role as ‘critic and conscience’ and those that seem to value their supposed progressive reputations over the ability for their staff and students to express themselves and perform research freely. The only university to receive a fail mark was Auckland University of Technology, which continues to display consistent opposition to free speech and its role as ‘critic and conscience’ of society.

“Despite the wide range of results, we believe all universities have room for improvement and we hope to engage constructively with Vice-Chancellors to amend and develop policy that enhances the freedom of their staff and students.

“We intend for this report to be updated annually to track the development of academic freedom and free speech in New Zealand’s universities. It is our expectation that we will see consistent improvement in years to come.”

The full report is here.

Victoria University scored best, with an A:

Committed to academic freedom and free speech in both policy
and practice. Policies show few restraints on free speech and
controversial events are consistently allowed despite protests
and calls for cancellation. 

Auckland Institute of Technology scored worst with an F:

Comparatively little regard given to responsibility of upholding
free expression and academic freedom, alongside policies that
show willingness to police language. Poor record regarding
controversial events, displaying a willingness to suppress ideas
in favour of maintaining progressive reputation. 

Ah the word progressive which has become oxymoronic in that its followers are regressive, fostering a return to the bad old days and bad places where thoughts were policed and free speech curtailed.

Quotes of the month

The provocation of fragility requires a bureaucracy of defenders to alleviate its consequences. The more fragile people become, the more they will run to the authorities for protection, as children run to their parents when they imagine witches at the window. A fragile population requires protectors, for the fragile by definition are incapable of protecting themselves, for example by confronting or moving away from a starer, but the would-be protectors themselves are cowards who prefer imaginary enemies to real and dangerous ones: thus is the dialectic between fragility and public employment on futile tasks created and maintained. – Theodore Dalrymple 

We in the anglosphere have become so used to conducting our business affairs in a “marketplace” that we take it for granted and if we give it any thought at all we ignore how fundamental it is to our way of life, preservation of our liberties, and to the health of our democracy. It is no accident that those who seek to destroy those liberties and democracy must first destroy the market economy by either state ownership on the Lenin model or an ersatz market place on the Russian and Chinese models. But what do we know about the history of this phenomena. – Anthony Willy

This means of organising society by allowing the untrammelled myriad daily personal decisions of the market place fulfils our most basic needs of food and shelter leading to the intellectual drive involved in the rise of science and the arts in what we call our civilised society. Above all it contributed to what may be mankind’s greatest achievement; the flowering of democracy which for many years we have taken for granted. However all is not well in the free market garden. Until recently the law was clear that any trader incorporated as a company with shareholders and a board of directors, (and that is most of the larger traders) the directors owed duties solely to their shareholders, and their only function was to maximise the profits of the company for the benefit of the shareholders with whose money they had  been entrusted. Increasingly this is no longer the case and there is a growing tendency for governments and pressure groups to require the directors to be influenced in their decision making  by extraneous matters such as global warming and gender politics. The Human Resources departments of many of New Zealand companies have responded enthusiastically to these demands with the result that the company is no longer able to trade freely and maximise the returns to the shareholders. In some cases this has resulted in the company ceasing hitherto profitable ventures with the loss of autonomy that entails.  Over the longer term nothing could be more destructive to the survival of free markets particularly as these are not constraints suffered by competitors in the totalitarian economies with whom we do business. In addition to these self imposed fetters there are of course ever present and more malign alternatives.   – Anthony Willy

That Marx’s prescription for substituting a system of state control for the free market is contrary to human nature has been amply borne out by the experience of those despots who have tried to impose it. The reason is simple, nowhere in the world has it flourished by the voluntary acceptance of the people. All such despots have failed sooner or later and will continue to do so, including those, such as the Peoples Republic of China and Russia who have attempted a bit of both by allowing a “market economy” to operate but only with the consent of the state and without democracy. The toll in human suffering when the state snuffs out private enterprise has been incalculable. – Anthony Willy

The other alternative to democracy and the free-market system and one gaining a lot of airtime among the “intelligentsia” in New Zealand is that of tribal control of the means of production and exchange whereby each tribe owns and controls its own assets and, human nature being what it is defends them from the covetous eyes of its neighbours. This alternative to free markets and communism was that practised by Maori tribes in New Zealand before the arrival of the Europeans, and it no doubt worked throughout their uninterrupted occupation of the country. It has shortcomings however as a means of maximising the wealth of society not least of which are: nobody owns anything and therefore cannot prosper from their labours (no pumpkin man), it invites tribal warfare if one tribe is being seen to do better than the neighbour, it creates no enduring “wealth” and causes envy and disaffection when eyes are cast  over the fence at those tribes enjoying the fruits of their labours. – Anthony Willy

There is nothing exceptional about this course of events, it is to be found in the remaining tribal societies mostly in Africa. It is always accompanied  by horrendous violence such as the genocide that occurred in Rwanda and to a lesser extent Kenya. Unsurprisingly after the bloodletting this is now in the past as most African countries have rejected communism and tribalism and have embraced free markets and democracy (albeit a bit dodgy at times). But astonishingly in New Zealand with a record of a settled and prosperous society second to none separate Maori tribal representatives, egged on by other worldly academics are promoting a tribal take over of our hitherto democratically elected institutions based solely on race.  –  Anthony Willy

Languages exist for one reason only — to communicate meaning. To this end they evolve with time and what is useful endures and what is not withers. And that’s it. That’s the inevitable, immutable, blind process, and nothing we say or do will alter it. Languages cheerfully borrow from each another. English has adopted hundreds of Maori words, largely to describe things that exist here and nowhere else — pukeko, rimu, mana and so on. And Maori has taken on board no end of words from English to describe the materials and ideas that settlers brought. But having borrowed them a language makes them its own. It fits them into its own structure. So while there is some overlap of vocabulary between te reo and English, there is none of grammar or syntax. The languages remain grammatically distinct.

The RNZ National announcer appeared to be speaking a new and hybrid tongue, part te reo, part English. In reality she was speaking English — the language she used to convey meaning — and she was dropping in chunks of te reo for a moral or political purpose. And language evolution scoffs at moral or political purposes.

In short, she was wasting her time. In doing so she was alienating Ms Plum, educating noone, patronising Maoridom and barking up a barren linguistic plum tree.- Joe Bennett

One of the most witless, inane and paradoxically evil ideas to contaminate contemporary culture in recent years is kindness, or, as what amounts to a campaign slogan says, ‘Be Kind’. On the surface, what could possibly be wrong with being kind to each other? Only brutes and criminals would find something wrong with such an obviously decent notion. The problem, though, is that beneath its beautiful and superficially moral surface, kindness, in its contemporary iteration, is surreptitiously ideological and smuggles into everyday life entirely new ideas of metaphysics, logic and epistemology, ones that have profoundly negative consequences for liberal democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. – Roger Franklin

We’ve established that kindness per se is not a sufficient condition for decent behaviour because political ideologies determine who can be treated with kindness and who can be treated with cruelty. This gets to the crux of the present situation because underpinning the current notion of kindness is the contemporary moral and ethical system of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), which has been introduced into almost every institution in Western liberal democracies. The HR department in your workplace, and workers’ rights legislation in your state or country, will almost certainly be infused with this ideology.

The problem, though, is that the politics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — wokeness, in other words — establishes a hierarchy of the saved and the dammed through the postmodern notion of identity. Where you sit on the hierarchy of marginalised groups, or whether you are intersectionally oppressed — perhaps doubly, triply or multiply oppressed — determines your saintly status. Individual rights, then, are no longer the sine qua non of liberal democracy. What we have, essentially, is irrationalism as a new metaphysics. – Roger Franklin

How are individual rights being supplanted by group rights, which are the modus operandi of all authoritarian regimes? How has this occurred in a liberal democratic political system where debate is a constituent part of its philosophy? It’s simple: institutional capture. Individual rights have been hollowed out from the inside by ideologues. What’s most depressing, though, is that the whole unedifying spectacle has been performed in the plain sight of our governing elites, who, while often hard-working and honest, are seldom intellectually sophisticated.  – Roger Franklin

While kindness is the slogan, the Trojan Horse of the ideology is the triple strategy of equivocating speech with violence, subjectivism and the weaponising of mental health. It’s a tapestry of confusion where all the threads fit together.

Conflating speech with violence means that hurt feelings, rather than damaged bodies, are utilised as a weapon of the ‘oppressed’. Hurting someone’s feelings — subjectivism, in other words — is viewed as violence. This is important because liberal democracy, at its core, rejects violence. Violence, as any civilised person should know, is always the last resort in adjudicating conflict. Consequently, indulging in violence, especially towards a disadvantaged person or an identity group, is the very definition of discrimination.

Modern subjectivism is based on the postmodern claim that truth is a fiction — bizarrely, even logical and scientific truths. – Roger Franklin

“Truth”, in its modern iteration, is defined as the epistemology of straight white males, who are viewed as the purveyors of all that is destructive in modern history. According to postmodernists and intersectional feminists, though, there are other ways of understanding the world, amongst them the ‘lived experience’ of identity groups , which are presented as equally valid. Feminists, for example, have claimed for decades that witchcraft and alternative medicine have been ‘marginalised’ by male ways of knowing, and that these epistemologies are as legitimate as the scientific method. That this is nonsense needs to be stressed because the idea that all opinions are valid has become a constituent narrative of contemporary culture. The irony is that postmodernists could not flourish if they followed their own philosophy, because irrational people live sub-optimal lives or simply die. – Roger Franklin

The expansion of mental health psychology into areas that, until recently, were considered the existential and ordinary facts of life, is not coincidental. The phenomenon runs parallel and in conjunction with the rise of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Feelings are now the gold standard of whether one is suffering from a mental health problem, not an imprudent lifestyle choice or any of the dreadful psychological conditions that make life a misery for people whose minds or brains are not working in a functional way.

The three strategies are equally important to the ideology, and they shift, twist, intertwine and turn depending on the situation. Put them all together and a comprehensive strategy exists to curtail freedom of speech, individual conscience and, inevitably, liberal democracy. – Roger Franklin

What DEI means in practice is not what its proponents advertise to the world. In practical terms the ideology works in the following way: Diversity stresses a plurality of group identity and not a plurality of opinion. Equity is an impossible dream which can only be enacted, with dreadful consequences, by force. And inclusion, by definition, welcomes different identity groups without criticism, and no-one else. Remember that, according to the theory, subjective feelings, which are denied validity by individuals and society lead to mental health issues, while truth itself is grounded in the identities of race, sex, class and gender. Everything must be affirmed rather than rejected or criticised because words which offend are construed as violence or are damaging to a person whose “identity” is questioned or criticised.

This is why statues are being pulled down around the world; why people with what were, until about five years ago, moderate views are called bigots; why supporters of free speech are called Nazis; why J.K. Rowling is called transphobic; why bad works of art by minority figures are replacing Beethoven, Shakespeare and Renoir (or, at the very least, how they are presented in concert halls, theatres and art galleries). It’s why those who offend are hounded from their jobs and see their reputations and livelihoods ruined. And all this is being perpetrated by ideologues with a fanatical zeal and, ironically, not a shred of kindness. – Roger Franklin

Nothing solid survives this pernicious attack on everything of value, and it’s why the cult of kindness and its three subordinate strategies — equating speech with violence, subjectivism and weaponising mental health — undermine the entire edifice of liberal democracy, which is a form of government based on individualism and the robust claims of negative rights. Two things define liberal democratic philosophy: don’t do this, and you’ve a right to offend. In straightforward terms, you can be an absolute bastard if you don’t commit a crime or perpetrate violence on your fellow citizens. That’s about all people can ask for or expect.

The rest of the noise about rights is virtue-signalling nonsense, money-making scams, or snake-oil drenched in false morality. Sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind. And sometimes you just need to be kind. Woke kindness is the inverse of the normal conception of kindness and it is toxic to individual rights. Don’t fall for the nonsense, linguistic equivocation is one of the oldest tricks in the book. – Roger Franklin

Just because you are Māori does not make you an expert in anything except being Māori. The government, in their determination to divide this nation racially, are mixing too many things together and hoping you won’t notice.

Clean water is one thing, and we all want it. Hijacking democracy for ideological purposes around race, we don’t.

This fight is far from over, and as such Friday’s update changes nothing. – Mike Hosking

Some defenders of Three Waters argue that the regional representation groups made up of iwi and council representatives are so removed from the day-to-day control of the water assets that anyone asserting iwi will play a significant role as co-governors can only be intent on making mischief. But if that argument is correct, Mahuta should have no trouble at all in dropping iwi members from her proposed set-up.

The fact the minister shows no sign of bending on co-governance — no matter how intense and overwhelming the opposition — will only convince increasing numbers of voters that the whole point of Three Waters is to function as a Trojan horse to hand unelected iwi members control over billions of dollars’ worth of community assets. – Graham Adams 

The belief that free speech is a “Right-wing conservative” ideal reveals a very limited knowledge of history. In different generations, the Left and the Right have both advocated for and opposed free speech. That’s why free speech is not a Left-Right issue; it’s a liberty-orientated vs authoritarian issue. – Jonathan Ayling

Now, that word “racist”. I believe a racist is someone who thinks certain races are inherently superior to others and therefore entitled to rights not available to supposedly “inferior” races. That’s a meaning we can all agree on. But the moment you stretch the definition beyond that, the word can mean anything the user wants it to mean. In the contemporary New Zealand context, that means it can be applied to anyone who disagrees with you – for example, on issues such as 50-50 co-governance with iwi. But the people who throw the term “racist” around don’t realise that they have stripped the word of its potency. “Racist” should be the most offensive epithet imaginable, placing the accused person on a par with Adolf Hitler or the Ku Klux Klan. But the word is so overused as to have become meaningless, so Shelley’s wasting her breath there. – Karl du Fresne

There is a unique record of co-operation, harmony and goodwill between the two main racial groups. That’s manifested in the history of inter-marriage which today ensures that every person who identifies as Maori must also own up to some European blood, which means their supposed oppressors included their own white forebears. I’ve yet to see anyone reconcile those awkward truths. If we’re to move forward as a society we need to acknowledge that all our forebears did bad things in the distant past and then put them behind us. We have too much in common to risk fracturing a society that the rest of the world has long seen as exemplary.

Where we run into trouble is where the Maori activist agenda collides with democracy. Democracy isn’t a white supremacist invention imposed to keep minority groups firmly under the heel of their oppressor. On the contrary, it’s a system whereby every citizen’s vote – Maori, Pakeha, Pasifika, Chinese, Indian, whatever – carries the same weight. I believe absolutely in democracy because ultimately, everyone benefits from it and everyone has a say. It is the basis of every free and fair society in the world, and those who undermine it need to think very carefully about what form of government might replace it. I can’t think of any that would appeal to me – certainly not one that grants special rights, privileges and entitlements on the basis of ancestry. We have a name for that: feudalism. We were smart enough to abandon it several centuries ago.

To finish, I am Tangata Tiriti and proud to be so. Like all Pakeha New Zealanders I’m here by right of the Treaty, a point often overlooked by Treaty activists who talk as if it grants rights only to Maori. My forebears came here in the 1870s and 1890s and New Zealand, therefore, is my turangawaewae. The thing is, we’re all beneficiaries of the Treaty and we need to think very long and hard before unravelling the many threads that bind us.- Karl du Fresne

The real tragedy of the wage rises of that size is that they are, of course, adding to the very problem they are trying to solve. If you are paying more because you are making more, selling more, and getting higher returns that’s good. But if you are paying more merely to hold talent so you don’t go bankrupt then that serves no one well in the long run. – Mike Hosking

If you are offering work to all who want it through expansion, and as a result of expansion everyone shares in the success with wage increases, that’s your economic sweet spot.

But if you are in a country that doesn’t let people in, has an economy that’s stalled because growth is not possible due to lack of staff, but those staff get paid more anyway, then you have a pending disaster.

It’s grinding to a halt. It isn’t good for anyone. And when your jobless rate doesn’t go down even when there are jobs galore and no one coming in to take them, that is a seriously large red flag. – Mike Hosking

Ultimately what counts most in a democracy is what the public thinks and why people vote the way they do, and there can be few people more poorly qualified to assess the public mood than press gallery journalists. The narrow world they’re exposed to is simply not the world most New Zealanders live in.

It would be a useful grounding exercise for them to listen to talkback radio for an hour or so each day. I wouldn’t pretend that’s the key to understanding what real New Zealanders are thinking, but it would expose press gallery reporters to a more authentic world than the one they inhabit, which largely consists of fellow members of the political class. (Of course it wouldn’t happen, because the typical political journalist probably regards talkback callers as the untermenschen.) – Karl du Fresne

If this seems a rather sweeping condemnation of the entire gallery, I plead guilty. I acknowledge there are capable political journalists who make an honest attempt to do the job well. It’s just unfortunate that they are tainted by association with others who come across as self-absorbed, over-confident and, dare I say it, sometimes not very bright.  – Karl du Fresne

In my fairly long experience as a doctor, I discovered that many were those who willfully, knowingly, and unnecessarily sought misery. They did things that they knew in advance would end disastrously, often in short order. I also discovered that the ways of self-destruction were infinite: One could never enumerate or come to the end of them.

Among the proofs that we were not made for happiness but on the contrary often seek out its opposite is the fact that so many of us follow the news closely, though we know it will make us wretched to do so. We pretend that we have a need to be informed and are shocked when we meet someone who hasn’t the faintest idea of what is going on in the world. How can he bear to be so ignorant, how can he be so indifferent? It is our duty as citizens of a democracy to be informed, or to inform ourselves, even at the cost of our own misery; because, of course, news rarely gives us reasons to rejoice. – Theodore Dalrymple

To observe happiness in others and to think of misery is, of course, the sign of an unhappy or discontented life. There are those who would look at the Taj Mahal and think only of how absurd it was, how unjust to the toiling multitudes, that the wife of an emperor should be memorialized in this extravagant fashion when all she had was the accident of beauty and the luck to be beloved of an emperor; these are sour people who would prefer the perfect justice of universal ugliness to an unevenly and unjustly spread beauty. – Theodore Dalrymple

It is clear that Ardern’s government plans to produce a document which sets out a future plan for Maori only, at the expense of parliamentary democracy and the civil and human rights of 84% of the New Zealand population. They are following exactly the same strategy they have in imposing “co-governance’ and compulsory acculturation of the New Zealand population throughout the public service, education system, health, welfare and justice, plus the enforced establishment of Maori wards in local authorities. – Henry Armstrong

The Declaration Plan feedback document contains many proposals which will effectively establish a race-based,  separatist Apartheid structure in New Zealand. Mainstream media have deliberately downplayed the huge adverse implications for New Zealand going forward and have purposely contributed to the Ardern government’s ongoing strategy of deception, untruths and misinformation.

If we believe Ardern (who has a habit of reneging on her previous statements, such as taxes), the NZ public will be “consulted” sometime this year, with no guarantee that this “consultation” process will in any way affect the Plan, once decided upon, for to do so would mean Ardern and co are themselves racist – and we cannot of course have that, can we?

And you thought Putin is evil?  – Henry Armstrong

Do not let low unemployment fool you into thinking everything is fine. It might well be the opposite .- Oliver Hartwich

Bad rules and regulations are more common than you think. Although the worst offenders eventually prompt action, it’s the costly (but not too costly) rules that accumulate over time that kill an economy by sclerosis  –Sam Dumitriu

Anyone who asks the question “what is a woman?” is thereby revealing that they have the intelligence of your average garden slug. This is why we shouldn’t trust these so-called “archaeologists” who claim to be able to determine whether those ancient skeletons they’ve uncovered are “male” or “female”. This is pure pseudo-science. Next they’ll be telling us they can work out their pronouns by measuring the femurs.

Let me settle this matter once and for all. A woman is anyone who says she is a woman. A woman is a feeling, a shimmering nimbus of possibility, an echo of distant dreams reverberating gingerly through a winter’s gloaming. She is a mewling constellation, a bagful of semi-felched pixies, the enchanted stardust that pirouettes luminously on the spindle of time.

It’s got absolutely nothing to do with tits. – Titania McGrath

 It shouldn’t come as a surprise that so few people are familiar with Maori. For all the current chatter and virtue-signalling, the language is not taught as a compulsory subject in a public school system where young Maori kids, especially boys, already leave early in disproportionately high numbers.

If Ardern’s government really wanted to make a difference, it could do more to encourage deprived Maori kids to stay on in education. As it is, it seems more content to change road signs and baffle visitors with startling name changes.– David Cohen

I find it unacceptable that despite our feedback over several decades, the government are still coercing the Pakeha identity on New Zealanders with European ancestry and am sure other ethnic groups have a similar frustration. – John Franklin

In this day and age where a boy is permitted to change his gender identity to female on the way to school at a whim, why are we being forced to assign to an identity we clearly don’t want?

The truth is that no one else’s opinion matters regarding our identity, we don’t need anyone’s permission, we don’t need a team of language experts, we don’t need a hui, it’s 100% our choice so all we need to do is to make a decision and then demand that our rights are respected. – John Franklin

There will always be those who will throw out their hate anchors to stop New Zealand from healing and moving forward but we can’t let them divide us further with their racist policies in the guise of indigenous rights.

Anything that undermines every New Zealander’s right to be treated equally or gives extra rights based on ethnicity is racist, it’s wrong and will have bad consequences. Don’t be fooled by the twisted use of the equity philosophy employed by those who want to justify their special privilege, only equality can be the foundation of our rights and freedoms. If the UN thinks the answer to divisive history is to elevate the rights of one ethnic group above the others, then they are just meddling fools that should be ignored as that undermines the foundation of equality which in turn undermines the rights and freedoms that are built on it. – John Franklin

The “woke” always surprise me with their high boredom threshold, for one would have thought that nothing could be more boring than always looking at the world through the narrow distorting lens of race, gender, and so forth and always coming to the same conclusion about it.

However, one has to give it to the woke: Just as you think that their idiocies can go no further, they come up with something new. They display a kind of malign inventiveness in finding new ways to provoke people of more sensible dispositions. The woke manage to be inventive and boring at the same time (as Marxists used to be); and while it’s boring to have to argue constantly against bores, it’s necessary to do so, because otherwise the undecided will come to think that the arguments of the woke are unanswered because they’re unanswerable. – Theodore Dalrymple

I think rather that wokedom is analogous to diseases such as Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob in humans and scrapie in sheep, caused by particles called prions that infect the brain and cause it to degenerate, resulting in strange and disturbed behavior ending in death. Unless a remedy is found, what will die, however, isn’t an individual human being, but ultimately a culture and a civilization. – Theodore Dalrymple

The problem with being a social justice advocate in a progressive liberal democracy is that there isn’t always enough overt sexism and racism from which to draw the requisite amounts of indignation. – Damien Grant

This country can stand rightly proud on what we have achieved when it comes to equality and diversity, even if serious mahi needs to be done in some areas. – Damien Grant

Investing with the disreputable Simon Henry provided an eight-times better return than with Companion of the NZ Order of Merit recipient and My Food Bag co-founder, Theresa Gattung.

This will be a surprise to no one who understands commerce, but to those who think EBITDArefers to a new grouping of intersectional identity, this result will have come as a bit of a shock. – Damien Grant

In years to come some government agency may run a slide-rule over similar comments to assess if they breach beefed-up hate-speech laws, but for the moment the only consequences are public scorn and the associated commercial risk of having said something objectively awful.

This is appropriate. Free speech isn’t speech without consequences. In a free-market, people can choose who they do business with, who they work for, and who they associate with. – Damien Grant

While many in the media were content to report and comment on what Henry said, others decided that they are guardians of a new morality.

It isn’t enough that sunlight be applied to Henry’s choice of language. There isn’t any point in being a Social Justice Warrior if you don’t occasionally bayonet the wounded. – Damien Grant

Is it possible that the search for outrage is inadvertently manufacturing it? – Damien Grant

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is widely misinterpreted as an effect where the observer changes what is occurring by their observation. It is possible that, through the manner in which the fourth estate has covered this event, they have created the very thing upon which they now breathlessly report on. – Damien Grant

Being a member of Parliament can bring out the best and the worst in people. You have to be slightly bonkers and have a high degree of confidence just to want to be an MP – unfortunately, that can click into arrogance really easily when you get there if not kept in check. I should point out that this arrogance is not the domain of just one political party. – Paula Bennett

I can’t believe that just three weeks ago Poto was denying there is a gang problem in NZ. But the PM has probably consoled herself that it’s not arrogance but incompetence and, as we see daily, that is acceptable in her Cabinet. – Paula Bennett

What should increasingly be worrying the PM is the arrogance of Trevor Mallard and the damage this is doing her. From badly handling the actual Parliament protest and then badly handling the aftermath by trespassing ex MPs and unforgivably giving Winston Peters a platform to crow from to generally running the debating chamber with ridiculous rulings that mean people can’t actually debate, it is time for him to bow out. – Paula Bennett

It is high time we stopped using History as a weapon, and started relying upon it as a guide. – Chris Trotter

Before we all became mesmerised by the internet, humans spent much of their time in a little place called the real world. Here, people tended to interact with each other face to face, in the flesh, and as such, one could get a good sense of a person’s character by observing their behaviour.

This all changed with the rise of social media. The transition from a world in which people interact in person to one in which people interact through text led to a shift in the way we define and judge people. With little visibility of a person’s deeds, we had to focus on their words. And so we began to define people primarily by their opinions.

Since opinions are now the basis of public interaction and identity, there’s a new pressure to have a point of view. If you don’t have a perspective on the thing everyone else is talking about, it becomes difficult to socialise—you basically don’t exist. The result is that people feel compelled to take a stance on everything. – Gurwinder

Research suggests that when humans are pressured to have an opinion on an issue they know little about, they’ll often just hastily make one up, ad-libbing without regard to facts or logic, rather than admitting they don’t know. To compound the problem, people dislike changing their opinions (as it requires admitting they were wrong), so their impromptu views, which they cobbled together from whim and half-remembered hearsay, will often become their new hills to die on.

Essentially, the pressure to have an opinion in the digital age can cause people to resort to believing, or professing to believe, babble. – Gurwinder

Since people are now defined chiefly by their opinions, there’s not just pressure to have an opinion, there’s pressure to have the best opinion—the smartest, most sophisticated, most high-status. Digital society has become a beauty contest for beliefs, an opinion pageant.

Clearly, if people are simply improvising their opinions, they’re not going to have good opinions, let alone the best ones. So people will often employ a different strategy: copying the opinions of others.

They typically do this by outsourcing their thinking to professional commentators, who offer prepackaged “designer opinions” that people can wear like haute couture to become the envy of their friends. – Gurwinder

However, just because a commentator is offering their opinions for sale, doesn’t mean their opinions are good. On the contrary, opinion-sellers often sell poorly considered opinions, because not only are they under the same pressure as everyone else to take stances on issues they know little about, but they must do so quickly. For a professional commentator, being the first one to think of a take is everything. As such, opinion-sellers will often rush their opinions out, and then, since they can’t change their view without looking bad, they’re forced to stick with it. – Gurwinder

Opinion-sellers make life easier for themselves and their customers by selling not just isolated opinions, but “opinion packages”. These are simplistic worldviews from which a set of consistent opinions on almost anything can be easily computed, equipping the bearer to opine on virtually any matter that comes up in conversation.

Arguably the most fashionable opinion package in the West today is what some refer to as “wokeness”. This is a kind of conspiracy theory that uses a lexicon of dubious concepts, such as “white fragility” and “toxic masculinity”, to portray Western society as “systemically” racist, misogynistic, and transphobic, and to scapegoat such problems on white people generally, and on straight white men specifically. – Gurwinder

Woke opinions are popular for several reasons. For a start, they lift a great burden from the brain; there’s no need to understand a complex world if you can just blame everything on bigotry. But arguably the most important advantage of woke opinions is their success in the opinion pageant. They’re an effective way to improve one’s social standing, because constantly calling out bigotry makes one look unbigoted, compassionate, and socially aware—all values with high social capital.

The social capital offered by wokeness makes it an indispensable opinion package in image-oriented industries like media, academia, Hollywood, and public relations, which may be why wokeness is most dominant in these spheres. – Gurwinder

But the trouble with opinions is that one cannot know for sure whether or not they’re sincerely held, which leads to another problem of the opinion pageant: fraud. Just as designer clothes can be counterfeited, so can designer opinions. Except opinions cost nothing to fake.

Ersatz beliefs are now common in the business world. Savvy corporations have realised that in the opinion pageant, they must take a political stance to secure relevance, and since wokeness is the most high status suite of opinions, they almost exclusively subscribe to that package. – Gurwinder

Wokeness offers corporations, celebrities, and other status-conscious entities the most prestigious package of views in the opinion pageant, but it’s increasingly having to contend with competitors. Perhaps the most notable of these is the “based” worldview. This opinion package is often sold by conservatives, but it’s less defined by what it’s for than what it’s against. And what it’s against is the reigning champion of the pageant, wokeness. – Gurwinder

The division of people into based, woke, and other competing worldviews has had an unfortunate side effect. It’s created a culture war between the various customer bases, a war that’s phony because most of the combatants are fighting for beliefs they haven’t properly considered, since they idly plagiarised them instead of concluding them through careful reasoning.

But the worst thing about the culture war is that it perpetuates the opinion pageant. When people become divided into factions, there becomes even more pressure to pick a side and have an opinion, or else one risks being known as a fence-sitter, a coward, or even worse, an enemy (“silence is violence!”, say the woke). The result is that even more people take a stance on issues they know little about. –

The end result of the opinion pageant is a fraudulent world, a world where most people’s opinions are not their own. It’s a world of puppets being ventriloquised by strangers—strangers who are likely themselves puppets. In such a world, where words matter more than deeds, and opinions matter more than character, being “smart” requires no gift for thought, only a gift for mimicry, and being “good” requires no heart of gold, only a silver tongue & brazen nature. – Gurwinder

In the end, opinions are a hopeless way to define people, because, like designer clothing, they’re both faddish and easily counterfeited. If you want to know someone’s true nature, look beyond their words, and scrutinise the one aspect of their character that’s costly to fake—their actions. – Gurwinder

While news from Ukraine has mainly been about infrastructure destruction, a small miracle is taking place in the war-torn country. As Putin’s forces continue to bombard their cities, Ukrainian authorities have already begun reconstruction. . .

The road holes where the shells exploded have been repaired. Water and electricity are back on.

Amazingly, even large pieces of infrastructure have been rebuilt. Among them were road and rail bridges that were destroyed by the Russians in the first weeks of the war.

Irpin’s main bridge is now replaced with a temporary bridge measuring nine meters wide and 245 meters long. It took five days of uninterrupted work to complete it. – Oliver Hartwich

So let’s send Waka Kotahi to Ukraine. And if they find Ukraine’s infrastructure secret, we may allow them to return to New Zealand – Oliver Hartwich

It is well known in all agricultural circles that the nitrogen fertilisers are the major contributor to lifting the third world out of poverty and why now, obesity is a bigger world-wide issue than malnutrition. And the peasant farmer getting richer is why the third world birthrate is dropping. But the watermelon Malthusians don’t want that.. You can’t establish a centrally planned world order in that environment. – Chris Morris

Bureaucrats sitting in Wellington are invariably highly skilled and the Ministry has some of the brightest public health advisors on staff too.

But I still feel they fail to realise the true impacts of the decisions they make on the lives of New Zealanders. – Merepeka Raukawa-Tait

Governments always talk about solutions being developed and decided closer to where the problems exist.

I couldn’t agree more. Communities do know what’s best for them. But with health that appears to be a “no go” area.

Communities are not trusted enough to be given the opportunity to have real input into planning and designing services.

They know the difference between primary and secondary healthcare and they know where they can make a meaningful contribution. – Merepeka Raukawa-Tait

We are in a warped world now, where work of minimal use and skill is better paid than what you might call a profession.

A world where reward comes from closed borders and a determination to limit the labour supply.

This is the recipe for economic ruin. It’s why today’s Budget will be in deficit, why the debt will be higher, and why the growth numbers will be anaemic if not non-existent.

A nurse starts at $53,000, a teacher $52,000, a dental assistant $46,000 and a lollipop person? $46,000.

You’ve got to be kidding me. – Mike Hosking

They have corrupted a crusade to save the planet into sleazy pork barrel politics. Labour and the Greens new climate change policies are just vote buying.

The climate change policies announced this week will not bring New Zealand one day closer to net zero emissions but will fund, to name one policy, changes to school curriculum and NCEA so we “embed an understanding of the collective nature of our wellbeing.” Our schools will be teaching socialist dogma.

It just proves we cannot trust politicians with our money; they will spend it on buying votes. – Richard Prebble 

Even those schemes that will reduce emissions will not alter the country’s path to net zero emissions. The path is already in place. The ETS requires all carbon producers to buy credits equal to their emissions. The total amount of emissions is capped and will decline to net zero by 2050.

The policies announced this week will not alter this path. Under the ETS scheme every unit saved from say switching to an electric vehicle frees up a unit for some other activity such as driving an eight-cylinder gas guzzler.

All these new policies will do is enrich some at the expense of others. Many, such as corporations, who will be feeding at the pork barrel, can finance their own route to zero emissions. – Richard Prebble 

A carbon credit from New Zealand forests has the same effect on the planet as a credit created from a tropical forest in the Solomon Islands.

It matters. While New Zealand is the world’s most efficient producer of milk we will never be the most efficient at growing forests to absorb carbon. An equivalent tropical forest absorbs four times more carbon.

New Zealand should be assisting poor countries like the Solomon Islands to regrow their tropical forests and earn ETS credits. Instead international investment funds are buying up productive New Zealand farms and turning them into inefficient carbon sinks.

Climate change in one country means the spot price of New Zealand carbon credits is $76.50. The world price is just US$20.81 – Richard Prebble 

Market price signals – not politicians – should decide the best way to allocate the carbon credits.

No marketplace would ever fund a “cash for clunkers” scheme. Everywhere it has been tried the scheme has proved a very expensive rort. When my daughter was training to be a teacher and needed a car to get to her rural school on section, I bought her an old clunker. Under this scheme she could trade that old clunker, get the $10 thousand subsidy, plus help from me, and buy a new car. I could drive the new car and let her drive my old car. She no longer has that car but you can see how easy the scheme is to rort.

Similar criticisms can be made of every one of the announced initiatives.

It is old fashioned centralized planning. Saving the planet is no reason to bring back failed socialist central planning. Combating climate change is so vital it is essential we use the most powerful and successful economic tool, the free market. – Richard Prebble 

When one surveys the various idiocies pursued by Western governments of late years, one cannot help but marvel at the stupidity of this branch of the human race, without immodestly guaranteeing that one would have done better than the buffoons and poltroons had we been in charge.

One of the reasons we could not guarantee this is that a condition of attaining power in modern democracies (other than insensate ambition and inner emptiness) is that those who seek power must promise six impossible things before breakfast to their credulous electorates. They must promise to square the circle, to part the Red Sea, to turn back the waves, to reconcile the irreconcilable. Afterward, they are trapped by their own rhetoric. When the circle refuses to be squared, the person who promised it becomes a figure of hate, ridicule, or contempt. It goes without saying that no electorate ever blames itself, any more than any fly blames itself for being a nuisance. –

For many years, the policy of several Western governments has been, by various subterfuges, to live beyond their means, to spread largesse they do not have, to put off the reckoning to another day, to deceive the electorate into thinking that what cannot continue will nevertheless continue, and moreover continue forever. No doubt it is economically primitive of me (by comparison, say, with the new monetary theorists), but I believe that the greatest economist who ever lived, or at least lived in a certain sense, was Mr. Micawber: – Theodore Dalrymple

To be frank, climate change is not high on my list of prioritise personally. I’m not a denier, I just don’t care terribly.

So, I’m not unhappy about this announcement today, because I feel like I’ve dodged a cost bullet again.

But I do wonder what the heck they’ve been up to if it’s taken them this long to pull together a plan that has no plan in it.  – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Since Grant Robertson became minister of finance, government spending has gone up 68 percent. With all of the growth forecasts slashed and most of the increased tax revenues spent, there is little in the Budget that shows the government is doing anything to stop the country from going backwards.

Granting everybody’s wishes may be fun, but it is unsustainable. – Brigette Morten

Labour’s failure to order the Covid vaccine on time looks to have cost the average Kiwi household around $7000. Don’t worry. That average household has already forked out around $5500 in extra taxes to help pay for it. We’ll pay the rest later. – Matthew Hooton

In Auckland in particular, the preventable lockdown also drove more family businesses broke, ruined a second school year for tens of thousands of students and worsened already fragile mental health.

Yet no one in the Beehive or the bureaucracy has even apologised for the failure to begin our mass vaccination programme six months earlier. – Matthew Hooton

The vaccine fiasco underlines that it is more often managerial competence than the amount of your money ministers boast they are spending that determines the efficacy of government programmes. Government didn’t ignore Pfizer’s 2020 offer because it was underfunded but because it was gormless.

Yesterday, Robertson boasted that he plans to spend more money than any of his predecessors. For 2022/23 alone, core Crown spending is now picked to be $127.1b, up another $6.9b over what was estimated as recently as December, already factoring in Robertson’s planned $6b of extra spending. This is not a sign of success but of failure, or at least that things are going wrong.

The increase over the December forecast is an extra $3500 per household. In 2022/23, Robertson now expects to spend $35.9b more than he and his predecessor Steven Joyce did in 2017/18. That is a 45 per cent increase, or nearly $20,000 per household.

To pay for it, Robertson estimates he will collect over $14,000 more per household in tax than he and Joyce did together in 2017/18. By the middle of next year, each household will carry over $50,000 more in net core Crown debt than when Robertson took the job — and debt will grow again in 2023/24. – Matthew Hooton

But if ministers, the media and the public continue to see increased government spending as a sign of success, not failure, then future finance ministers should do nothing. Demographics alone will allow them to boast big increases in spending, yet with no improvement in access, services or outcomes. – Matthew Hooton

The lesson from the 45 per cent increase in spending over which Robertson has presided is that the Government is taxing and borrowing quite enough. It has more than enough money to do a reasonable job at providing the services and support expected of it. But none of those services and support will in fact get better until the conversation turns to competence — and where governments at least apologise for things like unnecessary multibillion-dollar lockdowns. – Matthew Hooton

Here I am with my pronouns – Cactus Kate NPUWYWS (not putting up with your woke shit). Bite that as a pronoun. – Cactus Kate

Government spending has increased by 66 per cent since Labour came into Government. That means that they are spending $51 billion more than in 2017. I really want to repeat that. $51 billion. The Labour Government won’t be worried that I repeated that number, because most of you don’t think in billions and so you won’t be too bothered because the number is so big it is unrecognisable to the average person.

So let’s make it relatable. That is $10,000 per New Zealander. Yes, you have paid $10,000. So far. Well actually they have borrowed most of that, so your kids and grandkids will have to pay that back. When people say that spending $145 million on consultants at our transport agency Waka Kotahi is chump change, you’re the chump. – Paula Bennett

There are a whole lot of things going up under this Government. The number of kids not regularly attending school has gone up. Not your problem as you’re a good parent who can afford to read Premium? Well, it is as those kids are disengaged from society, some illiterate as they haven’t learnt the basics, they are going to be problems in the future. At best they will spend a lot of time on welfare, at worst they will join the growing crime spree as they feel they have nothing to lose. – Paula Bennett

Pattrick knows how to include her research so that it’s a background wash rather than a foreground blob. – David Hill

Yes this inflation is not temporary, it is not “transitory”. New Zealand will NOT be achieving its agreed inflation target, not even remotely, over the “medium term”. My question is: since when can a Finance Minister and a Reserve Bank Governor put their signatures to an “agreed” course of action, then willfully ignore it? In monetary economics, we call it a loss of credibility. – Robert MacCulloch

Democracy fails when a government is not honest about what it believes are the issues, why they want change and what they propose to do.

Honesty in the issues is a vital first step.

Instead, the Government leapfrogs this and moves straight into expensive and incoherent advertising spending.

Without a clear idea of what the Government wants to say, the ads vary from childish through unbelievable to what a load of rubbish. – Hilary Calvert

The truth however is that many of the waters of New Zealand are fine. There are some that are below standard, and the Government has made rules for local government to require the levels to be lifted so that all reach the required standards. For the areas where there are issues of the local populations not being able to afford the changes required, the Government can provide money to improve the water, with or without oversight or control of how the money is spent.

We are left wondering what the problem is the Government sees which makes them think the answer is an opaque multi-level bureaucracy replacing local control of water. – Hilary Calvert

When we ask the next question around how and why this will lead to better water, the responses suggest that the top level involvement of our tangata whenua is a pivotal part of the proposal. How this relates to the sparkliness remains unclear.

This lack of honesty is particularly dangerous to democracy.

We need to talk about the role of Maori in our government structures. We need to be mindful of our obligations under the Treaty. And it would be great to clarify what people feel comfortable with before the local government reforms.

Our way forward with all New Zealand paddling in roughly the same direction in our unique fleet of waka will be pivotal to our wellbeing and achievements as a nation in the future. – Hilary Calvert

The Government was prepared to work on what it described as a high-trust model for Covid funding. Yet somehow it is extremely coy about trusting us with information about fundamental changes to the governance and control of our entire country.

The Government not coming clean about its agenda is a danger to democracy.

These conversations are important to have.

There is no right outcome, only an outcome which comes through proper democratic processes.

We need to abandon attempts at persuasion through propaganda thinly disguised as factual information. – Hilary Calvert

The Government is silent about how democracy can work with co-governance with no inbuilt majority process.

If we don’t understand the basis of the issue we can’t contribute thoughtfully to talk of solutions and we risk confusion and stupid outcomes.

We can do better. We can and should defend democracy. We are still a smart and reasonably educated people.

We should be trusted with the facts and the ability to work through possible outcomes.

New Zealand is too small to be stupid. – Hilary Calvert

The energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine disabused many politicians of the notion that the world could make a swift transition to green energy powered by solar, wind and wishful thinking. As food prices skyrocket and the conflict threatens a global food crisis, we need to face another unpopular reality: Organic farming is ineffective, land hungry and very expensive, and it would leave billions hungry if it were embraced world-wide. 

The rise in food prices—buoyed by increased fertilizer, energy and transport costs—amid the conflict in Ukraine has exposed inherent flaws in the argument for organic farming. Because organic agriculture shirks many of the scientific advancements that have allowed farmers to increase crop yields, it’s inherently less efficient than conventional farming. – Bjorn Lomborg

A small country depends on our ability to sell stuff to the world with clear rules that everyone follows. The alternative is a trading world tilted to the powerful, where we’re forced to take sides and we survive by transferring wealth to our economic masters. – Josie Pagani

The explosion in trade mirrored almost exactly an unprecedented decline in extreme global poverty.

Despite record levels of international trade last year, that pace of growth is slowing. Slower growth in globalisation has coincided with slower progress in reducing poverty. –

While we welcome the US commitment to security in the Pacific, there is a gaping lack of a real trade and economic agenda.

Without market access, the US cannot hope to counter Chinese influence in the region. – Josie Pagani

There is nothing a strong government likes more than a weak people; and therefore, whether consciously or not, everything is done to render the people ever feebler. Not physically, of course, we are raising up giants of a size and strength never before seen, as can be seen on any sports field, but psychologically—which is why psychology is the handmaiden of soft authoritarianism, it teaches people their vulnerability.

The more vulnerable people can be induced to believe themselves to be, the more they need assistance to keep themselves going. Such assistance (which is self-justifying, though never sufficient, or indeed even partially effective) requires a vast legal and other infrastructure, put in place and regulated by the government. The government is the pastor, the people are the sheep. – Theodore Dalrymple

Are men now like sugar that dissolves in the slightest moisture? It seems so. Surely at one time men could have withstood or laughed off an insult or two without bursting into tears or seeking compensation for the terrible trauma to their ego that such an insult did. Of course, where a perceived harm is actionable at law, more such harm will be perceived. It is an established fact that in countries in which whiplash injuries as a result of car collisions are not legally actionable, people do not suffer from the kind of whiplash injuries that they experience when there is the possibility of compensation. The real cause of whiplash, then, is not accident but tort law, and it is the lawyers whom the sufferers from it should be suing, not the people who ran into the back of their cars. – Theodore Dalrymple

The more lawyers we train, the worse things get. As the French Revolution amply proved, underemployed and disgruntled lawyers are a very dangerous class, and they therefore have to be employed somehow. What better way of doing so than by promulgating a constant deluge of ever-changing regulations and ensuring that a population is made of eggshells? The proliferation of helplines (most of which are exceptionally busy today, that is to say whenever you ring them) indicates this.– Theodore Dalrymple

Better a society of cheats than one of informers. The fact is that informers are not thinking of the betterment of society but of settling scores with those they inform upon, or they take a malicious pleasure from inflicting discomfiture on others. – Theodore Dalrymple

Such qualities as resilience and fortitude are the deadliest enemies of any modern government bureaucracy.– Theodore Dalrymple

In the city, you’ve got consistency, convenience and control,” says Lim. “When we lived in Auckland, we got My Food Bag delivered, or you could pop out to the shops and get something when you felt like it and very quickly. Down here, it’s the complete opposite. Nature dictates when you’re going to have it and how much you are going to have. There isn’t any consistency. You just have to work with what you’ve got. – Nadia Lim

 I didn’t necessarily want to be on a big farm, I would have been quite happy on a lifestyle block, but Carlos wanted to do the proper farming thing.

“And I always felt, more so probably in the past five years, this overwhelming sense of responsibility to not only be part of the process of preparing food – teaching people how to cook and use these ingredients – but to also be part of the process of how the ingredients get to your plate. How you grow your food, how you raise it . . . I want to complete the full cycle. – Nadia Lim

There is no black and white. I don’t buy into the idea of people saying farmers should do things this way, or that way. There are far too many variables and there are pros and cons to all systems, whether they be conventional or organic or spray-free or regenerative.

“People watch documentaries or read an article, and of course humans like things to be made simple . . . I can 100 per cent put my heart on the line and tell you it’s not. – Nadia Lim

When it comes to growing food, to me it is the most simple, natural thing in the world – there is no such thing as an ecosystem that does not have plants AND animals in it. It’s not as simple as ‘livestock bad, plant good’. It comes down to who is helping curate the balance of the two. – Nadia Lim

Our leaders need to stand up, back our police and give them all the support and resource they need to keep us safe. It does not help when leaders like our current mayor reportedly state that there is a perception that our city isn’t safe. It is not a perception, Mayor Goff, that is insulting to the woman cowering in her own lounge as bullets explode around her property.

The violence can no longer be ignored by the Government and by us. It is no longer something that is happening among them – it is happening to us. – Paula Bennett

I worry when my kids are in town, I hate them going in there. They tell me town was OK, “only about 3 fights,” that they witnessed.

So just the 20 bullet holes, the 3 fights (that we know of), and the suburbs filled with opportunists hitting people up for cash.

Welcome to Auckland – what a cool place to live. – Kate Hawkesby

As I’ve been pointing out now for a couple of years, the obvious gap in the plans of our betters for a carbon-free “net zero” energy future is the problem of massive-scale energy storage. How exactly is New York City (for example) going to provide its citizens with power for a long and dark full-week period in the winter, with calm winds, long nights, and overcast days, after everyone has been required to change over to electric heat and electric cars — and all the electricity is supposed to come from the wind and sun, which are neither blowing nor shining for these extended periods? Can someone please calculate how much energy storage will be needed to cover a worst-case solar/wind drought, what it will consist of, how long it has to last, how much it will cost, and whether it is economically feasible? Nearly all descriptions by advocates of the supposed path to “net zero” — including the ambitious plans of the states of New York and California — completely gloss over this issue and/or deal with it in a way demonstrating total incompetence and failure to comprehend the problem. – Francis Menton

Bottom line: I’m not trusting anybody’s so-called “model” to prove that this gigantic energy transformation is going to work. Show me the demonstration project that actually works.

They won’t. Indeed, there is not even an attempt to put such a thing together, even as we hurtle down the road to “net zero” without any idea how it is going to work. – Francis Menton

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is backfiring for Russia on every front. For now, it has given the EU an advantage. How Brussels will use it may be a different matter.- Oliver Hartwich

Win $2 million in Lotto and you’re celebrated. Earn $2 million busting your arse to help other people and you’re criticised. Welcome to New Zealand.– Lani Fogelberg

Someone could be busting their arse in a business capacity and the good they’ve done won’t be celebrated. There will be an undertone that encourages people to envy them or ask why they should have $2m? But they may have worked hard and gone through quite a lot to have a genuine contribution. – Lani Fogelberg

The tall poppy syndrome here is worse than in Australia. The responses are pretty aggressive and it’s getting worse. If you’re successful in business, people treat you well to your face but behind your back, it’s different. They don’t want to be associated with successful people; rather than being celebrated, they’re viewed as someone not to hang out with. – Lani Fogelberg

A lot of New Zealanders think the only way you can be successful is using other poor people, walking over them for their own profitability and benefit, that’s the mindset of this country because we’re taught everyone must be equal. – Lani Fogelberg

My God! The amount of shit you get for owning a Ferrari. I’m a petrolhead. It’s no different to a woman being passionate about fashion. – Lani Fogelberg

In the Great Game of the 21st century, face-to-face diplomacy is perhaps the single most valuable tool – as Australia’s Penny Wong and China’s Wang Yi successfully demonstrated over the past week. The global geopolitical temperature is steadily rising. New Zealand needs to ensure it can withstand the heat. – Geoffrey Miller

 Humanism valorizes the individual—and with good reason; we are each the hero of our own story. Not only is one’s individual sovereignty more essential to the humanist project than one’s group affiliation, but fighting for individual freedom—which includes freedom of conscience, speech, and inquiry—is part of the writ-large agenda of humanism. It unleashes creativity and grants us the breathing space to be agents in our own lives.

Or at least that idea used to be at the core of humanism.

Today, there is a subpart of humanists, identitarians, who are suspicious of individuals and their freedoms. They do not want a free society if it means some people will use their freedom to express ideas with which they disagree. They see everything through a narrow affiliative lens of race, gender, ethnicity, or other demographic category and seek to shield groups that they see as marginalized by ostensible psychic harms inflicted by the speech of others. – Robyn E. Blumner

 Rather than lifting up individuals and imbuing them with autonomy and all the extraordinary uniqueness that flows from it, identitarians would divide us all into racial,  ethnic,  and  gender-based groups and make that group affiliation our defining characteristic. This has the distorting effect of obliterating personal agency, rewarding group victimhood, and incentivizing competition to be seen as the most oppressed.

In addition to being inherently divisive, this is self-reinforcing defeatism. It results in extreme examples, such as a draft plan in California to deemphasize calculus as a response to persistent racial gaps in math achievement.² Suddenly a subject as racially neutral as math has become a flashpoint for identitarians set on ensuring equality of outcomes for certain groups rather than the far-more just standard of equality of opportunity. In this freighted environment, reducing the need for rigor and eliminating challenging standards becomes a feasible solution. The notion of individual merit or recognition that some students are better at math than others becomes racially tinged and suspect.

Not only does the truth suffer under this assault on common sense, but we start to live in a Harrison Bergeron world where one’s natural skills are necessarily sacrificed on the altar of equality or, in today’s parlance, equity. – Robyn E. Blumner

But nobody should be under any illusion: the Government’s ongoing stimulatory fiscal policy is contributing to the need for the Reserve Bank to increase interest rates, something which the Treasury warned the Minister just weeks before the Budget when the Minister decided he wanted to dole out some cash sweeteners to help low income New Zealanders with the cost of living.

It’s like a car being driven with one foot on the brake and the other on the accelerator – the more the Government stimulates the economy with fiscal policy, the harder the Reserve Bank will need to apply the brakes of higher interest rates. – Don Brash 

Mallard must go

The Free Speech Union has launched a petition calling on Parliament to remove Trevor Mallard as Speaker:

“Trevor Mallard’s conduct during the protest has degraded the office he occupies. His instruction to journalists not to engage with protestors shows a disdain for fundamental democratic principles,” says Free Speech Union spokesperson, Jonathan Ayling.

“The Press Gallery literally exists to report on parliamentary news and events. Dictating to them how they may report on a story is an unacceptable restriction on press freedom which has a critical role in our democracy, now more than ever. Freedom of the press is founded on free speech, and it protects our basic liberties by giving us access to credible information.”

“It was especially alarming to hear the Speaker made the Press Gallery Chair relay to Barry Soper that there would be ‘consequences’ if he continued to ignore his instruction – that is to say, if he continued to do his job as a member of the free and independent media.”

“Similar comments by a Minister at another time would rightly result in the Prime Minister demanding their resignation. The Speaker’s disdain for democracy is palpable. Only his removal can restore dignity to his office.”

You can sign the petition here.