Apologies for the slight delay this morning - I got your messages! I fell asleep before I could finish it last night and so have been madly completing it bleary-eyed this morning.

Election 2026: Promises, petrol, and public servants

There was a lot of policy and promises this week. Labour kicked things off by saying they will freeze planned fuel tax increases and National promptly decided it also rather liked the idea of not putting petrol tax up immediately too, but stopped short of a complete freeze. The 12 cent increase due next January is now gone. Instead, the Government intends to begin raising the tax by 5 cents in January 2028, followed by another 3x 5 cent increases every 6 months. This will reduce expected transport fund revenue by $1.476 billion over the forecast period. About $450 million can be found in an existing fuel crisis contingency fund, but that still leaves a bit over $1 billion to find and David Seymour and Chris Bishop have both acknowledged that unless equivalent spending is cut elsewhere, the money will be borrowed. Labour has an even bigger unanswered question as freezing the increases for the whole next term will cost around $4.6 billion.

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Insanely, the Greens are the party taking the fiscally purist position here. Julie Anne Genter says the scheduled increase should go ahead because the transport system needs the money, although she would rather spend it on public transport, walking, and cycling rather than new highways.

Labour is also promising that every New Zealand-trained graduate nurse will be offered a job in the public health system and to double recruitment subsidies for primary care nurses, taking rural incentives from $20,000 to $40,000 and urban subsidies from $15,000 to $30,000. It is unclear which money tree this will be paid from.

ACT, by contrast, is promising fewer public servants and even Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche has argued New Zealand should move from 42 agencies to something more like 15 to 20. ACT has cheerfully seized on this proposing 18 ministers and 19 departments rather than the current 28 ministers and 39 departments.

Labour has gone the other way adopting a proposal advocated for by the Public Service Association which includes a mandatory public good test before restructuring agencies or cutting jobs. The assessment could include the effect on public services, Te Tiriti obligations, health and safety, and disadvantaged groups. Labour also says it is not committed to the $2.4 billion in baseline savings already in the Government’s forecasts. Money. Tree.

And New Zealand First has made an intriguing candidate announcement with Daryl Habraken running for them in Northcote. He was the planted “mole” on the 2020 season of The Bachelorette New Zealand, secretly feeding information back to the Bachelorette about the contestants.

Te Pāti Māori puts the constitution on the table

Te Pāti Māori has decided there is no point nibbling around the edges. Its new Te Tiriti policy proposes entrenching the Treaty in legislation, making Waitangi Tribunal findings binding, spending $220 million over 4 years on a Mātike Mai Fund, and creating a new Te Tiriti Commission with the power to investigate government decisions, issue compliance orders, and, most remarkably, stop or suspend executive decisions it decides are serious breaches of Te Tiriti. Their long term objective is constitutional transformation by 2040.

Mātike Mai, the 2016 report led by Dr Moana Jackson and Professor Margaret Mutu, envisages separate spheres of governance where Māori are distinct from everyone else, with a third “relational” sphere in which the two interact. And Debbie Ngarewa-Packer says the policy is a coalition bottom line.

This presents Chris Hipkins with quite a problem. Labour will most likely need Te Pāti Māori votes, but Hipkins says Parliament must remain the final decision making body and Labour will not support a commission able to suspend Cabinet decisions. However, Hipkins may want to look at his own caucus as Willie Jackson wrote this week that Māori never ceded sovereignty, but hedged the claim by saying that the Crown is sovereign and controls Parliament now.

As part of their announcement Te Pāti Māori somehow managed to inadvertently trigger somewhat of a separation of powers crisis. Rawiri Waititi told reporters that constitutional lawyers, Māori leaders, and “people in the judiciary” had looked over the policy to make sure it was fit for purpose. Te Pāti Māori then declined to clarify whether he meant a current judge or somebody retired from the bench.

This is a pretty significant issue as a retired judge expressing a political opinion is entitled to do so, but a sitting judge privately helping a political party develop constitutional policy would be a very serious matter indeed. Attorney General Chris Bishop said that if Waititi’s claim was true, it could undermine public confidence in the judiciary and would be something he would have to raise with the Chief Justice. If it is untrue Waititi has dragged the judiciary into a political controversy when judges cannot publicly defend themselves. Te Pāti Māori must clarify immediately.

Misinformation is bad, except when the principle is right

Green MP Tamatha Paul gave a fiery speech in Parliament recently attacking Government MPs for personally benefiting from changes to rental property taxation. However, it turns out many of her claims were wildly wrong.

Paul claimed National MP Grant McCallum had bought a Wellington property and was effectively getting taxpayers to help him pay it off through the parliamentary accommodation allowance. He had actually bought a property in Paihia hundreds and hundreds of kilometres away, in his electorate, does not rent it out, and says owning it saves taxpayers money because he no longer needs motel accommodation there.

National’s Tom Rutherford was another target. She accused him of buying an investment property after the Government changed the rules. In actual fact, he added a house to the pecuniary interest register as he got married and his new wife’s existing home became joint property.

And she said ACT’s Parmjeet Parmar had bought 5 new houses, but Parmar redeveloped 2 existing properties into 7 dwellings, creating 5 additional properties on the register, and so did not benefit from any tax changes.

This would normally be resolved by saying “Sorry, folks, I got some facts wrong” and issuing a correction. She had, after all, posted the video online and it attracted more than a million TikTok views. McCallum even asked for an apology, but Paul stubbornly refused to give one. Marama Davidson then defended the “principle” of the speech, describing criticism from property-owning MPs as “crocodile tears” and later telling Ryan Bridge that although the Greens oppose misinformation, the record had been corrected and the bigger argument remained.

So misinformation is dangerous to democracy unless it conveys an emotionally driven higher truth as endorsed by the Greens? The Greens have spent years treating misinformation and disinformation as grave civic dangers. They have promoted a political culture in which incorrect speech is not merely wrong but potentially socially harmful, a threat to democracy, evidence of evil networks, and something platforms or institutions need to intervene against.

A living wage, courtesy of the taxpayer

Labour, the Greens and Opportunity have signed a pledge to extend the Living Wage to all state-sector workers. Chris Hipkins, Marama Davidson, and Opportunity’s Jessica Hammond signed up at the Living Wage Movement’s election forum, with the policy expected to affect around 20,000 workers including school cleaners and caretakers, hospital cleaners and orderlies, and workers in government facilities. Living Wage Aotearoa says it would cost about $100 million over four years, or $25 million a year.

The Living Wage is currently $29.90 an hour, compared with the minimum wage of $23.95. It is a benchmark based on what a household of two adults and two children, earning 1.5 incomes between them, needs for a modest standard of living including housing, food, transport, childcare, and some ability to save and participate in ordinary life. I have never had much objection to the idea as a voluntary benchmark. But governments still have to confront the same tradeoffs private employers do and an extra $100 million over 4 years is still $100 million that has to come from taxes, lower spending somewhere else, or borrowing.

ACT versus Māori and Pacific medical-school admissions

ACT is campaigning on scrapping Māori and Pacific preferential admission schemes at Auckland and Otago medical schools after they say a Ministry of Health review failed to justify them. Unfortunately, the review itself still has not been released so we can not scrutinise this claim.

Seymour says he wanted evidence showing why treating applicants differently by race was justified, particularly where someone with stronger academic results might lose a place. He says the review did not provide it. Auckland medical dean Professor Warwick Bagg says a near-final draft he saw supported retaining the programme. He argues Māori remain only just over 5% of doctors and Pacific people around 3%, and that every medical student, whatever their pathway into university, ultimately has to pass the same clinical and academic standards before becoming a doctor.

That last point does not entirely answer ACT’s objection. Their argument is not that somebody who enters medicine through MAPAS gets handed a stethoscope and waved through their final exams. The question is whether ethnicity should affect which applicants get access to the scarce places in the first place.

Janet Dickson loses the fight against compulsory Te Kākano training

Janet Dickson has lost the latest stage of her nearly 3 year fight over a compulsory Māori tikanga course and now faces the likely end of a 30 year career in real estate as a consequence.

The Te Kākano programme was introduced by the Real Estate Authority in 2023 as a mandatory 90 minute professional development course covering Māori language and development, the Treaty, and Māori land. Dickson sought an exemption because she regarded parts of it as politically ideological, irrelevant to her work, and contrary to her Christian beliefs. The exemption was refused and she went to the High Court and then the Real Estate Agents Disciplinary Tribunal. But she has now lost again.

Her lawyer argued the state should not be able to compel somebody to engage with political or religious ideas contrary to their conscience, but the tribunal’s answer was essentially that she was only being required to listen.

Professionals should not be able to refuse training in relevant law, ethics, safety, or material relevant to customers simply because they dislike it. If the course were teaching real estate agents their legal duties in transactions involving Māori land, that might be more appropriate, for example.

The problem is that a professional regulator is making continued employment or licensing conditional on completing ideological cultural instruction only tangentially related to professional competence.

Minister Nicole McKee has herself said Te Kākano did not meet her expectation that compulsory professional development should be relevant to real estate work. The Government has since removed the 5 year prohibition imposed on agents who fail CPD, but the change is not retrospective and so does not help Dickson.

Winston Peters responded this week by calling what happened to her as “totalitarianism” and “woke cultural cancer”.

Methanex shuts down: the energy chickens arrive home to roost

Methanex has announced it will stop producing methanol at Motonui in February next year and indefinitely idle its New Zealand operations after more than 3 decades. The company is New Zealand’s sole methanol producer, employs more than 200 people directly and exports about 95% of its production. It says years of declining gas availability and the lack of a clear path to meaningful new supply mean it can no longer justify continuing production.

National says this is part of the long tail of Labour’s 2018 decision to halt new offshore oil and gas exploration. However, New Plymouth mayor Max Brough points out that new gas developments can take 7 to 10 years to bring online and says the loss will ripple through Taranaki’s engineering, electrical, and technical industries.

MBIE: another week, another multimillion-dollar IT bonfire

Last week Parliament’s Privileges Committee found MBIE had deliberately misled MPs about a cancelled biometric IT project. Chief executive Nic Blakeley was questioned at a select committee in March about the project’s progress and failed to disclose that it had already been cancelled. The committee found this was intentional and amounted to contempt of Parliament. Blakeley offered his resignation to Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche, who declined it, partly because Blakeley was relatively new in the job and had apologised.

Labour initially seemed content to let the committee’s condemnation stand as punishment, but has since toughened its position. Phil Twyford now says Blakeley’s job is “untenable” and argues a senior official who deliberately misleads Parliament has to face meaningful accountability.

Unfortunately, the cancelled biometric project turns out to be only one entry in MBIE’s exciting catalogue of information-technology adventures.

Stuff revealed this week that MBIE spent nearly $13 million trying to build the New Zealand Research Information System, a database intended to track publicly funded research. The bespoke version failed and was abandoned. A replacement using commercial software is now being built instead. The project is more than 6 years overdue. This follows the $5 million failure of a custom occupational licensing system and an immigration IT project that cost nearly $40 million and achieved nothing.

Foot-in-mouth disease appears to be contagious

It was a particularly bad week for politicians saying things that their party leaders wish had remained inside their heads or botching communications.

Labour’s Ginny Andersen decided to attack Mark Mitchell during their weekly Newstalk ZB slot because he said the National Land Transport Fund paid for road maintenance.

“You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Andersen told him, confidently explaining that the NLTF was for building roads and road maintenance came from a separate pot. Except she was totally wrong and after an ad break Andersen returned, having checked, and admitted she had it “around the wrong way”. The NLTF does indeed fund maintenance as well as the construction and operation of roads.

Former Health Minister Ayesha Verrall also had a moment at a Wellington North student debate. “I want to defend free stuff!” she shouted. “Free stuff is so good.” By “free stuff” of course she meant stuff paid for by hardworking New Zealanders via our taxes.

ACT’s Parmjeet Parmar had a slightly different communications problem in that she simply could not explain (on Newstalk ZB) her party’s immigration policy that would require permanent residents to spend at least 2 years in New Zealand during any rolling 5 year period. This should have been any easy sell as most New Zealanders likely do not want our public services exploited by people who don’t even live here, but she seemed incapable of answering Ryan Bridge’s questions.

In local government, Auckland mayor Wayne Brown was officially found to have committed harassment after joking to a security guard during a visit to RNZ that security could not be very tight if he was being escorted by a “Muslim terrorist”. No sanction was imposed. He also seems to be campaigning against ACT this election calling them Te Pāti Pākehā which is odd since both its leaders are Māori.

Labour’s infamous “Angry Andy” made an appearance in a Newstalk ZB interview when Wellington mayor Andrew Little lost his cool with host Nick Mills. They were disagreeing about Tiaki Wai and Little accused Mills of repeatedly misleading his audience and things got scratchy.

This next one may actually land well with supporters, but it certainly rarked up opponents. Paul Henry, campaigning for ACT at the Black Dog Tavern, roasted other parties with barbs such as “Look at the Greens’ list people. Seriously, look, they’re barely people” and calling Opportunity “dishonest socialists”.

Willie Jackson managed two entries. The first was his entire interview with Jack Tame on Q+A which was an utter trainwreck from start to finish. A particularly spectacular moment was when he admitted that his party were still going to pursue cogovernance policies but will need to call it something else because Kiwis don’t like cogovernance.

Later in the week he said one of Labour’s recurring dangers is being too conservative with spending. This is the party that blew tens of billions of dollars during Covid-19 and no one is able to say where it went.

Finally, Labour’s revenue spokesperson Deborah Russell asked in Parliament whether the Government had considered a land-value tax as a way of increasing revenue to fund infrastructure. Russell was asking a minister a question and was not announcing Labour policy. But when your party is already under sustained attack over taxation, voluntarily floating another form of tax in Parliament is like walking into a lion’s den dressed as steak.

🇺🇸 The grim “Queers for Palestine” irony in Tucson

Two men were murdered outside a gay bar in Arizona this week in what police say was a targeted anti-LGBT hate crime. Vincent Anthony Siqueiros and Cameron Davis Capara were shot dead outside by an alleged Islamist Ousman Ceesay who also took his own life. Police subsequently found a note indicating the attack was motivated by hatred of the LGBTQ community, along with a list of other LGBTQ-associated businesses.

Capara was a left wing political activist who participated in pro-Palestine, anti-ICE, and Antifa-associated protests, often wearing a keffiyeh. Capara’s political activism does not make his murder less appalling. But the irony is terrible. It is the natural end point for the “Queers for Palestine” movement which hates when anybody points out that attitudes to homosexuality across much of the Muslim world are profoundly illiberal to say the least.

🇪🇸 Ceuta: Spain loses control of the border, then the story

Spain’s political crisis over Ceuta continues to get more dire. At the end of July an estimated 72,000 people crossed into the Spanish enclave from Morocco during a mass breach of the border and around 5,000 are still believed to remain in Ceuta. At least 145 people reportedly died during the crossing and Spanish prosecutors say 23 sexual assaults have been reported in the town since the breach, 9 involving young children.

Protests have taken place in more than 200 Spanish cities and opposition leaders accuse Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of failing to protect Spain’s border.

Bizarre and tragic stories are being reported day after day including footage showing a group of migrants pulling a stranded baby dolphin from the water and passing it around while local officials tried to intervene. The animal was struck in the head with a stick and residents eventually wrestled it away and returned it to the water, but they were too late. It was dead.

Another bruising week for Police

New Zealand Police could probably have done without this week’s headlines. Although they would have welcomed Commissioner Richard Chambers being cleared of criminal wrongdoing in relation to historic allegations, several serving police officers told the Herald that ordinary staff facing comparable investigations would normally be stood down. But Public Service Commissioner Brian Roche had decided Chambers could remain in his role.

Meanwhile a police staff member is before the courts on 39 charges, including 3 counts of rape, 5 of indecent assault, unlawful sexual connection, kidnapping, assault, and threatening to kill or cause grievous bodily harm. The case is one of 10 active prosecutions arising from National Integrity Unit investigations as of May. Around 40 police staff were under NIU investigation at that point, and 22 prosecutions had commenced since the unit was established.

A former constable was also convicted this week on all 14 charges involving violence against 3 women known to him, including assault, indecent assault, strangulation, and blackmail. His name remains suppressed until sentencing.

And Auckland constable Amanuel Molla has been stood down after being charged with committing an indecent act on a child under 12. His lawyer says he strenuously denies wrongdoing and will defend the charge. His trial is scheduled for April next year.

Ten years is enough for killing your kids, apparently

Hakyung Lee murdered her two children, put their bodies into suitcases, abandoned them in a storage unit, changed her name, and moved overseas. The bodies of Yuna Jo (8) and Minu Jo (6) were not discovered until years later, when an Auckland family bought the contents of the abandoned storage locker at auction.

Lee was convicted of murder last year and sentenced to life imprisonment with a 17 year minimum non-parole period, but the Court of Appeal has now cut that minimum to 10 years.

The court’s reasoning centres on the disparity with the sentence imposed on Lauren Dickason, who murdered her 3 daughters and can seek parole after 6 years. The judges accepted Lee’s severe mental illness played a dominating role in the killings and concluded that requiring her to serve nearly 3 times Dickason’s minimum period produced a manifestly unjust disparity.

They are right because Dickason’s case set a precedent and that is the problem. In my view, the judge ignored the fact that the jury found her guilty of murdering her 3 children and decided to sentence her leniently. Totally unacceptable.

🇺🇸 Gloria Steinem obituary Gloria Steinem, for better and worse

Gloria Steinem died this week at 92 and hers was an extraordinary life. An iconic feminist she was a key figure in mainstreaming arguments for women’s rights and independence. She had a quality which has become rarer in political movements in that she seemed genuinely interested in persuasion.

Unfortunately, Steinem eventually travelled with the movement into gender identity politics. She had written critically about transsexualism in the 1970s but in the past decade got caught up in the wave of sex denialism. But it would be absurd to use that disagreement to write Steinem out of feminism’s history.

Thank you, Gloria. Rest in peace.

Chart of the Week

In short - other stuff that happened

• The Government’s rates cap bill, which would limit annual council rates increases to 2–4%, passed its first reading with no opposition after the Greens, Te Pāti Māori, and former TPM MPs Tākuta Ferris and Mariameno Kapa-Kingi forgot to vote against it. About 20 minutes later Green MP Scott Willis corrected the record.

• FMA chief executive Samantha Barrass had been suspended and was preparing an Employment Relations Authority action seeking reinstatement, but now she has announced she is leaving months before her term was set to expire. The FMA, Barrass, and minister Cameron Brewer have all declined to say whether a financial arrangement accompanied the departure.

• Casey Costello has been given ministerial responsibility for a new board coordinating the response to transnational, serious, and organised crime, after an expert group described organised crime as New Zealand’s number one national-security threat and found responsibility was scattered across at least 13 ministers.

• The man accused of last month’s rampage through Epsom can now be named as Shalty Heta (49). He has pleaded not guilty to 17 charges after allegedly assaulting a jogger, stealing a Good Samaritan’s vehicle, hitting 3 high school cyclists, and strangling a dog to death. His next hearing is in December.

• 🇺🇸 Former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom has filed a federal lawsuit after being removed from a Chicago Sky WNBA game. He was wearing a t-shirt with the definition of “woman” on it and argues his ejection violated his First Amendment rights.

• The Crown has finalised its settlement with Ngāti Ruapani mai Waikaremoana. The package includes about 12,000 hectares being added to Te Urewera, the return of cultural redress properties and $24 million in financial and commercial redress.

• A second settlement was completed with Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui after 9 years of negotiations. It includes $30 million in financial and commercial redress, $15.5 million for cultural revitalisation, and the vesting of 27 culturally significant sites.

• Horowhenua District Council has voted 6-5 to give iwi and hapū an exclusive first opportunity to express interest in purchasing 6 council-owned properties on Oxford Street in Levin. The properties were acquired using $2 million from Labour’s Better Off funding as part of the Levin Town Centre Transformation project.

• Former Te Ohu Kaimoana chief executive Graeme Hastilow was sentenced to 12 months’ home detention for child exploitation material offences. Police analysing more than 307,000 files found 136 files in the most serious category and another 1600 in other categories. His offending occurred while he was leading the Māori commercial fisheries organisation.

• Woolworths is proposing to move its New Zealand customer-care operation to Australia, putting around 130 jobs at risk. The proposal came shortly after Woolworths NZ reported $163 million in earnings before interest and tax.

• Winton’s corporate melodrama continues. Michael Stiassny has become its third chair in two months after NZX suspended trading following a cascade of director resignations amid complaints about founder Christopher Meehan’s alleged bullying and sexual harassment, and concerns over his refusal to relinquish control. Trading has resumed following Stiassny’s appointment.

• The Serious Fraud Office has been given wider investigative powers. Legislation passed its final reading allowing the SFO to obtain more digital and cloud evidence, seek oral search warrants, manage its own search scenes and prevent interference during investigations.

• 🇦🇺 Trans-identifying male player Maximillia Kostur has won the Nike FC Cup Golden Boot after competing in Victoria’s women’s football competition. Former professional footballer Addison Steiner and other female players have objected to male players competing in the women’s game, while Football Victoria maintains that inclusion is its priority and does not require players to disclose their actual sex.

• 🇮🇹 In Italy, a shopkeeper accused of sexually assaulting a 13 year old girl was released from custody after 2 days, with judges citing his cooperation, remorse, and apology. Prosecutors are appealing and Giorgia Meloni’s government has ordered the case reviewed.

• The independent review into Wellington’s Moa Point sewage disaster found “deep and systemic” problems built up over decades. The February failure spilled an estimated 14 billion litres of wastewater and the review identified failures across governance, accountability, risk management, ageing infrastructure, and resilience planning.

• 🇺🇸 Nearly 30 years after Tupac Shakur was murdered, Duane “Keffe D” Davis has been convicted of first degree murder. A Las Vegas jury deliberated for just under 3 hours before finding Davis guilty of plotting the 1996 killing. He is due to be sentenced on October 13.

• 🇭🇰 Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong has pleaded guilty to collusion with foreign entities under Beijing’s national-security law. The 29 year old, already imprisoned, faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment over allegations that he and exiled activist Nathan Law sought foreign sanctions or other international pressure against Hong Kong and China.

• 🇺🇸 Erin Piacenti, a 32 year old new mum and Bank of America executive, was killed in a random stabbing in Times Square just after returning from maternity leave. Her killer Pamela Cisneros (49) also stabbed another passerby before being shot dead by officers and is said to have been mentally ill.

• 🇦🇺 Australia celebrated Australian National Flag Day by accidentally flying New Zealand flags outside Parliament House. Two Kiwi flags were hoisted among the 44 ceremonial Australian flags in Canberra before somebody noticed and quietly replaced them.

Stuff you might find interesting this week

Women's Rights & Wrongs

The Capacity for Evil: Women Can Be Monsters Too

The Capacity for Evil is a two-part series. In Essay #1, I look at the reaction to Lindsay Clancy and the uncomfortable fact that women are capable of violence, cruelty, and criminality too, and that recognising female agency means recognising female culpability…

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2 days ago · 27 likes · 5 comments · Ani O’Brien

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You had a lot of questions. Some of them are enormous and deserve proper essays of their own. Quite a few of you want me to go back down the He Puapua and co-governance rabbit hole, others want a forensic examination of TOP, and several want me to work out what a Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori-TOP government might actually look like. There was also interest in strategic voting, electorate races, and what the minor parties could extract from National or Labour in coalition negotiations.

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I will endeavour to write essays covering as many of those topics as possible. But there were also lots of questions that have reasonably straightforward answers. So I thought I would begin with a kind of Q+A format.

Consider this the first instalment of Stuff You Wanted to Know.

Do MPs get their Wellington accommodation paid for 52 weeks a year even though Parliament is in recess for large chunks of it?

Yes, but there is some context worth adding before we get too excited about dragging MPs about it.

If an MP’s main home is outside the Wellington area, they can receive what is called a continuous accommodation payment to help cover the cost of maintaining somewhere to live in Wellington. For an ordinary MP, that is capped at $36,400 a year and for Ministers the cap is $52,000 a year. Alternatively, MPs can instead claim actual accommodation costs as they go. The current maximum is $260 a night for commercial accommodation e.g. hotels, motels, etc, or $70 a night for other accommodation like staying with friends or family. There are additional criteria and annual limits though.

To be fair to them, this is not quite the rort it might sound like. The payment exists because MPs from outside Wellington need to have somewhere to live in Wellington. Parliament may not be sitting every week, but landlords have this irritating habit of continuing to charge rent during recess too. The independent Remuneration Authority says the continuous payment is based on estimated central-Wellington market rents.

And parliamentary recess is not the same thing as MPs being on holiday. Select committees, electorate work, caucus meetings, ministerial duties, and political events all continue when the House is not sitting, and MPs can still be required in Wellington during those periods.

Why is ACC investing billions of dollars? Isn’t that money supposed to be helping injured people?

I can see why it might look a bit dodgy at first glance. But don’t worry, investing the money is actually part of how ACC pays injured people.

The Government doesn’t collect this year’s levies to cover this year’s accidents and hope everything roughly evens out. Some injuries create costs that last for decades, for example, someone seriously injured at 25 might need treatment, rehabilitation, weekly compensation, and other support for the rest of their life. So ACC has to fund not just the immediate cost of an accident, but the future cost of claims.

ACC is funded through levies, Crown contributions, and investment income. So the returns on the investments help reduce how much has to be collected from levy payers and taxpayers later.

Is it true that Māori corporations pay no tax?

No. There is, however, a kernel of truth buried inside it. Entities that qualify and elect to be treated as Māori authorities are taxed at 17.5%, compared with the standard company tax rate of 28%. Not every business owned by Māori automatically gets this rate as the status has eligibility requirements.

There are separate questions around charities, rates remissions, government contracts, and other arrangements involving iwi organisations, and I suspect I will return to those because several people asked.

But the claim “Māori corporations pay no tax” is false.

Has the public service actually got much bigger since 2017?

Yes. Considerably. In 2022, the Public Service Commission reported 60,381 full time equivalent (FTE) public servants, which it said was 27.8%, or 13,130 FTEs, larger than in 2017.

The workforce subsequently peaked at 65,699 FTEs in December 2023. After the current Government introduced its savings programme it fell, reaching 62,654 in June 2025. But it has since begun climbing again and in March this year it was back to 64,535 FTEs, up 2.1% from March 2025.

The coalition has reduced the public service from its late-2023 peak, but it remains vastly larger than it was in 2017.

Is it true that 14.3 per cent of New Zealand children are now living in material hardship?

Yes. But we should be careful about what that number means. The latest official figure, for the year ended June 2025, is 14.3%, or around 169,300 children. The comparable rate was 13.5% the year before, and Stats NZ says that year-on-year movement was “not statistically significant”.

The 14.3% figure is also higher than the 10.6% recorded in 2021/22. But “material hardship” does not simply mean that 14.3% of children are starving or homeless. It is a specific statistical measure of whether households are unable to afford a collection of things regarded as essentials. The new measure uses an 18 item questionnaire, with households classified as experiencing material hardship when enough deprivation indicators are flagged. Stats NZ also changed the survey and measurement methodology for the latest year, which is another reason to be slightly cautious about waving the numbers around without context. None of which makes 14.3% good, to be clear.

Can ACT and NZ First candidates split the centre-right electorate vote and accidentally let Labour win?

Kind of. In electorates, but not party vote if we assume that National, ACT, and NZ First pool their votes and become a coalition again.

Your electorate vote works under first-past-the-post (FPP) rules. Whichever candidate gets the most votes wins. They do not need 50%.

So lets imagine an electorate where the polling is about 55% centre-right candidates and 45% left candidates.

If on election day, the National candidate gets 30%, the ACT candidate gets 15%, the New Zealand First candidate gets 10% and the Labour candidate gets 45%, Labour wins the seat even though a majority of voters preferred centre-right candidates.

This is why electorate-level strategic voting is such a hot topic.

However, as I say, splitting your party vote does not work like this. Your party vote helps determine each qualifying party’s overall share of Parliament. It is these votes that are tallied and combined so the result could be National 37%, ACT 9%, New Zealand First 12% (=58%) or National 24%, ACT 18%, New Zealand First 16% (=58%), and the coalition would win.

If you are worried about splitting your electorate vote, it will be worth looking into any polling or previous results that can inform you of who is in the best position to win for your side.

What the hell is an overhang?

An overhang occurs when a party wins more electorate seats than its share of the party vote would normally entitle it to. How it works:

• The party vote determines how many seats the Party will be entitled to.

• The electorate vote determines which MP will represent your electorate.

• MPs who win an electorate seat are guaranteed a seat in Parliament regardless of how their party performs.

• When parties fill the seats that they are entitled due to their party vote, the MPs who won electorates take up spots first as they are guaranteed.

• Then any leftover seats the party is entitled to once electorate MPs are in are filled by MPs who haven’t won an electorate but are on the party’s list.

• For example, if a party were entitled to 15 seats thanks to its party vote and they won 10 electorates, they would bring in 5 list MPs to fill the remaining seats.

• Sometimes a party will win more electorate seats than the number they are entitled to thanks to their party vote. Because electorate seats are guaranteed, the party is not expected to cull some of their electorate MPs. The required additional seats are added to Parliament and the party ends up with more seats than its party vote entitles it to. This is an overhang.

• For example, if a party were entitled to 15 seats thanks to its party vote and they won 20 electorates, they would get 20 seats (5 extra). They would have zero list MPs.

We have had overhangs before and, in fact, the 2023 election produced a 2 seat Te Pāti Māori overhang, taking Parliament to 122 seats. Then we had the Port Waikato by-election and that added another seat taking it to 123.

Are we really potentially going to spend billions overseas because of the Paris Agreement?

The answer is kinda. Potentially. Maybe. New Zealand has made a commitment under the Paris Agreement to reduce our emissions by 2030 and this Paris target is more ambitious than the emissions reductions we are currently expecting to achieve domestically. So, yes, that leaves a gap.

One way we can fill that gap is by effectively paying other countries to reduce their emissions and put those reductions on our climate tab. Current Treasury modelling puts the possible cost of buying enough offshore reductions to meet our first Paris target at around $4.4-$5 billion. However, Treasury is very clear that this is not a bill already sitting on Nicola Willis’s desk. It is just modelling. What we ultimately need to pay for, if anything, will depend on our emissions here, international prices, what is available and, crucially, what the Government ultimately decides to do.

What the Government decides to do is the biggest factor, because New Zealand is not alone in staring at an ambitious climate target that it is unlikely to meet. UNEP says countries collectively are not on track to meet their 2030 commitments under Paris.

This has created somewhat of an international game of chicken. Who will blink first?

There is no global climate policeman who turns up, confiscates our fossil fuels, and fines us $5 billion if we miss our target. Though I am sure such an idea would delight the Greens. Paris’ compliance mechanism is explicitly non-punitive. It cannot impose penalties or sanctions. So one option for New Zealand, and other countries, is to just not meet our NDC1 target and adopt an attitude of “and what?” Treasury has acknowledged this option, but rightly points out it carries some reputational risk.

This is mostly because over the past decade climate commitments have become woven into international trade deals all over the place. Most significantly for us, the New Zealand-European Union Free Trade Agreement makes commitments concerning the Paris Agreement enforceable under the FTA and could technically trigger a dispute. Likewise, our UK trade agreement contains specific climate provisions and reaffirms both countries’ Paris commitments. However, the UK is in a very similar situation to us so won’t be pointing any fingers and the EU may just scrape through to its target, but it will have much bigger non-compliant fish to fry than us.

Basically, every country has an obvious incentive to look sideways at everybody else before voluntarily writing enormous cheques to meet their targets. Why would anyone want to send $5 billion offshore to satisfy an agreement barely anyone else is upholding? Hence the stand off.

Personally, I think Paris is an expensive and ineffective waste of time. I want New Zealand out of it, but I understand that we need to play the game of chicken first.

I am happy to get into this more in depth if there is interest. It can get very nerdy and dry with credits and offsets.

This was the first batch of Stuff You Wanted to Know.

I still have your questions about TOP’s land tax, He Puapua, Matike Mai, Māori seats, the National Iwi Chairs Forum, the sex voting gap, public sector DEI, energy security, interesting electorates, the actual ideological difference between National and Labour, and what the various possible coalition governments would really do.

I will do another batch of short answers next week and get to work on the essays!

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Are there particular electorates you think deserve a closer look? Candidates you want profiled? Policies you have seen announced but would like somebody to actually dig into rather than regurgitating the press release? Something about MMP, strategic voting, polling, coalition arithmetic, or the general mechanics of the election that you want explained?

Or perhaps there is a political claim you keep seeing repeated and you want me to work out whether it is actually true.

Basically, tell me what you want from Thought Crimes between now and election day. Leave your suggestions in the comments. I cannot promise to do all of them, obviously, but I suspect you will come up with several things I have not thought of.

And while I have you…

I have also recently launched my new Substack, Women’s Rights and Wrongs, which is where my longer writing about women, feminism, sex, gender, and all of the strange cultural stoushes surrounding them will live.

If that sort of thing interests you, I would be enormously grateful if you would subscribe to it, even if you only subscribe for free. Getting people through the door at this early stage really does help me build some momentum.

There will be a mixture of free and paid writing there. For now, my first two essays are both available to read for free, and both concern the extraordinary ongoing chaos in the WNBA including what I think it tells us about female-typical behaviour, social dynamics, and conflict.

So if you have not already wandered over there, please do.

Women's Rights & Wrongs

The Female Art of War: how women fight different

Women are no less competitive than men, but female competition has historically tended to take different forms: relational aggression, coalition building, social exclusion, reputation management, and the policing of group norms. Professional basketball creates a fascinating environment in which those dynamics coexist with intense physical competition…

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19 days ago · 34 likes · 20 comments · Ani O’Brien

Women's Rights & Wrongs

The Tallest Poppy: Caitlin Clark and the Psychology of Resentment

At the end of my first essay, after taking you on a lengthy detour of Finnish schoolchildren, evolutionary psychology, provocatively dressed research assistants, Queen Bees, workplace politics, relational aggression, and the various creative ways women have developed to make one another miserable without actually punching each other, I finally arrived a…

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9 days ago · 25 likes · 10 comments · Ani O’Brien

And finally, thank you again to everyone who has contributed to my Givealittle for fertility treatment. It has meant a great deal to us, and I am very grateful. For anyone who has asked where to find it, the page is here. ❤️

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Election 2026: The Great New Zealand Tax-Off

Christopher Luxon has promised “no new taxes” if National is returned to government. This makes a hell of a lot of sense given the opposition parties appear to be trying to outdo each other with the amount of new taxes they are announcing. Except Labour who swear they will not adopt these “bottom lines” of their coalition partners.

Chris Hipkins is adamant Labour will advance only its capital gains tax, but he has spent 3 years describing the restoration of landlords’ ability to deduct mortgage interest as a “tax cut for landlords”, and now will not say whether Labour intends to reverse it. National has its own clarifications to make after Revenue Minister Simon Watts initially declined to rule out increasing GST. Nicola Willis subsequently did so unequivocally. National will not increase GST.

Labour also announced it would cancel the scheduled fuel-tax increases next term. Willis promptly announced that National would not proceed with January’s scheduled 12 cent increase either, only for David Seymour to point out that Cabinet had not actually made that decision forcing Willis to clarify that she had been announcing National Party policy.

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Meanwhile Te Pāti Māori looked at this election’s increasingly crowded tax auction and decided to whack up the volume big time outdoing even their colleagues in the Green Party. Its newly announced plan contains 5 new taxes (a wealth tax, an international profit transfer tax, a land banking tax, a vacant home tax, and a 5% stamp duty on residential property sales, including family homes unless the buyer is a first home buyer purchasing below $1 million). Company tax would rise to 33%, the 39% personal income tax threshold would kick in from $90,000 (currently it is at $180,000), and new rates of 42% and 48% would be introduced.

In return, there would be a taxfree threshold up to $30,000 and something called “No GST on Kai”, which does not, in fact, actually remove GST from food. Instead, people earning under $60,000 would receive an $800–$1000 tax credit, supposedly equivalent to about 8 weeks of groceries.

The rather important political problem with all of this is that Labour says its CGT is a bottom line and it will not adopt coalition partners’ taxes, while Te Pāti Māori says “meaningful tax transformation” is its bottom line. Rawiri Waititi’s message to Hipkins was simply “We’ll see you on the 8th.”

And there, in 6 words, is the entire reason National is bundling every opposition tax policy together despite Labour’s protestations. Hipkins can rule out whatever he likes before 7 November. But on 8 November, if the left is successful, he will have to negotiate with a bunch of tax maniacs.

Social Media Ban: How to annoy both your coalition partners at once

National’s under 16 social media ban has managed the impressive feat of being introduced as a Government bill despite 2 of the 3 parties in Government opposing it. NZ First and ACT were disgruntled to say the least.

I wrote about the substance of the proposal separately this week, so I won’t repeat the whole argument here. CLICK TO READ.

NZ First and ACT agree that social media is harming children, but think National’s enforcement model either will not work or will require unacceptable intrusion into everyone else’s online lives.

In any case, it seems that National may not even do anything about the Bill this term despite getting provisional support from Labour. Luxon has said they intend to prioritise getting their rates cap legislation through first.

The whole thing has played out oddly because National could simply have released the legislation as National policy and campaigned on it. Instead it has created an avoidable stoush with both coalition partners just weeks after surviving an attempted leadership challenge.

🇺🇸 Social media’s Big Tobacco moment?

On the topic, Meta has agreed to a settlement worth up to US$17.1 billion with 47 American states and territories over claims concerning the design of its platforms for children. The amount sounds gigantic until you learn prosecutors had been seeking US$200 billion and Meta’s own lawyers had contemplated potential exposure of US$1.4 trillion.

But money aside, the more interesting thing is the behavioural restrictions included. Under the settlement, Meta will impose nighttime restrictions for children, stop notifications during school hours, limit screen time to 2 hours daily, strengthen age controls for under 13s, and hide like counts and certain appearance filters.

The comparison is being made to the tobacco settlements of the 1990s, which restricted advertising and youth marketing and preceded a dramatic fall in teenage smoking. Hence why I find the claim that concern about social media and children is merely the latest technophobic moral panic so difficult to take seriously.

You can oppose the measures and National’s proposed ban, for example. But the underlying problem is real. These platforms are deliberately engineered products using infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations, feedback loops, and popularity metrics to maximise engagement.

Election 2026: polling and candidate news

A Reid Research poll has found that 45.4% of voters thought National made the wrong decision by keeping Luxon, while 36.8% thought it was right. That result needs a fairly enormous caveat in that Labour and Green voters overwhelmingly thought National should have replaced him, which is not necessarily the leadership advice I would be rushing to take if I were National. Among National voters, 78% backed keeping Luxon.

There has also been some leaked electorate polling in my own electorate of Tāmaki, where a mysterious supposedly “internal” poll appeared on a blog putting ACT’s James Christmas on 26%, Labour’s Max Harris on 24%, and National’s Mahesh Muralidhar on 23%.

Strangely nobody will admit ownership of the poll. So we have a poll with no identified pollster, no identified commissioner, no methodology presented in the source material, and a result that would put Labour within 2 points of winning an electorate it has not held since 1957. By all means make of that what you will, but I would perhaps hold off remortgaging the house to bet on Max Harris becoming the MP for Tāmaki. I’ll be voting for James Christmas and hoping that my neighbours aren’t stupid enough to vote for a guy who was an economic policy advisor to Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. This economic policy was characterised by McDonnell saying he wished to “overthrow capitalism” and that he would be "the first socialist Labour Chancellor".

NZ First has had a kind of one-in-one-out this week. Out was Papakura candidate George Ngatai, who stepped down after screenshots were released by Shubz (Martel Wikeepa) showing he had been shopping himself around to other parties before securing his NZ First candidacy.

In was much more interesting with Former Financial Markets Authority chair Craig Stobo announced as the party’s Botany candidate. Stobo resigned from the FMA earlier this year after what certainly appeared to be a coordinated attempt to oust him via not one but two reviews. The first one clearly did not produce the desired outcome, but the second found that some of his public political comments breached the neutrality expected of someone chairing a Crown regulator. Funnily enough, CEO Samantha Barrass now finds herself stood down and facing her own investigation announced by the board a couple of weeks ago. Live by the sword and all that.

“The tribe has spoken”: Davina Smolders gets voted off the island

Far North District councillor and ACT list candidate Davina Smolders has been kicked off the council’s Te Kuaka Committee for Māori Strategic Relationships, after months of doing the apparently intolerable thing of questioning how it operates.

Te Kuaka has 15 members made up of 7 elected councillors and 8 unelected iwi and hapū representatives. Smolders was appointed in March and has persistently questioned, among other things, why unelected representatives have voting rights in council decision making.

Things came to a head after the Northland Iwi Chairs Forum, Te Kahu o Taonui, formally complained that Smolders had engaged in “ongoing hostile and undermining attacks” on iwi and hapū, challenged the legitimacy of their participation in council processes, and risked encouraging hostility towards Māori involvement in local government. The council subsequently voted 7–3 to remove her from the committee.

Smolders says she was not told about the complaint before the meeting and was not given an opportunity to respond to it. The forum itself had apparently asked for its complaint to be dealt with under the council’s code of conduct process, but Mayor Moko Tepania said that was not possible.

Councillor Arohanui Allen insisted the decision was not about silencing her but about the “trust and respect” required to sit on the committee. Deputy Mayor Chicky Rudkin said Smolders’ words had been hurtful, hōhā, and damaging. Councillor Kelly Stratford said councillors should remove themselves from committees where participation conflicted with their values. Smolders reminded them that the money council spends is not theirs. It belongs to ratepayers and that is who she is accountable to.

ACT wants Parliament back in charge of the law

In somewhat related news, ACT has released what it is calling its “One Law for All” policy, aimed squarely at combating judicial activism, vague Treaty clauses, and the increasingly expansive role tikanga has been allowed to play in the courts.

They propose to amend the Constitution Act to state 3 principles explicitly: Parliament is sovereign, the rule of law is fundamental, and all New Zealanders are equal before the law. They would also amend the Legislation Act so statutes are interpreted in the context of the time Parliament passed them, rather than being progressively reimagined by judges decades later.

Seymour also points to cases such as Ellis, where the Supreme Court expanded the role tikanga could play in common law, arguing that judges have been moving into territory Parliament never actually authorised. His argument is that judges are there to interpret the law, not to stealthily invent new sources of it. “Parliament is elected, judges are not,” he says.

Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer responded by comparing the policy to the Treaty Principles Bill, calling it “nonsense”, a “drama that doesn’t exist”, and accusing Seymour of “dog-whistling”.

Apparently wasting $40 million and contempt of Parliament won’t get you sacked

Well, there is currently no better encapsulation of Wellington’s accountability problem than the wet bus ticket that slapped the wrist of public servants who were found to have outright lied to ministers this week.

The Privileges Committee found that senior MBIE officials deliberately misled Parliament about the failed Biometric Capability Upgrade immigration IT project when during a select committee appearance, chief executive Nic Blakeley and former Immigration New Zealand head Alison McDonald were asked about the project and failed to disclose that it had already been cancelled. At least $40 million was wasted, and the wider scandal includes allegations that officials misled ministers and used “creative accounting” to avoid Cabinet scrutiny.

The committee found the ministry in contempt of Parliament, Blakeley offered his resignation, and Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche… refused it.

Roche said the finding was “extremely serious” and “completely unacceptable”, but accepting Blakeley’s resignation would not be “fair or proportionate”, partly because he had been chief executive for only 6 weeks when the misleading occurred.

What exactly does someone in the upper echelon of the New Zealand public service have to do to lose their job?

Blakeley did not personally create the 7 year disaster he inherited, but there is a real problem with no one having to bear a cost for the appalling behaviour of the ministry.

Taking “full responsibility” means absolutely nothing if bureaucrats know they will not face any consequences for even seriously egregious conduct. Our top public servants are on salaries of half a million dollars or more. At that level you are being paid to carry responsibility when things go spectacularly wrong.

Taxpayers’ Union v LGNZ: The battle of the calculators

The Government has confirmed its proposed cap on council rates increases at between 2% and 4%, although legislation will not pass until next term and the full regime won’t begin until July 2029. Simon Watts says the idea is to put a brake on runaway increases and force councils to focus on core services, Winston Peters points to “squanderous spending” by some councils, and David Seymour notes that Auckland ratepayers have just endured a 7.9% increase and says 4% sounds pretty good by comparison.

Then RNZ reported that Local Government New Zealand estimated the average household would save just $34 a year under the cap and Watts confirmed the figure when questioned, while arguing that the average disguises what the policy could mean for ratepayers in councils contemplating much larger increases. Thirty. Four. Dollars. Rather underwhelming for a policy being sold as putting the brakes on runaway rates. It will probably buy you a couple of blocks of butter by 2029…

But wait, the story does not end there! The Taxpayers’ Union has challenged the calculation, pointing to the Government’s own Regulatory Impact Statement, which estimates cumulative savings of $938 per rating unit over 7 years. Spread evenly across 7 years that is about $134 annually, although even that fairly crude calculation misses the point that rates compound.

The Taxpayers’ Union has produced its own, considerably more optimistic estimate. Using the roughly 6.5% average annual increase in rates over the past decade as the counterfactual, it reckons a 4% cap could save ratepayers about $2,736 over 7 years, or an average of $391 a year.

None of this shows LGNZ in a particularly good light. You can manufacture a remarkably unimpressive “average annual saving” if you flatten a compounding benefit across the period and present it in the least flattering way possible, but that is hardly an honest representation. And Simon Watts might want to develop a new media strategy involving taking a deep breath and thinking for 10 seconds before answering questions. He has managed to accidentally set off rumours that National is considering hiking GST and accept this absurd $34 figure at face value when the Government’s own paperwork told a different story. Ministers should actually know their own policies. Preferably before talking to media.

One genuinely excellent change for women

Health Minister Simeon Brown has announced that new clinical guidelines will support GPs to make clinical endometriosis diagnoses based on symptoms, family history, and examination, rather than women having to wait for laparoscopic surgery before receiving a confirmed diagnosis. This means that treatment can begin immediately. Diagnosis currently takes 8–12 years in New Zealand.

Endometriosis affects roughly one in ten women and includes living with debilitating pelvic pain, extremely painful periods, heavy bleeding, pain during sex and, for some, fertility problems. Until now it has also meant bouncing between GPs, specialists, surgeons, and emergency departments trying to establish what is actually wrong. Too many women have had their severe pain normalised or dismissed as simply part of being female.

Everybody please remain calm at Winton

Things are going to hell in a handbasket at property developer Winton. Its founder and majority shareholder Chris Meehan has been accused by former female employees of sexual harassment, including allegations of groping. Winton’s board commissioned 2 independent barristers to investigate workplace complaints and Meehan subsequently resigned as chair and chief executive, although he remains a director and, rather importantly, owns 55% of the company. He also does not appear to have gone far as he is seen frequently in the building.

And then everybody else started resigning. Former National finance minister Steven Joyce lasted just 7 weeks as chair before departing over what he described as a “fundamental misalignment of expectations” with Meehan. Director Guy Fergusson and CFO Jean McMahon left. James Kemp quit the nominations and remuneration committee. And executive director Julian Cook resigned after Newsroom published further allegations about Meehan.

At the centre of the drama is also an attempt by Winton’s independent directors to change the company’s constitution to give minority shareholders greater representation on the board and provide an avenue for independent advocacy. This was not an entirely academic concern given the person they were apparently seeking some independence from owns a controlling stake in the company. Meehan, with his 55%, blocked it.

The independent directors were then left in the slightly awkward position of apparently concluding they could not properly perform their duties as independent directors because the majority shareholder would not permit them sufficient independence. So they walked.

None of this is occurring against an otherwise sparkling corporate backdrop either. Winton listed at $3.87 in 2021 and its shares were trading at about $1.12 this week, taking its market capitalisation from roughly $1.15 billion at listing to around $332 million. Meanwhile, Auckland Council is challenging Winton’s enormous 3850-home Sunfield development through the courts.

I suspect we will be returning to Winton in future wrap ups.

When your expert is married to a Labour MP

ACT’s proposal for a dedicated national cancer centre (its “Starship for Cancer” idea) received a lot of positive feedback. However there was one fairly brutal negative review shared by media from University of Otago professor of cancer medicine Chris Jackson this week.

Jackson called the funding model “magical thinking”, argued centralising cancer care would drain resources from the regions, and said there were much better ways to spend the money, including lung cancer screening, and lowering the bowel screening age. These are substantive criticisms and he is obviously qualified to make them.

There was, however, one piece of context that some media outlets forgot to include…

Professor Jackson is married to Labour MP Rachel Brooking.

That does not make his argument wrong and experts are allowed to marry politicians. But, it does mean the relationship is very relevant information when a news outlet is presenting his assessment of an ACT Party’s election policy.

The Professor will also be thrilled to know that the current Government is already lowering the bowel screening age. It was 60, has been lowered to 58, and from 30 September 2026 the next staged reduction to 56 begins.

🇺🇸🇬🇧🇧🇪 The Arday scandal becomes an international incident

Plymouth Marjon University has reinstated the emeritus professorship of 78 year old David Harris, who had his title removed after publishing research critical of critical race theory. Internal correspondence described his work as “controversial” and that the “tone and content” of his communications did not meet its values. Harris also happens to be one of the academics who raised concerns about Jason Arday’s work well before the scandal finally exploded this year.

Nathan Cofnas, the American academic whose investigation of Arday’s work helped bring the plagiarism allegations into the mainstream was similarly punished. Belgium’s Ghent University suspended Cofnas last week and opened disciplinary proceedings over his public statements, thus managing the impressive feat of turning an already international academic scandal into a minor diplomatic incident.

US Ambassador to Belgium Bill White publicly condemned what he called Ghent’s “retaliation against an American scholar following his accurate whistleblower reporting on academic fraud” and announced that the United States was reviewing its relationships with the university. Given that the American government funds research, academic exchanges, and other relationships with foreign universities, this was a bit more consequential than another angry open letter from some academics.

Ambassador White has now announced that Ghent and Cofnas have reached an agreement under which his suspension will be lifted and he can complete his postdoctoral appointment. He thanked rector Petra De Sutter (don’t get me started on him) for listening to those calling for academic freedom.

The valedictories

Two departing MPs gave valedictory speeches this week: ACT’s Mark Cameron and National’s Dr Shane Reti.

Cameron is leaving Parliament after 6 years because of serious ill health. He has suffered kidney failure and acute heart failure, and has also endured the unimaginable loss of his son to suicide.

“We all have our shit, as we say in rural New Zealand, and I have certainly had my fill,” he told the House.

MPs' lives don't stop happening when they enter Parliament. It is easy to forget that the people sitting in the House are actual human beings whose marriages fail, parents die, children have typical struggles, and sometimes genuinely terrible things happen, all while cameras remain pointed at them and thousands of strangers who know almost nothing about them confidently condemn their character. Cameron has had an extraordinarily rough few years and I hope retirement gives him some peace and, particularly, some improvement in his health.

Dr Shane Reti also gave his final speech after nearly a decade in Parliament. His was understandably lighter, including jokes about the frankly ridiculous number of National Party leaders he has served under. Reti is an incredibly highly respected member of Parliament and a thoroughly nice man. His intellect and good intentions were not, however, accompanied by the mongrel and political savvy necessary to be a more effective political operative. He was, I think, simply too nice.

Politics is a strange career in which you can spend a decade climbing almost every rung of the ladder and then, one day, stand up, say your farewells, and simply walk out of the building.

Chris Penk, incidentally, has decided not to give a valedictory following his spectacularly abrupt departure from Cabinet and decision to leave politics. Probably for the best, but sad nonetheless.

🇺🇸 Goodbye, Dolly

Dolly Parton died this week and all my group chats went mental. People I did not expect to be Dolly fans were just as devastated as I felt. She was enormously talented, very funny, gloriously over-the-top, and never became insufferable despite having been famous for most of her life. She wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love You on the same day, gave away millions of books to children, and once lost a Dolly Parton lookalike contest. An absolute original.

In short - other stuff that happened

• 🇳🇵A catastrophic flash flood and landslide has struck the Nepal-China border. At the time of writing, Nepalese police said 392 bodies had been recovered, with more than 1400 people missing. Five New Zealanders were among those unaccounted for, according to MFAT. Authorities believe a glacier collapse caused the disaster.

• 🇺🇸 The Lindsay Clancy murder trial has gone to the jury, which must decide whether she was criminally responsible when she killed her 3 young children. Her defence says she was psychotic, disastrously overmedicated, and failed by her medical care. Prosecutors accept she was mentally ill but argue she still knew right from wrong.

• 🇦🇺 A 16 year old Sydney girl has died after a suspected choking act during sex, a grim reminder of how sexual strangulation has become normalised among young people. A 2024 Australian study found 57% of 18–35-year-olds surveyed had been strangled during sex at least once.

• A Waikato woman has received a discharge without conviction for incest with her father. She was in her late teens, had only recently met him, and was found to have an intellectual disability and significantly below-age functioning. Her father, who is in his 70s, faces his own charge and remains in custody awaiting mental health reports.

• Our Fruit Box director Riiria Jade Tatana, who declared “God is my boss, not MPI” while continuing to sell unpasteurised juice despite a Food Safety direction to stop, has been found guilty of 3 Food Act charges. Sentencing is in October and hopefully God can provide a character reference.

• 🇨🇰 Former Cook Islands rugby league international Tangiia Tongia has been sentenced to 8 years and 3 months for raping and sexually violating a woman in her Christchurch home. Tongia had admitted the offending when first interviewed by police before later denying it at trial, which Judge Tom Gilbert described as “pig-headed denial in the face of overwhelming evidence”. He received no credit for remorse or good character. Good.

• 🇧🇷 A Brazilian trans-identifying male adult content creator had his NZeTA cancelled before flying to Auckland after Immigration NZ said he declined to provide evidence of sufficient funds, gave inadequate details of his travel plans and raised concerns about the accuracy of his employment information. The story inevitably became about him being transgender, when on the facts available it appears he was denied entry for the same boring immigration reasons anyone else might be.

• Fringe religious leader Kaixiao Liu has been sentenced to 10 years and 5 months for the manslaughter and kidnapping of 70 year old Shulai Wang, whose body was found wrapped in rubbish bags at Gulf Harbour in 2024. His wife, Lanyue Xiao, received 7 years and 11 months. Wang had been restrained and denied food and water, and Justice Mathew Downs described Liu’s treatment of her as showing “callous indifference”.

• 🇺🇸 The WNBA’s dildo-throwing problem is back. A green one landed on court during the Dream v Sparks game in Los Angeles. The alleged thrower was arrested and indefinitely banned from WNBA, NBA and other league-affiliated events. The following night, at least three more were thrown during a Chicago Sky game.

• 🇺🇸 Seattle Times columnist Matt Calkins has resigned after editors refused to publish his column defending women and girls who oppose males competing in female sport, saying he no longer felt he could do his job properly.

• 🇬🇧 Tim Curry, the endlessly versatile British actor best known for his role as Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, has died aged 80. Curry, who also gave us Pennywise in It, Clue, Home Alone 2 and Muppet Treasure Island, died peacefully at his Los Angeles home after years of ill health following a serious stroke in 2012.

• 🇺🇸 Donald Trump has renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America”, because apparently the Gulf of Mexico was not enough cartographic trolling for one presidency. Trump justified dropping “Ontario” by saying there was no point naming it after the Canadian province because US-Canada trade would soon dry up.

• Dunedin Hospital’s new $440 million outpatient building has officially opened, with clinical services beginning from October. Once fully operational, it is expected to provide around 1700 additional day surgeries and 13,300 additional imaging appointments each year.

• 🇺🇸 A male player now called Lily Hamilton was allowed to compete on a women’s Aussie Rules Football team in California despite being a registered sex offender who had been convicted by a US military court in 2006 of raping a child under 12 and forcibly sodomising 2 other children. Hamilton was sentenced to 41 years in military prison, reduced to 25 under a pretrial agreement, and reportedly served around 15 years. He was quietly removed from the team, but a subsequent complaint alleged his female teammates were never formally told why, despite having shared hotel rooms, social events, and spaces involving children with him.

Stuff you might find interesting this week

Women's Rights & Wrongs

The Tallest Poppy: Caitlin Clark and the Psychology of Resentment

At the end of my first essay, after taking you on a lengthy detour of Finnish schoolchildren, evolutionary psychology, provocatively dressed research assistants, Queen Bees, workplace politics, relational aggression, and the various creative ways women have developed to make one another miserable without actually punching each other, I finally arrived a…

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8 days ago · 19 likes · 10 comments · Ani O’Brien

A small personal note before I go: thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to our Givealittle for fertility treatment so far. I have been genuinely overwhelmed by people’s generosity and kindness.

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The architecture of social media is deliberately addictive, children are particularly susceptible to it, and pretending otherwise in the name of some absolutist conception of liberty is not a position I share. This has resulted in me being called a “luddite” among other things. Funnily enough I find myself more at liberty to discuss this now.

It is my firm belief that primarily parents, but also the state in some circumstances, have a solemn responsibility to protect children and that because of this children do not have the same freedom rights as adults. We do not allow them to drink alcohol, enter into contracts, or drive until a designated age, for example. Parents should be the number one protectors and decision makers for their children, but legislation and the state can take action to support them in this and pick up the slack where absentee parents exist. I want to be clear that I do not think the state should interfere in families as much as it does these days. And yet, I still think parents would be aided by the government making it easier for them to say “no” to their kids about social media.

My opposition to National’s proposal has therefore never been about its objective. It is the mechanism that it seems determined to use despite its failure in Australia. National’s bill would require so-called “high risk” platforms to take “reasonable steps” to establish that users are at least 16. Those steps can include existing account information, facial age estimation, digital ID services, and formal identification. The regime would apply to platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube and X, while primarily messaging services, online games, and various other services are excluded. An online safety regulator inside the Department of Internal Affairs would monitor and investigate compliance, with penalties potentially calculated as a percentage of a company’s global revenue.

At their press conference to announce the legislation, Christopher Luxon said the Government cannot accept the harm being done to children, while Erica Stanford described the bill as an “enduring framework” that will evolve with technology. Luxon is right about the harm and Stanford is right that technology companies bear some responsibility for products deliberately designed to consume attention. But National has not convinced me that their legislation will actually keep children off social media without substantially changing the relationship every New Zealand adult has with the internet.

This is the problem I keep coming back to. If an internet service must establish that I am an adult before allowing me to use it, the service must have some means of establishing something about who I am. Perhaps that involves formal ID, a third-party digital identity service, or maybe they are hoping that facial age estimation eventually becomes good enough to establish age without establishing identity. I am more open to genuinely privacy-preserving age-assurance technology than I am to universal identification. But the burden of proof should sit very heavily on the people proposing it. The internet is now one of the principal places in which people speak, organise, conduct business, find information, and participate in politics. Anonymous and pseudonymous speech exists for very good reasons even though I wish fewer people would make use of it, and governments should require an exceptionally good reason before making identification the price of participation.

National’s “reasonable steps” approach also looks like an attempt to avoid confronting the actual problem. A weak age-assurance system is easily circumvented by determined teenagers and therefore does not accomplish what the legislation supposedly exists to accomplish. But, a stronger system would become progressively more intrusive for everyone else. Australia has already demonstrated the obvious difficulty with trying to build a digital fence around teenagers, who possess the combination of technical competence, spare time, and bloody-mindedness that has allowed teenagers to evade adult rules since the beginning of time. And so, failed enforcement inevitably creates political pressure for escalating enforcement. Age verification will fail and so somebody will start talking about banning VPNs. When that fails perhaps device monitoring becomes attractive and eventually we discover that we have rebuilt the internet around proving who is permitted to access it because 14 year olds kept finding workarounds. Governments do not generally respond to the failure of their flagship regulation schemes by cheerfully dismantling them.

Now, I acknowledge that my position on this Bill is not a majority one. I know for a fact my openness to legislation that will actually work has infuriated some of my freedom-loving peers. But we are likely in the minority anyway, because there is a lot of support for Government action in this space. That support diminishes as you talk about the methods and impacts of action, but there is a fair bit of support for it nonetheless. National correctly identifies something that is worrying an enormous number of parents. They have committed themselves publicly to doing something about it, and are now trying to construct a regulatory solution capable of fulfilling the promise. Luxon has said he will “die trying” to make the ban happen. That is stirring stuff, I suppose, but determination is not a great substitute for workable policy.

Reporting has referred to this as a “government bill”, but the coalition is split on it. ACT and New Zealand First are both exercising their agree-to-disagree provisions and opposing National, meaning National needs Opposition support to get its bill through its first reading. David Seymour’s objection is essentially what I have already outlined in that if they make the system weak the teenagers will circumvent it, but if they make it strong adults will be caught in it. Winston Peters has gone further, warning that enforcing such a regime pushes governments towards digital ID and restrictions on privacy technologies. Both parties acknowledge that there is a problem to be solved but they do not believe this is the solution.

As I argued in a previous Substack, I think we are tackling the wrong end of the problem. We normalised giving children the most sophisticated communications devices human beings have ever possessed then started frantically designing systems to prevent them using the applications those devices were built to deliver. Children do need to be able to call their parents, but they do not need smartphones. A basic phone provides the safety and communication parents want without placing TikTok, Instagram, pornography, algorithmic rabbit holes, and the entire accumulated lunacy of the internet in a child’s pocket 24 hours a day.

So I remain much more attracted to the idea of banning the hardware before banning the software. We could restrict the sale and possession of smartphones for under 16s while permitting basic phones. Make it unlawful for under 16s to hold social media accounts, but place the primary responsibility for that rule on parents rather than constructing a system under which every adult internet user must continually demonstrate eligibility to technology companies. That will not achieve perfect compliance because nothing will. Some parents will ignore it and some teenagers will evade it, just as some teenagers obtain alcohol. The purpose is to change the default expectation and support parents who do not want to give their 13 year old a smartphone, but who are currently forced to fight a culture in which everyone else has one. Law can change that norm without pretending that every breach must be technologically impossible.

There is a genuinely reasonable position available here, although our political debate keeps trying to pretend there is not. We can recognise that children are different from adults and require protection from products designed to exploit immature judgment, while remaining ferociously protective of the privacy and liberty of adults. We should expect parents to exercise responsibility while giving them laws and social norms that make doing so easier. We must also demand that technology companies address genuinely harmful product design without handing a government regulator an ever-expanding mandate over lawful adult communication. I argued in July that protecting children and protecting freedom become competing objectives only if we design policy badly enough to make them so. I have not changed my mind.

I want children off social media and for parents to have considerably more support in keeping them off it, and I am perfectly prepared to support law to help achieve that. But I will not accept that saving childhood requires turning the adult internet into an identification checkpoint, nor will I applaud a policy merely because its architects have attached the words “child safety” to it.

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Election 2026: Everybody has discovered the MMP cheat codes

Te Pāti Māori has formally announced that it wants the electorate vote in the Māori seats, but supporters can give their party vote to Labour or the Greens. If Te Pāti Māori wins more electorate seats than its tiny party vote would entitle it to, those electorate MPs become overhang seats. Parliament gets bigger and, depending on the final numbers, the left bloc potentially gets a small mathematical advantage.

MMP has always allowed voters to split their votes and parties have always tried to exploit the distinction between electorate and party votes. What is unusual is a political party openly telling supporters not to party vote for it. Te Pāti Māori is effectively saying its primary purpose this election is no longer to maximise Te Pāti Māori representation according to the party vote, but to maximise the number of seats available to the anti-coalition bloc.

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Willie Jackson says this strategy risks provoking a backlash against the Māori seats, but Debbie Ngarewa-Packer accused him of hypocrisy because Labour removed its Māori-seat candidates from the list in 2017 to pressure voters. Of course, Labour still asked for two ticks.

A similar strategy has been suggested by Don Brash for the centre-right. He has observed that if voters give National electorate votes while directing their party votes to ACT or New Zealand First, a large overhang could be created. There is a cost, though. If National’s electorate candidates romp home while its party vote is cannibalised by ACT and New Zealand First, its list will be wiped out. That means the end of the road for some senior National figures who rely on list placement e.g. Nicola Willis, Gerry Brownlee, Paul Goldsmith, and Chris Bishop.

The media’s Luxon brain worms are getting worse

Christopher Luxon has a unique ability to make otherwise normal people lose their minds and no, I am not talking about his own caucus. This is also not an argument that Luxon is a brilliant Prime Minister. He certainly has an almost supernatural ability to turn an ordinary sentence into several days of political media crisis and there are perfectly legitimate reasons to dislike him. But some of the coverage about him is just bizarre as if the media are on a mission to portray him in the worst light possible.

In Lower Hutt this week, Luxon was asked about Wellington’s decline and the influence of Labour and Green councillors. He reminisced about living there in the early 1990s, complained about the Molesworth Street cycleway, and told people that if they do not bother voting in local elections, “you kinda get what you deserve”.

Stuff initially headlined this as Luxon telling Wellington “You get what you deserve” as if he thought Wellington just deserves a hard time. It later restored the rather important “kinda” and added the context of the full question he had been answering. Stuff also corrected another error around the timeframe he lived in Wellington as a young man, but not before the private investigators of Grey Lynn began accusing the PM of lying about the circumstances of buying his first house.

Then, because after those corrections it needed another “gotcha” angle, Stuff produced a video investigation: “Is it ‘very difficult’ to cross Molesworth St as Luxon says? We check.”

Meanwhile, at his next public meeting in Christchurch, six separate protesters interrupted proceedings, including one with the chant: “We are Mordor, build our Mordor brand”. Luxon remained remarkably calm throughout, but it was the protesters who received very sympathetic treatment from the media. They were largely presented through the grievances that motivated them rather than the obnoxiousness of repeatedly preventing everyone else from hearing the answers to questions.

Stuff and The Post are quite transparent in their hunger for Luxon to be rolled even though their own polling following National’s latest failed coup disaster found Luxon was still comfortably the preferred Prime Minister for National voters with 57% choosing him, compared with Erica Stanford on 9%, Nicola Willis on 6%, and Chris Bishop on 4%.

Mount Maunganui: everybody knew, nobody owned it

Six people died on January 22 of this year after a landslide hit the Beachside Holiday Park at the base of Mount Maunganui and retired High Court judge Paul Davison’s independent review concluded that the tragedy was preventable. The hazard was not newly discovered and consultants had repeatedly identified it for more than two decades.

As far back as 1999, Dr Laurie Richards warned that putting fragile holiday accommodation beneath those slopes was imprudent and that the danger to sleeping occupants was high. In 2006, modelling estimated that a debris flow could put roughly 30 people in its path and kill 21. Trigger Action Response Plans were recommended in late 2023 and again in mid 2025. Nothing meaningful was done and now it is too late.

The report also revealed that just 7 months before the landslide, another report assessed a high risk to life. It appeared in the agenda for a meeting involving Ngā Poutiriao ō Mauao and the Mauao Trust. But unfortunately, the meeting was cancelled and Tauranga City Council says the councillors therefore did not read the report. Despite the chief executive’s name appearing on the agenda cover, the council says that does not mean he read it either. Information was received, filed, (perhaps) discussed, forwarded, and then left. Everybody touched the information and nobody owned the consequences.

There is no single obvious villain here. Instead, a bureaucracy became very good at generating reports, circulating warnings, forming committees, and recording risk while never quite producing a decision to do anything about it.

WorkSafe is now investigating and could possibly prosecute. While councillors are excluded from criminal liability under the relevant law, the council as an organisation and potentially its chief executive could face it.

The court would like your pronouns, please

The judiciary has issued new Guidelines for Courtroom Conduct for Counsel, endorsed by the Chief Justice and Heads of Bench. Much of it is perfectly sensible and extraordinarily detailed. Lawyers should be punctual, dress formally, silence their phones, and should not swear at each other. All very common sense. Then we reach paragraph 38.

Counsel are told it is their responsibility to know the correct spelling and pronunciation of their clients’ and witnesses’ names, as well as “the titles and pronouns they use”, and where possible this information should be given to the registrar in advance. Later the guidelines state that witnesses should usually be referred to using their formal name, title “and their pronouns”. You can probably guess where I am going with this.

There is no exception to pronoun policy for the difficult situation where someone accused of a sexual offence is male but “identifies as a woman”, and the victim believes his sex matters to what happened to her. Nor does the guidance deal with what happens when one person’s preferred identity conflicts with another person’s beliefs or their need to describe what happened accurately. The guidelines simply assume that using someone's requested pronouns is an uncomplicated courtesy. In a courtroom, it isn't always.

British courts have already had to deal with cases where female complainants and witnesses were expected to describe male offenders as women and the guidance in England and Wales was eventually changed to recognise the problem. The current Equal Treatment Bench Book acknowledges that a woman describing a traumatic sexual assault may find it deeply confusing or distressing to hear her male attacker referred to as “she”. It also recognises that making victims change the language they naturally use could make it harder for them to give clear and accurate evidence. New Zealand’s brand new guidance has not taken this into consideration.

Labour finds another tax behind the sofa

National spent the beginning of the week accusing Labour of planning a streaming tax. A levy on streaming companies like Netflix, Disney+, etc that they argue would result in higher fees for Kiwi customers.

Chris Hipkins indignantly fronted media to exasperatedly say there was no streaming tax and National was up to mischief. The problem was that senior Labour MP Willie Jackson had a Bill in the biscuit tin proposing just that and it had been endorsed by Hipkins himself. Now to be fair, it had been there for 2 years so perhaps, Hipkins forgot, but he did recommit in January to the policy.

After Simeon Brown drew attention to the Bill, it rapidly disappeared from Parliament’s website and Hipkins said continuing to have it in the ballot had been an “administrative oversight” and that Labour was now going through its members’ bills to ensure they all match their election manifesto.

Parties change policy from time to time, but Labour is already on shaking ground when it comes to tax given Hipkins promised there would not be a Capital Gains Tax while he was leader and they are now saying they will introduce one to pay for their election promises. National is already repeating the line that “you cannot trust Labour on tax” and desperately needed a distraction after the Penk leadership debacle. Labour handed them this one gift-wrapped.

Opportunity finally gets asked some actual questions

Opportunity is finally being taken seriously and realising that unfortunately that comes with a certain degree of scrutiny. Up until now the party could publish ambitious policies safe in the knowledge that almost nobody expected them to have to implement them. However, now it is flirting with the threshold and journalists are finally audaciously doing their job.

Jack Tame’s Q+A interview last weekend with leader Qiulae Wong was the toughest test she has had so far. Former Prime Minister Helen Clark called the interview a “train wreck” and appeared to launch Labour’s attack campaign on the smaller party. Tame grilled Wong on Opportunity’s plan to make us all beneficiaries by giving us pocket money after they tax the heck out of us. He pointed out that there were few incentives for Kiwis overseas to return home and plenty of people who would be hit hard in the pocket by their policies.

Opportunity wants a 1.75% tax on urban land and 0.5% on rural land, alongside higher income tax settings, and the Citizen’s Income of $19,400 per adult. A property sitting on $500,000 of urban land value could therefore attract an $8750 annual land tax.

Wong told viewers they needed to “look at the bigger picture” and said she would be happy to pay much higher taxes. She also acknowledged the party had not modelled for capital flight. Even the Greens modelled for capital flight even if it was undercooked!

Then Tame raised the matter of the party’s largest donor and party board member Alan Wilderland. He has given more than $221,000, donates another $5000 each month, sits on the party’s strategy team, and was one of the five people involved in selecting Wong as leader. Tame asked Wong if Wilderland supports Opportunity’s proposed cap on political donations at $30,000. She said he does.

And Tame actually managed to get a constitutional change out of them. He pointed out that Opportunity's constitution gave its board the power to overrule its parliamentary caucus with a 75% vote. The party has now sensibly decided to get rid of it, subject to a special meeting.

Breaking: defence lawyer defends client

LawNews published a fairly savage piece this week from criminal defence barrister Samira Taghavi responding to Labour Health spokesperson Dr Ayesha Verrall’s questioning of Health Minister Simeon Brown’s appointment of Roderick Mulgan to the Medical Council.

Verrall had suggested in Question Time that Dr Mulgan is some kind of sex offender advocate. She did not make it clear to anyone that he is both a doctor and a barrister and that his involvement with sex offenders was in the course of doing his job as a lawyer.

In her article, Taghavi reminds Verral that the entire justice system depends upon people accused of appalling things having lawyers prepared to represent them. Defence counsel act for murderers, rapists, domestic abusers, and people accused of every other form of human awfulness imaginable. The fact that a lawyer acts for a sex offender is not a declaration of his personal approval of the alleged behaviour.

Taghavi described Verrall’s questioning as displaying an “egregious lack of understanding” of the distinction between advocate and adjudicator.

🇬🇧 Jason Arday and the posthumous rewrite

The Jason Arday story has become a lot uglier since his death. The former Cambridge professor whose extraordinary biography and academic record had come under intense scrutiny, was found dead not long after resigning from his position. There has been a huge amount of rewriting of recent history. Allegations about plagiarism, dubious academic affiliations, extraordinary charity claims, and other parts of his public biography rapidly disappeared to make way for claims that a brilliant Black professor had essentially been hounded to death by racists.

There were undoubtedly racists cheering his downfall. There are racists on the internet cheering almost everything. But they didn't invent the problems with Arday's story. Arday lied and lied and lied, and those lies caught up with him. The fact that he deceived so many people does not disappear because he took his own life and, in fact, deifying or martyring him as many are doing contradicts every bit of advice around how to talk about suicide so as not to encourage copycat behaviour.

Nathan Cofnas, who kicked off the scrutiny into Arday, has now been suspended by Ghent University while it conducts a preliminary disciplinary investigation. The university said it was shocked by Arday’s death and stressed that academic freedom comes with responsibilities and can be restricted to protect others. This is quite incredible. No matter any other facts surrounding the matter, Cofnas only revealed the inconvenient truth about Arday. He was not wrong to do so. Suicide cannot be weaponised to stop journalists doing their jobs.

🇺🇸 The Lindsay Clancy rabbit hole

I have fallen down the Lindsay Clancy trial rabbit hole, and I am warning you that it is extremely deep. Clancy is currently on trial in Massachusetts for killing her three young children in January 2023. Nobody (except hordes of really convincing women on TikTok) disputes that she strangled them. The question for the jury is whether she was criminally responsible (sane) at the time. Her defence says she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and heard a male voice commanding her to kill the children and herself. Prosecutors argue that she planned the killings and deliberately engineered an opportunity to be alone with them.

Everyone let her down. Her former mother-in-law testified that Lindsay was “begging for help” before the killings and her own mother and sister described escalating paranoia, suicidal thoughts, and fears about her medication. A psychologist testified that there is no evidence she was faking or exaggerating psychiatric symptoms and a hospital chaplain testified that Lindsay said she heard a voice commanding her to act. Meanwhile, hundreds of women dressed in pink have gathered outside the courthouse this week in support of her, arguing that her case represents a catastrophic failure to take women’s postpartum mental health seriously.

And then there is an enormous parallel investigation taking place on TikTok, Reddit, and elsewhere in which people are dissecting Lindsay’s ex-husband Patrick Clancy’s movements, testimony, phone records, clothing, behaviour after the murders, subsequent move to New York, and remarriage. The New Yorker has called it the “Lindsay Clancy Conspiracy Spiral” and is unequivocal that there is no evidence Patrick killed the children.

However, I have now consumed enough of the conspiracy content to understand why it has taken off. Some of it is deranged for sure, but some of the questions being raised about Patrick’s timeline and testimony are sufficiently odd that I have caught myself going, “hang on, what?” And it is relatively safe to say he was possibly having an affair with his now wife (which doesn't make him a murderer, just a scumbag).

It is intriguing how a case in which the identity of the killer is not actually disputed has nevertheless mutated into an enormous online whodunnit. Which is probably why I cannot stop reading about it.

🇬🇧 Britain is now handing out “rape is illegal” leaflets

The British Home Office has produced new guidance for asylum seekers explaining, among other things, that men and women are equal, women may work and study, domestic abuse is illegal, sex with children under 16 is illegal, and sex without consent is rape. Yes, really. I double checked. They have produced a leaflet that basically says “don’t do rapes please”.

The guidance also states that consent is required every time, including within marriage, and warns that somebody who rapes another person could go to prison, lose asylum support, and have the offending affect their claim. Yeeeeeaaaaaap.

Britain has spent years insisting that concerns about integration are little more than xenophobia. Women who raise the clash between liberal British norms and deeply patriarchal cultures are regularly accused of racism. Yet the Home Office itself is now producing illustrated instructions informing new arrivals that wives are allowed to leave the house and marital rape exists. You cannot simultaneously argue that cultural differences around women’s status are a racist invention and print government leaflets explaining those differences.

The most Wellington workplace dispute imaginable

The Taxpayers’ Union has calculated that waiata and karakia practice across 9 public agencies could be costing about $3.48 million a year in staff time. The Union used an average public service hourly salary of $49.66 and used the assumption that only 10% of agency staff attend the relevant sessions. That is deliberately conservative in participation terms.

Most departments seem to offer one paid 30 minute waiata session per week and then there is MBIE. In 2024, MBIE confirmed that its main office had waiata sessions from 9-9.30am every weekday. Senior management later tried to reduce the frequency but staff responded with an 8 page argument for retaining the sessions, invoking tikanga, Te Tiriti obligations, cultural capability, staff wellbeing, and fears that moving the singing into enclosed rooms could amount to symbolic marginalisation.

Senior executives then held meetings about this highly important matter and eventually a compromise was reached of three 30 minute sessions a week. I have never heard something so Wellington in my life… A government department entering an extended negotiation over whether staff should be paid to sing three times a week or five.

ACT wants public agencies to be prohibited from initiating or resourcing cultural or spiritual practices during work unless there is a genuine occupational reason and this is being called an “attack” on Māori culture.

If workers want to sing waiata together, wonderful. The issue is whether taxpayers should be expected to pay for it. Most New Zealanders have cultural interests and our employers generally expect us to pursue those interests in our own time.

The Winter Energy Payment disaster

Nearly 15,000 superannuitants and veterans did not receive their Winter Energy Payments as they should. The error came from last year’s Social Security Amendment Bill, which was passed through all stages under urgency and therefore never went through a select committee. The legislation required people receiving various supplementary payments to periodically review their circumstances and the Winter Energy Payment should have been excluded because it is automatic and not means-tested for superannuitants. But it was not.

Between May 1-August 7, 14,862 people were affected, but MSD has now backpaid them and Minister Louise Upston has apologised.

Luxon initially described it as an IT issue. Upston rather more accurately said it began as a policy omission which became a legislative error. Computers are wonderfully useful political scapegoats, but the IT system appears to have simply implemented the law it was given.

The news audience is moving

The latest Nielsen figures show Stuff remains comfortably in first place with 2.2 million monthly unique users in July, up 3% on June, with The Herald second on 1.85 million, down 4.4%. But RNZ is now on 1.79 million, up 8.4% in a single month, and 25.7% year-on-year.

That means our publicly funded broadcaster is now breathing down the Herald’s neck for second place. This seems fair given that RNZ does a significant amount of the detailed reporting that other news media then reproduce. They have made noticeable improvements to the quality of their written news media.

Following the top three, 1News had 742,000 monthly uniques, The Spinoff 478,000, The Press 461,000, and The Post 456,000. Stuff and the Herald still dominate daily engagement, each regularly producing four to five million page views a day while the smaller sites remain under one million.

In short - other stuff that happened

• 🇺🇸 Actress Hayden Panettiere has died aged 36 after being found unresponsive at a South Carolina apartment. She went into cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead by emergency services and the investigation is ongoing.

• ACT has proposed a Working with Children Card that would follow workers between employers and be continuously monitored rather than relying solely on the existing 3-yearly safety check cycle. Criminal convictions and disciplinary information could trigger suspension or revocation, with employers and regulators notified. It could cost up to $20 million to establish.

• Gore District Council spent $8200 +GST investigating a councillor for calling a staff presentation “gay”. Donna Bruce apologised, and the investigator concluded it was a one-off incident that was neither significant nor serious. The council has spent more than $22,000 on code-of-conduct complaints in just 2 years. Gaaaay!

• The Serious Fraud Office has charged a former council manager and two associates over an alleged scheme that funnelled more than $12 million of council work to an engineering firm they controlled. The SFO alleges the manager used roles at Auckland Council and Kāpiti Coast District Council to manipulate procurement. All 3 have pleaded not guilty and have interim name suppression.

• 🇬🇧 Prince Harry and Meghan are moving back to the UK later this month, six years after leaving royal duties and settling in California. Their children, Archie and Lilibet, are enrolled to start at a British school in September. After six years of insisting Britain was intolerable, they are coming home.

• 🇺🇸 McKenna West, a surrogate carrying a California couple’s biological child, initially agreed to an abortion after the baby was diagnosed with severe heart defect hypoplastic left heart syndrome, but changed her mind, travelled to Texas and gave birth there. The baby has since undergone major heart surgery, and West is now fighting the biological parents for custody.

• Suspended Financial Markets Authority chief executive Samantha Barrass is seeking an urgent Employment Relations Authority determination overturning her suspension and reinstating her to the top job. Barrass was placed on leave after staff raised workplace conduct concerns, while former staff have described a dysfunctional culture involving favouritism and bullying.

• The Public Service Commission has commissioned another independent review of an MBIE technology programme, this time Immigration New Zealand’s $336 million Our Future Services programme. This follows the ongoing investigation into the failed biometric project that wasted at least $40 million and involved ministers being misled about viability and costs.

• 🇨🇦 New Statistics Canada data shows support for unrestricted gender expression has fallen noticeably since 2018. Among women, agreement dropped from 85% to 77%; among men, from 78% to 70%. CBC’s experts mostly blamed conservative politicians, Trump and “hate”. Another possibility is that after years of being told every objection was bigotry, quite a few people are simply fed up.

• 🇺🇸 This week’s Indiana Fever–Atlanta Dream game drew 2.6 million viewers on ESPN, reportedly the most-watched WNBA game ever on cable.

• Former Alliance Party candidate Mary O’Neill has been sentenced to 2 years of intensive supervision after what a judge described as a “cynical act of harassment” against her former Napier neighbours. O’Neill had hired a contractor to cut trees on their property and has a longer history of harassing the same family, including breaches of a protection order and making false allegations of sexual misconduct.

• 🇬🇧 Snowsport England has restored a sex-based female category for its Parallel Lines Race Series. Its new system defines the female category as female sex at birth, while the open category includes males, transgender, and non-binary competitors. In other words, they have managed to protect women’s sport while calling it something other than men’s and women’s sport.

• A 37 year old woman has pleaded guilty to concealing the body of her newborn son after giving birth alone in a central Auckland hotel bath last August. She told police she later wrapped the baby in a towel, placed him in a handbag and left it in an Albert Park rubbish bin and his cause of death could not be determined.

• 🇺🇸 Seattle Times sports columnist Matt Calkins resigned after 11 years when the paper declined to publish his column arguing that supporting sex-based categories in women’s sport does not make someone transphobic. Calkins said several of his previous columns challenging prevailing newsroom views had also been spiked, and concluded he could no longer do his job properly.

Stuff you might find interesting this week

The First Social-Media Babies Are Growing Up And They’re Horrified by Kate Lindsay, The Atlantic

This is from 2023, but I stumbled across it this week and it is worth reading. We are now getting the first generation of adults who had their childhoods documented on social media before they were old enough to have any say in the matter, and some of them are furious about it. Lindsay talks to young adults whose parents posted everything from bath photos and medical diagnoses to tantrums and deeply personal family information. One woman describes being recognised and followed home by a stranger at 12 and being bullied at school using information her mother had put online. It is interesting because we are debating children’s own access to social media while giving little thought to the enormous digital footprints parents were creating for them.

Here’s why so many people are struggling to find love by Jack Rear, The Telegraph

Will Darbyshire collected nearly 16,000 accounts of people’s romantic lives in 2016, has repeated the exercise a decade later, and the comparison is fascinating. Dating apps have vastly increased the number of people we can theoretically meet while apparently making us less willing to take a chance on any particular one. People hold out for somebody better, agree to a 20 minute coffee rather than an actual date, struggle to compromise, and treat politics and attitudes towards children as non-negotiable compatibility tests. Encouragingly though, underneath all this dysfunction, Darbyshire found oddly little cynicism. People still desperately want to fall in love. We have just constructed a rather terrible system for doing it.

Top GP: ‘I would ban the label ADHD’ by Helen Brown, The Telegraph

The article is a lot more nuanced than the headline! Dr Iona Heath, a former president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, argues that ADHD is a social construct rather than a medical condition and that the explosion in diagnoses may tell us as much about schools and society as it does about children. Brown’s own son was diagnosed at seven and she writes about the impossible trade-off between medication that made him a successful student and the sense that it also made him a sadder child. Heath’s argument is essentially that we have designed schools increasingly hostile to children who need movement, sport, creativity, and practical activity, and then medicalised their failure to fit into them.

Status Defines Friendship for Too Many Americans by Christine Emba, The New York Times

Bleak, but very good. “I don’t have anybody that I feel like I matter to,” said one of the interviewees. Christine Emba looks particularly at working-class men without university degrees, almost half of whom in one small qualitative study reported having no close friends at all. She explores that university doesn’t merely provide qualifications; for many people it supplies several years of ready-made community, friendships, clubs, mentors, and social networks. Those who don’t go increasingly enter an adult world in which churches, unions, clubs, stable workplaces, and affordable third places have also declined.

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This makes perfect sense from the perspective of support for individual political parties. However, when the system consolidates into blocs as it has done in recent years, it does not necessarily continue to make sense from the perspective of a voter who has less loyalty to a party and more interest in one bloc gaining or retaining power. With less than three months until the New Zealand general election, people on both sides of politics seem to have independently arrived at roughly the same conclusion… it is time to get creative with MMP.

Over the weekend, Te Pāti Māori made vote splitting its official election strategy. It is campaigning for candidate votes in the Māori electorates while effectively ‘releasing’ its supporters to give their party votes to Labour, the Greens, or another party on the left. Debbie Ngarewa-Packer described it at the party’s campaign launch as “one plan, two votes”. Rawiri Waititi has gone further, arguing that a Te Pāti Māori electorate vote can elect one of its candidates while a Labour or Green party vote can help elect another Māori MP from those parties’ lists. In Te Tai Tokerau, for example, he told voters they could elect Te Pāti Māori’s Aperahama Edwards while Labour’s Willow-Jean Prime and Green MP Huhana Lyndon returned through their respective lists.

A very similar strategy is being proposed on the other side of politics too. Former National and ACT leader Don Brash proposed essentially the same trick in an interview last week and it has set tongues wagging. Brash suggested on The Platform that voters who want the current coalition returned should give their electorate vote to National candidates across the country (with the exception of Epsom and Tāmaki), while directing their party votes to ACT or New Zealand First. The intention is that National continues winning a great pile of electorates while its party vote collapses below the number of seats those electorates would normally entitle it to. Then ACT and New Zealand First receive the party votes that National has deliberately forgone. Hello, overhang.

Before getting into the competing strategies, lets quickly run through how an overhang works because this entire scheme depends on a peculiarity of MMP which most people vaguely know exists without necessarily understanding what it can do when deliberately exploited. Skip ahead if you are an MMP aficionado.

The party vote normally determines how many MPs a party is entitled to take into Parliament. For example, if a party receives roughly 30% of the party vote, it should receive roughly 30% of the seats. Those seats are filled first with the electorates the party has won and the remainder are filled from the party’s list. So if National is entitled to 40 MPs according to its party vote, and wins 35 electorates, it will get five list MPs to fill its 40 seats. However, if it wins 40 electorates, the party fills its seats with electorate MPs and gets no list MPs.

The key to overhang strategies is what happens if a party wins more electorates than its party vote says it should have. It has to keep them as the electorate has voted for a specific candidate and that creates an overhang. The Electoral Commission gives the example of a party receiving enough party votes for around 6 MPs but winning 7 electorates. All 7 electorate MPs remain in Parliament, the party gets no list MPs, and Parliament expands to accommodate the additional seat. The other parties do not have seats taken away to compensate, we just have more MPs in total.

Many people don’t realise we currently have an overhang in Parliament. Right now, Parliament has 123 MPs rather than the 120 it is ‘meant’ to. This was created by Te Pāti Māori winning more electorate seats than its party vote could accomodate. So while the phenomenon is not new, what we have not seen is a major political bloc attempt to turn this feature of MMP into a mass strategic-voting operation.

National’s position on this was clear even before Brash floated his proposal. At the party’s annual conference in June, campaign chair Simeon Brown told National supporters that “sharing isn’t caring, sharing is diluting” and explicitly warned them not to give their party votes to ACT or New Zealand First. Chris Bishop has since responded to Brash by saying voters would punish that sort of game-playing. Of course they would say that. They aren’t stupid. Asking the National Party whether National supporters should give their party votes to ACT and New Zealand First is like asking Woolworths whether customers should buy their groceries at Pak’nSave. National exists to elect National MPs. It is not a charitable foundation established to maximise the combined parliamentary representation of the centre-right.

Voters, however, are under no obligation to care about National’s institutional interests. Voters should act in their own individual and collective interests and the best hope for any political party in an election year is that those interests align with voting for their party. And Don Brash has made a compelling case that the centre-right voters would benefit enormously for approaching this election as a bloc rather than as supporters of each of the 3 parties.

The Brash Strategy, as I am going to call it because every daring electoral manoeuvre sounds better when named after somebody, is much more ambitious. It is about attempting to create additional seats in order to shift the weight of Parliament in favour of the right.

Imagine, for the sake of easy numbers, that National wins 43 electorates but receives a party vote which would normally entitle it to only 25 seats. National does not lose 18 electorate MPs in order to restore proportionality because obviously we cannot tell 18 people who won their local elections to go home. So National would get all 43 electorate MPs and zero list MPs, creating an overhang of a whopping 18 seats.

Meanwhile the party votes which centre-right voters gave to New Zealand First or ACT instead of National have not vanished. Those votes result in more list MPs for those parties meaning the number of centre-right MPs expands.

Some people are calling it a clever way to “make both votes count”, but this understates the objective. Both votes already count. The objective is to use a quirk of the system to make them count in different ways. One voter. Two ticks. But potentially much more parliamentary representation for the voter’s preferred bloc than would result from just going “two ticks” National.

You can see why people are excited about it as strategy. You can also see why the Electoral Commission recommended removing overhang provisions during its 2012 review of MMP. The Commission was already concerned about the proportionality implications of overhangs long before anyone contemplated attempting one on this scale.

Te Pāti Māori has arrived at the same destination from the opposite direction. Its strategy is actually easier to understand because the party has a highly concentrated electorate base. It does not need to win 40-odd electorates. There are 7 Māori electorates and Te Pāti Māori believes it can win enough of them to make its parliamentary presence largely independent of its party vote as it did this term of Parliament. So it is sacrificing the latter.

Waititi describes this as an “ultimate sacrifice”. There is a fair bit of theatrical flourish in that description, obviously. On current polling they are not anywhere near the 5% party vote threshold required for entry to Parliament without an electorate seat. Te Pāti Māori is not throwing itself into a volcano to please the electoral gods. It is just attempting to maximise the number of MPs on its side of Parliament.

Party votes are political capital in our system and parties beg for them because they determine not only parliamentary representation but also the public perception of a party’s size and legitimacy. It is always easier to ‘sacrifice’ what you don’t actually have, but Te Pāti Māori is effectively telling voters not to worry about making their party vote bigger. That is why their strategy feels like less of a play for dominance and more of an attempt at survival. They have had a shocking term with the party only hanging on by the skin of its teeth amid fissures and bootings. Te Pāti Māori seems to be conceding that their supporters might not be thrilled enough with their performance to be willing to cough up both ticks so they are creating a narrative of “greater good” to concede the party vote without losing the electorate one.

Survival or not, if Te Pāti Māori is successful in this strategy they will see benefits similar to that proposed via The Brash Strategy. The party will retain or expand its electorate representation and if (as is likley) its electorate victories exceed the number of seats justified by its own reduced party vote, an overhang will be created.

There are, however, several fairly enormous “ifs” in there. The largest being that Te Pāti Māori actually has to win the electorates. This would be a much safer strategy if the party were entering the election in fabulous organisational health with 6 (Labour currently holds one Māori seat) unbeatable incumbents. But it is not. It is really not. Its spectacular internal implosion last year has left scars across several electorates. Mariameno Kapa-Kingi and Tākuta Ferris fell out with the leadership and are no longer in the party, electorate committees resigned, former party figures publicly criticised John Tamihere and the leadership, and Te Tai Tokerau and Te Tai Tonga are now considerably messier contests than they otherwise would have been.

Their electorate-only strategy therefore contains a gamble. They are displaying an almost comical degree of confidence for a bet that could result in utter electoral decimation. If you deliberately crater your party vote and then fail to win the electorates, there is no clever MMP trick left. You have simply lost.

There is another sizeable issue with their plan. Their allies in Labour and the Greens are not reciprocating. Willie Jackson has been positively delighted to accept any Te Pāti Māori party votes coming Labour’s way while making it abundantly clear that Labour will continue campaigning for its own electorate candidates. Marama Davidson has said much the same for the Greens. Apparently political altruism has limits.

This means Te Pāti Māori is attempting to persuade its supporters to behave as a bloc while Labour and Green voters remain free to vote Labour and Green in the Māori electorates. Asymmetry throws the whole game plan out of the window because Te Pāti Māori is now effectively only talking to its shrinking base rather than bringing in new Labour and Greens voters who are also thinking strategically. The plan is much shakier when only one party is doing the sacrificing.

Willie Jackson also issued another warning to his allies in Te Pāti Māori that deliberately manufacturing an overhang through the Māori electorates could create a backlash against the Māori seats themselves. He may well be right. There are certainly plenty of grumblings that the time for Māori seats has passed give how successfully Māori MPs get elected without their assistance.

However, Jackson is being a little bit cute about it too. It is likely he is just scaremongering to put voters off giving Te Pāti Māori their electorate vote instead of Labour. Labour would love to pocket all 7 Māori seats and his objective is to dissuade anything that risks that.

Even at its most successful, however, Te Pāti Māori can produce only a handful of overhang seats. The Brash Strategy is far more explosive. If the right bloc pull it off National, theoretically, could manufacture dozens of overhang seats.

National won 43 electorates in 2023 and while its current polling is substantially below its 2023 party vote, many of those electorate MPs remain well placed to hold their seats. They are struggling on a national level, but haven’t seemed to take the hit locally.

I have seen some modelling on various election outcomes and one particularly interesting model takes National down to 19.8% of the party vote while assuming it retains all 43 electorates. Under that scenario, National keeps all 43 MPs despite having an absolutely dire party vote. Assuming ACT rises to 12.8% and New Zealand First to 15.6%, the Parliament balloons to 141 seats. The right ends up with 78 seats, with 71 required to govern.

Disclaimer alert! That is just a scenario, obviously, not a prediction. Polling changes at the drop of a hat and there are no guarantees that electorates won’t change hands. Voters do not move around in tidy mathematical blocks and National supporters cannot be programmed through an app like little blue Roombas and sent off to execute the optimal electoral strategy. And ACT and New Zealand First voters are definitely not interchangeable.

But the modelling demonstrates a possibility and that possibility would be an extraordinary outcome.

Brash’s proposition is basically that the centre-right should stop thinking about National, ACT, and New Zealand First as competitors for the purposes of the ballot and instead treat them as different instruments for producing the same governing majority. National’s structural advantage is its electorate machine while ACT and New Zealand First’s role would be converting party votes into additional MPs. National supplies the constituencies and ACT and New Zealand First supply the lists.

So why, when they could benefit from a massive overhang, does National hate the idea? There are actually perfectly respectable reasons for National to hate it despite its potential. A government consisting of 43 National electorate MPs and enormous ACT and New Zealand First caucuses would be a very different government from the one National currently leads. David Seymour and Winston Peters would not respond to their bolstered caucuses by modestly asking Christopher Luxon what he would like them to do. To put it bluntly, coalition negotiations would be carnage.

National voters who like the current government but find ACT too economically radical or New Zealand First too, well, Winstonian, may reasonably prefer a larger National caucus even if some theoretical alternative produces more seats for the right overall. They may prefer to take the risk that the three parties can scrape a majority in the hope that the smaller majority has more National seats than ACT or New Zealand First.

MMP makes the smallest of size differences matter. Everything is proportional (its in the name!) and relative. Negotiating leverage in coalition agreements and divvying up Cabinet positions is all about who has the numbers. Unless you are Winston Peters in which case you might be knee high to a grasshopper and out-negotiating a party three times your size.

Possibly the biggest challenge, beyond even if National likes the idea, is the logistics of coordination. The strategy works beautifully on a spreadsheet because spreadsheets are not, as I remarked in another piece this week, “monkeys with WiFi”. Human beings are harder to wrangle than cats.

How many National supporters would actually be willing to surrender the party vote? Which minor party should receive it? What happens if polling shifts dramatically in October? What happens if a substantial number of voters decide that, having given their party vote to ACT, they may as well vote for the ACT candidate too?

A strategy designed to exploit National’s electorate strength could, if communicated badly, start eroding the very electorate strength it depends upon. It is difficult to persuade voters to distinguish between “National the party” and “National the vehicle through which we elect local MPs”. Asking supporters to become amateur electoral strategists is risky.

Which brings us to perhaps the most divisive the part of The Brash Strategy… If it is successful, National’s list gets obliterated. Completely. For the overhang to be created National has to win more electorate seats than its party vote entitles it to. You cannot simultaneously manufacture a giant National overhang and preserve a healthy National list intake. The two things are simply mutually exclusive.

For some, this spells utter disaster and rules out The Brash Strategy as an option because National has some rather important people relying on that list. Nicola Willis and Gerry Brownlee are standing list-only in 2026. Paul Goldsmith may as well have been list-only as he is in Epsom where David Seymour will win. However, the sudden vacancy created by Chris Penk’s departure from Kaipara ki Mahurangi has produced speculation about whether he could somehow find his way into one of the safest National seats in the country. And then Chris Bishop looks set to lose Hutt South back to Labour meaning he will rely on a list spot as well.

Under a fully realised The Brash Strategy these three senior ministers and the Speaker of the House would be gone. If National even accepts that the strategy has merit they are effectively saying they are willing to sacrifice some of their key personnel.

For some voters, of course, this is not a bug. Actually, scratch that. For some in the National Party, including its caucus, this is not a bug.

There are certainly more conservative portions of the party in and out of Parliament who would be quite happy to see the liberal caucus mortally wounded by losing Willis and Bishop. There are those who have not been fans of Gerry Brownlee’s style of House management and who might gladly bid him adieu. And Goldsmith has attracted criticism for his managerial rather than reformist style too. Basically, it is doubtful there will be a shortage of people on the right who say, “You had me at wipe out the National list.”

Quite frankly, there is a not so small number of voters who would regard replacing a collection of senior National MPs with another dozen ACT and New Zealand First MPs as the principal attraction rather than unfortunate collateral damage. That puts National’s leadership in the tricky situation of perhaps not wanting to draw too much public attention to precisely who would disappear under this strategy in case the very idea gives it more legs.

Willis, Bishop, and Goldsmith’s power, influence, strategic leadership, political nous, and key portfolios are reasons for them to be both protected and for them to go depending on who you ask. Regardless, losing several senior ministers would leave a victorious National Party that has hollowed out its own upper ranks.

Strategic voting cannot, therefore, be reduced to the cheerful slogan that every party vote for ACT or New Zealand First “helps the coalition”. It may help the coalition numerically while profoundly changing what that coalition is. That may be exactly what some voters want, but they should understand what they are buying.

Likewise, a Te Pāti Māori voter giving Labour the party vote should know they are not merely performing a clever mathematical trick. They are strengthening Labour relative to Te Pāti Māori. They are helping determine which party has more potential ministers, more negotiating power, and more authority to claim a mandate after the election.

Strategic voting always has a price. It is just that this election has us finally talking openly about that price. For years we have had an oddly infantilising culture around MMP voting where commentators tut whenever voters discuss tactical arrangements. Politicians insist elections should be about policies rather than “numbers and overhangs”, as Willie Jackson put it, despite the small problem that elections are literally mechanisms for turning numbers into parliamentary power. Of course voters should think about the numbers.

There is nothing dirty about strategic voting. People do it under every electoral system on Earth, MMP merely gives voters more variables to play with. The problems arise when rules create outcomes that begin to defeat the stated purpose of the system itself. MMP is supposed to produce proportional representation with the party vote as king. If sophisticated vote-splitting can deliberately create a 140-seat Parliament in which one bloc has accumulated a giant overhang through electorate victories while simultaneously diverting its party votes elsewhere, then we have wandered some distance from the intuitive meaning of proportional representation. In theory.

If Te Pāti Māori successfully uses the Māori electorates to generate an overhang while its supporters boost Labour and the Greens, the right will scream bloody murder. If right wing voters successfully use National electorate candidates to generate an enormous overhang while flooding ACT and New Zealand First with party votes, the left will suddenly discover a passionate interest in electoral reform. Both will accuse the other of manipulating democracy and both will be correct in one sense and ridiculous in another.

We are all manipulating the system. That is what electoral strategy is. I believe the saying goes “don’t hate the player, hate the game”. We should question whether the system should make manipulation so rewarding, but for the moment, these are the rules and voters are entitled to use them.

Thirty years of MMP, and New Zealanders may finally have worked out that the two votes really are two votes. The parties may come to regret teaching us that.

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Yes, I was in the news. Nope, wasn’t fun.

Read about it from my perspective here:

How not to overthrow a Prime Minister

If you had told me at the beginning of the week that Chris Penk would end it having attempted to bring down Christopher Luxon, been stripped of every ministerial portfolio, and announced his retirement from politics, I would have assumed you were on crack. And yet. AND YET. Here we are, folks.

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There are varying reports of what exactly went down and this is what I pieced together from discussions the night of the coup [Click]. It is alleged that the former Defence Minister believed there was sufficient discontent inside National’s caucus to force a confidence vote on Luxon’s leadership and sufficient support for Erica Stanford and/or Chris Bishop to take over. I maintain that Penk did not seriously intend that he would ultimately become leader himself; rather, he seems to have been operating on the assumption that he could help tip Luxon out and leave Stanford and Bishop to fight over the next round.

Whatever the plan was, it went very badly. By the time Penk arrived in Wellington he seemed to realise the numbers were not there and pledged support for Luxon. But it was too late. One of Parliament’s good guys learnt the hard way that it isn’t possible to recover from organising a firing squad, discovering nobody else has brought ammunition, and then announcing your confidence in the intended victim. Penk was sacked from Cabinet and subsequently announced that, after nine years in Parliament, he would not contest the election.

It is a genuinely sad ending for Penk, who I rate highly. But Luxon had almost no choice. A Prime Minister who survives a challenge and then leaves the person who initiated it sitting around the Cabinet table simply invites another one.

ACT’s Andrew Hoggard perhaps offered the most succinct analysis of the entire affair. After spending Wednesday out of reception visiting farmers on the West Coast, he finally caught up with events and texted David Seymour: “What a shit show!” Seymour, naturally, read it aloud to journalists.

Ironically, there is a slim chance that National’s plotters may have inadvertently given Luxon exactly what he needed. For months he has looked vulnerable, surrounded by leadership speculation and accused of being Winston’s lapdog. Now an actual challenge has happened, failed, and he has been able to demonstrate strength by punishing his pretender.

And the award for influencing the coup goes to…

In a piece assessing the winners and losers from the failed leadership challenge, NZ Herald’s Audrey Young awarded a “special commendation” to Herald political editor Thomas Coughlan. Coughlan, she wrote, had been reporting “disquiet in the ranks of National over many months” and broke the coup story on Monday night.

Fair enough. Coughlan got a genuine scoop. Nobody sensible disputes that journalists should report a leadership challenge when they learn one is happening.

But then came this:

“His disclosure on Monday may well have had an impact on its success or failure, although that, of course, was not the motivation.”

And there, rather magnificently, is the entire problem.

The complaint has never been that journalists should not report coups. Of course they should. It is that the political media are not behaving as merely passive observers. Their reporting becomes part of the mechanism through which instability develops, gathers momentum, and ultimately succeeds or fails. Endless stories about anonymous MPs do not simply document a political atmosphere, they also contribute to creating one.

Young appears to understand this perfectly well, but not because she acknowledges it is a problem. No, she is celebrating it.

We are now explicitly being told by the Herald that the Herald’s reporting may have influenced whether a challenge to the sitting Prime Minister succeeded. Yet anyone who points out that political journalists can affect the events they cover risks being dismissed as one of Young’s “keyboard warriors” who “confuse the messenger with messages”.

You cannot have it both ways. Either the media are simply messengers, standing outside the political process and neutrally conveying information to the public, or their reporting can materially alter the outcome of an attempted coup. Young has just given Coughlan a special commendation in recognition of the latter.

None of this means Coughlan should have sat on the story. If you discover that a Cabinet minister is attempting to roll the Prime Minister, you publish it. But some self-reflection about how this reads to ordinary New Zealanders wouldn’t go amiss.

Election 2026: 6 MPs walk into a coalition negotiation…

Unfortunately for National, surviving your own caucus is one thing. Surviving the election is another. The latest Talbot Mills corporate poll has Labour on 34%, National on 29%, New Zealand First on 13%, the Greens on 8%, ACT on 7%, Opportunity on 5.2% and Te Pāti Māori on 3%. That translates to 59 seats for the coalition bloc and 55 for the left bloc. And Opportunity gets 6. With 61 seats required for a majority Qiulae Wong could well be sitting there after election night with 6 MPs and the 2 blocs staring at her like hungry Labradors watching someone open a packet of Tim Tams.

It is important to note that the poll was conducted before the Penk challenge, so we do not yet know what National’s latest round of self-harm has done to its support. It also serves as a slight warning about over-interpreting individual polls because just a week ago, Curia had Labour down at 27.8%, National on 31%, Opportunity on 6.1%, NZ First on 9.1%, and ACT on 7.3%. Polls are snapshots, not stone tablets carried down from Mount Sinai and this election is on a knife’s edge.

Meanwhile, Chris “Teflon” Hipkins is 1 point ahead of Luxon as preferred Prime Minister in Talbot Mills, 23% to 22%. In the Curia Poll he was at just 15% to Luxon’s 17%. His small target strategy continues to prop up a leadership that should be on life support and probably would be in the morgue if National didn’t keep throwing Hipkins lifelines with their antics. When are we going to hear grumblings from McAnulty or Edmonds?

National and Labour are both sitting far too low in the polls and MMP is doing what MMP does… distributing leverage to people the big parties would really rather not have to deal with. Luxon spent last week complaining about “yahoos and numpties” from other parties, but at this rate he may soon miss having the luxury of choosing which ones.

Oh and don’t give your dog Tim Tams.

Sylvia Park: police shoot gun thief before he enters mall

Hapai Ropata Clyde Otene, a 33 year old father of 5, grabbed a long-barrelled air rifle from Gun City in Penrose and fled. Gun City says the weapon was unloaded and that he did not take pellets. Police pursued the vehicle through Auckland, used road spikes, and the car eventually became stranded near Sylvia Park. Otene got out carrying the rifle and ran towards the shopping centre. Police followed him and shot him dead beneath an overpass. Police are conducting a critical-incident investigation and the Independent Police Conduct Authority will investigate separately. That much appears clear, but a lot else is not.

It has not yet been established publicly whether Otene pointed the rifle at police nor what information the officers confronting him had about whether it was loaded. His partner has questioned why police did not shoot him in the leg and stressed that the weapon was only an air rifle. She is grieving and deserves compassion, but “shoot him in the leg” is unfortunately one of those things that sounds obvious in films and much less so when an armed person is running towards a crowded shopping centre and officers have seconds to determine whether members of the public are about to be shot.

Otene also had previous convictions including aggravated robbery and firearms offending and was out on bail, although police say he was not breaching his bail conditions at the time… well, apart from robbing a gun store and getting into a police chase.

His dumb choices and criminality don’t make his death less tragic for his family. Nor does being a father erase the danger created by running toward a shopping mall carrying a firearm. Two things can be true at once, a concept the internet continues to reject on religious grounds.

The SIS says New Zealand’s security environment is getting worse

Almost at the same time as the armed incident sent shoppers running for cover in Auckland, the NZSIS released its 2026 Security Threat Environment assessment.

Though there is no suggestion of terrorism in Otene’s case, the juxtaposition is sobering because one of the SIS’s six key assessments is that another terrorist attack in New Zealand is considered possible, with the most likely scenario being a lone actor attacking people in a crowded place using easily accessible weapons and with “little to no intelligence forewarning”.

Director General Andrew Hampton says New Zealand’s national security challenges have intensified over the past year, driven by geopolitical instability, conflict overseas, technological change, foreign interference, espionage, and violent extremism. The SIS says our private and public sectors are being targeted for intellectual property, technology, and non-public information. Likewise diaspora communities are being targeted by foreign states trying to suppress democratic rights and insider threats are becoming more significant.

The SIS highlights concerns about antisemitism and Islamophobia, the radicalisation of vulnerable young people online, increasingly mainstream extremist rhetoric, and the ability of artificial intelligence to make propaganda easier to create and distribute. It also describes overseas conflicts including Gaza, Iran, and Ukraine as feeding domestic hostility and an increasingly poisonous us versus them political culture.

The SIS says several states conduct espionage here but the People’s Republic of China is “the only country we have detected doing it at scale”. It also says the PRC remains the most active foreign-interference actor in New Zealand.

One example involved China’s Purple Mountain Observatory allegedly attempting to install ground-based space infrastructure in New Zealand through a local company that was probably unaware the equipment could collect intelligence of military value. The SIS says it disrupted the activity.

China’s Embassy responded with the diplomatic equivalent of “NO U!”. It called the allegations fabricated, accused the SIS of smearing legitimate cooperation, suggested the report itself “may well” be a product of foreign interference, warned New Zealanders against becoming pawns of “anti-China forces”, and deployed the magnificent phrase “do not lift a rock only to drop it on their own feet.”

China is our biggest trading partner, which means we have to manage this relationship like grown ups. Pretending Beijing poses no security threat is stupid. Treating every Chinese New Zealander or Chinese business as a potential spy is just as stupid.

Soon it'll just be press releases all the way down

RNZ announced on Friday that it expects to lose around 10% of its workforce over the next financial year because of reduced Government funding. That means roughly 25-30 roles. This follows earlier cost cutting and comes alongside changes to Saturday Morning, which is moving from 2 hosts to 1 with a smaller production team.

Across town, Stuff Digital is already consulting on its own restructure. Stuff says its proposal could produce a maximum net reduction of 8 jobs from a Stuff Group editorial workforce of more than 300. E tū Union says the impact inside Stuff Digital is more substantial than that headline number suggests as its editorial workforce would fall from 75 roles to 65, 19 journalist and reporter positions would be consolidated into 11, six editor positions into 3, while several platform and production positions would disappear.

I criticise the media a lot. Sometimes deservedly, occasionally with excessive enthusiasm. But while I would love some diversity of thought in the sector, fewer journalists means fewer people sitting through council meetings, reading court documents, filing Official Information Act requests, checking politicians’ claims, covering provincial stories, and doing the hard work that still matters.

It also means more stories rewritten from press releases, more cheap outrage content, more aggregation, and less time for verification.

Labour candidate Rakesh Naidoo cleared of keeping Police bosses in the dark

Back in June, I wrote about the strange circumstances surrounding senior police officer Rakesh Naidoo becoming Labour’s number 13 list candidate. At the time, Police Commissioner Richard Chambers was publicly unimpressed, saying Naidoo should have informed him earlier of his political intentions and that remaining in his role as a Superintendent was “untenable”. Police Minister Mark Mitchell was also unhappy, pointing out that Naidoo had continued attending sensitive briefings and events with him while Labour had been courting him.

While those concerns were understandable based on the information available at the time, documents subsequently released to RNZ under the Official Information Act show Naidoo told his manager, Assistant Commissioner Tim Anderson, that he was considering standing for Labour about 2 weeks before his candidacy was announced. He told him he had not yet made a decision, but kept AC Anderson in the loop as he went through his decision making and selection process.

Anderson did not pass the initial conversation on to Commissioner Chambers because he regarded it as a confidential discussion about something Naidoo had not yet decided to do. When, on 4 June, Naidoo told Anderson he was putting his name forward for Labour’s list-ranking process. Anderson informed Chambers that afternoon.

Anderson has now apologised to both Naidoo and Chambers, saying that “in hindsight, it would have been helpful” to tell the Commissioner about that first conversation and acknowledging that his decision resulted in incorrect information being given to the media.

Naidoo took a fair amount of public criticism based on the impression that he had quietly pursued a Labour candidacy while keeping his Police bosses in the dark. In fact, he appears to have been diligent about the political-neutrality issue.

There are still legitimate questions about how senior public servants and Police officers should manage the transition from politically neutral positions into partisan politics. Labour had been talking to Naidoo for a couple of months, and someone in such a senior and sensitive Police position has to be extraordinarily careful. But that is a very different argument from accusing Naidoo of failing to disclose his intentions.

Polkinghorne finally takes the stand

The coronial inquest into Pauline Hanna’s death was always going to be extraordinary because Philip Polkinghorne did something during it that he never did at his murder trial. He gave evidence.

Polkinghorne was acquitted in 2024 of murdering his wife and he is not being tried again. Coroner Tania Tetitaha has repeatedly emphasised that an inquest is not a criminal trial. The task now is to determine on the balance of probabilities how Hanna died and the circumstances surrounding her death.

But listening to Polkinghorne being cross-examined under oath has been remarkable. Police counsel Alysha McClintock put the homicide theory to him directly on Friday:

“You laid her out and you go about making it look like she killed herself.”

“No,” Polkinghorne replied.

She alleged an argument, an attack, Hanna being incapacitated, killed, and the scene then staged. He rejected every allegation.

Earlier in the week he admitted deleting photographs and messages involving sex worker Madison Ashton after realising police likely considered him a suspect. He said the material was embarrassing and he wanted to keep it private. He was also confronted with inconsistencies between his evidence and earlier accounts.

Then footage filmed for the Polk documentary in 2022 caused a bother as it revealed more inconsistencies. In unused interview footage Polkinghorne said he did not recall using electronic devices after going to bed on the night Hanna died, but at the inquest he acknowledged evidence showing he had been using his phone until around 2am. In the documentary he also denied deleting WhatsApp messages with Ashton and this week he acknowledged deleting them.

Asked whether he had previously been in trouble with the Medical Council for self-prescribing medication, Polkinghorne initially said “no”. In response, McClintock produced a 2018 Medical Council letter warning him about exactly that, including the sleep drug zopiclone. He apologised and said he had forgotten. But things got more awkward when a message he sent to Ashton discussing the letter read: “No biggie, I’ll use a false name in the future.”

None of these inconsistencies proves murder. But it is clear the Police still believe that to be plausible. McClintock’s central challenge is if Hanna took her own life and all Polkinghorne had to do was truthfully explain what occurred afterwards, why have so many versions of important details emerged?

🇬🇧 Bin there, done that. Nigel wins his by-election.

Nigel Farage resigned his Clacton seat last month to trigger a by-election, presenting it as an opportunity for voters to judge him directly after questions over his finances. Labour and the Conservatives more or less declined to participate in his theatre, but Count Binface did not.

Farage won comfortably with 22,239 votes while Binface, a satirical candidate wearing an industrial rubbish bin on his head, received a not-so-shabby 9,455. Magnificent.

But aside from the chuckles, it must be said that Farage got what he wanted. He sought a direct personal mandate and received one. His opponents can call it a stunt, and it absolutely was one, but given Labour just pulled a remarkably similar one to catapult TikTok PM Andy Burnham into Downing Street, glass houses and all that.

Still, Binface getting more than 9,000 votes… Sometimes democracy speaks. Sometimes it makes fart noises.

🇺🇸 AOC begins the great unwokening

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has had an unusually personal week. The 36 year old congresswoman revealed that she is freezing her eggs, sharing parts of the process online, and explaining that the decision makes her feel “more in control” of her life. The announcement prompted questions about her longtime fiancé Riley Roberts and it has since been reported that the pair quietly ended their engagement some time ago. They had been together for more than a decade and engaged since 2022.

None of that is especially politically interesting except that AOC is plainly positioning herself for a much bigger future. She has not ruled out running for President or challenging Chuck Schumer for the Senate in 2028.

And what is even more revealing about her political ambitions, is that she is trying to leave some of her “wokeness” behind. Defund the memory!

Asked this week about positions embraced by democratic socialists during the George Floyd era, including defunding police, AOC argued that those positions were products of the period and candidates should be judged on what they advocate now. Dismissing the havoc wrecked by the lunacy of the politics, she remarked “Woke 1 was crazy.”

The progressive left spent several years insisting that anyone warning these ideas were politically disastrous was racist, reactionary, or insufficiently enlightened. Now, with a possible presidential campaign looming, one of its brightest stars would prefer everyone regard the whole period like an embarrassing fringe haircut we once had.

People are allowed to change their minds. In fact, politicians admitting mistakes would be refreshing. But “that was just the vibe in 2020” is not quite the same as saying “we were wrong”. There is going to be a lot of this over the next few years.

🇬🇧 No, rape is not a “spectrum”

Scottish Green Q Manivannan has caused outrage after comments emerged from a podcast discussion he had in which he discussed rape. Note: I will not call him “they” just because he has long hair and a desire for attention.

The charitable interpretation of Manivannan’s argument is that society should not imagine rapists solely as obvious monsters lurking in dark alleys, because sexual offending is often committed by otherwise ordinary people and acquaintances. That point is not controversial and in fact, is something to bear in mind. But that is a very charitable reading of what he said.

What Manivannan actually talked about was the “demonisation of rape”. He also said rape “is a spectrum”, and argued that any individual can be capable of committing it.

No. He should be sacked.

This is the logical end game of a particularly irritating intellectual habit in parts of progressive politics to attempt to make every moral category more nuanced until eventually nobody can say what anything is and nothing means anything.

🇺🇸 The WNBA discovers the problem with refusing to define your terms

Former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White have both announced that they intend to make themselves eligible for the 2027 WNBA draft by declaring themselves women or transgender. This is obviously a political stunt, but who are we to gatekeep womanhood from these stunning and brave men of colour?

Freedom said that if simply declaring who you are is sufficient, then he meets the requirements to compete. White similarly said he identifies as transgender for the purposes of professional basketball.

The WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement says only players who are “women” may play in the league but apparently does not elaborate further on gender identity or biological sex. Given the amount of virtue signalling from some coaches and players about “trans women are women” the definition is up in the air.

The league responded by saying there are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA and denouncing “bad-faith efforts” to use transgender issues to demean or marginalise others. But “they’re acting in bad faith” is not actually an eligibility rule.

We have been told for years now that all is required for a man to be a woman is a declaration. We have been told assuming transition involves surgery and drugs is transphobic. We have been told to respect the identity of bearded men fetishising womanhood. But now that two men are doing it to expose this insanity we are allowed to reject their gender identity?

A women’s basketball league that cannot straightforwardly explain what makes somebody eligible to be a woman basketball player has rather brought this problem upon itself.

In short - other stuff that happened

• Anna Mowbray and Ali Williams have proposed fast-tracking a privately owned domestic netball league for 2027, as Netball NZ faces losses of up to $6 million and has no broadcast deal guaranteeing the ANZ Premiership’s survival next season. Their proposal would begin with a scaled-back competition next year before a more ambitious relaunch in 2028.

• Chief Victims Advisor Ruth Money is pushing for youth sexual offences to be heard in the District Court rather than the Youth Court, saying the current system is not “fit for purpose” and that she has already advised ministers on legislative change. Her comments follow a Dunedin case in which youths aged 15, 16, and 17, admitted raping and repeatedly sexually assaulting an autistic woman, with Money saying her office is overwhelmed by complaints from victims about the youth justice system.

• Parliament has passed changes expanding citizens’ arrest powers so people can intervene to stop any Crimes Act offence at any time of day, use reasonable restraints or force, and must contact police and follow their instructions. The wider Crimes Amendment Bill also creates new offences for assaulting first responders and “coward punches”, introduces a shoplifting infringement regime and strengthens trafficking and people-smuggling laws.

• Victim Support has appointed two independent reviewers to investigate its own workplace culture, staff confidence in leadership and complaints processes following allegations of a “toxic” and “bullying” environment.

• A woman attacked during the Epsom rampage has been hospitalised again after suffering three seizures linked to her head injury, while an Auckland Grammar student struck by the stolen car remains critically ill. Police allege a 49 year old man assaulted the jogger, stole a Good Samaritan’s car, deliberately drove at five schoolboy cyclists and later killed a dog before being tasered and arrested.

• Greater Manchester Police trainee officer Mohammad Hassan (23) has appeared in court charged with rape and kidnapping, along with strangulation, sexual assault, theft of a mobile phone, and dangerous driving. Hassan, who was off duty, was arrested following a police pursuit, is remanded in custody, and has since been suspended.

• 500 schools have been selected for the Government’s $30 million solar programme, with panels to be installed over 3 years at schools facing high energy costs, fuel insecurity, or resilience issues. Up to 150 will also receive energy-management systems and some will get batteries, with large schools expected to save about $8,000 a year on electricity.

• Former Breakfast host Kamahl Santamaria and TVNZ will finally face off in a 2 week Employment Court hearing next week, more than 4 years after he resigned just 32 days into the job following a complaint about allegedly inappropriate touching of a colleague. Santamaria alleges TVNZ breached its good faith and safe workplace obligations and their 2022 settlement agreement, including through its own newsroom coverage, while TVNZ denies the claims and is counterclaiming that Santamaria himself breached the settlement.

• New Zealand and Viet Nam have agreed new agricultural market access, opening Viet Nam to New Zealand honey, deer velvet, and venison while allowing Vietnamese flowers and foliage including carnations, daisies, orchids, and lilies into New Zealand. They also signed a new cooperation agreement covering agriculture, fisheries and forestry, including research, technology, sustainability, and capability development.

• According to the NZ Herald, The Post editor-in-chief Matthew Hooton reportedly had a loud newsroom flare-up with a Stuff videographer after being unhappy with how a post-Luxon leadership coup video with Andrea Vance was produced. Multiple staff reportedly witnessed the exchange, with one calling it a “public tantrum” and another “unprofessional”.

• Eight of 16 replacement emergency helicopters are now operating across New Zealand, with Hawke’s Bay the latest region to receive a new Airbus H145 D3 following a $27.3 million government investment in 2024 and 2025. The remaining eight are expected to enter service by June next year.

• A government-commissioned review of the Waitangi Tribunal has been completed but remains unreleased while ministers consider its recommendations, more than a year after the coalition promised to refocus the Tribunal on the “original intent” of its legislation. NZ First’s Shane Jones says the Tribunal has suffered “mission creep” through broad kaupapa inquiries into government policy, while Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka says he does not support removing its ability to conduct the current inquiries.

• From September, up to 1,000 additional places will be available at any one time for young children with high and complex developmental needs through an expansion of the Early Intervention Specialist Service. New alternative providers will deliver the extra capacity alongside the Ministry of Education, with the Government saying the change is intended to cut waiting times, provide earlier specialist support and give families more choice.

• Chief Ombudsman John Allen has ruled MBIE wrongly withheld a key report underpinning the Government’s proposed $1 billion plus LNG import terminal, finding the document was “fairly advanced” and there was a “very high” public interest in its release. The report concluded LNG was unlikely to materially reduce average electricity prices, would mainly help in extreme dry years under particular conditions, and that alternatives including coal, gas storage and additional renewable generation could provide similar energy security.

• Genesis Energy’s 220MW Foxton Solar Farm has become the 32nd project, and eighth renewable energy project, approved through the Government’s Fast-track process. The project is expected to generate 345GWh a year, enough for around 47,000 homes.

Stuff you might find interesting this week

Before you go, I am about to launch a new Substack: Women’s Rights & Wrongs.

I have found myself holding back from writing about “women’s stuff” as much as I used to because Thought Crimes has such a broad politics audience now. So I thought I would set up a separate newsletter to discuss the mess that is feminism and our rights and wrongs. There will be some free content, but I will be creating subscriber-only content too. Thought Crimes remains accessible to all for free.

Women’s Rights & Wrongs’ premise is that women exist as a distinct sex class, modern feminism has got some things profoundly right and others spectacularly wrong, and women should be allowed to argue about all of it. I’ll be writing about sex-based rights, feminism, motherhood and fertility, lesbian and gay politics, violence against women, medicine, sport, family, and the various culture-war battles we apparently cannot escape.

If that sounds like your sort of thing, please head over and subscribe. It is brand new, so every early subscriber helps enormously.

Subscribe to Women’s Rights & Wrongs

To kick things off I am working on a series about the WNBA and how it is one giant example of self-sabotage. The first essay will be out this week and looks at female-typical relational aggression.

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Funnily enough, being told to “grow a thicker skin” does not actually help one to do so.

In any case, I actually do have a fairly thick skin, despite what anyone who has witnessed one of my occasional meltdowns might conclude. My general, and possibly unhealthy, pattern is to have a sook, feel sorry for myself for a bit, perhaps cry in the car, and then dust myself off and charge back into whatever fight I was in before.

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I have been talking about politics on the internet for more than a decade. In that time I have been called stupid, ugly, fat, evil, racist, fascist, communist, far right, a stupid liberal, a bitch, a TERF, a homophobe (despite being a lesbian), xenophobe, a meat sack, and most available variations of cunt. I have received numerous threats of rape, violence, and death. People have contacted previous employers trying to get me fired and I had one particularly creepy stalker in actual, non-internet life in Wellington. Bizarrely, strangers I have never met regularly hold lengthy online discussions about how terrible I am and recently somebody showed me page after page of Reddit discussions about me. Well, I say “about me”, but I do not recognise the woman they are describing.

So yeah, I am battle-hardened, but I am not impervious.

I am also very aware that I dish it out. I criticise politicians, journalists, activists, and political movements, sometimes harshly. I am sarcastic, make jokes, swear like a sailor, and I get irritated quickly. I have a stubborn streak that borders on pathological and a particular inability to back away once somebody tells me I should. Defiance has served me very well at various points in my life and caused me no end of trouble at others.

I am not asking anybody to imagine me as some gentle wee flower who has wandered innocently onto the internet and been horrified to discover disagreement there. People who voluntarily spend their lives arguing about contentious political questions in public probably have to be a little bit mental and I certainly am. Sane people would assess the risk-to-reward ratio and say, “No thank you very much.”

Some of my worst characteristics, including recklessness, impulsivity, and obstinacy, are also part of what allows me to do what I do. The traits I am most complimented on funnily enough overlap with the ones I get most criticised about.

However, if I say something stupid or unfair, I expect people to criticise me. If I get a fact wrong, I want to be corrected so that I can rectify it. I am well aware that some people think my politics are reprehensible because knowing what a woman is and left wing politics of a few decades ago are apparently now “literal violence”. I have stubbornly refused to bend the knee to fashionable identity politics and trans activism despite the social penalties that have come with it.

We all have opinions and beliefs and they should be fair game for criticism.

All of which makes my current situation rather complicated. There is a conundrum I want to talk you through. You may judge me harshly, but at least I will have laid it out.

As you may have seen in the news this week, I have taken Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury to Court under the Harmful Digital Communications Act. I have also spent several years on the governing Council of the Free Speech Union, an organisation that has repeatedly criticised that law and campaigned for its reform.

Anyone looking at those two facts and thinking, well, that looks a bit bloody hypocritical, is not being unreasonable. I grappled with it myself. I am not going to build some elaborate philosophical escape tunnel in which there is never any tension between those two things, because plainly there is. What I can do is explain what happened, what I sought, why I reached the point I did, and why going through the process has left me even more convinced that the HDCA needs reform.

A while back I appeared several times alongside Martyn Bradbury and Damien Grant on their podcast The Working Group. Martyn and I disagreed about almost everything, which was the point of the thing, but it was civil. Friendly, even.

But at some point his attitude towards me changed. I still don’t know why. I don’t recall some great falling out or dramatic political showdown. His commentary about me simply became more frequent, aggressive, personal and, in my view, increasingly nasty and defamatory.

There were repeated defamatory references and posts about my employment, allegations about my involvement in various conspiracies, and other people’s misfortunes. Due to the ongoing legal case I cannot at this time discuss the exact posts and social media activity that is in question except to say it was very personal and nothing to do with disagreeing with me politically. The Court’s interim decision records some of that material and, importantly, also records that I explicitly said I was not seeking to prevent him from criticising my political opinions or my work.

It is in the affidavit I filed before this became a ridiculous national story:

Judge Kate Davenport KC later recorded that in her interim decision too:

I want people to know this because one of the more frustrating aspects of this entire saga has been the suggestion that I suddenly woke up one morning and decided a left wing blogger should be legally prohibited from calling me right wing.

If Martyn wants to say I am right wing, he can knock himself out. He is wrong because I am entirely too chaotic to be confined to one wing, but he can say it.

If he wants to say my arguments are stupid, fascistic, reactionary, liberal, neoliberal, conservative, deranged, or whatever adjective is fashionable on The Daily Blog that week, fine. I may respond and I may be rude back. But I do not think the law should prevent him from criticising my politics.

This case is not about political opinions or disagreement. Martyn is doing his very best to make himself a martyr, but really he is putting on a performance of Les Misérables because someone asked him to stop being a dick on the internet. It isn’t his first rodeo either. In 2011, he declared he was banned from RNZ which was news to them.

I contacted him directly before I went anywhere near a courtroom. I texted him and asked him what on earth he was doing and told him I was finding his behaviour abusive and explained that a number of things he had attributed to me were simply untrue. His response was horrible and he ended by saying that if I thought I was being abused I should go to Netsafe or the Police. So, feeling desperate and beaten up, I went to Netsafe.

By then I was at a very low ebb. I felt miserable, creeped out, and, at times, scared.

This is the point at which somebody will inevitably say “you are a political commentator. What did you expect?”

Quite a lot, actually! I have come to expect insults, for people to misunderstand me, for ideological opponents to assume bad motives, for partisan journalists to frame things in ways I dislike, and unfortunately I expect strangers to call me all sorts of names. None of this is a particularly surprising consequence of spending 13 years arguing politically on the internet. I ignore an extraordinary amount of weird, abusive, and creepy commentary about, and to, me.

This was different. Part of what got to me was the cumulative effect of being repeatedly portrayed to an audience as something not merely wrong but sinister; a Nazi, an extremist, some dangerous far-right creature operating maliciously behind the scenes.

People sometimes shrug at those labels because political language online has become so ludicrously inflated that everyone to the right of Chloe Swarbrick eventually ends up being Hitler. But there is still a difference between saying somebody is wrong and repeatedly telling strangers that somebody is morally monstrous. The latter is dehumanising. Charlie Kirk and Ann Widdecombe’s assassinations are the extreme result of this dehumanisation.

I am increasingly recognised in public and, thankfully, almost every person who has approached me has been lovely, but I cannot know what everybody who recognises me has read or believes about me. If they take Martyn at his word I am a person who deserves to be confronted, aren’t I? Who is going to care if a Nazi gets beaten up? Once you portray somebody as beyond the moral pale, you change the way an audience is invited to think about them. I do not think it is irrational to feel some nervousness about that.

The Court will ultimately decide whether my allegations meet the legal threshold. I am not asking readers to make that determination here. I am explaining my state of mind when I reached for the tool available to me, the law Parliament says exists to protect against behaviour like Bradbury’s.

I was hurt, overwhelmed, and I desperately wanted it to stop. There is no point rewriting myself as a tougher character after the fact. So I went to Netsafe and, eventually, to Court.

I want to clarify what I actually did, and didn’t, do and set the record straight on the “Martyn faces prison for free speech” theatre that followed.

I did not lay a criminal charge against Martyn Bradbury nor ask the Police to prosecute him for criticising me. I brought a civil application under the Harmful Digital Communications Act.

In response to my application, Judge Davenport’s initial ruling was expressly an interim decision. She found, on an interim basis, that breaches of principles had been established and that the statutory gateway for interim relief had been met. She ordered specific material be taken down, restrained further communications about me, and prohibited encouragement of other people to make similar communications pending further order. Clearly Martyn misunderstood those instructions.

The words “on an interim basis” are rather important. The Court has not held the substantive hearing and declared Martyn legally wrong for all eternity. Interim orders are temporary measures available while a matter proceeds toward full determination. Martyn has the opportunity to contest the application.

Unfortunately, the phrase “interim civil order” lacks revolutionary glamour so Martyn rapidly announced that he was prepared to go to prison for free speech. He called on mainstream media to descend on the Court, demanded everyone involved (that would be me, myself, and I) be exposed, said he would refuse to apologise or pay a fine, invoked The Shawshank Redemption, requested books should he be imprisoned, and generally accelerated through several acts of a political-prisoner drama before we had made it through a basic civil procedure. A short interim order somehow became the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela on The Daily Blog.

The possibility of criminal consequences arises separately because Parliament has made failure to comply with an HDCA order, without reasonable excuse, an offence. Disobeying court orders can create separate legal consequences and Judge Sharp in our initial callover hearing warned Martyn about the risks he was running due to the media circus he kicked off. He urged him to get legal advice because he could be looking at potential contempt of court and deferred our hearing another week.

I am not remotely saying that interim restrictions on speech should be treated casually. But scrutiny requires accurately describing what happened and he wasn’t being put in cuffs.

Ironically, his public campaign ensured that as much as I had thought the HDCA was flawed before I took the case, I am now more convinced it needs to be reformed. The case has demonstrated how the process fails those seeking protection and relief. My identity was meant to be protected, but instead, anonymity created a mystery. Martyn announced that somebody had secretly dragged him to Court. He did not say my name, but damn near drew a map to find me. Naturally people started guessing and I started getting phone calls.

He made the initial story all about the Free Speech Union. Martyn complained loudly that the organisation had not leapt to his defence despite, at that stage, not having even approached it for assistance nor being a member. This sudden demand for help was particularly curious because he has spent years attacking FSU.

Talking about the Good Faith Yarns tour I recently travelled around New Zealand hosting, he described the FSU as the “most disingenuous pricks in the game”, compared it to the “IDF media team” and wondered whether we would be inviting Genghis Khan, Caligula, and Joseph Goebbels as speakers.

It is crazy the speed with which we apparently transformed from Zionist Goebbels-adjacent propagandists into the emergency service responsible for protecting Martyn Bradbury’s civil liberties.

The media, of course, became intensely interested in the FSU angle Bradbury offered up. And something happened that left me and my newly acquired lawyers puzzled… Stuff applied for access to the court documents using the correct proceeding number (the mind boggles as to how they got hold of it) but naming the case Free Speech Union v Martyn Bradbury.

It is not Free Speech Union v Martyn Bradbury. The Free Speech Union was not the applicant, did not initiate the proceeding, did not fund it, was not directing it, and was not even a party to it.

Having the right case number attached to the wrong applicant demonstrated that information about the proceeding was circulating while the action was being wrongly associated with an organisation on whose Council I sit. Once that happened, people did not need to be Hercule Poirot.

After The Post/Stuff reporting I started receiving more messages from people who had correctly worked out that I was the applicant and others began asking people who know me. The protection around my identity was not only not protecting me, it was creating a Streisand effect and loads of speculation.

That is why, on Thursday, I asked the Court to remove the protection around my identity. I would rather say “yes, it is me”, and explain the decision myself than have people play Cluedo and construct their version of my motivations.

That brings me to a much longer term frustration. There is an “Ani O’Brien” who seems to exist in the imaginations of people online whom I find myself being asked to answer for. Sometimes it feels that those who are committed to hating me, and seeing me in the worst light possible, will deliberately attribute the worst most extreme positions to me even if I have not said anything remotely like it. I may have commented on a much narrower set of facts, but later the entire episode will be converted into “Ani said the worst thing”. The fictional Ani is easier to attack than the real one because she has conveniently done everything her critics already believed somebody like her would do.

I am perfectly willing to answer for my own actions, including the ones I regret. I am not willing to answer for imaginary ones.

The issue of Benjamin “Bussy” Doyle is perhaps the clearest recent example and one that Martyn Bradbury repeatedly invokes as justification for his behaviour toward me.

Yes, I drew attention to screenshots from then-MP Benjamin Doyle’s alternative Instagram account, BibleBeltBussy. I thought repeated sexual language and innuendo on that account, including the use of “bussy” around photographs of a child, was wildly inappropriate for a sitting MP and raised legitimate safeguarding questions. I said so openly on my Substack and later in the New Zealand Herald. READ HERALD OP-ED.

People are entirely entitled to think I overreacted or that I misunderstood the humour, was politically motivated, or exercised terrible judgment. However, I did not make any of the serious allegations that were circulating about Doyle. In fact, I explicitly declined to repeat them because I had not seen evidence that substantiated them. Others online went considerably further and they are responsible for what they said. I am responsible for what I said. It’s just like how a left wing commentator might comment on the poor decision of centre-right MPs to use Snapchat, but should not be held responsible for the lunatics who take it to the extreme and accuse those MPs of similar things to what Doyle was accused of. That everyone should be responsible for their own actions is not terribly radical. Is it?

The Maiki Sherman situation follows the same pattern. I reported an incident at a pre-Budget drinks function which I believed was newsworthy and which had been widely known within the press gallery for close to a year. I criticised both the conduct alleged and what I regarded as the media’s remarkable reluctance to report on one of its own senior figures. I did not call for Sherman to be fired. However, her departure from TVNZ has subsequently been transformed by Martyn and others into “Ani got Maiki sacked.”

I do not know all of the factors behind Sherman leaving TVNZ and I am not going to pretend that I do. What I do know is that the central event I reported was already known to TVNZ for about a year, which makes the idea that my Substack suddenly revealed it to her employer rather implausible. If my reporting added to public scrutiny, then yes, I accept that. I published it and my name was on it. But there is a very large difference between accepting responsibility for publishing a story and accepting the melodramatic claim that I single-handedly “ruined” someone’s life.

These distortions form the basis of Martyn Bradbury’s justifications for his treatment of me. His cruelty becomes righteous because the fictional Ani deserves it.

Then there is the Free Speech Union, which is understandably the bit everybody finds delicious. I have been on its governing Council for several years and the organisation, via Chair Stephen Franks, has now publicly said it does not support my case.

I did not ask them to endorse it, nor expect them to. It was my case.

I’ll be honest and say that I don’t think the comments were necessary. Bradbury and The Post wanted to create a drama between me and FSU where there wasn’t one and this allowed them that. The Post has been the most aggressive pursuer of this story and most critical of FSU in recent months on other matters too.

In other news, The Post recently got a new editor, Matthew Hooton. He is (as is public knowledge) currently fighting a defamation case from Don Brash in which Stephen Franks of Franks Ogilvie is representing Brash. We don’t need to call Sherlock Holmes on this one either.

The subsequent news reporting has been pretty awful, but I have been avoiding social media and telling myself “this too shall pass”. I have given a large amount of unpaid time to the FSU and it is never enjoyable discovering that people you respect are willing to hang you out to dry so publicly.

For the avoidance of another minor media mythology, I did not stand down from the Council and was not stood down. I recused myself from matters relating to Martyn Bradbury. I have been travelling New Zealand representing FSU at ten events so it can hardly be claimed that there has been some kind of dramatic dumping.

In any case, my original Council term had already ended, but I had agreed to stay for an additional year, and that extension finishes at the AGM next month. I had already said I would not seek another term.

I remain enormously fond of many people at FSU and proud of much of what the organisation has achieved. Its staff are excellent and Executive Director Jillaine Heather is a huge talent.

And I still think the HDCA should be reformed.

But, people live under laws they think should change all the time. A Green Party supporter who wants a wealth tax does not voluntarily send Inland Revenue an additional cheque each year on ideological principle. Businesses comply with regulations they lobby to repeal and lawyers make applications under laws they have publicly criticised.

Now, there is an obvious difference between arranging your affairs under tax law and asking a court to exercise power over another person. I do not pretend otherwise. That is why I dropped the original complaint I made to Netsafe in March. Then things got worse and I again reached for the legal mechanism available because, at that moment, I did not know what else to do.

This next bit made headlines yesterday and I am kind of bemused as I think it is pretty self-evident: I have never been a free speech absolutist. Very few people are. Most of us accept the role of defamation law and laws around threats, fraud, and perjury. The existence of those laws does not mean free expression is meaningless; it means the argument has always been about where legal boundaries should sit, how narrow they should be, and what protections are required to stop legitimate criticism, opinion, and public interest speech being swept up with genuinely unlawful conduct.

One reason I dislike the HDCA is that its boundaries are not nearly clear enough. Defamation law, for all its faults, at least contains established defences including truth and honest opinion. However, litigation is unfortunately so slow and expensive that it is beyond the reach of most ordinary people, which is one reason the HDCA can end up functioning as a crude substitute. The HDCA operates with much broader concepts and without equivalent protections. My criticism before all of this was that truth should receive far stronger protection under the Act. I haven't changed my mind because I am now an applicant under it. I also think the Act should be strengthened explicitly in regards to revenge porn and deep fakes.

If anything, this whole experience has been a painful (and public) lesson in how the HDCA is a bad law and is not even an effective protection against malicious behaviour like what I allege Martyn Bradbury has engaged in. It has solidified my belief that we simply need to have better online social norms.

Free speech answers the question: “should the state prohibit this?” It does not answer “is this a decent way to treat another human being?”

Those questions have become bizarrely intertwined online. We increasingly behave as though conduct must fall into one of two categories. Either it is illegal and therefore society may condemn it, or it is legal and therefore any objection to it represents censorship. Most human civilisation operates in the enormous territory between those poles.

There are countless things you are legally entitled to say to a colleague which will nevertheless result in everybody around you deciding that you are an arsehole. If a man in an ordinary workplace spent months and months treating a female colleague the way I allege Martyn has treated me, carried on after being explicitly asked to stop, discussed intimate parts of her life publicly and repeatedly encouraged others to regard her with contempt, nobody would require a new criminal statute before forming an opinion about his behaviour.

If somebody blocks your trolley at the supermarket, you do not normally get in their face and call them abusive names. Not because Parliament has passed the Supermarket Civility Act, but because several thousand of years of human socialisation have taught most of us that this is deranged behaviour. The equivalent of this happens online all the time when mild disagreement turns into all caps comments full of expletives.

I do not want a Parliament endlessly trying to legislate the ugly edges off human behaviour. I would rather have stronger legal protection for expression and stronger social expectations about what we do with that freedom. The law should set an outer boundary and then culture has to do most of the work inside it.

That is actually what the Good Faith Yarns tour I just completed was all about. It wasn’t about the law and the usual fights FSU has to get into. It was about modelling how we can talk about challenging, and high stakes, issues without melting down and abusing each other. It was really successful. We spoke to some incredibly interesting Kiwis and every single event was more than we could have hoped for. We showed that as adults we are capable of setting expectations and parameters and treating each other with respect. The law had nothing to do with it. It is in the absence of a culture of respect that we reach for the law.

We seem to have lost confidence in making moral judgments unless we can staple a statutory prohibition to them. We should be able to instead say “you have every legal right to say that, but I think what you are doing is disgusting.” I firmly believe that society needs to bring back the kind of shame that mothers used to use to teach their kids lessons. Everyone is so shameless now and it means that society struggles to wrangle the antisocial arseholes who wreck havoc.

In this culture, a woman regarded as politically virtuous receives one standard of protection while a woman regarded as politically wicked can apparently be abused and have her life turned into punchlines because she had it coming. There is a particular kind of progressive misogyny, that in my view Mr Bradbury is afflicted by, that has persuaded itself that cruelty towards the wrong women does not count.

Freedom of speech does not impose an obligation on the rest of us to applaud. It includes the right to condemn and call out. That standard has to apply to me too. I am going to continue writing robustly about things I care about because apparently I am constitutionally incapable of becoming a quiet person. That means I will inevitably sometimes get things wrong, be unfair, or be reactive when I should take a breath. When this happens, I expect to be held accountable for it.

But I expect to be held accountable for what I actually wrote, not the most deranged thing somebody else said during a controversy that someone pathologically wedded to hating me whacked my name on and then demands that I defend forever.

And we should all become more conscious of the point at which criticism of somebody’s conduct turns into the reconstruction of an entire human being as a villain. Because that is the thing I am most exhausted by. There is an effigy of a person walking around the internet with my name whom I do not recognise. She is apparently far more powerful than I am, considerably more malicious, has personally orchestrated the downfall of half of Wellington and holds several beliefs I would be fascinated to hear more about. I am tired of being asked to defend her because she does not exist.

The substantive case against Martyn remains before the Court and ultimately a judge will determine it. Again, I am not asking readers to decide the legal case for me.

This experience has sharpened my understanding of why people reach for these bad laws. Principles are wonderfully tidy when nobody is hurting or when you have no skin in the game. Reality is messy. I am human and flawed.

Somewhere between “send him to prison” and “just shut up and have a thicker skin” is the place where most normal human relationships have always operated.

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This morning Chris Penk was a Cabinet minister, ranked 14th on National’s newly released party list, with responsibility for Defence, Building and Construction, Veterans, Space, the GCSB and NZSIS, as well as an associate Emergency Management portfolio. Tonight he has announced that he will not contest November’s election.

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In between, Christopher Luxon survived a confidence vote and then stripped Penk of every ministerial portfolio, declaring that he had “launched a leadership challenge” and that his continued presence in Cabinet was therefore “untenable”. This was the right thing for the Prime Minister to do. He had to send a message that the cycle of attempted coups must end and he had to make an example out of someone. It is a tragedy, in my view, that it was Chris Penk who took the fall.

Penk released a short statement saying that, after reflecting on his political future with his family, nine years in Parliament would be enough.

Earlier today there were reports that Penk had been doing the numbers for his own leadership bid. Frankly I thought this sounded ludicrous and posted on X that anyone saying so must be “cuckoo”. It has been my assumption all day that he must have been doing the numbers for someone else. However, this evening when the media tracked down Chris Bishop he was adamant that Penk had not been doing the numbers for him and that he had been doing them for himself. He said that people do not launch leadership challenges on somebody else’s behalf and distanced himself and Stanford from Penk.

Bishop was high on the suspect list of instigators simply by virtue of being in one of the more precarious situations of any senior National MP. He is likely to lose Hutt South and despite being second in line for a list seat (assuming Luxon gets Botany) National may not get enough for him to make it over the line. The logic of incentives and motivations indicated that Bishop was involved. But that is not the case. At least not directly.

The version of events being shopped around this evening is that Penk challenged Luxon, Penk lost, Penk was sacked from Cabinet, so Penk quit. But that version just does not make sense to those of us who know Chris Penk.

Like I say, when the first reports emerged that Penk had been ringing around National MPs and “doing the numbers”, I was confused. Not because I thought it inconceivable that there was serious dissatisfaction with Luxon. You would need to have spent the past few months living under a particularly large rock to think that. Nor because I thought Penk was incapable or unqualified of being a leader one day. But because he is in one of the safest seats in the country and does not have the same pressure on him as others. He is also politically astute and not naive about the realities of caucus politics.

Most of all, it did not make sense that Chris Penk was doing the numbers for Chris Penk. His name has not been in the mix for Prime Minister except amongst his fan boys on X and it was strange to think he would back himself for a run out of no where.

I know now that I was right. And I was wrong.

This evening I have learnt that what Chris Penk was actually canvassing was support for an Erica Stanford–Chris Penk leadership ticket. To be clear that is: Stanford for leader and Penk as her deputy. And to be equally as clear: I have not been able to determine the level of involvement of Erica Stanford in the discussions.

Anyway, Penk was sounding out colleagues about whether there might be sufficient support within caucus. Things had not progressed much beyond initial discussions.

Then somebody talked.

Another MP leaked what was happening to the media before the possible leadership ticket had been sufficiently supported. Suddenly what was supposed to be an exercise in determining whether an alternative leadership team was viable became an immediate public leadership crisis.

The story was out, journalists were ringing MPs, MPs were being asked to declare allegiances, and Luxon had every incentive to force the issue immediately rather than allow his opponents time to organise properly.

The coup, if you want to call it that, had been triggered far too early.

When National MPs assembled in Wellington today, they never got to the question of whether Stanford and Penk had support. The first hurdle was simply whether Christopher Luxon retained the confidence of his caucus. And he did.

Once Luxon won that confidence vote, the process stopped. There was no vacancy and therefore no contest between alternative candidates.

The public explanation being offered tonight is that Penk himself mounted a challenge for the leadership. The Prime Minister’s Office has explicitly maintained that Penk was challenging for himself rather than acting on behalf of somebody else. 1News reports that the Prime Minister’s Office says neither Stanford nor Bishop officially challenged and that Penk was the person who did so at caucus. Curiously, for a meeting whose proceedings are supposedly confidential, the Prime Minister’s Office has been remarkably willing to tell journalists who did and did not challenge.

The precise details of what happened inside National’s caucus room will remain a mystery. People have strong incentives to minimise their involvement after an unsuccessful challenge, and that is what we are seeing right now. The schemers have all fled the scene.

My sources tell me that while Penk was the “stalking horse”, he did not make a leadership challenge in caucus. But someone else did. I am working to corroborate who that was.

The idea that Chris Penk suddenly, out of no where, decided, three months before an election, that he should become Prime Minister is seriously implausible. Him being part of a ticket as a deputy makes much more sense. And whatever one thinks of the wisdom of attempting to change leader this close to an election, the collateral damage is that Parliament is losing one of its genuinely good MPs.

Chris Penk has never quite fitted the mould of the modern professional politician, which is part of what made him such a good one.

Before Parliament he got a BA and law degree from Auckland, served in the Royal New Zealand Navy aboard Te Kaha and with the Royal Australian Navy’s submarine squadron, then a had legal career and his own law firm. He arrived in Parliament in 2017 as John Key’s successor in Helensville and comfortably won the seat. Boundary changes turned it into Kaipara ki Mahurangi, which he held through National’s 2020 wipeout and again in 2023.

He spent his first six years largely in opposition, doing the unglamorous apprenticeship of select committees, portfolios, late night speeches in the House, and constituency work. When National finally returned to government, he was given Building and Construction, Veterans, and associate responsibilities in Defence.

Building and Construction is hardly a portfolio designed to make you famous, but Chris was good at it. He got stuck into the maddening accumulation of rules, delays, and bureaucracy that makes building anything in New Zealand so impossible. Self-certification for trusted professionals, faster inspections, granny-flat exemptions, less red tape for sheds and garages, and wider reform of the building system followed.

That performance earned him promotion to Cabinet in April after Judith Collins retired. His previous naval service also made Defence a natural fit.

While his time in the job was brief, it included work on replacing the Navy’s ageing frigates, rebuilding Defence infrastructure, and expanding support for veterans. In July he announced another 1,300 veterans would become eligible for health, rehabilitation and financial support for deployment-related conditions. In May he opened new homes for Defence families at Linton, Ohakea, and Burnham, delivered ahead of schedule and under budget.

Now, four months after entering Cabinet, he is leaving politics altogether. That is, in my view, an enormous waste of talent and experience. But my sadness about Chris leaving is not about a list of ministerial achievements.

Those who have met him know that he is clever, extremely funny, nerdy and, most importantly, a fundamentally good person. He has strong political views but has never needed to regard everyone who disagrees with him as stupid or evil. He is quick-witted without being cruel, can laugh at himself, and is genuinely interested in ideas.

I understand why Luxon sacked him. You cannot participate in an attempt to remove the Prime Minister, lose, and reasonably expect to wander back into Cabinet on Monday morning as though nothing happened. Politics is not kindergarten and there are no participation certificates for unsuccessful coups.

But understanding the consequence does not make it easier to stomach. And it is especially frustrating given how it appears to have unravelled. A leadership move that was still at the stage of testing numbers was leaked before those numbers were secured.

His statement tonight was characteristically gracious. No attack on Luxon, no airing of caucus laundry, no attempt to burn down the house on his way out. He reaffirmed his support for National and for Luxon to lead the Government after the election.

Political careers end all the time, and often deservedly so. But Chris Penk still had an enormous amount to offer.

He made a gamble and it failed. That is politics.

But his nine years of public service deserve to be remembered as considerably more than one chaotic Wednesday in August.

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The Greens have provided extensive policy on their website. They are not hiding what they believe and have laid out a thorough campaign platform that does not leave voters guessing... if they actually read it. These are not policies for managing the current New Zealand model in a more environmentally friendly way. It is an overhaul of our entire system.

The Greens are unusually honest that their programme requires a lot more money. But, even with this honesty, when you read their whole platform, it is painfully obvious that their spending plans are much larger than the increased tax take they are proposing, and much larger than current state capability. The Greens want to “substantially increase government revenue and expenditure as a proportion of GDP” in order to fund “universal” services and reshape the economy. Their 2026 tax package is meant to fund that, with a forecast net gain of $5.147 billion in 2027/28 rising to $5.725 billion by 2030/31.

Reading between the lines of their priorities, it is evident that the Greens are not, in the ordinary sense, an environmental party any longer. They are much more fairly classed as a redistribution party. They want to redistribute money from wealth, property, corporate profits, and higher earners into the state. But they also want to redistribute institutional authority from universal democratic structures into Tiriti-based arrangements. Additionally, they want the state to take over risk usually borne by individuals, while shifting power away from the private sector and towards public systems and Māori-led governance.

The party’s Te Tiriti policy says all Green policies must align with the Treaty, endorses constitutional transformation “as envisioned by Matike Mai”, supports devolving power and resources to whānau, hapū and iwi “in all matters that affect them”, and says the Waitangi Tribunal should have binding authority. The Greens want a serious reallocation of political authority. They do not seek a co-governed New Zealand, they envisage a tangata whenua led Aotearoa.

When it comes to paying for their policies, the Greens repeatedly fall back on aspirational fantasy where costings should be. The Greens’ biggest revenue assumption is their proposed annual 2.5% tax on net wealth above $10 million, which they forecast to raise $3.762 billion in its first year. However, the tax document itself admits the modelling does not estimate the full behavioural response, and instead simply assumes that 28.5% of revenue will be lost to avoidance and evasion. That is a very large caveat attached to the biggest line in the spreadsheet and one that is likely undercooked.

Furthermore, only a small number of OECD countries still operate wealth taxes and revenues are generally low. This does not mean the Greens’ wealth tax is impossible. But perhaps they should ask Scotland how higher taxation is going for them. Scotland increased its top income tax rate to 48% in April 2024 and there are now reports that it cost the country around £22 million in lost tax in its first year. This is the Laffer Curve in action. If you raise a tax beyond a certain point, you may in fact reduce revenues.

Naive assumptions run through the rest of the tax package too. An inheritance-style Capital Acquisitions Tax is forecast to raise $953 million in its first year, and a higher company tax for large companies another $1.37 billion. In practice, inheritance and wealth-transfer taxes are among the easiest to legally avoid unless an enormously intrusive anti-avoidance regime is introduced. Which, to be honest, I would not put past the Greens.

When we turn from revenue to spending, the maths gets much worse, and fast. The Greens have produced an expansive programme, but nowhere is there a credible attempt to reconcile the total cost of their promises with the revenue to pay for it. This is not a manifesto with one or two expensive flagship policies. They have dozens upon dozens of them, across separate policy documents, each apparently written as though it exists in isolation.

They’ve given the welfare state a complete utopian makeover, effectively transforming ACC into a total social-insurance scheme covering illness and disability as well as accidents, potentially adding billions to annual expenditure. Then come free health and dental care, higher benefits and a minimum-income guarantee, free tertiary education, expanded disability support, public housing, a universal child payment, and longer paid parental leave. These are lovely ideas and, in a world where money grows on trees, perhaps we could have all of them. The exact cost of many of these promises is impossible to establish because the Greens have not developed many of them beyond basic descriptions. Even conservative estimations quickly produce billions and billions of dollars in additional annual spending.

And that is only the social policy wish list. Their environmental programme brings a new Department of Animal Welfare and Parliamentary Commissioner of Animal Justice, free pet desexing, and new Māori-led funding bodies. Then climate policy (yes, it is a separate policy document) adds “large-scale, transformational public investment”, greater international climate finance, publicly funded retraining and redundancy compensation, and more money for adaptation. Biodiversity brings another new sovereign fund, a job guarantee programme, expanded DOC staffing and pest control, biodiversity payments to landowners, and public acquisition of ecologically important land. And, true to form, freshwater policy adds another layer of regulation and enforcement. On their own, you can make a case for plenty of these things. Collectively, the taxpayer is starting to have a very bad day.

Energy is one area where the Greens have actually attached detailed numbers, and those numbers give some idea of the scale involved. Their 2026 plan budgets $2.096 billion in additional operating expenditure and $1.036 billion in capital expenditure over 4 years. That includes $980 million for the new state-owned Kiwipower, nearly $970 million expanding Warmer Kiwi Homes, $421 million for zero-interest clean-energy loans and $460 million putting solar on public housing, alongside smaller community and Māori energy programmes. That is more than $3.1 billion over 4 years in one policy area, before we even begin adding up the more expensive promises in health, welfare, education, housing, ACC, and transport.

Those are the policies where we actually have numbers. We can tally up some of the other commitments roughly, for example, about $12 billion a year for the Household Income Guarantee, $9 billion a year for free healthcare, close to $1 billion for Kiwipower, hundreds of millions more for overseas aid, and the huge additional investment for lifting research and development spending to 3% of GDP. But even that doesn’t capture the scale of what they are proposing.

The Greens ultimately want “universal public housing for all”, with means-testing phased out as the housing stock expands. How do we even begin to cost that up? They also say they would establish a Ministry for Green Works to undertake a massive state building programme, expand rent subsidies, and directly fund housing projects through the state rather than relying on private finance. I mean, it sounds like socialism, guys. And socialists always run out of other people’s money.

Their livelihoods policy promises a legal right to a minimum income, higher benefits, compensation for unpaid labour, taxpayer retirement contributions for low-income people and carers, welfare debt forgiveness, hardship grants rather than loans, and legal entitlements to essentials including internet access. Then there is the proposed fund to help whānau, hapū and iwi reacquire dispossessed Māori land as it comes onto the market. None of this is free. Someone has to pay for it.

This is why it is essential to read Green policy as a collection rather than one press release at a time. Almost every policy document comes with another thing the government should fund, subsidise, or create a new bureaucracy to run. And everything has Māori-specific spending layered on top. Many of their ideas can sound modest and, of course, compassionate. When the Greens speak about policy in isolation they look reasonable and other parties look cruel for rejecting lovely-sounding ideas. The media dutifully reports them as plausible and in a positive light and no one is the wiser that they are just one small part of an impossible dream.

The Greens can point to their wealth tax, higher income taxes, and various new levies and insist that the rich will pay for it. But their optimistic revenue estimates have to fund all of this simultaneously. Eventually the numbers have to add up. In the Green Party’s vast policy suite, they simply don’t.

The Greens’ new AI policy is a good example of what the party gets right and what it cannot help get wrong. At the Green Party AGM, Chloe Swarbrick announced a 1 year moratorium on consenting new “AI data centres”. The immediate target is the proposed $3.5 billion Datagrid development in Southland, expected to draw roughly 6% of New Zealand’s present electricity supply. The Greens argue that projects of this scale should not be approved before the country decides what obligations operators should face around electricity, water, and infrastructure. I am with the Greens on this. A development consuming that much power is more than an ordinary land-use matter, and no company should be allowed to privatise the benefits of scarce infrastructure while socialising the costs of expanding it.

The problem is that the Greens’ argument does not stop there. Swarbrick wrapped that perfectly reasonable concern in a rousing speech portraying AI data centres as dystopian symbols of an “extractive economy”, claiming they take local water, turn it into “sludge”, hollow out towns, extract profit, and offer few lasting jobs. Okay, Boomer? Data centres are certainly energy-intensive and do not create employment in proportion to their capital cost once construction ends. But Mr Burns is not behind these developments tapping his fingertips together. They support the AI tools Kiwi businesses and individuals are already using, not just the projects of tech bros. Treating the entire sector as an extraction scam ignores the economic activity, data sovereignty, and resilience benefits that domestic infrastructure can provide.

The false choice the Greens put to us is between letting every project rip without conditions and banning all new consents for a year. But Government can impose standards now like requiring additional generation, making developers meet the cost of upgrades, regulating water use, and arrangements during periods of system stress. A blunt ban risks sending another signal that large capital projects entering New Zealand may find the rules rewritten when politicians have anxiety attacks.

The overreaction from the Greens also reveals that despite the party calling for New Zealand to lift research and development spending above the OECD average, build domestic capability, and create a more resilient economy, its most prominent new technology announcement is a halt on doing just that. They want the rewards associated with advanced technology, while protesting the energy, infrastructure, capital, and scale required. Doesn’t this sound familiar? It is opposing mining for minerals while using an iPhone all over again.

Since the Greens’ AGM, we have been given an even better example of what all of this means. On Sunday, Chloe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson announced Te Waonui a Tāne: Thriving Marae and Thriving Communities, a proposal to put $2.44 billion of Crown money into a new Te Rangatiratanga Trust owned and governed by hapū and iwi. Of that, $400 million would fund immediate projects over 4 years, while $2 billion would be invested in an intergenerational fund intended to provide an enduring stream of income.

It is true, some marae have functioned as emergency hubs during floods, earthquakes, and other civil defence events. And the Greens say 1 in 3 marae are exposed to flooding, 1 in 3 are in landslide-prone areas, and 2 in 5 are susceptible to liquefaction. So while marae are hardly the only community or religious organisations that step up in emergencies, if the Government expects them to perform a public function, there is a legitimate case for helping fund that capability.

And if it were simply a $400 million contestable infrastructure programme then we could probably justify it. But Te Waonui a Tāne goes much further. The remaining $2 billion would be invested permanently, with the Greens estimating the fund could grow to around $3.8 billion by 2039/40 and eventually distribute between $47 million and $118 million a year. The money could support not merely emergency infrastructure for marae but Māori housing, Māori health services, Māori social services, and Māori enterprise.

The best bit, the Greens say, is that having supplied the capital, the Crown would surrender all control of it. The Government would have no power to direct investments, appoint trustees, or alter funding decisions. Nationwide wānanga would determine the governance arrangements, with Matike Mai and Whānau Ora-style commissioning models informing the process. Taxpayers would provide $2.44 billion to establish a permanent institution, after which their elected government would have no governance rights over the money.

Earlier I described them as wanting to redistribute not merely wealth but institutional authority. This is it in practice. The policy transfers a massive amount public capital into an institution deliberately designed to sit beyond ministerial direction. Marama Davidson calls this “actual tino rangatiratanga for iwi”. We should take her at her word because this is much more than just another announcement, and certainly more than fixing a few marae roofs. It is a practical example of the constitutional arrangements the Greens advocate for elsewhere; Crown resources transferred into institutions exercising autonomous Māori authority.

Davidson also complains that existing marae funding depends upon “the priorities of the government of the day”. Well, yes. That is normally how a democracy works. Funding priorities change because voters change governments. Creating an institution specifically designed to prevent future elected governments exercising control over billions of dollars of public capital removes that money from democratic contestability.

And then there is the small matter of paying for it. National’s Māori development spokesperson Tama Potaka quite reasonably asked where the $2.44 billion is coming from. Just weeks ago, the Greens announced a tax package they say will raise a little over $5 billion net annually. Well, this one announcement alone requires initial Crown expenditure totalling nearly half that amount. This demonstrates the extraordinary scale of the commitments being layered on top of one another. The tax package has effectively been spent several times over before the election campaign has even properly begun.

Why not invest in marae resilience? Well, because you’ve already spent billions on dental care, benefits, and public housing. Why not increase overseas aid? Because there is also renewable energy to subsidise, families to pay, Māori land to reacquire, and welfare debt to forgive. The trouble starts when somebody has the unfashionable idea to add all of their costs up.

And this is why I return to the point I made at the beginning of this essay. The Greens deserve credit for telling us what they believe. There is something refreshing about a political party prepared to admit they want to spend $2.44 billion investing in an something that will only ever benefit a small minority of the population. The Greens’ Māori Manifesto says they will “devolve power and redistribute resources back to tangata whenua.” They are telling voters explicitly that their objective is not to improve Māori outcomes within the existing system, nor merely to consult Māori more often. They want power itself devolved and resources redistributed based on race.

Which power, which resources, and from whom? Well, the rest of the manifesto shows that the Greens want iwi and hapū exercising authority in all decisions involving Māori, they want a Māori Education Authority, a Tiriti-based immigration system involving devolved resources and decision making to hapū and iwi, they want local government explicitly constituted as a Tiriti partner, and across central government they want iwi and hapū participating as “partners rather than as advisors”.

And to say power and resources must be redistributed “back” to tangata whenua assumes that authority properly belongs, at least in significant areas, to tangata whenua and has been wrongfully accumulated or retained by the Crown. The manifesto makes exactly that argument, describing the existing system as one created to oppress Māori and saying that Crown actions have eroded Māori social structures and authority. Within that worldview, devolution is about restitution of the kind that we have usually left to the Waitangi Tribunal. Do the Green Party not accept the full and final process of Treaty settlements?

There is an enormous difference between saying Māori should have a voice in public decisions, which few New Zealanders would find particularly revolutionary, and saying political authority should be redistributed according to ancestry. The first operates within a common democratic system, but the second requires remaking the system itself and raises difficult questions about where sovereignty ultimately rests.

None of those questions can be answered by saying Te Tiriti and democracy are complementary, as the Greens do. That is just a statement and it carries no reassurance or qualifying information. If “partnership” means consultation, representation, and protection of legitimate rights, then sure, it can sit alongside parliamentary democracy. If it means autonomous spheres of political authority, permanent transfers of public assets, and institutions from which elected governments are deliberately excluded, well then, no, it can’t.

This is also why describing the Green programme as “co-governance” understates it. Co-governance implies two parties jointly administering something. The Greens repeatedly use stronger concepts like rangatiratanga, devolution, redistribution, Māori authority, and constitutional transformation. Again, you have to give it to the Greens, there is at least a logical coherence to all of this that deserves acknowledgement. If you accept the Green interpretation of Te Tiriti, their policies make sense. If Māori did not cede sovereignty, and if tino rangatiratanga requires an enduring sphere of independent authority, then just placing more Māori faces inside existing institutions will never be enough. Power and resources must be reallocated. In that sense the Greens are being considerably more candid than politicians who invoke “partnership” without ever explaining where they think the logic of partnership ends.

At some point New Zealanders are entitled to ask who actually gets to make decisions. Are powers currently exercised by governments elected by us being transferred to institutions that answer to a different source of authority? How far does redistribution go? Who gains authority? Who relinquishes it? Do New Zealanders consent to the end result?

A realistic constitutional transformation process of the kind the Greens endorse would require a serious commission, legal drafting, huge public engagement and almost certainly referenda, with an eye-watering bill for the taxpayers before we even get to the real cost, which is political. Either this section of their policy is entirely wishful thinking or the Greens need to start developing an approach that is much more “storm the Bastille”.

The Greens’ campaign slogan is “For all of us.” It is clever because so much of the programme is framed in universal terms like free healthcare, secure housing, higher incomes, cleaner energy, stronger communities. Who doesn’t want those things? But read the policies rather than the slogans and the universality starts to look questionable. Some of the promises depend on taking vastly more from a relatively small group of taxpayers. Others explicitly redistribute political authority and public resources according to ancestry. And all assume a level of government competence, administrative capacity, and available money that does not presently exist.

The Greens have probably produced the most ideologically coherent programme of any party going into this election. They know what they think is wrong with New Zealand and they know, at least in theory, what they want to replace it with.

But having a destination is not the same thing as having a credible route there. The Greens are offering direction, but that does not mean the direction does not terrify me personally. And it is direction that requires feats of fiscal acrobatics, an extraordinary faith in the competence of the state, and a certain level of collective delusion, but direction nonetheless.

Strip away the branding and the best description of this programme is not compassionate, progressive, or even particularly green. It is redistributive, maximalist, ethnonationalist, and administratively undercooked.

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National Party president Sylvia Wood called it an “energised team” combining experienced ministers with new candidates who have real world experience. Most of the immediate coverage concentrated on the usual list announcement questions. Who is up? Who is down? Who has been told that they now have an exciting opportunity to spend a great deal more time in their electorate?

But this year, the most important National list is not the one National released. It is the one Curia pollster David Farrar produced after it.

Farrar took the published list and stripped out the candidates who can reasonably be expected to win safe National electorates. That leaves what he calls National’s “effective list”. The problem is that on current polling there may be no list seats for these people to fill. National could quite plausibly end up with no list MPs.

Farrar’s effective list in order: Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop, Paul Goldsmith, Gerry Brownlee, Nancy Lu, Dale Stephens, Mahesh Muralidhar, Katie Milne, Angee Nicholas, and Melissa Lee.

The latest Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll has National at 31%, ahead of Labour on 27.8%, with the Greens at 10.1%, New Zealand First at 9.1%, ACT at 7.3% and Opportunity suddenly above the threshold on 6.1%. On Farrar’s seat calculation, National gets 40 MPs. That is 8 fewer than they won at the 2023 election, when 38.08% of the party vote delivered 43 electorate MPs and 5 list MPs.

Often polls are discussed purely as horse race results. National 31, Labour 27.8, therefore a good National poll. Well, compared with Labour, yes. But Labour having an atrocious result does not magically turn 31% into an impressive one for National. And National’s particular kind of shrinkage is more dangerous because its electorate base is so strong.

Just in case you need a refresher, under MMP the party vote determines the total number of seats a party receives. Electorate winners fill those seats first, and the remaining seats needed to bring the party up to its proportional entitlement based on party vote are then filled from the party’s list.

For example, if Christopher Luxon wins Botany (as is very, very likely), he enters as the MP for Botany. Simeon Brown will almost certainly win Pakuranga, likewise Erica Stanford, Louise Upston, and Mark Mitchell (he won by the largest margin of any MP in 2023 with a 23,376 vote majority in Whangaparāoa). So assuming they all do win their seats, they enter Parliament as electorate MPs and their list ranking becomes irrelevant.

Now we get to the people who actually need the list. And, awkwardly for National, some rather important people are standing in the queue. Nicola Willis is not standing in an electorate so she can only get in via the list. Then Bishop is attempting to defend Hutt South, which he won by just 1,332 votes in 2023, but which has always been difficult terrain for National. Goldsmith may as well be a list-only candidate like Willis as he is standing in Epsom against David Seymour. Then the Speaker himself, Gerry Brownlee, is also relying solely on the list, as is Nancy Lu. I could go on, but the likelihood of anyone further down the list entering Parliament is pretty low.

And this is where MMP gets weird. Normally suggesting that National might quite like to lose a few electorates would be idiotic, but with their deputy leader, ministerial powerhouse, and Speaker all requiring list seats, they will be happy to drop a few so they can take more from the list. The worse National does in electorate contests, the more room there is for its senior list MPs. Chris Bishop’s best insurance policy is one of his colleagues losing their seat. Look out for senior National MPs sitting around the Beehive sticking pins into voodoo dolls of their marginal seat colleagues.

National could run fairly appalling campaigns in seats like Whangaparāoa, East Coast Bays, Selwyn, Kaipara ki Mahurangi, and Pakuranga, and still struggle to lose them. However, where things were already shaky in 2023, and where list MPs might be hoping to see any colour but blue on eleection night, are Banks Peninsula, New Lynn, West Coast-Tasman, Hutt South, Mt Roskill, Wairarapa, and East Coast (now East Cape). But then even if National drops some of them, there is every chance a plucky candidate or two could pick up a seat that National did not win in 2023. For example, in 2023, Labour held Mt Albert, Nelson, Te Atatū, Wigram, Ōhāriu, Taieri, and Christchurch Central by less than 2000 votes. They could easily result in an unwanted victory.

For example, in Nelson, Labour’s Rachel Boyack defeated National’s Blair Cameron by 26 votes in 2023, and they are facing each other again. It is likely it will be another tightly fought race.

Mt Albert could be the electorate on which a lot hinges. It is the most crowded electorate with the potential for a very split vote. Labour’s Helen White embarrassingly beat National’s Melissa Lee by just 18 votes in 2023 after Jacinda Ardern won it with the country’s largest margin the election previous. Labour continue to persist with White but she has proven to be pretty unpopular with Labour voters and after her comments about hoping house values drop she has probably torched another batch of votes.

The Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March got a decent minority of the votes last time in Mt Albert and he is back to fight in 2026. But it is the arrival of Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong that really puts the cat among the pigeons. It would be smart for Labour to do a cuppa tea deal with Opportunity as it would guarantee them another coalition partner. But they have been emphatic that they will not. So Melissa Lee has a much more possible route into Parliament through Mt Albert than you would think. The left could splinter their chunk of the vote between them and allow her to canter through the middle.

Christchurch Central is in play too with Labour incumbent Duncan Webb retiring. National has Dale Stephens, who is number 23 on its list and 6th on Farrar’s effective list, facing new Labour candidate George Hampton. Stephens was close behind Webb in 2023 and he could well pick the seat up.

And this is where I confess to finding a few of National’s potential electorate losses more appealing than others.

Banks Peninsula is one. Vanessa Weenink won it by only 396 votes in 2023 and faces former Labour MP Tracey McLellan again. Weenink is number 39 on National’s list, so there is no realistic list parachute waiting for her if she loses. I would not exactly be inconsolable if she were to crash out of Parliament. Actually, if I am honest I want her to lose.

Weenink is a former Labour Party member who actually worked on Duncan Webb’s 2017 campaign. She describes herself as socially progressive and fiscally conservative. That social progressivism has seen her behave as an enemy to women rights in Parliament this term with blatant trans activism on display. She has every right to have changed parties, obviously, and she has an impressive background as a doctor and military veteran, but watching her in action this term I have concluded she should never have left Labour.

If any readers (who support National or the coalition) are in the Banks Peninsula they may like to assist Labour in taking the electorate from Weenink because her defeat will help create list space for somebody like Willis, Bishop, Goldsmith, or Brownlee.

East Cape is another seat where I would not regard a National defeat as a tragedy. Dana Kirkpatrick won the old East Coast electorate by 3,199 votes in 2023 and is now ranked only 33rd on National’s list. She faces Labour’s Jo Luxton in the new East Cape electorate who my friends in the farming sector say is actually one of the best of the red bunch. Kirkpatrick too has been weak on womens’ rights and would generally not be a loss to caucus.

That sounds harsh because it is harsh. Elections are brutal. Political parties rank their candidates based on who they most want in Parliament. But MMP ensures that voters do not have to always cooperate with those judgements.

While I am on a tear about traitrous female National MPs, unfortunately it is virtually guaranteed that Nicola Grigg will win Selwyn. Grigg won Selwyn by 19,782 votes in 2023, the third largest general electorate majority in the country. She is ranked 17th on National’s list but could be ranked behind the photocopier in the Parliamentary library and still come back through Selwyn.

Grigg is the Minister for Women, yet she trots out lines from trans activist playbooks and eagerly looks around for pats on the head from the otherside of the House. Readers who have followed me for any length of time will know where I sit on that. A Minister for Women who cannot see the relevance of ensuring the law can reliably identify the class of people her portfolio exists to represent has sold women out. Unfortunately for those of us who might enjoy seeing the electoral consequences of that, Selwyn is one of the safest National seats in the country.

One seat I would like to see National win even though it would add another electorate to the tally, is Auckland Central. Recent polling puts National’s candidate Candace Kinser ahead of incumbent Chloe Swarbrick. On the ground they are hearing that locals just want a decent MP to represent their interests rather than be Minister for Palestine. In Kinser they would certainly receive that.

Kinser has actually done things outside politics. She has run NZTech and Biomatters, headed Palantir's New Zealand operation and worked at Jarden. She has sat around enough board tables too, including the University of Auckland Council and Callaghan Innovation. It is a CV that would outshine a fair number of the people already sitting in Parliament. More importantly for Auckland Central, she understands business and might actually be interested in the increasingly difficult business of making the central city work.

On the other hand, National should be willing to leave Tāmaki to ACT’s James Christmas. It is an electorate they can afford to lose to a coalition partner and a candidate they clearly rate as he was previously touted as National’s future Attorney General. National’s candidate Mahesh Muralidhar is enthusiastic and has hit the campaign hard, but Christmas is a barrister specialising in public law and national security who spent a decade working as a senior adviser to Sir John Key and Sir Bill English, and worked closely with former Attorney General and Treaty Negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson. The latter may be seen as problematic, but my conversations with him suggest that his experience in Treaty matters and his pragmatic approach could be very useful.

I have been clear that I won’t be sharing my party vote before the election as I don’t want to become aligned with one party when I primarily want the coaliton to be returned and to discuss the merits and failings of all three parties. However, I am comfortable sharing that as a Tāmaki constitutent I will be voting for James Christmas (unless he does something supremely dumb between now and November 7). He is a great candidate and it will help National’s list if he wins.

Wasted votes, or a lack thereof, are another factor that will play a massive part this election. In 2023, 5.57% of all party votes went to parties that received no seats and so were “wasted”. Votes cast for parties that fail to qualify for representation are excluded from the pool used to determine proportional representation. The practical effect is that parties which do make it into Parliament receive a larger share of the seats than their party vote percentage suggests. Farrar calculates that National’s 38.1% in 2023 amounted to about 40.3% of the effective vote once wasted votes were removed.

The big question is will Opportunity cross the threshold this time around. They have been hanging around the 5% for several polls and surpassed it in recent ones. That suggests that unlike the chunk of votes that they have received in previous years which have been wasted, they will carry them into Parliament potentially leading to much lower total wastage.

Aside from potentially losing Willis, the Bishop situation is easily the most politically consequential. He has been central to National’s housing, infrastructure, and planning agenda. He is one of the party’s best parliamentary performers and, whenever the ritual speculation about Luxon’s leadership starts again, one of the small handful of names repeatedly discussed as a possible alternative. He has openly acknowledged that he will probably not win Hutt South back, which suggests he has seen some polling we perhaps have not.

So, is “two ticks blue” really the right message for National to be promoting? With its strange combination of local strength and national weakness, National may need to be more nuanced in some electorates. Unless, of course, losing those list MPs is not the crisis for them that I am assuming.

National may finish fractionally ahead of Labour as some polls are showing. It may even be enough, when combined with ACT and New Zealand First, to return the current Government with a slim majority. But 31% is still a poor result for National.

Dropping from 48 seats to around 40 will be difficult to experience as a real win. The fact Labour is currently managing an even more spectacular act of self-immolation does not make National’s problems disappear. A 40 member National caucus would change the power relationship inside a second coalition government. ACT and New Zealand First would have at least 21 seats between and although National would still be the largest partner, it would be less dominant in terms of numbers compared to this term.

Losing several senior ministers at the same time would only magnify that weakness. At National’s current level in the polls there is a perfectly plausible scenario in which National gets exactly 1 list MP. Nicola Willis. That is it. A second term government should normally be more experienced. Ministers have learned their portfolios, relationships with officials have developed, and policy programmes are finally moving into implementation. The Government should enter its second term with institutional memory rather than needing to reconstruct half its front bench.

That’s why the focus should not be on whether Melissa Lee should have been 25th rather than 30th, or whether Gerry Brownlee deserved 9th rather than 7th, or whether National has enough women in its top 20. The focus should be on whether there are any list seats available in the first place. And despite the Prime Minister’s spontaneous declarations, National does not need a different electoral system. It needs more votes.

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Election 2026: polls in which nobody is winning

Neither Luxon nor Hipkins had a good week. The polls aren’t looking good for either and we are less than 100 days from the election. One Chris has taken to hating on MMP while the other is blaming a “rogue poll”.

The Taxpayers’ Union–Curia poll released yesterday put Labour on a grim 27.8%, down 3.7 points in a month and only fractionally higher than what it got on election night 2023. National is back in front on 31%, NZ First is on 9.1, ACT 7.3, and the Greens 10.1. Te Pāti Māori has fallen all the way to 1.5%. On these numbers, the current coalition would scrape back into office with 61 seats.

Unfortunately for Labour, Curia is not actually a “rogue” poll given Roy Morgan’s July poll had Labour even lower, on 25.5%, while National was on 32. The Government parties collectively sat on 49% compared with 41% for Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. Opportunity is on a whopping 8%, enough for ten MPs and to hold the balance of power. Curia has Opportunity slightly lower at 6.1%, up 2.8 points in a month.

Roy Morgan’s demographic figures are worth a look too. The governing parties lead the opposition 64–28 among men over 50, while Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori lead among women under 50 almost exactly the other way, 60–28. New Zealand politics is developing a sex/age gap you could drive a Ford Ranger through.

Election 2026: When policy happens live on air

Speculation that Luxon ruled out TOP on the fly last week was bolstered when he appeared to make another whimiscal announcement on Newstalk ZB in response to a listener’s question. He announced that he thought New Zealand should have another referendum on MMP. He later repeated the idea at a public meeting and suggested it could be held alongside the proposed referendum on moving to 4 year terms.

National MPs had to figure out pretty quickly whether their leader had just announced an actual policy. Campaign chair Simeon Brown said Luxon had merely expressed a “view”, Mark Mitchell said National would not be campaigning on it, Nicola Willis observed, magnificently, that “the Prime Minister is the leader of the National Party”, and Simon Watts referred reporters back to Luxon’s “statement in regards to what his expectations are”. But by Friday Paul Goldsmith declared that it was “of course” party policy because when the leader says he wants to do something, “it becomes policy, obviously”.

It has been 15 years since we voters were last asked if we can stomach MMP (57.8% chose to retain it) and there could be conversations about the 5% threshold, electorate coat-tailing, the power of small parties, proportionality, and whether the system is producing the political incentives New Zealanders want. But announcing a referendum immediately after complaining about having to accommodate “some yahoo or numpty from some other party” rather unfortunately looks like frustration with your coalition partners nicking your votes.

Election 2026: Labour loses another candidate

Labour lost its second electorate candidate in a month this week when Tracey-Lee Repia withdrew from Kaipara ki Mahurangi for personal reasons, following Selwyn candidate Nick Moody’s withdrawal last month. Repia has been replaced by public servant Jolyon “Jo” Swinburn. No candidate is likely to steal the electorate from the popular Chris Penk anyway, but having candidates pull out is never ideal.

Opportunity unveiled its list last week and I will get round to doing some analysis on it this week. National is set to reveal its list this weekend which I will inevitably comment on too.

And it has been a long final week of the Good Faith Yarns Tour and I can’t remember if I told you last week that New Zealand First has brought Ron Mark back, so apologies if this is me repeating myself.

Political theatre and Chloe Swarbrick booted from the House

Look, I didn’t like Winston Peters’ remarks to Lawrence Xu-Nan, but the reaction to it exposed a pretty troubling double standard. On Saturday, Migrant Workers Association activists staged a mock trial of Winston Peters before wheeling an effigy of him to a guillotine and chopping off its head while supporters cheered. Organisers described it as “political theatre” but it should have raised a lot more alarm than it did. Much of the media treated it as little more than colourful activism, rather examining the increasing comfort parts of the activist left have with violent political imagery.

Winston Peters should have an honourary doctorate in getting under the skin of left wing activists. In fact, in the House this week he drove Chloe Swarbrick to the brink. After perceiving that Peters was repeatedly escaping consequences for his behaviour, Swarbrick accused Speaker Gerry Brownlee of applying “double standards” and was kicked out of the House. She has since claimed to media that Brownlee has privately acknowledged to her that Peters receives more latitude because he is effectively “part of the institution”. Naturally, Brownlee strongly disputes this.

Endless analysis of whether Peters is treated too leniently sat alongside remarkably little outrage about activists literally staging his execution in Auckland days earlier. The media even dragged Raybon Kan out of his time machine because apparently no political controversy is complete without a celebrity anecdote from three decades ago. Kan says that Peters told him to “go back to your own country” sometime in the 1990s after a celebrity debate.

Ayesha Verrall thinks lawyers should be judged on their clients

The attack on the Health Minister’s ministerial appointments to the Medical Council moved from media to Parliament with Labour’s Ayesha Verrall attempting to discredit Dr Roderick Mulgan by portraying his legal work as evidence that he was unfit to serve on the Medical Council. Disclosure: he is my friend.

Hearing her questions might leave one thinking he was some kind of voluntary pedophile supporter. Verrall’s line of questioning repeatedly suggested there was something inherently suspect about him. But the truth is that as well as being a medical doctor, Roderick is a defence lawyer. Overachiever, I know.

Like every defence lawyer, he often represents clients who aren’t exactly the most sympathetic of characters. He has acted in Medical Council disciplinary matters and has also worked on Clean Slate applications, helping people who have served their sentence, and remained on the right side of the law, move on with their lives. This is under legislation Parliament itself enacted, obviously.

Verrall’s attack is illiberal and concerning. Defence lawyers do not endorse every client they represent and the right to legal representation is a cornerstone of a free society. But she sought to blur that distinction deliberately, inviting us to believe that because Mulgan has defended dodgy people, he must also be dodgy.

That is like saying anyone who has defended an accused murderer is somehow suspect and should not be trusted to advance to appointed positions like, oh I don’t know, becoming a judge? It is an absurd idea, but one Labour seemed perfectly happy to advance when the political target happens to be someone appointed by Simeon Brown.

Her attacks became even more silly when she turned to Roderick’s interest in nutritional medicine. Verrall repeatedly tried to paint his support for supplements containing ingredients such as turmeric, olive leaf, and black pepper as evidence of quackery, despite the Speaker himself intervening to remind her use of nutritional supplements is widespread in New Zealand. Roderick doesn’t argue that supplements should replace conventional medicine. Like many many doctors, he simply believes that lifestyle, nutrition, and pharmaceutical treatments all have roles to play.

It is also interesting criticism coming for someone whose own Government enthusiastically embraced rongoā Māori as part of the public health system. Labour championed traditional Māori healing practices and allocated millions of dollars towards rongoā services.

New Zealand First wants more Kiwi kids

New Zealand First’s Kiwi Kids Grant isn’t guaranteed to reverse New Zealand’s collapsing birth rate, but it at least acknowledges we have a problem.

With fertility now sitting at around 1.5 births per woman, well below replacement level, New Zealand is ageing rapidly and becoming increasingly reliant on immigration to sustain population growth. For years, politicians have largely avoided this conversation altogether.

The proposed policy would provide $5,000 a year for the first three years of each of a family’s first three children. While international evidence suggests baby bonuses alone won’t restore fertility, and critics are right to point that out, they’re wrong to conclude that means we shouldn’t try anything.

The reality is that declining birth rates are driven by far more than just household budgets. Housing affordability, delayed family formation, career structures built around uninterrupted work, declining marriage rates, and a culture that increasingly treats children as something to fit in after you’ve finished living all play a role. No single policy will reverse half a century of demographic change. That requires massive social change and a shift to valuing motherhood in particular but parenthood in general.

The real value of the Kiwi Kids Grant is that it starts a conversation New Zealand has been avoiding. If we genuinely believe families are important, then our politics, economy and culture should make it easier for people who want children to have them.

Labour pledges to drop the Investment Boost

Labour was chasing the small business owner vote this week and there are some sensible ideas buried in the policy. The party wants big businesses to pay small suppliers within 15 days for invoices of $25,000 or less, lift the instant asset write-off from $1,000 to $10,000 for businesses turning over less than $10 million, and raise the GST registration threshold from $60,000 to $80,000. Labour says around 35,000 of the smallest operators would no longer need to register for GST, and the package would cost taxpayers $1.56 billion over four years.

Timing was great for Labour as Christopher Luxon had just spent several days apologising for telling struggling business owners in Rotorua that they had a “parent-child mentality” and needed to be more “adult”. But where the politics look good, the economics look less so.

The 15 day payment rule is probably the strongest part. Small firms carry payroll, rent, GST, and supplier costs themselves so faster payment is useful. But the bigger issue is how Labour proposes to pay for all this. It would abolish National’s Investment Boost, which allows businesses to deduct 20% of the cost of new capital assets, and replace it with this much narrower small business package. Investment Boost was forecast to cost around $6.6 billion over 4 years, while Labour’s replacement costs $1.56 billion. That leaves roughly $5 billion sitting there for Labour to use elsewhere.

Labour’s argument is that Investment Boost is too broad and rewards firms for purchases they would have made anyway. There is some evidence for that, but the party is then too quick to reduce the debate to a caricature about CEOs getting tax breaks on BMWs. The point of Investment Boost is to lower the cost of capital investment across the economy and Treasury has estimated it could lift GDP by up to 0.5% over five years. So Labour is proposing to scrap a productivity policy and replace it with a smaller, more political package.

Helen White unintentionally highlighted another policy contradiction. The Mt Albert MP said this week that she wants house prices to come down because they have become hopelessly unaffordable. True. But Labour is simultaneously relying on capital gains to fund part of its health programme. Its CGT modelling assumes average house price growth of around 3% in its calculation of how much tax it will collect. Chris Hipkins unsurprisingly declined to endorse White’s position, while Barbara Edmonds said she wants prices to remain “stable”.

National have also experienced this policy conundrum with Christopher Luxon and Chris Bishop advocating for price growth and greater affordability respectively. However, Labour has made he contradiction more acute by explicitly earmarking CGT revenue for spending commitments.

Bizarre rampage in Epsom causes carnage

In the space of about 8 minutes, what began as an ordinary Auckland morning became a scene of extraordinary violence. In Epsom events unfolded rapidly, beginning with an attack on a woman out for a run. A passerby stopped to help her and was rewarded by the assailant stealing her car and almost immediately driving it into a cluster of Auckland Grammar boys out training with their cycling club before school. One boy remains in a critical condition, facing injuries police have described as life-altering. Then, in another final act of senseless brutality, the assailant exited the car and accosted a woman walking her dogs. He strangled one of the dogs to death in front of her before police arrived and managed to subdue him.

If, as has been publicly suggested, this was committed by someone with a significant history of severe mental illness known to authorities, we must honestly examine whether enough was done to protect both him and the public.

The 49 year old man now faces 17 charges, including attempts to cause grievous bodily harm, injuring with intent, assault with a vehicle, unlawful taking of a motor vehicle, dangerous driving, cruelty to an animal, and assaulting police. The most serious charge carries a maximum penalty of 14 years’ imprisonment. He was due to appear in the Auckland District Court on Thursday, but remained in Auckland City Hospital under police guard. The judge therefore adjourned the matter until Monday, granted interim name suppression, and directed that he could appear by audio-visual link. He is to be remanded in custody once his medical condition allows.

The McSkimming scandal somehow gets worse

Just when you thought the Jevon McSkimming scandal had exhausted its capacity to make New Zealand Police look catastrophically dysfunctional, another lot of internal correspondence has been released and it gets worse.

The latest documents show that while McSkimming was on special leave because allegations of a sexual nature were being investigated, then-interim commissioner Tania Kura thanked him for offering to provide her with “support and expertise” and told him she had informed the Police Minister that he would do so. The emails do not establish whether he ultimately provided that assistance, but the fact it was contemplated is extraordinary. This was a deputy commissioner whose conduct was sufficiently serious to require stand down yet senior leadership was still comfortable treating him as a useful adviser rather than maintaining the clearest possible distance.

Newly released correspondence also shows the former commissioner Andy Coster pushing back against the IPCA’s intervention and framing McSkimming as someone who risked being further “victimised” by an investigation that might derail his shot at becoming commissioner. Coster wrote that the process could irreversibly damage McSkimming’s career and stressed the need to resolve matters quickly because of the commissioner appointment process. The IPCA later concluded that his preconception of McSkimming as the victim clouded his judgment and that he had sought to bring a serious investigation to an “unduly rapid conclusion”.

McSkimming was convicted of possessing child sexual exploitation and bestiality material on police devices and sentenced to 9 months’ home detention. The scandal then triggered a rapid review of police processes, and this week another officer, Matthew Rogers, pleaded guilty to possessing objectionable publications. Police investigated 22 cases prompted from that review. Of those, 12 have already resulted in disciplinary or performance action and 4 people resigned.

🇬🇷 Scottish woman found dead in suitcase in Athens

The murder of 38 year old Scottish aid worker Elisabeth-Jane Ross (known as Lisa) in Athens has again drawn attention to the increased violence in Europe and Britain against women by migrants from countries that severely oppress women. Afghanistan is not simply a country with slightly different social norms. It is a place where women are catastrophically oppressed under Taliban rule. Girls are barred from education and women face severe restrictions on participation in public life. They cannot travel without a male “guardian” and even their voices have been restricted in public broadcasting. Dress codes are coercively and violently enforced, and international human rights organisations describe the Taliban’s treatment of women as systematic persecution. People do not arrive at a border as blank slates. They bring beliefs, habits and assumptions with them, some admirable and some profoundly incompatible with liberal societies.

Ross’ body was found stuffed inside a suitcase in an abandoned building. She had spent years helping refugees and vulnerable people and had travelled to Greece to continue that work.

A 26 year old Afghan migrant and boxer, Sharif Ahmadzai, has been charged with intentional homicide, robbery, and weapons offences. He denies killing Ross, although Greek police say he has admitted moving her body in a suitcase, taking her phone, and bank cards, and sending messages from her phone after her death. CCTV shows him transporting the suitcase through Athens before abandoning it at the site where she was found. He is now in pre-trial detention.

Ahmadzai arrived in Greece as a teenage migrant from Afghanistan. His journey was even turned into a sympathetic Red Cross film presenting him as a refugee success story.

ACT policy attracts headlines

ACT is asking the question: who is actually in charge of the classroom? Their answer is that the teacher should be and they propose to amend the Education and Training Act to give teachers an explicit legal power to direct seriously or persistently disruptive students to leave the classroom and, where necessary, use reasonable force to remove the student who repeatedly refuses lawful instructions after senior staff have become involved. It would also provide clearer legal protection for teachers acting in good faith, require mandatory stand-downs or suspensions for assaults on teachers or students, and require parents to engage with schools following serious behavioural incidents, with fines for persistent refusal.

Naturally, the headlines have been very much preoccupied with the “reasonable force” bit. Teacher unions and principals have come out against the policy. Opposition politicians argued for more funding and additional learning support instead. But ACT points out the Education Review Office found that almost half of teachers report losing 40-50 minutes every day dealing with challenging behaviour, while many cite classroom disruption as a major reason they are considering leaving the profession altogether.

Critics characterised the proposal as a return to corporal punishment, despite ACT explicitly ruling that out. They say their policy is not about hitting children, but about restoring authority. Reasonable force already exists throughout New Zealand law as a legal standard, for example the police, security guards, and parents may use reasonable force in appropriate circumstances. ACT says teachers should not be left paralysed by fear of complaints and bureaucratic investigations when attempting to maintain order in their own classrooms.

🇬🇧 Jason Arday and the biography that fell apart

If you have not heard the story of the extraordinary rise and spectacular fall of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, buckle up.

When Cambridge University appointed Arday in 2023, the university practically launched a global publicity campaign. The headlines spoke of the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history, a man who had reportedly been unable to speak until the age of 11 and unable to read or write until 18, overcoming impossible odds to reach one of the world’s most prestigious universities. He became the face of the institution’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Well, 3 years later, that celebrated narrative has imploded.

Arday resigned this week after Cambridge announced an investigation into his qualifications, academic appointments, and basically every claim he has ever made. Plagiarism claims first attracted attention, but it has gone far beyond that now. Journalists have spent weeks unpicking an astonishing collection of shifting public claims that now appear to be complete fiction. He says he ran 600 miles in 6 days before later saying it had actually taken 12 days. He also said he personally raised £5.5 million for charity before later explaining the money had been raised collectively by a syndicate of around 100 people. There were claims about volunteering for WaterAid (the charity says nope), appearing in the famous Seven Up documentary series decades before he was born, holding visiting professorships that institutions now say did not happen, and even stories involving masked attackers and a pig’s head delivered to his parents’ home. All have come under intense scrutiny.

Cambridge itself, initially described criticism of Arday as part of a “vile smear campaign”, but they have now abandoned their defence of the man.

As is often the way, the dam has broken and all the stories are pouring forth. Students have described inadequate supervision, cancelled meetings, and being effectively abandoned during their studies. One student moved to another supervisor after complaining about the quality of supervision and another said hour-long sessions routinely lasted only twenty minutes.

The Arday affair should be a cautionary tale for every institution pursuing identity-driven appointments. Every exceptional Black academic now faces more suspicion because one university fell for an impossibly inspiring biography.

🇺🇸 The WNBA is at war with itself

The WNBA seems to spend more time talking about internal dramas and politics than basketball. Caitlin Clark has brought unprecedented audiences, television ratings have surged, and women’s basketball has finally entered the mainstream sporting conversation. But the league seems determined to turn every opportunity into another culture war, alienating many of the ordinary fans it spent decades trying to attract.

Nothing illustrates that better than the reaction to Sophie Cunningham’s entirely reasonable position that biological men should not compete in women’s basketball or share women’s changing rooms. Cunningham went out of her way to emphasise that she bears no ill will towards transgender people and believes there should be love and respect for everyone. Her argument was simply that women’s sport exists because biological sex matters. It is the very premise upon which every women’s sporting competition has been built.

Yet now Cunningham is being treated as though she committed some grave offence. Protests have been organised around her appearances, teenage girls wearing shirts supporting women’s sports have been abused by a WNBA team co-owner, and media outlets have portrayed Cunningham as some kind of right-wing provocateur rather than an athlete defending the integrity of her sport.

The response from Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve perfectly captures how detached parts of the league have become from the people they are supposed to be entertaining. Reeve appeared courtside in a “Trans Kids Belong” shirt and publicly argued that including biological males in women’s sport means “we all win”. The irony is that Reeve benefited from decades of women fighting for recognition, funding, and respect, only to use her platform to undermine the very sex-based category that made her career possible.

The absurdity is being highlighted further by calls for French transgender player Julie Tétart to join the WNBA. He is a 6’3” male, who dominates France’s women’s league, averaging roughly 21 points and 20 rebounds per game and collecting loads of medals and honours.

The WNBA spent years demanding that women’s basketball be taken seriously. Serious sport, however, depends upon rules that people believe are fair.

Attorney General reminds the courts that Parliament is supreme

Attorney General Chris Bishop delivered a constitutionally significant speech this week, making an unapologetic defence of parliamentary sovereignty and warning against the growing tendency to use the courts as an alternative legislature. He said in a democracy, major public policy decisions belong to Parliament because Parliament alone possesses both the democratic mandate and the institutional legitimacy to make them. Courts exist to interpret and apply the law, not to drive their own policy preferences.

In short - other stuff that happened

• Immigration Minister Erica Stanford has referred fresh evidence to the Michael Heron KC inquiry after documents suggested officials withheld key information about the failed biometric capability upgrade, including that projected costs had blown out from $35 million to about $45 million and would require Cabinet approval.

• The Waitangi Tribunal has warned that the Government's review of Treaty clauses across 19 statutes could cause "real harm" and potentially contribute to Māori deaths, a claim New Zealand First deputy leader Shane Jones dismissed as "extraordinary" and politically motivated. Jones accused the Tribunal of fearmongering and attempting to undermine New Zealand First ahead of the election.

• ACT candidate Paul Henry told a packed Blenheim campaign event that voters should give their party vote to ACT but their electorate vote to National’s Stuart Smith, acknowledging ACT's Kaikōura candidate Tom Spooner was unlikely to win the seat. Spooner said he was standing to promote the party's values despite long odds.

• Wellington's new water entity, Tiaki Wai, has apologised after sending water bills to homeowners whose properties have been declared uninhabitable following storm damage. The agency says the bills were sent in error during the transition to the new system.

• Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has ordered a review of the Ministry of Justice after it emerged a former employee accused of money laundering remained suspended on full pay for five years as it went through the courts, costing taxpayers more than half a million dollars. Goldsmith said the case represented a “comedy of errors” that had seriously shaken his confidence in the ministry and has directed the Public Service Commissioner to strengthen guidance for all agencies on managing staff facing criminal proceedings.

• James Miller has been appointed chair of the Financial Markets Authority for a five year term, with Trevor Janes joining the board for two years, as the regulator takes on expanded powers and undergoes an independent investigation into workplace conduct and culture. The appointments come after the recent leave of chief executive Samantha Barrass who pushed out Craig Stobo.

• Auckland's City Rail Link will officially open on Sunday, 13 September, ending more than a decade of construction and years of delays. The 3.5km underground rail link adds two new central city stations, more frequent train services and a transformed rail network.

• ACT MP Todd Stephenson has criticised new diversity action plans from MBIE and Treasury, arguing initiatives such as expanding everyday use of te reo Māori, cultural capability programmes and employee diversity networks risk distracting public servants from their core work despite recent Public Service Act changes emphasising political neutrality and merit-based appointments.

• Corrections Minister Mark Mitchell has halted a proposed $9 million nationwide rongoā Māori programme in prisons, including mirimiri (traditional massage), karakia and spiritual healing. The programme, which was expected to deliver 111 hours of services a week at $175 an hour, had been justified by Corrections on the basis of Māori overrepresentation in prisons.

• The coroner's inquest into Pauline Hanna's death began this week. Her husband Philip Polkinghorne was acquitted of her murder in 2024 and is expected to give evidence next week.

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Police in Scotland are investigating reports that four Ugandan boxers, two men and two women, went missing after the Commonwealth Games amid allegations they intend to seek asylum in the UK. The athletes reportedly failed to travel home with the rest of the team.

• A Hamilton care worker, Karanpreet Singh, has been sentenced to 8 years, 3 months and 2 weeks in prison for raping and attempting to sexually violate a vulnerable woman living in supported accommodation on his first day working unsupervised. Singh will be deported to India after serving his sentence.

Stuff you might find interesting this week

Steve Braunias’ brutal review of Kiri Allan’s memoir Go Hard or Go Home argues that while the book is candid, energetic, and often well written, it ultimately lacks the redemption arc needed to make it truly satisfying. He praises Allan’s vivid account of her unconventional upbringing, rise through politics, and honest discussion of her mental health crisis, but criticises her for continuing to portray herself as a victim over her 2023 drink-driving arrest, glossing over much of her ministerial career, and offering little reflection on colleagues or her political legacy.

Highly recommended just for a refreshingly honest assessment of the situation.

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As supporters chanted “Give him the chop!”, the mannequin’s head was severed. Afterwards Kaloti told the crowd “loud and clear, that’s our message” and urged “Christopher Luxon, sack Winston Peters. The people have decided.”

Metaphorical? Satire? Theatre? No harm intended? But the symbolic is very powerful. If it is not, they would not have spent days constructing a guillotine.

The ire of the MWA comes following Winston Peters comments to Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan in Parliament in which he told him to “go back to his country”. Comments that received widespread condemnation from other parties in Parliament and the media. However, in a feat of absolute absurdist inversion, the MWA seem to believe that offensive speech is worse than beheading a mannequin with a politician’s face on it. The organisation’s hypocrisy was well and truly on show with organiser Joe Carolan declaring that even though they were staging a political execution, they are in fact opposed to the death penalty.

Now, bear with me, but I need to point some other hypocrisies; ones that I feel like I discuss way too much. I contemplated leaving this out of this piece because I am sick of talking about it, but a few months out from an election the behaviour of our media has massive consequences and should be called out.

So, let’s do the usual comparison… What would New Zealand’s political and media establishment have done if supporters of Winston Peters had wheeled an effigy of Chloe Swarbrick to a mock gallows? Or if ACT activists had staged the symbolic beheading of Chris Hipkins? Or if Hobson’s Pledge supporters had invited a crowd to vote on whether Te Pāti Māori MPs deserved “the chop” before theatrically removing an effigy’s head?

The answer is fairly obvious. There would have been days of headlines, editorials about political intimidation, demands for police investigations, and endless commentary about democratic norms and the dangers of inflammatory rhetoric. It would have been a media shitstorm and moral crisis that would stop just short of being declared a national emergency. Instead, the Peters mannequin’s beheading has thus far received limited coverage. I have only seen one article from Stuff and it does not manage to reach the outrage it expressed for offensive words last week.

It is an example of the utterly ideologically captured nature of news media in New Zealand.

Most New Zealanders would probably assume, from its name alone, that the Migrant Workers Association is a fairly conventional advocacy organisation helping exploited workers. It certainly performs that role to an extent. It has represented migrant workers in exploitation cases, advocated for stronger employment protections, and campaigned against labour abuse. But that is only part of the story. Spend even a short time examining the organisation’s public activity and it becomes abundantly clear that MWA is deeply embedded within a far left activist ecosystem comprising militant trade union organisers, Socialist Aotearoa, anti-capitalist campaigners, pro-Palestinian activists, anti-war coalitions, and politicians from the Green Party and Labour who have appeared alongside its campaigns.

The same names appear repeatedly alongside MWA at events and promoting shared causes. Unite Union, One Union, Socialist Aotearoa, Anupam “Anu” Kaloti, Joe Carolan, Mike Treen, Ricardo Menéndez March, Marja Lubeck, Sandra Grey, and Helen White. That does not mean every organisation is controlled by another, nor does it mean every Green MP endorses every position taken by Socialist Aotearoa. I have been the subject of far too many “Atlas” conspiracies to apply the same poor logic to the otherside. New Zealand is small and no matter what your politics there are likely to be a relatively small group of people taking on active and public roles. However, it does reveal an activist network that is more interconnected than many people might assume.

Carolan himself is not simply a union organiser. He has spent decades organising within Unite Union and co-founded Socialist Aotearoa, a revolutionary socialist organisation whose stated objective is replacing capitalism and building socialist organisation within trade unions. His own public interviews make that strategy explicit and earlier this year he argued that protests should be escalated into industrial action capable of bringing down the Government. He praised the idea of a coordinated “pink flu”, in which workers collectively call in sick, discussed general strikes, and declared that governments could be defeated without waiting for elections. “What Parliament does,” he argued, “the streets can undo.” Whether you or I agree with those views is beside the point. The point is that these are not simply employment advocates who occasionally wander into politics. Politics is central to everything they do.

Perhaps the most politically significant parliamentary relationship appears to be with Green MP Ricardo Menéndez March. The Migrant Workers Association has repeatedly promoted his events to migrant communities and appeared alongside him on several panels. One recent example was a Punjabi community meeting featuring Menéndez March using official Green Party branding promoted on the MWA Facebook page. The promotional material stated it was authorised by the MP and funded through Parliamentary Service. That does not establish that Parliamentary Service funds the Migrant Workers Association itself, but it is arguably a bad look for parliamentary-funded Green Party material to be used by an organisation that stages political assassinations. Menéndez March has also repeatedly aligned himself with campaigns that overlap with MWA and if journalists are prepared to scrutinise political associations in other contexts, it is reasonable to ask for the same level of scrutiny here.

The relationship with Labour is slightly less friendly as the MWA has frequently criticised Labour governments for not going far enough on migration policy, yet Labour MPs have also appeared alongside its campaigns. Former Labour MP Marja Lubeck and current MP Helen White have participated in campaign events promoted through the same activist network.

The Migrant Workers Association is also a registered charity. Nothing prevents charities from advocating for policy change; in fact, it is common. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Re Greenpeace, political advocacy is not, by itself, incompatible with charitable status where it genuinely advances a charitable purpose. But charities are not supposed to become vehicles for partisan political campaigning or electoral activism.

New Zealand has already seen one high profile example in Family First, which spent years fighting to retain its charitable status after regulators concluded its primary purposes had become political rather than charitable. It demonstrated that the Charities Registration Board is prepared to scrutinise organisations whose advocacy begins to blur into overt political campaigning and the Migrant Workers Association’s activities deserve similar scrutiny.

In recent years the association has campaigned on residency pathways, employer-tied visas, immigration raids, anti-racism initiatives, Palestine solidarity, anti-Coalition Government protests, events with Green politicians, and repeated collaborations with Socialist Aotearoa networks. The symbolic execution of a serving Cabinet minister surely is an irrefutable piece of evidence that they are politically motivated. If regulators were prepared to ask questions of Family First, they should be prepared to ask them consistently of any registered charity, regardless of where it sits on the political spectrum.

Just as an aside, while researching for this piece, I stumbled upon an article from 2010 about Joe Carolan leading protests demanding that then-broadcaster Paul Henry be sacked over comments about Governor-General Sir Anand Satyanand. Carolan acknowledged that unions do not usually campaign for workers to lose their jobs but argued Henry’s comments were intolerable. Again, offensive or unpleasant words are unacceptable, but symbolic behaedings are not? Sixteen years later, Carolan must be consumed with rage as both Peters and Henry campaign for their respective parties.

Even those who were deeply offended by Winston Peters’ remarks to Xu-Nan can surely acknowledge that it is quite a leap from offensive words to cosplay beheadings. People are entitled to believe Peters’ comments were racist and they are entitled to demand his resignation, protest against him, or campaign against New Zealand First. All of these are routine features of democratic politics. Staging a mock execution of a political opponent is not routine and represents a seriously unhealthy form of political expression. It marks a troubling escalation in the violence of political rhetoric in New Zealand.

Guillotines have never been politically neutral props. MWA chose this method of execution precisely because it communicates a powerful historical image of revolution and uprising. This is far left extremism and should be thoroughly condemned by every political party. The Greens and Labour especially should denounce the stunt and call for calm. These are their supporters. Their activists. And given the increasing political violence we are seeing from the left across the world, left wing politicians should be leading by example and denouncing violence.

What is happening here in New Zealand sits within a much wider and deeply concerning international trend in which the activist far left have become increasingly comfortable flirting with violent imagery, revolutionary symbolism and, in some cases, outright political violence. Over the past few years, we have seen repeated examples of assassination attempts against Donald Trump, followed not with unequivocal condemnation but with jokes, celebration, or rationalisation online from the left. The murder of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson saw Luigi Mangione transformed into a folk hero by leftists on the internet who treated political murder as an understandable response to corporate grievance rather than an act of cold blooded violence. In Britain, Green Party leader Zack Polanski faced criticism after sharing an image featuring Nigel Farage being guillotined. Britain is also still grappling with the brutal killing of former Conservative minister and Reform UK spokesperson Ann Widdecombe. A far left activist with ties to Jeremy Corbyn’s new party has been charged with the murder and counter terrorism police are investigating terroristic motivations.

New Zealand has already had a warning that political hostility does not always stay confined to slogans and placards. In October last year, after days of increasingly heated protests over the Government’s stance on Palestinian statehood, Winston Peters’ Auckland home was targeted. A man smashed a window with a crowbar while Peters’ partner and a guest were inside, sending glass through the room and over the family’s dog. A 29 year old man was arrested and charged.

That incident should have been a line in the sand. Taking political protest to a politician’s private home and escalating to criminal damage crosses a fundamental democratic boundary. Home is where partners, children, and families live, and they should not be dragged into the political arena.

Across Western countries, slogans such as “globalise the intifada” have become commonplace at demonstrations despite the term’s association with waves of terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of civilians. The Green Party in particular has enthusiastically used the slogan here along with “from the river to the sea”. Chloe Swarbrick has spent the better part of this term of Government screaming into a microphone chants that are at best antisemitism-adjacent.

The irony is that many of the same activist networks are often the first to argue that words matter and political rhetoric creates dangerous social norms. They see Nazi and white supremacists symbology in a woman zipping up her jacket. Infact, the violence enacted against Posie Parker (and those of us attending to hear her) at Albert Park is another example of left wing political escalation. There may have been families and well-intended allies present down the back, but at the front activists tore apart barriers, assaulted elderly women, and surrounded Posie Parker. I genuinely thought they were going to kill her.

It is long past time we took left wing violence seriously. The constant death threats, violent messages, and hideous personal abuse I receive are not isolated incidents or the work of a few unhinged individuals. They are the predictable product of a political culture that wraps itself in the language of compassion while practising intimidation, dehumanisation, and narrative distortion as standard operating procedure. The “be kind” brigade has perfected the art of demanding endless empathy for their preferred causes while showing none toward those who dissent, and they treat threats and abuse directed at their opponents as somehow deserved.

This is not compassion or empathy. Calling something kind does not make it so, any more than declaring a man a woman makes him one, or rewriting history to fit a preferred ideology turns falsehood into fact. Twisting the narrative is not an occasional feature of leftist politics; it is fundamental to how it operates. Reality is subordinated to the story that must be told, and anyone who refuses to play along is marked as fair game for harassment, cancellation, or worse.

Saturday’s mock guillotine was not harmless theatre. Symbols of execution aimed at political opponents are never neutral, and treating them as such only when the perpetrators claim progressive motives is selective blindness. When homes are targeted, when violent imagery is excused, and when the volume of threats against people who hold mainstream views is routinely downplayed or ignored, the message is clear that some lives and some opinions are less protected than others.

A society that cannot bring itself to condemn political violence and intimidation with equal force, regardless of the ideology of the perpetrators, is not serious about democracy. The double standard that treats left wing aggression as either non-existent or somehow mitigated by good intentions has gone on long enough.

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Election 2026: Buff Bros and Bad Ideas

In a week full of controversy, Green candidate for Waiariki, Tania Waikato, drew attention by posting photographs of scantily clad Māori men and women (including herself) alongside information about enrolling and switching electoral rolls. She calls it the “bikini baddies and buff bros” campaign, the media calls it a thirst trap, and I call it a red flag for the Green Party. I am not sure they have room for an ego of Waikato’s size in their caucus.

The Greens’ response to Waikato’s approach was tentative with Marama Davidson saying it was “not my cup of tea” and Chlöe Swarbrick calling it unconventional but accepting that politics now operates in a “brave new world”. Shane Jones naturally spotted the double standard with Labour and the Greens having spent the previous week denouncing his “kneepads” remark, yet a Green candidate is now explicitly using sexualised imagery as an electoral tool.

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Waikato’s campaign was not even the Greens’ only brand-related drama. Tamatha Paul had to remove her “Tametallica” campaign range after questions were raised about its resemblance to Metallica’s logo. Chlöe Swarbrick had already modelled the shirt at Paul’s campaign launch before it disappeared from the website, along with Edmonds Cookbook-inspired material.

On policy, Winston Peters announced that New Zealand First wants to restore employment to the Reserve Bank’s mandate, describing its removal under the current Government as a “dead rat” the party had been forced to swallow. National believes the Reserve Bank should have one clear job of controlling inflation. But Labour’s finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds said the party was seriously considering restoring the dual mandate too.

The media’s favourite party, Opportunity, was ruled out as a coaltion partner by National and Chris Hipkins then declared there was “no way” Labour would support Opportunity’s tax policy either, but he stopped short of ruling out working with the party altogether.

Opportunity responded by releasing a candidate list of 40 people and continuing to insist it could work across the political spectrum. It clearly wants to present itself as a centrist, but its flagship policies have turned off both sides of politics.

National’s proposal to make paid parental leave more flexible is one of the campaign’s more sensible policies. Rather than increasing spending, it simply allows parents to divide the existing entitlement in the way that best suits their family.

Former National MP Harete Hipango-Brownlie, is campaigning for New Zealand First and calling on conservative Māori to “come out in strength and force”. She accused National of abandoning its core values and becoming globalist.

Far North Councillor Davina Smolders will stand as an ACT Party list-only candidate, bringing her advocacy for local democracy, property rights, and free expression from local government into the national political arena.

Offence, outrage, and Winston Peters

During some parliamentary sparring with Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan, Winston Peters said “I know you just came here five minutes ago. Go back to your own country.”

Labour and the Greens have called for Peters to be sacked as Foreign Minister. National campaign chair Simeon Brown called the remark racist, while Christopher Luxon initially described it as attention-seeking before later agreeing it had caused huge offence. Peters dismissed the criticism and insisted he had been defending New Zealand democracy.

While the remarks no doubt did offend a number of New Zealanders, the outrage machine is pretty disingenuous when it couldn’t be bothered spluttering to life when in the not so distant past other MPs have engaged in similar behaviour. Just the other day Tamatha Paul gave a speech that was full of contempt and derision for the English language callling it a “bastard”. Her Green Party co-leader also infamously blamed all violent crime on “white cis men”. While former Te Pāti Māori MP Mariamenno Kapa Kingi openly denegrates white New Zealanders in the House and Takuta Ferris took to social media to complain that “ethnics” were campaigning for Labour in the Tamaki Makaurau byelection. He pointed out the Indians and Asians in Labour’s photos and said the main parties were using multiculturalism against Māori. A bit further back Labour has the notorious “Chinese sounding names” saga blackening their scorecard.

Polls: New Zealand’s astonishingly short memory

A leaked Taxpayers’ Union-Curia electorate poll this week shows Chlöe Swarbrick is in real danger of losing Auckland Central.

The poll covered about 400 voters over the past week. Once undecided voters are excluded, National’s Candace Kinser leads on 30%, Swarbrick sits on 25%, and Labour’s Naisi Chen is only one point behind her on 24%. The raw figures contain a sizeable 22% undecided vote.

The Greens will inevitably respond by warning Labour supporters that voting for Naisi Chen risks National coming through the middle. But Labour voters may ask themselves why they should continue donating an electorate to the leader of a rival party, when they believe they have a credible candidate of their own.

I suspect we'll be hearing a lot more about Auckland Central before November.

The more consequential polling this week, however, came from Ipsos. Apparently three years is now sufficient time for national amnesia to set in.

The July Issues Monitor surveyed 1002 New Zealanders and asked them to identify the country’s most important problems and which parties they considered best able to manage them.

The cost of living remained the dominant concern, selected by 62% of respondents. Healthcare and hospitals followed on 38%, the economy on 34%, housing on 22%, and unemployment on 20%. Labour was judged the party most capable of managing all five.

National will be very concerned to see Labour overtake them on the economy. Labour rose from 28% in May to 34% in July, while National fell from 33% to 30%. Labour was considered best placed on 15 of the top 20 issues and National led outright on only crime and law and order.

The Government is clearly failing to persuade people that conditions are improving, and in politics perception becomes reality. But Labour being seen as the answer to the economic damage is an extraordinary triumph of short term memory over lived experience.

Remember, Labour presided over an explosion in government spending, entrenched enormous structural deficits, helped fuel domestic inflation, expanded the bureaucracy, buried businesses under regulation, and left the incoming Government with deteriorating books and public services that somehow consumed more money while delivering less.

Labour will say it was dealing with a pandemic and global inflation. Fair enough. But so was everyone else.

Equally, National can't dine out forever on blaming Labour. Governments are elected to fix problems, not merely conduct guided tours of the wreckage. After nearly three years, voters expect visible results. National has failed to make the contrast vivid enough.

New Zealanders have notoriously short political memories. We tire of one government, replace it, become frustrated that the clean up is slow, and then begin romanticising the people responsible for the original mess.

When a union becomes an election campaign

The Public Service Association is openly campaigning to remove the Government.

There is zero subtlty about its slogan. It isn’t “protect public services”, “defend fair pay”, or “stop the cuts”. It is literally “change the Government”. The postcards they printed with this message on them reportedly carried the promoter statement required for election advertising, were distributed through public service workplaces, and urged voters to throw out the elected administration on 7 November.

In response, Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche says this is plainly inconsistent with the political neutrality expected inside government agencies.

The PSA insists the campaign is an exercise of free expression and up to a point, it is. Public servants do not surrender their political rights when they accept a government salary. They may join political parties, attend rallies, criticise ministers, campaign in their private capacity, and vote however they please. A union is also entitled to tell its members that government policy threatens their jobs, wages, or conditions. It may email them, hold meetings, produce analysis and encourage them to participate politically in their own time.

But none of that is the same as turning public hospitals, ministries, and service centres into campaign distribution networks. A patient arriving at a hospital for treatment should not be confronted with material telling them to vote out the Government. A member of the public entering a government department should not encounter election slogans displayed in a building funded by taxpayers of every political persuasion.

The distinction ain’t complicated. Communicating privately with members is legitimate union activity. Bombarding members of the public who are trying to access government services isn’t.

The PSA appears to understand this distinction when forced to confront it. Its revised advice tells members that postcards should not be displayed anywhere open to the public. Members are also told not to use workplace resources for election activity and to conceal work identification when attending rallies.

There are also important questions about how far the PSA has departed from industrial representation into party-political activism. Its national secretary has now stated explicitly that the union wants “to change the Government to one that properly values a public service” and is urging voters to do so at the election.

Campaigns are expensive and the PSA is engaged in a considerable one. How much of their union dues are being spent on election advertising, campaign design, printing, organisers, legal advice, political communications, and staff time devoted to removing the Government? Compare that to how much is being spent representing individual members in disciplinary cases, negotiating pay, protecting employment rights, and resolving workplace grievances? Are members able to opt out of financing electoral campaigning?

Unions have always engaged in politics because employment law, public spending, and workplace regulation are political decisions. But there is a difference between advocating for policies and functioning as an undeclared campaign arm for the the Labour Party.

The biggest employment law shake up in years

The Employment Leave Bill has passed its third reading and will replace the Holidays Act 2003. Most provisions will take effect two years after Royal Assent, with employers given a further year to update employment agreements. However, some parental leave changes will begin on 1 July 2027.

Under the new legislation, annual and sick leave will accrue in hours from the first day of employment at 0.0769 hours for each standard hour worked, equivalent to four weeks a year for someone with stable hours. Sick leave will accrue at 0.0385 hours per standard hour, up to a maximum balance of 160 hours. But bereavement and family violence leave will also be available from the first day of work.

Part time workers will receive sick leave in proportion to their standard hours rather than the current flat entitlement of 10 days a year. A worker on 20 hours a week will accrue about 40 hours of sick leave annually, while a worker on 40 hours will accrue about 80 hours.

Employees will also be able to request payment for up to 25% of their annual leave balance each year.

The plot thickens at the FMA

The drama at the Financial Markets Authority now looks a lot worse than a simple dispute over political neutrality. Former chair Craig Stobo was subjected to an expansive investigation after three board members went to the minister with a collection of allegations. The review examined rumours about an allegedly inappropriate relationship with a former staff member, his self-funded trip to Estonia, travel requests, a potential conflict involving a mortgage company, media commentary, and his personal submission supporting the Treaty Principles Bill. But most of the allegations went absolutely nowhere.

Wendy Aldred KC found no evidence of an inappropriate relationship between Stobo and former FMA employee Kyla Bottriell. She found no evidence that he had directed or approved coercion of another staff member. His travel applications were not inappropriate and he had properly disclosed his Indi directorship. But in the end, the report ultimately concluded that his political commentary was sufficient on its own to justify his removal.

The process itself was a bit of a shambles as when the investigation began, there was no formal written complaint or record of the board’s concerns. They had been communicated verbally and expressed broadly. Aldred had to request a written summary setting out what Stobo was actually accused of.

Stobo’s public comments were supportive of the coalition and critical of the previous Labour Government and this was portrayed as a political neutrality issue. But the treatment of his Treaty Principles Bill submission went further with the report finding that his personal submission contradicted the FMA’s board-approved Māori strategy and was therefore made “at the expense of the FMA’s interests”.

It is largely accepted that Stobo had ruffled feathers by being an unusually hands on chair and pushing to improve the regulator’s performance and after internal opposition emerged, virtually every available line of attack was assembled to take him down.

The most serious rumour about an alleged affair was comprehensively rejected and Kyla Bottriell has said false and damaging claims about her were allowed to circulate within the FMA and reach the media. She said she had raised concerns through proper channels about the regulator’s culture, internal rumour spreading, leaking and lack of accountability. Those issues remained unaddressed.

Now the person at the centre of the FMA’s executive leadership is herself on leave. Chief executive Samantha Barrass has stepped aside while the board urgently considers allegations about bullying, psychological safety, and wider cultural problems. Multiple current and former employees have reportedly raised concerns with the Government’s Chief Victim Adviser Ruth Money, who escalated them to the relevant authorities.

Former employees have alleged bullying involving some of the organisation’s most senior staff, a culture of fear, retaliation against people who spoke up and reliance on non-disclosure agreements to keep dissatisfied employees quiet. During the year to June 2025, 77 employees left, including ten senior leaders.

The FMA demanded that Craig Stobo be judged against exacting standards of conduct, institutional loyalty, and public confidence. Those same standards must now be applied to the people who judged him.

🇪🇸 Europe's border crisis explodes

In the space of roughly 24 hours, between 49,000 and 60,000 (numbers changing rapidly) people crossed illegally from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. For a city of just 84,000 residents, the influx was almost unmanagable and Spain deployed the military. Spain’s own pro-mass migration Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, described the crossing as “an attack” on Spain’s territorial integrity. European leaders have also demanded emergency action.

The images of the invasion are all over X but largely missing from legacy media. They expose the uncomfortable truth that these are not refugees fleeing an active war zone. The overwhelming majority of those making the crossing were young Moroccan men seeking entry into the European Union. It was a mass illegal border crossing into Europe.

Once people gain access to the European Union migrant system, they are not only welcomed in, but also aided to get where they want to go. the consequences are no longer confined to Spain. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that Europe “cannot allow anyone to come to our Union without abiding by our rules.”

🇬🇧 Three women do not simply have simultaneous heart attacks

Moving to the migrant crisis set in the English channel, three women were found unconscious on an overcrowded Channel boat. All three died and the narrative being reported ias that they had all suffered heart attacks. That explanation is basically a statistical impossibility. The probability would be roughly one in three quintillion.

The more credible possibilities are that they may have been crushed or suffocated in an overcrowded dinghy, have inhaled something toxic, been trapped beneath other passengers, suffered severe hypoxia, or been exposed to extreme physical violence. And because all three dead passengers were women on a vessel overwhelmingly occupied by men, controlled by criminal smugglers, and because these things have happened before, sexual assault and homicide must be considered. There is already extensive evidence that women moving along illegal migration routes are raped, trafficked, assaulted, and coerced.

Astonishingly, the rest of the passengers on the boat reportedly declined assistance and the boat was permitted to continue towards Britain. Around 75 people were subsequently taken to Dover, where authorities said they would be questioned and the vessel examined.

Has Simeon Brown personally offended Andrea Vance?

Did Simeon Brown accidentally reverse over Andrea Vance’s pot plants? Insult her mother? Because at this point it feels less like she is trying to complete a side quest to destroy the Health minister.

Over the space of a week we’ve had article after article after article devoted to Simeon Brown’s ministerial appointments. What makes it particularly entertaining is the standard apparently being applied. Every acquaintance, meeting, previous employer, shared office, coffee, phone call, or passing interaction is presented as another piece of the great conspiracy board connecting Simeon Brown to... people who generally agree with government policy.

None of this is to say ministers shouldn’t be scrutinised. Of course they should. But scrutiny should apply a consistent standard and if appointing someone who shares your governing philosophy is scandalous today, then where were the front pages cataloguing Labour’s appointments of former ministers, union leaders, ideological allies, and activists to Crown boards over the previous six years?

The latest instalment centres on Sharon Brownie, the Government’s Nursing Council chair, and a three year old Kenyan employment judgment in which she was found to have privately compared her executive assistant to a bullfrog. Yes. A bullfrog.

Apparently this was worthy of another front-page political exposé. At this rate, I fully expect tomorrow’s exclusive to reveal that one of Simeon Brown’s appointees once failed to return a library book in 1998 or accidentally called someone “mate” in a passive aggressive tone.

🇺🇸 COVID isn't finished with politics

COVID returned to the political agenda this week both here and in the United States, but in very different ways. Here at home, the Coalition Government formally responded to the Royal Commission into New Zealand’s COVID-19 response, accepting all 63 recommendations either in full, in principle, or in part. The most significant change is a commitment that, in any future pandemic, the official advice underpinning major decisions affecting New Zealanders’ rights must be proactively released within five working days. That may sound like an administrative tweak, but it represents a profound philosophical shift. The new approach recognises that transparency isn’t an optional extra during emergencies. It is essential to maintaining public trust.

The Government also accepted recommendations that emergency financial support should be “timely, temporary and targeted”, reflecting criticism that much of the COVID Response and Recovery Fund extended well beyond immediate pandemic needs.

While New Zealand debates how to improve future decision making, the United States has been interrogating its COVID Tsar. Dr Anthony Fauci appeared before a Senate committee this week after being subpoenaed by Senator Rand Paul. Rather than answering questions, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination throughout the hearing on the advice of his lawyers. His decision followed the release of more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s work diary, which, according to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., consisted of government records created on a government computer during official duties rather than private personal journals

The diaries paint a more personal picture of a man who had become one of the most recognisable public officials in the world. While recording daily death tolls and case numbers, Fauci frequently reflected on his media profile. He described front page profiles in The Washington Post as “very flattering”, wrote that his national and international fame was “explosive and really unimaginable”, and claimed it was “not hyperbole” to say he had become “the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognisable people in the world.” In another entry, written while cases continued to soar, he noted that “the press is going wild with me” before listing major newspaper profiles and television appearances. These observations sit uncomfortably alongside pages recording mounting death tolls.

When will New Zealand take sexual offending seriously?

I cannot stomach the judicial leniency shown to sexual predators in New Zealander any longer. We cannot go on tolerating the indifference to victims’ suffering and the mollycoddling of sexual criminals by the judiciary.

Open Justice reported this week that a Waikato father recorded himself sexually abusing his 5 year old daughter, produced further material from the recordings, and offered to create more for an overseas contact. Police also found hundreds of images and dozens of videos on his phone. His sentence was just 3 years and 10 months in prison after discounts reduced it from a starting point of 5 and a half years. He will likely not serve even close to all of that sentence.

Another example is Michael Sullivan who possessed thousands of child exploitation images, including material involving toddlers and infants and received 12 months of home detention and 100 hours of community work.

The notorious case from a few years ago was Jayden Meyer who was convicted of raping 4 15 year old girls and sexually violating another. A psychologist assessed him as presenting a medium risk of reoffending and said he continued to minimise the harm he had caused. He outrageously received 9 months of home detention.

The High Court later described that sentence as manifestly inadequate and said the process had undermined public confidence. Yet an appeal to change it was declined. Meyer was subsequently convicted of sexually violating another 15 year old girl on the night he was released on bail for the earlier offending.

Then there is Laken Maree Rose, who is a man repeatedly refered to as a woman by our media and convicted of extensive sexual offending against girls aged as young as three. The original judge described the case as almost unprecedented in scale and gravity. However, the Court of Appeal reduced Rose’s sentence by six years, from 19 years and five months to 13 years and five months, and removed the minimum non-parole period.

Sentencing judgments carefully examine the offender’s age, mental health, upbringing, remorse, guilty plea, rehabilitation prospects, coercion, and personal hardship. And while the damage to victims is acknowledged, sometimes movingly, it appears wholly disconnected from the sentencing process.

Rehabilitation is importanr. I am certainly not disputing that. But it's only one purpose of sentencing. The law is also meant to provide accountability, denunciation, deterrence, and protection of the community.

New Zealand has a sexual violence problem. It also has a sentencing credibility problem. The public is repeatedly told that these offences are among the most serious imaginable, only to watch courts work methodically backwards from that conclusion through discounts until the punishment is a slap on the wrist. New Zealand sex offenders can get home detention for crimes that would land them a life sentence in the United States.

In short - other stuff that happened

• Officials have discovered a further $6 million in costs linked to MBIE’s failed Biometric Capability Upgrade, taking known spending beyond the previously disclosed $33 million. MBIE says it still cannot confirm the project’s full cost and has commissioned an independent financial audit.

• 🇺🇸 Donald Trump announced that Hamas has agreed in principle to a phased ceasefire plan that includes disarmament, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, deployment of an international security force and the establishment of a technocratic Palestinian administration. Hamas officials described the agreement as the result of months of negotiations and key details, including the surrender of Hamas' heavy weapons and tunnel network, are yet to be completed.

• Parliament has passed the most significant overhaul of New Zealand's firearms laws in more than 40 years, creating an independent firearms regulator separate from Police, introducing tougher restrictions on gang members, new offences and penalties, and a range of changes aimed at simplifying compliance for licensed firearms owners.

• The Waitangi Tribunal has found the government's proposed reforms to Treaty clauses across 19 Acts would breach multiple Treaty principles, cause significant prejudice to Māori, and further damage the Māori–Crown relationship. Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith said the government does not accept the Tribunal's conclusions.

• Zoe Hobbs made history by winning New Zealand's first ever Commonwealth Games women's 100m gold, with an Oceania record and personal best of 10.93 seconds.

• Eliza McCartney won pole vault gold at the Commonwealth Games.

• Police have launched a Mass Allegation Investigation into alleged historical sexual abuse involving a 63 year old man, who has been charged with four counts of unlawful sexual connection with a male aged 12–16 and three counts of indecent assault relating to two other complainants. The alleged offending occurred in Christchurch between 1996–1998 and 2003–2005, and police believe there may be additional victims.

• The government has appointed Byron Pepper as Deputy Chair of the Reserve Bank Board for a 4 year term. Pepper has served on the Board since 2022 and chairs the Reserve Bank’s Financial Policy Committee.

• A 53 year old early childhood teacher has been charged with making an intimate visual recording after a recording device was discovered in a staff bathroom at a Mount Maunganui childcare centre. Police say no children appear in the recordings, but the teacher has agreed not to teach while the case proceeds and is due to reappear in the Tauranga District Court on 3 August.

• An SPCA investigation is underway into the death of a 3 year old spoodle at Dog Manners, an Auckland dog daycare, after the dog died from internal bleeding caused by significant blunt force trauma. Former employees have alleged repeated animal abuse by the owner and raised concerns about the deaths of three other dogs at the facility.

• The Crown has been given until 30 September to decide whether it will retry David Tamihere after the Supreme Court quashed his 1990 murder convictions for the deaths of Swedish tourists Heidi Paakkonen and Sven Urban Höglin.

• New Zealand added two more track cycling medals in Glasgow, with Devon Briggs winning gold in the men’s C1-C3 1000m time trial, while Sami Donnelly claimed silver in the women’s scratch race.

• David Liti claimed New Zealand's fifth gold medal of the Commonwealth Games, producing a dramatic final 223kg clean and jerk to finish with a Games record total of 389kg. The victory gives Liti a third consecutive Commonwealth Games medal.

Stuff you might find interesting this week

The media's fascination with the Opportunity Party continues unashamedly. TOP continues to attract a remarkable amount of editorial attention and little of it can be described as critical. As journalist Chris Lynch wryly observed, one Herald interview with the party’s leader was followed up with a political panel featuring the deputy leader's own mother, well-known public relations consultant Deborah Pead. Pead denies involvement with the party, but deputy leader Daniel Eb has previously acknowledged Pead was involved in the party's early development. This could explain the cosy ecosystem of political reporting, commentary, and campaign promotion.

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This week’s headlines tell the tale of what happens when an utterly ideological media decides to act astonished at this process. As if no minister in the history of our democracy has ever appointed people who he or she knows will enact the agenda the people of New Zealand voted for. The story “uncovered” or “exposed” Health Minister Simeon Brown’s recent appointments to the Medical Council. Among four new members, he named Dr Manoja Kalupahana, a veteran Auckland anaesthetist who the Free Speech Union defended previously and Dr Roderick Mulgan, a specialist GP and barrister who is on the board of the Free Speech Union. I must disclose here that I am also on the board of FSU and both of these appointees are friends of mine.

Almost instantly, Labour and the media leapt on the appointments as if Brown had appointed unqualified criminals who advocate for witch doctoring to the Council. When the Free Speech Union challenged the narrative being set up by Andrea Vance and pals, The Post doubled down and Opposition leader Chris Hipkins declared that Brown was setting up the Free Speech Union and the Taxpayers’ Union as “his own personal troll farm” targeting journalists. Labour’s narrative from the opposition benches is that any ideological comrade placed on a regulatory board is inherently sinister, even corrupt. But this is a terrible case of throwing stones from glass houses.

Ministers do not, and should not, appoint strangers with alien agendas and no will to prioritise what voters have mandated at the election. The government is meant to pursue the political programme that they promised voters and they need their appointees to be on board with that.

In any case, it is frankly worrying that the fact that Kalupahana and Mulgan have a particular interest in upholding key democratic and civil rights that are present in our Bill of Rights Act (BORA), is seen as sinister. Every elected official should actively uphold our rights under BORA. One could argue that the principled stances of the two doctors is going to be an asset to the Medical Council which should support BORA rights being up held in our healthcare system.

Additionally, a minister “may only appoint those who have the appropriate skills and background” to help the entity do its job and with these appointments Brown has nailed the brief. Dr Kalupahana isn’t some random activist, she’s a highly regarded anaesthetist with nearly two decades experience and is the lead for Paediatric Anaesthesia for Health New Zealand Waitematā. She is on the Southern Cross Brightside Hospital Clinical Governance Committee and a member of the New Zealand Paediatric Network. And she is the Waitematā Branch President of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists union. In other words, she’s a highly experienced clinician with governance experience whose appointment to the Medical Council makes perfect sense.

Dr Mulgan is also extremely qualified. He begun training to be a General Practitioner before I was born (he will hate me pointing this out). Then he must have got bored or something because he went back to university and studied law. He now practises as a both a barrister and a doctor. He’s perfectly credentialed for a doctors’ regulatory body, and actually told the media that he believes regulators should avoid “picking sides in a contested ideological debate”.

In short, both appointees have the competence required for their roles on the Council. Any suggestion that their personal beliefs should disqualify them is exactly the kind of ideological litmus test that falls outside the law. Ministerial guidebooks expressly say that appointments should be judged on qualification and performance, not one’s politics.

It’s telling how angrily the media have inverted this. The Post’s political editor Andrea Vance sent a bunch of leading questions to Minister Brown’s office following the annoouncement of the appointments and Brown’s office then forwarded this on to Dr Kalupahana as is appropriate given it concerns her. Then she sent to me as **shock horror** she is my friend and the Free Speech Union, of which I am a board member, is mentioned several times in the request for comment. She also called and spoke to our Executive Director Jillaine Heather.

In her reporting, Vance focused on the fact that the Free Speech Union quickly put out a press release on the matter strongly insinuating that the minister's office had sent the questions to us. She never contacted our Communications Manager whose details are on all of our press releases to verify this nor did she contact our Executive Director.

“FSU issued its press release two hours and 16 minutes after the questions were emailed to Brown’s office.” Andrea Vance

She also focused on the fact that Jonathan Ayling previously worked in Simeon Brown’s office, but he has not been involved with the Free Speech Union for about a year.

Our press release was sent out quickly because our chair former MP Stephen Franks instructed us to get ahead of the inevitable hitjob by the journalist notorious for calling women she disagrees with politically “c***s”. The media seems to think that they are entitled to set the agenda and we are meant to sit back and wait for them to publish pieces so politically spun that Pravda would ask them to tone it down. We decided we weren’t going to play their game and our Executive Director Jillaine Heather accused Vance of “muckraking” of applying an “ideological litmus test” to public appointments. Our chair Stephen Franks warned that journalists shouldn’t be the ones deciding which opinions disqualify someone from public service and appointments. He said “competence, not conformity, should decide who is entrusted with public responsibility”.

And as I say, Vance took exception to us calling her out and soon Labour MPs were parroting her spin, crying that Brown had unleashed a “personal troll farm” on a poor unsuspecting journalist whose hitjobs are notorious.

The press gallery then picked up the slack and questioned Prime Minister Luxon about the appointments they were determined to portray as corrupt. He responded that he was “completely relaxed” about how Brown’s office handled things.

The framing of these appointments as some kind of snub to propriety is fundamentally dishonest and Labour’s pearl clutching is, as I said, a case of chucking stones in a glass house. Under the last Labour government, ministers routinely populated boards with close ideological allies with zero finger-wagging from the press at the time.

No one complained when Jacinda Ardern’s Government backed a new Medical Council that was perfectly ideologically aligned to dutifully roll out a co-governed health care system with a separate Māori Health Authority. Dr Rachelle Love was appointed in 2020 by the Labour Government and was elected Chair in February 2024. Her bio on the Medical Council website says “Dr Love’s research interests are in Māori health, particularly cultural competency and cultural safety in surgical education…”

Dr Love’s CV is impressive and I am not arguing that she should not have been appointed. I am merely demonstrating that Labour selected her for her competence and the fact that she was politically aligned and well placed to further their vision for healthcare in New Zealand.

Under Dr Love’s leadership, the Council focused on “cultural safety” measures putting out documents that asked doctors to examine their own “privilege,” challenge the “dominant culture” of the health system, study cultural appreciation versus appropriation and even help “dismantle” structural inequities. Where was Vance to report on this crystal clear example of a ministerial appointee focusing on what her appointers deemed important? If Brown’s appointees have strong personal views, the previous council was nothing if not overtly driven by political concepts. The difference is that the media treated their politicisation as acceptable because it is a politics favoured by them. Only after a National minister decided not to renew Dr Love and her deputy Simon Watt because they were clearly incompatible with his prioritisation of reducing wait times and providing quality healthcare over identity politics, was it suddenly an “agenda.”

There are countless examples beyond health where Labour ministers made plainly partisan picks and again I stress that this is entirely normal. Broadcasting, energy, education, and other regulators gained members who were on the same page as Jacinda’s ministers, yet I challenge anyone to recall an op‑ed whining about it. Former Labour Ministers Steve Maharey and Ruth Dyson were appointed to roles under Labour. Maharey has held one of the most extensive portfolios of Crown governance appointments ever chairing Pharmac, ACC, Education New Zealand, and UCOL. He also sat on the boards of Health New Zealand, WellingtonNZ, and was Vice-Chancellor of Massey University from 2008–2016. Ruth Dyson was appointed to Fire and Emergency New Zealand, Earthquake Commission, and Toka Tū Ake EQC. She was deputy chair in all of them.

Labour has also made a habit of giving ex-Labour ministers cushy ambassador roles post-Parliament. Annette King was made High Commissioner to Australia, Trevor Mallard was Ambassador to Ireland, and Phil Goff was High Commissioner to the United Kingdom.

Then there are the unionists. Former President of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Richard Wagstaff was appointed to the Health New Zealand board. Another former NZCTU President, Ross Wilson, was appointed to the Climate Change Commision. Long time employment lawyer, who has acted extensively for unions, Paul Tolich KC was reappointed Chair of the Employment Relations Authority. Former Policy Director and Chief Economist of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Bill Rosenberg was appointed to be a Commissioner on the New Zealand Productivity Commission and as a member of Sir Michael Cullen's Tax Working Group.

Why were these union appointments fine, but appointing someone affiliated to the Free Speech Union is not? The unions are completely aligned with Labour. We all know this.

And, moving in to territory that is less acceptable, Labour also indulged in a bit of good ol’ keep-it-in-the-family. Then-Labour minister Nanaia Mahuta’s sister Tipa Mahuta was appointed chair of the Te Aka Whai Ora (Māori Health Authority) and Taumata Arowai (the Crown entity in charge of water services regulation). She was also a board member of Health New Zealand. Again, she may well have been ideally qualified, but the family connection is not one that can be dismissed.

Complaining that Brown is choosing “ideological” people only exposes the ideology of the complainers. If Kalupahana and Mulgan were objectively unqualified or corrupt, then public debate and scrutiny would be entirely warranted. But neither is the case. They are plainly up to the job, and their views are lawful and widely held.

This kerfuffle isn’t about rooting out some nefarious influence, it’s about media and opposition parties refusing to accept that, a centre-right government has the right to appoint political allies as regulators. The real outrage in it all is the pettiness in the reporting. The scoring cheap political points by suggesting quite normal appointments are scandalous. Governments are elected to govern. That includes appointing people they trust to implement the programme voters elected them to deliver.

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Just as important, the Commission did not pretend that hate crime and hate speech are the same thing. Hate speech was explicitly outside the scope of the review, even though submitters repeatedly raised it. The report distinguishes between punishing violent or intimidating conduct and criminalising expression about ideas, beliefs, and doctrines. New Zealand should preserve that distinction like its constitutional life depends on it. Because it does.

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The political pressure to bring in hate speech laws has not gone away. In fact, it has begun to show a more honest shape, one that is driven largely by demands from Islamic lobbyists for blasphemy laws. The Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand’s (FIANZ) own proposed definitions extend well beyond direct incitement of violence to speech that “denigrates”, “demeans”, “vilifies” or promotes hostility towards religious beliefs and practices. Its suggested warning signs include calling members of a group liars, cheats or criminals, alleging conspiracies, or associating the group with child abuse. Note that FIANZ want the belief and practices protected, not just the adherents of the beliefs.

No organisation has pursued the expansion of New Zealand’s hate speech laws with greater persistence than FIANZ. At this point, it is becoming difficult to identify a political controversy involving religion, extremism, or social cohesion that FIANZ does not use as another opportunity to demand restrictions on speech. It has become something approaching organisational singularity.

FIANZ was advocating for expanded hate speech and hate crime laws immediately after the Christchurch mosque attacks in 2019. In 2022, when the Labour Government proposed adding religious belief to the protected categories in the Human Rights Act, FIANZ did not celebrate the change as sufficient progress. It criticised the Government for failing to go further, complained that the proposal did not cover electronic communications adequately, and argued that the relevant provision should instead be placed in the Crimes Act.

In 2023, it demanded a firm timetable, dedicated funding, and additional resources to complete the legislation. FIANZ representatives argued that social cohesion initiatives would not work unless backed by law, dismissed objections as coming from only a small number of people, and suggested that the Ministry of Justice should simply get on with producing the legislation.

When the National-led Government halted the hate speech review in 2024, FIANZ returned to the media to demand an explanation. Its representative insisted that hate speech and hate crime were inseparable and that “you can’t have one without the other.”

In 2025, after Brian Tamaki’s supporters tore and burned religious and political flags at a protest, FIANZ again called for a legislative framework protecting faith communities. The display was ugly, provocative, and deliberately offensive. The correct response in a free country is condemnation, ridicule, counter-protest and, where genuine threats or disorder occur, enforcement of existing law. FIANZ’s instinct was once again to reach for new speech restrictions.

Then, in May 2026, FIANZ warned that New Zealand was experiencing its worst anti-Muslim environment in two decades and renewed calls for “legislative safeguards”. Its chairman described a “hate soup boiling over” and argued that inflammatory rhetoric was creating the conditions for violence. Violence enacted by who?

Yet the minister responsible for the intelligence agencies said the national threat level remained steady, the NZSIS had not identified one ideology as presenting a greater current threat than others, and the Prime Minister said he had seen no intelligence indicating an increased threat specifically to Muslim communities.

And now, following the Law Commission’s 2026 report, FIANZ is back again. Its response was not simply to disagree with the report’s conclusions. It is complaining that hate speech was excluded from the terms of reference and urging political parties to return to the Royal Commission’s proposals. Its spokesperson, Abdur Razzaq, dismissed thousands of free speech submissions as potentially little more than one person repeatedly clicking a button, while presenting FIANZ’s own preferred interpretation of public opinion as authoritative.

To FIANZ, every offensive protest is evidence that speech laws are inadequate, every delay is a betrayal, every review that does not deliver the desired result is too narrow, and every government that hesitates is accused of abandoning vulnerable communities. Most manipulatively, every objection is reframed as indifference to the victims of Christchurch.

The murder of 51 Muslims in Christchurch was an atrocity, and Muslim New Zealanders are entitled to the full protection of the criminal law. But that does not mean FIANZ is entitled to dictate the boundaries of lawful public discussion. Victimhood does not come with a veto over civil liberties, and the horror of one terrorist attack cannot become a permanent blank cheque for censorship.

We must all see FIANZ for what it is; a political organisation that lobbies for greater power for itself. This can be seen in the distinction FIANZ continually blurs between protecting Muslims and protecting Islam. Muslims are people and they possess rights. Islam is a religion and it must remain open to scrutiny, mockery, rejection, and fierce criticism, just as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, atheism, and every political ideology must be.

FIANZ participates vigorously in contested cultural debates. In 2023, it issued an “urgent advisory” encouraging Muslim parents to object to Pride Week activities in schools. It provided template letters and urged parents to make their opposition known to principals, boards, and teachers. That was entirely within its democratic rights. Religious communities are free to object to state-funded messages about sexuality and gender. But the principle must work both ways. FIANZ cannot demand the freedom to tell schools that Islamic parents reject aspects of Pride while also seeking laws broad enough to punish criticism that comes the other way.

FIANZ’s persistence is politically understandable. Advocacy groups exist to advocate, and an organisation representing Muslim associations will naturally focus on the fears and interests of Muslim communities. Its original calls for improved recording of hate-motivated crimes were also reasonable. In 2019, it joined calls for police to collect better information and for the law to distinguish hate-motivated offending from ordinary crime. But their campaign has moved far beyond better data and stronger protection from violence. It has become a sustained effort to obtain legal protection from certain forms of expression. And because the definition of “hate” remains elastic, the power being requested would ultimately be exercised not only against violent extremists, but against ordinary citizens.

FIANZ can keep demanding. The rest of us have every right, and every reason, to keep saying “no”.

I repeat: People have rights, religions do not. We understood that when we repealed the offence of blasphemous libel in 2019, with the Government stating that the provision was obsolete and inconsistent with modern protections for freedom of expression. That was the correct decision then, and it remains the correct principle now. The state may protect citizens from threats, discrimination, and violence, but it has no business shielding “sacred” claims from challenge, mockery, insult, or criticism.

International human rights law supports this although it is under similar pressure to capitulate to the Islamic lobby. The UN Human Rights Committee’s General Comment 34 states that prohibitions on displays of lack of respect for a religion, including blasphemy laws, are incompatible with the ICCPR except in narrow circumstances, and it specifically says such laws cannot be used to prevent criticism of religious leaders or commentary on doctrine and tenets of faith. The Rabat Plan of Action went further and called national blasphemy laws counter-productive because they stifle the healthy debate and criticism that free societies need.

New Zealand’s own public authorities already recognise the difference. Police explain that some hateful expression may be “awful but lawful” and that speech alone is not a basis for arrest unless it crosses a criminal threshold. A liberal democracy does not merely protect the devout. It protects the sceptic, the apostate, the dissenter, the atheist, the reformer, and the person who has left the faith community of their birth. The moment the law starts treating criticism of religion as legally suspect, those people are the first to lose.

New Zealand keeps batting back attempts at speech suppression. Aside from the almost-introduction of hate speech laws under Labour a few years ago, there was also the fortunately terminated Human Rights (Incitement on Ground of Religious Belief) Amendment Bill which would have extended sections 61 and 131 of the Human Rights Act to religious belief, using language about words that are “threatening, abusive, or insulting” and likely to excite hostility or bring groups into contempt or ridicule. Elastic definitions of “hostility” would have been used not to protect Muslims as citizens but to slide into protecting Islam as an ideology.

Blasphemy-style laws repeat old hierarchies and function as power grabs. They protect the beliefs of some people from criticism, make it easier for them to punish ex-believers, and tell women inside conservative faith communities that they may not complain of mistreatment because it denigrates the theology underwriting it. It is a process of enforced submission.

If you think this is all theoretical, you should look overseas. Pakistan’s blasphemy regime has roots in British colonial law, but its modern Islamic expansions have created some of the harshest religious-offence provisions in the world. Academic Junaid Hafeez was arrested after students accused him of anti-Islam blasphemy on social media, held in solitary confinement after attacks by other prisoners, and sentenced to death in 2019. His lawyer, Rashid Rehman, was murdered.

Indonesia offers the same lesson in another form. Human Rights Watch reported that restrictions on the Ahmadiyah community, sold by officials as necessary to reduce violence, in fact fuelled hatred and failed to stop attacks. Reuters has also reported that Indonesian courts jailed comedian Aulia Rakhman for joking about the name Muhammad.

Even Britain, which abolished blasphemy laws, shows how quickly the same instinct returns by another route. Section 29J of the Public Order Act expressly protects discussion, criticism, ridicule, insult and abuse of religions and their beliefs or practices. That safeguard exists because Parliament understood that protecting believers from hatred must not become a ban on criticising belief. Yet Hamit Coskun was still prosecuted and convicted in 2025 after burning a Qur’an outside the Turkish consulate, before his conviction was overturned on appeal. The original conviction, and the CPS’s earlier use of wording directed at the “religious institution of Islam”, showed how easily ordinary public-order tools can be steered towards de facto blasphemy when officials forget the difference between hostility to people and attack on ideas. If that can happen in a jurisdiction with an explicit free-expression clause, New Zealand should not flatter itself that vague “anti-hostility” definitions would stay narrow here.

The current terrorism landscape does not justify insulating ideology from criticism. The terrible Christchurch Terror Attack in 2019 is often used as a justification as to why free speech should be disregarded in favour of blasphemy laws. It is incredibly hard to argue against invocations of the massacre as we are somewhat collectively traumatised by the horrors of that day.

Nonetheless, if we are actually honest about the true nature of terrorism in the 21st century it must be acknowledged that there is something profoundly absurd about creating new protections around Islam. Across the Western world, security agencies are dealing with a continuous stream of Islamist plots, radicalisation cases, terrorist propaganda, attempted attacks, and completed atrocities. The threat is very real, immediate, organised, and ideological. It consumes enormous police and intelligence resources every day. Why should the ideology that is behind the overwhelming majority of terroristic violent attacks globaly be the one our governments protect?

The Global Terrorism Index 2026 reports that terrorism deaths in the West surged by 280%. The same body reports that youth radicalisation is rising and that lone-wolf attacks accounted for 93% of fatal attacks in the West over recent years. That is the profile of a threat that is decentralised, memetic, online, emotionally charged, and often wrapped in political or religious grievance. You do not defeat that threat by teaching the public that the ideology behind it may not be named, analysed or condemned without legal risk. You meet it by exposing ideas to light before they harden into permission for violence.

Caveat time. Of course that does not mean ordinary Muslims are terrorists, although moderates do not tend to speak out or condemn the extremists much. It does mean that Islamist terrorism is real, persistent, and disproportionately significant within the contemporary scope of terrorist threats.

There is also a moral obscenity in responding to Islamist violence by curtailing the freedoms of its intended victims. Jihadists have repeatedly murdered people for drawing cartoons, writing books, teaching history, leaving Islam, criticising clerics or simply refusing to obey religious taboos. To answer that violence by making the taboo more enforceable is to reward the threat. This is a thugs’ veto. It tells the fanatic that intimidation works.

Instead of confronting this reality, we are constantly told that the urgent problem is actually excessive scrutiny of Islam. Apparently, while police officers investigate bomb-making, knife plots, recruitment networks, and teenagers consuming jihadist propaganda, the rest of us must become more circumspect about discussing the belief system invoked by the perpetrators.

A religion that is overtly political and that makes claims about law, sex, family, dress, apostasy, blasphemy, warfare, and the organisation of the state is theocratic. And we must ensure it cannot enter the public square carrying a rulebook for everyone else and then demand immunity from reply.

Islam is not a race nor an immutable characteristic. It is a collection of theological claims, moral rules, historical traditions, legal doctrines, and political interpretations. And there is a legitimate and necessary right to criticise Islam for doctrines and practices that are fundamentally at odds with liberal democracy. That statement should not be controversial. Religions are systems of ideas and those ideas affect real people, especially when religious institutions seek political influence or when believers attempt to turn doctrine into law.

Islamic societies and institutions vary, but there are plainly significant numbers of Muslims whose interpretations of Islam subordinate women. These can include male guardianship of adult women, unequal inheritance, unequal evidential status, restrictions on dress and movement, tolerance of polygamy for men, pressure into arranged or forced marriages, acceptance of male violence, and systems in which divorce is substantially easier for husbands than wives. In some jurisdictions, women are punished for sexual conduct, pregnancy outside marriage, or alleged breaches of modesty while male violence against them is excused, minimised or concealed. Underage marriage for girls is also widely accepted by the faith.

It is not anti-Muslim to say that these practices are wrong. It would, in fact, be a betrayal of Muslim women not to say it.

Western feminists would never accept the argument that Christianity must be protected from criticism because some Christians might feel targeted. They readily criticise Catholic teachings on abortion, evangelical views on sexuality, and conservative Christian attitudes toward women. Yet that strident advocacy for women’s rights collapses when Islam is involved. Fear of appearing prejudiced overrides the basic feminist obligation to tell the truth on behalf of women.

The same double standard appears in relation to homosexuality. In Muslim-majority countries, homosexuality remains criminalised, and penalties can include imprisonment, corporal punishment, or death. Even where such laws are not enforced to their maximum extent, gay people face family rejection, forced marriage, intimidation, blackmail, and violence. A gay person has every right to criticise a religion whose authoritative texts, clerics or institutions describe his or her relationships as immoral, corrupting or worthy of punishment. It is frankly insane that when Islam advocates for our murder we are condemned for calling it out.

Tolerance cannot mean that liberal people must tolerate doctrines that deny their equality while being forbidden to describe those doctrines honestly. This is where Karl Popper’s tolerance fallacy is evident. A society committed to tolerance cannot survive if tolerance is interpreted as an obligation to submit indefinitely to movements that reject reciprocity, suppress dissent, and seek to deprive others of the very freedoms they themselves enjoy.

Popper’s argument was that danger arises when tolerance ceases to be a liberal virtue and becomes a tool by which illiberalism advances.

Liberal societies rightly allow Muslims to practise their religion. But liberalism cannot require women, gay people, apostates or secular critics to remain politely silent about doctrines that subordinate them. It cannot offer religious conservatives the freedom to condemn homosexuality while denying homosexuals the freedom to condemn religious homophobia. It cannot protect the right to teach that women must obey men while treating feminist criticism of that teaching as hatred. The bargain is not that one group may make sweeping moral claims about everybody else while its own beliefs are placed off limits.

The paradox of tolerance is not an excuse for suppressing Islam, nor for restricting the civil liberties of Muslims. It is a warning against allowing tolerance to be manipulated into surrender. Liberalism must be confident enough to defend freedom of religion without abandoning freedom from religion, and to protect minority communities without granting minority doctrines authority over what the rest of us may say.

When extremist violence is committed in the religion’s name, it is preceded by ideas including a theory of divine authority, a division between believer and infidel, a grievance rendered sacred, a justification for violence, and a promise of spiritual reward. Police may disrupt the final stages, but a free society also has to challenge the preceding arguments. That requires people to be free to discuss doctrine, expose preachers, compare interpretations, investigate institutions, satirise and critique, and say plainly when an idea is dangerous.

You cannot counter extremist ideology while forbidding accurate descriptions of it.

Censorship hands extremists a monopoly. Special definitions of “Islamophobia” or “anti-Muslim hostility” begin with conduct everyone agrees is wrong, such as threatening Muslims or denying them equal treatment, then expand until criticism of Islamic beliefs, political movements, or historical practices is treated as an attack on Muslim people. The protected category shifts from the believer to the belief.

That is how a blasphemy law is built in a secular country. Nobody announces that God must be protected from insult. They say a community must be protected from harm and redefine theological criticism as group hostility. The enforcement mechanism may be a criminal prosecution, an employment investigation, a regulatory complaint, or a professional sanction, but the message is the same: you cannot criticise Islam.

Christianity is criticised relentlessly in New Zealand, and that is fair game in a free society. Its scriptures are mocked and its teachings on sexuality, marriage, abortion, and sex/gender are challenged in the media, universities, and politics. Christians may object, protest, boycott, or attempt to persuade others that the criticism is unfair. What they cannot do is demand that the state silence their critics. That is how a liberal democracy should function. No religion has a right to legal protection from criticism simply because its adherents find it offensive.

The same principle must apply equally to every religion. Muslims are entitled to the full protection of the law against threats, discrimination, and violence, just as Jewish New Zealanders are entitled to protection from the disturbing rise in antisemitism seen since the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023. But protecting people does not require protecting ideas. Islam may be criticised for its doctrines, history, institutions, or treatment of women, homosexuals, apostates, blasphemy, or political authority, just as Christianity and Judaism may be criticised for theirs. Religious ideas belong in the marketplace of ideas alongside every other worldview. They should succeed or fail through persuasion, not legal privilege.

So the choice in front of New Zealand is not between caring about vulnerable communities and defending free speech. That is a false framing, and it has done enough damage already. The real choice is between a legal order that protects citizens as equal rights-bearers, and a legal order that starts smuggling sacred immunity and blasphemy laws back into public life under therapeutic language. The Law Commission has shown the better path with stronger consequences for hate-motivated violent offending, clearer denunciation, better data, better enforcement, no new offence architecture built on a nebulous concept of hate, and no confusion between violence and disagreement.

New Zealand repealed blasphemous libel because it recognised that modern democracy cannot treat irreverence as a crime. It should not now recreate the same logic in updated vocabulary. We do not need anti-blasphemy law with a diversity label. We do not need a doctrine of “religious harm” so malleable that it chills journalists, apostates, ex-Muslims, feminists, satirists, scholars, and ordinary citizens who want to speak plainly about what religions teach and demand. We need a state confident enough to say that no mosque, church, temple, synagogue, prophet, scripture, imam, pastor or ideology is above criticism. Not one.

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If this is the campaign we’re going to have, it’s going to be a very long few months

We’re barely into the election campaign and I’m already exhausted. New Zealand is facing enormous questions about economic growth, energy security, infrastructure, health, the Treaty, the cost of living, and our place in an unstable world. Parties are releasing substantive policy that deserves serious scrutiny. However, this week far too much of the political conversation has revolved around drinking games, innuendo, and outrage cycles that last 24 hours before being replaced by the next one.

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Shane Jones found himself at the centre of a controversy after telling other politicians to "take off your knee-pads" when hosting foreign leaders. Critics, including Chris Hipkins, David Seymour, and Christopher Luxon, condemned the remark as crass, interpreting it as a reference to oral sex. But Jones insisted he was talking about politicians getting down on their knees in a figurative sense, eg. showing excessive deference or grovelling before foreign leaders, and accused the media of reading something salacious into a fairly common expression about submissiveness.

Then the Paul Henry “shoot, shag, marry” saga is another example. Within hours we had multiple stories, follow up stories, and reaction stories. A media feeding frenzy that did not require them to leave their desk or even pick up the phone. Eventually, it had to be acknowledged that the terribly outraged Chris Hipkins had happily played “kiss, marry, kick” in 2023.

Whether the comments are funny or crass is beside the point. My question is why they became the dominant political story while issues that actually speak to the character and conduct of people in public office often barely register.

Stuart Nash’s final own goal

One story about comments made by a candidate that couldn’t be avoided was Stuart Nash managing to end his political comeback over text message.

Former Attorney General Chris Finlayson revealed that Nash had privately texted him describing National MP Katie Nimon as “the laziest MP I have ever come across” because she had supposedly taken 9 months off on full pay after having a baby. Nimon was actually away from Parliament itself for 6 months, only taking around 10 weeks completely away from work before returning to electorate duties.

MPs across the political spectrum condemned the comments, Christopher Luxon publicly ruled out Nash ever serving as a minister in a government he led, and within hours Nash had resigned as New Zealand First’s candidate for Napier, ending a short lived political comeback for the man with perhaps New Zealand’s worse case of foot-in-mouth disease.

The saga has ignited some debate over whether MPs’ parental leave arrangements are fair. Members of Parliament are not employees in the ordinary sense, and the system surrounding parliamentary leave is different from the paid parental leave scheme available to most New Zealand parents. It is entirely legitimate to ask whether elected representatives should receive different arrangements from the people they represent, particularly when ordinary families often face significant financial pressure after having children. But there is an enormous difference between questioning a public policy and making inaccurate, personalised attacks on an individual MP’s work ethic.

New Zealand First has moved on quickly to confirm Te Kira Lawrence as the new candidate for the Napier Electorate. She is a sitting Napier City Councillor.

Election 2026: the coalition gains ground

National is still polling at levels from which governing parties do not ordinarily win elections, but Labour has so far failed to capitalise and things have started looking better for the coalition.

The latest Talbot Mills poll has Labour on 33% (down 1pt), National on 31% (up 2pts), New Zealand First holding on 12%, the Greens down a huge 4 points on 9%, ACT up 1 on 7%, and Opportunity up to 4.7%. Despite Labour remaining the largest party, those numbers would comfortably return the current coalition to office with a 63 seat majority. Government’s approval rating has also improved and Christopher Luxon has edged ahead of Chris Hipkins as preferred prime minister for the first time in this poll in a year. Naturally all of this good news for National was reported on heavily….right?

Three consecutive major polls have now placed Qiulae Wong’s Opportunity Party just below the 5% threshold. If it crosses 5%, the coalition loses its majority and neither bloc can govern without TOP. On the Talbot Mills numbers, the right would fall to 59 seats, Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori would have 55, and Opportunity’s six MPs would become the kingmakers.

This has intensified speculation about whether Labour should gift Mt Albert to Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong. But Mt Albert is one of Labour’s symbolic heartlands, represented in the past by Helen Clark, David Shearer, and Jacinda Ardern. If Labour were to stand aside, it would be a sacrifice of more than just a seat. However, if Labour genuinely believes another Luxon-led government would be disastrous for the country, it will eventually have to decide what it is willing to do to prevent that.

New Zealand First, meanwhile, has emerged from its convention last weekend energised and continuing to occupy its strongest position this far out from an election since 1996. Historical polling also shows that New Zealand First usually outperforms polls taken three months before polling day.

Who gets credit for consent reform?

National has announced that, if re-elected, it will rewrite New Zealand’s sexual consent laws so that consent must be actively communicated rather than inferred from the absence of a refusal.

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith says the law should make clear that there must be a “yes”, expressed through words or actions, and that silence is not consent. Consent on one occasion would not imply consent on another, and a previous sexual relationship would not create any ongoing entitlement.

The basic principle is difficult to object to. Sexual activity should be something both people positively choose. Currently rather than defining consent directly, the Crimes Act largely provides examples of circumstances in which consent does not exist. National’s proposal would give judges and juries a clearer positive definition while retaining the existing burden of proof. Prosecutors would still have to prove beyond reasonable doubt both that consent was absent and that the defendant did not reasonably believe it had been given.

Labour is not happy, however, as their justice spokesperson, Camilla Belich, has already drafted a bill covering almost the same ground. It was developed through cross-party work and would define consent as free and voluntary agreement communicated through words or actions. Labour and the Greens say National participated in those discussions before walking away about a month ago to develop and campaign on its own policy.

Goldsmith and Luxon have described it as a matter of “traffic management”. There is plenty of justice legislation already before Parliament, and there may not be enough time to complete this reform before the House rises. That is not unreasonable. Governments have limited parliamentary time, and Labour had six years in office to make the same change but did not.

The End of Mana Whakahono ā Rohe agreements

The Government has confirmed that existing and proposed Mana Whakahono ā Rohe (MWR) agreements will not transfer into the new resource management system. Instead, councils will be able to negotiate new, more narrowly defined iwi participation agreements with clearer statutory limits.

MWRs are currently formal agreements between a local council and one or more iwi authorities that set out how they will work together on resource management matters under the Resource Management Act (RMA). They usually cover things like when and how iwi are consulted on planning decisions, how information is shared between councils and iwi, processes for developing district and regional plans, identifying wāhi tapu and culturally significant sites, and how Treaty settlement obligations would be reflected in council planning processes.

Objections to MWRs arose for reasons including that they give iwi privileged institutional access to planning processes that other community groups don't have. The agreements can shape how planning occurs from the outset, so opponents see them as creating an additional layer of influence that isn't directly accountable to voters.

When the replacement RMA legislation was introduced there were only 8 agreements in force nationwide. By mid-2026, several dozen more had been signed or initiated as councils and iwi rushed to preserve them before the law changes.

Another confidence problem for Police

New Zealand Police have reopened a historical sexual assault investigation after an internal review found the original inquiry was so flawed that the complainant “was not listened to and not believed”, while the accused sportsman’s “promising career” was prioritised.

The 15 year old girl had woken after a party with no memory of having sex, only to later be told by the 20 year old sportsman that she should take the morning-after pill because they had. Detective Sergeant Darren Folau concluded there should be no prosecution, noting that the young man had “a promising career as a professional athlete” and recommending, at most, a warning. A review conducted by Detective Inspector Scott Anderson years later found the investigation was poor, key lines of inquiry were missed, the complainant’s evidence was not properly tested before the suspect was interviewed, and that DS Folau had reached his conclusion remarkably early in the process. DI Anderson concluded the sportsman did not appear to have a valid legal defence to the under 16 charge at all. Whether the reopened investigation ultimately results in charges is now a matter for the independent investigators.

This case is part of a much wider problem for New Zealand Police. As of June, 33 police staff were under investigation for alleged sexual misconduct. Police insist this represents only a small proportion of a workforce of more than 16,000 people. But, Police are the people victims are expected to trust with the most frightening and traumatic experiences of their lives. Allegations of sexual misconduct within the force therefore carry a significance far weightier than in other workforces.

A very public case behind closed doors

The coronial inquest into Pauline Hanna’s death begins next month, but NZME, Stuff and RNZ have been refused permission to report on it fully. They asked the Chief Coroner for exemptions from the usual restrictions on reporting suspected self-inflicted deaths. The Chief Coroner ruled that the restrictions must remain because further reporting could create a risk of “suicide contagion”.

The trial of eye doctor Philip Polkinghorne for her murder was one of the most intensively reported criminal cases in New Zealand history. The public heard weeks of evidence about Hanna’s death, Polkinghorne’s methamphetamine use, their marriage, his infidelity, prostitution, the state of the scene, and the competing theories advanced by the Crown and defence. There have since been podcasts, documentaries, books, and endless public discussion. As Stuff’s Andrea Vance put it “the horse hasn't just bolted from the barn; it’s starring in a three-part TV documentary and a best-selling book.”

There is immense legitimate public interest in this particular inquest because it may produce findings that differ sharply from the outcome of the criminal trial. Polkinghorne was acquitted of murder because the Crown could not prove his guilt “beyond reasonable doubt”. A coronial inquest operates differently with the coroner generally making factual findings on the “balance of probabilities”. Which means whether something is more likely than not. The coroner cannot convict Polkinghorne of murder, overturn his acquittal, or impose criminal punishment. But the inquest may reach findings about the cause and circumstances of Hanna’s death that sit uneasily with the criminal verdict.

Treasury rains on the Greens’ super-rich parade

The Green Party’s Super-Rich Tax was sold as a small number of extremely wealthy people finally paying their fair share, billions rolling into the public coffers, and everyone else better off. But unfortunately, Treasury’s modelling suggests the money may prove rather more elusive than the Greens’ policy implies.

The Greens propose a 2.5% annual tax on net wealth above the policy’s threshold. Their calculations assume that behavioural responses like restructuring assets, shifting wealth offshore, or otherwise reducing exposure to the tax, would shrink the taxable wealth base by 28.5% which is already a substantial concession. It means the Greens accept that nearly $3 out of every $10 they hope to tax will disappear from reach once people respond to the policy.

But Treasury’s methodology says it is much worse than that. In advice prepared during the previous Labour Government’s consideration of a wealth tax, Treasury estimated that each percentage point of tax would produce a 17.5% reduction in the taxable wealth base. Applied to the Greens’ 2.5% rate, that suggests 43.75% of the wealth they hope to tax could be shifted, sheltered, or otherwise removed from scope once the full behavioural response took effect.

Dave Letele’s one-week CEO career

Any genuine threat or attempt to intimidate someone and their family is unacceptable. But, as I wrote last week, claims of online abuse are also increasingly used to shift attention away from legitimate scrutiny. The existence of abusive messages does not make every criticism abusive, nor should they function as shields from hard questions and credible accusations of wrong doing. Some people may have crossed the line, and Dave Letele may still deserve criticism.

Because Dave Letele has not covered himself in glory. His tenure as NZ Muscle CEO lasted just one week. After announcing he would lead the troubled supplements company, saying he wanted to save 35 jobs and turn the business around, Letele announced he was stepping back because he had realised he “can’t help in the way it needs”.

NZ Muscle is not a company suffering from a temporary PR crisis due to a poor taste ad campaign or employee disgruntlement. It is facing investigations by 2 government agencies over allegations of food safety and product labelling failures. Products have been recalled, customers have lost confidence, former employees have made detailed public allegations, and the company looks dodgier than a balaclava in a bank.

Letele clearly saw an opportunity. He has openly said that his public speaking work has dried up and there is nothing wrong with looking out for projects to turn into successes.

There is irony in how successfully and quickly Letele shifted the spotlight off NZ Muscle and onto himself. Within days, the focus was no longer on mislabelled products or breached food safety obligations. The allegations against the company became secondary to stories about death threats, leaked addresses, and sleeping with a baseball bat on the couch.

Those threats, if made, deserve unequivocal condemnation. But they do not negate the validatity of the complaints of NZ Muscle customers and some of the scrutiny on Letele himself. The comments sections did become pretty unpleasant for the man who is constantly declaring that his food bank charity is about to go under. Commenters were eager to remind everyone that he drives a 2019 Lamborghini. He says it was purchased through his speaking income rather than charitable funds. That may well be true, but it is undeniably an awkward image.

Blasphemy laws must not be legislated in New Zealand

The Law Commission’s long-awaited report on hate crime law is, on the whole, a welcome rejection of the worst proposals that followed the Christchurch terrorist attack. It is not perfect, but it is better than expected.

It has declined to recommend creating a new class of standalone “hate crime” offences. Instead, it proposes improving the existing system, under which criminal conduct such as assault, intimidation, or vandalism can attract a heavier sentence when it is motivated by hostility towards a particular group.

One of the Commission’s most important recommendations is that sex should be expressly added to the Sentencing Act’s illustrative list of characteristics. At present, the Act mentions race, colour, nationality, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, and disability, but not sex. The list is not technically exhaustive, but the explicit exclusion was glaring.

Police would also be able to flag a possible hostility motivation when charges are laid and judges would have to record when that aggravating factor was established and explain it at sentencing. Police and the Ministry of Justice would also publish better data under these recommendations.

Crucially, none of this creates a crime of having the wrong opinion. It deals with conduct that is already criminal. So, naturally, the report had barely landed before the usual lobbyists began complaining that it had not gone far enough.

The Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand (FIANZ) welcomed the hate crime recommendations but immediately returned to its longstanding demand for hate speech legislation. Its chair, Abdur Razzaq, is alleged to have been a significant force in torpedoing Mark Mitchell’s interfaith initiative, and yet he has immediately come out arguing that hate speech laws such are needed to deal with rhetoric directed at faith communities. Never mind that a lot of the “hate” is between these communities.

FIANZ’s own proposed definitions extend far beyond direct incitement of violence to speech that “denigrates”, “demeans”, “vilifies” or promotes hostility towards religious beliefs and practices. Its suggested warning signs include calling members of a group liars, cheats or criminals, alleging conspiracies, or associating the group with child abuse.

It was entirely fair for the Catholic Church to be accused of child abuse because it emerged that it was indeed covering it up. It is also totally right to call out the practise of underage marriage in the Muslim faith.

A law prohibiting speech that demeans a religion, brings its adherents into contempt, or makes harsh claims about religious doctrines performs the same function as blasphemy law. And FIANZ seeks to place politicians, journalists, historians, ex-Muslims, women’s rights advocates, gay people, and members of competing religions at risk for speaking plainly about Islamic texts, practices, or political movements. Criticism of Muhammad’s life, the treatment of apostates, Sharia penalties, forced marriage, sex segregation, or the persecution of homosexuals could readily be characterised as vilification or hostility.

New Zealand abolished the offence of blasphemous libel in 2019. We should not reconstruct it five years later under the language of social cohesion.

🇺🇸 🇬🇧Turns out "Top G" isn't a legal defence

Andrew and Tristan Tate have spent years projecting that they are untouchable. They have boasted about friendships with powerful people and presented every investigation into them as proof that some shadowy establishment fears their influence. That strategy may finally have run out of road.

The brothers are being held in federal custody in Miami while the United Kingdom seeks their extradition to face a truly awful collection of charges. Andrew Tate faces at least 42 charges in Britain, including rape, human trafficking, assault, extreme pornography, and offences involving indecent images of a child. Tristan faces 17 charges, including rape, sexual assault, and facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation. Both men deny wrongdoing.

Their lawyers’ attempt to recast the extradition process as “political kidnapping” is laughable. This is not a case built around an ambiguous allegations. The central problem for the Tate brothers is that they have spent years telling on themselves.

There is an almost unbelievable volume of material in which Andrew Tate describes the crimes now alleged against him. He has openly explained how to exploit women. He sold lessons to other men on recruiting women into what he called “sexual slavery,” boasting that he had done it with more than 100 women. There are videos, podcasts, online courses, private messages, War Room chats, and social media posts. There is also footage of Andrew Tate striking a woman with a belt, videos in which he describes grabbing, choking, and threatening women, and messages allegedly sent to an accuser saying, “I love raping you”.

Innocent until proven guilty is an important legal principle, but it does not require us to pretend we are deaf, dumb, and blind. Nor does presumption of innocence compel anyone to regard all explanations as equally plausible. We can acknowledge that guilt has not yet been established beyond reasonable doubt without pretending that no evidence exists.

Andrew has claimed close relationships with members of the Trump family, and told followers that Trump’s return meant he would be free. But he was wrong. The White House has said Trump will not intervene in the extradition process. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has deliberately distanced the administration from the case and former supporters are suddenly unavailable, silent, or keen to minimise their relationships with the brothers.

In short - other stuff that happened

• 🇪🇸 Spain beat Argentina in the FIFA World Cup final.

• 🇺🇸 The US will increase tariffs on New Zealand exports from 10% to 12.5%, with the new measures justified on claims about forced labour, which Trade Minister Todd McClay strongly rejected. McClay said around a third of New Zealand exports, including beef and kiwifruit, remain exempt, and expects the latest US tariff regime to face further legal challenges.

• The Government inquiry into the January Tauranga landslides that killed 8 people has opened public submissions. Led by Sir Mark O'Regan, the inquiry will accept submissions until 11 August before delivering its final report and recommendations in December.

• Datagrid has received consents for a 78,000 square-metre AI data centre in Makarewa, including permission to draw more than 600,000 litres of groundwater a day and discharge about 5000 litres of treated wastewater, prompting concerns that current resource management rules cannot adequately assess the long-term water and energy impacts of hyperscale data centres.

• Stuff has begun a formal consultation process with Digital staff over proposed organisational changes, with affected employees called to confidential meetings and told no decisions have yet been made. The proposals have not been disclosed publicly, but the process comes as the media industry continues to face financial pressure and follows years of job cuts across Stuff, NZME and TVNZ.

• 🇺🇸 Vance Boelter was sentenced to two life terms plus 40 years after pleading guilty to murdering former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and critically wounding state senator John Hoffman and his wife after impersonating a police officer and carrying out a planned series of attacks in June 2025. Boelter also continues to face separate state charges including murder, attempted murder, impersonating a police officer and animal cruelty.

• Former Green Party candidate and activist Jack Brazil has been sentenced to 40 hours' community work after pleading guilty to disorderly behaviour and resisting police over a late night incident at a Dunedin bar in November, in which he threw a drink at an off duty staff member, spat at a duty manager and fled from police.

• Finance Minister Nicola Willis is not yet considering ending the $50 weekly fuel payment despite petrol prices falling below $3 a litre for 2 consecutive weeks, saying 4 weeks below the threshold would only trigger a review rather than automatic removal. Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour says the payment should end if prices remain below $3 for 4 weeks.

• 🇳🇮 Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has announced the country will no longer hold elections, saying the move is necessary to prevent the opposition from taking power.

• John Ruddock, who recently secured New Zealand citizenship for himself and his three overseas born children after taking a claim to the Waitangi Tribunal, is continuing to campaign for a dedicated citizenship pathway for Māori born overseas, arguing the current law leaves many whānau without a practical route home. Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden says the Government has no plans to amend the Citizenship Act, despite the Waitangi Tribunal recommending the creation of a tikanga-based pathway.

• Shayne Dempster, a Man Up facilitator in Northland, has been sentenced to 5 months' home detention after being convicted of assaulting his wife, threatening to kill her during a dispute on their farm, and unlawfully possessing a prohibited firearm. The court heard Dempster pushed his wife to the ground while taking an iPad from her, told her "You're not leaving here alive".

• At the coronial inquest into the 2021 LynnMall terror attack, Corrections officials said Ahamed Samsudeen repeatedly identified himself as a terrorist, threatened prison staff and displayed escalating violent behaviour while held in Auckland Prison's extreme risk unit.

• A Christchurch police officer charged with theft and allegedly falsifying records has remained suspended on full pay since 2022 while awaiting trial, costing police hundreds of thousands of dollars. The case comes as Police introduce a new disciplinary policy allowing employees facing serious allegations to be suspended without pay in some circumstances.

• Provisional Ministry of Education data shows 64.2% of students attended school regularly in Term 2 2026, up from 58.4% a year earlier and the highest Term 2 attendance rate since 2016.

• Auckland Council has voted 17–5 to support a revised housing intensification plan that retains 6 storey zoning around rapid transit and town centres while allowing 10–15 storey buildings around most train stations within 10km of the CBD. The proposal is intended to meet the Government's housing growth requirements and will go through public consultation as part of Plan Change 120.

• Police have recovered a body in the Swanson area during the search for missing 20 year old Wolvnie Ding, who was last seen on 17 July while visiting family in West Auckland.

• Former The Casketeers personality Scott (Scottie) Williams has been charged with 9 fraud-related offences after allegedly stealing more than $1 million, including taxpayer funds, from 3 trusts and marae between 2021 and 2023.

• 🇬🇧 A UK government-commissioned report has classified anti-transgender narratives as a form of misinformation and recommends using techniques such as "psychological inoculation" and expanded monitoring to reduce the spread of claims it considers false.

• An Auckland lawyer has admitted assaulting his former girlfriend but has filed an urgent application for interim name suppression after the New Zealand Herald sought comment, despite not initially seeking suppression when he pleaded guilty. The lawyer is also applying for a discharge without conviction, retains a current practising certificate, and could still face disciplinary action by the New Zealand Law Society.

• 🇬🇧 A UK employment tribunal has ruled that requiring an employee with anxiety to keep their camera on during online meetings amounted to a failure to make reasonable adjustments for a disability.

Stuff you might find interesting this week

Regular readers will know I've been arguing for years that same-sex attraction and gender identity are different issues, and that lumping lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals together with the ever-expanding TQ+ umbrella serves neither group particularly well. This new LGB Alliance report provides some interesting data from 1,709 lesbian, gay, and bisexual supporters of the organisation, the overwhelming majority of whom said they feel uncomfortable being described as "LGBTQ+" or "queer", alongside hundreds of comments explaining why. READ THE REPORT.

RNZ has published a piece asking whether anyone can use a Māori name. It begins with the reassuring answer that "nobody owns culture", but quickly descends into a maze of caveats about cultural consultants, historical trauma, colonialism, and the responsibility to ensure a child understands the political significance of their own name. If your instinct is that choosing a baby's name shouldn't require an ideological risk assessment, it's an interesting example of how even the most ordinary aspects of life are increasingly being filtered through a political lens.

Our first week of events was fantastic. Thank you to everyone who came along. Next week we are in Whangārei on Monday, Hamilton on Tuesday, Auckland on Wednesday, and Tauranga on Thursday. Tickets are still available and we have moved to a bigger venue for the Tauranga event so are no longer sold out.

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Note: apologies this isn’t my best wrap up. I got home from an event at 10.30pm last night and hadn’t even started writing it. I kept falling asleep writing so excuse typos etc.

The inconsistencies of Wayne Brown

Wayne Brown says he is looking into getting better security following an incident at an event hosted by real estate businessman Graham Wall on the 23rd June 2026. He says that at this event an “angry little man…took a swing at him” and he blames this on lobby groups who have been heavily criticising him following the Auckland rates rise.

The problem is that the event was a small private event that Brown attended with his wife and no one who attended is backing up his account of what happened. What use, beyond flipping the narrative to make himself the victim, would this increased security have been in a gathering of about 30 mostly very wealthy people, likely mostly known to him? What did this have to do with “lobby groups” except that he is especially excised lately that they (or anyone) dares to criticise him?

Brown’s account of the evening is not consistent with any of the people who attended the event that I, nor the media, have spoken to. The version of events I heard from attendees sounds a lot like the version Newstalk ZB’s Barry Soper was told by the man who had the confrontation with Wayne (let’s call him Mr A). That is that Graham Wall invited a bunch of people around to informally meet Candace Kinser. It wasn’t a National Party event, but National’s Auckland Central candidate was invited to speak at it.

As Candace spoke, the Mayor repeatedly interjected and this made other attendees uncomfortable. Having sat on the table next to his at a Labour Party event earlier this year, this does not surprise me in the slightest. This was a large official event and he still called out repeatedly. At the end of the speech, Mr A made complimentary remarks about Kinser and referenced her being a talented or great “young lady”. Contrary to the claim Brown made to The Post, that he spoke up to object to the other man making a sexist remark, witnesses say it was Brown who made a quip along the lines of “I don’t know about ‘young’”.

The gathering continued and later, Brown, Mr A, Kinser’s campaign manager John Hanna, another guest, and a campaign volunteer or staff member were in the kitchen. People outside the kitchen heard glass breaking and shouting, but those inside the kitchen are reluctant to talk.

This is understandable as Brown is not somebody who is shy about wielding his power. If one were, for example, involved in business deals or property development in Auckland they might reasonably conclude that speaking out about the incident would not be worth the risk.

What we do know is that Hanna has publicly said he did not see Mr A take a swing as Brown alleges. Mr A told Barry Soper that Brown’s version of events is totally wrong and he had considered whether he should go to police at the time. That suggests that it was a bit more than a shouting match. Indeed, Soper has surmised that it was Brown who broke the glass in the confrontation between the two men.

Brown and his wife left the event abruptly and without saying goodbyes.

Some kind of altercation occurred in that kitchen. Perhaps more evidence will emerge or Mr A will speak publicly. But based on what witnesses have actually confirmed, it is safe to say the Mayor’s behaviour was very poor. He has made it worse by running a narrative that other attendees say is nonsense and by suggesting he was some kind of hero defending Kinser from sexism when a room of people saw him make the comment.

🇬🇧 The Murder of Ann Widdecombe

When it was announced last week that Reform spokeswoman and former Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe had died, no details of the cause of her death were included and it seems everyone just assumed that at 78 she had succumbed to old age. It was with horror that we learned not long after that she had been murdered.

Immediately we were told by police a white man was responsible and there was no political motivation. Suspicions were roused by this straight away and inconsistencies in how police and media handled the identity of the suspect were noted.

Counter terrorism officers have now taken over the investigation after evidence emerged indicating that it was afterall a politically motivated “targeted attack”. British press are reporting that the suspect was motivated by Widdecombe’s conservative politics, with speculation focusing on her outspoken views on immigration, Brexit, and transgender issues.

Widdecombe is the third political figure to be murdered in Britain in the past decade. Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in 2016 and Conservative MP Sir David Amess in 2021. And yet, despite Nigel Farage and Reform expressing very similar grief and concern that Labour and Conservatives did, they have been accused of “politicising” Widdecombe’s death by raising concerns about political violence directed at its members. In 2016 and 2021, entirely appropriate discussion about the threats facing public figures and the health of British democracy was sparked much like it has been in this case.

The reaction online to Widdecombe’s assassination has been disturbing. Across social media, particularly on Bluesky, there have been countless users openly celebrating Widdecombe’s death, joking about it, or insisting she somehow deserved her fate because of her political beliefs.

One particularly grotesque example came from a University of Aberdeen employee and transgender activist Heather Herbert in Scotland, who celebrated Widdecombe’s death online posting that Widdecombe's death was "good news". He said he hoped it was an "extremely painful death" and that “she was handcuffed to the bed as she screamed in agony." Police Scotland has now arrested and charged him. Free speech advocates have spoken up saying that although the comments were vile, callous, and morally repellent, they were not illegal and he should not have been arrested.

The exact political motivation has not been named but police have said that it is left wing in nature. For years, governments, police and media organisations have focused overwhelmingly on the threat posed by the far right which certainly exists and should be taken seriously. But there has been far less willingness to acknowledge that in 2026 political extremism and violence in large part left wing.

Election 2026: new candidates

National has selected Rangitīkei Māori ward councillor Coral Raukawa to contest the Māori electorate of Te Tai Hauāuru. But in her first major media interview Raukawa publicly questioned the Government’s decision to require referenda on Māori wards and declined to explicitly endorse several Government policies affecting Māori, saying instead that “our people have spoken up, and I guess they’ll speak at the polls too”.

Meanwhile, the Green Party has proposed making union membership the default for new employees. Under the policy, workers covered by a collective agreement would automatically be enrolled in the relevant union unless they actively opted out.

ACT caused a stir when they announced that former broadcaster Paul Henry is standing for them. Henry has given a series of interviews that reveal both his appeal and his potential headaches. On one hand, he’s an experienced communicator who can dominate a news cycle almost at will. On the other, he has already demonstrated a willingness to diverge from ACT orthodoxy on firearms, for example.

A manufactured scandal

The New Zealand Herald‘s ran a front page story about Nicole McKee recusing herself from reappointing members to her Ministerial Arms Advisory Group because of a potential conflict of interest. I kept waiting for the actual scandal to emerge. It never really did.

Three existing members of the advisory group had reached the end of their terms and wished to continue. McKee initially began the reappointment process, then decided there was a potential perception of a conflict given her previous work in the firearms sector. In accordance with policy, she handed the decision to Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith, who independently approved the reappointments before Cabinet signed them off.

These weren’t controversial new appointments. They were reappointments of people already serving on the advisory group. The criticism also creates an impossible standard. Ministers are expected to appoint people with relevant expertise and unsurprisingly, experts in a sector tend to know other experts in that sector and a minister with experience in the sector will too. Safeguards exist to manage potential conflicts and I fail to see how acting within those safeguards is news.

It is likely this is more about firearms politics as McKee has long been demonised for her past involvement with COLFO (Council of Licensed Firearms Owners).

When disagreement becomes “silencing”

There was another media beat up this week that left me wondering whether we’ve forgotten how representative democracy is supposed to work.

Stuff ran a lengthy piece suggesting Health Minister Simeon Brown was “silencing scientists” after four prominent public health physicians accused him of political interference for declining to reappoint the chair and deputy chair of the Medical Council. The article frames a perfectly ordinary ministerial decision as an attack on science itself.

Nobody has been censored, prevented from publishing their views, nor disciplined for speaking out. In fact, the very article alleging they are being “silenced” revolves around a lengthy editorial they wrote in the New Zealand Medical Journal, widely reported by the media. Is that what being silenced looks like?

The real disagreement is about priorities. Brown has been explicit that he believes health regulators have become too focused on issues such as cultural safety and race-based policy, and not focused enough on their core functions of professional standards, competence, and patient outcomes. It is unsurprising that thee authors of the editorial disagree profoundly with that assessment since they are all prominent Māori public health academics or physicians who supported the vision of the former chair and deputy.

Ministers are meant to advance the policies of their government in their portfolios. They should all have a vision for what they want to achieve and how to go about it. The blow back on the Health minister doing exactly that has been a demonstration of the arrogance of politicised public servants who have refused to accept the directions set by the government.

Kupe and Cook

Winston Peters has announced that the two new Cook Strait ferries will be named Kupe and Cook. Excellent names. They are simple, historic and unmistakably New Zealand. They recognise the two great seafaring traditions that shaped this country; Polynesian navigation and European exploration. Kupe and Cook both crossed enormous distances, charted unfamiliar waters and became central figures in the story of these islands.

Naturally, that is not how everyone has chosen to receive them.

Peters predicted that the “snivelling wokesters” would work themselves into a lather over the name Cook, and almost immediately sections of the media and activist class set about proving his point. Rather than seeing Kupe and Cook together as a balanced recognition of the two traditions from which modern New Zealand emerged, critics treated the inclusion of Cook as inherently offensive.

That tells us something depressing about the limits of our supposed commitment to “biculturalism”. Māori arrival is treated as exploration, courage, and settlement. European arrival must be framed primarily through violence, colonisation, and guilt.

History should not be sanitised. But nor should Cook be reduced to a cartoon villain whose name cannot appear on a ferry without being treated as an endorsement of every injustice that followed European contact.

A genuinely mature bicultural country should be capable of holding more than one thought at once. It should be able to honour Kupe without pretending Māori history began in perfection, and honour Cook without pretending European history was free from wrongdoing.

Instead, we increasingly seem to have arrived at a version of biculturalism in which one culture is celebrated and the other is tolerated only when it is confessing its sins.

Kupe and Cook are good names precisely because they place both traditions side by side. They do not erase one another. They reflect the country as it actually exists: shaped by Māori and European settlement, conflict and cooperation, continuity and change.

The activists complaining about Cook’s name are making it harder to sustain. A shared national story cannot survive if half of it must always be spoken of in shame.

Two stories that made me question whether we’ve learnt anything

Two stories this week perfectly illustrate why I remain deeply sceptical that New Zealand’s institutions are emerging from the peak years of gender ideology.

The first was the judicial review initiated by the misleadingly named Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa (PATHA) over the Government’s ban on new puberty blocker prescriptions.

PATHA’s central legal argument wasn’t about the scientific evidence and harm to young people. It was about identity. Counsel explicitly told the High Court that the case was “not about medication” but about “whether society will accept and affirm” transgender young people. An extraordinary concession.

Medical treatments should rise or fall on evidence of safety, efficacy and clinical judgment, not on whether declining to prescribe them is interpreted as denying someone’s identity.

The irony is that the Government’s position is actually a remarkably cautious one. Unlike in other parts of the world that have outright banned the drugs for treating gender dysphoria, existing patients can continue treatment. The restriction applies only to new prescriptions.

Despite the weakness of PATHA’s argument, judicial fondness for identity politics in New Zealand means the outcome is far from certain.

Then there was an employment settlement between Corrections and a female prison office who “identifies as a man”. She complained after being prevented from conducting intimate searches of male prisoners and rather than defending what is a reasonable safeguarding policy, Corrections apologised, paid confidential compensation, and changed its policy so staff can now carry out duties according to their gender identity rather than their biological sex.

Prisoners lose many rights when they are sentenced to prison. They lose their liberty, privacy, and an enormous amounts of personal autonomy. But they do not lose every right. One remaining safeguard has always been that they are entitled to have intimate and rub-down searches conducted by officers of the same biological sex.

Many prisoners have histories of sexual abuse and trauma and these searches are intrusive and thorough. But the rights of prisoners have been subordinated to the emotional validation of a staff member.

The settlement avoids the matter going to tribunal or court and confronting a long contested legal question of whether “sex” in the Human Rights Act should be interpreted to include gender identity. This has rested largely on an old Crown Law opinion rather than binding judicial authority. By settling before a tribunal ruling, everyone avoids having that question properly tested. Convenient.

The rest of the democratic world is increasingly stepping back from this ideology. New Zealand, meanwhile, still seems determined to double down.

🇬🇧 Amnesty International’s spectacular own goal

Own goal of the week goes to Amnesty International UK. The organisation that once built its reputation defending prisoners of conscience and victims of authoritarian regimes published a report on the supposed “anti-rights movement” in Britain. Among the organisations it chose to blacklist were feminist groups, gay and lesbian organisations, For Women Scotland, and, most astonishingly of all, Beira’s Place, the women-only sexual violence support centre founded by JK Rowling.

You could not invent a more perfect example of institutional capture if you tried.

Beira’s Place exists because female survivors of sexual violence are entitled to access trauma support from women in a women-only environment. Apparently, in the fevered ideological imagination of Amnesty UK, that basic safeguarding principle now amounts to hostility towards human rights.

The report also attacked For Women Scotland, the group that successfully went to the UK Supreme Court to clarify that “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to biological sex. Instead of pausing to consider whether the country’s highest court had identified an important legal distinction, Amnesty responded by placing the women who vindicated that distinction on a list of ideological enemies.

The backlash was immediate and entirely predictable. Amnesty UK pulled the report, claiming it had been uploaded without going through the proper internal checks, and expressing regret over its language.

Even Amnesty International’s global secretariat has now begun edging away from its UK branch. The international body stressed that it had not been involved in preparing the report and supported its withdrawal.

Unfortunately for Amnesty UK, the consequences may not end with just a humiliating climbdown. Lawyers for Beira’s Place have accused the charity of defamation and demanded that the report be withdrawn permanently, that Amnesty publish a prominent apology ,and that an external investigation be commissioned into how such “egregious falsehoods” were published. JK Rowling has also offered financial support to other women’s and gay men’s organisations considering legal action.

The Charity Commission is now assessing the matter after Amnesty UK filed a serious incident report about itself. There are also calls for its chief executive to consider her position.

Ban the hardware, not the software

If you’d told me a fortnight ago that an idea I wrote about on Substack would end up in a David Seymour speech, be reported by every major political outlet in the country, and spark a national conversation about whether teenagers should have smartphones, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.

The idea itself was simple. Rather than trying to regulate every social media platform on earth (requiring age verification, threatening adults’ online privacy, and forever chasing whatever Silicon Valley invents next) why not focus on the piece of hardware that gives children constant access to all of it?

Ban the hardware, not the software.

RNZ, Stuff, The Post, the Herald, Newstalk ZB and countless commentators all weighed in. Kerre Woodham endorsed it and Jenna Lynch had fun pointing out the irony of ACT suddenly flirting with banning something. Suddenly a conversation that had previously been about impossible-to-enforce social media bans became a much broader discussion about what smartphones have done to childhood.

Winston Peters was not a fan of the idea. He was denounced it as “totalitarian”, insisting the Government shouldn’t be telling parents what phones their children can have. For the record, I don’t think Winston is entirely wrong either. The tension between protecting children and preserving parental responsibility is exactly the sort of trade-off worth arguing about. Public policy gets better when people are willing to test ideas in public rather than treating every suggestion as a blood oath.

How did LynnMall happen?

The coronial inquest into the 2021 LynnMall terrorist attack has moved into the next phase: how New Zealand ended up with a known violent extremist under police surveillance who was nevertheless able to stab six people.

Ahamed Samsudeen had been on the authorities’ radar for years. He had been identified as a terrorist threat, arrested at Auckland Airport amid suspicions he intended to travel to Syria to join Islamic State, imprisoned for possessing extremist material, and closely monitored after his release. Police believed he had previously been mobilising towards an attack. Yet seven weeks after leaving prison, he walked into the LynnMall supermarket, took a knife from the shelves and began stabbing strangers.

The inquest is now examining whether there were opportunities to prevent that outcome, and the emerging evidence is uncomfortable.

There is no evidence Samsudeen was radicalised before arriving in New Zealand in 2011. By March 2016, however, his commitment to violent extremism was apparent. The coroner is considering whether his four years on remand, including 17 months in segregation, the quality of his mental health care and the religious and cultural support he received contributed to his radicalisation.

That does not mean prison created a terrorist. Samsudeen was not a passive victim of circumstance. Witnesses have described a deeply difficult, manipulative, and hostile man. He distrusted authority, abused prison officers, threw urine and faeces at staff, attempted to bargain his cooperation for electronic devices, and then withdrew consent once he got what he wanted. His probation officer told the inquest he had never managed an offender requiring such extraordinary oversight.

There was also a disturbing pattern in his treatment of women. Samsudeen became fixated on his lawyer, repeatedly contacting her after being asked to stop, attempting to arrange meetings alone and eventually engaged in conduct experts described as stalking and harassment. A forensic psychiatrist told the inquest that the stalking could not be separated from the attack and suggested that a non-association order made the day before the stabbing may have intensified his rage. Other expert evidence identified misogyny as part of his worldview and concluded that he presented a broader risk to women.

Violent extremism is rarely only about abstract ideology. It often combines political or religious grievance with personal resentment, isolation, humiliation, fixation and hatred. In Samsudeen’s case, his belief that Muslims were being persecuted sat alongside contempt for authority, obsessive conduct towards women and an apparently growing desire to act.

The State’s difficulty was that officials could see the danger but had limited powers to address it. Samsudeen refused psychological intervention. He could not lawfully be detained indefinitely. His refugee status had been cancelled, but he remained a protected person under immigration law and could not be deported. Police therefore followed him covertly through the community, knowing he might attack with little warning but unable to arrest him for a crime he had not yet committed.

The inquest has not yet concluded that any single agency failure caused the attack, but it is clear New Zealand had a man whom police believed was committed to violent extremism, Corrections found almost impossible to manage, rejected efforts to help him, showed escalating hostility and fixation, and who nevertheless could not legally be kept away from the public.

NZ Muscle and the Wayne Brown Paybook

Social activist Dave Letele and NZ Muscle appear to have borrowed the same public-relations playbook Wayne Brown used this week: when scrutiny becomes uncomfortable, flip the story so that you become the victim.

To be absolutely clear, death threats and publishing someone’s home address are unacceptable. But that does not mean the threats should be allowed to swallow the original story.

NZ Muscle is facing serious questions about the labelling, packaging, and safety of products consumed by thousands of people. Regulators are investigating and customers are entitled to be angry and to demand answers.

Instead, the media narrative has rapidly shifted from what NZ Muscle did to how awful people have been to NZ Muscle and Dave Letele.

Letele has arrived as the respected public face of a company whose reputation is collapsing. He says he is there to fix it, save jobs, and restore trust. But he has also inherited the obligation to answer for what went wrong.

The existence of extremists making threats is being used to blur the distinction between harassment and accountability. But a person asking whether NZ Muscle knowingly cut corners is not responsible for a death threat sent by somebody else. A customer demanding proof that the product they consumed was safe is not harassing Dave Letele’s family.

A competent crisis response would keep those matters separate. It would report threats to the police, protect staff and families, and then return immediately to addressing failings and winning back the trust of customers.

In short - other stuff that happened

• Former ACT Party president Tim Jago has pleaded guilty to another historical charge of sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection and is due to be sentenced in Auckland District Court. He is already serving a 2.5 year prison sentence after being convicted in 2024 of indecently assaulting two teenage boys he mentored in the 1990s.

• 🇬🇧 England were eliminated from the 2026 FIFA World Cup in a 2–1 semifinal loss to Argentina. After the match, Argentine players displayed a banner reading "Las Malvinas Son Argentinas" ("The Falklands are Argentine"), prompting questions about whether it breached FIFA's rules on political messaging.

• Michael David McLeod (42) a Dunedin musician, was jailed for two years and three months in the Dunedin District Court on July 15, 2026. He pleaded guilty to a representative charge of contracting a 15 year old girl for sex services and drug-related charges.

• 🇬🇧 Former New Zealand Labour campaign manager Hayden Munro has been appointed political director to incoming UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham after helping run Burnham's successful leadership campaign. Munro previously managed Labour's 2020 and 2023 election campaigns in New Zealand before moving to the UK to work in politics and lobbying.

• A Porirua early childhood teacher has had her teaching registration cancelled after the Teachers' Disciplinary Tribunal found she attended work impaired by alcohol. The tribunal found her guilty of serious misconduct, citing evidence she regularly drank up to two bottles of wine at night, and ordered her to pay more than $25,000 in costs.

• New Zealand has confirmed its first case of the H5N1 strain of bird flu after a brown skua found on Petone Beach tested positive, prompting increased surveillance and monitoring of wild birds. Authorities say the immediate risk is to native wildlife and poultry rather than humans, and are urging the public not to handle sick or dead birds and to report them to MPI’s biosecurity hotline.

• And now a second bird flu case has been identified. A kāhu (swamp harrier hawk) found in Wairarapa.

Stuff you might find interesting this week

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We decided to do the tour because in an election year public debate feels louder, nastier, and increasingly useless. People talk past one another. Politicians recite lines. Social media rewards the most hysterical interpretation of everything. Meanwhile, many perfectly normal New Zealanders have concluded that it is safer to say nothing at all.

We want to try something a bit different.

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At every stop, I will sit down with someone who knows their subject, has something interesting to say, and will not necessarily agree with me. These are not “debates” with winners, losers, buzzers, or point scoring. They are proper conversations between people willing to discuss, listen, and disagree honestly and in public.

Then we will hand the microphone over to the audience and have a substantial audience Q&A, so please come armed with questions!

Tickets are only $10. We didn’t want cost to be a barrier and realise money is tight for a lot of people.

Ticket sales go directly to the FSU to cover costs. I am donating my time.

QUEENSTOWN — Tuesday 21 July, 6.30pm

Growth, Infrastructure, and Who Gets a Say

Guests: Queenstown Lakes Mayor John Glover and Mike Casey, CEO of Rewiring Aotearoa

Mayor John Glover and electrification advocate Mike Casey will join me to discuss who pays for growth, whether central and local government are getting the balance right, the future of Queenstown’s energy infrastructure, and how you build a genuine community in a district where so much of the population is transient.

Venue: Sherwood Queenstown, 554 Frankton Road

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CHRISTCHURCH — Wednesday 22 July, 6.30pm

Partnership, Representation and the Treaty Debate

Guest: Professor Te Maire Tau, Ūpoko of Ngāi Tūāhuriri

We will discuss the legacy of the Ngāi Tahu settlement, Māori political representation, the aftermath of the Treaty Principles Bill, whether the Treaty should operate as a constitutional document, and how New Zealand can have a serious conversation about these matters when so many people fundamentally disagree about what the Treaty is and what it means to us all.

Venue: Russley Golf Club and Function Centre, 428 Memorial Avenue

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DUNEDIN — Thursday 23 July, 6.30pm

The Future of New Zealand: AI, Technology and Identity

Guest: Tā Ian Taylor KNZM, founder of Animation Research Ltd

We will talk about artificial intelligence, innovation, regional growth, Māori identity, creativity, and whether our political institutions are remotely prepared for the speed of technological change. We will also discuss why New Zealand continues to treat the arts, language, and imagination as pleasant extras rather than essential national infrastructure and Sir Ian’s public criticisms of National and Labour governments.

Venue: Moot Court Theatre, University of Otago, 362 Leith Street

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WHANGĀREI — Monday 27 July, 6.30pm

Co-Governance, Race and Local Democracy

Guest: Far North District Councillor Davina Smolders

Davina Smolders has become known for asking awkward questions about local government processes, spending, representation, and democratic accountability. We will discuss what happens when elected councillors challenge institutional consensus, whether councils are still focused on their core responsibilities, and how race and Treaty obligations should, and should not, shape local democracy.

Venue: Cobham Oval, 79 Okara Drive

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HAMILTON — Tuesday 28 July, 6.30pm

Seventeen Years in the Press Gallery: Inside and Outside the Bubble

Guest: Duncan Garner

Thank you to ElliottBourke for sponsoring this event.

Duncan Garner has spent more than 30 years working across television, radio, newspapers, and digital media, including 17 years inside the Parliamentary Press Gallery. We will discuss media hypocrisy, political access, the strange incentives of the Wellington bubble, why legacy journalism is losing its audience, and whether the profession has become too cautious, too cosy, or too frightened of its own readers.

Venue: Te Whare Taonga o Waikato Museum & Gallery, 1 Grantham Street

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AUCKLAND — Wednesday 29 July, 7pm

Public Service, Neutrality and the Limits of Free Speech

Guest: Rob Campbell CNZM

Can somebody serving in a senior public role express a political opinion? Where is the line between political impartiality and political neutering? And who should be trusted to draw it?

Rob Campbell was removed as chair of both Te Whatu Ora and the Environmental Protection Authority after expressing political opinions online. He did not apologise, and he has continued to argue that people holding public appointments should not be stripped of their right to speak politically.

Venue: Ellen Melville Centre, 2 Freyberg Place

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SOLD OUT! TAURANGA — Thursday 30 July

186 Years: How New Zealand’s Relationship with the Treaty Evolved Over Time

Guests: Dr Alistair Reese and Professor Paul Moon ONZM

Dr Alistair Reese and Professor Paul Moon will bring two very different perspectives to a discussion about the Treaty of Waitangi, reconciliation, Pākehā identity, Māori history, co-governance, and the evolution of the Treaty’s place in New Zealand law and public life.

PALMERSTON NORTH — Tuesday 4 August, 6.30pm

Politics, Media and Life Beyond Wellington

Guest: Liam Hehir

Politics in the regions does not always look like politics in Wellington, although the people in Wellington are sometimes the last to notice.

Palmerston North lawyer and political commentator Liam Hehir will join me to talk about the election, political tribalism, the role of the media, and the growing gulf between how politics is discussed inside the capital and how it is experienced elsewhere.

Venue: Palmerston North City Library, 4 The Square

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WELLINGTON — Wednesday 5 August, 6.30pm

Life, Death, and the Right to Choose

Guests: ACT MP Todd Stephenson and former National MP Simon O’Connor

Todd Stephenson, and ACT, are campaigning to extend the End of Life Choice Act following the Ministry of Health’s review. Former National MP Simon O’Connor remains one of the country’s most persistent and principled opponents of assisted dying.

They hold deeply different convictions about autonomy, suffering, dignity, medicine, and the obligations a society owes to vulnerable people. We will put those views together in the same room and hopefully they will help us all understand the issue better.

Venue: Legislative Council Chamber, Parliament Buildings

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NELSON — Thursday 6 August, 6.30pm

Paddock to Parliament: Farming and the Policy Gap

Guest: Wayne Langford, former national president of Federated Farmers

Golden Bay dairy farmer Wayne Langford spent three years leading Federated Farmers through a period of immense change in New Zealand farming. We will talk about the gap between scientific modelling and life on the farm, whether policymakers understand the cumulative burden of regulation, why trust between rural communities and Wellington has deteriorated, and what genuine environmental progress looks like when farmers are treated as participants rather than enemies.

Venue: Pūtangitangi Greenmeadows Centre, 233 Songer Street, Stoke

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FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE TOUR

Free speech is not merely the right to deliver a monologue to people who already like and agree with you. It is part of a wider culture in which disagreement is normal, curiosity is encouraged, and people are permitted to finish a sentence before somebody starts launching into their denunciation.

Like everyone, I know I could do better in how I engage in political discourse. I certainly get grumpy at times. And this tour is really challenging me to get into the mindset of listening and considering before responding, rather than just debating to win.

I am very excited and also a bit terrified. I have not done this kind of thing before! I am much more used to sitting down to hammer out my arguments on my keyboard for people to read.

So please come along. Tickets are $10, every event includes audience questions. I would particularly love to see Thought Crimes readers in the room and put some faces to the names I see in the comments.

Come and say hello and come prepared for a proper yarn.

Ani

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