On 23 April 2026, National Party Associate Health Minister Matt Doocey announced an advertising campaign by Health New Zealand.

The false pretense of the campaign, which will run until the end of this month of September, is to reduce alleged widespread stigma and discrimination against New Zealanders infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). HIV is a virus that, without effective medical treatment using antiretroviral drugs, usually results in death from HIV’s advanced stage, AIDS.

Doocey’s announcement is typical of the nonsense that pours out of this pitifully poor politician (and best friend of Luxo), on whom I’ve previously poured scorn:

The campaign’s catchcry is “The 80s Calling”. The protagonists in the video/TV advertisement are “David” who notices “Sarah” hugging another man at a social function and asks an unnamed woman, “Didn’t Sarah have, um...”. Unnamed girl boss woman completes David’s sentence, “…HIV”, and hands Dopey Dave an oversized 80’s brick phone to answer a call time travelling forward from that decade.

David is delighted to inform the 80s that hugging, kissing and sharing food with a person with HIV is “all good” and, with the right treatment, people with HIV can stay well and can’t pass HIV on to sexual partners, so there’s no need to “freak out”. You can (hopefully) view the video, and hear the radio advertisement, on this link:

80s Calling

The invented reason for the advertising campaign, repeated like a mantra, is that “Research shows that around three-quarters of New Zealanders still hold onto HIV-related stigma and discrimination, fueled by fear-based myth”. There is obviously no such research.

(Are we honestly supposed to believe that ¾ of the men, women and children in New Zealand stigmatize people with HIV? Outside of one’s immediate friends and family, how could anyone even know that someone else is HIV-positive?)

The whole premise of the campaign is therefore a complete and blatant lie.

There are bucket loads more bollocks in the campaign. Back in the 80’s, with no medical treatments available for HIV, there was every reason (despite “David’s” back-in-time reassurances) to “freak out” about the prospect of unprotected sex with an HIV-positive “partner”. Even today, the best available antiretroviral drugs cannot eliminate HIV from a person’s body and the drugs themselves can have significant adverse side effects. It’s therefore still risky (if you don’t already have HIV) to have unprotected sex – especially anal sex – with someone who’s HIV-positive.

The whole campaign is rife with other distortions and half-truths. For example, it’s misrepresentative for the HIV-afflicted person to be a woman (“Sarah”), given at least 85% of New Zealanders who’ve ever contracted HIV have done so because they are (or were) men who had penetrative sex with men.

I made an Official Information Act request for the costs of Health NZ’s HIV-stigma-removal advertising campaign and was pleased to receive the following timely response (usually Government agencies either ignore OIA requests or unlawfully decline them or delay).

You’ll see that the cost to Health NZ of the campaign is budgeted to be well over a million dollars (plus GST?). That’s money that could otherwise be spent on medicines, including antiretroviral drugs. The quoted cost excludes the cost and time of Health NZ staff involvement.

This idea of removing “stigma” is common. In 2024, Hedwig Eisenbarth, an Associate Professor at Wellington’s Victoria University, together with “researcher” Courtney Spiller, conducted a study titled, “Testing the Effect of Educational Modules for Reducing Stigma Towards People with a Sexual Attraction to Children“. The study’s main aim was to bolster the mental wellbeing of people who are sexually attracted to children, by reducing stigma faced by such pedophiles. Yikes.

So, what sort of cultural and political factors are at play here?

The campaign is a product of a public “service” culture of unaccountable waste and profligacy in which activists are at liberty to waste the citizenry’s hard-earned money in pursuit of their own ideological goals. All those involved in the campaign will have New Zealanders believe that New Zealand is chocker block with bigots prejudiced against sufferers of HIV, and crazy germaphobes.

According to Health NZ, the “community leaders” with which Health NZ collaborated on the campaign include the Burnett Foundation. Until 2023 known as the “New Zealand AIDS Foundation”, on its change of name to “Burnett Foundation Aotearoa” the Foundation completely jumped the shark and began to preach all the crazy contemporary crap (humans can swap their biological sex etc.).

Grateful recipients of Health NZ’s campaign $$$ include TVNZ, TV Three, SKY, Maori TV, NewsTalk ZB, Stuff and MediaWorks. And there’s not-so-subtle messaging here – vote for a Labour-led Government at the next election and the publicly-funded advertising valve will be opened to inundate lamestream media channels with public largesse, on myriad deranged advertising campaigns. Dedicated followers of State-sponsored advertising under the last Labour regime will recall the infantile Waka Kotahi “Road to Zero” advertising campaign.

The messaging for Health NZ staff and other public servants is clear – vote for a Labour-led Government and the public “service” sheltered workshops wastage will balloon.

We mustn’t underestimate the insidious roles that advertising agencies and their enablers play in all this plundering of the public purse. The advertising agency for Health NZ’s HIV campaign is VML Auckland. The “production company” is Australian firm Good Oil (how dreadfully carbon unsound).

Lurking in the shadows of “The 80s Calling” campaign is a global outfit known as Little Black Book. LBB describes itself as “a global community for companies and professionals involved in advertising and creativity”.

Similar to LBB is the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA). Organisations like LBB and WFA advise advertisers and advertising agencies on “brand safety” and steer them towards politically/culturally “correct” media channels i.e. channels that are Woke or at least Woke adjacent/compatible. The LBB/WFA’s of the murky world of advertising act as ideological commissars directing where advertising budgets can “safely” be spent, and ostracizing “unsound” media outlets.

In the final analysis, the derisory “The 80s Calling” HIV campaign is just more of the same cancer that plagues New Zealand…Identify easily pilfered public money, couch the theft in Woke garb and fill your pockets. New Zealand remains blighted by Free Sh*t Junkies:

Meanwhile, THE POST continues to push profligacy, with this puff opinion piece last Saturday from Wellington Mayor and King of Easy, Other Peoples’ Money, Andrew Little:

New Zealand’s hospitals are creaking under the strain of patients suffering respiratory infections. According to Dr Hannah Cooper of PHF Science, a Government health research organisation, “All indicators suggest COVID-19 activity remains very low”. In other words, it’s influenza, rhinoviruses (which don’t come from rhinoceroses) and common colds – not the “deadly virus” COVID - that are causing the surge in winter illness and killing far more New Zealanders than COVID.

This un-COVID sickness surge is entirely predictable. After Omicron became the dominant COVID strain in early 2022, COVID simply stopped posing any significant health risks to healthy people.

Although COVID is over, the effects of Western nations’ political and public health responses to COVID will linger on. One of the only genuine long COVIDs is a pervasive distrust of public health “experts” and politicians. Lies that COVID vaccinations were entirely safe and effective to prevent contraction and transmission of COVID heightened general distrust of vaccinations. This distrust reduced flu vaccination rates, which has significantly exacerbated New Zealand’s current flu surge. It’s no exaggeration to say that New Zealand’s warped response to COVID is now causing manifold flu deaths. Authoritarian lies have unfortunate consequences.

This general distrust of New Zealand institutions and people in positions of authority is only worsening.

King’s Counsel Grant Illingworth chaired the formal Phase Two Inquiry into New Zealand’s response to COVID. Phase Two was ostensibly intended to help restore faith in New Zealand’s institutions and leaders, but has done precisely the opposite.

In March 2026, Illingworth and his fellow Commissioners, Anthony Hill and Judy Kavanagh, delivered their Phase Two report entitled, Whītiki Aotearoa: Further lessons from COVID-19 to prepare Aotearoa New Zealand for a future pandemic. The clue to the merits of Phase Two is of course the double whammy “Aotearoa”.

Grant Illingworth and Anthony Hill are antique lawyers.

Judy Kavanagh’s main claim to infamy is that she was for 10 years a Productivity Commissioner, before the Productivity Commission was abolished in 2024. I’ve previously commented on the mercy killing of the absurdity that the Productivity Commission became under Woke Mess Ganesh Nana:

The Phase One COVID Inquiry was a brazen, shameless attempt at a whitewash. In December 2022, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern rubber stamped terms of reference for the Phase One Inquiry that were framed so narrowly as to prevent Phase One from conducting any legitimate investigation of the quality of her Government’s response to COVID.

The Phase Two COVID Inquiry only added insult to injury. Chair Illingworth deliberately avoided exercising the Inquiry’s express powers, under the Inquiries Act 2013, to summons anyone at all to attend the hearing and give evidence in public, on oath (or the secular equivalent, affirmation).

This abrogation of Phase Two’s responsibilities excused Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins, Andrew Little, Grant Robertson and Ayesha Verrall - together with former Director-General of Health, Sir Ashley Bloomfield - from genuine scrutiny and interrogation. Phase Two neglected to require anyone, including any of those central actors in the COVID cosplay, to formally testify.

Ardern, Hipkins, Little, Robertson and Verrall each flatly refused Phase Two’s perfunctory requests to testify on oath at public hearings. There’s no evidence that Bloomfield declined any such request, so most probably the Phase Two Commissioners didn’t even ask the ex-Director-General of Health to testify in a public forum.

If Phase Two had formally summonsed Bloomfield, and put him on oath, he couldn’t – unlike Anthony Fauci, Bloomfield’s US equivalent – have pled “The Fifth Amendment” (the US’s constitutional right to stay silent in order to avoid self-incrimination). He’d’ve had to formally front up.

Nor did the Inquiry at any stage exercise any of its statutory powers to require production of documents or other relevant information.

The indisputable logic is that Phase Two of the COVID Inquiry was also contrived and conducted so as to avoid discovering unpalatable truths and answering hard questions.

This dereliction of duty and failure to exercise the Inquiry’s statutory rights allowed anyone and everyone - no matter how intimate their involvement with the COVID response - to simply choose to avoid participating in the Inquiry. And those who voluntarily chose to talk to the Phase Two COVID Inquiry could say as little as they liked, and lie, with absolute impunity. Without being summonsed to appear on oath, participants in Phase Two avoided exposure to jeopardy for knowingly giving false evidence or withholding information, including any risk of being prosecuted for perjury.

The Phase Two COVID Inquiry’s softly softly tactic of wilful blindness achieved its purpose. New Zealanders learnt nothing new, and their legitimate questions went unanswered.

It became public in February 2022 that a July 2021 memorandum from New Zealand’s COVID-19 Vaccine Technical Advisory Group had advised Bloomfield directly that:

• myocarditis and pericarditis (heart conditions) were resulting from Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccinations

• international health data indicated heightened heart risks following Pfizer vaccinations

• these health risks were higher following a second vaccination, in males and younger age groups

Despite clearly receiving the July 2021 memorandum, in his initial chat with the Phase Two Inquiry Crew on 26 May 2025 Bloomfield avoided acknowledging that continuing to mandate two-dose COVID vaccines for healthy young people after July 2021 had been in any way a mistake.

In his follow-up chat on 11 September 2025, Bloomfield conveniently claimed that his recollection of individual decisions was blurred. The ex-D-G of H deflected by simply and repeatedly referring the Inquiry back to unspecified “briefings”.

A central question that inquisitive individuals such as myself wanted the Phase Two Inquiry to answer was:

The answer to this question would help reveal the delays between Bloomfield learning of the health risks to young people of COVID vaccination and him informing the Government of those risks, and also between the Government knowing those risks and addressing them.

But the Phase Two Inquiry avoided answering that question. It failed to even acknowledge this crucial question, let alone try to answer it.

Fortunately, thanks to the subsequent earnest journalistic endeavours, we now know the following:

• Despite Bloomfield learning definitively of the risks in July 2021, he didn’t formally advise Andrew Little, as Minister of Health, or Hipkins, as Minister for COVID-19 Response, of those risks until December 2021 at the earliest. In that very month the Government decided to continue two-dose vaccine mandates for young people.

• Certainly by March 2022, Hipkins knew of the heart risks of COVID vaccinations, as evidenced by a report from him to Cabinet in that month entitled, “Report back on implementation of COVID-19 Pfizer paediatric vaccine for children aged 5 to 11 years”. Despite his evidenced knowledge, Hipkins told the Phase Two Inquiry that he was never – at any damned time - made aware of the vaccine heart risks for young people, and the Phase Two Inquiry falsely found that was indeed the case. AND GET THIS…The Phase Two Inquiry came to that finding despite the Ministry of Health having voluntarily published Hipkins’ March 2022 report in May 2022, on the Ministry’s own public website. The Phase Two Inquiry either missed Hipkins’ March 2022 report or, more likely, chose to ignore it.

• The Government pushed out two-dose vaccine mandates for young people for a prolonged period after March 2022, needlessly exposing this vulnerable group to heart risks.

The deep and enduring mystery is why the Labour regime and its health apparatchiks continued to mandate risky double-dose COVID vaccinations for young people well after any possible justification had disappeared. The most generous interpretation is that they were all suffering from the delusion that vaccinated youngsters couldn’t contract COVID or, if they could (of course they could), they couldn’t pass it on to “vulnerable” oldies and fatties.

Whatever the reason for the bizarre COVaxathon of juveniles, it was completely unethical. It’s a flagrant breach of Ethics 101 to force risky medical treatment on people who don’t need it and haven’t given informed consent, even in order to try and protect others.

Everyone’s sick of the effects of COVID; far more than the vast majority of us were ever, or will ever be, sick from the virus.

The laboratory in Wuhan, China where COVID was probably created was doing “gain-of-function” research. Which is a euphemistic way of saying that the mad scientists were - still are - bizarrely trying to create coronaviruses that are more virulent and contagious.

In New Zealand, the China virus’ only gainful function has been to open our eyes even wider to the dishonesty of our power elites and health Tsars, and to be even more suspicious of THE MAN, the Deep State, the Bloberati, official “Inquiries”...

On 18 August 2026, NZ Herald published an opinion piece by Alan Ringwood entitled Including religion in hate speech laws is a Trojan horse that protects those like Brian Tamaki

The byline to Alan’s article states “Alan Ringwood is a lawyer and former partner at Bell Gully. He was for many years the Herald’s editorial lawyer”. We were both at that law firm together, but I don’t remember Alan. It was a long, long time ago.

Ringwood’s article focuses on the crime of inciting racial disharmony, as contained in section 131 of New Zealand’s Human Rights Act. In broad terms, that section criminalizes the public use of threatening, abusive, or insulting words that are likely to excite hostility or ill-will against, or to bring into contempt or ridicule, any group on the ground of the group’s colour, race, or ethnic or national origin.

Ringwood’s central thesis, in his article, is that section 131 should not be extended to criminalise wordy barbs directed at religious groups because, unlike race, religious beliefs “are not innate or immutable”.

I agree with Ringwood’s thesis. But his framing is loopy. Ringwood’s article gives the impression that Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki favours “hate speech” criminal sanctions against criticizing religions. He implies that Tamaki would like criticism of religions to be criminalized, in order to shield Destiny Church from criticism. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the opposite is true.

Tamaki has been a strong and consistent opponent of expanding New Zealand’s so-called “hate speech” laws. He characterizes stronger hate speech laws as an ideological power grab, designed by proponents to silence, punish and imprison political opponents.

The starkest recent examples of Western weaponization of “hate speech” laws began in British Prime Minister Keir Sta(lin)’s Disunited Kingdom, where Labour politicians are abusing the Police and Courts to imprison political opponents for expressing dissenting views.

The latest Tamaki derangement and discombobulation resulted from Tamaki calling for a purge of Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities from New Zealand, in response to Hindu nationalist targeting of Christians in India. In response, New Zealand’s parlous Police pinched all of Tamaki’s guns.

Ringwood’s article correctly records that “there have been calls by the Federation of Islamic Associations of NZ, Hindu Council of NZ, Supreme Sikh Society NZ, and other interested parties such as Amnesty International Aotearoa, for gaps in our hate speech laws to be closed and for political parties to outline their policies on hate provocation”. And that’s entirely predictable from New Zealand’s Islamic Federation, Hindu Council and Sikh Society. They come from traditions that favour authoritarianism, censorship, religious prejudices and preciousness, and sectarianism, all in preference to Western freedoms of expression.

Sadly, Amnesty International has totally lost the plot over the last couple of decades. The once august Amnesty organisation has about-faced from dedication to freeing individuals incarcerated for expressing their views to promoting imprisonment of “dangerous” free speakers who commit such “crimes” as skepticism of gender identity. Amnesty Aotearoa (the clue is of course not calling New Zealand by its one and only name) has naturally opposed the legislative Bill to define a “woman” and a “man” as inconsistent with Te Tiriti o Waitangi (that’s the Treaty of Waitangi). In short, Amnesty’s gone Woke.

And New Zealand’s National Party shows no sign of throwing off its Woke Cloak. Completely mental Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey is Woke on (sex change) steroids. Nicola Grigg, as Minister of Women’s Affairs, doesn’t know what a woman is. A Prime Minister who’s been chief executive of Sky Wakas Aotearoa (Air New Zealand) and who is a great mate of Doocey can’t not be a dyed-in-the-wool Wokester.

And now The Nats have gone and selected a United Nations-loving human rights lawyer as its Wellington Central candidate in the upcoming general election. Dr Scott Sheeran is a frightfully censorious Identitarian who as recently as June 2026 put out this piece, in The Post.

In his piece, Sheeran opined that Tamaki’s remarks would be unlawful in countries such as the UK, Canada, and Australia, and lamented that New Zealand law currently does not criminalise incitement of antipathy against religious groups. He’d no doubt criminalize expressions of distaste for Islam… the “Islamophobia” invented and propagandized by the Islamic Brotherhood.

Sheeran is yet another unreal doctor. His legal “doctorate” is in international law, from Essex University. He worked with Sir Geoffrey Palmer, at Chen & Palmer. Enough said.

The Nats failure to abolish the Broadcasting Standards Authority, a legislative initiative that would’ve enjoyed immediate support from coalition partners ACT and NZ First, says it all. Be under no illusions. The LuxNats are more Leftie that the Labour Party of yore.

If inciting hostility or ill-will against a religious group were to be criminalized, then Red Radio NZ’s John Campbell could be prosecuted for his crazed hatred of, and attacks on, Tamaki’s Destiny Church. But as tempting as it is to want to see Campbell in the dock and then jailed, it’s no valid reason to enact such criminalization.

Unlike Christians and Muslims, Jews are an ethnic group. So inciting hostility or ill-will against Jews can be criminal, under the Human Rights Act. In September 2024, Labour Party MP Damien O’Connor reposted a video claiming, “Palestinians have every right to do whatever they did on October 7th”, and never apologized. Chlöe Swarbrick, Green Party co-leader, has repeatedly chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, a chant universally acknowledged to be a call for termination of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants.

Peter Davis, husband of former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark, posted on social media about the 7 October atrocity perpetrated by Palestinians, “You reap what you sow”. Davis truly sucks.

Under New Zealand’s current laws, O’Connor, Swarbrick and Davis could each be criminally prosecuted for inciting hatred of Jews, as an ethnic group.

But I’m still with Alan Ringwood. Inciting hostility or ill-will against any religious group, or bringing contempt or ridicule on any such group, shouldn’t be criminalized.

Warren Zevon would never have wished for that, not even for the contemporary Jew-hating Mus Wolves of London. But we live in crazy times. Abdur Razzaq of New Zealand’s Islamic Federation would’ve imprisoned Warren Zevon just for the name of Zevon’s song, “Mohammed’s Radio”.

Judge Elizabeth (Ema) Aitken has been restored to her District Court throne and is back dispensing her version of justice. I’ve been covering this sorry saga:

Queen Aitken’s restoration comes after a Judicial Conduct Panel decided in April 2026 that her conduct at Auckland’s Northern Club on the evening of 22 November 2024 fell short of warranting termination of Her Majesty’s Judgeship.

The Judicial Conduct Panel comprised King’s Counsel Brendan Brown KC (Chair), Court of Appeal Judge Jill Mallon and Sir Jerry Mateparae. Mateparae is New Zealand’s former Governor General and Defence Force Chief. He’s a competent, honourable man but was on the Panel purely as window dressing. In practice, the Panel’s decision was Brown’s and Mallon’s alone.

Brown’s and Mallon’s crucial exculpatory finding was that, when Aitken was sounding off at what NZ First leader Winston Peters was saying (on a microphone, from a lectern, in front of a NZ First gathering), she had no idea whatsoever that it was Peters who was speaking. If Aitken was found to have known it was Peters she was railing against then, even with the greatest of leniency and desire for her to remain a judge, her number would’ve been up.

According to the Panel’s decision, the legal test for misbehavior justifying removal of Aitken as a judge is as follows:

In a fast paced world, events quickly disappear over the rear horizon; in these exciting and turbulent times, we must keep moving. So let me wrap the Aitken Affair up by setting out the version of events that Brown and Mallon tried to force us to believe, the crock of excrement that they would have us swallow, the fiction on the basis of which they let Aitken off the hook (with one of my thoughts in bold italics)…

• Aitken did not comprehend, when she entered the Northern Club on that fateful evening, that a New Zealand First Party function was being held at the Club, at the same time as the function Aitken was attending - a Christmas and farewell function for Auckland District Court Judges. Her ignorance was despite the fact there was a placard clearly specifying all functions being held at the Club that evening, including the NZ First function, immediately inside the Club’s front door.

• Returning from the bathroom, by pure accident Aitken found herself standing on stairs directly outside the Wintergarden room where the NZ First function was being held. She simply did not notice a two-metre high NZ First banner directly outside that room.

• Positioned there, on the stairs, she clearly heard Winston Peters say to his audience, in his well-known voice from the podium, that law schools are teaching students that tikanga Māori “law” overrides New Zealand’s common law Westminster system. But she didn’t recognise that the words she was hearing were coming from Peters. The voice she heard was completely disembodied and anonymous, despite Peters being in her direct line of sight through a large, open doorway that was right in front of her.

• Aitken’s tirade started with “he’s lying” (without having a clue, of course, who “he” was) followed by words to the following effect:

• Aitken only realised it was Peters who was the subject of her undignified ranting when, after she’d ended her diatribe and for reasons that remain entirely unclear, she just happened to turn around as she was walking away, look through a different, much smaller, doorway into the NZ First function room and, for the first time, see Peters. In the words of the Panel’s decision, “If the Judge did not see Mr Peters through Doorway One and did not recognise his voice [as the Panel pretended to conclude], then catching sight of Mr Peters before departing the anteroom was the only logical explanation for the Judge’s statement about Mr Peters a few moments later to those at her table in the Dining Room.” Of course, the “only logical explanation” is that Judge Aitken knew full well it was Winston Raymond Peters about whom she was spewing her errant invective.

• On her return to her fellow Judges, she boasted, “I’ve just called Winston Peters a liar”.

This whole saga has myriad disconcerting features. On all the objective evidence, Aitken is a politically partisan, self-serving liar with no impulse control who’s continuation as a judge is untenable and who had to be – and clearly should have been - removed as a judge.

Judges must routinely assess credibility and regularly decide that people appearing before them are lying. But a liar judge labelling others liars is of course a brazen hypocrite who brings the judiciary and the legal “profession” in general into disrepute. Which squarely meets the legal test for “misbehavior” justifying removal. It is untenable for a judge who is a compulsive, self-serving, political activist liar to remain a judge.

Aitken’s lie, which she repeated ad infinitum, both personally and through her legal representatives as the investigations and Court proceedings regarding her conduct unfolded, is that she had no idea it was Peters she was chastising. Many repetitions of her lie were on oath. There’s a name for this sort of lying. The crime is called “perjury”. Judge Aitken has repeatedly perjured herself. Yet this perjurer judge is back sitting in judgment of her fellow citizens, including other perjurers. In any orderly, civilised judicial system, this ought to be untenable.

Panelists Brown and Mallon employed all manner of tactics and ruses in their determination to exonerate Aitken. They compartmentalized her conduct and confined the scope of their examination essentially to what happened at the Northern Club, ignoring all of Aitkens other awful antics in the wake of her brazenly inappropriate behaviour that evening.

The exonerating duo of Aitken’s comrade lawyers also cunningly found Aitken guilty of various other non-hanging “offences”. This is classic deflection. Their mock admonishments included the following, with my thoughts in bold italics:

I could go on. But let me end my cathartic rant by pointing out that what Peter said is not only defensible, it’s for all practical purposes true. Law schools throughout New Zealand are indeed teaching and promoting a subversive notion that there is an emergent and evolving common law Māori tikanga that has primacy over other common law and Parliament’s statutes.

The law schools are working in lockstep with the Courts and the New Zealand Law Society in this regard. Tai Ahu, President of the Māori Law Society, claims “Tikanga Māori has long been a source of New Zealand law”.

Leftie activists’ overt attempt to employ tikanga to undermine Parliamentary sovereignty and subvert traditional common law principles, while at same time denying they are doing so, is classic postmodernist gaslighting.

Ema Aitken’s tenure as a judge is currently set to end on 5 February 2027. Perhaps there’ll be a Judgy farewell function, but not at the Northern Club. That august Club has rightly banned her, along with her odious husband and idiotic Michael Reed KC, who each personally invaded the NZ First function.

Once she’s out of New Zealand’s Judgery, Aitken will be a free citizen, unconstrained by judicial strictures, fully at liberty to spread as much antidemocratic, Woke rot as she wants.

Stuff’s Saturday broadsheet newspaper, The Post, has once again come to the party with sign-of-the-times subject matter for my Substack.

The 8 August edition contained a piece glorifying Patrick Morgan, a self-styled Wellington cycling advocate and member of lobby group Cycle Wellington Inc. The piece’s author, Amy Ridout, lauded Patrick for hauling Paul Heffernan through New Zealand’s Court system.

Heffernan is a former Wellington Council candidate and current president of Better Wellington Inc., a society that advocates for fiscal restraint from Wellington’s City and Regional Councils.

Heffernan’s alleged transgression under Harmful Digital Communications Act?…simply happening to be Better Wellington’s President when the following anonymous words were posted on the society’s X page:

The comment entirely disappeared in November 2025 when Better Wellington deactivated its X page, a fact Morgan conveniently neglected to tell the Court, instead claiming “Once it’s been online, it’s going to exist forever...”. What tosh.

Morgan paints himself as a vulnerable victim, and credulous Amy Ridout lapped it all up (with my responses in bold italics):

Under the HDC Act, for Morgan’s allegation - that he’d suffered a harmful digital communication - to legitimately get to Court it first had to be assessed by Netsafe, New Zealand’s self-styled internet “safety” agency.

Morgan claimed, without supporting evidence, that he’d referred his gripe to Netsafe. Heffernan advised the Court that he’d never heard from Netsafe. For that reason alone, Judge Kevin Kelly should have chucked Morgan’s claim out. Kev clearly didn’t know what he was doing and the case itself was a shambles. At one stage the Court Registrar unlawfully tried to ban The Post from the Courtroom, with Kev later having to apologize for that botch up.

In tacit acknowledgment of the ridiculousness of Morgan’s litigation, Judge Kev didn’t require Heffernan to apologize, artfully claiming that imposing any such requirement would bring the comment back into the public eye. But Heffernan apologized anyway to Morgan, an apology that Morgan of course rejected – “I’m not satisfied they really understand how serious this is”. (NEVER apologize to the likes of Morgan or Wokesters in general. They simply reject all apologies, and gleefully construe any apology as an admission of guilt. Never EVER apologize when you’ve got nothing to apologise for.)

Despite not having been formally involved in the Court case, Netsafe chief online safety officer Sean Lyons weighed in, but suspiciously without clarifying whether Netsafe had heard from Morgan.

Amy Ridout quotes Lyons as stating “If [this way of talking] has become how we talk to each other on the internet, why are we allowing this potentially harmful behaviour to exist on the internet?”. Lyons was at pains to emphasise to Amy that, “this [proof of harm] was subjective: one person might shrug off abusive speech, while another might not. This was taken into account when assessing harm.” This is the Woke primacy of subjective feelings over objective realities, and Lyons’ involvement in Amy’s coverage smacks of an orchestrated stitch up.

Sadly, Amy Ridout’s effort amounts in substance to an attempted smear job on Paul Heffernan and two other individuals who weren’t even parties to the Court proceedings; Vlad Barbalich and Glenn Inwood. Absent any valid grounds on which to malign Better Wellington, Amy resorts to the amorphous pejorative, “controversial”.

But she inadvertently hits the mark – not a cyclist - when she writes, “Morgan knows some will dismiss [Morgan’s objection to the “first against the wall” online comment] as attention seeking rhetoric from a group trying to drive engagement”.

Because, in truth, Morgan comes across as a neurotic, obsessive solipsist. I’ve been cycling around Wellington’s streets for over 40 years. My “lived experience” of cycling around New Zealand’s capital city must be much the same as Morgan’s.

Vehicle drivers have become much more considerate of cyclists over the decades. As I ride in and out of Wellington’s CPD, the most unpleasant stretch is the cycle lane along the retail area of Thorndon. Negotiating this grossly expensive waste of money (c. $50m) is a game of chicken with oncoming electric bikes and scooters, negotiating raised pedestrian crossings and pedestrians, and avoiding vehicles crossing the cycle lane. It was much better in the old days. But this is what Morgan advocates for more of. The man must be mad or bicycle incompetent, or both. The man was obviously a darling of a former Wellington mayor:

Morgan’s HDC Act action against Heffernan is yet another example of abuse of legislation that must be scrapped. Legislation intended to protect children and adolescents from bullying is being “weaponized” (hate that word, but it’s almost okay here) to attack robust debate and criticism, and stifle free speech.

In a competitive field, perhaps the grossest abuse of the HDC Act was when the Courts allowed representatives of the Chinese Communist Party to resort to this flawed legislation to silence CCP-critic journalist Portia Mao.

But then there’s the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade trying to silence criticism, from the Director of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, of MFAT’s pro-Palestinian actions and funding in relation to the Israel’s retaliation for the October 7 2023 atrocities.

Brave Gendermania-critic Rex Landy faces multiple further Court appearances under the HDC Act. And so on and so forth. New Zealand’s next Government must banish the HDC Act from the books.

Under a 1992 Deed of Settlement, New Zealand’s Government granted ownership of the lakebed of Lake Taupō, plus the beds of rivers and streams feeding into that great lake, to Ngāti Tūwharetoa – a central North Island Māori tribe. Specifically, ownership of those tracts of New Zealand was vested in the Tūwharetoa Māori Trust Board.

That vesting was said back then to be substantially symbolic, with the 1992 Deed containing the following assurances:

But of course that wasn’t the end of it. Far from it. A 2007 Settlement Deed inexplicably replaced and extended the 1992 Deed. Under that replacement deed, the Crown expressly permitted the Tūwharetoa Board to impose licensing requirements on commercial operators on Lake Taupō and its rivers and streams (Taupō Waters), and to tariff such operators.

The 2007 Deed provides that the Tūwharetoa Board, as owner, “may grant rights of occupation or use of parts of Taupō Waters for any purpose and charge for the same”.

Then in July 2017, the Crown and Tūwharetoa entered into yet another settlement deed that affirmed the 2007 deed and gifted extra goodies to Tūwharetoa.

By no coincidence whatsoever, a month later in August 2017 Tūwharetoa applied for a declaratory judgment from New Zealand’s High Court. The Tūwharetoa Board sought Court endorsement of a Tūwharetoa entitlement to require “Commercial Users” of Taupō Waters, including fishing guides, to obtain a licence from Tūwharetoa, and to charge such operators whatever Tūwharetoa damn well likes.

In 2021, shortly after the Labour-only regime came to power, Tūwharetoa cemented its vice-like commercial grip on Taupō Waters when its 2017 application crystalized in a formal declaratory judgment. That Tūwharetoa coup was a fait accompli, because the judge was “Justice” Cheryl Gwyn.

Devoted readers of my Substacks have met this Gwyn womyn before. I mentioned her in an earlier piece covering New Zealand’s current war for constitutional supremacy.

A former – perhaps current – member of New Zealand’s Socialist Action League, Cheryl Gwyn was – astonishingly – the head of New Zealand’s Security and Intelligence Service from 2014 to 2019. In other words, extreme Leftie Gwyn was the Head of New Zealand’s internal State surveillance apparatus.

Prior to that, Cheryl worked in all the telltale areas. From 2003 to 2014, as Deputy Solicitor General, she oversaw the Attorney General’s activities at the Crown Law Office, with direct responsibility for the management of Treaty of Waitangi claims, constitutional and human rights law issues, race relations and indigenous rights. On such matters, she’d represented New Zealand at the now-farcical United Nations. The Attorney-Generals during Gwyn’s tenure as Deputy Sol. Gen. were Margaret Wilson (2003-2005), Michael Cullen (2005-2008) and CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (2008-2014).

Cheryl Gwyn’s final time as the Head of Stasitearoa, under the Ardern Regime, was a busy for her. In addition to spying on pink skinned New Zealanders who were failing to exhibit prophylactic pounamu, Gwyn was fighting a personal Court battle on her ex-home front.

Our Cheryl was sued in 2018, along with others, for misrepresenting the condition of a house she and her husband/partner had sold. Specifically, she’d deliberately misled the unsuspecting purchasers by failing to disclose that the dwelling leaked like a sieve. With Gwyn recognising it would be practically impossible for her to become a Judge while having her dirty laundry aired in Court, Gwyn & Co. coughed up and settled the claim.

IMO therefore…High Court Justice Cheryl Gwyn is one of many embedded “sleepers” in New Zealand’s Deep State, poised to wake and fully reactiWoke – in her judicial capacity – under New Zealand’s next Left wing Government. To their post-modernist, neo-Marxist graves, Gwyn-types never disappear or change their crusading, conniving minds and ideologies. Cheryl could well succeed her ideological (apparently not physical) twin on the Supreme Court, “Justice” Glazebrook.

Glazebrook’s extended two year term is due to expire on 8 February 2028. What The F was Attorney General Judith Collins thinking when she extended G’s Spot on New Zealand’s highest court? These Nats are not what they seem.

Justice Gwyn’s 2021 declaration - that Tūwharetoa has cart blanche to tithe anyone trying to earn a decent living doing anything to do with Taupō Waters - supercharged Tūwharetoa’s milking of Taupō Waters fishing guides. Since then, Tūwharetoa has thumped all Taupō Waters fishing guides with a 7% levy on all their gross earnings. Many guides have now abandoned or are thinking of abandoning their Taupō Waters guiding businesses.

It’s impossible to overstate just how preposterous Tūwharetoa’s exploitation of commercial operators on and around Taupō Waters is. This is a tribal shake-down, never expressly countenanced by New Zealand’s Parliament. And it’s limitless. There’s simply no fiscal limit on what Tūwharetoa can seek to squeeze from commercial operators on and around Taupō Waters.

Tūwharetoa’s official Fact Sheet – guided fishing activities on Taupō Waters (#12 above) contemplates “actions for trespass” for fishing guides who don’t pay their dues. But in reality, transgressive entrepreneurs and their customers who refuse to bow to Tūwharetoa’s Water-use racketeering are far more likely to attract the physical attentions of Tūwharetoa’s hired goons…the sorts of nefarious characters whom the Tūhoe tribe got to burn down all the huts in what used to be New Zealand’s Urewera National Park (before the National Party gave away that national park in 2014).

The current Government could and should step in, with legislation, to either extinguish Tūwharetoa’s Water Rort or, if the Nats don’t have the guts, at least formalize, limit and otherwise regulate what’s going on. But the current Government won’t do either. Which is why the National Party may well attract less than 30% of the party vote, at the next election.

What can we expect from Tūwharetoa’s Taupō Waters commercialization, in the next few years? Here’s my pick. Tūwharetoa will supercharge their relentless levies on businesses dependent on Taupō Waters, and exempt anyone with Tūwharetoa ancestry from any such levies.

(Pay your fishing guide in cash)

Meanwhile, Minister of Conservation Tama Potaka and “his” Department of Conservation have bestowed upon Ngāi Tahu the management and operation of the Crown’s massive Molesworth farming station. From now on, either open your wallets to that pseudo-tribe if you want to do anything on the Molesworth Crown Land, or F OFF. Race-based land control and commercialization is gathering steam.

We still await the Court decision on Ngāi Tahu’s claim to pretty much all South Island water. None of this is pretty.

Sit down and pour yourself a strong one. Or a cup of tea. It’s all the same to me. I’ve got news for you. You are going to DIE. And, in the overall scheme of things, your death will come soon. The longer you live, the more likely it is that your last few years will be unproductive and unpleasant. In old age (if you get that far), you’ll be a burden on your fellow New Zealanders. There is no “right to life”.

Dr Malcolm Mulholland is the public face of an alarmist advocacy group called Patient Voice Aotearoa. Malcolm is not a medical doctor. His PhD, titled “Prominent Flags and Changing Notions of Identity”, resulted from his time on Shonky John Key’s ill-conceived New Zealand Flag Referendum Panel. With two decades at Massey University under his belt, Malcolm’s a lifer at that derailed and deranged tertiary institution.

Malcolm’s particular badge of dishonor is that he was a Kiwibank Local Hero in 2024.

A year ago, Malcolm was appointed chairman of Pharmac’s new(ish) Consumer and Patient Working Group, a motley collection of neurotic individuals designed (according to Pharmac’s website) to “help Pharmac reset how it works with consumers”. The “consumer” corporate-speak is the giveaway.

It’s not clear what “reset” of Pharmac is intended - not that Pharmac doesn’t urgently require a reset.

So far has Pharmac strayed from its statutory function that it recently began to subscribe to a bizarre and bogus notion of a mystical fourth article of the Treaty of Waitangi (“Whakapuaktanga Ritenga Maori”), a constitutional addition that Sir Geoff Palmer said could indeed be formalized with ““deep analysis, development of policy options, interdepartmental consultation, and consultation with Māori”.

Malcolm’s wife Wiki, the mother of his children, died of breast cancer. Malcolm blames her death on Pharmac not funding fancy breast cancer drugs. To make matters worse, after Wiki died Malcolm got prostate cancer. Thanks to Western medicine, Malcolm has survived. But he’s never got over his wife’s death or his own health scare.

Malcolm thinks Pharmac should make available, for free, the best medicines available on the planet, public stating:

What Malcolm unfortunately fails to grasp is that New Zealand’s dismal economic state, resulting mainly from the last Labour Government’s gross mismanagement of the COVID virus and general fiscal incompetence, means that our plucky little country simply can’t afford to provide many medicines that other countries are able to provide to their citizens.

Even more unfortunate is that Malcolm has unwittingly become a pawn in the Leftie Lamestream Media’s campaign to discredit and upend the current Nats/ACT/NZ First coalition Government and install a Labour-led government under a diminutive beady eyed ginger haired beta male. The Wokerati is playing on Malcolm’s psychoneurosis (and Maori ancestry) to paint a false picture of a Government that is deliberately depriving New Zealanders, and those with Maori ancestry in particular, of miracle chemical cures.

Malcolm persistently parrots the false narrative that New Zealand’s health system is in “CRISIS”. Since 2023, when the current Government came into power, Malc has been trotting out this rot. In fact, New Zealand has one of the best public health systems of any country in the world, commensurate with its financial capacity.

In November 2025, Malcolm delivered his “Buller Declaration” (health CRISIS!) to Parliament’s steps, accompanied by Green MPs Hūhana Lyndon and Marama Davidson and Labour’s Ayesha Verrall, but no current Government Ministers.

The present Government appointed Malcolm as the chair of Pharmac’s Consumer and Patient Working Group mainly to try and shut him up and appease New Zealand’s hordes of hypochondriacs who hallucinate that New Zealand has unlimited resources to spend on every fringe miracle cure promoted by Big Pharma.

In the real world, every dollar spent on drugs extending the miserable lives of decrepit oldies and the terminally ill is money that could be spent on improving the mental health and wellbeing of New Zealand’s most neglected group, young people – and paying off our burgeoning national debt.

Malcolm is therefore a delicate (albeit corpulent) flower whom the Left should leave alone to get on with his life.

His position as chair of Pharmac’s Consumer and Patient Working Group is not a statutory role. If “Doctor” Mulholland continues to abuse his position to catastrophize about the state of New Zealand’s enviable public health system, Health Minister Simeon Brown should remove him from his position and leave him to focus on whatever he’s supposed to be doing at Massey University.

Current Government Ministers mustn’t continue to masochistically tolerate their own appointees undermining faith in New Zealand, biting the hands that feeds them and spreading irrational fears.

A Members’ Bill initiated by National Party Member of Parliament Andrew Bayly has been randomly drawn from Parliament’s (actual) biscuit tin and will now progress through Parliament’s legislative process. Members’ Bills are pieces of proposed legislation initiated by individual MPs, rather than political parties.

Bayly’s Bill is the Crimes (Offence of Failing to Report Child Harm) Amendment Bill. The Bill, if enacted, will make it a criminal offence to fail, without a “reasonable excuse”, to report an assault on a child to the Police. Reasonable excuses include where someone fears for their, or another person’s, safety, or believes the information has already been reported by someone else.

It’s a tribute to Bayly that he’s still trucking on in Parliament. His legislative initiative comes after New Zealand’s power-hungry, Woke Prime Minister Christopher Luxon forced Bayly to resign Bayly’s ministerial portfolios in February 2025. Bayly’s “crime”?...touching a lowly Parliamentary staffer’s arm in what Bayly described as “an animated discussion”.

Bayly’s bill alone, if it comes to fruition, promises to trump anything that Sir Luxalot has personally achieved during his time as Prime Minister.

A one year old boy named Ruthless-Empire Souljah Reign Rhind Shephard Wall was fatally attacked in his own “home” on 22 October 2023 and died in hospital, just short of his second birthday. The child is reported as affectionately known as “Baby Ru”, but of course he never got to feel true affection before he was murdered.

The only humans (if you can call them that) who were in the house at the time Ruthless-Empire was killed were his biological mother Storm Angel Wall (that’s her on the right), a female named Rosie Morunga and Rosie’s feral squeeze, Dylan Ross. One or more of these monsters killed Baby Ru. His atrocious mother Storm Wall and Dylan Ross roam free. Rosie Morunga was jailed in September 2024 for a variety of unrelated crimes, but is probably out of jail by now.

Almost three years after the little boy was killed, the diabolical threesome have closed ranks and not disclosed anything useful to the Police, who have not charged anyone in connection with the killing.

In February 2024, the Police announced they know the identity of a person who tried to clean up the crime scene and removed crucial evidence, as the boy’s dead body lay in hospital, but have not charged that person.

In October 2025, the officer in charge of the investigation of Ruthless-Empire’s murder, Nick Pritchard, announced the Police had “really comprehensive evidential foundation for consideration of criminal culpability” – as if there’s possible doubt that someone is criminally culpable – and described the investigation as a “very complex case”. But still nothing.

The murder with impunity of Baby Ru is just one of a long line of infanticides that have gone unpunished because people in the know have failed to disclose the killers to the Police. To list but a few of these atrocities:

This parlous societal situation of kid killing with impunity begs the questions why Parliament has not legislated to:

• criminalise non-reporting to Police of assaults on children

• remove the general right to silence for child killers and anyone who knows the identity of a child killer

What politicians have resisted such legislative action?

In the wake of the unpunished 2020 killings of Poseidyn Pickering and Sofia Taueki-Jackson, then Minister of Justice and current Wellington mayor Andrew Little expressly rejected removing the right to silence in child killing cases. Little claimed – entirely incorrectly – that removing the right to silence would require amending New Zealand’s Bill of Rights Act, a statute that Little maintained is, “together with the Treaty of Waitangi, the equivalent of New Zealand’s constitution”.

It’s indisputable that removing the right to silence would not require any amendment of the Bill of Rights Act. The general right under the Bill of Rights Act for anyone arrested or detained to refrain from making a statement would be subject to any removal of a right to silence in connection with child killing and abuse, with the Courts expressly required to respect any such removal. Little was either dumb, or playing dumb, or worse. The Labour Party’s 2020-2023 regime passed multiple enforceable laws that breached the Bill of Rights, mainly in its authoritarian response to the COVID virus.

Little was not the only Labour Party Minister to reject removing the right to silence in child abuse (including killing) cases. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern also weighed in on the side of child killers and their accomplices, asserting out of thin air that removing the right to silence had not worked in Australia.

In 2022, Kelvin Davis, as the Labour Party Minister of Children, together with Minister of Justice Andrew Little, rejected Dame Karen Poutasi’s recommendation for mandatory reporting.

Poutasi’s recommendation came in the wake of the killing of Malachi Subecz. Monstrous “caregiver” Michaela Barriball, a “friend” of Malachi’s mother (imprisoned for importing methamphetamine, along with Michaela’s mother), was convicted of murdering Malachi after atrociously abusing him over a prolonged period. Michaela’s sister Sharron Barriball was convicted of concealing evidence of Michaela’s abominable crimes.

I can’t understand why Little, Ardern, Davis and all the rest have resisted removing the right to silence for child killers and their accomplices, and instituted mandatory reporting of the sort sought by Andrew Bayly. And why hasn’t the National Party adopted and promoted Bayly’s member’s bill as that political party’s own legislative initiative? Any ideas?

As indicated, Ardern couched her 2020 opposition to removing the right to silence in an invented notion that such removal has failed to increase the number of successful convictions in Australia. However, on the contrary, overseas evidence is that removing the right to silence and/or mandatory reporting improves detection, reporting and rates of criminal convictions.

The evidence is less strong that right-to-silence removal/mandatory reporting reduces the extent of abuse itself, but so what? It’s perfectly logical to expect that the sorts of low-life sadistic sociopaths who abuse and kill children will not be put off by the prospect of being caught and convicted.

Let’s all hope Bayly’s Bill gets passed before the upcoming November general election, because it won’t be passed under a Labour-led Government.

I’ve just read The Unlikely Doctor, a book about a man who now goes by the name of Timoti Te Moke. The book is written in the first person (“I”), but was in fact written for Te Moke (and the publisher, Allen & Unwin) by a fella named Eugene Bingham. Being a full time medical doctor, Te Moke made it plain, “I ain’t got the time [to write a book]”.

Bingham also ghostwrote the book titled This is the F#$%ing News on behalf of joke journalist Paddy Gower. As a wordsmith, Steve Braunias eats Bingham and Gower for breakfast. Braunias’ unflinching review of “Gower’s” book began…

Your Unlikely Book Reviewer has reviewed only one other book. This Substack review is one of my most read Substacks:

The Unlikely Doctor describes Te Moke’s gritty life to date and his indisputably remarkable and admirable achievement - given his bad luck in life - in becoming a medical doctor at age 56. But, as inspiring and moving as it is, The Unlikely Doctor is significantly flawed literature.

The incessant speech marked (“ ”) quotations of invented dialogue don’t add verisimilitude but, rather, make the reader wonder just how much of the rest of the content has been made up. And the book is blighted by deflections, minimizations and downright untruths.

The main thing downplayed in the book is the appalling role that Te Moke’s mother played in his tough start to life, and his life in general. Te Moke’s mother gave Timoki up as a toddler to her parents, where he says he was nurtured and loved. Then, when the boy was six years old, his mother demanded him back as her ticket for higher social welfare child support benefits. She hauling him back into a horrible household with a ghastly violent step-father. Mother lied to the Court that her partner was Te Moke’s biological father and formally changed the child’s name to Timothy Morrison.

Another minimization is the fact that his biological father, said to be Tongan, buggered off before Te Moke was born, never to be seen again. That’s a terrible thing to happen to any child.

Unable to honestly confront the dastardly dual causes of this descent into crime and imprisonment (his mother and absent father), Te Moke – in Bingham’s ghostwritten words - blames colonization. Quoting from the book:

I’m a descendant of many generations of New Zealanders without Māori ancestry (i.e., I’m entirely descended from “colonizers”). And I defensively bristle at being blamed for all society’s ills and stickered with white privilege. My skin is as thin as it is pink.

Te Moke’s blaming of colonization for his personal challenges in life contrasts starkly with the attitude that my dear deceased friend, Robert Tuhekengarangi Morehu, took to his own tough life. I’ve covered this remarkable man:

Robert’s gravestone at his urupa (cemetery) bears the inscription “a self-inflicted tumultuous life”, and there’s some truth in that. (Robert’s son, also a good friend of mine, went along with the inscription!)

Robert T Morehu certainly didn’t run around blaming anything on colonization.

The book about Dr Timoti Te Moke dwells on the Central North Island (CNI) Treaty of Waitangi Settlement, in the following terms:

That statement is completely incorrect. The CNI Settlement was not for land confiscations, or even primarily for unconscionable land dealings by the Crown. The supposed Treaty breaches behind the settlement remain largely unclear to this day. Robert Morehu confided in me that he couldn’t understand the CNI settlement, given there were no confiscations.

The blurb on the back page of Dr Te Moke’s book states “A true story of resilience, redemption and revolution”. As indicated, Timoti’s story, while certainly of resilience and redemption, is not all true. Te Moke’s recounting of faded and selective memories to ghostwriter Eugene Bingham was akin to Chinese whispers.

And blurb’s “revolution” claim is murky.

Timoti appears to have fallen into the thrall of a Māori activist lawyer, Roimata Smail. In 2024, Roimata published a book titled, Understanding Te Tiriti: A Handbook of Basic Facts About Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Roimata’s didactic handbook is decidedly short on “basic facts” but, predictably, big on the invented, ahistorical notion that there exists, as I type, an entirely separate nation of undefined “Māori”.

Back in 2019, Roimata, on Timoti’s behalf, filed a claim with the Waitangi Tribunal requesting an urgent hearing into her and Timoti’s allegations of systemic bias against Māori in the prosecution of crimes. Timoti’s claim has subsequently been rolled into a wider, undecided, Waitangi Tribunal claim alleging wholesale justice system bias against Māori.

My overriding hope is that Timoti hasn’t paid Roimata a dime of his own money, from his book proceeds or doctor’s salary or otherwise. Waitangi Tribunal claims are mainly funded by “legal aid” i.e., New Zealand taxpayers.

Apart from wanting a fairer and generally better New Zealand (who doesn’t), it’s not clear what “revolution” Dr Te Moke might have in mind. At one stage, according to the book, the good doctor advocated to disgraced Police Commissioner Andrew Coster for “an independent body that oversaw police decisions to prosecute Māori”. Coster is said to have demurred.

If the book is to be believed, Te Moke’s self-esteem is rising along with his prospects in life. The book ends with:

It comes as a comfort to me that it was born-again Māori Eugene Bingham who wrote those words, and not Dr Te Moke. Because Timoti doesn’t strike me as an egomaniac. Because the big wide world will never know Timoti Te Moke’s name.

It’s just great the good doctor is now fulfilled and contributing to colonized New Zealand, in a medical profession that wouldn’t exist without colonization.

In late June 2026, it was revealed that the Independent Police Complaints Authority and the Police’s National Integrity Unit are investigating two historical complaints against current Police Commissioner Richard Chambers. Reports are that the complaints involve allegations of untoward sexual conduct on Chambers’ part, towards women. I’ve no idea about the merits of the complaints.

Police Minister Mark Mitchell has disclosed that one complaint was made in late 2025 and the other in early 2026, expressed confidence in Chambers to continue as Police Commissioner and declined to be interviewed or comment further. Mitchell is awaiting the results of the investigations. His approach is that addressing the complaints is an operational matter in which it would be inappropriate for the Police Minister to involve himself.

Contrast this with the previous Government’s approach to the Police’s operations. In disgraced Andrew Coster, the Labour Government found at the pound an overt lapdog of a Police Commissioner. A man desperate to do the Government’s bidding, on any front. Under Prime Minister Ardern’s direction, Coster effectively suspended enforcement action against criminal gangs and brazen raiders of shops, and stopped investigating property crimes. New Zealand become significantly lawless.

In the aftermath of those hazy crazy authoritarian days of COVID, Coster was also more than willing to play the Police’s part in cover-ups of Ministerial misconduct.

On the evening of 23 July 2023, then Minister of Justice Kiri Allan smashed her car into a utility vehicle parked on Wellington’s Evans Bay Parade. In these fast-moving, modern times, it’s easy to forget significant events. But it’s worth reminding ourselves of Allen’s crash and its aftermath, as a remarkable example of Labour working in lock-step with the Police and the Courts to protect one of The Left’s own.

Drunk and quite likely also drugged, Allan tried to flee the scene of her crime, with Police apprehending her about 500 meters away. Allan physically resisted arrest and a road-side alcohol breath test before having to be handcuffed. When eventually subdued and breath tested in the police car, at 9:32 pm, she blew over the criminal threshold of 400 mcg per litre of breath. She then refused to accompany Police to Wellington Central Police Station. Forced to do so, she told officers she had “written the law” and questioned whether officers had read it. At the police station, she refused to leave the police car and disputed her Court summons. The Minister of Justice slurred that charging her was a “political stunt” and demanded that the summons “disappear”.

At this point, the Labour Machine kicked fully into gear. At 9:56pm, Police Commissioner Andrew Coster texted Police Minister Ginny Andersen foreshadowing a call, following up on the blower to Andersen that Allan was being dealt with by Police following a crash and had blown over the legal alcohol limit. Andersen immediately briefed Labour Party Chief of Staff Andrew Kirton who, at 10:00pm, told Prime Minister Chris Hipkins what was unfolding.

The Police then waited sufficient time (until 11:43pm, more than two hours after her initial criminal reading) for Allan’s evidential breath test to come in under the criminal threshold of 400 mcg (she apparently recorded 335 mcg), at which point the Police were able to issue her with an innocuous (non-criminal) infringement notice for excess breath alcohol.

With the Wokewash in full swing, the following morning Hipkins accepted Allan’s resignation as Justice Minister and, instead of charging Allan with her manifest criminal conduct of “resisting arrest” and “reckless driving”, Police charged her with lesser offences of “refusing to accompany a police officer” and “careless driving”. Police went on to steadfastly and unlawfully resist requests under the Official Information Act to release information disclosing their complicity with the Labour Government to cover for Allan. Eventual release of the Police records revealed the records having been labelled “locked down due to [the] high-profile nature of the person involved”.

Allan ultimately plead guilty to careless driving and also, after crazily contesting it, the charge of failing to accompany a police officer. Judge Brooke Gibson fined Allan $300 for careless driving, discharged Allan on the charge of refusing to accompany a police officer and ordered her to pay $5,296 in reparation for writing off another’s vehicle worth much more than that.

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins chimed in, playing the now-familiar mental health card and diminishing Allan’s preposterous criminality by blaming all her conduct on supposed “emotional distress and mental-health difficulties”. Lamestream media produced a plethora of puff pieces portraying Allan as the real victim…and that was that. Job done. A tidy Fabian Team effort.

So, what factors help explain this stark and sinister contrast? The glaring difference between Minister Mitchell’s extreme reluctance to involve himself in the allegations against Commissioner Chambers – a matter the Minister has a legitimate interest in staying on top of – and the demonstrable, concerted conspiracy between the ousted Labour Government, the Police, the public service and the Courts to let Kiri Allan off the hook for her preposterous criminal conduct as Minister of Justice?

What is it that prompts normal, law-abiding politicians to defer to “operational independence” of the public service, when the post-modernist, neo-Marxists (Labour, Greens, Maori Party) have absolutely no hesitation about working in ideological cahoots with the public sector and the Courts to achieve their ends?

First and foremost, in the world according to the crusading Wokerati, the ideological ends justify the means…any means. Rule of law, objective truths, transparency, constitutional conventions, democracy itself…be damned. For adherents to Western traditions and civilization, on the other hand, such things are foundational and essential.

For the forces of Reason, the “means” matter, and produce nuanced, evolving ends that are the products of open and democratic public discourse, elections, law-making and law enforcement. Ends backed by credible, non-partisan Courts that respect the supremacy of a democratically-elected Parliament.

Callous disregard for time-honored rules and principles of reason and rationality are not a by-product of neo-Marxist Identitarianism. Such disregard is a central tenet of anti-Western ideology. Wokery and other belief systems opposed to Western civilization and traditions worship the primacy of subjective feelings and raw power over universalism (and science). Boiled down, the current incarnation of the Left is a dark, nihilistic cult in which Machiavellian elites steal and eat the diminishing collective pie while the plebian rest starve, spiritually (and sometimes - as under Marxist China and the Soviet Union – literally).

A Labour-led Government after the next election could only, and would inevitably, be more radically authoritarian, fiscally irresponsible, contemptuous of the rule of law and generally incompetent than the previous “pure” Labour Government. This is so, Dear Readers, because Labour would have to accommodate, at the very least, the antisemitic batshit crazy Greens. Under such a government, the improprieties and abuses that characterized the Kiri Allan debacle would look, in the rear vision mirror, like child’s play.

The New Zealand Law Association is doing an admirable job enabling subversive, activist lawyers to expose themselves. The Association is a divine reincarnation of the former Auckland District Law Society. Unlike the New Zealand Law Society, the NZ Law Assn has no statutory authority and doesn’t try to hound un-Woke lawyers out of the legal profession. I’ve previously covered the Law Society’s brutal, unlawful hounding of heterodox lawyers:

The Law Association’s latest coup was to allow former Solicitor-General Una Jagose to reveal her true self at a breakfast meeting hosted by the Association on Thursday, 2 July. Jagose’s central thesis was ostensibly that New Zealand is at risk of “sleepwalking” into a collapse of its constitutional separation of powers – between the legislature, executive and judiciary – and its rule of law.

New Zealand is certainly at risk of a collapse of its democratic checks and balances. However, the reasons for that risk are diametrically opposite to those that snotty-nosed Jagose proposed.

Jagose blamed the threat to New Zealand’s rule of law on its democratically elected Parliamentarians doing what they supposed to do – simply passing laws. Her spiel included these verbatim, revelatory morsels:

What can we make of these utterances out of Una, oracular high priestess of Woketearoa?

Transparently, she’s shooting to join her brother as a senior New Zealand judge. She’s also giving us all a gaslighting Nothing-To-See-Here concerning the New Zealand judiciary’s radical use of amorphous and undefinable Māori customs (Tikanga) as a Trojan horse to re-invent NZ’s common law to suit the judiciary’s critical ideological agendas.

Jagose’s notion that Parliament’s powers are limited by “Māori” interpretations of the Treaty of Waitangi is a direct pump for a particularly crazed neo-Marxist aspiration. It’s the anti-democratic nut-job notion that the Waitangi Tribunal should be formally enshrined as New Zealand’s supreme constitutional court and unelected legislative chamber.

Jagose purported to support New Zealand’s separation of powers. But her real hope is for New Zealand’s Courts to invoke Tikanga to ride roughshod over Parliament i.e., undermine and override the black-letter words of democratically enacted legislation.

In her self-righteous/serving lecture, Jagose selectively referenced a 2025 “survey” by The Helen Clark Foundation. The survey purported to “find” that only 30% of New Zealanders trust their government to do the right thing most of the time and that 34% believe government leaders abuse their power most of the time. Of course, nothing that Harridan Helen’s Foundation produces can be trusted because Helen’s pet podium is an overtly politically-biased charity that, under any credible charities regime, should have been deregistered long ago.

But assuming Clark’s foundational creation can be trusted, Jagose conveniently ignores the HC Foundation’s other finding that only 43% of New Zealanders believe that our courts make fair, impartial decisions based on the available evidence, falling to 31% for those struggling financially and 35% for respondents aged under 30. That’s what you get, with Jagose’s brand of extreme judicial inventiveness. No sane person trusts activist Courts when they routinely decide contrary to established law. It’s Jagose and her Identitarian Ilk who have destroyed faith in the Government, Crown Law, the judiciary and the legal system in general.

On 12 December 2024, Una Jagose, as Solicitor-General, volunteered to be interviewed by Sean Plunket on The Platform. The interview came in the wake of controversy surrounding Jagose writing, in her foreword to her mid-October 2024 proposed new prosecution guidelines, that prosecutors should “think carefully” before prosecuting individuals with Māori ancestry or who are “disproportionately impacted” by New Zealand’s justice system. Jagose was looking to “front” the controversy on The Platform, but it didn’t go well for her. When Plunket asked her directly whether she’s a Critical Race Theorist, she didn’t answer. So we know the answer.

Jagose’s father is an ethnic Indian from India. Her mother is from Ireland. Because her skin is a bit brown, Una thinks she both oppressed and at the same time qualitatively better and more deserving than people with pink skin. That’s her guiding principle.

And that’s where her principles end. In November 2024, Jagose apologised on behalf of Crown Law to the myriads of New Zealanders who have suffered abuse in State “care”. Such sufferers rightly called upon Jagose to resign, following the formal inquiry into the abuse. Suffers pointed out that, in cases brought against the Crown by surviving claimants, Solicitor-General Jagose was personally complicit in withholding evidence from the Police, used aggressive and re-traumatizing lines of questioning, and suggested - as a legal strategy - the use of psychological stress against claimants.

More of Jagose’s malfeasance in public office is connected to a current criminal case. Two policemen are being prosecuted for deliberately doctoring evidence presented to the Court in order to secure the false conviction of Alan Hall. I’ve covered this shocking miscarriage of justice, including Jagose’s role in it:

Specifically, when Crown Law’s role in keeping innocent Hall in jail became transparently clear in 2022, S-G Jagose feigned surprise and outrage. In doing so, she studiously evaded the inconvenient truth that by 2018 she knew full well, from investigative journalist Mike Wesley-Smith, the incontrovertible fact that Hall had been deliberately and falsely jailed - an inconvenient truth she tried to bury.

Jagose shouldn’t ever be a judge. But if there’s a Labour-led government after the next election, she almost certainly will be.

Talking to embedded individuals can provide intriguing insights into elite sentiments on controversial matters.

I recently chewed the fat with one of our neighbors, an English-born doctor idling at the Ministry of Health. When I asked him what the general mood is at that Ministry, his face clouded with anger. He explained that Ministry staff are all furious and terribly distracted over the Minister of Health, baby faced assassin Simeon Brown, firing the chair and deputy-chair of the Medical Council.

Already vaguely familiar with the kerfuffle, I politely pointed out to said neighbor that Dr Rachelle Love (chair) and Simon Watt (deputy-chair) had not been fired and that their terms on the Council had simply expired, with Brown merely deciding not to re-appoint them for further terms. But the good doctor – not to be told otherwise – lectured me, in no uncertain terms, that Brown was duty bound to reappoint the Love Watt duo because…the Medical Council itself had decided that the Love Watts should remain on the Medical Council. Recognising that I was wasting my time talking to his haughty hand, I left it at that.

The legal position couldn’t be clearer. Under the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003, the Minister of Health appoints all members of the Medical Council, who remain Medical Councillors until their terms expire. Clear as a bell.

Normal people in the real world understand and accept that, if they are on fixed term tenures, they may well not be reappointed. But the New Zealand public service in general, and the Medical Council in particular, is not a real world composed of normal people. And neither is Radio New Zealand, who’s coverage of the expiry of Love’s & Watt’s terms was headed with this nonsense:

Note, if you will, all the telltale signs of RNZ’s political bias against the current government. The passive voice (“Concerns raised”). The use of “replacement” to falsely insinuate that Minister Brown has actively removed Love and Watt.

So, who exactly is the concerned citizen? It’s a woman by the name of Sarah Dalton, “executive director” of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS), the communist trade union for New Zealand’s senior “health professionals”. According to Dalton:

It’s abundantly clear, therefore, that Dalton has drunk deep from the neo-Marxist Woke Well, to the point of drowning in it. So, apart from wallowing in her white privilege, what are Dalton’s credentials to lecture Simeon Brown on what doctors need, and how Simeon should do his job? Answer – precisely none.

Dalton has no medical credentials whatsoever. She has an arts degree in English literature and history, together with a teaching diploma. More particularly, Dalton is a dyed-in-her-wool trade unionist. Before joining the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (where she’s been for over 11 years), Dalton was seven years at the neo-Marxist anti-education Post Primary Teachers’ Association. According to her Linkedin, Dalton is About “Equity, diversity, sustainability” and “Working towards restorative paradigms”.

Dalton is therefore, transparently, an ideologically-driven zealot who hasn’t a clue how democracy and the rule of law ought to work. For Dalton to accuse Simeon Brown of political bias is the very height of hypocrisy, a reality that’d of course be completely lost on Demented DEI Dalton.

The Woke extremism that probably tipped Brown into not re-appointing Love & Watt was the Medical Council’s promulgation, earlier this year, of proposed new statements for the medical profession on cultural competence, cultural safety and hauora Māori (a mythical “holistic” Māori philosophy of health). The draft statements created a furor, so extreme was the Māori-focused apartheid that they contained. The Medical Council has now buried the draft statements, and I’ve been unable to find a copy. But the statements must have been outlandish, given the Council’s current, operative Statement on Cultural Safety (2019) is itself woefully Woke whacky:

Departed Medical Council chair, Dr (Strange) Love, is manifestly an extreme Critical Race Theorist, with a penchant for attention-seeking spectacles.

Departed deputy chair Simon Watt is slippery fish. I used to work with him at the Bell Gully law firm. While a partner at Bell Gully, Watt negotiated the New Zealand’s contact with pharmaceutical conglomerate Pfizer for supply of COVID vaccines. That’s the secretive contract, complete with water-tight confidentiality obligations, under which the New Zealand Government bound itself to keep the contract well away from the prying eyes of the New Zealand public. It’s the contract that – with the endorsement of the Government Ombudsman – our Ministries of Business Innovation and Employment, and of Foreign Affairs, together with Pharmac, have refused to publish.

What general themes can we draw from all this?

First, New Zealand’s senior public “service” is replete with Woke ideological extremists who consider they have divine rights to:

• complete shelter from any political scrutiny and accountability

• perpetually re-appoint themselves, outside of all applicable statutory processes. Inhabitants of “industry bodies” such as the Medical Council are characterized by a gross, antidemocratic sense of self-importance and entitlement to be free from democratic political accountability, to be at lawless liberty to eternally pursue their own crazed ideological agendas.

Secondly, criticism of Parliamentary laws and legislative initiatives has moved from critique to insinuations of illegitimacy i.e., that the relevant impugned law is not simply faulty or without merit but is somehow irregular or invalid.

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown repeatedly falls into this mental trap, with his constant refrains that “Wellington” (Parliament) should leave his fiefdom of Tāmaki Makaurau alone, including not question the racist statutory Māori representation on key Auckland Council committees.

Thirdly, this Māori race preferencing and differentiation is all, at core, racist stereotyping. Deep down, the Pakeha Daltons of Woketearoa think the noble, dimwitted natives are desperately in need of their sickening succor.

Last, what do these multitudes of mandarins actually do all day? Are we really meant to believe that the 1,500 non-front line individuals who dwell in the Ministry of Health are all diligently writing useful policy papers, monitoring legislation and health sector performance and generally working to improve the health of everyday New Zealanders? Of course they’re not. They’re all mostly just bitching, around their coffee machines and water filters and in the Molesworth Street cafes, about Simeon Brown not appointing their fellow travelers. This crap must end.

New Zealand’s latest political poll, a 1 News-Verian poll conducted from 13 to 17 June, has The Opportunity Party at 4.6% of the popular vote. Opportunity is trending upwards. If the trend continues, Opportunity will get over the 5% threshold for representation in Parliament and would probably form part of NZ’s next Government.

Opportunity’s website sets out various “policy priorities”, but Opportunity’s most significant stance is not to be found on its website. In an interview with Radio New Zealand’s Guyon Espiner on 10 June, Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong attacked the New Zealand First party, and its leader Winston Peters in particular.

“Q”, as she likes to be called, questioned “what has he [Peters] really done for New Zealand” and described NZ First as “a handbrake on progress”. Clearly, Opportunity won’t be part of any coalition Government with NZ First. And with NZ First having ruled out going into coalition with Labour, Opportunity’s only route to power (assuming its gets over 5%) would be as a member of a Labour/Greens/Māori Party/Opportunity coalition. So, for almost all practical purposes, a vote for Opportunity will be exactly the same as a vote for Labour, Greens or the Māori Party. You can pretty much take your pick. (That said, anyone for – gulp - a National/Labour/Opportunity UNIPARTY?)

Opportunity is technically the same political party that was formed by Gareth Morgan and registered with the Electoral Commission on 6 March 2017. Since leaving TOP, Morgan has repeatedly expressed his regret that he didn’t shut it down, describing its 2019 troupe of actors as “a group of groveling, compromising political aspirants”. On 28 January 2026, TOP changed its official name from The Opportunities Party to The Opportunity Party. The single opportunity offered to voters being to…keep NZ First out of power?

Q got the TOP job by putting her name forward after Opportunity advertised the role nationally, including on job site SEEK. Opportunity’s general manager is ex-Labour Party MP and Government Minister, Iain Lees-Galloway.

In July 2020, former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern axed Iain L-G as a Minister, prompting him not to stand in the 2020 election and leave Parliament. Ardern chopped Lees-Galloway because he’d had an extra-marital affair with a former Labour Party staffer. Ardern accused L-G of a “lack of judgment” and of abusing a “power imbalance”. Which were decidedly selective accusations, given Chris Hipkins’ penchants for junior staffers.

Q smells like Jacinda Ardern. She’s slick and outwardly personable, but vacuous, IMO.

Opportunity’s palate is teal and that’s no accident. In the mold of Australia’s Teal movement, Opportunity is looking to portray itself as a blend of fiscal conservatism, environmental activism and social liberalism (LGBTQ+). Then throw in the Te Tiriti re-invention of the Treaty of Waitangi under which the Mystical Magnificent Māori Monolith didn’t cede sovereignty to a central Government and is a separate nation in partnership with the Crown and people pitifully bereft of blessed Māori ancestry.

Opportunity submitted against NZ First’s “Definition of Woman and Man” Bill “because it is pointless, unscientific and unworkable - and because it harms New Zealanders”. In its submission, Opportunity states, “We are firmly against divisive culture wars”.

Opportunity favors empowering unelected “Citizens assemblies”, a 1.75% annual land tax and not jailing anyone under 26 years of age. Outside of those specific policies, Opportunity looks very much like Labour.

Phillip Mills, founder of the Les Mills fitness club chain, has donated $100,000 to Opportunity, because he likes Opportunity’s policies and also hates NZ First. Phillip says he would like to see a Labour-led government after the next election. And for very good reason. Labour was very kind to Phillip. Les Mills took $4.5 million in COVID subsidies from the Labour Government, money that Phillip has failed to pay back.

The Opportunity Party is sometimes abbreviated to “OP”. When I was growing up, an “OP” smoker was someone who didn’t buy their own cigarettes but brazenly and persistently bludged cigarettes off others. There’s a distinct “OP” aroma about Opportunity. They’re overtly against all “extractive industries” (which is code for mining) and want to overturn New Zealand’s current agricultural industry. Deputy leader Daniel Eb, who describes himself as “a social impact founder in the food & fibre sector”, states:

Opportunity will “Strengthen the Emissions Trading Scheme by adding a mechanism for agricultural emissions” i.e., tax farmers for animals farting.

In short, Opportunity is a bunch of acolyte students from the alchemy school of economics. Money and wealth magically materialize, with little truly productive effort. In reality, Opportunity is deeply devoted to the “deindustrialization” dogma of Western Leftism. Shrink the pie, with cultural elites eating the lion’s share, and radically redistribute wealth away from productive people to try and placate the general populace. Opportunity is a vibe party of unserious and potentially damaging individuals.

Opportunity itself hasn’t had to spend much on promotion because all of New Zealand’s mainstream media outlets, and Radio New Zealand in particular, are doing the job for them. Qiulae is a darling of MSM. Independent journalists Ani O’Brien and Chris Lynch have comprehensively covered all this credulous championing of Opportunity.

Thought Crimes

The media isn't reporting on TOP's rise, they are creating it

Political momentum is one of the most powerful forces in politics. Voters are heavily influenced by ‘social proof’ which is the psychological phenomenon where people copy the actions of others to validate their own behaviour. People want to support parties that appear viable and relevant. Therefore, a party that is constantly discussed in the media acqu…

Read more

2 months ago · 111 likes · 72 comments · Ani O’Brien

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a democracy devotee. If Opportunity gets over the 5% line and forms part of New Zealand’s next Government, then so be it. But New Zealanders have to know what they could be getting themselves into. Opportunity is a clever, elitist, Leftist construct that’s far from what it may seem. If Opportunity gets into Government, then Māori Marxist Dystopia here we come.

By the way, with the election looming, the Government must pass legislation expressly requiring voters to produce credible proof of identity (driver licence, passport) in order to be entitled to vote. Were you as bewildered as me, at the last election, that anyone could simply point to any name on the electoral roll and breeze into the voting booth? That‘s a recipe for widespread electoral fraud.

On 16 June 2026, Minister of Immigration Erica Stanford angrily highlighted that the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has repeatedly and deliberately misled her about an information technology project purporting to improve biometric capability at Immigration New Zealand. Immigration NZ is part of MBIE. The project, which wasted at least $38 million of public money in less than 10 years, has been abandoned after achieving nothing.

The supplier, NEC, has done the same biometric immigration job for other Western nations, including US, Japan, Singapore. All that was required was for Immigration NZ to work with NEC to adapt NEC’s overseas solutions to the minimum extent required to “fit” New Zealand’s laws and existing systems. The legitimate question to be asked is whether Immigration NZ was ever committed to completing the project, or just wanted tens of millions of taxpayer money for a go-nowhere IT sheltered workshop.

Unfortunately, Stanford’s anger will probably go nowhere. For one good and simple reason. Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche has promised to “investigate” what’s happened. I’ve previously covered Roche’s nothing-to-see-here inquiry into the murky, criminal goings on at the Manurewa Marae on election day 2023, including the wilful blindness to John Tamihere cajoling his minions to grab others’ voting papers and vote them for the Maori Party.

Stanford’s chagrin followed publication of a report reviewing Immigration NZ’s nefarious conduct relating to its biometric capability project. The report is replete with management consultancy speak but nevertheless contains some juicy titbits and insights (while partly blaming…COVID?!). It’s author is named as Greg James, who’s credentials are redacted from the publicly available version (“Privacy of natural persons”) along with much other content (“Commercial information, Negotiations”). I’ve read the report, so you don’t have to.

MBIE received the report on 1 April 2026, April Fools’ Day, but did not provide it to Stanford until 12 June. Treating New Zealand’s general public and politicians as fools, newly-minted MBIE CEO Nick Blakeley told Stanford that the delay in providing the report to Stanford was due to a “wrong call” by officials who – Blakeley claimed – had decided to provide a response, alongside the report. To which Stanford sardonically responded, “In that preceding two months, there was no response provided.”

Stanford is being bullshitted on an industrial scale, and she knows it. Blakeley is just another feckless career mandarin who spends too much time on his hair.

Heather du Plessis-Allan interviewed Roche on 17 June.

https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/audio/sir-brian-roche-public-service-commissioner-calls-for-investigation-into-mbie-border-biometrics-project/

Roche claimed in the interview that he doesn’t think any of the culpable individuals are still employed in the public service. How could he possibly know that? (Clue: he doesn’t) The Public Service Commissioner then blames MBIE’s delay in providing the mythical response to Stanford on the “fuel crisis”. He proceeds to assert, contrary to all the anecdotal and empirical evidence, that the INZ biometric debacle is unique in the public service. The gnomish Knight concludes by claiming that Carolyn Tremain, MBIE’s CEO from 2017 to September 2025 (covering the entire relevant period of the Biometric Basket Case), wasn’t “involved” (which she transparently was) and is delighted to disclose that Carolyn has texted him and wants to be involved in Roche’s pretend investigation.

Well before Brian Roche roped his friend Carolyn in for her “help”, Treacherous Tremain had already started whitewashing…

An application to Minister Stanford for extra funding in March 2024 stated completely incorrectly:

Questioned about the manifest rubbish being spouted, Tremain wrote to Stanford in April 2024:

Exact how, pray tell Carolyn, can an application for funding containing clear concocted lies, and viewed by multiple eyes, not evidence a “deliberate intention to mislead”?

Winton Peters, in stark contrast, is not beating around in the bush. He’s said publicly that he’s in no doubt that Immigration NZ people deliberately misled the Government and demanded, for good measure, that the fibbers be jailed.

If anyone is to be imprisoned, the first for the clink should be English-born buffoon and recently retired head of Immigration NZ, Alison McDonald. In March 2026, Mendacious McDonald and current MBEI CEO Bulls**ting Nick Blakeley appeared in person before Government Select Committee. Both brazenly failed to disclose that the whole project had in fact been axed in November 2025. Lies by omission. Check this out.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/616552/immigration-new-zealand-head-didn-t-tell-select-committee-35m-it-project-had-been-axed

Coining the words of Judge Peter Mahon from his investigation of Air New Zealand’s Mount Erebus crash, we’re looking here at an “orchestrated litany of lies”.

In order to whitewash this ugly stain of public service malfeasance, Roche has brought the Old Firm back together. Yesterday Roche announced he’s appointed – you guessed it – Michael Heron KC to head the “inquiry”. Labour leader Chris Hipkins has joined the whitewash working bee, saying it’s not up to Parliament to decide whether Blakeley or any other public servant should lose their job, and deferring to Public Service Protector & Defender Roche to decide.

Roche has already kicked one of his cans of whitewash down the road, telling media that the inquiry is likely to take several months to complete due to the "serious nature of these allegations, the complexity of the inquiry and the need to meet procedural fairness requirements". By which time, there’ll have been a general election and this whole tawdry pond of the swamp of ineptitude and deceptions will mainly be forgotten.

But there’s a limit to how much of this insulated public sector wrongdoing New Zealand’s general public can take. Before long, ordinary New Zealanders will demand radical reform, including reinstating direct accountability of public servants to democratically elected Government Ministers.

I naturally face occasional pushback against my criticisms of particular individuals. Sometimes the dissent can even be justifiable! But resistance on the basis that an individual I’m criticizing is “civil” – polite and courteous, exhibiting social graces…“nice” – doesn’t cut it with me.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing per se against civility. All else being equal I favour Western civility over incivility and barbarism. But being civil should not be a free pass or get-out-of-jail card, or provide immunity from justified reproach.

Recently, a friend proffered the view, in defence of Dame Patsy Reddy, that she’s a “nice person”. But even assuming Patsy is personally pleasant, that’s practically irrelevant to any objective assessment of her legacy and continuing impact as an elite member of New Zealand’s Bloberati. I’ve previously commented (unfavorably) on the diminutive Dame.

In the same vein, another friend of mine assessed newly-minted Radio New Zealand Morning Report show host John Campbell as, in person, a “good guy”. Which, even if it were true, is simply damning with faint praise. (I regard Mr Campbell – and it’s my prerogative - to be a lazy State-sponging Woke twat.)

Pompous John’s latest attempt at virtue projecting self-aggrandizement came in response to Mike Hosking winning the award for best presenter (talk/drive) at the recent NZ Radio & Podcast Awards, for the fourth year in a row.

Hosking was beamed into the Awards with a pre-recorded acceptance speech in which he had a mild jab at the Waiata Wokeness of the ceremony (“no one loves a culturally appropriate ceremony like I do”). And, no surprise and true to form, juvenile John loudly lambasted Hosking’s remark as “disgraceful”, as guests streamed out of the auditorium.

New Zealand’s High Priest of Race Hustling, Sir (Tā) Stephen (Tipene) O’Regan, is personally pleasant, at least in public. My limited personal experience of O’Regan back in the 90’s was that he was a decent enough human.

Subversive Government Ombudsman, John Allen, on whom I’ve also previously commented, is superficially just batty benign. (An acquaintance of mine lately argued that anti-freedom-of-information Allen should be immune from criticism, simply because his wife has predeceased him.)

Chris Finlayson, nowadays a petulant paid propagandist for the Ngāi Tahu and Tainui tribes, can still beguile when it suits his solipsistic self-interests.

As abominable as Judge Ema Aitken’s behaviour was at the Northern Club, at least we now know, from her conduct and the fact that she got off scot-free, that New Zealand’s judiciary and legal profession are appallingly politically Woke-biased. With the wisdom of hindsight, Aitken’s uncharacteristically uncivil antics were revelatory; perhaps her finest work.

The smiling assassins of New Zealand’s constitutional integrity are a global phenomenon. Baron Peter Mandelson, traitorous gay pederast and close friend of Jeffrey Epstein (dec.?) and current British Prime Minister Starmer, is a charming man.

Therefore give me “Tuku” Morgan any day of the week. At least you know where you stand. Tukoroirangi Morgan is the current executive chair of the Tainui tribe.

Two weeks before his election to Parliament in 1996, Tuku spent $4,000 of State-funded Aotearoa Television’s funds. He spent the money on fancy clothes for himself, including silk underpants at $85 dollars a pair. A month before Tuku’s spending spree, Tuku’s brother-in-law Tau Henare, as Māori Affairs Minister, had announced $4 million of new government funding for Aotearoa Television. In the 1980’s, Tuku picked up a criminal conviction for obstructing Police.

The Tainui tribe’s first Treat settlement was in 1995. It came with the same “relativity” clause that Ngāi Tahu enjoys, meaning more money every time another Māori tribe achieves a Treaty settlement. Tainui’s first settlement was worth $170m, but that was steadily squandered on crazy “investments” such as the Warriors rugby league franchise and multiple Hamilton hotels.

By 2010, Tainui had effectively done its dough, and secondary settlements kicked in. Relativity payments started, which to date have amounted to about $400m. Additionally, there was a separate settlement for supposed Treaty infractions involving the Waikato River, worth hundreds of millions of dollars (it’s hard to divine).

I’m inclined to regard Tuku Morgan as a boorish and divisive race provocateur. Mr Silk Undies is also a transparently performative thespian, who clearly wasn’t sincere – i.e., he absolutely knew he was talking crap - when he told the Waitangi Tribunal on 3 June 2026:

But I still prefer Tuku to the Smiling Subversives. Likewise Tuku’s brother-in-law Tau Henare (they’re married to sisters).

Tau entered Parliament in 1993, in the Northern Maori electorate seat, as a New Zealand First MP. Following a heated exchange in Parliament in October 2007, Trevor Mallard punched Tau in the head, for which Trevor plead guilty to the crime of fighting in a public place. Anyone who gets Lame Duck Mallard criminally convicted has my vote.

Tau Henare’s tribal roots are Ngāpuhi, which Tau characterizes as “all the North”. Ngāpuhi is the last major Māori tribal group yet to settle with the Crown for land confiscations. It’s the tribe of the Horrible Harawiras, on whom I’ve previously commented:

In a frightful flip-flop, muddling Treaty Negotiations Minister Paul Goldsmith announced on 16 June 2026 that he is not ruling out including an agree-to-disagree sovereignty clause in the Crown’s settlement deed with Ngāpuhi. Last year Goldsmith said the Government will not agree to Treaty settlements that entertain invented fictions denying a single sovereignty.

Goldsmith also said on 16 June that he’d earmarked fully 10 separate Ngāpuhi groups to join settlement negotiations. Endorsing Ngāpuhi nonsense that there isn’t one Government for all New Zealanders and treating with 10 separate Ngāpuhi groups are recipes for constitutional mayhem. Settlement on the basis of any such nonsense would only mean that, post-settlement, another 10 Ngāpuhi groups will come out of the woodwork, each claiming their own separate sovereignties and settlements. Feckless Goldsmith is just another slippery civil(ian).

On the other hand, proud Ngāpuhite and Government Minister Shane Jones is continuing with draft legislation requiring a single settlement with Ngāpuhi rather than multiple settlements with smaller groups, saying there is no benefit in turning the country’s largest iwi into “confetti”. Jones has warned against the Ngāpuhi settlement being “hijacked” by separate sovereignty sideshows. Love ‘im or hate ‘im, at least you know where you stand with Mr Jones. The same can’t be said of Goldsmith and his cordial, ephemeral ilk.

Better to be punched in the face than have stiletto knifes slipped through the ribs into New Zealand’s constitutional heart. Tuku Types at least reveal themselves for all to see.

On 2 June 2026, changes relating to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) were made to New Zealand’s Public Service Act 2020.

The changes, initiated by the New Zealand First political party:

• removed mandatory requirements for public service chief executives to:

  • “be guided by the principle that the group comprising all public service employees should reflect the makeup of society”

  • “in employment policies and practices, foster a workplace that is inclusive of all groups”

• removed a mandatory requirement that panels appointing chief executives “must undertake those functions having regard to the requirements…relating to diversity and inclusiveness”

The amended Public Service Act retains:

• an express principle, in order for the public service to achieve its purpose, “to make merit-based appointments (unless an exception applies)”

• a requirement for chief executives and boards, when making appointments, to “give preference to the person who is best suited to the position”.

DEI is the flawed and failed neo-Marxist philosophy aimed at forcing equal outcomes (not opportunities) on a society’s citizens, regardless of ability and merit. The DEI social engineering experiment hasn’t worked, promotes performative virtue signaling, discriminates against non-preferred categories of people, demeans preferred categories, polarizes and divides societies, harms economic growth and prosperity, and encourages ideological conformity and self-censorship.

At first glance, the changes to the Public Service Act restore merit as the driving criterion for public service appointments. And indisputably, merit and DEI are, and always have been, mutually incompatible and exclusive. An individual is either the best suited for a particular position, based on the position’s objective requirements, or they’re not.

Moreover, the Woke public service has ceased, in the last couple of decades, to even pretended to try to (in the former words of the statute) “reflect the makeup of society”. It has stacked its DEI die-hard managerial ranks with disproportionate numbers of women and gay, gender dysphoric and brown-skinned people, in preference over people who would represent the real composition of New Zealand’s population.

When the de-DEI changes were first proposed, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters rightly labelled public service DEIfication as “Woke” and heralded putting “an end to the Woke left-wing social engineering and diversity targets in the public sector”.

Judith Collins announced, “We’re strengthening the Act to make sure that the best person for the job is the one who gets it…the person with the right skills and experience to deliver”. Even Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, himself woefully Woke, conceded that the public service is “pretty Woke”.

The changes were trumpeted on the political Right as removing DEI from New Zealand’s public service.

And as predictably as night follows day, the changes have been lambasted by the Left as surrendering the public service to neo-Nazis. Labour’s Camilla Belich (who chaired the select committee that considered the Bill) tried to gaslight Parliament and the New Zealand public in general that, “Those two things [DEI and Merit] can be true alongside each other”.

Labour MP Ayesha “Vaper” Verrall, high as always on her own self-importance, fumed, “I could not think of a more limited, small-minded, managerial, hopeless vision of our democracy than this bill.”

But unfortunately, those who think the changes removed scope for DEI in the public service need to think again. Because the changes did no such thing. They simply removed DEI compulsion, leaving public service leaders free to continue with DEI if they wish (which they all do). It appears that, in the legislative process, NZ First’s bold ambition to remove DEI was watered down.

The contrast with how the current Trump administration dealt to DEI in the United States public service, and in US society in general, is stark.

By Presidential executive orders, Mr Trump terminated, dismantled, and prohibited DEI programs, mandates, and offices across the US federal public service, closed DEI offices and roles (e.g. Chief Diversity Officers), criminalized taking DEI factors into account in hiring, promotion and performance reviews, and banned federal contractors from having affirmative‑action programmes.

In addition to leaving it open for Government departments and agencies to continue on their merry DEI ways, the Public Service Act still contains active DEI encouragements and permissions, not least for individuals with Māori ancestry or who self-identify as Māori.

The Act continues to contain the following:

Pollyannas who still have faith in New Zealand’s failed human rights regime and Commission may seek comfort that, while the Public Service Act still allows and encourages DEI, discrimination based on race or other privileged DEI characteristics must necessarily breach New Zealand’s Human Rights Act 1993.

But unfortunately, the current Government has left an express exception for positive discrimination (“affirmative action”/DEI) in our human rights legislation. Section 73 of the Human Rights Act provides:

The effect of section 73 is to provide carte blanche, across-the-board permission for Wokesters to continue with DEI discrimination, in the public service and throughout New Zealand society.

Any Government genuinely committed to ending DIE and restoring meritocracy to New Zealand must positively prohibit DEI and repeal section 73 of the Human Rights Act.

On 5 June 2026, Xin Li and her son Boyuan Zhang were sentenced following their earlier convictions for trying to take expensively-purchased greenstone (pounamu) out of New Zealand. The pounamu they were trying to spirit off to China exceeded the legal export weight limit of 5 kilograms. The oriental offenders were fined $5,000 (a dollar for each gram of that weight limit).

This piece is not a defence of the discombobulated and dispirited duo. They broke a ludicrous law and, even if they weren’t aware they were committing a crime, ignorance of the law is no excuse. I’m simply reveling in the absurd over-reactions to their minor misdemeanor.

For those uninitiated in the monetized monopolization of New Zealand jade, non-tribe Ngāi Tahu’s “tribal” authority, Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu (TNT), literally owns all greenstone. Parliament, on behalf of all New Zealanders, gifted TNT the entirety of New Zealand’s greenstone under the Ngāi Tahu (Pounamu Vesting) Act 1997. I’ve covered Ngāi Tahu previously:

Immediately following the convictions back in April 2026, Ngāi Tahu “representative” Susan Wallace (Ngāi Tahu struggles to find recruits with Māori names) claimed that the verdict was an emotional moment for ALL Ngāi Tahites - “it’s a huge outcome for us”. Susan advocated for all removals of legally-acquired pounamu from New Zealand to nevertheless be illegal without a special paid-for permit from Ngāi Tahu:

Green Rock Racketeering Rising!

Ngāi Tahu’s current “management plan” for pounamu apparently allows anyone, including tourists, to gather for themselves pounamu from designated West Coast beaches. Allowable pounamu is limited to what fossickers can carry on their person or in a backpack. But even where gathered in this way, tourists – if Ngāi Tahu has its way – will have to pay TNT explosive amounts to repatriate their pounamu.

And with sentencing, things got even funnier and more absurd. Ngāi Tahu ex-chair - and current deputy chair of the Climate Change Commission - Lisa Tumahai gave a “victim impact statement” on behalf of Ngāi Tahu:

Not-much-Māori Ngāi Tahite Francois Tumahai is Lisa Tumahai’s hubby. Mafias like Ngāi Tahu are family affairs. Francois mounted his high horse and went on the charge, spouting:

Customs prosecutor Anna Devanthasan fervently rejected any notion that the culprits were unwitting dupes or victims of circumstance.

Speaking after the sentencing, insipid Customs investigations manager Dominic Adams, brimming with righteous triumph, said the officers who discovered the pounamu would be celebrating the result:

Wouldn’t it be nice if cringe worthy Dominic and his minions had more success intercepting the cakes of methamphetamine entering New Zealand.

Pounamu is not a gem. It’s rock. But the Stuff(ed)/Three News coverage of sentencing is a metaphorical gem, a treasure trove of twaddle. Here’s the URL:

https://www.stuff.co.nznews/3608857/pounamu-smugglers-sentenced-unprecedented-case

Judge Richard McIlraith was clearly not to be outdone on all the virtue projection and claimed victimhood, parroting from his pulpit, “Customs are correct to point to the harm caused by your offending. I accept that this is not a victimless crime.”

Particularly Pakeha-ish Paul Madgwick joined the Pounamu Pile-On, pontificating:

Madgwick’s madness reminds me of the late Sir Bob Jones’ comment about Ngāi Tahu Elder Statesman, Stephen (now “Tipene”) O’Regan… “I knew Stephen before he was even Māori”.

Francois Tumahai then chimes in with:

Francois’ utterances meld nicely with Ngāi Tahu’s constant claim that everyone with Ngāi Tahu ancestry is quite literally descended from New Zealand’s tallest mountain, Mt Cook/Aoraki.

My favourite is possibly the breathless Three News reporter, who’s apparently got himself his very own pounamu pendant (lawfully acquired, one would hope).

All these claims of victimhood and the ritual humiliation of the Pounamu Pilferers from Peking beg the question of who the real victims are.

According to Paul Madgwick, the green rocks themselves are the victims, “It’s more than just a stone pulled out of the river. It has whakapapa”. Alternatively, according to Francois Tumahai, humans with Ngāi Tahu ancestry and pounamu are one and the same, and this strange amalgam of flesh and stone is verily the true victim - “This is who we are”. Francois may have rocks in his head, but he’s not greenstone.

Others suggest that every single human with Ngāi Tahu ancestry is the pitiable victim of Xin Li and Boyuan Zhang’s pounamu perfidy.

But assuming victimhood can be a real “thing” outside of those who fall victim to actual criminal violence or property crime, perhaps the real victims here are those who, by accident of birth, are bereft of Ngāi Tahu ancestry. Those unfortunate individuals can’t reap the rewards of Ngāi Tahu’s cunning monetization of a plentiful, naturally occurring type of rock.

Many New Zealanders missing mythical Ngāi Tahu ancestry still possess pounamu artefacts. When under attack from other Māori, Māori often cached (hid) valued items in the hope of recovering them later, only to be slaughtered. Centuries later, such caches are sometimes discovered. Other non-Ngāi Tahites have been gifted pounamu and weapons and other bits and pieces comprising pounamu.

Many New Zealanders therefore possess legitimate private collections that include pounamu. But be very careful loaning any such collection to a museum. With the best of legal efforts to retain ownership and control, museums and particularly New Zealand’s national Te Papa museum will deem your artefacts to be “taonga tūturu” and “consult” with Māori - and neither you nor your descendants will ever get your precious pounamu property back.

So, what cultural transformations are motivating all this monetized mumbo jumbo? Here are my pounamu stabs in the dark…

The Abrahamic religions, including Christianity, replaced animism in the regions where those religions came to dominate. Animism is any belief system holding that places, objects and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. Animism perceives all things – animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather, human handiworks and even words - as being animated by own agency and free will.

Christianity has its holy relics - finger bones allegedly from Jesus of Nazareth, Shrouds of Turin etc. With Christianity fading from New Zealand, I contend that Māori animism is NZ’s rising New Religion, complete with spiritually animated pounamu and holy pounamu relics.

To keep New Zealand’s unenlightened humans on the hop, Ngāi Tahu sometimes refers to itself as Kāi Tahu, on the pretext that South Island Māori tended to pronounce their “Ng”s as “K”s. Whether or not that’s true, it fits nicely with the burgeoning numbers of tribal Karens joining “Kāi” Tahu (a few of whom I’ve covered above).

Ngāi Tahu’s population was way less than 500 when the “tribe” signed the Treaty of Waitangi. Nowadays, the official number is 90,000. Ngāi Tahite Karens have clearly been breeding like South Island rabbits over the last almost-200 years.

The latest thespian to act as if he’s outraged about public service wastage of ratepayer and taxpayer money is the Wellington City Council’s Deputy Mayor, Ben McNulty.

Ben has apparently just found out that his Council paid Journey Digital, a proudly Woke Auckland-based IT outfit, $600,000 to create a website for Wellington’s new library.

Deputy Ben McN has claimed, “’A developer on Fiverr could have built something similar for 1/40th of the cost”. For good measure, Journey Digital also charged an additional $72,000 in the last year, for hosting and maintenance of the website. To all intents and purposes, Journey Digital has lucratively captured the Council’s bewildering library website.

https://www.tematapihi.govt.nz/

At any time in Ben McNulty’s almost four year stint as a Councillor he could’ve corralled his fellow Councillors into fighting the Capital City Council’s out-of-control spending. But he’s never honestly cared.

In relation to the Journey Digital Joke, an anonymous “spokesperson” for the Council announced:

Approver of Journey Digital’s website heist, Wellington Council’s Chief Operating Officer, is James Roberts.

If Wellington’s Councillors really cared about Wellington’s ratepayers, it would demand that the Council’s CEO Matt Prosser rid ratepayers of James Roberts, and if Pommie Imposter Prosser doesn’t do that, the Council should give him his marching orders too.

Wellington’s library has been a vast, bottomless cesspit of Council waste. The Council spent $220 million on needless earthquake strengthening of the library to 100% of the earthquake code (whatever that’s supposed to mean). The Council spent almost $200,000 on the opening function for the renovated library. Mayor Little, in another act of performative penny-pinching, claims to have halved the original library opening budget of $400,000.

The Council doesn’t miss a trick when it comes to squandering ratepayers’ money. Another eternal bonfire of cash is the earthquake strengthening of the Town Hall, a building that should’ve been demolished long ago. So far, the Council has blown $180 million on the upgrade, and expects to spend at least that amount again, before its merry dance around that cash-fueled fire pit ends.

But Wellington is not content to limit its largesse to long-suffering Wellingtonians. It’s sharing its love of bounteous banknote bonfires with all New Zealanders…

A 4.5km raised causeway between Petone and Ngauranga is now complete. The Māori name for the causeway is Te Ara Tupua, a name said to have been gifted by a man named Kura Moeahu.

How Mr Moeahu came to think he owned that name in the first place, in order to be entitled to gift it, is a mystery.

The causeway comprises a shared walking/cycling path and lots of rocks to protect the path, railway line and State Highway 2 from erosion by Wellington Harbour seawater and wave action. There’s also a preposterously over-engineered overbridge, complete with ornate Māori motifs.

The causeway cost $350 million, twice its budgeted cost. That’s $77.5 million per km - $77,500 for each meter.

The Crown (taxpayers), directly and through its National Land Transport Fund, paid $343 million for the causeway. The Wellington City and Regional Councils paid $7 million.

The munificently rewarded engineering and construction firms, who surely can’t believe their luck, were Downer, HEB Construction and Tonkin & Taylor. Withholding of the commercial arrangements, on grounds of “commercial sensitivity”, means the paying public have no way of knowing how or why those firms managed to get themselves paid double what was originally budgeted and what they had agreed to receive.

All this profligate spending begs the question of whether New Zealand’s Auditor-Generals have been properly performing their crucial role. NZ’s current State Auditor is Grant Taylor, appointed for a seven year term from 3 July 2025. Aunty Granty is a good bastard. His Taylor-made role under the Public Audit Act 2001 includes (quoting from section 16 of that legislation) to:

Given the chronically wasteful and spendthrift nature of the public service and local government in New Zealand, the Auditor-General has no shortage of public entities warranting examination under section 16.

An excellent target for Grant Taylor’s immediate attentions is Tiaki Wai Limited. Word is that Tiaki Wai is bound to pay Maori $50,000 per year for its name.

Tiaki Wai is set to become responsible for the Wellington region’s drinking water, wastewater and stormwater in less than a month’s time, on 1 July 2026. Wellington’s water company is a owned in equal shares by the Hutt City, Porirua, Upper Hutt, Wellington Regional and Wellington City Councils.

In its first year, Tiaki Wai expects to charge Wellington households about $2,500 each, for its “services”. Within the next ten years, Tiaki Wai intends to increase its annual charge per household to about $6,000. But of course, unchecked, Tiaki Wai’s extortionate charges will increase much more than that. I’ve touched on the terror of Tiaki Wai in previous pieces:

Tiaki Wai will be co-governed along racial lines, with a formal “Partners Agreement” and a “Partners Committee” that will include unpleasant Ngati Toa tribal leader Helmut Modlik and Kara Puketapu-Dentice.

Ngati Toa is the remnants of Te Rauparaha’s war party and subjugated wahine, ejected from the Waikato in the 1820s. Kara is the head of an organisation that represents descendants of a group of disparate Maori individuals who fled Taranaki for Wellington in the 1820’s and 30’s. What happened to Wellington’s original Maori population is unclear. Long since digested, I guess.

Tiaki Wai’s constitution is specifically designed to interfere with proper democratic accountability of Tiaki Wai’s board to its Council shareholders. In a conventional company governance structure, each shareholding Council would appoint a director to Tiaki Wai’s board. But under Tiaki Wai’s constitution, Tiaki Wai’s “Partners Committee” appoints Tiaki Wai’s directors. This brings in the Maori tribal Partners, fudges the board’s responsibility to the Council shareholders and creates a distinct risk of the Tiaki Wai Board becoming an insular, self-appointing Wellington Water Commissariat.

Career Blobocrat and Tiaki Wai chairman Will Peet has been penning all manner of piffle in defence of Tiaki Wai. But Tiaki Wai is already a bloated, self-important, dysfunctional, rent-seeking monopoly - a ravenous corporate water monster that will, without preventative action, only get worse.

Fortunately, by virtue of being a Council-controlled organisation, Tiaki Wai can and should be immediately examined by the Auditor-General, for its ineffectiveness and inefficiency, waste, and lack of probity and financial prudence.

In April, the Commerce Commission announced that it’s investigating Tiaki Waiki’s foreshadowed charging. That’s a good start, but the Commission should immediately move to exercise its statutory powers to restrict and otherwise regulate Tiaki Wai’s charges. Ubiquitous unaccountable utilities are rorting ordinary New Zealanders and skinning the general populace to the bone.

Much has been made of Chris Hipkins not disclosing Labour Party policy positions in the lead-up to the November 2026 general election.

Hipkins’ ostensible reason for not (yet?) announcing policy is that he wanted to wait until after the Government delivered its budget on 28 May. He hints that he may begin to announce Labour policies in June.

Hipkins pretend reason for remaining tight lipped is that he wants to fully understand New Zealand’s fiscal position before unleashing his pearls of political policy wisdom. But of course Hipkins doesn’t care one iota about New Zealand’s fiscal position. He didn’t care when Labour was last in power, and he doesn’t now. He’s of the Leftist Just-Print-&-Borrow-&-Tax-More-Money school of economic lunacy.

Media channels and journalists from all parts of the political spectrum have weighed in on Mummy’s Boy Hipkins keeping mum on policy. In one of my most viewed Substacks, I’ve previously covered the prospect of Hipkins becoming Prime Minister again:

Jonathan Ayling, former head of the Free Speech Union in a 28 May piece for The Herald, has argued that it would be illegitimate for Labour to regain power after the next election without revealing its policy programme. Jonathan compares Hipkins’ silence to the policy void of Sir Keir Starmer’s British Labour Party before the 2024 British election, and points out that “Starmer is now fighting for his political survival”. But no lawfully-elected Government is illegitimate simply because it’s been tight lipped on policy.

A day earlier on 27 May, in another piece for The Herald, Jamie Ensor bravely speculated that Labour may delay longer than June before beginning to announce its policies. No kidding, Jamie.

In a 27 May piece for Scoop, Leftie Doyen Gordon Campbell heavily criticized Hipkins, opening with “Chris Hipkins is testing the patience (and allegiance) of every centre-left voter”. Gordon laments that “Unfortunately, Labour has not broken away from the economic model that has held sway in this country for the past 40 years, despite the manifest failures of that approach”. Gordon bemoans that, “Labour really isn’t a centre-left party. It’s a soft right-wing party”. Gordon dwells in a different world.

Red Radio New Zealand has purported to treat Hipkins’ silence on policy seriously, as if he’s a serious political figure worthy of being taken seriously. In doing so, RNZ has reported on criticism of Hipkins’ hush from Labour’s political opponents, ACT Leader David Seymour and National’s Finance Minister Nicola Willis.

Political pundits claim that Hipkins’ cunning tactic is to make the Labour Party a “small target”; in other words, not present policies that might be amenable to criticism. And, to give Hipkins his due, Labour is New Zealand’s highest polling political party and Hipkins is probably – gulp - New Zealanders’ current preferred Prime Minister.

But for two very good reasons, all this journalistic noise about Hipkins’ muteness on policy is just vapid chatter.

First, no Labour Party policy promises from Hipkins can or should be taken seriously. He says whatever conveniently fits his ideologies, and never recants or repents.

Secondly, and more importantly, we know with a high degree of certainty – without Hipkins having to open his tight little lips - what Labour will do if it gets into power.

Labour will not return to power except in coalition with the Green and Māori political parties. And neither the Greens nor Te Pati Māori will go into power with Labour without injecting their own policies into the coalition arrangements.

To give them their due, unlike Labour, the Greens have announced numerous policy positions:

• New/increased taxes (wealth, inheritance, 45% marginal personal tax rate, 33% corporate tax rate)

• Guaranteed minimum State funded income of $400 per week

• Free GP doctors and dentists visits

• Elimination of fossil fuels in favour of solar and wind turbine power generation

• Reinstatement of the ban on oil and gas exploration

• Revocation of all fast-track mining consents

• Cutting fertilizer use (the same cunning plan that collapsed Sri Lankan’s economy)

• Heightened commitment to the Treaty of Waitangi

• General “Deindustrialization” of New Zealand

And the Māori Party has been outspoken in what they will demand if they’re part of New Zealand’s next Government:

• Constitutional recognition of a separate Māori nation, reflecting the myth that Māori did not cede sovereignty to a unitary government for all New Zealanders

• Give the Treaty of Waitangi legislated constitutional supremacy

• Make the findings of the Waitangi Tribunal binding on the Government, such that the Tribunal will become a combined paramount New Zealand Court and upper house of Parliament, with the power to strike down legislation considered to be inconsistent with the Treaty of Waitangi and its amorphous “Principles”, all under the auspices of a sinister, constitutional high priest, the “Te Tiriti Commissioner”

• Abolish all prisons by 2040

• Ban sea drilling for oil and gas

• Give Crown and Department of Conservation Land to Māori groups

• Make all personal income up to $30,000 tax-free

• Increase the top marginal tax rate to 48%

• Introduce wealth taxes

• Impose new taxes on foreign-owned companies, undeveloped land and vacant houses

Importantly, Labour has not resiled from any of its actions and plans when it was last in power. In particular, Labour has committed to reinstating a separate health system for people with Māori ancestry, under a reconstituted Māori Health Authority (Te Aka Whai Ora).

It’s also reasonable to expect that Labour will finish the job it started when last in power, to merge Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand into a massive State media propaganda machine for Liberal Progressive agendas. Fractious fractional-Māori Willie Jackson will consummate his Orwellian ambition.

With an L/G/M Coalition Government, the current Government’s promise to abolish the Woke Censorious Broadcasting Standards Authority will be unfulfilled. Media channels such as The Platform and Reality Check Radio that don’t fully subscribe to New Aotearoa Orthodoxy will be gone.

Therefore, for all practical purposes, we know precisely what Labour will do if it regains governmental power. It will restart the money-printing presses, fall in with its Greens/Māori Party coalition partners and forge ahead with the creation of a Neo-Marxist, Māori Dystopia. Western freedoms and civil liberties will be stripped. Two-tier policing will be reinstituted. New Zealand will collapse, Venezuela-style, into a failed State run by cultural and tribal elites. There is no ambiguity here. The future, if Labour/Greens/Māori win, is in plain sight.

And there’s a name for this distinct prospect of State sponsorship, curation and control of official ideological narratives. It’s Fascism. There’s a myth that Fascism is the preserve of the Right. Germany’s Nazi Party was socialist.

One decisive thing that will happen following a Labour/Greens/Māori Government is that Justice Melanie Harland will issue her judgment upholding Māori pseudo-tribe Ngāi Tahu’s claim to almost all the fresh water in the South Island. Ngāi Tahu made its Court claim in 2020, with the substantive hearing back in early 2025.

Harland has parked her judgment knowing that, if she issues it during the term of the current Government, the National/ACT/NZ First coalition will pass legislation to overrule it. But the Race Identitarian Lefties are lurking and working in lockstep, poised to hand control of South Island fresh water to Ngāi Tahu. And a Labour/Greens/Māori Party coalition Government would be simply delighted to let that happen.

Maiki Sherman has left Television New Zealand. And not before time. Her last day as TVNZ’s Chief Political Editor was 8 May. She claims she resigned, but it’s not clear that’s true. Almost certainly, she’s been paid a handsome dollop of cash out of TVNZ’s trough in connection with her exit.

Maiki’s departure came in the wake of revelations that she called fellow phony broadcaster, Stuff(ed) journalist Lloyd Burr, a faggot, at a function at Parliament hosted by Minister of Finance Nicola Willis. Word of mouth has it that Maiki’s missile was in retaliation for Lloyd telling Maiki he’d love to do something sexy to Maiki’s stud bubby ((Night)Mare Maiki has six children to Anaru MacDougall - good for them.)

In my view, calling Burr a faggot is not a sacking offence. But unfortunately, Maiki was never a credible appointment as TVNZ Chief Political Editor. She was appointed because of her Māori ancestry and proudly abused her role to cheerlead for the Māori Party, announcing on her 25 March 2024 appointment:

If Maiki Sherman is a victim, it’s only of TVNZ’s unmeritocratic Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) idiocy.

Just before being elevated from Deputy to Chief TVNZ Political Editor, Maiki produced preposterously partisan 6pm One News coverage of the current Government’s early stages in power, after a political poll. Frothing her wishful thinking, Maiki announced, “In reality the first 100 days of the coalition have been chaotic”, describing the poll as a “nightmare poll” and “mayday for the coalition”.

I’ve previously covered my complaint to TVNZ that Maiki’s parlous performance breached Free-To-Air Television Code of Broadcasting Practice (Standard 5 - Balance):

TVNZ’s response, both alarming and disarmingly honest, was that TVNZ’s Chief Political Editor needn’t even pretend to be politically balanced and that, for balance, viewers should look elsewhere – fine words indeed for the State television broadcaster:

On 22 May, a fortnight after leaving TVNZ, Maiki Sherman was awarded Political Journalist of the Year. The judges in that category, Graeme Muir and Leigh Pearson, described Sherman’s work as follows:

Maiki’s acceptance speech included the following:

The Political Journalist of the Year award is self-selecting in the sense that journalists must submit their own work in order to enter. And the field is further narrowed by the fact that the News Publishers’ Association decides who is eligible, by working for a media channel that the NPA deems to be a “recognised news/current affairs outlet” and submitting content that the NPA considers qualifies as journalism. It’s safe to say that judge Leigh Pearson’s ex-husband, Sean Plunket (Suzerain of The Platform), doesn’t get a look in.

Until this year, the NZ Media Awards were known as the Voyager Media Awards. Voyager is a company that provides broadband and other communications services. The News Publishers’ Association dumped Voyager as a naming sponsor (but kept Voyager’s sponsorship money) after Voyager’s founder and chief executive, Seeby Woodhouse, inadvertently reposted something “offensive” on social media.

I understand that, unbeknownst to him, what Woodhouse reposted (and immediately deleted) contained something pejorative of Jews. If that’s the case, then it’s ironic given the antisemitic bias readily apparent in New Zealand’s publicly funded media outlets. Lady MSM doth protest too much about Seeby, me thinks.

• TVNZ and Radio New Zealand both consistently refer to Hamas and Hezbollah as “militants” rather than terrorist organisations.

• Radio New Zealand has repeatedly edited stories from international news channels, including Reuters, to instill anti-Israel slants:

  • the headline “Israel’s Netanyahu returns with hard-right cabinet” becomes “far-right” (“far-right” being how TV3 described The Platform in its 25 May 6pm News)

  • “Most world powers deem settlements built on land captured in war illegal” becomes “The settlements are, according to international law, illegal.”

  • “Palestinian gunmen” becomes “Palestinians”; “militant” becomes “resistance”; “including eight gunmen” is removed from “10 Palestinians including eight gunmen were killed.”

• Then there’s all the credulous swallowing of Palestinian Gaza casualty figures produced by Gaza’s terrorist overlords, Hamas, as if they’re fact.

On 1 May 2024, shortly after Maiki Sherman’s appointment as TVNZ’s Chief Political Editor, TVNZ’s 1News reporter Corazon Miller announced to the audience that (and I quote), “[The International Court of Justice] so far has said it’s plausible that genocide is happening on the ground in Gaza”. What the ICJ in fact said was that Palestinians have plausible rights to be protected from genocide. Quite different.

On 14 October 2024, the discredited Broadcasting Standards Authority rejected complaints about TVNZ’s plausible genocide allegation, contorting itself to find that the coverage was not materially inaccurate or misleading.

The best approximate figures I can find indicate that up to 70,000 Gazan Palestinians may have been killed in the conflict, out of a total population in Gaza of just over 2 million people, and that at least half of those 70,000 were combatants. If we assume that 30,000 civilians have been killed, that’s about 3.5% of Gaza’s civilian population. Which, while of course awful, isn’t remotely a genocide or - given Israel’s military might and the scale of the destruction of infrastructure - any attempted genocide.

To put this in perspective, the Nazi Holocaust killed about 6 million Jews, being about two thirds of European Jews. The worldwide population of Jews has only recently recovered to its pre-WWII level of about 15 million.

Will Maiki Sherman stand for Te Pāti Māori, to help combat the ongoing genocide of Māori, as repeatedly alleged by co-Leader Debbie Ngarewa‑Packer?