The assertion that some films are now produced in countries such as New Zealand is a national security threat to the United States is, ummm, somewhat over stated.

Now the world would be a better place if different countries and cities did not compete with each other to offer rebates on film production. But no one can afford to unilaterally “disarm” so to speak. It is worth noting that US states such as California, New York and Georgia all offer subsidies similar to what countries like New Zealand and Ireland do. So having countries drop these incentives while US states do not, is unlikely.

How a tariff on so called foreign produced films would work is far from obvious. Most of the films are still owned by US companies. They don’t import the films into the US – they are US companies. And almost all films have parts of them made overseas, such as special effects etc. So what would you put a tariff on? The ticket price?

First we have a Labour Party electorate sharing an image of Brooke van Velden as a Nazi. Yes Labour Whangaparaoa think changing the threshold for pay equity claims from 60% to 70% female dominated industries is akin to gassing millions of Jews to death.

Then Chris Hipkins personally authorises an advertisement that is a blatant lie. Not a single person, including nurses, has had a pay cut or is getting a pay cut.

So Labour are resorting to smears and lies. (/sarc) If only the Disinformation Project was still here, as I am sure they would be calling them out for their extremism. (/sarc)

Mark Mitchell announced:

Police Minister Mark Mitchell today announced the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Jevon McSkimming, has resigned. 

Mr McSkimming has been on suspension since last December. Deputy Commissioners of Police are appointed by the Governor-General on the recommendation of the Prime Minister. 

Mr Mitchell said Mr McSkimming resigned today, with immediate effect, before he could be dismissed. 

“I can confirm a process had been underway for the Prime Minister to consider recommending the Governor-General immediately remove the Deputy Commissioner of Police from office,” says Mr Mitchell.

“I instructed the Public Service Commission to commence the process to remove Mr McSkimming from office after allegations of a very serious nature recently came to light, separate to the investigation that led to him being suspended.

McSkimming was appointed Deputy Commissioner in March 2023 by then Prime Minister Chris Hipkins.

Nicola Willis writes:

Having the C-word directed at me by a journalist in a mainstream publication wasn’t on my bingo-list for Mother’s Day 2025. Nor was being accused of “girl-math”.

But there you have it, that’s what was thrown at me and my female colleagues in a recent newspaper column as hopelessly devoid of facts as it was heavy on sexist slurs.

It is astonishing that a journalist would not just write a column accusing female Ministers of being c**ts, but that the newspaper would publish it.

It could only happen against National and ACT Ministers. Can you imagine if a journalist had written a column describing either of the past two female Prime Ministers as c**ts. Every other media outlet in NZ would have it as their front page story.

Also consider the hypocrisy that media have all these articles decrying sexist attacks on female MPs from people on social media, and they then publish this column! Their credibility is zero.

Nicola doesn’t respond to the insults with insults of her own, but facts:

First, the right to equal pay remains as it ever was. Equal pay has been protected in New Zealand law since 1973. It’s the simple concept that a woman doing the same job as a man should get the same pay. Nothing has changed there. I’d resign my job before I’d let that happen.

Second, no woman has had her pay cut. Twelve existing pay equity settlements including for nurses, social workers, midwives, teacher aides, school librarians, care and support workers and a range of other female-dominated workforces remain. Those settlements resulted in higher pay for tens of thousands of women, and they continue to be funded by the Government, at a cost of around $1.8 billion a year. Our Government values those workers and none of them should be scared into thinking their pay is at risk. It’s not.

So no change to equal pay, and no unwinding of the 12 settlements already made.

In 2020, a full three years later, Labour finally got around to putting its own, very loose, regime into law. Unfortunately, like almost everything Labour got its hands on, the system got way out of whack and became completely unaffordable; admin workers were being compared with civil engineers; social workers were being compared with detectives; and librarians were being compared with fisheries officers. Multiple employers were being joined to claims and some had dozens of very different jobs in scope.

What started as a pay equity regime had become a Trojan Horse for a multi-billion dollar grievance industry driven by public sector unions. It had departed a very long way from issues of sex-discrimination.

Sounds like it was done by the same people who delivered Kiwibuild and Te Pukenga!

What the Government did last week was put in law a much more workable pay equity regime that focuses squarely on the actual issue of sex-based discrimination, setting out a transparent process through which employers and employees can negotiate the question of equal value.

And one that won’t bankrupt the country by comparing admin staff to engineers.

Yes, fixing Labour’s flawed regime has released billions of dollars that we can now invest in this and future Budgets. Yes, that will mean there is more funding available for things like cancer drugs, new schools, new hospitals and other much needed initiatives. Yes, that means our Government won’t have to tax and borrow even more to balance the Budget. You can call that ‘girl-math’, I call it facing-up to financial reality.

I’m a feminist, I wear the badge proudly and I’ve upheld those values throughout our Cabinet’s consideration of pay equity issues. I’m up for a debate on how to define sex-based discrimination, but I’m not up for misleading rhetoric and seeing women MPs having their gender weaponised against them and their views dismissed. All our daughters deserve better.

I really am astonished that Stuff published the column. We all know that a column that used the same wording against prominent Labour MPs would have been killed long before publication.

This chart uses data from the Quarterly Employment Survey which was just released this week. It is adjusted for inflation.

In December 2017 the average hourly wage was $42.16 (in 2025$) and in December 2023 when Labour left office it was $42.20. So an increase of 4 cents an hour over six years! Thanks Grant.

Since December 2023, the average hourly wage has increased to $42.85, so 65 cents an hour more after just five quarters. That is equally to around $1,350 a year.

A guest post by Lucy Rogers:

I have no strong view on prisoner voting rights. I am open to arguments either way. However, I find it inconsistent of Dr Emmy Rākete to claim that a ban on prisoners voting is an “attack on democratic principles” and that in implementing such a ban the Government is “spitting on the rule of law” (see: https://www.waikatotimes.co.nz/nz-news/360670649/prisoner-voting-ban-be-reinstated-government) when she is a professing communist. Communist nations have never respected the right of anyone to vote (whether prisoners or otherwise) and that is to say nothing of the rule of law.

Similarly, a few years ago Dr Rākete’s organisation People Against Prisons Aotearoa protested the practice of solitary confinement in New Zealand prisons. In my opinion, it is likewise inconsistent for a communist to protest solitary confinement when it was a common practice in the Soviet Union and remains a common practice in communist nations like China and Cuba today. If Dr Rākete has ever condemned human rights abuses in China I have yet to hear about it (although she regularly criticises New Zealand’s failings).

The truth is that Dr Rākete is in effect acknowledging that free elections are a positive thing when it suits her to do so, while actively seeking the destruction of those self-same structures. This is typical of the intellectual and moral dishonesty of both postmodernism and communism.

A reader writes in:

All the doctors, dentists and specialists working in clinical positions for Health NZ and the Ministry of Health get generous leave and expenses for so-called professional development – which is often an overseas conference in an exotic location – flying business class and staying in a premium hotel. I have this on good authority from someone who processes the claims! This leave and generous allowance which can accumulated for two or more years.

See p25 of this collective agreement agreement:

https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/assets/Whats-happening/What-to-expect/For-the-health-workforce/Employment-relations/Employment-agreements/ASMS-SECA-2023-Signed.pdf

The $16,000 annual allowance is subject to FBT at 49.25% or 63.93% so the cost to the taxpayer is at least $23,880. Plus there is the 10 days leave which is likely to cost at least another $6,000 – so pretty much at least $30,000 a year for all these staff working for Health NZ. I understand that Ministry of Health staff who are doctors, specialists or dentists get $12,000 per year to spend similarly.

It might be argued that the allowance and leave is necessary to attract qualified staff, but surely it would be better to add a lesser amount to the annual salary and let them spend it how they like – or limit the use of the allowance to actual training costs. How much benefit is there to the NZ health system in specialists and dentists jetting off to overseas conferences? 

I don’t think anyone would disagree with doctors undertaking professional development – but this is mostly a perk with dubious benefits. I heard how a medical professional at the Ministry of Health used their allowance to go to this:

https://www.who.int/news-room/events/detail/2025/03/25/default-calendar/second-global-conference-on-air-pollution-and-health

What would be interesting is to find out what locations people have gone to using this taxpayer funded perk. I suspect there are few in poor, cold countries and many in very warm locations!

Paul Goldsmith announced:

The Government has agreed to reinstate a total ban on prisoner voting, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith says.

“Cabinet’s decision will reverse the changes made by the previous government in 2020, which allowed prisoners serving sentences of less than three years to vote.

“Restoring prisoner voting was typical of the previous government’s soft-on-crime approach; we don’t agree with it.

“Citizenship brings rights and responsibilities. People who breach those responsibilities to the extent that they are sentenced to jail temporarily lose some of their rights, including the right to vote.

“The proposed change will establish a consistent approach to prisoner voting, regardless of the length of sentence.

I believe there are only two principled positions you can take on whether prisoners vote – all prisoners can vote, or no prisoners can vote.

Having a three year threshold for losing voting rights is arbitrary. Someone sentenced to 35 months gets the vote and 27 months does not. Someone who is in prison constantly for 10 years through a series of short sentences gets a vote while someone in prison for 4 years for one sentence does not.

I don’t support mass killers such as Brendon Tarrant getting the vote. He removed the ability to vote for dozens of New Zealanders he killed, so why should he get to vote (if he was a NZ resident)?

Judges go out of their way not to sentence people to prison. The law in fact tells them to do this – choose the least restrictive punishment that is appropriate for their crimes. You generally only go to prison if you are a hardcore recidivist, or your offending was very serious. You lose your liberty and many other rights when you go to prison.

In some countries, you don;’t only lose voting rights while in prison, but for a period afterwards. I don’t support that though.

Very few prisoners actually vote, despite the Electoral Commission making it very easy for them.

At Invercargill prison there were 24 votes out of 149 prisoners.

At Otago, there were 12 votes out of 405 prisoners.

And at Waikeria there were eight votes from 433 prisoners.

Chris Bishop announced the following changes to deal with by racers and fleeing drivers:

• A presumptive sentence of vehicle destruction or forfeiture for those that flee Police, street racers, intimidating convoys and owners who fail to identify offending drivers
• Police to have more powers to manage illegal vehicle gatherings by closing roads or public areas and issuing infringements
• Increasing the infringement fee for making excessive noise from or within a vehicle from $50 to $300
• Increasing the maximum court fine for making excessive noise from $1,000 to $3,000

Will be interesting to see if the opposition parties vote for these changes!

David Taylor writes at The Spinoff:

Since 2007, New Zealand schools have had an excellent curriculum, acknowledged the world over and used successfully in diverse communities throughout the country.

Whether it is excellent or not is of course a subjective view. The objective data is below:

Now this might not be due to the curriculum. It might even be in spite of the curriculum. But when you defend the status quo, it is useful to look at what the outcomes are.

 I have already met with my principal to tell her that I am not prepared to teach, or lead people to teach, this new curriculum

Mr Taylor has every right to say he thinks the new English curriculum is crap. But he does not have the right to refuse to teach it. He suffers from the arrogance all too common where self-proclaimed experts think their views trump democracy.

If he refuses to teach the curriculum in a public school, then he can’t keep his job. Hopefully he can find employment elsewhere.

The Herald reports:

Rotorua woman Santana Tonihi’s criminal record stretches 13 pages, with most of the 129 convictions being for stealing from shops. …

Judge Skellern gave a starting point on the burglary of the television charge of eight months’ jail and added another four months for all other charges. 

She then discounted the 12-month prison sentence by 25% for Tonihi’s guilty pleas but added another two months for her previous convictions and a further month for offending while on intensive supervision.

That gave an end sentence of 12 months’ imprisonment, but given she had already served about five months in custody, it meant she only had one month left.

A mere two month uplift for 129 previous convictions. That is ridiculously light. It is meaningless.

How about this. Say you get one month extra in prison for each previous conviction?

The Herald reports:

Senior Minister Erica Stanford sent official briefings to her personal email account – an action discouraged by Parliament’s Cabinet Manual. 

Stanford says she forwarded the emails so she could print them at home or at her electorate office, often while being away from Wellington for work. 

Her electorate office printer was only connected to the Parliamentary server last month, she said. 

Parliament’s Cabinet Manual – a rulebook for Government ministers – says “as far as possible” ministers should not use their personal email accounts or phone numbers for ministerial business.

Forwarding yourself an e-mail so you can print it out at home, is not using a personal account for ministerial business. That would be if you were e-mailing other people about ministerial business – not e-mailing yourself.

The purpose of the rule is to make sure ministerial correspondence is captured by government systems. It is not to make it hard for a Minister to print out a document.

Sometimes people who knew a Minister before they became an MP may e-mail them on their personal e-mail address. If it relates to official business, then best practice would be to cc any reply to your official address so it is captured by the DIA system.

This is much ado about nothing.

UPDATE: Roger Partridge has a great take here.

In the recent UK local elections, the number of Councillors elected by party was:

1. Reform 677
2. Lib Dems 370
3. Conservatives 319
4. Labour 98
5. Greens 79

In the latest average of the parliamentary polls, the seat projections are:

1. Reform 245
2. Labour 177
3. Conservatives 94
4. Lib Dems 60
5. SNP 43
6. Greens 4

Prime Minister Nigel Farage is a distinct possibility.

As the budget nears National/Act/NZF are at pains to say that they are “pulling every leaver”.

Prior to the election they made significant promises to reduce the size/spend of bureaucracy. So far they have comletely failed.

1. Our government education spend for 2024-25 is $20.5billion (exclusive of tertiary education). Over the last 15 years this is associated with a significant decline in the education achievements of our young people.

2. 31.3% of the public sector work-force is for education (150,800 employees).

3. This is all paid for by taxpayers.

4. The Ministry of Education budget – after excluding property (where they are known to be incompetent) and frontline services for learning support – is $547million.

5. The National and ACT parties promised to reduce the Ministry employment of “full time equivalents” to 2,700 (the number before the recent Labour government). Halfway through their term the Ministry FTE is at 3,949 with a “head-count” of 4,217 employees (which does not include teachers).

There are HUGE saving available here as so much money is wasted on a completely disfunctional Ministry.

It should also be noted that the oversight of the MOE by the Minister and State Services has not been able to appoint a new Secretary for Education despite the old one walking out the door in October 2024. Ellen MR has just been re-appointed as the “acting” Secretary for Education for another year. Hardly a decisive desion by Minister Standford who has been playing favourites on her emails. Very little has changed at the higest levels of the Ministry of Education.

6. Funding to improve attendance is: $34,000,000 / 20,500,000,000 -= 0.17% of the education spend. Attendance and the 10,000 children enrolled nowhere are the biggest problems for our system.

7. The failing Charter School roll-out is only $123,000,000 – $30,000,000 on the Charter School Agency – both over four years = 0.12% of the education spend. Not a chance of being “game-changing”.

Justine Mahon – lead of the CS Authorisation Board has finally admitted that a HUGE part if their decisions for new CSs was to be “cost effective” as they only had $10million to spend in the first 18 months. They will have a tiny amount to spend until the end of 2026.

8. In term 4 of 2024 the overall attendance by school students in NZ was 58.1%. This is marginally up on T4 2023 but it was 64.7 in 2021.

For Maori the full attendance figure was 44.1%.

For Pasifika the full attendance figure was 42.4%.

It makes very little difference to improve curriculum if the children who need that the most are not there.

Erice Standford has an education system that is on fire and is pointing the hose at the building next door.

Alwyn Poole
[email protected]

At Patreon (paywalled) I analyse the Trump effect on the Canadian and Australian elections, and whether it means that National in New Zealand could also head down in the polls because of a perceived association with Trump.

A post from PaulL, regular reader and sometime poster.

I regularly read about productive farmland being used for solar farms. I see people questioning why productive farmland would go into solar.

I’m generally a free market kind of guy. I think land should go into it’s most productive use, and we can tell it’s most productive use by how much people are prepared to pay for it. If a solar energy company can afford to pay more for land than a dairy farmer, then by definition the land is more useful in solar panels than it is in dairy farming.

And yet, the market here isn’t actually efficient. So I would suggest that the government could assist to do things better. And I know some of what I’ll suggest smacks a bit of central govt planning, but I’m not totally averse to that where there are legitimate co-ordination problems (or, in fact, where co-ordination may be illegal).

In a relatively short conclave Cardinals have elected Robert Francis Prevost as the 267th successor of Saint Peter as the Bishop of Rome and supreme pontiff.

Ten facts about the new Pope:

• He is the first American Pope. American has the 4th largest number of Catholics in the world after Brazil, Mexico and the Phillipines.
• He is the first Pope from an English speaking country since Adrian IV of England in 1154.
• He grew up in Chicago and was a priest there but was posted to Peru where he became Bishop of Chiclayo
• He was only made a Cardinal in 2023
• He is only 69 years old, considerably younger than the two Popes before him
• He speaks English, Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese, and can read Latin and German
• He has worked as a Maths teacher
• He was head of the influential Vatican Dicastery for Bishops which advised the pope on bishop appointments globally.
• He is an Augustinian friar and was prior general of the worldwide order
• His father was a US Navy veteran of WWII

This is a very very disappointing tweet from Peter Davis, who I normally find to be much more thoughtful.

He is basically saying that Jews in Wellington deserve to have grafitti scrawled against them, because of the actions of the Israeli Government.

Would he excuse graffiti that says they hate Hindus because of the actions of the Indian Government? Or grafitti that says they hate Americans because of the actions of the US Government?

Conflating Jews with the Israeli Government is in itself classic anti-semitism. While the vast majority of Jews support the right of Israel to exist, there is a huge variation of opinion about the current Israeli Government, the war in Gaza, settlements, boundaries etc. Jews have a religion in common, but are very politically diverse.

So for Davis to justify graffiti that spreads hatred towards Jews on the basis of what the Government of Israel does is not at all good.

Benjamin Netanyahu won’t see graffiti in Wellington. It won’t influence him. The people who will see it is Jewish kids and Jewish families who live in Wellington and have to put up with this racism.

The Electoral Commission has published the donation returns for 2024. The level of overall donations is:

1. National $4.89 million
2. Labour $1.63 million
3. Greens $1.59 million
4. ACT $1.46 million
5. NZ First $758k
6. TPM $54k

The breakdown by size is interesting.

Only 33% of National’s donations come from those who donated over 5,000. 43% came from small dollar donors and 24% from medium level donors.

NZ First and the Greens are in fact the two parties that are most reliant on large donors.