Sky News Australia reports:

Enter the Women Unlimited Leadership Summit, featuring a cameo from the former New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. …

VIP tickets at $4,499 – a little over the national average monthly mortgage payment to listen to a failed leader talk about a subject of which she is totally ignorant. …

The Australian Tax Office spent $10,029 on tickets, the Department of Defence and the Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security spent $13,371 each, the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water spent $15,385 – and the gong for wasteful spending goes to the Australian Signals Directorate torching a whopping $28,975 to learn how to disrespect citizens and suppress their basic rights.

To be fair I’d rather Australian taxpayers fund a Jacinda love fest, than NZ taxpayers!

A guest post by a reader:

As a small island nation in an increasingly volatile global landscape, New Zealand faces two growing pressures: persistent economic headwinds and escalating geopolitical friction in the Indo-Pacific. While our default approach has been to maintain status quo diplomacy and steady trade policy, it is worth asking a bold, fundamental question: Is our current trajectory serving us, or is it time to consider radical integration?

This paper explores the case for New Zealand voluntarily seeking integration as the 51st state of the United States.

1. Unlocking Economic Scale & Prosperity

New Zealand’s economy is fundamentally constrained by scale, distance, and low productivity growth. Becoming part of the world’s largest economy would immediately transform our economic reality:

• Direct Access to Capital: Seamless integration into U.S. markets would eliminate bilateral trade friction, foreign investment barriers, and tariffs, triggering massive capital inflow into NZ infrastructure, tech, and agriculture.
• Currency and Purchasing Power: Adopting a global reserve currency would shield Kiwi households from import inflation and currency volatility, significantly boosting domestic purchasing power.
• Higher Wage Trajectories: Alignment with U.S. labor markets and corporate structures would drive wage parity upward over time, tackling the chronic “brain drain” of talent leaving for Australia and beyond.

2. Unrivaled Security in a Restless Indo-Pacific

Our defense network relies on partnerships, but our actual military footprint remains small. As tension builds across the Pacific, reliance on soft power alone presents growing risk:

• The Ultimate Security Guarantee: Formal statehood extends full U.S. constitutional defense protection, turning the South Pacific into an absolute security zone.
• Strategic Infrastructure: NZ would become a primary naval and air force hub in the Southern Hemisphere, bringing billions in U.S. defense sector investment and modernization to local bases.

3. Preserving Local Governance (The Federal Model)

The most common objection to integration is the fear of losing national identity. However, under the U.S. federal structure:

• State Sovereignty Remains Intact: Just as Hawaii or Alaska maintain distinct cultures and local laws, New Zealand would retain its own state governor, state legislature, and local laws over internal matters.
• Representation at the Highest Level: NZ would gain two seats in the U.S. Senate and proportional representation in the House of Representatives, giving Kiwis a direct vote on global policy, international treaties, and federal spending.

4. Cultural Continuity & Everyday Life

Integration does not require abandoning everyday Kiwi life. Under the U.S. federal framework, individual states retain broad authority over local customs and administrative choices:

• Road Rules & Driving Side: Road regulations are determined exclusively at the state level. New Zealand could legally retain left-hand driving and metric speed limits (km/h) without federal interference.
• Weather & Everyday Standards: Local media and broadcast networks would continue using Celsius (alongside Fahrenheit for U.S.-wide contexts), balancing local familiarity with national integration.
• Language & Education: Because the U.S. has no mandated federal official language, educational standards and official spelling conventions would adapt organically over time while preserving regional identity.

5. How Healthcare Would Work (The Policy Detail)

In the U.S. federal system, individual states have broad authority to run their own state-funded healthcare programs alongside federal ones (Medicare/Medicaid). For example, Hawaii passed its own state universal healthcare mandate back in 1974, and Massachusetts built its own state coverage model in 2006.

So New Zealand could absolutely maintain a state-funded, universal healthcare system funded by state taxes while being part of the U.S.

Conclusion: Starting the Conversation

This proposal is not about diminishing our history or identity—it is about securing our future prosperity and survival in a changing world order. Incremental policy tweaks will not solve New Zealand’s long-term economic isolation. It is time to seriously debate what full integration could offer the next generation of New Zealanders.

Sad to note the passing of Jim Hopkins. I had met him a few times at political retreats, and he was a hugely intelligent and entertaining guy.

Lianne Dalziel has a nice tribute that captures him well:

I often used to travel to Oamaru for the North Canterbury IHC debate. It was always a great event because of the extraordinary energy and wit that Jim brought to the occasion every single time.

He was incredible. I would watch in awe as he scribbled notes on a few pieces of paper just before taking to the stage to mesmerise the audience as he did year in year out. It seemed so effortless, and his sense of the absurd was infectious.

He was a natural talent. I also recall him taking part in celebrity debates and bringing the house down.

There are many people who will remember Jim in this role as a debater, or as a broadcaster, writer, MC, or raconteur, but this was not all by any means. His time as a councillor, first for Banks Peninsula and then for Oamaru, showed his true spirit. Behind the showman was someone with a deep passion for people and place, the essence of what makes a community.

And that was Jim: a deeply committed community advocate, who stood up for what mattered and what he believed in.

He was also a man of quite deep and philosophical political convictions, and was indeed committed to serving the community.

By Lucy Rogers

More factions in the anti-Israel movement in Aotearoa include (a) antizionist Jews and (b) communists. I think the reasons that these factions hate Israel overlap with those of leftwing postmoderns articulated in part 1 of this series: it involves hatred of “the system” and Western culture, even though Israel is not a Western country. In the case of communists in general, the reasons for this are obvious.

As for antizionist Jews, however: I suspect that this demographic are disproportionately the descendants of Holocaust survivors, and that in a proportion of survivors trauma is so extreme that it manifests in counterintuitive ways. I am thinking of for example someone like Norman Finkelstein, himself a Jewish man whose parents survived the Warsaw Ghetto, who went on to argue that the Holocaust death toll of 5-6 million Jews was grossly exaggerated by the “Holocaust grievance industry” to justify supposed Israeli atrocities.

Finkelstein is by the way a favourite amongst a faction in the anti-Israel movement in Auckland I would describe as “classical antisemites”, because given his parentage his good faith is considered to be beyond argument. I think this is flawed reasoning, because it overlooks the possible impact of generational trauma.

I suspect that survivors of the concentration camps were confronted with such a degree of evil that they and their children could not accept that the world is incapable of change. Trauma drove them to the point that they had to believe that it is possible for human beings to avoid a recurrence of the Holocaust. In turn, that drove a proportion of them into utopian movements like communism, or in a milder form hostility to “the system”, just like leftwing postmoderns. (Antizionist Jews do not identify as “white”, but I think they see sufficient cultural similarities between themselves and Europeans for the ethnicities involved to trigger off the need to pathologise everything Israel does.)

I add in passing that as a Christian, I agree with this impulse, but that our answer is different. The answer of the Christian faith is that Christ died not just to suffer the penalty for our sins but also to supernaturally transform human hearts and change us into better people through reorienting our lives towards Him. Then, in the world to come, God will rid the world of sin and evil, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Not every antizionist Jew is as extreme as Norman Finkelstein, and of course within any demographic people’s motivations are diverse. It is important not to generalise. I think intellectual arrogance is another factor influencing the more communist-inclined antizionist Jews. (Communism has rightly been described as “the disease of the intellectual”.)

I also think that people on all ends of the political spectrum (not just antizionist Jews) seek approval from their peers, and that leftwing postmoderns see having antizionist Jews on board as useful to prove that their own views on Israel couldn’t possibly be intellectually dishonest. (See for example Asher Wilson-Goldman’s appointment as a Green Party candidate.) That means there is significant social incentive for some Jewish people to express unbalanced views on Israel.

Antizionist Jews are a tragic case. There is a significant part of me which feels very deep sympathy for people who have been driven to this point after experiencing horrors that Kiwis living in the 21^st century can’t really imagine. I try not to judge, and I try to remember that intellectual honesty versus intellectual dishonesty is not a binary thing, and that people have genuine criticisms of Israel in good faith. But it is easy to say that in the abstract, when you’re not having to deal with one of these people standing in front of screaming at you, face contorted with hatred. Or when they attempt to drive you out of your job, as with Stephen Rainbow.

I have with my own eyes seen a member of an NZ-based antizionist Jewish group say on social media that she couldn’t really understand what was so bad about Stalin. I think somewhere very deep down she knows how evil he was, but she cannot accept that because it would mean abandoning her hope for a better world. I feel sad for her: I am told by people who know her that she is a lovely person.

Trauma might go some way to explaining how people get to where they’re at, but at the end of the day, we’re talking in some cases about people who are prepared to murder their political opponents. Understanding how they got there is different from it being justified. People who are so damaged that they are prepared to murder their political opponents do not come out of nowhere: the Nazi concentration camp guards will also have their own stories.

That is also not to say that all antizionist Jews are that extreme, of course: however in my view their views have arisen from something other than the honest pursuit of truth.

Radio NZ reports:

The country’s top public servant has directed the Public Service Association (PSA) to stop handing out its “change the government” campaign material in departments and agencies, saying it breaches expectations of political neutrality.

But the union said that’s an overreaction and is seeking an “urgent meeting” to make its case to the public service boss.

The PSA is effectively a branch of the Labour Party. It is now trying to turn government agencies into the same, by circulating change the government material within agencies. Worse of all, they think they have done nothing wrong.

In an email in response, PSA national secretaries Fleur Fitzsimons and Duane Leo said they disagreed that the postcards amounted to election advertising.

It’s calling to change the government and they claim it isn’t election advertising. They must think we’re morons.

The fuel crisis caused by the Middle East conflict has caused me to think a lot about how we should consider our energy needs in future.

The worst case scenario for the disruption to our energy supply was catastrophic. It wasn’t not enough petrol for cars. It was our industrial and agricultural industries grinding to a halt due to lack of diesel. It was potential food shortages due to lack of fertilisers. The worst case scenario was much more severe than anything else we have faced.

So the first priority for energy should be supply. If New Zealand doesn’t have enough energy to support our businesses and households, we face economic disaster. This isn’t just electricity, but energy. The first focus of energy policy must be ensuring adequate supply. We must ensure supply remains ahead of demand.

The second priority should be domestic resilience. We were and are dangerously exposed to what Iran and the Houthis do in foreign sea lanes. We need to increase domestic production of both energy and electricity. Where we do have to import it, we need greater storage facilities, and where possible more refining done domestically. China has 12 to 24 months of energy supplies in storage. We have a few weeks. This means more power stations, more gas and even more coal (as a backup). Also battery storage.

The third priority should be price. Before this crisis, I would have had price as first or second. But now it is more important we have surplus supply and greater domestic production and storage – even if it costs more. However price is still important. Consumers have to be able to afford electricity and fuel. Businesses that have higher energy costs will pass them on in higher prices.

The fourth priority should be environmental impact. We should have an ETS which covers the external costs of greater greenhouse gas emissions, as that encourages more renewable electricity etc. However it can’t stand in the way of supply and domestic resilience. It is better to dig up coal in New Zealand, than import it from China. 45% of our energy is from renewable sources, which is a lot higher than 15% globally. But purity is not more important the supply and resilience.

Labour managed to remove any combat ability from the Royal NZ Airforce in 2000. Now it seems they want to do the same with the navy!

The Post reports:

The Labour Party is open to the idea of a frigate-less Defence Force, saying it’s yet to take a position on replacing the ageing Anzac-class fleet.

Next they will be open to an Army without guns!

O’Connor said Labour hadn’t completely ruled out upgrading the frigates, though it was worth considering the technological advancements – and steep cost.

“We will have to maintain marine capability – how that is structured is for future discussions when in government.”

“Money always plays a factor but the commitment to our [Cook Strait] ferries is probably more important than the commitment to the frigates at this point in time.”

This is a staggering comment by Labour’s spokespersons. He is saying that they regard the Cook Strait ferries as more important than our navy, There are private ferry operators such as Bluebridge. But it is a core responsibility of the state to defend the country.

Labour signed off on the 2019 defence capability plan which included frigate replacements. They now seem to be walking away from what was bipartisan policy.

The Guardian reports:

Police are “conducting inquiries” into an image shared by Green party leader Zack Polanski on Instagram after Reform UK reported it for “inciting murder”.

The image showed a man wearing a black T-shirt with the words “we’re only making plans for Nigel”, alongside a photograph of a guillotine.

A Green party spokesperson said that Polanski “condemns the image on the T-shirt” and accepted being tagged in a post with 20 images “without realising there was more to it than he had seen”.

Nigel Farage shared a screenshot of the image on X and wrote: “This is what Zack Polanski has just posted on his Instagram.

“If I was to post anything as inciteful then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski.”

Just days after a Reform figure was bludgeoned to death by a far left activist, it is despicable for the UK Green leader to post a cartoon advocating Farage be executed. Polanski is a despicable figure.

But that doesn’t make what he did a criminal issue for the Police. It clearly was not inciting violence.

However imagine if say a prominent Green Party figure had been murdered by a far right activist, and then Nigel Farage had posted a cartoon talking about executing Polanski. There would have been 1,000 Policer complaints within an hour.

Stuff reports:

A doctor who was arrested at Wellington Airport on his way home to Australia, had his passport confiscated and was held in custody for three nights, has been allowed to return to Sydney after negotiating a deal with the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) over a $180,000 student loan debt.

Vic, who had returned to New Zealand in late May to visit his ailing father, was the 15th student loan defaulter arrested at the border in the past decade.

He and his brother Bob* owed almost half a million dollars in unpaid student loans, interest and penalties between them. …

“The IRD are treating me as the Ned Kelly of student loans, but I haven’t killed anyone,” says Vic. “In fact, I spend my working life trying to help people.”

Vic was 23 when he took out his loan; it was the first year of the scheme, he borrowed $20,000 to finish his medical degree, and then “life unfolded, both good and bad”.

I have no sympathy for Vic. He is not a lowly paid charity worker. He is a medical specialist ion Australia. The average income for a surgeon in Australia is almost A$400,000. He has been working for 30 years as a specialist and could have paid his loan off decades ago. He chose not to.

The Parole Board has not published a single decision since May 2025. They used to publish once or twice a week, yet for over a year they have not published once.

This is appalling. We are meant to have an open justice system. The Minister should send them a rocket, and not reappoint anyone who was party to the decision to stop publishing their decisions.

Also of interest is they have made their decisions less useful over time. They used to explicitly include the Roc*Rol assessment which is the risk of conviction and imprisonment. By hiding this data, it frustrates independent analysis of their decisions. But now they have gone even further and decided the public should not have access to any of their decisions at all.

UPDATE: The Parole Board has sent me this statement:

Up until May 2025, the Parole Board did publish hearing decisions that had been requested by the media on its website. After a review, the Board made the decision to stop publishing those decisions on the website while it investigated some matters that needed to be addressed. 

It did not, however, stop providing those decisions to media. Since 1 May 2025, the Board has provided more than 350 hearing decisions to the media. We do also make a note of how often these releases – or media attendance at hearings – result in media coverage, although it’s all done manually so it would be very approximate.

And a statement attributable to the Chair:

“We are unable to discuss matters under investigation, but it is our intention to resolve them as soon as possible. In the meantime, anyone is welcome to apply for hearing decisions under the Official Information Act. Since 1 May 2025, the Board has provided more than 350 decisions to the media through the OIA.”

I’m grateful the Parole Board has responded to my story. I would note though that there is a huge difference between media access and public access. As someone who has spent 25+_ years researching law and order issues, I don’t want to reply on the media to choose for me what information is made public, and to what detail. I want to read the full decisions of the Parole Board, just as I like to read full court sentencing notes rather than the media stories.

The ability to request something under the OIA is not a substitute for proactive release. One may not even know there is a decision to OIA it.

My firm belief is all criminal offending documents should be in the public domain (with redactions as needed for name suppression etc) in searchable and machine readable formats. This would be all district and high court judgments and all Parole Board decisions.

Reading between the lines, it looks like there was some unknown reason the Parole Board stopped publishing them, and it may do so again in future. I hope so, and IMO it shouldn’t take 15 months to resolve.

By Lucy Rogers

A faction of anti-Israel protesters I have encountered at the protests in Auckland are Westerners who love the idea of championing indigenous peoples against oppressive white colonisers because it has a moral payoff. They overlap with leftwing postmoderns, but are subtly different from that faction. Their primary motivation is not hostility to the concept of responsibility, but moral pride in being “allies” to the oppressed.

I have a few insights to offer about this faction. Let’s start with an analogy. If a person hears a rumour that a colleague she dislikes has done something morally wrong, she may well sincerely believe the rumour without consciously realising the fact that what she wants to believe about the person affects her willingness to believe what was said. Therefore, it is entirely possible for people to sincerely believe lies and yet to have arrived at those beliefs for the wrong reasons. Now, imagine that but also that the person hears loads of rumours over the period of many years and comes to very entrenched but sincere beliefs which also happen to be wrong.

In the same way, I have encountered severely deluded individuals at the anti-Israel protests who sincerely do not believe that Hamas engaged in atrocities on October 7 2023, and who believe that Israeli casualties were the result of Israel implementing the so-called “Hannibal Directive”. They do not realise the role of moral pride in making that narrative appeal to them. They want to believe that the Israel/ Palestine conflict is a morality play, and they are starry-eyed about the grungy freedom fighters in Hamas while perceiving Netanyahu’s government as being Nazis because they like the idea of themselves as good allies.

The problem is that when someone is that misguided, it takes intensive dialogue to show them the error of their ways. Imagine dialoguing with someone who sincerely denies the Holocaust and you’ll understand why. They do not accept the same academic sources as a normal person: imagine for example showing someone pictures of starving Jewish concentration camp survivors in a textbook, only to have someone question how the author of the textbook came to have those photos in the first place. The person then engages in ad hoc speculation about whether there was some kind of conspiracy that went into the photos being distributed to archivists, without any reason for rejecting the sources other than pre-existing beliefs.

That is, of course, if the moral pride faction are willing to dialogue with you in the first place. They perceive anyone who criticises Hamas as being a Nazi genocide apologist. That’s not conducive to sitting down with people you disagree with over dinner and talking about the issues.

The problems with the white coloniser versus oppressed indigenous peoples narrative ought to be obvious. Jews have a variety of skin colours, including black skin. 50% of Israelis come from Mizrahi backgrounds, meaning they are not from Europe. They were ethnically cleansed from North Africa and parts of the Middle East in 1948, and were forced to move to Israel. And of course, millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis in the 20^th century for not being white. But the moral pride faction either aren’t aware of this, or don’t want to know.

I comment in passing on the extraordinary consistency with which the vast array of diverse human failings all seem to find a way to turn on the Jews, in every era. It’s interesting to me that even moral pride can actually be something truly monstrous.

Simon O’Connor points out:

So Radio NZ ran a story from Reuters about the terrible hate crime attack in Berlin which saw 1 killed and 29 wounded at a pride festival.

However they removed a key detail from the story. That the attacker was an Islamist. Reuters had this in their story, yet Radio NZ removed it.

What is more useful context to NZ readers – that the car used was white, or the ideology of the attacker?

The killer in 2025 had tried to join ISIL in Syria. The German courts must be followers of TOP policy because they treated the 21 year old as a juvenile and gave him a suspended sentence. He was released just a few weeks before he ploughed into the pride festival. Maybe it is a bad idea to treat 21 year old terrorists supporters as juveniles!

The Herald reports:

Ministry officials are denying they deliberately misled a Parliament select committee by not revealing an immigration IT project had been terminated while being questioned about its progress. 

Appearing before Parliament’s Privileges Committee today, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) chief executive Nic Blakeley and former Immigration New Zealand (INZ) head Alison McDonald insisted they hadn’t intended to hide the project’s cancellation from MPs and instead had believed the matter was commercially sensitive and couldn’t be discussed as negotiations were ongoing.

Commercial sensitivity doesn’t trump misleading Parliament. Also it is not clear if it was commercially sensitive – they just said they believed it was.

Blakeley and McDonald apologised to the committee of cross-party MPs and conceded a “different approach” could have been taken; an admission at times met by exasperation by sceptical MPs, including committee chairman and National minister Chris Bishop, who at points threw up his hands and declared the project a “disaster”.

This suggests the Committee may not be in a forgiving mood.

At a March select committee meeting, McDonald, who previously headed INZ, which sat within MBIE, was asked by Labour MP Phil Twyford about the risks posed to the project.

McDonald linked delays to the fast-paced evolution of technology and referenced ongoing work to ensure the country’s identity management system was fit for purpose.

Blakeley, who had appeared alongside McDonald, echoed how the ministry was in the process of working out what the programme would look like.

The project was actually dead at this point.

However, he later conceded MPs could have been told the IT project was not continuing or officials could have briefed the committee in a private session. 

“In hindsight we should have taken a different approach.

“I agree, we got it wrong.”

Blakeley wouldn’t acknowledge his statements were inaccurate when asked during the hearing, instead accepting they were “incomplete”.

It might not have been a lie, but it was clearly misleading. The Privileges Committee should make clear how unacceptable this was, so other government departments don’t do similar in future.

The FSU released:

This Wednesday at the Ellen Melville Centre, Rob Campbell CNZM, Chancellor of the Auckland University of Technology, sits down with Free Speech Union board member Ani O’Brien to discuss whether New Zealanders holding public appointments are still permitted political opinions. Campbell lost two chairmanships over a LinkedIn post. The subject of the evening is who gets told to stay quiet.

So this public forum (one of a series being done around NZ by the FSU using Ani) is on a very interesting topic. Rob Campbell was removed as Chair of HealthNZ due to his columns attacking the then National opposition. So this discussion is actually giving a voice to a long-term left activist (Campbell) by having a discussion about whether those with public appointments should be allowed to publish their political opinions.

But left wing Auckland Councillor Julie Fairey is trying to have it cancelled.

Auckland Councillor Julie Fairey, who chairs the council’s Community Committee, has emailed council staff to query the booking. She says the venue is a Proud Centre and suggests the event may be incompatible with it. She describes the Free Speech Union as bad faith actors. Members of the public have been encouraged to write to the centre demanding cancellation.

“We could not have arranged a better illustration,” says Jillaine Heather, Executive Director of the Free Speech Union. “Wednesday’s conversation asks who decides which views may be aired inside public institutions. A councillor has stepped forward to answer.”

Fairey is trying to have it cancelled on the basis that the venue is a “safe space for our queer community”. And here is the irony. Ani O’Brien is a lesbian, and I assume Fairey is not as she is married to former Labour MP Michael Wood. So Fairey is trying to get this event closed down because O’Brien is the wrong sort of lesbian. She doesn’t share Fairey’s left wing views. Her crime is she (like most NZers) has views on gender issues that are not left-wing. They use the same logic with Maori – Karen Chhour is the wrong sort of Maori, because she its not left wing.

Julie Fairey sees her role as a Councillor to try and prevent people with non-left views from being able to use ratepayer owned facilities.

The Post reports:

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has ruled out working with Opportunity after the election.

Opportunity has polled within a percentage point of the 5% threshold in three different public polls in recent weeks. If the party made it into Parliament on current polling its support would be needed for either the coalition or the Opposition parties to govern.

Part of the party’s platform is a stated desire to work with both sides of politics.

Luxon was asked at his post-Cabinet press conference about whether he could “coalesce” with Opportunity after the election by the party’s former comms chief Sean Plunket, who now runs online broadcaster The Platform.

Luxon responded: “We wouldn’t want to be in business with people who want to increase taxes.”

Luxon was referring to Opportunity’s main policy – a land tax that would pay for a universal basic income.

Very pleased to see this. Voters can now be clear that a vote for TOP is a vote for a Labour/Green/TOP/Te Pati Maori Government.

TOP are proposing the biggest ever increase in tax and welfare that the NZ economy has seen. They would increase the tax take as a proportion of the NZ economy from the current 27.6% to 32.9%. And they would use it to turn every single New Zealanders into a beneficiary.

Another key policy is to have violent and sexual offenders aged under 25 dealt with by the youth court. So 24 year old gang rapists would get a family group conference rather than prison.

The Good

1. There has been a positive and statistically significant improvement in full school attendance for Term 2 2026 compared to the previous 10 years.

2. I was asked about Erica Standford’s engagement with schools. I therefore took the time to go through her Minister of Education diary for the last three years. I found that she has directly visited approximately 60 schools. Given that she is also Minister of Immigration I would think that this is a very good level of engagement. A case can be made that there is a low level of visits to highly challenged schools but the diary contains no information about where she has actually been invited to.

The Bad and the Ugly

3. In a couple of weeks I will receive the raw LEAVERS data for every high school in NZ. I have done this process every year for the last 8 years and it has become an important indicator on the state of the system and is purchased by many schools and education interested parties.

The 2024 LEAVERS data showed 15.9% of NZ students leaving school with no qualifications. My educated guess on a range of data through the last 7 months is that the 2025 data will show approximately 18.5% of students leaving with no qualifications and stocking up the NEETS cupboard.

It does not look good for 2026 leavers either with a 5% increase in students failing the Numeracy requirement to get any level of NCEA. Specific examples:

“Māori students’ rates were 49 percent reading, 46 percent writing, and 36 percent numeracy.”

“Pacific students’ pass rates were 41 percent reading, 43 percent writing, and 27 percent numeracy.”

A student cannot get NCEA Level 1 (i.e. even the lowest qualification) – without passing all three co-requisites and getting 60 more subject credits.

While the Minister/Ministry have been focussed on curriculum and qualifications changes they have been negligent to the students still doing NCEA – which lasts up until 2030. This will have significant run-ons to welfare dependency, lower tax take, etc.

4. All research makes it clear that socio-economics impacts education – and vice-versa.

The government’s Ministry of Social Development reports:

“a growing number of children in material hardship, reaching 13 percent between 2023 and 2024, up from 11 percent three years prior.

Children’s Commissioner Dr Claire Achmad said the government was failing to protect the rights of the 170,000 children living in poverty right now, up by 47,500 in 2022.”

Is this where NZ, in 2026, should be?

[email protected]

The Daily Sceptic reports:

In March 2020, a group of influential virologists published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine arguing that an animal spillover event probably caused the pandemic.

The article, known as ‘The Proximal Origins of Covid‘, concluded “we do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” and was hugely persuasive in stifling debate globally.

So they said a lab leak was “not plausible” which is very strong language.

But in private they said:

Three months after the paper was published, one of the authors, Professor Kristian Andersen, of the Scripps Institute, California, wrote on Slack, the communication platform: “At the end of the day, we really don’t have any hard evidence one way or the other – and especially given some of the recent evidence, we also can’t rule out that somebody actually put it in there. …

Prof Andersen said that a lab leak was 30% likely while co-author Prof Eddie Holmes of the University of Sydney put the probability at between 10 and 20%.

So in public they said a lab leak was “not plausible” while in private they said it was up to 30% probable. Disgraceful.

The Herald reports:

The Green Party is accusing Treasury of politicisation after the department suggested a more conservative reading of its own wealth tax analysis than what the Greens had used to model their “super-rich tax”. …

As recently as Friday, the Greens had been saying Treasury’s modelling was in line with their own. 

By Saturday, when the Herald presented commentary from Treasury that suggested the party’s reading of that advice was incorrect, the Greens hit out at the department itself, saying the organisation’s view was “out of step with recent research and experience”.

This is pretty appalling stuff. They incorrectly claimed that their modelling was in line with Treasury’s. They said that to give their policy credibility. And then when they finally admit they got it wrong, they then attack the Treasury modelling.

In the paper, Treasury estimated that for every 1 percentage point of wealth tax, there would be a “17.5% reduction in the in-scope wealth base” thanks to the behavioural response

That means that if wealth is taxed at 1% then 17.5% of the taxable wealth will go elsewhere, if it is taxed at 2%, then 35% would go elsewhere and so on, either offshore or lost through some other behavioural response to avoid paying the tax. The Herald, in a previous story, noted that this would suggest the Greens’ 2.5% wealth tax would see avoidance of 43.75% — although Treasury did not model a 2.5%.

This means that 44% of the (taxable) wealth of New Zealand would move offshore. Not only does this mean the wealth tax will bring in much less money than the Greens claim, it will also have a very significant impact on income tax, and employment. Imagine almost half the private wealth in NZ disappearing overseas, and try and imagine that this would not have flow on effects.

The Herald story also reveals how the Greens reacted to the Herald exposing their mistake. They did the following:

1. Demand the Herald retract the story
2. Then claimed the Treasury modelling (which they claimed they based their policy on) was out of step with recent experience
3. Also claimed Treasury didn’t understand their own modelling
4. Then claimed Treasury was politicised by telling the truth that the Green policy was not consistent with the Treasury modelling

I also remind people that 75% of the European countries that had a wealth tax have now abolished it.