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.

RNZ reports:

National has pledged to extend paid parental leave from 26 weeks to 30, if re-elected.

The party is also proposing to revive a policy that allows parents to take some or all of their leave at the same time.

The second part of the policy is arguably more important than the first. There can be huge benefits in having both parents at home during the first few weeks, or even couple of months. Allowing both parents to take paid leave at the same time, means each couple can choose what works for them. It could be:

• Mum takes 30 weeks paid leave
• Mum and Dad take 15 weeks each
• Mum takes 22 weeks paid leave and Dad takes 8 weeks

National has proposed changing the entitlement incrementally, increasing it to 27 weeks in 2027, 28 weeks in 2028, and then 30 weeks in 2029.

Labour left us a structural deficit, so any new policies that cost money have to be phased in over time, so that economic growth can fund them.

By Lucy Rogers

I have previously criticised the anti-Israel movement for being intellectually dishonest, and provided examples: https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2025/10/guest_post_stop_accusing_anti-israel_westerners_of_antisemitism_and_start_accusing_them_where_appropriate_of_intellectual_dishonesty.html At the time I did not cover why people are intellectually dishonest about this issue, which is a question I would now like to explore. The answer differs according to the faction of anti-Israel protester in question. 

The first faction are leftwing postmoderns. Postmodernism in its leftwing form is obsessed with various oppressed minorities: certain favoured ethnic minorities, LGBTQI+, women, disabled people, Muslims, etc. (If you’re a transgendered lesbian Muslim woman in a wheelchair and a native American Sioux you win the Oppression Olympics.) The political right tends to refer to these people as “woke”, although I think “postmodern” is a more appropriate and less dehumanising term.

I used to think that what postmoderns want more than anything else is marijuana and sex without babies. I have come to realise that I am wrong. What postmoderns want more than anything else is the absence of moral responsibility. Which is to say: leftwing postmoderns want to be able to do whatever they want and have the consequences be the fault of “the system”. (Rightwing postmoderns, by contrast, just want to be able to do whatever they want and not have social obligations to their neighbours.)

I realised this when I was thinking about the Green Party’s contradictory approach to prohibition of tobacco and marijuana respectively. The reason for the contradiction is that the respective policies make different moral points. Treating marijuana use as a “health issue” means that users are officially labelled victims of the system who are not responsible for their own choices. That in turn makes a moral point about responsibility for our actions which has wider application to other social issues as well.

On the other hand, there has been a social consensus that tobacco should be legalised for some time, which means that it is no longer helpful to make an ideological point about moral responsibility for our own actions. Instead, it is helpful to make a different ideological point: that the government has an important role to play in bossing us around for our own good. Cannabis use isn’t what leftwing postmoderns actually want per se: rather, the respective policies make a desired moral point.

Leftwing postmoderns want to believe that their every failing is the fault of the system and that they are victims of circumstance. They are terrified of responsibility. They want to have sex with whomever they wish or smoke whatever they wish or do whatever they wish and have it be someone else’s fault.

It’s the same reason that so many people are marriage-phobic. They may end up getting married, but only on their own terms: they’re not prepared to refrain from casual sex or cohabitation beforehand, or to avoid no-fault divorce, not primarily because they’re reluctant to forgo sex (although they are) but because accepting that these things are wrong would entail accepting the concept of moral responsibility, which is even worse than going without sex.

Of course, this means that they have to spend their lives raging against the system and sticking it to the man, while never practising self-examination and trying not to think about the fact that deep down they know full well that although of course circumstances can be hugely mitigating and that judgementalism is wrong that at the end of the day we still make moral choices. (If they didn’t know that, they wouldn’t need to be intellectually dishonest.)

How does this translate into unbalanced hostility to Israel? I think the answer is that in their view, Jews count as white. (This isn’t true: Jews were murdered for not being white in the 20^th century, but let’s not let facts get in the way of a good story.) Accordingly, they see the Israel/ Palestine conflict through the lens of white colonisers oppressing indigenous Palestinians. That means that they demonise everything Israel does and do not want to acknowledge complexity in the conflict, because Israel in their eyes represents an ideology and social structures which they have a vested interest in believing the worst of.

The reason they don’t take an obsessive interest in (say) Tibet is that criticising Chinese imperialism doesn’t make the desired moral point, because they don’t live in Chinese society but in Western countries. They want to believe the worst specifically of the social structures in which they live, not of colonialism in general. Jews, as I have said, are considered Western.

The result is that leftwing postmoderns fervently believe that they are not antisemitic, and repeat ad nauseam that criticism of the Israeli government is not in itself antisemitic, while deliberately ignoring the fact that their views of Israel have everything to do with the ethnicities involved, and knowingly ignoring the complexity of the conflict.

Stuff reports:

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says the US decision to impose new 12.5% tariffs on New Zealand products is “extremely disappointing” and will drive up costs for businesses.

US President Donald Trump earlier announced he was going ahead with new double-digit tariffs on dozens of US trading partners just as the clock runs out on stopgap levies he imposed after a stinging defeat at the US Supreme Court.

The new taxes – of 10% to 12.5% on imports from 60 countries – account for 99% of US imports. The Trump administration accuses the 60 countries of inadequately enforcing bans on goods produced by forced labour, following an investigation by the US government.

New Zealand is on the list, and faces a rate of 12.5% for the new tariffs – although it appears beef and kiwifruit, two of our big exports, are excluded. Dairy and wine – another of our two big exports – do not appear to be excluded, however.

These tariffs will also probably be struck down as unlawful. They are not based on any objective or rational evidence. But in the interim it just dries up prices for US consumers and reduces income for NZ exporters.

Stuff reports:

Labour leader Chris Hipkins wasn’t happy when new ACT Party candidate Paul Henry said he’d need to “shoot” Hipkins, during a game of “shoot, shag, marry”.

His other options were Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and NZ First leader Winston Peters, who, given the options, he’d “shag”.

Hipkins said Henry wasn’t a serious candidate.

“New Zealanders expect leaders who take their responsibilities seriously, not treat politics like a circus audition,” he said. …

A few years ago, Hipkins answered a very similar question – as did a leader from every political party.

The Project played a slightly more toned down version of the same game with the leaders of every political party ahead of the 2023 election. They asked: “Kiss, marry, kick?”

With the options of David Seymour, Luxon and Rawiri Waititi.

“Kick David Seymour, that’s really a no brainer,” Hipkins said.

The hypocrisy is almost laughable. A yet to be ranked ACT candidate plays the game and Hipkins calls it a death threat and that Henry is now a serious candidate.

Yet Hipkins himself played almost exactly the same game as the incumbent Prime Minister!

As many readers will know 78 year-old Ann Widdecombe was (allegedly) murdered by a 28 year old. The murder is extremely disturbing, but so has been the Police statements on it.

• The allowed her management team to announce her death, with no reference to the fact it was a homicide
• They then said there was “nothing to suggest” the attack on her was politically motivated or terrorism.
• Even after they arrested the alleged killer, they still said “there is nothing to suggest Widdecombe’s death was politically motivated”

The 28 year old, Joshua Kerry, entered her house, hit her 21 times in the head with a hammer, then tipped her from her chair and stole her wallet. It was a brutal attack, which she would have no way to resist. This was captured on her security camera.

He drive 300 miles to kill her. He is or was a regular on Reddit and there is no doubt he hated Reform and Nigel Farage. Where are all the articles decrying the far left extremism?

What makes this even more chilling is she wasn’t a current MP, or even a candidate. All political violence is loathsome, but those standing for office are slightly more aware of the risks and can take some steps to protect themselves. She was killed simply because of the party she supported. She would never ever have imagined someone would drive 300 miles to murder her for her views. She would have no access to private or public security.

Audrey Young writes:

The other reason that National has reason to be disgusted at New Zealand First this week is because it is reinventing history in terms of its role in the ban on new oil and gas exploration in 2018.

Peters, in a press conference after his conference speech announcing $1 billion would be used to map New Zealand resources, said that neither he nor Shane Jones had been consulted over the ban. The proof of that, he said, were the pictures that showed Shane Jones with his hand covering his face when then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced it in New Plymouth.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The announcement, on April 12, 2018, was in Wellington. Shane Jones put his hand to his face at the very end during an innocuous comment by Ardern.

What’s more, Jones said he backed the PM 100%, that no one should have been blindsided by the announcement and that his leader, Winston Peters, had been leading the negotiations with Labour over the package. …

There is no doubt that New Zealand First did not embrace Labour and the Greens’ ban on new oil and gas exploration. And for about a month it negotiated to mitigate the effects of it on employment in Taranaki.

There is no doubt that it now bitterly regrets its involvement and that it happened.

The Greens had campaigned on it, Labour had not. The ban was not part of the coalition agreement New Zealand First signed with Labour. It came four months into their term of Government.

But New Zealand First was involved. The reality is that it did not veto the move, when it had the power to do so.

It was not blindsided by it. It is trying to rewrite history.

The ban was not in the NZF coalition agreement with Labour. They could have simply refused to back it, and there would not have been the votes for it. But they decided to back it. That is a fact.

The Herald reports:

A Labour MP is accusing Act’s Paul Henry of making a “death threat” against leader Chris Hipkins in a radio game, but the former broadcaster says there was no “violent rhetoric” and it was “plainly humour”. 

Hipkins told the Herald: “With political leaders around the world actually being shot and killed, Paul Henry should know better”.

“New Zealanders expect leaders who take their responsibilities seriously, not treat politics like a circus audition.”

But Henry said he was “completely dumbfounded by their reaction”.

The new Act candidate was on Radio Hauraki this morning and asked to play a “quick game of shoot, shag, marry”.

It’s a variation of a parlour game in which participants are asked to choose between three people, in this instance, one to shoot, one to shag and one to marry.

The options given to Henry were Labour leader Chris Hipkins, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters and Prime Minister and National leader Christopher Luxon. 

“You’ve got to shoot Hipkins, haven’t you?” Henry said. “There is no question … You’ve got to shoot Hipkins. You’ve given me three choices, to be fair.”

Hipkins looks like a humourless pillock when he labels this a death threat. It does a disservice to those who get real death threats.

I suspect the vast majority of NZers have played shag marry kill, often with famous people. Hell, I’ve been at a party where people (most in attendance were female) played it, going through each parliamentary caucus.

One can certainly have a view that MPs and candidates should avoid playing the game on radio and television broadcasts. Australian PM Anthony Albanese got into trouble saying his choice for date, shag, marry would be Kylie Minogue for all three. It’s not compulsory to take part.

But to label Paul Henry’s comments as a death threat, as Ayesha Verall has is hysterical nonsense. It has been noted on X that a Green Party candidate has said far far far worse, and the media have basically ignored him.

The Herald reports:

Stuart Nash has confirmed he has resigned as a New Zealand First candidate, after backlash over his comments had become “a significant distraction”.

It comes after Nash accused National’s Napier MP Katie Nimon of being “lazy” for taking maternity leave. Nash is a former Labour MP and minister and has a string of controversies to his name.

Best comment comes from Ben Thomas:

This is the latest data. Regular attendance dropped 16 percentage points or 25% from 2017 to 2023. A disaster. Since 2023 it has increased 17 percentage points or 37%. In real terms there are 157,000 more students now regularly attending school.

For Māori students regular attendance dropped 17 percentage points or 34% from 2017 to 2023. What do you think that will do to equity!. Since 2023 it has increased 16 percentage points or 47%. In real terms there are 15,000 more Māori students now regularly attending school.

This is the proportion of students absent for more than 12 weeks a year – so all but dropped out. It peaked at 14% under Labour, and even worse was at 24% for Māori students. Labour will die in a ditch over co-governance of water, but allowed 1 in 4 Māori students to drop out of school.

There are 39,000 fewer students chronically absent in June 2026 than in June 2023. Again a great achievement.

Of course still a long way to go, but the trend is very very clear.

Readers should click on the tweet above and read it in full. Basically he makes the following points:

• Our current global population of 8+ billion people is only alive because of a supply chain infrastructure built up over the last 60 years
• The sulfuric acid that extracts phosphate (for fertilizer) from phosphate rock ores, for example, comes from pulling excess sulfur out of “sour” crude oil, we’re facing a loss of the infrastructure that keeps 8+ billion people alive on this planet.
• If you lose 25% of the global supply of these critical substances, you will sooner or later lose 25% of the global population: 2 billion people. The Persian Gulf, by the way, supplies roughly about one-third of the world’s fertilizer that traded in the global marketplace.

So the author is saying that an accidental byproduct of the Iran War could be a loss of fertiliser, which is critical to keeping 8 billion people alive.

What I want readers to focus on, is that it is official Green Party policy in NZ to ban this very same fertiliser. What is a potential disastrous byproduct of the war in Iran, is official Green Party policy.

What makes this worse is that this nihilistic lunatic policy has actually been tried in Sri Lanka. It saw:

• A 50% to 60% reduction in some crops harvest
• A 29% of tea crops – their major income earner
• A 7% reduction in overall national income
• A 20% income reduction for farmers

The Herald reports:

Officials warned the Government that its move to put the English name before the Māori name in its official branding could cause “material harm” to the Crown-Māori relationship.

The branding was officially updated in May, putting “New Zealand Government” before “Te Kāwanatanga o Aotearoa”.

Advice on the change, presented to Public Service Minister Paul Goldsmith by Public Service Commission officials, said it would be “likely to be perceived as de-prioritising te reo Māori and diminishing the Crown’s active protection and partnership obligations”.

Officials claimed it could cause “material harm to the Crown-Māori relationship”.

What a load of bollocks. This is the woke virus that has infested much of the public service. They say that putting the language used by 99% of NZers ahead of the language used by 3% of NZers will cause material harm.

Stuff reports:

A former political figure involved in a late night bar incident can now be named.

Jack Brazil, a former Green Party candidate and high profile activist, appeared for sentencing before community magistrate Sarah Steele in the Dunedin District Court on Friday afternoon.

Brazil, 33, was originally charged with assault, behaving disorderly and escaping police custody following an incident at a central city Dunedin bar on Friday, November 27, according to court documents.

Our Jack has done more than merely assaulting someone and escaping police custody.

His lawyer, Sarah Saunderson-Warner confirmed he was no longer seeking name suppression, but opposed in court media applications.

She noted Brazil’s volunteer work, and his wider work in the community.

Despite not working, he “was not opposed to community work”.

Of course he doesn’t have a job!

Brazil, a former Green Party candidate and high profile New Zealand activist, was shot in the liver on Littlebourne Rd, near Otago Boys’ High School, in the early hours of April 16, in 2023.

That investigation remains open, with police believing the shooting was an “isolated incident”.

There is a story there waiting to come out.

He left New Zealand in the months after the shooting, and was charged with the burglary of a Footlocker store in central Dublin during riots in the city.

The Greens really do pick therm well!

Stats NZ reports:

New Zealand’s consumers price index (CPI) increased 4.1 percent in the 12 months to the June 2026 quarter, according to figures released by Stats NZ today.

The largest upwards contributor to the annual inflation rate was petrol, up 27.5 percent.

“Higher petrol prices accounted for almost a quarter of the 4.1 percent annual increase,” prices and deflators spokesperson Nicola Growden said.

If petrol and diesel prices had not changed, the CPI would have risen 2.9 percent in the 12 months to the June 2026 quarter.

So while it doesn’t make things easier for consumers, good to know it would have been under 3% without the Iran war.

It is clear – from school feedback and an Auditor General’s report that the current school lunch programme is beset with issues.

Societally it is controversial as our history in this area has been parents providing the lunch box. On a Friday, when I was at primary school, you could order fish’n’chips and you could get plate sized potato fritters for 5 cents (still addicted). I was completely fired up when I returned home one day, as a boy called Ronald had beaten me up and stolen my lunch. I was around 8 years old. I wanted him sent to prison for life (or worse). My mother’s response was to make two lunches the next day.

In terms of the high performing countries on international data – NZ is an outlier (along with Australia) for not providing high quality school lunches.

Almost every European country offers school lunch programs. Finland, Sweden, Croatia and Estonia provide universal, free daily meals to all students. Most other nations rely on mixed systems where the government subsidizes meals, charges income-adjusted fees, or partners with local authorities to offer catered lunches. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, the UK, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Poland and Romania provide targeted meals at a range of levels and eligibility.

Outside of Europe. Singapore operates widespread school canteens and offers meal subsidies for students from lower-income families.

Canada is rolling out a National School Food Program. The government has agreements with all provinces and territories to expand local school meal and snack initiatives.

Japan has a highly structured, nationwide school lunch program that operates in over 99% of public elementary and junior high schools, serving freshly made, nutritionally balanced meals designed by licensed nutritionists.

China has a large-scale school lunch system, highlighted by the nationwide Nutrition Improvement Program. It provides free or highly subsidized, nutritionally balanced lunches to over 37 million students, particularly in deprived rural areas.

Taiwan has a widespread school lunch program, but it is decentralized. Each city and county operates its own school lunch administration, determining subsidies, menus, and whether lunches are free for students.

South Korea has a highly regarded universal free school lunch program that provides daily, freshly prepared, nutritious meals to over 5 million elementary, middle, and high school students.

Particularly on Finland – where the effects of the lunch programme have been deeply researched:

“The school meals system plays an essential role in Finland’s educational system. Equal access to education and free-of-charge school meals has been one of the key factors in supporting economic growth and transforming Finland into a knowledge based society. Initially, school meals were introduced to address post-war poverty and malnutrition. For more than 75 years, Finland has been offering school meals for all students – the longest-running free-of-charge school feeding programme in the world which is funded with the government and municipal taxes. The funds for operating costs are disbursed directly to the education providers.”

“A school meal is considered as part of the national core curriculum, providing the pupils not only with a free of charge, balanced meal every school day, but also with food-related knowledge and skills. School meals play a key role in food education in school and the promotion of the well-being of the whole school community. The objective of food education in school is to master healthy and sustainable everyday food choices, the diversity of food alternatives and their significance, and to aim at food competence.”

The effects in Europe:

– Reduced Absenteeism: Studies from the UK and broader Europe show that free school meals—particularly universal programs—significantly reduce absences. This is heavily attributed to both financial savings for struggling families and improved health-related immunity and nutrition.

– Academic & Long-term Benefits: Long-standing programs, such as those in Sweden, have demonstrated measurable impacts, including increased years of schooling and a higher likelihood of students pursuing university education.

As I have said before. If we are going to have a school lunch programme, and I think we should, we have to do it well. NZ needs to be pulling every possible leaver to improve the education provision for all children.

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