Stuff fact checks TOP’s claims, and Top doesn’t come out of it with any credibility.

• TOP claimed their tax package would see Farmer Kev better off by $48 a week. In reality the average farmer would be worse off by a massive $575 a week!
• TOP claimed Shane and Katie who earn $205k between them and own a home with $1.5 million land value would be $18 a week better off. In reality they would be $2 a week worse off. And when Katie goes back to FT work, they would be $84 a week worse off

A speech in Parliament by Green MP Steve Abel which is so deranged, that it should make him inadmissible for ministerial office. In response to the bill which simply states climate change policy is to be formulated by Parliament, not the courts, Steve Abel said:

There’s a concept that was conceived by a philosopher called Hannah Arendt. She came up with the concept of the “banality of evil”. She described the character of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi who participated in the Holocaust. It strikes me that those corporate bosses today—and, frankly, complicit politicians—are a truer form of the banality of evil, because though they will never personally come so close, as Eichmann did, to transporting human souls to the gas chambers, collectively their actions are far more consequential. They are gassing our whole planet towards an inconceivable human and animal death.

This is simply outrageous. The media should be all over this. He actually says Government MPs who vote for this law are more evil than Adolf Eichmann. It is an absolute insult to victims of the Holocaust that he trivialises their slaughter by saying Government MPs are comparable to Eichmann.

I have just completed the annual data process I do that covers the LEAVERS data for every high school – as well as data aggregates. The raw data becomes available from Education Counts (a part of the Ministry of Education) in August. School leavers are those that leave a school during or at the end of the school year – from any level – and do not enrol in another school. It is a far more accurate indicator set than the cohort (Year Level) data that comes out in February.

I have made some significant improvements to the process from previous years. Please see the listings of the Excel sheets below. 

Key Uses: 

– Schools use the data for Reporting to BoT, Staff, Parents & Community.

– Schools use the data information for Goal setting and planning.

– Schools use the data for improved professional development contact between schools through seeing examples of positive change. Some school principals have based sabbaticals around the data showing clear examples of remarkable achievement/improvement.

– Schools, education interested organisations, politicians, researchers, media, parents use the data for improved individual and collective understanding of the NZ High-School system at this time of rapid change.

The seventeen sheets cover:

1. Base data by School Number

2. Base data by EQI

3. Listed by Size

4. Listed by L2 NCEA for leavers 2022 – 2025

5. Listed by L3 NCEA for leavers 2020 – 2025

6. Listed by UE for leavers 2018 – 2025

7. Listed by L3 NCEA to UE for leavers gap – 2028 – 2025

8. Listed by student retention until 17yo 2018 – 2025

9. Listed by Progression to L7+ degree study 2019 – 2024

10. Listed by UE results in EQI 10ths – 2021 – 2025

11. Listed by UE results with EQI coded – 2021 – 2025 (highlighted those doing well from higher EQI situations)

12. STATE only: Listed by UE results with EQI coded – 2021 – 2025 

13. National Measures – Attendance & UE Means by EQI 10ths (2022 – 2025)

14. Broad Sector Measures – Overall, Ethnicity, Gender, School Governance, School Type, Geographical Area.

15. Boys’ School Groups (Super 8, South Island) – UE and Retention 2024 – 2025.

16. UE Data for 59 Impressive Improvers – 2023 – 2025.

17. Data Summary and Goal Setting Sheet for Schools to Use. 

If you order the data for professional use I will send it immediately (with an invoice that can be paid in your payments cycle). The cost is $400+ GST.

For private use – a donation is a good thing – in recognition of the work and value.

In the next couple of weeks, I will detail some of the interesting aspects – for example – the huge improvements over the last three years from schools such as Auckland Girls Grammar, St Catherines (Kilbirnie), St. Paul’s Ponsonby, McAuley High School, etc.

Alwyn Poole
[email protected]

A criminal defence lawyer did the following:

• took a boxing match too far with his son in April 2022, striking him repeatedly after knocking him down, despite the boy’s pleas to his dad to stop
• removed his son from hospital against medical advice
• delayed the case for four years by ignoring timetabling for submissions
• Avoided summons
• Filed numerous meritless pre-trial applications
• showed no remorse according to the judge

Yet despite all that, he got permanent name suppression.

UPDATE: Even worse. I missed he had 10 previous convictions!! And he is a lawyer!

Te Pati Maori has announced the following as part of their tax policy:

• A top marginal tax rate of 48%
• GST of 15%
• A 2.5% tax on assets above a certain threshold
• An increase in the company tax rate by 5%

Let’s say you are a very high wealth NZers with $100 million of assets. Let’s say they produce income of 5% of their value, or $5 million a year. Very roughly the tax they would pay would be:

• Income tax of $2.4 million
• GST of say $350k
• Asset tax of $2.5 million

This would see that high wealth NZers paying an effective tax rate of over 100%. Now unless they are a moron, they would simply leave NZ. And then the actual tax paid in NZ would zero.

Stuff reports:

Immigration Minister Erica Stanford has expressed support for MBIE’s chief executive, hours after he was found to have deliberately misled a select committee.

The Privileges Committee found on Wednesday that Nic Blakeley and MBIE’s former deputy secretary in charge of Immigration NZ, Alison McDonald, deliberately misled the Education and Workforce Committee when answering questions about the failed Immigration Capability Biometric Upgrade project (BCU) in March.

“The ministry would have been aware that in choosing to answer as it did it was certain that the committee would have been misled … on this basis, we find that the ministry deliberately misled the Education and Workforce Committee and, in doing so, committed a contempt,” the committee found.

I don’t understand how this is survivable. I’m sure Blackly and McDonald are very good people who made an uncharacteristic error of judgment. But unless there is a serious consequence for misleading a select committee, other public servants will potentially do likewise.

Erick Erickson writes:

The good news for Democrats is that the President has started a trade war with Canada. He just imposed new tariffs and says more are coming in January. Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister and an actual trained economist, which is more than you can say for the people whispering tariff policy into the President’s ear, says his country will reciprocate. He is not bluffing. He has twenty billion dollars in counter tariffs ready for the day after Labor Day, which is the day Americans start paying attention to the midterm election.

The President says we have a trade deficit with Canada and that this proves the Canadians are taking advantage of us. The truth is we import a lot of oil from Canada. Take the oil out of the ledger and Canada runs a deficit with us. American crude is light and sweet. Before the fracking revolution we could not get to most of it, so our refineries retooled to run heavy crude from elsewhere. Now we sell our light sweet crude abroad and buy heavy crude to feed refineries built for it. This is basic chemistry, not advantage.

Canada is going to retaliate. So look for gas prices to go up. Northern states like Michigan and Maine, where the GOP has two competitive races it cannot afford to lose, get electricity and a lot of trade from Canada. The power bills will go up as early voting starts in must-win states.

Even crazy Democrats will win when the President starts a trade war that hurts American consumers.

Lucy Rogers suggested this would be a good caption contest. Have fun in the comments.

This is a very good ad. With the likely government of the left needing a four way coalition, one can only imagine how many of the nine taxes they’ll need to implement to fund all their promises.

In 2017, Labour and the Greens promised they would keep core crown expenditure to under 30% of GDP. They didn’t. Now in 2026 Labour is promising to keep it to 33% of GDP – so one third of the entire economy would be consumed by the central state.

This is around $13 billion a year more (in real terms) than they promised last time they were in opposition. Rather than restrain spending, they just want to spend billions more than even Grant Robertson said was necessary in his 2019 wellbeing budget.

The Opportunistic Party has said their policy is to restrict donations to a political party over an electoral cycle to $30,000.

So far this years they have banked the following donations:

• $180k
• $100k
• $100k
• $50k
• $41k

So big donations are bad – unless it is to them.

Incidentally I am amused that so many NZ politicians want to turn our healthy political funding system into a US style system. The US has caps across the board on how much you can donate to parties and candidates.

What this leads to is a huge influx of donations to lobby groups. As someone who set up a lobby group, I should welcome this policy. It would probably triple our income.

A reader writes in:

The greens announced that supermarkets were making $1m a day in excess profits.

Breaking down the numbers, theres 5m people in New Zealand – so thats 20 cents per person per day.

The average household has 2.7 people

So thats 54 cents per household per day

Thats $3.78 per week per household.

New Zealand must be in a pretty good place where a priority is a flagship policy which will save people 20 cents a day.

I like Helen’s summary being “fantasy posing as policy”

The day after the second confidence vote in Chris Luxon’s leadership, I was asked by media if I thought there would be a third vote in the future. My response was:

Dunne, Robinson and Farrar all were of the view the possibility of National going for a third potential leadership change before the election was very low. 

“I think the masochism is not that high,” Farrar said. “Like, if you’re into that, go find the dominatrix to whip you.”  

By pure coincidence that evening the Prime Minister was at a public meeting in Nelson, as reported by The Press:

The questions concluded with a query from a former deaf Wellington dominatrix who asked about policies to cut the public service in Wellington.

After struggling to find work in the hearing world, she had run a successful small business in the capital’s sex industry, but cuts to the public service meant that “overnight my business collapsed”, she said through a sign language interpreter.

“Your issue is a demand problem,” Luxon said, before saying that growing the economy would be good for small business, but they would continue to make the public sector more efficient.

I had to read this twice. Yes she said that her business as a deaf dominatrix collapsed because of the reduction in the number of public servants in Wellington. This raises so many fascinating questions, such as why are public servants more likely to use a dominatrix, than private sector staff?

Also on a related note, how do you do a safeword when the dominatrix is deaf? Hope they can lip read you?

A trillion dollars of borrowing in 95 days. That is beyond scary. Hell that even exceeds the Greens’ ambitions!

The Press reports:

Public health advocates are taking one labelling win – all alcohol drinks will soon have calorie counts printed on their labels – and they’ve now got a new challenge: getting cancer warnings labels on liquor.

Consumers may have already noticed that some of the alcoholic drinks they buy now show an “energy statement”, as per rules introduced about a year ago mandating beverages containing 0.5% or more “alcohol by volume” (ABV) or alcohol-reduced or free versions of the above requiring a panel on the product showing how many calories people are consuming with each drink.

All liquor will have to be labelled this way by 2028.

The new rules, quietly introduced by Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), also say a product can include a Nutrition Information Panel instead of a specific energy statement, and must include an NIP if making claims about nutrition content, which can contain energy, carbohydrate, sugar and gluten content.

I actually wrote in favour of this back in 2012. Dispassionate neutral info that can help people make decisions is a good thing.

I’d actually mandate that meals sold in cafes etc should have calorie count information printed on menus, on available in the store (as is the case in New York).

A guest post by James Doolan:

If you own a second property, rent it regularly through Airbnb and have not told your council about the commercial use, this opinion piece is directed at you.

You may regard the omission as harmless or perhaps you’ve realised that the chances of being identified are low. Deliberately withholding information that affects your rates liability is not clever tax planning. It’s gaming the system and leaving other ratepayers to pay more. Kiwiblog readers are usually quick to condemn exactly this behaviour when it occurs in other contexts, particularly when there’s failure to disclose changes in circumstances affecting benefit entitlements.

The obligation to disclose already exists and unambiguous. Section 29 of the Local Government (Rating) Act 2002 requires ratepayers to notify their council when circumstances change in a way that affects information in the rating database, including a change in land use. Councils are required to maintain that database because it determines which rating category applies and how much each property owner pays. 

Auckland Council has made the position especially clear. A property rented through Airbnb, Bookabach or a similar platform for more than 28 nights during the relevant rating year may be subject to increased business general rates. Owners are expected to complete a short-term accommodation declaration, even if Council has not contacted them. 

This is not a proposed tax. It is the existing law and Auckland’s existing rating policy for short-term rental accommodation (STRA). Basic analysis suggests the change of use disclosure system is not working.  It’s costing Auckland Council millions of dollars each year – money that could be spent attracting SailGP or events to Eden Park, something Mayor Brown has long advocated for.

Information obtained via LGOIA requests of Auckland Council showed approximately 505 rating units in its STRA-specific rating categories. AirDNA data, meanwhile, identified more than 4,700 entire-property short-term rental listings across Auckland, along with approximately 1,300 private-room listings. 

Those figures might not be perfectly comparable. One property can generate multiple listings, some hosts will fall below Auckland’s thresholds, and no dataset is perfect. Even after making reasonable allowances for those factors, it is difficult to reconcile a market containing several thousand active listings with only a few hundred properties captured in STRA-specific rating categories.

Auckland Council is legally required to maintain a rating information database capable of determining the correct rating treatment for properties. It’s questionable whether that legal obligation is being met.

The financial consequences are significant. For 2025/26, HCA’s analysis calculated Auckland’s approximate urban residential general rate at 0.00225223 per dollar of capital value. The corresponding STRA categories ranged from approximately 0.00303195 for urban medium occupancy to 0.00381167 for urban moderate occupancy. On a property with a capital value of $1 million, correct classification could therefore increase annual general rates by roughly $780 to $1,560 per year.

Using the earlier dataset of 4,777 active listings and subtracting the 505 rating units identified by Council leaves a potential gap of 4,272 properties. Applying the same $780 to $1,560 range across those properties suggests potential under-collection of approximately $3.3 million to $6.7 million annually. The precise figure is impossible to know because Auckland does not have comprehensive visibility of the sector. That, in many respects, is the problem.

The same issue exists with Auckland’s City Centre Targeted Rate. A residential apartment pays a capped charge of just over $75 per year, while a commercially-rated accommodation property with a typical $750,000 capital value would contribute around $990 annually. HCA’s analysis suggests more than 1,200 city-centre STRA properties may sit outside the intended framework, potentially creating another seven-figure funding shortfall. If two physically similar properties are being used to sell overnight accommodation, there should be a very good reason why one contributes more than ten times as much towards the main city centre targeted rate. 

There are only a handful of explanations. The market data could be materially wrong. Auckland Council’s records could be materially incomplete. Or a significant number of owners may simply not be disclosing commercial accommodation activity as required.  The “rates avoidance” angle gets far too little attention and it’s time to start calling out the hypocrisy of some STRA owners.

Kiwiblog readers tend to be strong supporters of personal responsibility. If somebody receiving a benefit fails to disclose a new income source or a change in circumstances that affects their entitlement, there is usually little sympathy. The same attitude should prevail with people who rent second properties on Airbnb while conveniently skipping past their disclosure and commercial rates obligations.

What is good for the goose should be good for the gander. If we expect honesty and disclosure from beneficiaries, employees and small business operators, we should expect the same from people earning tens of thousands of dollars a year by renting out investment properties and holiday homes through global technology platforms.

This Auckland situation is not unique.  That is where a national STRA register enters the discussion.

A cheap national register, funded through a modest annual registration fee, would give councils a practical way to identify commercial accommodation activity without requiring them to trawl Airbnb listings, cross-reference property photos and pursue individual owners one at a time. HCA has consistently argued that councils have a tourism funding problem only in-part because they lack a cost-effective STRA identification tool. A central register solves that problem. 

Before councils ask for new funding tools, they should absolutely make better use of the tools they already have, including collecting existing commercial rates and geographic targeted rates. 

A national STRA register is not a new tax. It is basic compliance infrastructure. And if your objection is that it might result in a commercially operated property being identified and rated properly, you are not really arguing against bureaucracy.  You are arguing for the right to remain below the radar and game the system.This should be the most non-contentious opinion piece ever submitted to Kiwiblog.  The call to action comprises two simple and connected next steps: (1) If you rent your property on Airbnb, then declare “change of use” and pay your rates fully if you’re captured by existing bylaws; and (2) Whether or not you’re a landlord, support a simple national STRA register that ensures everyone pays their fair share.

James Doolan is the Strategic Director of the Hotel Council Aotearoa.

Kate Truska writes:

I come from Sloviansk, in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.

For anyone who has followed Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014, the name will probably be familiar. Sloviansk was where armed men led by Russian citizen and former FSB officer Igor Girkin seized government buildings in April 2014, and where one of the first major battles of Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine unfolded.

And yet, more than twelve years later, I still regularly encounter versions of the same story: “that something happened in Donbas in 2014 because the people there were fundamentally different from the rest of Ukraine; that Ukraine somehow fractured naturally between a Russian-speaking East and a Ukrainian-speaking West; that an internal conflict erupted and Russia subsequently became involved.”

For somebody from the region, it is difficult to overstate how profoundly misleading that narrative is.

The reality is that Putin exaggerated minor differences to cause resentment and justify his invasion.

In a piece published by Estonia’s Delfi under the striking headline A warning to Estonia: You too can be turned into a Donbas — so learn from us, Vlad describes Donbasification as something much more sophisticated than separatism. It is the deliberate construction of an enemy-made regional identity inside another country: taking real regional characteristics, layering mythology, propaganda and historical distortion over them, exaggerating genuine differences, suppressing inconvenient history, and eventually presenting the resulting artificial identity as evidence that the territory never properly belonged within the nation at all — and using that manufactured division against the state itself.

Sounds like the exact strategy that Te Pati Maori seem to advocate!

On 1 December 1991, Ukrainians were asked directly whether they supported an independent Ukraine. Every administrative region of the country voted yes.

Nationally, support exceeded 90 percent. In Donetsk oblast, 83.90 percent voted for Ukrainian independence. In Luhansk oblast, 83.86 percent did the same. Crimea and Sevastopol returned majorities for Ukrainian independence too.

That referendum is extraordinarily inconvenient for the mythology subsequently built around Ukraine’s East. When people there were actually asked which country they wanted to belong to, the answer was Ukraine.

Before this was, Ukranian and Russians were brothers and cousins, not foes and fatalities.