A guest post by Chris Scott:

 Most New Zealanders can picture a family farm. Not the romantic postcard version, but the real thing: a few hundred acres, a shed full of tools, and a family that has been arguing about how to run the place for as long as anyone can remember. Anyone who’s ever tried to run a farm with family members knows that politics isn’t confined to Parliament. 

Beneath the noise, it’s a system. It has inputs and outputs, constraints and feedback loops. Some constraints come from the land itself — soil, water, weather. Others arrive in the form of rules someone in Wellington has decided are important. Some of those rules feel pointless; others quietly save you from a mistake you didn’t know you were about to make. 

A farm like this is small enough that you can see the whole thing at once. You know where the water comes from, where the money goes, which paddocks are struggling, which machines are on their last legs, and which decisions are likely to start an argument at the dinner table. You don’t need a consultant to tell you where the bottlenecks are. You can feel them. 

Government is the same kind of system, just scaled up until no one can see the whole thing anymore. The incentives are still there. The arguments are still there. The constraints are still there. But the visibility is gone. The people running the system are buried inside it, and the people affected by it only ever see their corner. 

You can see the consequences in projects like the Auckland Harbour tunnel. It was conceived, consulted on, modelled, costed, debated, redesigned, and eventually abandoned — after years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars spent. And the bottleneck it was meant to solve is still there. 

From a systems perspective, this isn’t surprising. The project wasn’t just a tunnel. It was a tangle of subsystems: 

transport modelling environmental constraints local and central government politics procurement rules engineering risk public consultation budget and election cycles regulatory approvals inter-agency coordination 

Each of these has its own incentives, timelines, and failure modes. And no one — not ministers, not agencies, not consultants — ever gets the full 10,000-metre view. Everyone sees their slice. No one sees the whole machine. 

This is why the project could be technically feasible, economically justified, politically supported, and still fail. Not because the people involved were incompetent, but because the system they were working inside was never decomposed, modelled, or redesigned as a whole. 

If you applied a modern decomposition approach, you wouldn’t begin with the route or the price tag. You’d begin by separating the system into parts that can be understood on their own terms. 

Once separated, the shape of the problem changes. 

You can see where delays accumulate. You can see where incentives clash. You can see where information gets lost between agencies. You can see which constraints are real and which are inherited from older decisions that no longer make sense. 

And once you can see the system, you can model it. 

You can test scenarios before committing to them. You can identify points of fragility. You can distinguish structural constraints from artefacts of process. 

This is, in essence, what modern AI and software tools enable. 

Inside large software systems — with millions of moving parts, legacy decisions, and hidden dependencies — these tools are used to map relationships, trace flows, and surface bottlenecks. For example, engineers can simulate how a single change propagates through a system before deploying it, avoiding costly failures downstream. 

It’s not magic. It’s visibility. 

And it’s visibility our government doesn’t currently have — at a time when the complexity of the problems we face is only increasing. 

If we’d had that kind of visibility for the tunnel, we might still have decided not to build it. But we wouldn’t have spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars discovering that fact the slow way. 

A family farm can survive on intuition because the system is small enough to see. A government can’t. The problems we’re trying to solve now are too large, too interdependent, too full of hidden constraints. 

If we want a government that works, we need to give it the ability to see itself. 

Right now, it can’t. 

Postscript: On AI’s role 

I drafted this piece myself, but I used an AI collaborator to help refine the structure, test the logic, and tighten the language. The ideas are mine; the AI helped expose weak points and iterate faster. It didn’t write the argument — it sharpened it. 

The revelation that Peter Mandelson failed his security vetting, has left Keir Starmer looking like he is a liar or incompetent.

Starmer had told the House Mandelson passed his vetting. This was untrue. He claims he only found out this week that he had not passed. The head of the Foreign Office has been sacked, as the official who gave a waiver.

But it is almost impossible to think that the Foreign Office permanent secretary would have given a waiver to Starmer’s personal appointment as US Ambassador, without consulting the PMs office.

Even more unbelievable is that even after Starmer said several months ago that his vetting process was normal, that no one thought to tell the PM or his office that Mandelson in fact had failed it. It is hard to believe they could be that incompetent.

Starmer was probably toast anyway after the May local elections, but this may bring him down even before then.

No this isn’t an uncrackable password for your banking. It is the latest growth in the acronym that once was LGB, then LGBT, then LGTBI and so on and so on.

The NY Post reports:

A socialist Canadian lawmaker drew gales of mockery for showing just how woke she is — by casually dropping the acronym MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ while speaking at a live press conference.

Leah Gazan, 53, uncorked the new ultra-lefty term while bemoaning $7 billion in budget cuts to a pair of federal indigenous departments.

And what does the acronym stand for, whom she claims is being genocided?

The 16-characters in MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ stand for “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual,” with the plus-sign encompassing any other gender-identity not covered by the nearly paragraph-long initialism.

This beats the previous woke record of the Ontario teachers’ union who used:

“LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP” stands for “lesbian, gay, genderqueer, bisexual, demisexual, transgender, transsexual, twospirit, intersex, queer, questioning, asexual, allies, pansexual, polyamorous.”

They really are beyond parody.

As President Trump attracts global attention for the US military operation against Iran (now thankfully near a conclusion), I wanted to cover this issue that has bubbled along for some months now. Possible overlaps between President Trump and the now-deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have become the source of endless media and political speculation. This post attempts to examine this issue and to try to separate facts from fevered imagination. I’ll do this by asking 8 questions:

1 – Who is Jeffrey Epstein?

He was born in New York in 1953 into a modest middle-class family. His first occupation was as a schoolteacher at an exclusive Manhattan private school. There he met the CEO of Bear Stearns, a then prominent Wall Street trader and investment house, and he worked his way up from a junior clerk to an options trader, eventually becoming an investment advisor to high-net-worth individuals. He left to form his own consultancy firm advising big, influential clients like Steven Hoffenberg and Saudi businessman Adnan Khashoggi. His breakthrough into the big leagues of the mega rich came when he began to manage assets for Ohio retailers and owners of The Limited and Victoria’s Secret retail giants, billionaires Les Wexner and Leon Black. He met his longtime associate, Gislaine Maxwell, the glamorous daughter of UK media magnate Robert Maxwell, in the early 1980s. Epstein’s financial advising to the ultra-rich and socialising with Maxwell’s A-list of media celebrities and business magnates saw Epstein befriend a Who’s Who of billionaires, famous politicians, media celebrities, and movers and shakers across American and European elite society. Epstein’s predilections for young girls came to be investigated by Palm Beach Florida Police and later the FBI in the early 2000s, who became aware of his procurement of teenage girls from the adjacent poorer suburb of West Palm Beach who came to his multi-million-dollar Palm Beach mansion for sexual favours. He utilised a network, largely overseen by Maxwell, of key older teen girls who would recruit other mostly vulnerable teenage girls to feed his desire. He was eventually prosecuted for procuring an underage prostitute. Epstein’s recruitment of young girls for his and famous clients’ pleasure was extended to all his extensive high-value properties, including his Zorro Ranch near Stanley, New Mexico, his large home in New Dublin, Ohio, his huge brownstone Central Park mansion in New York, and a luxurious apartment in Paris, in addition to his famous Caribbean island, Little St. James, in the British Virgin Islands, which became infamous as a discreet retreat for Hollywood celebrities, top business people, high-profile politicians, media magnates, judges, and other elite luminaries.

2 – What information on Epstein’s clients is likely held by US government agencies?

It’s important to define exactly what the Epstein files are because there is a misconception that the files held by the Department of Justice are the complete entirety of everything that the government has concerning Jeffrey Epstein. The DOJ files that are being progressively released contain the quantum of communications regarding Jeffrey Epstein, his emails with various parties, and any other relevant information that only the FBI and the Department of Justice have stored about him over the years. It is not possible to fully determine from the public record precisely how much material that, for instance, all the various intelligence agencies in the US hold regarding Jeffrey Epstein and, more importantly, his clients, associates, and friends. It is quite widely known that Epstein installed hidden cameras in every single room in every single one of his five large mansions, and it has been approximated that the volume of recorded material is over 1,000,000 hours across tens of thousands of individual recordings. Given the rumours that circulate that he was an agent for either Mossad, MI6 and/or the CIA, and given that honeypot operations are stock in trade for intelligence agencies, it would be an intelligent guess that there exists a very large amount of compromising material given what we know about Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking activities, of which only the very tip of a very large iceberg has been revealed at this stage.

Donald Trump did famously say in an impromptu interview that he gave in front of Marine One in 2018, “I caught the swamp. I caught them all. Only I could do it”. My personal opinion (that I’ve got no documentary evidence to back up) is that one of the reasons why Trump is proceeding forward with the Epstein situation with a surprising amount of equanimity and confidence is that the intelligence agencies that he has control over likely do possess a large amount of compromising material featuring what is rumoured to be elites of politics, law enforcement, Hollywood, academia, media, and government. Some would say that the histrionics and vitriol that has been hurled at Trump and his team over the subject may possibly be because of the fact that Trump is getting nearer and nearer to very sensitive targets, and if you are the subject of compromising video material, then obviously you are not wanting that material to see the light of day or to be in the hands of Trump’s law enforcement. On this topic, I think only time will tell, but I’m going to make a bold prediction that we’re going to learn some very ugly things about some very prominent people.

A guest post by Samira Taghavi:

A public meeting held on March 11^th in Mt Eden, under the banner of “Stop War on Iran” was presented by its organisers (Joe Carolan, of Socialist Aotearoa, et al) as a principled anti-war gathering. From the perspective of Iranians who have escaped the Islamic Republic however, the event possessed no legitimacy whatsoever. Accordingly, the meeting was not a serious conversation about peace but an ideological rally in which the Iranian regime was defended and the lived experience of its victims ignored.

Among Iranians, both inside the country and across the global diaspora, the case for confronting the Islamic regime is no longer controversial. For many, it has become an unavoidable conclusion. Many of us have experienced enough violence to understand the catastrophic consequences of war far better than those who approach the issue through ideological slogans. 

The meeting, dominated by white leftists whose hostility toward U.S. and Israeli policies, involved no genuine engagement with those of us experienced in life under the Islamic Republic. It was a worldview infected with the grotesque romanticization of the Iranian regime, neatly packed into an “anti-imperialist” narrative.

The “progressive” tone was set when by socialist Suha Aksoy, for the Cuba Friendship Society no less, opined that “we do not have any option but to support Iran. This war must be won by Iran” – an invocation met with enthusiastic applause.

For anyone familiar with the reality of life under the mullahs, the moment was distressingly surreal. For forty-seven years the regime has ruled Iran through fear, imprisoning dissidents, executing political opponents, violently suppressing protests, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have not forgotten to also inflict barbarity abroad. Yet inside that meeting hall, the regime was not treated as the authoritarian theocracy it is, but as a misunderstood victim of Western aggression. This was not anti-war principle but instead ideological theatre.

What made the evening particularly troubling was the involvement of two sitting Members of Parliament. Labour MP Phil Twyford and Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson both spoke at the meeting, despite having been warned beforehand by members of the Iranian community about the nature of organisers’ sympathies for the regime. Both politicians had been told clearly that the event did not represent the voices of the Iranian diaspora. Both chose involvement anyway.

Twyford spoke after a speech that had praised Iran’s war effort, making no attempt to challenge such remarks or to address the applause that followed them. Instead, the contributions were something he had “really enjoyed listening to”, thereby legitimising those deplorable sentiments. 

Davidson’s position was no surprise. While her party bleeds for Gaza, the bleeding of the Iranian people has now long been coldly bypassed by the far-left, her party in particular. 

Outside the event, meanwhile, a great many more (mostly-Iranian) New Zealanders had organised a peaceful counter-protest precisely because the (mostly-European) attendees inside were attempting to present themselves as the voice of Iran. Hundreds gathered carrying the Lion and Sun flag, an historic symbol, now widely associated with the aspiration for a democratic and secular Iran, while many other New Zealanders joined us in solidarity. The contrast between the two gatherings could not have been clearer. Inside the hall stood “proud socialists” – and as Stalin might have put it, their “useful idiots” – who have never lived under brutal state control, explaining (absurdly) why the regime deserves support. 

Iran appeared to be little more than a stage upon which to perform a familiar ideological drama over “imperialism”, capitalism and anti-Americanism. But for the Iranian diaspora, Iran is the country where our families have been imprisoned, tortured, or killed. 

These socialists are not motivated by solidarity with the Iranian people, but by a worldview in which hostility toward the United States automatically produces sympathy for any regime that positions itself against it. Within that framework the Islamic Republic becomes a symbol of resistance rather than what it actually is: a violent theocracy sustained by repression.

Our region has only recently witnessed the horrific consequences of ideological extremism, with the Bondi attack in Australia. In this environment, political leaders should exercise far greater judgment about implicitly endorsing insanity.

The lesson from the Mt Eden meeting should therefore be unmistakable. The Iranian people have spent nearly half a century resisting a regime that governs through fear. Their struggle deserves solidarity grounded in reality rather than ideological distortion. There is also a practical step New Zealand should take without delay in designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization – which it most obviously is. 

Iranians and New Zealanders must continue to challenge Joe Carolan and his comrades, who would apparently prefer to see both countries living under heavy state control. These “anti-imperialist progressives” do not speak for Iran, because they can never represent the real Iranian people who seek democracy, freedom and the end of state-instigated terror. 

Tony Blair writes:

The suffering of Gaza, the death and destruction, is undeniable. You can make a legitimate criticism of Israel’s tactics in the conduct of the war. Many Jews around the world make exactly those critiques.

But you cannot engage in such criticism legitimately if you do not also condemn the terrorism of October 7. You cannot pretend that Israel does not face a substantial terrorist threat from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime, and other groups that do not recognize Israel’s right to exist.

You cannot complain about the restrictions on goods and material going in and out of Gaza unless you also reference the reasons for the restrictions: the fear in Israel that such materials will be used for the purpose of building a terrorist infrastructure, which is precisely what nearly 300 miles of tunnels underneath Gaza represent.

You should not diminish the charge of genocide—whatever your views of Israel’s actions—by a barb particularly aimed at Jewish memories of the Holocaust, which was a genocide.

And it was disingenuous to call for Israel to end the war without accepting what is undoubtedly true, which is that the war would have ended at any point in time if Hamas had said they were releasing the hostages, withdrawing from the government of Gaza (directly or indirectly through their weapons), and accepting the united position of the international community that a Palestinian State must be achieved through negotiation, not violence.

Spot on.

One poll during the Gaza war showed that only 24 percent of the British Muslim community believed that October 7 happened in the way it did. Some even believe it was all an elaborate Israeli plot. That is frankly unacceptable.

I know some say that defending the State of Israel is not the way to defeat antisemitism. But there is more at stake than simply defending Israel. It’s about defending reason. Defending facts. Standing up to the noise and intimidation to assert the truth.

None of this means that you cannot support the creation of a Palestinian State or disagree strongly with this or that action of the government of Israel, particularly when that government includes within it figures from the very far right—with whom, it should be said, most members of the Jewish community would disagree.

Facts, not feelings, as Ben Shapiro says.

Oliver Hartwich writes:

New Zealand’s ministers answer to Parliament for departments they cannot control. They cannot choose, direct or remove the chief executives who run those departments. The Public Service Commissioner makes those appointments.

The New Zealand Initiative argues this arrangement is broken. It recommends that New Zealand adopt a version of Germany’s model, where ministers appoint their top officials while a protected career service operates below.

The state sector changes of 1988 were meant to make chief executives more accountable to ministers, but fixed-term contracts renewable by the Commissioner shifted accountability to the bureaucratic system instead.

Some departments answer to as many as twenty different ministers. Ministers work from the Beehive, separated from the departments they are accountable for.

Virtually every other developed democracy gives its elected ministers some say over who runs their departments. France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom all do. New Zealand does not.

Dr Oliver Hartwich, Executive Director of the Initiative, examines three international models in Who Runs the Country? and argues Germany’s approach offers the best fit.

“Governments of all stripes have struggled to turn their agendas into action,” said Dr Hartwich. “No one person is to blame. The system itself makes ministers accountable for results they cannot deliver.”

Germany does it differently. Ministers appoint their top officials from a pool of candidates with proven competence. Ninety per cent of these posts are filled from within the career service, not by outside loyalists. Career officials below are protected by statute.

The Initiative is calling on the government to legislate for ministerial appointment of chief executives, with safeguards to prevent the system from sliding into jobs for mates.

This is a worthwhile debate. NZ sits at one end of the spectrum where Ministers only get a veto of appointments (which has never been used) and at the other end the US model where the President appoints 9,000 political allies to run agencies.

There are more nuanced models between these two extremes.

David Harvey writes:

The decision of the BSA regarding the Platform has once again raised the issue of the relevance of the BSA in the Digital Paradigm but if the BSA is to go there must be some form of replacement.

There are a number of models available. That proposed by the Safer Online Services and Web Platforms paper issued by the Department of Internal Affairs was a heavy-handed and invasive model. Similar models are present in the Australian Online Safety Act and the UK Online Safety Act, both of which are invasive.

What I propose in this article is a light handed and less invasive model that advocates voluntary compliance which attracts a number of advantages and legal protections.

I agree the BSA must go, and any replacement should be light handed and where possible voluntary.

The current regime is:

The Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 (HDCA) — a reactive, complaints-based mechanism for individual harmful digital communications, administered by Netsafe as the approved agency and the District Court.

The Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) — a quasi-judicial body exercising jurisdiction over broadcasting standards under the Broadcasting Act 1989, limited to linear broadcast services and expressly excluding on-demand content.

The New Zealand Media Council (NZMC) — a voluntary self-regulatory body for news publishers, with a complaints adjudication function but no statutory powers.

The Office of Film and Literature Classification — administering the prior restraint classification regime under the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act 1993.

A proposed definition of harm is:

For the purposes of platform regulation, “harm” means a demonstrable adverse effect — more than trivial and supported by empirical, clinical, or reasonably inferable evidence — on the physical safety, mental health, wellbeing, dignity, or fundamental rights of an individual or identifiable group. Mere offence, discomfort, disagreement, or exposure to controversial or unpopular ideas does not constitute harm. In the platform regulation context, harm extends to adverse effects arising from platform design, algorithmic amplification, and recommender system failures, not only from individual items of content.

That definition would be far far better than the current one.

In the first instance, a large degree of responsibility is vested in industry, which develops codes of practice or conduct that set standards for the prevention of online harms. The substantive content of codes is determined by industry participants or industry associations. …

No government department has any involvement in developing the content of codes other than the ability to make submissions as part of a public submission round. This ensures a strict separation between the State and the regulatory process. Any suggestion of state involvement, especially in any area that might involve an interference with or restriction of the freedom of expression, must be avoided, lest the integrity of the process be compromised and the regulatory authority be seen as a quasi-censorship arm of the State.

Industry self-regulation, rather than state regulation.

Unification is not amalgamation of the regulatory regimes. The three divisions operate under distinct statutory mandates, distinct codes, and distinct membership or participation frameworks. A news publisher that is a member of Division 1 is not subject to Division 2 codes. A social media platform subject to Division 3 platform duties does not become a ‘news media organisation’ by reason of operating within the same regulatory authority.

The MCA does not have a single complaints process applying to all regulated entities. Each division maintains its own complaints pathway, its own codes, and its own standards adjudication. What is shared is the governing board, the administrative infrastructure, the legal framework, the Communications Tribunal interface, and the foundational principles.

This is what I like about the proposal – one agency, but different codes and membership for different entities. I am currently a member of the Media Council so would just slot into the Division 1 code.

I can’t do justice to the proposal here, so recommended people read it fully. I think it should be embraced by Parliament as the way forward.

The Taxpayers’ Union released:

While Kiwi businesses are facing economic uncertainty, the Ministry supposedly responsible for helping businesses has been spending our money on Workplace Waiata – i.e. staff singing sessions in their Wellington offices.

And this isn’t just a one-off thing: At their swanky Wellington offices, MBIE were hosting 30 minute sessions every work day, every week!

MBIE employs 5,892 bureaucrats (it’s grown from 4,676 in 2020), literally being paid to sing, clap, poi, and recite Māori proverbs and hymns.

According to documents we’ve unearthed, last year, MBIE bosses attempted to reduce these sessions from daily 30-minute sing-alongs across various floors, to “just” 20 minutes, twice a week.

According to email correspondence (obtained under the Official Information Act) one of the reasons for the ‘cut back’ was concerns about the Workplace Waiata causing noise distraction for others in the office. 

No kidding!

But here’s where it gets even more ridiculous…

The precious MBIE staffers weren’t having a bar of it!

They revolted at management for daring to cut back the entitlement.

This reminds me of how MBIE staff went on strike a few years ago. A former Beehive senior staffer quipped that the impact on the Government of this strike would be the equivalent of the Dom Post running a second daily quiz!

The Herald reported:

An Auckland man who has spent his entire adult life in and out of jail – including for a 2021 incident in which he fired a gun during a police standoff – told a judge this week that he is finally ready to make a genuine effort at getting his life on track.

Of course he is. They always are at sentencing hearings.

“I really hope you can do that,” Judge Lummis said on Thursday of Cossill’s expressed desire to live a better life. “You need to keep this positive attitude …” 

But the judge also pointed to Cossill’s more than 200 prior convictions, and the many chances judges have afforded him in the past – some of which left other judges likely regretting their charity after Cossill reoffended within days.

Which is why we need a decent three strikes law. Why let him out time after time, so he can reoffend within days?

“I consider you have suffered enough and nobody has given you a chance to address your addictions,” Judge Mary-Beth Sharp said during his July 2022 sentencing for the charge, describing Cossill as “somebody that this country has failed dismally”.

Yeah, he is the real victim.

The four-year sentence she settled on reflected two 15% reductions – for his guilty plea and for his background – and an additional 5% reduction for his remorse and efforts to change.

He gets 5% for remorse for his 222nd conviction!

The Free Press reports:

In the weeks since the U.S. and Israel launched their joint assault on Iran, perhaps no American has more aggressively and publicly rallied behind the Islamic Republic than Calla Walsh. From her new base in Lebanon, the 21-year-old Cambridge-raised activist has taken to social media and left-wing podcasts to incite her fellow countrymen and women to sabotage U.S. and Israeli defense contractors wherever they can find them. On March 3, she mocked four American soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike, posting: “They all died fighting for fascism, genocide, pedophilia, and cannibalism.” She attached pictures of the dead Americans. In recent days she reposted a list of missile-production sites inside the U.S.

“We have a duty to escalate,” Walsh told her host on the Psychic Militancypodcast last Saturday from Beirut, noting that “lockdowns” of weapons factories and vandalism alone are “not sufficient at this point.”

She added: “And as the genocide and these wars of aggression continue to escalate, much more is demanded of people in the West.”

Walsh looks every part the art-school hipster, with her thick-rimmed glasses and a mop of curly hair. But she’s a chameleon of terror. Five years earlier, as a 16-year-old, Walsh was fawned over by The New York Timesfor being a young, social media-savvy activist who was helping to shake up the Democratic Party in Massachusetts. But as a monthslong investigation by The Free Press shows, she’s thrown her allegiance squarely behind the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Axis of Resistance, which includes the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

So she was lauded by the NTY at 16, and now she’s a fully fledged activist on behalf of terrorist regimes.

In early February, Walsh traveled to Iran as part of a regime-backed media delegation aimed at galvanizing international support for the Islamic Republic in the face of the looming U.S. and Israel attacks on the country. She was also there to whitewash Tehran’s January massacre of thousands of protesters by framing the regime as a bulwark against imperial and Zionist aggression.

30,000 Iranians killed by their own Government, and she’s on the side of the Government that killed them!

A guest post by Ro Edge, New Zealand Spokesperson, Save Women’s Sport Australasia (SWSA):

The decision by the International Olympic Committee to restore the core purpose of women’s sport: providing biological females with a fair and safe arena to compete, is long-overdue. For years, many sporting bodies adopted the IOC’s earlier open-door policy, leading to predictable harm. Women and girls lost podiums, scholarships, team places and opportunities. In contact sports, their safety was put at risk. Science was sidelined in favour of ideology.

IOC President Kirsty Coventry put it plainly: “It would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category. In addition, in some sports it would simply not be safe.”

We have consistently warned that male developmental advantages – which begin in utero and are powerfully reinforced at puberty – cannot be fully removed by testosterone suppression or surgery. Female athletes also face unique biological challenges, such as menstruation, that can affect performance. Women’s sport is not a consolation prize; it is a sex-based category designed to recognise and protect female biology.

For too long, the debate in sport has centred almost exclusively on how to include trans-identifying males in the female category, often at the direct expense of female athletes. The more important question – how to ensure fair and safe participation for everyone – was largely ignored. The conversation can now shift. Let us pursue genuine inclusion for all by welcoming all males, no matter how they identify, in the male category, where natural male diversity is already accommodated, and by protecting the female category as the sex-based space it was always meant to be.

The IOC’s announcement sends a clear message to every national sporting body in New Zealand. If fairness and safety matter at the Olympic level, they must matter at every level: from elite competition down to school sports, clubs and regional events. Loopholes or partial measures at grassroots level will only undermine the very principles the Olympics have now reaffirmed.

Any organisation that ignores the established science on male developmental advantage and chooses not to follow the IOC’s lead will be making a deliberate decision to undermine women’s sport.

Female athletes have already sacrificed too much. They have been pressured to accept unfairness in silence and told that their concerns about safety and opportunity are unkind or bigoted. It is time to stop gaslighting girls and women and to recognise that biology is not bigotry.

Women’s sport deserves defending because it celebrates what female bodies can achieve on a level playing field. After puberty, male bodies are, on average, stronger, faster and more powerful in nearly every athletic measure. Pretending otherwise does not create equality; it punishes the group biology has already disadvantaged.

The IOC’s decision is a victory for evidence over ideology. It shows that when the stakes are high – Olympic medals, global prestige and athlete safety – science can prevail. New Zealand’s sporting bodies now have both the permission and the responsibility to follow suit.

This op ed was offered to the NZ herald who declined it.

Stuff has an article about Rod Drury that as far as I can tell reveals around 10 years ago he asked a staff member who was going out to dinner with him, if he could kiss her. She said no, and he didn’t.

For this, they have asked him if he will relinquish his New Zealander of the Year Award!

NZ First announced:

New Zealand First Leader Winston Peters has today announced a campaign commitment to fund an extra $15 million for the Christ Church Cathedral to get the rebuild moving.

I was hoping Winston meant he would put in $15 million personally but instead he means he wants taxpayers from Hamilton, Te Kuiti, New Plymouth and Hastings to fund it.

The Church never wanted to rebuild it. They knew the cost wasn’t worth it. They could build a new cathedral for much less. But they got bullied into it.

The cost of the rebuild is now $248 million. The insurance replacement value was $39 million.

It’s been 15 years, and Christchurch is doing fine without it.

Which of these is more deserving of breathless play-by-play media coverage this week?

1. The morning media round of a political party leader who doesn’t memorise his colleagues by their ethnicity, or

2. The morning media round of a political party leader who is currently stalling a free trade agreement with the most populous country on earth, while businesses employing thousands of New Zealanders call on him to get behind it for the good of the country.

You won’t be surprised to know the second one got essentially no follow-up coverage at all, while the first one got numerous articles.

Radio NZ reported:

Labour has selected the former Auckland councillor and mayoral candidate Kerrin Leoni to contest the Tāmaki Makaurau seat.

The Auckland electorate is currently held by Te Pāti Māori’s Oriini Kaipara – who bested Labour’s Peeni Henare in last year’s by-election.

Ms Leoni was the first wahine Māori elected to the Auckland council – serving from 2022 to 2025.

She unsuccessfully ran against Wayne Brown for mayor last year.

She got just 23% of the vote against Brown. She was described by Labour MP Phil Twyford as not credible. Yet she is now their candidate in a seat they declare they want to win back.

I wonder if this is a cunning plot by Willie Jackson to help his old mate JT old, by ensuring Te Pati Maori retain their seats?

The Herald reports:

Some of New Zealand’s top exporters and business associations have signed an open letter calling on all political parties to back New Zealand’s free trade agreement with India. …

The open letter, organised by BusinessNZ, was signed by 28 exporters and industry associations, such as Federated Farmers, Zespri, Seafood New Zealand and Beef + Lamb New Zealand.

The letter said trade was critical to New Zealand’s prosperity and the FTA was the next significant step forward.

“In an increasingly uncertain global environment marked by rising protectionism, geopolitical tension and supply chain disruption, New Zealand cannot afford to stand still,” the letter said.

Having trade agreements with other countries protects us, especially in times like today.

Securing better access to India will help build resilience, spread risk and strengthen our economic position. 

“An FTA with India is not a luxury; it is a strategic necessity for our economic security.”

If you’re worried we are too reliant on China for our exports, you should support the India FTA.

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters said the letter was a “breathtaking” position for BusinessNZ to take.

“How they and the 28 other businesses and associations could have signed up to support the India FTA without knowing what is in it is an appalling commentary on them all,” Peters posted on social media.

“How on earth can there be any sort of proper analysis of the FTA if they haven’t even read the agreement?”

This is silly. The major details have been published and are well known. It is inane to say you can’t have a position on an FTA, unless you have read every clause. By this logic, Winston isn’t in a position to oppose it, because he hasn’t seen the full text either.

The summary of the FTA provides lots of detail. The final text gets wrangled by lawyers for months, and has to be consistent with the high level agreement.

Quantum computers are arriving sooner than we think. They pose a huge threat to Bitcoin, which relies on cryptographic codes to remain secure.

Fewer qubits may be required from quantum computers to breach the cryptographic codes of Bitcoin and Ethereum, Google has suggested. They believe it may take only 500,000 qubits, a figure that is 20 times lower than previous estimates. All of this has been derived from studies by Google Researchers, meaning Q-Day may arrive sooner than we think.

The Current State of Bitcoin

As of March 31st 2026, the BTC price NZD stands at $116,918. This is down from a short spike to $118,733 earlier in the day, brought on by potential alleviations of tension in the Middle East. Issues with oil in the Strait of Hormuz are severely impacting risk assets such as Bitcoin.

Binance noted how this is impacting possible economic data in the United States. It noted that CPI and PCE matter because oil’s pass-through hasn’t fully hit prints yet. They stated that an upside surprise delays cuts and reinforces a supply-shock pricing regime, with second-round food inflation risk building via fertiliser and input disruptions. All of this turns people away from risk assets, of which Bitcoin is one, to safe havens.

Alongside this, the risk posed by quantum computers is also weighing on its price. Testing by Google was done using two schemes. The first used 1,200 logical qubits along with 90 million Toffoli Gates. These essentially act as ‘and’ gates for quantum circuits, letting them reconstruct inputs from outputs due to their reversibility. A second used 1,450 logical qubits and 70 million gates. Both were sampled using a superconducting cryptographically relevant quantum computer. From this, the company has deduced that it would take between nine and 12 minutes to execute an on spend attack.

Discussing the revelation, Google added that “We aim to draw attention to this issue and provide the cryptocurrency community with recommendations to enhance security and stability while it is still possible.” All of this suggests that Quantum attacks may arrive much sooner than previously thought.

Google also added that it depends on which hardware scales first. A slower system may initially target stored funds, while faster ones may provide instant attacks as transactions are taking place.

The Threat to Bitcoin’s Sleeping Wallets

Wallets from the early days of Bitcoin utilise P2PK, a pay-to-public-key. This locks Bitcoin to a public key, meaning it can only be spent by the owner. Many of them are inaccessible due to their keys being lost. Some contain billions of dollars, including early Satoshi-era wallets. In fact, it is estimated that around 1.7 million Bitcoins are still dormant in them.

The issues arise from the fact that they can not be upgraded to quantum-level security. This means they can be unlocked by whoever gets first access to a quantum computer able to prise them open. In a system that is decentralised, this is becoming extremely hard to police, and policing it flies in the face of what a decentralised network should be. 
Attacks of this type could have the potential to seriously disrupt the economics of Bitcoin. With floods of coins on the market, price drops would be endemic.

The Threat to Ethereum

Ethereum could be at a greater risk than even Bitcoin. Smart contracts are particularly at risk, and Layer 2 networks have KZG commitments, which are quantum vulnerable. This had led the Ethereum Foundation to place quantum security as its top priority.

Binance noted that Ethereum has outlined its “Strawmap” quantum-resistance roadmap and 2026 upgrades: Ethereum introduced Strawmap as a four-year quantum-resistance framework targeting 2-second slots and 6 to 16 second finality. It also had two 2026 upgrades, Glamsterdam and Hegotá, focused on L1 performance, privacy, and cryptography.

Senior researcher Justin Drake has noted that a dedicated research and engineering team is working on this. Their strategy will involve governance processes and live post-quantum development networks.

The Future of Cryptocurrency

The double whammy of unstable global politics and the threat of Quantum computing seems to be cooling the desire for cryptocurrency. Inflows to spot ETFs cooled this week, suggesting more traditional investors and those with low risk appetites are turning away from it. Added to this has been a slowdown in the growth of stablecoins.

Real interest rates also continue to rise. When compared to something like Bitcoin, which produces no yield, investing in crypto starts to look even less appealing. Yields on 10-year inflation-protected securities have risen, and this really does pull people away from risk assets. Any anticipation once held for FED rate cuts is now well and truly dead in the water.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are thus facing a double hit. In the short term, global politics and, particularly, the price of oil per barrel are hitting it hard. Yet long-term, quantum computing is a real threat that could collapse the whole ecosystem. The right security measures need to be found, and fast. 

Do you remember Chris Hipkins complaining National hadn’t consulted Labour over NCEA changes, and then it transpired their spokesperson had turned down multiple offers from the Minister to brief her.

Well they’ve done it again. Chris Bishop writes:

Chris Hipkins tried (and failed) to get a story up this morning in advance of his weekly media interviews, with his office claiming to TVNZ that we had failed to respond to a Labour MP’s concerns about the Waioweka Gorge. You might remember last year when he claimed the Government had failed to engage with Labour about NCEA changes, only for the facts to show we had tried several times and Labour had failed to respond.

Now it’s happened again.

Yesterday, before Hipkins’ weekly interview, Labour sent a letter about Waioweka Gorge that Jo Luxton had written to me back in January to TVNZ’s Breakfast, telling the producer that I hadn’t bothered to reply.

Unfortunately for Hipkins, a long email trail shows that’s just totally untrue.

Jo Luxton did write to me in late January, seeking a briefing from NZTA on recovery works through SH2 Waioweka Gorge. I take all letters from MPs seriously, so I asked my office to arrange a briefing for her.

A staff member emailed Ms Luxton on 18 February to organise the briefing. She didn’t reply, so he followed up a week later.

Eventually 4 March was settled on for her briefing, which she then cancelled as she was unwell.

The briefing eventually took place on 18 March, covered all the issues Ms Luxton had asked to be briefed on, and a staff member followed up on a couple of issues afterwards with her. Ms Luxton’s staff member sent a nice thank you message to my office afterwards.

So why is Chris Hipkins out there telling TVNZ that I never responded?

You think they would have learnt.