The Taxpayers’ Union released:

The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union can reveal through an Official Information Act request that the Ministry for Ethnic Communities funded $30,000 for Asturlab Cultural Centre to run a nationwide advocacy campaign, using taxpayer funds to promote pro-Palestinian narratives on the conflict in Gaza.

The campaign was a political lobbying campaign encouraging people to lobby the PM and MPs on this issue. I’m all for NGOs lobbying using their own money, but here we have bureaucrats handing out money to NGOs to lobby the Government on a highly contested political issue.

“The fund’s own rules say it does not support political objectives, yet this application was approved within days, with a Ministry advisor even helping tweak it to get over the line.”

But it doesn’t stop there.

So this political lobbying campaign got $110,000 from taxpayers from two different government entities.

Bryce Edwards writes:

In Dunedin, a charity called Te Kāika has been receiving tens of millions of dollars in government funding to provide health and social services to some of the city’s most vulnerable people. Over the past year, the Otago Daily Times has been methodically pulling back the curtain on what is going on inside this organisation. The picture is not pretty: nepotistic governance, unexplained payments to the leadership, staff fleeing in droves, government contracts unfulfilled, a youth facility shut down over abuse allegations, and a senior manager convicted of domestic violence. The Department of Internal Affairs is now investigating.

And yet, almost nobody else in New Zealand media or politics has said a word about it.

I had never heard of Te Kaika until Bryce wrote on them. I’m glad he did.

But the governance was flimsy. For nearly five years, the board consisted of just two people: chairwoman Donna Matahaere-Atariki and Matapura Ellison – a breach of the charity’s own constitution, which requires a minimum of three. The University of Otago, which had been involved early on, withdrew its shares in 2020, and all the outside voices on the board departed.

Then in June 2022, founding CEO Albie Laurence was abruptly replaced by Matt Matahaere (the chairwoman’s son). Her daughter, Winnie Matahaere, manages social services. When the board was eventually expanded to three members in 2023, the new addition was an accountant who had previously been suspended from practice for two years for breaching the chartered accountants’ ethical code.

Ask yourself the obvious governance question: how could the chief executive be independently held to account by the board, when the board chair is his mother?

They can’t. A good start would be the Government to set a rule that no social service provider will be funded that doesn’t have a minimum of five board members, none of whom are related to senior staff.

Over the weekend the ODT reported that Te Kāika’s main site appeared to have just one part-time GP serving thousands of enrolled patients. The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners recommends a ratio of about 1,000 patients per GP; Te Kāika’s Caversham hub reportedly has one doctor working four days a week for 5,000 to 6,000 patients.

Clinical consultations plummeted by nearly two-thirds in a single year (from 44,939 to 15,874), while patient registrations (and the government capitation payments that come with them) kept climbing. That matters because capitation funding follows enrolled patients, not the number of times they are actually seen.

The capitation rate per patient varies but on average is at least $300. So they would have got $1.8 million from the taxpayer, for one GP!

The tempting response to all this is to write Te Kāika off as an outlier: one rogue charity, exceptional in its dysfunction. 

It’s not. Bryce notes very similar issues with the Waipareira Trust and the Manukau Urban Māori Authority.

Health New Zealand, the Ministry of Social Development, and Oranga Tamariki were all channelling millions to Te Kāika. None of them had adequate oversight mechanisms in place.

This goes beyond Te Kāika. It reflects the way the system now works. This is close to what some scholars call the “shadow state”: charities and NGOs taking over public functions, but without the same transparency or discipline expected of government. The state has outsourced enormous amounts of social provision to NGOs, and has simultaneously failed to build the monitoring, auditing, and evaluation capacity necessary to ensure that outsourcing serves the public interest.

So, the state has become very efficient at shovelling money out the door. It has been far less effective at proving what that money achieves. And in a culture where questioning the kaupapa of Māori service providers has become politically sensitive, the space for honest scrutiny has narrowed further.

This is spot on. Now the answer isn’t for the state to provide all social services itself. If the state can’t even contract properly, what faith could we have in them being able to run them themselves.

This is not just an issue for NZ. Followers of US politics will know about Minnesota daycare centres and California hospices, which have become huge rorts.

Because governments are not spending their own money (they spend ours) they are less concerned with actual outcomes and value for money.

Here’s an idea. Why don’t we take 2% from the budget we have for contracting social services and use it to hire firms whose sole job is to scrutinise providers and contracts. They could scrutinise governance arrangements, finances, outcomes. They could do site visits to see if what they promise actually occurs.

Fitch Ratings released:

Fitch Ratings has revised the Outlook on New Zealand’s Long-Term Foreign-Currency Issuer Default Rating (IDR) to Negative from Stable and affirmed the IDR at ‘AA+’.

The Outlook revision reflects our view that a substantial debt reduction is becoming more difficult to envisage, as fiscal consolidation has been delayed in the past few years. The general government debt-GDP ratio has increased substantially over the past six years as the economy has been buffeted by a number of shocks.

In other words, we can’t wait much longer to start repaying debt.

The main change based on the election outcome could be the composition of the consolidation. The incumbent National Party-led coalition focuses on expenditure constraint, while a Labour Party coalition would emphasise revenue measures.

Labour will increase taxes rather than restrain spending.

The Guardian reported:

Zack Polanski’s claim to have immediately apologised for offering hypnosis intended to increase a woman’s breast size has been cast into doubt by the emergence of a 2013 interview with the Green party leader.

In 2013, before he entered politics, Polanski was approached by a Sun journalist to see if a hypnotherapy session could make her breasts bigger. This experience was then written up as an article.

He claimed he could increase breast size with hypnosis. He’s perfect for the UK Green Party.

The NY Post reported:

President Trump was stunned to learn last week that US intelligence indicates new Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei may be gay — and that his father, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, feared his suitability to rule the Islamic Republic for that reason, The Post can reveal.

Trump couldn’t contain his surprise and laughed aloud when he was briefed on the intel, according to sources.

Others in the room also found it “hilarious” and joined the president’s reaction, while one senior intelligence official “has not stopped laughing about it for days,” said one person familiar with the briefing.

A gay Ayatollah was not a glass ceiling I ever expected to be broken!

A classified US diplomatic cable from 2008, published by WikiLeaks, described Mojtaba being treated in the UK for impotence, though that report did not identify what may have caused the condition. 

Well we may now have an explanation!

The Anglican Church on Friday delivered an Easter message, viewable here: https://www.anglicantaonga.org.nz/news/common_life/2026abps_easter As an Anglican myself, I wish to respond, because in my view there are many problems with it:

Christ is described as a “teacher” who espoused an ethic of love and challenged unjust power structures of His day. In fact, Christ claimed to be far more than a teacher: He claimed to be God Incarnate. (For anyone interested, former Muslim Nabeel Qureshi explores the textual evidence that Christ claimed to be divine in his books Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus and No God But One.)

The Anglican Church’s statement also does not explain why according to our faith Christ needed to die on the cross in the first place. In fact, at the Last Supper Christ said that His blood was “poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28). Thus, Christ Himself states that His death was a sacrifice to reconcile the world to God, as foreshadowed in the Passover sacrifice and the Old Testament sacrificial system.

But supremely, there is no mention in the Anglican Church’s statement that Christ rose from the dead. It is amazing to me that the archbishops manage to mention the Ukraine, Gaza, the cost of living crisis and basically everything other than Christ’s bodily resurrection in a message about the meaning of Easter.

“Just be nice, everyone” is nothing I couldn’t learn in a sociology course at the University of Auckland. It is a message indistinguishable from the secular world. The sight of God Incarnate walking through the streets of Jerusalem and carrying His cross to be crucified by the very human beings He created in an act of deicide ought to be one of the most extraordinary spectacles in human history. That and not radical niceness is the unique contribution of the Christian faith to humanity.

Easter isn’t about nice warm mushy feelings and whatever vogue cause of the day the Anglican Church chooses to attach itself to. (I notice in passing that the Ukraine and Gaza are the Anglican Church’s particular fixation, and not for example the genocide of Christians in Nigeria by Boko Haram or the persecution of political dissidents in Cuba.) Easter is about a crucified saviour dying for our sins and rising from the dead.

The fact that the archbishops did not mention any of this in their statement about (of all things) the meaning of Easter shows to me that they simply don’t believe the most central teachings of their own faith or have any idea of the power of this message to change our lives.

I read an overseas article that cross-tabulated homicide data by ethnicity for both the victim and the killer. I thought this was interesting, so asked for NZ equivalent data. Sadly it was declined on privacy grounds, but they did provide the data without the cross-tabulation.

For those interested the breakdown by ethnicity for homicide victims for the last ten years is:

1. Māori 35%
2. European 27%
3. Unknown 22%
4. Pacific 6.8%
5. Asian 3.5%
6. Indian 3.1%
7. Middle Eastern 1.5%
8. African 0.5%
9. Hispanic 0.1%
10. Fijian 0.1%

And the breakdown for homicide offenders is:

1. Māori 48%
2. European 30%
3. Unknown 1.4%
4. Pacific 15.0%
5. Asian 2.6%
6. Indian 2.9%
7. African 0.1%
8. Hispanic 0.1%

Note that if you kill multiple people, you get counted once for each death, so the European total include 50+ counts for Tarrant.

The Taxpayers’ Union announced:

The Taxpayers’ Union is celebrating winning two international Reed Awards, widely regarded as the top global awards for political campaigning and advocacy.

The awards, run by Campaigns & Elections, recognise the best political campaign work from around the world, including election campaigns, advocacy groups, and political consulting firms. They are are often described as the “Oscars of political campaigning” with past winners including US presidential campaigns, national political parties and major international political consulting firms.

These awards are normally won by huge campaign organisations such as presidential campaigns and the like. To have a small NZ NGO win two awards is extraordinary.

If they had been won by a left wing group, there would no doubt have been fawning profiles in every media outlet.

The Herald reports:

A New Zealand-born man who served with the US Marine Corps for seven years but is now facing deportation says his only hope of a reprieve lies with either Congress or President Donald Trump stepping in. 

Paul Canton was born in Warkworth in 1971 and moved to Australia as a child. 

He first arrived in the United States at age 17 but overstayed his student exchange visa and instead enlisted in the US Marines on March 29, 1991.

Don’t overstay is a good piece of advice. He lived illegally for two to three years before enlisting. He should not have enlisted as he was not a US legal resident.

In 1998, after leaving the Marines, he settled in Florida, where he built a life, raised a family and voted for years believing he was a US citizen.

How could he believe he was a US citizen? Did he think it was a Xmas present? You don’t magically become a citizen by overstaying? Did he ever apply for citizenship? So really he voted illegally in scores of elections.

He claims he was told he would become a citizen after serving, but I call bullshit on that as it is against federal law for illegal aliens to enlist.

However, in 2019, he discovered he had never obtained citizenship, and a federal judge recently ruled he was ineligible because the conflict tied to his military service had ended before his active duty began.

Look I think they should have flexibility for cases like this, but I also think you shouldn’t overstay.

I did not expect to see a column in Al Jazeera saying that the US and Israel war against Iran is succeeding, but there is. The author, Muhammad Sellom, is an Assistant Professor of International Politics and Security at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He writes:

When you look at what has actually happened to Iran’s principal instruments of power – its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air defences, its navy and its proxy command architecture – the picture is not one of US failure. It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades. …

Iranian ballistic missile launches have fallen by more than 90 percent from 350 on February 28 to roughly 25 by March 14, according to publicly available data. Drone launches tell the same story: from more than 800 on Day 1 to about 75 on Day 15. …

Iran’s naval assets, fast-attack craft, midget submarines and mine-laying capabilities are being liquidated. Its air defences have been suppressed to the point at which the US is now flying nonstealth B-1 bombers over Iranian airspace, a decision that signals near-total confidence in air dominance.

And they got air dominance without losing a single aircraft in combat.

The most politically potent criticism is that the administration has no endgame. Trump’s own rhetoric has not helped: the oscillation between “unconditional surrender” and hints at negotiation, between regime change and denial of regime change, feeds the impression of strategic incoherence. Only 33 percent of American respondents in a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll said the president had clearly explained the mission’s purpose.

But the endgame is visible in the operational phasing, even if the rhetoric obscures it. The objective is the permanent degradation of Iran’s ability to project power beyond its borders through missiles, nuclear latency and proxy networks.

Call it strategic disarmament.

It will be fascinating to see what happens in the next few weeks.

Paul Ehrlich has died, the environmentalist most well know for being wrong about basically everything.

Richard Hanania has read Ehrlich’s infamous “The population bomb” and summarises for us what Ehrlich thought.

Click through and read the whole series. It is amazing.

A speculative post by PaulL, sometime poster and regular commenter.

There are many on here who point out that NZ Super recipients are NZ’s largest class of beneficiary, and the only one that isn’t means tested. And furthermore, that NZ Super is becoming increasingly unaffordable with current settings. These things are true.

There are those on the other side who claim that NZ Super should be an entitlement because current retirees have paid in for decades, and are now getting back what they funded. This is demonstrably false, because those same retirees haven’t bequeathed current generations a large savings pool. It is true that current retirees voted themselves income in retirement, but at the same time they voted to spend all the money on the way through, so effectively they’ve voted that other people (current generations) should pay for their retirement. I can see why they might do such a thing, but it’s not a principled “we paid into a savings scheme, now we want our savings out.”

There is, however, some truth that current retirees bequeathed future generations a large set of assets – roads, institutions, power generators etc etc – all the current assets of NZ that each citizen enjoys a one in five millionth share of. I haven’t done the maths, but it’s certainly arguable that this asset base that is gifted to each new citizen is more than is being asked for in retirement income.

I’m ignoring all that in this post. Instead, I’m asking the question of whether it’s economically defensible for NZ Super to remain universal.

An interesting report looking at the speech patterns of US Presidents. They found:

Trump talks like an a second grader reads. Short sentences, with repetition and simple words. This is what many like about him – he speaks like a normal Joe, not a polished politician.

Look at this comparison of him vs Obama. Trump is so non-presidential, but so funny.

The Bank of England has announced that they plan to replace famous historical figures from their banknotes, and replace them with cute animals. No I’m not joking. They cite a poll and the fact animals are harder to counterfeit.

Their current notes are:

• £5 – Winston Churchill
• £10 – Jane Austen
• £20 – J. M. W. Turner
• £50 – Alan Turing

All great choices – their most famous PM, author, painter and mathematician.

In NZ the people are:

• $5 — Sir Edmund Hillary
• $10 — Kate Sheppard
• $20 — Queen Elizabeth II
• $50 — Sir Āpirana Ngata
• $100 — Ernest Rutherford

Also all great choices, and a great way to get kids interested in history.

Hillary being placed on a bank note was very unusual, because he was alive at the time. As I understand it the rule was to never having a living non-royal on a bank note in case they do something bad later in life. Imagine the embarrassment if one of your bank notes had a felon on it. But Hillary was held in such high esteem, that a (worthwhile) exception was made for him.

CBS News has run a story that should be unexceptional, but is in fact very rare. It was a story about widespread fraud of taxpayer subsidies. Such stories previously have only been done by bloggers and citizen journalists, with most mainstream media rushing to put them into “context”. Here you have CBS lead the way. Here is what they found in California.

• Fraudulent enrolment of health people in hospices
• A 1500% in hospice companies in LA since 2010
• LA County has six times more hospices per capital than the national average
• 700 of the 1800 LA hospices have red flags indicating possible fraud
• 500 hospices are all located within 3 miles of each other – the most dense concentration in the US
• One street alone has 137 hospices on it!
• 89 hospices are registered to a single building!

May we see more of this type of journalism.

Stacie-Marie Laughton’s record is:

• Sentenced in 2008 to 7 1/2 – 15 years in prison for conspiracy to commit credit card fraud and 3 1/2 – 7 years for falsifying evidence
• Served four months before being released under the condition of 10 years of “good behavior.”
• Elected to New Hampshire House of Representatives in 2012 (not disclosing conviction), but resigned as probably ineligible
• Arrested in March 2015 for a phoned in bomb threat against a hospital – six month suspended sentence
• Elected to New Hampshire House of Representatives in 2020 and 2022
• Aug 22 – convicted of repeatedly texting 911 during non-emergencies
• Nov 22 – charged with stalking and violating a court order
• Dec 22 – resigned from NH House
• Jun 23 – charged with distributing child sex images and aiding and abetting in the sexual exploitation of children
• Nov 25 – pleaded guilty – faces up to 30 years in prison

A recividist offender, who still managed to get elected and re-elected. Amazing.

As a preface: I do not have a strong opinion on the death penalty one way or the other, although I lean against it. The purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to establish that regardless of where one stands on the issue, Western hysteria surrounding Israel’s policy change re: the death penalty is excessive and intellectually dishonest, and (2) to highlight some issues with Israel’s policy on the issue.

It is important to realise that the 250 hostages that Hamas captured on 7 October 2023 were traded for thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons including people who had committed terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. The hostage-to-terrorist ratio was extraordinarily high: on 15 October 2025 for example Hamas traded 24 Israeli hostages for over 2000 Palestinian prisoners, including 250 prisoners serving life sentences for acts of terrorism: https://www.nbcnews.com/…/joyous-scenes-israelis…

For example, Muhammad Aref Samhan was released after murdering 23 civilians in a terror attack on a bus in Jerusalem in 2003. I suspect many of the people currently in fits of hysteria over Israeli policy would feel differently in the shoes of Micah Avi, who is the son of one of Samhan’s victims and who spoke to the media about his experiences having to watch his father walk free.

Another example is that Yahya Sinwar (who was serving four life sentences at the time for terrorism offences) was notoriously released in 2011 as part of a hostage deal whereby 1027 Palestinian prisoners including people who were serving sentences for terrorism offences were swapped for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Yahya Sinwar then became the leader of Hamas in Gaza and orchestrated the mass rape, torture and murder of Israeli civilians on October 7 2023. That is the problem with releasing mass murderers.

Thus, Israel’s policy to date of imprisoning people convicted of terrorist offences has meant that Hamas has incentive to kidnap more Israelis to swap them for prisoners in Israeli prisons. Regardless of where you stand on the death penalty, I think it is important to understand that context to the recent law change. It’s easy to take the moral high ground when you’re living in Aotearoa and not surrounded by maniacs like Hamas who hate you and want to kill you.

However, the flip side of this coin is that I am concerned that if Palestinians convicted of terrorism offences are swiftly executed, that denies the individuals concerned the opportunity to appeal. Due process including the right to appeal is a human right. If Palestinians are kept on death row while appealing convictions for terrorism, then the impetus for Hamas to kidnap Israelis appears to remain in place. It could I suppose be argued that even if someone spends a few years on death row that is shorter than spending many decades serving out a life sentence, and therefore the motivation for Hamas to abduct people is reduced somewhat.

Nevertheless, I find it grossly hypocritical of Israel’s critics in the West to go into fits of hysteria over Israel’s policy in this regard (I have seriously heard Netanyahu compared with Hitler) without criticising Hamas (or any number of Middle Eastern paradises) for having the death penalty. It is intellectually dishonest and contemptible to the nth degree to criticise Israel for executing terrorists who blow up school buses when the same people have never in their lives before criticised (say) Saudi Arabia or Iran for executing LGBTQI+ people for gay sex.

Shane Jones announced:

A project to extend Hamilton Airport runway will receive a $6.5 million loan from the Regional Infrastructure Fund, boosting resilience for Waikato and the national aviation network, Regional Development Minister Shane Jones says.

“Extending the runway will increase Hamilton Airport’s capacity to support a broader range of aircraft. Its location and proximity to major highways and link roads also make it a key hub for moving people and freight domestically and internationally,” Mr Jones says.

Apart from the fact that it is highly likely they will get no increased usage from a longer runway (which is already longer than Wellington, Palmerston North, Queenstown and Dunedin), why do taxpayers need to loan the money?

Why doesn’t the airport just get a commercial loan? Or get more equity from their shareholding Councils? The airport company has assets of $328 million and equity of $267 million. Last year they made a profit of $30 million yet muggins taxpayers is giving them a loan.