A guest post by Michael Littlewood:

Is anyone else a little tired of articles that tell us we aren’t saving enough for our retirement, or that the country can’t afford New Zealand Superannuation (NZS)? Most seem fuelled by KiwiSaver providers or financial advisers who tell us we don’t know what we are doing; also that we need the government to force us out of our apparent indifference. Or even that the financial sky is falling in, or will be.

Instead of acting as the voice for financial service providers, why don’t reporters do some research; ask some questions; demand answers?

1. Future cost of NZS: The Treasury tells us that the net cost of NZS in 2060 will be 6.0% of 2060’s estimated Gross Domestic Product (GDP), up from a current net 4.5% (2025 – NZSF-model-BEFU 2025). Will that really be unaffordable? Regardless of today’s debate, 2060’s taxpayers will decide whether 6.0% is too much to pay for NZS in 2060, just as taxpayers today seem to think that a net 4.5% is about right.

But what are other countries now paying?

The average cost of state pensions in the OECD today is a net 7.4% of those countries’ GDPs (Pensions at a Glance 2025). Somehow, taxpayers in those countries choose (and manage) to pay today quite a bit more than we expect to pay in 2060 (23% more). So, why is the estimated 2060 cost of NZS a particular problem? Is it because the Treasury says it is? Or is it just a question of future spending priorities And do we need to make those decisions today?

By the way, the presence, or absence, of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund doesn’t change any of this. The cost of NZS today and tomorrow is, and will be, the benefits actually paid. Those are unaffected by the workings of the NZSF.

2. KiwiSaver balances: Regardless of the amount of money in KiwiSaver and the endless analyses of average balances today and at our expected retirements, where is the evidence that Kiwis are actually under-saving for retirement? KiwiSaver is such a small part of the total net household assets of all New Zealanders (just 3.9%, according to Household financial data Table 1-5A December 2023, StatsNZ) that discussing KiwiSaver balances by themselves is virtually pointless. There was, of course, no evidence to support the 2026 lift in total contributions to 7% of employees’ pay, nor to the next increase to 8%. Those seem to be ‘answers’ to an unidentified problem.

And how much of the money now in KiwiSaver comes from ‘other’ savings (see point 5 below)?

3. How much is enough saving? Many commentators say that New Zealanders won’t have enough to live on when they reach retirement with endless calculations of average balances, average contributions and some guesses about investment income and the expected cost of living. These guesstimates are really pointless. Is anyone asking actual New Zealanders how much they want to have saved when they reach retirement?  How much do they have now? Oh and by the way, when do New Zealanders expect they might want to stop working?

Journalists should also note that private savings have nothing to do with the expected cost of NZS (point 1 above). We don’t have a means-test. Or is ‘more private savings’ code for a future means-test?

4. Do we know whether our retirement income framework is working? We do not know if today’s retired have the retirement they were expecting (or need). Until we have statistics that drill down to actual households to figure out what their retirement income aspirations might be (or have been), their current state of preparedness and their expected position at their chosen retirement ages, we will never know.  Asking New Zealanders what they think is pointless. For example, one couple’s aspiration might be to continue working after age 65 while they are able and then retire to live on NZS alone. That couple does not need anything in a KiwiSaver account and there can be no public policy justification to say that our couple should be saving specifically for retirement. 

The Retirement Commissioner now acknowledges that we need a longitudinal study of New Zealand households to find out what’s really happening (Review of Retirement Income Policies, 2025) but that didn’t stop the Review’s making many recommendations to change the way we do things, such as ‘more KiwiSaver’. Talk about firing policy shots in the dark!

5. Does anyone remember SoFIE? Before KiwiSaver started, StatsNZ tried to uncover some answers to questions 3 and 4 through a longitudinal study: Survey of Family Income and Employment, which ran from 2002 to 2010. SoFIE looked at what actual households were doing over an eight-year period. The Treasury wrote a series of reports based on SoFIE that, in summary, concluded:

• New Zealanders were probably slightly over-saving for retirement before KiwiSaver started in 2007 (Treasury report from 2004: Saving for Retirement: New Evidence for New Zealand; from 2007: Are Kiwis saving enough for retirement?  Preliminary evidence from SoFIE; and from 2009: Saving Rates of New Zealanders: A Net Wealth Approach); 

• Of KiwiSaver contributions, about one-third were ‘new’ savings, the rest being effectively transferred from other financial assets (Treasury report 2011 KiwiSaver: An Initial Evaluation of the Impact on Retirement Saving);

• KiwiSaver members seemed to have accumulated less net wealth than non-members (Treasury report 2014KiwiSaver and the Accumulation of Net Wealth). 

The authors of those reports will tell you that there were significant difficulties with the later tranches of data but we knew from SoFIE, before KiwiSaver started, that New Zealanders were probably saving ‘enough’ for retirement. That’s the only time we have ever asked or tried to answer those questions. So, was KiwiSaver the answer to a problem we didn’t have? Why have taxpayers spent billions of dollars subsidising KiwiSaver?

Any KiwiSaver provider which suggests we aren’t saving enough for retirement has no evidence to back that up. They might be right but we don’t know; and the Retirement Commissioner doesn’t know either. We can’t answer those questions today unless we have a new (better) SoFIE.

6. The obsession with ‘total remuneration’ employment contracts: This isn’t the right place to run all the arguments about whether employers should be ‘allowed’ to pay their employees under the principles of ‘total remuneration’. But if we needed to make anything compulsory on this, I strongly believe that ‘total remuneration’ should be the only acceptable way of forcing employers to behave in any particular way. The alternative ‘pay + benefits’ approach either saves employers money (by avoiding contributions for non-members) or shows that employers haven’t thought through the consequences of their current remuneration strategy. Either conclusion is, at best, unedifying. ‘Pay + benefits’ is simply unfair on employees who can’t, can’t afford or don’t need to join KiwiSaver.

7. KiwiSaver won’t/can’t fix the ageing ‘problem’: Today’s NZS is a claim on today’s economy.  So are today’s retirement savings (for current retirees). The same applies to tomorrow’s NZS/retirement savings. The answer to the population-ageing ‘problem’ is to grow the economy by more than we currently expect so that we can meet all those expected claims.

The mix between public and private provision doesn’t much matter unless you argue that KiwiSaver itself will grow the economy so that more KiwiSaver means more growth. The trouble with that line is with the evidence, or lack of it. Economists tend to suggest that the links between savings and investment and then between investment and growth are tenuous at best. It’s even possible that the links run the other way – more growth leads to higher savings so that savings are a consequence of growth, not a cause.

Getting really specific – how precisely will more KiwiSaver help the economic issues raised by an increase in the claims, both public and private, on tomorrow’s economy from an ageing population?

8. Why can’t KiwiSavers access their savings? I think KiwiSavers should have free access to their savings whenever they wish. After all, whose money is it? KiwiSaver providers of course like the restricted access but why does the government make rules about that?  Now that tax breaks have been largely withdrawn, what business is it of the government to tell savers they must wait until age 65? Doesn’t the government trust the owners of those savings to make decisions that are in the savers’ own best interests?

9. No KiwiSaver provider will agree with any of this: It really is pointless to ask KiwiSaver providers what changes they would like to see in the current regime. They will, of course, support strengthening the current contribution regime and further restricting access to savings. They are in the business of growing their schemes as their own incomes depend on more money and more members for longer. All that makes them deeply self-interested in calling for New Zealanders to do more under KiwiSaver.

In conclusion

A suggestion: why don’t journalists ask providers/advisers what they think about items 1 to 8 above? Don’t they trust New Zealanders to behave sensibly with their own money? Perhaps a SoFIE of the late 2020s might just produce similar answers to SoFIE of the 2000s. Just perhaps, New Zealanders might already be saving enough for retirement.

Stuff reports:

The Government is weighing changes to the Broadcasting Standards Authority, with Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith signalling disestablishment is currently his preferred option.

Goldsmith says no final decision has been made, but confirmed the Government is considering whether to retain the authority, redefine its role, or scrap it entirely, NZ Herald reported. …

Speaking at a public meeting in Waikanae, Goldsmith said the Government would “probably” land on scrapping the authority, the NZ Herald reported. He later reiterated to Newstalk ZB that disestablishment was where he was leaning.

While not a final decision, this is good news.

CBC reports:

• Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals have secured a majority government with wins in all three byelections.
• The Liberals were just one seat shy of a majority after five opposition politicians broke ranks to join the ruling party in recent months.

You need 172 seats for a majority. At the election they won 169, meaning they needed the lunatic NDP’s seven seats or secessionist’s 22 seats to govern.

They now have 174 seats. This is probably good for Canada, as not being reliant on the NDP can only be a good thing.

UK Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch writes:

We can see it everywhere – from the recent looting by hordes of teenagers, to the explosion in welfare dependency, to the tide of small-boat arrivals that mock our border controls on a daily basis. They’re all symptoms of the same disease: the collapse of consequences in British life.

All of us were shocked by the phone footage of children smashing up shops in broad daylight, stealing, laughing, filming themselves as though it were a game.

Some commentators immediately reached for a racial explanation, but that was to miss the point completely.

While the majority of young looters in Clapham, south London, seemed to have Caribbean or African heritage, the fact is that children in Lagos and Nairobi do not behave that way.

Why? Because in Nigeria and Kenya the boundaries are clear and actions have consequences. Parents, communities and authorities do not wring their hands or look the other way. It’s a lesson we’ve forgotten here.

Over time, Britain has convinced itself that crime, idleness and bad behaviour are things to be explained away rather than clamped down upon. We are building a culture in which people think they can do whatever they like – and that nothing will happen in response. All too often, they are right.

We didn’t get here overnight. For years, there’s been a drip, drip, drip of institutional and cultural change, not least the belief that social programmes matter more than tough enforcement in maintaining discipline. I profoundly disagree.

What was London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s answer to the Clapham looting? An extra £30million for youth clubs in London, as if children and teenagers smash up shops because there’s nowhere to play table tennis.

This is spot on – it is not race, but culture and consequences.

I saw a story about how the BSA only had 90 complaints in the last year, so less than two a week.

That got me interested in how this compares to the NZ Media Council who consider company’s about non-broadcasters. The data is stunning.

The BSA spent $1.67 million dealing with 90 complaints. That is an average cost per complaint of $18,500.

The Media Council spent $325k dealing with 256 complaints. That is an average cost per complaint of $1,270.

If you work it out per decision, the numbers are $19,800 vs $2,300.

So it is a no brainer to abolish the BSA, and hand over broadcaster complaints to the Media Council. Taxpayers and broadcasters would save around $1.5 million between them.

The Press reports:

National has announced it selected former Federated Farmers president Katie Milne and the Labour Party has selected teacher Rory Paterson as its candidate for the West Coast-Tasman electorate in this year’s general election.

Former Buller District mayor Jamie Cleine will represent New Zealand First. A farmer, Cleine led Westport through the devastating 2021 floods, which saw dozens of homes red-stickered, as well as several other emergencies.

Katie Milne is a very strong candidate, and would have to be favoured to win the seat. The Labour candidate actually lives in North Canterbury. While Milne is:

Milne is a fifth-generation West Coast farmer and was the Vice President of the World Farmers Organisation, a director for Predator Free 2050 and served as Federated Farmers first female president between 2017 and 2020.

Milne has chaired the West Coast TB Free Committee and was a member of the Farmer Mental Wellness Strategy Group, director of Westland Milk Products, and helped found the Lake Brunner Community Catchment Care Group, a community-led clean up effort which halted a downward spiral in water quality in Lake Brunner five years ahead of schedule in 2015.

It should be a non-brainer. However there is a risk that the NZ First candidate could split the vote, allowing Labour to come through the middle.

Jason Walls writes:

By the time Breman took over, the bank’s reputation appeared to be at a near all-time low. 

But, in the short four months she’s been in charge, that tarnished reputation has been on a fast track toward recovery. 

On transparency, she’s nailed her brief. 

Throughout Orr’s tenure, and Graeme Wheeler before him, interviews were very rare. 

Not for Breman. 

Since taking over in December, she’s done 23 interviews with media from major players such as 1News and Newstalk ZB, to smaller outlets such as NBR and Interest.co.nz. She’s even sat down with financial blogs.

Meanwhile, Breman’s delivered major speeches across the country as well as fronting five press conferences. 

When it became apparent the conflict in the Middle East was likely to have a material impact on New Zealand’s economy, she fronted to business leaders and reporters to ease concerns.

This is indeed a very good start, and hopefully it will continue. The Governor is our most powerful appointed official. They should be accessible to the media.

At the start of her tenure, she suggested she would look into making the votes of the members of the Monetary Policy Committee – that’s the board tasked with setting the official cash rate – public, so everyone can see which way they voted.

So far, who voted which way is still mostly shrouded in mystery.

That would be good.

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!