The BSA has done its annual poll of what words NZers find most offensive.
I hadn’t even heard the term nappy-head previously. Somewhat surprised it features highly hear as it is really a US term. Also surprised that so many even know what gypped is. I wonder if respondents were told what the meanings of the terms were?
An interesting chart on favourability of institutions. Basically Democrats should stop attacking Amazon as most Americans love them.
The net favourability, in order, is:
An interesting poll from Radio NZ.
Reid Resarch asked:
Do you think the Treaty of Waitangi has too much, about the right amount, or too little influence over government decision making?
Now this was asked in 2026, so is a reflection on the current Government. The one accused every day of genocide by Te Pati Maori because it did something they say breaches the Treaty etc.
The results were:
So only one in six New Zealanders think the Treaty has too little influence over government decision making.
The net score (too much minus too little) is 38% – 17% = +21% for too much influence. Let’s look at how that breaks down by party vote:
So ACT, NZF and National voters all very strongly think the Treaty has too much influence on government decision making. TPM and Green voters strongly think it doesn’t have enough.
Labour voters actually seen the most happy, where around equal numbers think it has too much and too little influence.
Ashley Church writes:
The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Treblinka. It began much earlier, with ideas, laws, exclusions, and the slow normalisation of cruelty. The part that history often forgets.
When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, there was no plan to exterminate the Jews. What did exist was a heavily racist worldview: that Jews were alien, that they were a corrosive presence within society – and that the economic hardship, moral decay, and national humiliation that the Germans were facing was their fault.
This was common in most of Europe. In many countries Jews needed a permit to marry, to try and prevent them breeding too much. Jews have been persecuted not for just 12 years of Nazi rule but for over 2,000 years.
The pattern is unmistakable: Jews tolerated when useful, vilified when convenient, attacked when politically expedient. As such, Germany did not invent antisemitism – it simply systematised it.
So, when Zionism arose in the 19th century, it wasn’t through an imaginary desire for conquest or supremacy. It was through exhaustion.
Zionism recognised the unavoidable lesson. That no matter how integrated the Jews became, no matter how loyal or assimilated, they were never truly safe. Rights could be withdrawn overnight. Citizenship could be revoked. Neighbours could become executioners.
So Zionism proposed a simple proposition: a people without safety needed a homeland. And not just any homeland. Their own homeland – on land which they had possessed for thousands of years and from which they had been expelled in relatively recent history.
Zionism is simply supporting the right of Jews to have their own country where they are safe. Any if any group has ever demonstrated the need for the safety of their own country, it is Jews.
So the State of Israel was declared in 1948. Not by military might – but by the agreement of the world community following a UN-backed partition plan. But the surrounding Arab states rejected coexistence and launched a war aimed at annihilation. Many Arab residents fled, expecting a swift victory and a return. That victory never came.
Israel survived. Barely.
If you support the role of the UN and international law, then you should be a Zionist. That doesn’t mean you support everything or even most things Israel does. It just means you support there being an Israel.
Holocaust Remembrance Day is not just about mourning the dead. It is about recognising the pattern that led to those deaths while there is still time to interrupt it.
Because the Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with the same things that we’re seeing, right now.
And history has a habit of repeating itself – first slowly, then all at once.
Sadly.
SCOTUS Blog reports:
In a major ruling on presidential power, the Supreme Court on Friday struck down the sweeping tariffs that President Donald Trump imposed in a series of executive orders. By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the tariffs exceed the powers given to the president by Congress under a 1977 law providing him the authority to regulate commerce during national emergencies created by foreign threats. …
In a part of the opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Roberts said that Trump’s reliance on IEEPA to impose the tariffs violated the “major questions” doctrine – the idea that if Congress wants to delegate the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must do so clearly. In 2023, the court relied on the “major questions” doctrine to strike down the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness program. In that case and others like it, Roberts observed, it might have been possible to read the federal law at issue to give the executive branch the power it claimed. But “context” – such as the constitutional division of power among the three branches of government – and “common sense” “suggested Congress would not have delegated ‘highly consequential power’ through ambiguous language.”
The majority are quite correct. If the President wants the ability to impose tariffs at will, he should get Congress to pass such a law authorising him to do do.
This is temporarily good news for New Zealand as the 10% tariff on our exports is gone for now. However it is highly highly likely Trump will reinstate most or all tariffs under another justification, and that will take a year or so to be decided.
I’m going to quote from UK’s Matt Goodwin. I do so as someone who is pro-immigration. I think moderate, controlled immigration is good for a country, and specifically has been good for New Zealand. But a good thing can become a bad thing is if it too large, or uncontrolled. If NZ took in 1 million immigrants a year (for example), it would be bad. Our infrastructure would not cope, and new migrants would not integrate as well as they currently do in NZ.
Goodwin writes:
More than 75% of Brussels is now foreign-origin, with over 60% coming from outside Europe. Nearly 60% of Amsterdam’s population is of migrant background while only one in three children have two Dutch parents.
In Frankfurt and Rotterdam, native populations are already minorities. In Stockholm and Vienna, close to half the population is now foreign-born or of foreign origin.
In Hamburg and Stuttgart, it is about 40%. In Berlin, official statistics just revealed that more than half of all children and teenagers have a migrant background.
In London, entire boroughs are places where more than eight in ten children have at least one foreign-born parent — often from South Asia, the Middle East, or Africa.
These are not marginal changes.
They are civilisational shifts.
They are quite staggering statistics.
And according to Pew Research, if current trends continue, by the year 2050, only 24 years from now, around 31% of Sweden, 20% of Germany and Austria, 18% of France and Belgium, and 17% of the UK will be Muslim — not through conquest, but through choices made by elites who never asked the public for consent.
Some immigration is inevitable. Some is beneficial.
But what Europe has experienced is neither controlled nor moderate. It is change at a scale and speed that no society in history has ever absorbed without tension.
The key words here are controlled, moderate and with consent.
Again NZ does this well. We have a points system where your ability to get a skilled migrant visa is dependent on your qualifications, income, occupation, work experience.
But the reason there is such a populist uprising in Europe is because the pace and extent of uncontrolled immigration has caused huge problems. Cities in Sweden like Malmo have become ganglands with teenage assassins. The gun murder rate is 30 times higher than in London. 45% of guns crimes are done by teenagers.
A lot has been made of “significant” changes to the NZ education system under Erica Stanford. Some things have been put in place (e.g. changes to early reading, cell-phone ban). Primary school curriculum changes are being rolled-out by schools during this year. Other changes – qualifications changes, senior curriculum – still have a long-way to go and there is much division in these areas.
However, from an education outcomes perspective – the point of education – the coalition has been hugely disappointing.
A successful pattern for education is theoretically simple. Have all in place in our society to see children develop well within pregnancy and the first five years of life. Have them turn up to school bright-eyed and bushy tailed. Then have a combination of parental emphasis and quality/purposeful schooling that brings children in EVERY day. See to it that the VAST majority of students leave schooling with a purposeful qualification that provides a chance for an aspirational life.
Despite Erica Stanford telling me directly that National would have a parenting policy – there has been nothing and we are stuck with the situation where many children are arriving at their first school lacking the most basic skills. Research tells us that they rarely catch up.
David Seymour – as Associate Minister of Education – has responsibility for improving school attendance. He has completely failed and the response to him at Waitangi gives context to how the lowest attending demographic feels about his contribution to Maori aspiration. He is the wrong man for the attendance role. In term three of 2025 only 36% of Maori students fully attended their schools. To call that a disaster is a major understatement. It is no use having a flash curriculum, methods, etc – if students are not going to school. On top of the attendance crises there are 10,000 children not enrolled anywhere each year – and the Ministry is not even looking for them.
Very little effective has been done for the MANY students stuck between the senior curriculum/qualification reforms – this will have many being a part of a neglected generation. It has just been released that 15,000 more Year 12 and 13 students are at risk of leaving school with no qualifications through not getting through the numeracy and literacy requirements. The co-requisites was a reasonable idea. It was poorly implemented by Labour but has not been improved by the current Minister. We have an ongoing decline in the full range of qualifications outcomes and when the LEAVERS data comes out later in the year it will show a very significant downward trend – especially for Maori, Pasifika and poorer students. For 2024 16% of students left school with no qualification at all. Under Minister Stanford’s watch – in 2025 – it is will be even higher.
Despite the Ministry of Education being a key feature of the failure of the New Zealand education system the Minister has left the Ministry largely untouched and appointed a long-term Deputy Secretary to the top job. Stanford/Seymour promised the Ministry of Education would come back to 2,700 full-time employees – i.e. pre-Hipkins numbers. In September 2025 it had 3,939 employees and climbing. Surely Nicola Wills should be eyeing significant budget savings here. To get a full understanding of how Ministry of Education staff feel about their job – their employee evaluation is worth a read in full. Note; only 41% of employees would recommend the Ministry of Education as a good workplace. Twenty-six percent say they intend to leave within 12 months. Only 62% believe the Ministry is able to give “free and frank advice” to the Minister. The taxpayer resource consumed by the Ministry would be far better transfered to the schools in significant part.
If the trends above occured under Labour the political Right would be castigating them. It is easy to point the finger at the last Labour government but National have been the main party of government for 11 of the last 17 years.
In 2026 there needs to be clear emphasis on – supporting parenting and child development for 0 – 5s. Working much more effectively to get the missing 10,000 enrolled and hugely increasingly regular attendance (a bence-mark could be England’s 75%). Placing a great deal more emphasis on keeping students in school until 17 and lifting all qualfications levels for current high-school students (not just hoping for possible Primary schooling to drift through in future years). And, getting the taxpayer resources for education into the right places.
The Post reports:
New Zealand is capitalising on global instability — including the so-called “Trump effect” — with hundreds of wealthy Americans seeking residency by investing billions in the country.
Less than a year after the Active Investor Plus visa was revamped to make it more attractive, 573 applications worth nearly $3.4 billion have been approved or committed — about half from the United States.
Around $1.05b has already been invested into New Zealand businesses, with a further $2.34b expected to be deployed over the next six months.
Immigration Minister Erica Stanford said she was under no illusions about the timing behind the surge. “It’s a visa at the right time.”
It’s a win-win. We get more wealth individuals living in NZ, and paying tax to fund our schools and hospitals. Businesses get more capital, and the investors get to live in a country where your chance of being shot by the Police at a protest is basically zero.
The Government has introduced a bill to recognise that English is an offical language of New Zealand. Of course English has been a de facto official language of NZ since 1840. The fact the bill is in English shows why it is not needed.
Māori and sign language are de jure official languages. That needed a law to state they are official because they previously were not. English does not need such a law. There is no problem that needs fixing. Parliament has better things to do than debate such a law.
But this was in the coalition agreement with NZ First, and it is important the Government does what it agreed to do. What I would suggest is that at first reading they ask for leave of the House to pass it through all three stages without debate.
An amazing interview at The Spinoff:
Swarbrick said she had regularly told Beck that contributing to a media narrative of the city centre being all “chaos and crime and knives and guns” resulted in less foot traffic, less vibrancy and less safety. “I have personally contacted Viv and spoken to her at a number of meetings about how I think that her approach, or I guess you could plausibly call it a strategy, is hugely detrimental to the city.
This just sums the Greens up perfectly. Rather than actually look to reduce violent crime, their stance is that people should just not talk about it, and then people will feel safer!
Who will be the Justice Minister in a Labour/Green/TPM Government? Tamatha Paul who wants to abolish police foot patrols or Chloe who just wants people to pretend crime doesn’t exist?
The BBC reports:
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
The last member of the Royal Family to be arrested was King Charles 1 in 1647 – 379 years ago.
King Charles III said the “law must take its course” in response to Andrew’s arrest and that the police had his “full and wholehearted support and co-operation”.
Have to feel for the King. Andrew is his brother. However it also shows how right he was to make him renounce his titles.
Police had previously said they were considering investigating Andrew over allegations relating to his association with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and were reviewing allegations he shared confidential material.
If Andrew has been arrested for sharing confidential materials with Jeffery Epstein, then surely Peter Mandelson’s arrest can’t be far off.
A few months ago I founded a Facebook group called NZ Against Hamas to organise Kiwis who are interested in pro-Jewish advocacy and counterprotests against the anti-Israel movement in this country. (Incidentally, if anyone wishes to join the link is here: facebook.com/groups/nzah.private) A month or two ago one of the members of the group (“Caoimhin B Morcant”) contacted me saying that he was part of a private group of individuals who compile dossiers of information on members of the far left. When I enquired as to why this was he said it was to keep Aotearoa safe from such people. He asked me to provide him with the name of someone I have seen at the street protests. I said I didn’t know.
A few weeks later another account (“Charles Gray”) contacted me referring to this conversation and asking me if I had discovered the name of the person in question yet. I was confused because I had never had a conversation with this individual about the matters in question. He made some bs excuse which I didn’t give too much thought to at the time. It was not until later that I realised that it was the same person messaging me from different accounts, and that he had messaged me from the wrong one on the second occasion.
It became obvious recently that our page had been infiltrated by spy accounts, and so I finally sat down to sort out the problem by systematically working through our membership list. Eventually I found an account which it became clear was a fake account. I Googled this person’s name and found that it was the known alias of a particularly militant and rather nasty far-left activist whom I had met at the anti-Israel protests in Auckland. The website which identified the alias provided the name of a second alias which it said was controlled by the same person. I ran the name through our membership list and it was one of the accounts that had messaged me asking me for information about a protester and who had said that he was compiling dossiers of information on political opponents.
According to the website containing the two aliases the individual in question has dozens of very sophisticated fake social media accounts with thousands of friends, and the person who controls these accounts has boasted publicly about building a database of information on members of the political right.
It was then that I joined the dots and realised that Caoimhin B Morcant and Charles Gray were one and the same person, and that he is spying not on the far left but on people he deems to be rightwing (which seems to include me, even though I am a queer, pro-indigenous Labour Party voter). I checked the posts made by these accounts on our Facebook page and they were consistently requesting information valuable to the other side, for example about my lawsuit against the Police or about a private pro-Israel social media page run by someone who joined our page. That is consistent with building a database on the owner’s political opponents.
The public need to know that these three Facebook accounts are fake accounts controlled by a far-left activist for the express purpose of harvesting your data:
Sally Jade Jones: https://www.facebook.com/jadejonesnz This account has over 4000 friends.
Caoimhin B Morcant/ Kevin Morgan: https://www.facebook.com/kevin.morgan.92754397 This account has nearly 2000 friends.
Charles Gray: https://www.facebook.com/gray.charles333/ This account has 800 friends. (Note that he has since placed this account into inactivity.)
If you have a Facebook account, I suggest unfriending these accounts immediately, or warning any mutual friends who are on his friend lists. A number of people have commented to me that they had overlooked adding these accounts, so I suggest checking to make sure.
Former PM Sir Geoffrey Palmer has written a column disagreeing with my call for New Zealand to become the seventh state of Australia. It is a very reasonable column, and I’ll use the blog to respond to some of the points here.
There is no respect in which Australia differs more from New Zealand than its constitutional structures and decision-making.
To give up the advantage of being a sovereign state to become a state of Australia means New Zealanders would have a very limited input into the decisions of the new government.
Yep that is the downside of not being a sovereign state. However I would point out state governments in Australia still provide many of the most important services to the public such as health, education and police. And we would be almost the third largest Australian state with 12 Senators and 28 MPs, which would be the balance of power often.
It also means New Zealand’s voice would be eliminated at the international level and in the councils of the world.
There are two respects in which this would be a loss.
We would no longer have a seat in the United Nations General Assembly. .
New Zealand would lose its capacity to negotiate and participate in the making of treaties that apply to New Zealand, both multilateral and bilateral.
As a trading nation, that voice is essential and to lose it would be most unfortunate and have deleterious economic consequences.
I think Sir Geoffrey overlooks the premise made by Mark Carney and myself. In the new world order of nationalism, multilateral institutions are far far far less useful and powerful. It is their weakening that makes us needing to be bigger and stronger. Wishing the world hasn’t changed doesn’t make it so.
As for a vote in the UN General Assembly. Even putting aside its general impotence, how often do Australia and NZ vote differently in the UN? Would an Albanese Government vote differently to a (say) Hipkins Government. Very unlikely.
The history of Australia’s written constitution, as interpreted by the High Court of Australia, places considerable limits upon the capacity of the Commonwealth to govern effectively.
I found that out when assisting Sir Owen Woodhouse in Australia during the days of the Whitlam government.
The Prime Minister wished to enact a measure comparable to the New Zealand accident compensation legislation. But there was an absence of federal power to do so.
This is actually a good thing for NZ, if we joined. It means we could keep ACC. I like having limits on the power of a federal government.
There are profound legal differences between a federation of limited central powers and a unitary state, such as New Zealand, where all the power lies with a single government.
Yep, and if you are a state, those differences work to your benefit. Canberra can’t tell you what to do on everything.
New Zealand already has in force one of the deepest and most comprehensive trade agreements in the world: the Australia- New Zealand Economic Relations Trade Agreement 1983, known as ANZCERTA.
In effect, this gives New Zealand all the advantages of being a state of Australia.
New Zealand has free trade with Australia for all goods, including agricultural products. And it includes all services as well.
Therefore there would be precious little advantage for New Zealand to become a single state, rather than a separate country.
It is because we are so economically integrated that it would be easy to become a state. The key thing missing is that when a super-power starts throwing its weight around, Australia is not going to economically defend New Zealand. If Trump puts a 200% tariff on our lamb exports because he doesn’t like our copyright law, we’re screwed, However if part of Australia, we can’t be singled out – and Australia as a whole would work to reverse them.
I’d also point out if we are a state of Australia, they could no longer deport the 501s to us. No such thing as an internal deportation.
I recall when Michael Kirby, the distinguished Australian judge, years ago made a proposal that New Zealand should be two states of Australia, not one.
That would not be acceptable either.
That would be great, but I don’t think we could convince the Aussies of that – even after a few drinks on Melbourne Cup day. Having 24 Senators instead of 12 would make us incredibly powerful in Australia – equal to NSW and Victoria combined in the Senate.
It would hand over the interpretation of the law to the High Court of Australia.
The NZ Supreme Court would rule on most NZ legal issues. The Australian High Court on federal law issues. There would be an appeal on issues such as whether a state law breaches the constitution.
Under what is proposed, major taxation decisions would not be made in New Zealand.
That is an advantage as 99% of Australians pay less income tax than New Zealanders on the same income.
New Zealand would be easily outvoted in both the Australian House of Representatives and the Senate.
That makes the mistake of think the Australian House and Senate vote as a bloc. They are divided on many issues. The 28 NZ MPs and 12 NZ Senators could well prove decisive on many issues.
The Public Service Commission has published a scathing report into how the Teaching Council managed conflicts and procured work with a firm part owned by the CEOs husband. They note:
It found serious and repeated failures in the Teaching Council’s procurement and conflict of interest processes between late 2018 and early 2025. These failures were not matters of minor or technical non‑compliance – they reflected poor oversight and immature organisational controls, particularly in relation to conflict management.
I’ve just read the report and what I think is equally note-worthy is how almost all the contracts were for projects that were far from core work for the Council – teacher registration etc. Even if the projects had been procured better, they were still just a massive costs that teachers were being levied to fund. They include:
I am sure the Medical Council doesn’t need to spend $500,000 on digital engagement. You’re a regulatory body, not a social media agency.
Spending $600,000 on a stakeholder engagement plan is just an excuse to fund contractors. A decent mid level comms staffer should be able to put together a stakeholder engagement plan in a week or so.
The change to Kainga Ora in the last two years has been massive. Chris Bishop has a long list of changes. Here are some of the bigger ones:
So less debt, a drop in the waitlist, lower build costs, higher tenant satisfaction, fewer vacant homes, less rent arrears and fewer disruptive tenants. Now a bad job.
The geniuses at NZEI have launched a campaign called Make It Stop. Their campaign video has kids playing the recorder and people begging them to stop. It is meant to be some sort of super clever analogy aimed at the Government, but most people will just see it as the NZEI dissing kids learning music.
Learning the recorder is a hallowed part of school. I remember learning it at Island Bay Primary. And here the NZEI thinks it is something to be mocked.
Now I wasn’t the best recorder play at school, but as it happens one school girl who was very good at the recorder is a certain Erica Stanford. And she has just shot a video showing off her recorder skills, and urging music teachers not be to be out off teaching kids the recorder as it is such a great entry into learning music.
If there was a award for worst political campaign of the year, the NZEI would be an odds on favourite to take it out, even though it is only February.
Vernon Small points out:
But what should also be a concern to the party is that he is the latest in a long line of senior male MPs (including a significant clutch of Māori MPs) who have taken their leave since the 2023 election or have announced they are going.
Which is where the “eight” comes in.
The tally of the Blokesit so far is: former deputy leader Kelvin Davis, Grant Robertson, Andrew Little, David Parker, Duncan Webb, Rino Tirikatene, Adrian Rurawhe and now Henare. That includes, worryingly, four senior Māori MPs against the backdrop of Labour’s ambition to win all seven Māori electorates.
Also Greg and Damien O’Connor have no seats, so may both leave also.
Labour only had 16 male MPs elected in 2023, and 8 – 10 of them have left or are leaving. That is a huge departure rate.
1. Māori Party in court with its MPs
2. Two former Māori Party candidate options have gone to Greens. There may be others.
3. Peeni Henare gets the chop by his Party. He is a good man with a heart for the people. He rangatira no tētahi kāwai rangatira.
4. Willy Jackson moves in on Tamaki seat against Orini. Orinis team was from JTs team. Orini is on the outer with the Māori Party. JT and Willie are thick. Figure out the rest!!!
5. Māori Party at 1% down from 7%.
6. In to each other at Waitangi
The interesting aspect is his statement that new MP Orini Kaipara has already fallen out with Tamihere and that Tamihere and Willie and working to take her out.
The Taxpayers’ Union reports:
The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union can reveal through an Official Information Act requestthat staff at the Ministry of Education were paid $414,119.68 by taxpayers to do 8,528 hours of union work.
This includes organising and advocating on behalf of the New Zealand Educational Institute Te Riu Roa (NZEI), the Public Service Association (PSA) and the Association of Professional and Executive Employees (APEX).
Labour approves collective contracts where taxpayers fund union officials to work on behalf of Labour. It’s basically corruption.
“Ministry staff were paid to help coordinate strikes that last year left kids out of the classroom and parents forced to fund childcare. Minister Seymour has already announced that union strikes tanked school attendance last year.”
Incredible. The Ministry is funding its own staff to help organise strikes against the Ministry!
Liam Hehir writes:
Wayne Brown’s claim that the Government’s proposed rates cap would save Auckland households “just $2.79 a month” is eye-catching, quotable, and deeply misleading. Not because the rates cap is necessarily a good idea, but because Brown’s framing badly understates its real effect. …
Rates are a compounding charge. What matters is not the first-year saving, but the rate base that is locked in and carried forward year after year. A slightly lower increase today permanently reduces every future increase that follows. This is basic arithmetic, familiar to anyone who understands mortgages, interest rates, or inflation.
If rates rise by 9% instead of 4% in a given year, the difference does not vanish after 12 months. It becomes the new starting point. Next year’s increase is applied to a higher number. And the year after that. Over time, modest differences at the margin turn into material differences in household budgets.
Take the current average Auckland rates bill of about $4,000. An extra 4% instead of 8% sounds trivial if you treat each year in isolation, as if the increase simply resets back to zero. On that mistaken view, the difference is about $160 a year, forever. But rates do not work like that. They compound.
Each year’s increase is applied to a larger base created by the year before. Over 10 years, a 4% annual increase lifts the bill to around $5,900. An 8% path takes it to roughly $8,600. The gap is no longer $160. It is nearly $2,700 every year, locked in permanently.
In Wellington it may be even greater savings.
The average rates bill is around $6,000 and increases have been over 10%. A 10% annual increase vs 4% annual increase will be a difference of $6,680 within 10 years. That is $128 a week difference.