This should be a parody, but sadly it is not.

At Patreon I have done my normal monthly analysis of the polls and fundamentals in Australia, Canada, NZ, UK and US.

I note:

In the wake of the Bondi Beach terrorist attack, the Australian Government loses support. However the beneficiary has been One Nation, rather than the Coalition.

The Herald reports:

Te Pāti Māori says it will abolish prisons by 2040 in favour of community-led solutions to address the enormous inequities facing the country’s indigenous people – if it gets into power at the next election. 

The most likely governing scenario for Te Pāti Māori is with Labour and the Greens, given the National Party has ruled out working with it. But the party would have to convince Labour to change its stance on prison abolition – Labour told the Herald today it did not support the policy as prisons were “necessary” for corrections and rehabilitation.

They only disagree on how many prisoners to release.

The last Labour Government’s policy was to empty the prisons by 30%. Te Pati Maori just wish to take that and make it 100%. So I guess they’ll compromise somewhere around 50% or so?

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution writes:

In 2015, for example, 6,852 of the 8,760 complaints submitted to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport originated from one residence in the affluent Foxhall neighborhood of northwest Washington, DC …

In 2024, for example, one individual alone submitted 20,089 complaints, accounting for 25% of all complaints! Indeed, the total number of complainants was only 188 but they complained 79,918 times (an average of 425 per individual or more than one per day.) …

In 2023, for example, 5059 sexual discrimination complaints came from a single individual–from a total of 8151 complaints. Thus, one individual accounted for 68.5% of all sexual discrimination complaints in that year.

I think all complaints bodies should be able to set a limit to how many complaints from an individual they will accept in a year. Let’s be generous and say it is 10. No one should even genuinely have more than 10 complaints in a year to the same body.

The BBC reports:

The chief constable of West Midlands Police has retired after damning criticism of a decision to ban Israeli fans from a match against Aston Villa.

Craig Guildford’s retirement was confirmed on Friday after both Downing Street and the home secretary said this week they had lost confidence in his leadership.

He faced numerous calls to resign after apologising for providing incorrect evidence to MPs, which included the denial that AI was used in a report which led to the decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from the game on 6 November.

The real scandal isn’t the incorrect information, but the decision to ban Maccabi fans from the stadium. The West Midlands Police said it was because the fans were violent and would terrorise locals. This was a lie, with fake AI created evidence to justify it later. The real reason was that they thought the Maccabi fans would be attacked by Islamist elements in the UK.

So basically they banned the Jews, and blamed the Jews for their own banning, even though the actual intelligence was that the Jews would be the victims, not the aggressors.

Disgraceful.

A guest post by Harro104:

New Zealand likes to think of itself as a rich country that has simply lost its way for a while. The reality is more uncomfortable. We are managing our own economic decline, steadily, deliberately, and with broad political consent.Around the year 2000, New Zealand’s GDP per person was roughly 75% of the income level of the richest OECD countries. Today, it is closer to 50%. That is not a cyclical dip or a short-term policy failure. It reflects a long-running structural divergence, and nothing in our current policy settings suggests that trend is about to reverse.This is not about pessimism. It is about incentives, behaviour, and mindset.

Spending today, saving too little

At both household and government level, New Zealand has normalised spending more than it earns.Governments routinely run structural deficits even outside crises. Long-term obligations, especially universal superannuation, are largely funded on a pay-as-you-go basis from general taxation. National saving is weak. Capital accumulation is thin.The consequences are predictable. When a country does not save enough, it cannot invest enough. Instead, it resorts to workarounds.Public-private partnerships are one such workaround. They are often sold as innovative financing tools. In reality, they are usually a symptom of under-investment, a way to build infrastructure without first doing the hard work of saving for it. PPPs shift costs off the balance sheet in the short term, but typically deliver higher lifetime costs, complex contracts, and reduced flexibility. They are an expensive substitute for having the capital in the first place.Countries that are serious about growth fund core infrastructure directly from savings and surpluses. Countries that are not rely on financial engineering.

A tax system that pushes capital into property

Our tax system reinforces the problem. We tax income and enterprise heavily while leaving most capital gains on housing and land untaxed. Property investment in New Zealand sits behind political protection and regulatory moats, which makes it uniquely attractive on a risk-adjusted, after-tax basis compared with productive investment.Capital responds rationally. It flows into bidding up existing property rather than into businesses, exports, or innovation.This has been enormously successful at inflating balance sheets and deeply unsuccessful at lifting productivity. Once household wealth depends on rising property prices, reform becomes politically radioactive. Asset protection is mistaken for economic stability.No country has ever built lasting prosperity by recycling capital through existing land. Residential property is not scalable, not exportable, and not innovative.

Productivity tells the real story

The consequences show up most clearly in productivity.Around the year 2000, New Zealand produced roughly USD 35–40 of output per hour worked. Norway, a small, remote country with a large welfare state and high environmental standards, produced closer to USD 90 per hour. Today, New Zealand produces around USD 55 per hour, while Norway is near USD 160 per hour.Both countries have grown. But the gap has widened rather than closed.    New Zealand’s aggregate income numbers appear closer partly because we work more hours per person, not because we produce more value per hour.   This divergence explains much of what has happened since. Productivity per hour is the foundation of long-run incomes. Countries that invest, build, and scale pull away. Countries that consume, delay, and protect incumbents fall behind.

A system wired to say no, and short on ambition

The deeper problem is cultural as much as fiscal. New Zealand has built systems that consistently reward saying no over saying yes, and caution over ambition.We see it in the Overseas Investment Office, which narrows bidder pools, adds delay and risk, and treats foreign capital as something to be tolerated rather than competed for. We see it in planning systems that empower objectors while imposing little accountability for economic cost. We see it in infrastructure projects delayed, redesigned, or litigated until skills disappear and costs explode.The most extreme expression is Wellington, where heritage-listed, seismically prone buildings sit vacant and decaying, protected in theory and unusable in practice. Capital is trapped, land sterilised, and the city hollowed out.But the mindset extends beyond regulation. Wellington lost the Rugby Sevens. Auckland caps major events at Eden Park. We hesitated and failed to bring the America’s Cup home. These are not trivial cultural issues. They signal a country uncomfortable with scale, visibility, and ambition.Even in our core industries, the same thinking applies. Fonterra sold off the crown jewels, brands and downstream capability, rather than backing itself to build global consumer value. For a country that produces thousands of marketing graduates each year, it is remarkable how reluctant we are to brand and sell our own milk to the world.

Infrastructure without vision, and without a pipeline

Nowhere is managed decline more obvious than in infrastructure.New Zealand lurches through a boom-and-bust investment cycle. Projects are announced, cancelled, revived, redesigned, and delayed. There is no credible long-term pipeline that gives firms the confidence to invest in plant, train workers, or retain capability. Skills are lost during busts, then rehired at premium cost during booms. We pay more and get less, repeatedly.This lack of continuity feeds directly into reliance on PPPs. When governments refuse to run surpluses and save in advance, they lose the ability to fund infrastructure directly. PPPs then appear attractive, not because they are cheaper, but because they defer political pain. The long-term cost is higher prices, weaker accountability, and fragmented delivery.The absence of vision compounds the problem. NZTA spends decades inching roads south of Auckland and north of Wellington, project by project and consent by consent, without ever articulating a serious plan to connect the North Island economy.The strategic prize is obvious. Auckland, Whangārei, Hamilton, Tauranga, Rotorua, and Taupō operating as a single integrated economic system is how agglomeration, scale, and productivity are built. Instead, we deliver fragments and call it progress.

Energy, resources, and skills, another case of saying no

The same lack of ambition is evident in energy, natural resources, and skills.New Zealand has chosen to block mining, disband a once-functional gas exploration industry, and move at a pedestrian pace on large-scale solar and firming capacity, despite rising electricity demand and a stated ambition to electrify the economy.Energy prices are high and volatile. Supply is tight. Instead of cheap, abundant energy being a competitive advantage, it has become a constraint. That pushes firms back toward lower-value activity and makes it harder to climb value chains.New Zealand once developed world-class geothermal expertise. That capability could have been scaled and exported to other geothermal-rich countries. Instead, it was treated as a domestic utility issue rather than a platform for exportable know-how.This is a country with a long tradition of technical excellence, from boatbuilding and hydro engineering to geothermal and rocketry. Yet New Zealand has not opened a full engineering school since 1906 (Auckland). Over the same period, law schools and marketing programmes have proliferated.  This is not a criticism of those disciplines. It is a reflection of misaligned incentives. Universities expand what is cheap to deliver and easy to scale, not what underpins productivity, energy systems, infrastructure, and advanced industry.

Choosing growth over managed decline

The prevailing mindset in New Zealand is to solve today’s problem, ease today’s pressure, and defer the rest. That produces political comfort and incremental decline.Reversing it requires different choices:competing aggressively for capital, including by cutting the corporate tax rate relative to Australia;targeting superannuation and tertiary funding rather than treating universality as untouchable;focusing education and training on areas of genuine comparative advantage, rather than funding ever-expanding generalist degrees with weak links to productivity and exports;rebalancing regulatory systems so that yes is the default for investment and building;running surpluses in normal times and investing directly in infrastructure and energy systems that connect and power the economy, rather than disguising under-saving through financial engineering.This is not an ideological argument. It is an economic reality that New Zealand’s systems now reward consumption, rent-seeking, and veto power over capital formation, productivity, and scale.Countries that allow that drift do not collapse. They decline.At present, we preside over a diminishing economic pie and argue endlessly about how to divide it more finely, a free GP visit here and a small tax tweak there, while the foundations of prosperity erode. In recent years, politicians and public bodies have distracted themselves with institutional restructurings that rearrange form rather than improve function.Countries do not fall behind because they lack compassion.
They fall behind because they lose ambition, and the will to build.Unless New Zealand chooses growth over managed decline, the slide will not stop here. It will simply continue, politely, incrementally, and entirely self-inflicted.None of this is inevitable. New Zealand is resource-abundant, well-connected, and deeply capable. We have energy, land, skills, institutions, and access to global markets.  People want to move here if we let them.  We have shown repeatedly, in engineering, science, design, and entrepreneurship, that we can compete at the frontier when we choose to. What has been missing is focus.New Zealand imported a loosely defined laissez-faire economic attitude from much larger economies, without recognising that small countries cannot afford strategic indifference. Where scale is limited, markets need coordination, capital needs direction, and skills pipelines need deliberate construction. Successful small economies are not anti-market, but they are anything but passive.  We can choose to educate and train for the industries where we have genuine advantage. We can save for the future rather than consume it, and stop pretending that universal programmes are free. We can rebuild national savings, invest deliberately, and back ourselves to build at scale.The question is not whether New Zealand can afford a better future.
It is whether we are willing to choose it.

Samira Taghavi writes:

Iran is bleeding again and as an Iranian New Zealander, I am severely worried by what is happening in my country of birth.

This piece is about why the Iranian situation demands international intervention — not silence, not hollow statements and certainly not ideological distortion. To my fellow New Zealanders, I plead: this is not a distant crisis belonging to someone else’s geography. It is a test of whether we believe human rights are universal, or merely afforded to some, only when convenient.

Iranian civilians are being shot dead in the streets and families are refused the bodies of their loved ones. The wounded are seized from hospitals and taken straight into detention, with prisons filling at speed. The internet and telephone system are deliberately shut down so the scale of the killing cannot be reported to the outside world.

It is hard to know how many have been killed. The low end estimates are 2,000 and the high end 20,000. Either way it is a massacre which the normal suspects have been silent on – no marches in the streets.

Yet much of Western liberal media has spent years looking away. In my view, this is because to report uprisings honestly requires answering one unavoidable question: why are people prepared to fight their state’s ideology, even to the death? That question demands naming the ideology upon which the state is built.

It is hard to imagine the bravery it takes to night after night turn up to protests, knowing that thousands have already been killed for doing so. They do it because they want to be free.

In much Western “progressive” discourse, Islam has been racialised and sanctified. It is no longer treated as a belief system or governing ideology, but as an identity category that must not be criticised. Dissent is reframed as intolerance. Doctrine is treated as skin colour. This is not moral sophistication; it is historical ignorance dressed up as virtue.

Spot on.

Within this framework, the Iranian people disappear. Our language, culture and history — Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; specific, not interchangeable — are erased. We are talked over, flattened into stereotypes and ignored precisely because our rejection of the regime disrupts the narrative.

I’ve been lucky enough to visit Iran, and the people there are truly wonderful. My host commented that if you got rid of the regime, Iran would be the greatest country to live in.

I am therefore not surprised when members of the Green Party or similar ideological movements wear symbols they do not understand but present as moral virtue. One such symbol is the keffiyeh. I do not speak hyperbolically when I say I hate this garment. In Iran, it signals doctrinaire allegiance to the regime and hostility to the West and Israel. For many Iranians who lived under the Islamic Republic, it is not neutral cultural dress. It is associated with repression — with arrest, interrogation, torture and the destruction of lives

Will they listen? I doubt it.

I know what will follow this publication. The trolls will come — the self-appointed activists and keyboard revolutionaries. Let me spare them the effort. I lived under the regime for 24 years. I endured arrest, interrogation, punishment and violence designed to break the will. I did not learn oppression from social media. I survived it.

I did not know that Samria had been through that in Iran.

I know that determined action against this evil regime is the correct course. Like the vast majority of Iranian New Zealanders, I welcome Western action to free our brothers and sisters. Revolutions do not succeed on courage alone. Courage must be met with action.

I also hope there will be action to stop the killing of Iranians by their own government.

LBC reports:

PC Cliff Mitchell applied to join the Met in 2020, but the vetting process flagged up a previous allegation of raping a child in 2017, and his application was rejected.

However, a vetting panel, made up partly of senior officers, overturned the decision because the force wanted to improve the number of officers from ethnic minorities.

PC Mitchell went on to carry out a “campaign of rape” against two victims, including a child under the age of 13, while he was a serving officer.

Once upon a time being an alleged child rapist would be disqualifying to become a UK police officer. No longer!

I spent my summer holiday sprawled on Takapuna beach reading the memoirs of Eli Sharabi, an Israeli who was held hostage by Hamas following October 7 2023. It was a highly thought provoking book for all sorts of reasons, which I cannot cover here in full. However, one thing which stood out to me was that Sharabi narrates that Hamas dramatically reduced the hostages’ food at one point, claiming that the Israelis had just done the same to Palestinian security prisoners.

To my surprise, when I looked this up I found it was true. Far-right Israeli politician Itamar Ben Gvir did sharply decrease living conditions for Palestinian security prisoners, including among other things a reduction in food: https://www.timesofisrael.com/high-court-rules-state-failed-its-duty-to-feed-palestinian-prisoners-in-slap-to-ben-gvir/ The Israeli High Court has found that Palestinian security prisoners were not being given enough food for basic sustenance, “essentially […] starving” them.

This is especially horrifying to me because Israel’s understanding of “security prisoners” includes all Palestinians held without trial in administrative detention, which means that if an Israeli soldier arrests an innocent Palestinian out of hatred for Palestinians or simply on a power trip, then a person who hasn’t done anything wrong can face starvation in prison without having legal representation to prove their innocence.

While the High Court’s findings were enough to persuade me, I was a little sceptical due to reliance on affidavit evidence from Palestinian prisoners themselves. However, the Times of Israel published a further article on the subject today, saying that inspectors from the Public Defender’s Office visited four Israeli prisons and documented “skeletal” prisoners and evidence of beatings and medical neglect: https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinians-in-israeli-jails-face-conditions-unfit-for-human-beings-state-agency-says/

I quote: “The Public Defender’s Office of the Justice Ministry show that Palestinian security detainees held in Israeli prisons have suffered from severe and systematic violence from prison guards, deprivation of food, and medical neglect, while also having been subjected to insanitary conditions that caused and exacerbated outbreaks of disease in the prisons.” The inspectors described one prison they visited as “not fit to hold human beings”, and said of another that their findings showed “unnecessary and unjustified violence against prisoners” carried out “on a regular basis and on numerous occasions.”

I note by the way that The Times of Israel is not a leftwing newspaper and cannot be accused of anti-Israel bias.

Of course, Israel has an independent judiciary and accountability mechanisms for when people like Ben Gvir overreach like this, whereas an independent Hamas judiciary defying Sinwar and ordering that the Israeli hostages be given more food would never happen. (The very idea is laughable.) But I think it’s important for Westerners to be aware of the treatment of Palestinian prisoners by Israel in order to understand that the situation is not black and white.

This week the NZ Herald reported that Mangere College was put under statutory management.

While appointing a limited statutory manager for a school in NZ is not highly unusual – this is the first time I can recall that academic achievement is cited so highly as the reason.

Here is why it is an interesting precedent. There are a lot of schools who see their students perform worse the Mangere College.

There are approximately 460 high schools in NZ.

School Leavers results is the data-set that has the highest credibility. I process that data set each August – when the raw data becomes available (I am happy to provide on request). The most recent set is for 2024 school leavers.

– For Level 2 NCEA  69% of Mangere College’s 2024 Leavers had that qualification. 111 high schools did worse than that.

– For Level 3 NCEA 48% of Mangere College’s 2024 Leavers had that qualification. 175 high schools did worse than that.

– For University Entrance 7% of Mangere College’s 2024 Leavers had that qualification (not flash!). 30 high schools did worse than that.

– In terms of retaining students until 17yo … Mangere College has 77% of their students stay until then. That is better than 175 other high schools – some of them high profile as “good schools”.

– In terms of progression to degree level study … Mangere College has 15% of their students move on to that level. That is better than 129 other high schools.

– The Equity Index Number for Mangere College is 525. There are only 40 high schools whose children are deemed to be worse off. It could be argued that many of the results for Mangere College are above expectations.

High schools do not have to set achievement goals – either for outcomes our improvements. It is major weakness of our system and could have been fixed by a stroke of the Minister’s pen. I work with a number of schools on a 5 year improvement plan and it is making a difference.

Here is the key question: Given that Mangere College is under statutory management due to their students’ results – will the many schools that are doing worse, or only marginally better, also face that situation? Why or why not?

Have “acceptable” levels of achievement been communicated to schools?

[email protected]

The BBC reports:

Andy Reid had been in Afghanistan for three months when the incident happened that would change his life forever. 

Out on a routine patrol in the Helmand Province, he stood on a Taliban improvised explosive device, resulting in him losing both legs and an arm. 

“I was there on the floor on my back, a big dust cloud all around me. I couldn’t hear anything,” he says. 

“I wasn’t really in any pain at the time, but I felt some numbness throughout my body.”

“I knew something bad had happened to me. I looked down and I couldn’t see my legs at that stage.”

He was one of thousands of British troops injured in Afghanistan. A further 457 British service personnel were killed in the conflict.

For the injured and the families of the deceased, many are deeply offended at US President Donald Trump’s claim in an interview that America’s Nato allies sent “some troops” to Afghanistan, but “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines”.

Over 800 mainly NATO troops died in Afghanistan, responding to the attack on the US on 9/11. They did not stay back from the front lines. 457 UK and 159 Canadian soldiers were killed.

The death rate per million population was:

1. Georgia 8.42
2. US 7.96
3. Denmark 7.82
4. UK 7.25
5. Estonia 6.92
6. Canada 4.68
7. NZ 2.27
8. Norway 2.04
9. Australia 1.86
10. Latvia 1.82

43 Danish troops died fighting for the US in Afghanistan. It is no surprise that they feel aggrieved with his threats over Greenland. It is a shameful way to treat an ally whose soldiers died fighting for you.

There is real anger in the UK. Even Keir Starmer has come out swinging as families of dead soldiers have been very vocal about how insulted they feel – especially coming from someone who avoided the draft for Vietnam.

YouGov has the latest royal ratings. In order:

1. Prince William +62%
2. Catherine, Princess of Wales +62%
3. Princess Anne +58%
4. Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh +38%
5. Prince Edward +32%
6. King Charles +29%
7. Princess Beatrice +12%
8. Princess Eugenie +11%
9. Queen Camilla -3%
10. Prince Harry -29%
11. Meghan, Duchess of Sussex -47%
12. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor -87%

A bit rough on Camilla!

As almost everyone knows, Manage my Health was hacked by someone seeking a $60,000 ransom in return for not releasing the hacked files, which appear to be uploaded health documents.

I don’t criticise MMH for being hacked. It is hard to be hack proof. There may be legitimate criticism for them not encrypting uploaded documents and/or not having multi-factor authentication.

What I find incredible is that it took them 10 days to e-mail users to tell them if they had been affected or not. And even worse, they got it wrong, and had to do a second lot of e-mails saying you haven’t been affected after all. I’m one of those who got both e-mails. And annoying because I’m overseas, MMH won’t even allow me to log in and see any details.

A well governed and managed health software company should have hacking as one of their major risks in their risk matrix, and they should have a detailed contingency plan setting out what to do if it happens. As far as I can tell, MMH were not prepared in any way, and had to be prompted by the Ministry of Health to call in external advisors to help them manage it.

The MMH software is pretty good. I can book GP appointments with it. I can see all my test results and vaccinations. I can see all the reports from specialists. I’m glad my GP uses them.

But software is only part of it. They need to also be well governed and managed for situations like what just happened. And the evidence to date is they have not been.

While personally I’m not worried if some hacker has the results of my shoulder and ankle ultrasounds and x-rays, there will be many people very concerned about their health records. Bryce Edwards made the point:

The potential harms are immense. Think about what’s in these files. Psychiatric diagnoses. Sexual health information. Details of domestic violence. Records of abortions. The intimate confessions people make to their doctors believing, as they should, that such information is sacrosanct.

People could be blackmailed over sensitive diagnoses or traumatic histories. Identities could be stolen. As one furious patient told RNZ, she is “one part terrified, one part really angry, like ragingly angry” that details of her past sexual assault – secrets she hasn’t even told some family members – might be made public. This isn’t just a bureaucratic failure. Real people will suffer real consequences.

So this is a very big deal for some.

I write at Patreon:

NZ First scored 11.9% in the January 2026 Taxpayers’ Union – Curia poll. This is a very high level of support for NZ First generally, but especially for them in Government.

The last time NZ First polled this high was in the lead up to the 2017 election. They also spiked up there in 2003. Prior to that you would be talking about their formative period in the mid 1990s.

What makes their result even more exceptional is that it has occurred while they are in Government. Normally being in Government results in NZ First doing very badly in the polls, and at the subsequent election. I’ve charted below the four periods NZ First has been in Government.

The paywalled article shows you the comparison, and also shows you what share of the coalition vote NZ First has received this term.

Hipkins also ignores that Clark called a snap election in 2002, meaning the 2002 and 2005 election could not be held in November (or October). So if you exclude those you have November for 1999, 2008 and 2011 and October only in 2020 and 2023. Any time between September and November is not unusual for an election date.

Also worth noting every non snap election from 1946 to 1981 was also in November.

Newsroom asked some pollsters for their predictions for 2026. Mine are below:

Every poll (or almost every poll) will show that both National and Labour will need two partner parties to govern, not just one – that is: only National/Act/New Zealand First and Labour/Greens/Te Pāti Māori will have enough seats to make 61. 

All 71 public polls since the election have said Labour can’t govern without both the Greens and Te Pāti Māori and only two out of 71 have National and Act able to govern without New Zealand First.

New Zealand First will continue to poll above its 2023 result. The party has been above its 6.1 percent results in the past 20 public polls. 

The top three issues will remain cost of living, economy and health. These have been the top three issues in every Taxpayers’ Union–Curia poll since July 2024.

The vast majority of polls, before the campaign period, will have a narrow margin between the Government and Opposition – no bloc greater than 65 seats. No poll since November 2024 has had a bloc projected to win over 65 seats.

Key things which I will be looking out for are:

The state of the economy. I think this will be hugely influential. As well as economic data, and what the right/wrong direction polls are saying as a proxy for that.

What happens with Te Pāti Maori will also be important to keep an eye on. With the polls so close, the party’s current two-seat overhang could determine who gets to form government. But if they go into an election with new Te Pāti Māori candidates against incumbent MPs, then I think Labour will win those seats and Te Pāti Māori will not get overhang seats.

I’ll also be watching for any polls showing Labour can govern without Te Pāti Māori. This will boost Labour if they do, and damage them if Te Pāti Māori looks essential to their path to power.

How high New Zealand First rises, and whether that support is coming from former National or Labour voters is also something to watch.

A moving story at The Free Press about Mark Swidan who spent 12 years in a Chinese prison on trumped up charges. Basically totalitarian states arrest random US citizens from time top time to use as bargaining chips to get their spies etc released. Some extracts:

For more than a decade, he had been served two meals a day, the same meal every meal: a bowl of mushy, yellowish rice with a quarter-size morsel of pork fat. Sometimes, there would be boiled bits of pumpkin or cabbage.

Swidan, who is 6-feet-2, said: “I was 225 pounds when I went in, and then I went down to the 120s, and I was about 140, 145 when I got out.”

In prison, they rarely let him outside. His immune system had taken a hit from the lack of sun. He also got frequent fungal infections—mostly from showering on grimy, concrete floors. “It would go all over your head and face and down your neck,” he said. He would get red and splotchy. It made sleeping for weeks at a time nearly impossible.

The aftereffects were visible: His skin was covered in tiny lines and scars. And his teeth were a mess. His eyesight had been compromised.

Worst of all were his hands—over the years, he’d broken lots of bones in his fingers and wrists and hands from fights with other prisoners but mostly with guards. “I’m not the guy who’s just going to stand there when you threaten me,” Swidan said. “Someone would put his finger in my face, and I’d knock him the fuck out, and there would be four or five of them—I didn’t give a shit. You’ve given me two death penalties already.” He learned how to scrounge for bits of cardboard and tape so he could set his broken fingers. The Air Force doctors in San Antonio said there wasn’t a lot they could do about his hands. “They said it’s worse to rebreak and then fix them,” he said.

What is scary is this could happen to anyone randomly.

Do you recall Labour MPs and others saying that the changes National made to speed limits (basically reversing Labour’s across the board reductions, and replacing them with case by case limits) would kill many more NZers.

Well the 2025 road toll was the lowest per capita in 100 years and the second lowest in gross terms in 73 years.

Of course the road toll is about more than speed limits. It is car safety, drink driving etc. But Labour MPs insisted that the changes would kill people.