The Post reports:

Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith has made clear that a law change designed to assist the media was shelved because of concerns over how US President Donald Trump might respond. …

Responding to questions from his Labour Party counterpart Reuben Davidson in Parliament on the long hold-up, Goldsmith said “as is highly obvious to everybody, circumstances changed somewhat at the end of 2024 with the US presidency changes, and a more cautious approach was adopted”.

I’m still bemused as to why a National-led Government wanted to pass a law forcing Internet companies to fund NZ media organisations. NZ media have spent a month refusing to report on the MUMA and Willie Jackson story, and National wants to force Internet companies to write huge cheques to them as a reward!

Donald Trump is terrible on Ukraine, on tariffs, on the rule of law, on democracy etc, but he does do well in stopping the NZ Government from doing stupid things sometimes!

The Herald reports:

Te Pāti Māori has broken with tradition and decided against running MP constituent offices in their electorates, despite getting additional funding for the large electorates it won at the 2023 election.

New Zealand First, as well, has decided not to run any offices in the community – but it has no electorate MPs.

All electorate MPs in other parties have at least one office each, with 14 MPs having two offices, and four MPs having three offices. The Māori Party previously ran electorate offices from 2005 to 2017.

Electorate offices are typically open during the week, and staffed with people who can offer practical help to the community – on behalf of their MP – with issues as diverse as housing, immigration and concerns about crime.

This is interesting and new information. I have never before heard of an Electorate MP not having an electorate office. They receive taxpayer funding specifically to allow them to rent offices and have electorate staff in them.

I guess TPM have as much contempt for their constituents, as they do for Parliament.

Radio NZ reports:

A district court judge has reserved his decision on whether a by-election is needed in an Auckland local body election.

The hearing followed a petition by former Ōtara-Papatoetoe Local Board member Lehopoaome Vi Hausia, who claimed to have received reports of voting papers being stolen from residents and submitted without their consent.

Dale Ofsoske, an independent electoral officer for Auckland, was the respondent to the petition.

At a preliminary hearing at Manukau District Court in November, Judge Richard McIlraith ordered five ballot boxes containing votes from the electorate to be transferred from Auckland District Court, where they were being kept, to Manukau for scrutineering in the presence of Judge McIlraith, legal counsel for Hausia and Ofsoske, as well as Ofsoske himself.

Seventy-nine voting papers were subsequently identified during examination as having been cast without the rightful voter’s knowledge.

79 is a lot. That is not an isolated case where say someone received voting papers for someone who had moved address and decided to vote for them (which is of course illegal). This looks like an orchestrated campaign where ballot papers were stolen from letter boxes, filled in, and posted back.

“We say there are 3000 new votes in the Papatoetoe subdivision,” he said on Monday.

“And that is the only subdivision or local board area in the entire Auckland city that has had an increase in voting. Every other local board had a decrease in voting.”

Mitchell argued that the irregularities and unexplained surge in voting in Papatoetoe could only be explained by mass voter fraud.

This isn’t quite right. The surge in voting could be through legitimate means. If you get a team of volunteers to go around door knocking, urging people to vote, and even waiting while they fill the ballot in, and then dropping it into a ballot box for them – you can lift voting turnout. That is quite legitimate and even commendable.

But if you bypass the actual voter, and just steal the ballot paper and fill it in for them, that is illegal and corrupt.

And there are 79 proven instances of this.

Under the Local Electoral Act, a by-election could be called if enough unlawful votes were proven to have changed the outcome.

“The problem here is that the victors of the election won by about 1200 votes,” he said. “So, you would have to prove that there was a very widespread pattern of unlawful voting.”

Geddis said it was unclear whether a judge, if unable to prove whether enough unlawful votes could have changed the outcome, would let the result stand or could void the election due to public distrust in the process.

“I would hope it’s an option that’s available because it would be pretty bad, I think, to have a judicial inquiry that finds, yes, there were widespread irregularities, but the judge just has to let the results stand,” he said. “I think that would be a bad outcome.”

The 79 proven fraudulent votes are a lot less than the 1,200 margin. But here is the quandary. How many more were there? Unlike online voting, where the voter is notified that a vote has been cast on their behalf, there is no way voters know if someone voted on their behalf, if they themselves did not vote. Only if you noticed you did not receive ballot papers and cared enough to follow up, would this be discovered.

So I suspect there were more than 79 fraudulent votes. Is it 1,200? No idea. But a by-election would be the best outcome as both tickets could campaign, and do all the legitimate things around encouraging people to vote, and then see who wins.

If there is a by-election, I would suggest there be a safety mechanism where the Returning Officer sends a letter to any voter whose ballot has been received, saying it has been. This would allow the voter to know if someone voted on their behalf. In fact that could be a good safeguard for all postal voting elections.

1 News reported:

The latest estimates put the market share for illegal tobacco sales between 25% and 65%, illicit tobacco and e-cigarette commissioner Amber Shuhyta told a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday night.

Rising tobacco taxes have driven the average price of a pack of over-the-counter cigarettes towards $50 and incentivised criminal gangs to set up shop.

In stark contrast, a pack of black market cigarettes bypassing legal import channels can be easily found for about AU$15 (NZ$17.17).

The result is a steep decline in taxation revenue and sales for legitimate retailers.

The same has been happening in NZ. If you tax something too much, then illegal sales replace legal sales.

Following yesterday’s terrorist attack in Bondi Beach, a march against antisemitism has been organised on 21 December 2025 at 3pm in Auckland. We will start with speeches at Aotea Square, then march down Queen Street at 3.30pm. You would be welcome to join us.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1122340829974909

I blogged previously on the remarkable stats achieved by Haeata Community Campus, where school lunches is their special focus.

Well the Auditor-General has just revealed:

Haeata Community Campus School paid $18,500 for a trip to Queenstown for professional coaching and wellbeing for its senior leadership team but did not provide enough evidence that all the spending had a clear business purpose.

Almost $20,000 on a trip to Queenstown for school senior leaders. What a great use of taxpayer money. Think of many school lunches that could have paid for. They spent $3,000 per SLT member on “coaching and wellbeing”.

Of the $18,000, $6,000 was on meals, drinks, and tourist activities in Queenstown according to Chris Lynch. That is $1,000 each. That’s a lot of wellbeing!

Psypost reports:

A new longitudinal study published in Personality and Individual Differences provides evidence of a complex, two-way relationship between environmental activism and specific personality traits. The findings suggest that while manipulative and aggressive tendencies can predict involvement in environmental causes, engaging in activism may also reinforce traits such as narcissism and psychopathy over time.

They go on to explain:

Perhaps the most unexpected findings concerned psychopathy. The researcher had not initially hypothesized a link here, and the 2024 study found no unique associations. Yet, the current analysis showed that both civic environmental actions and participation in activist groups predicted higher levels of psychopathy one year later.

This suggests that the confrontational nature of certain forms of activism might foster characteristics associated with psychopathy, such as callousness or impulsivity. It is also possible that the disruption associated with protests allows for the expression of these traits.

This may explain why so many Green Party MPs have been exposed for bullying, not paying wages or shoplifting!

News.com.au reports:

A mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach that left at least 12 people dead has been declared a terrorist incident. 

Naveed Akram, 24, is confirmed to be one of the two shooters who opened fire on a Jewish Hanukkah event shortly before 7pm on Sunday.

One of the gunmen were shot and killed by police, while another gunman was shot before being taken into custody in a critical condition.

So at least 11 people were slaughtered because they were Jewish, or at a Jewish event. I’m equal mixtures of grief and rage. Jews everywhere are thinking “That could have been me killed”.

I hope the surviving gunman lives because I want him to do life in prison.

Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman has been identified as one of a dozen people killed in the horror attack at Bondi.
His wife Larisa Kleytman, also a Holocaust survivor, confirmed his death to The Australian, saying she heard loud “boom” sounds before seeing him fall to the ground.
“He came on Bondi Beach to celebrate Hanukkah, for us it was always a very, very good celebration, for many, many years,” Ms Kleytman told the outlet.
Alex Kleytman survived the Holocaust with his mother and younger brother in Siberia, The Australian reported. He and his wife later immigrated to Australia from Ukraine and had been married for nearly 60 years.

He survived the Holocaust to be gunned down on Bondi Beach. Hatred has no boundaries.

But in the midst of evil, there is heroism and hope.

A man who heroically tackled and disarmed one of the Bondi Beach gunmen has been named.

News.com.au can confirm the hero has been named as 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed, a Sydney local who owns a fruit shop in Sutherland. 

The father-of-two was shot twice during the unbelievable act, according to his cousin who spoke to 7News.

He put his own life into mortal peril to save others. He truly is a man of God. His heroism should be celebrated and recognised.

I’m away tramping for six on the next seven days, and will be uncontactable during that time. There will be some blog posts appearing, written in advance. But don’t expect any coverage of any breaking events during the week.

Very sad that Hamish Price has died. I’ve known him for almost 30 years. My strongest earliest memory of Hamish was at a public meeting in Loaves and Fishes Hall in Wellington where he loudly asked Winston Peters if he would apologise to Selwyn Cushing (whom he had been found guilty of defaming). Winston got Hamish evicted.

Hamish was Nikki Kaye’s campaign manager for Auckland Central all four successful campaigns. It is fair to say that being Nikki’s campaign manager wasn;’t the easiest job in politics, but Hamish would spend months working full-time for no pay to help get Nikki over the line.

He had a wicked, often inappropriate, sense of humour. He blogged for a few years as Insolent Prick and not even his friends could work out when he was being serious and when he was trolling.

Despite his ability to be extremely undiplomatic, he also had the ability to be very diplomatic. He was one of the brightest people around on foreign policy and trade (his father was a diplomat) and he was a very trusted advisor to Todd McClay in the Key/English Government. He went out of his way to be as bipartisan as possible, and I recall him saying he always pressed MFAT to give Jane Kelsey access to documents etc – despite their different worldviews.

In the 2020 election he hit the spotlight while with Judith Collins, and his blue shoes even got their own Twitter account.

A nice tribute to him from Kate Freeman and also from Aaron Gilmore.

He had been battling Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma this past year, and generally responding well to treatment. But sadly it spread quickly, and he died very suddenly. He will be missed by his many many friends.

The BBC reports:

A 2026 World Cup fixture designated by organisers as an LGBTQ+ ‘Pride Match’ will feature two countries where homosexuality is illegal.

The local organising committee in Seattle, one of the host cities for the Fifa tournament next summer, have said the match at the city’s Lumen Field on 26 June will feature celebrations of the LGBTQ+ community.

The plans were put in place before the teams involved in the fixture were selected or the draw for the 2026 World Cup was made.

And following Friday’s draw and Saturday’s fixture allocation, it has been confirmed that the game on 26 June in Seattle will be the Group G match between Egypt and Iran.

So the pride match will involve two teams whose home countries make homosexuality illegal. Great work.

Stuff reports:

Wellington architects have put forward plans for restoring and reusing a block of “ugly” and “dangerous” flats set to be demolished.

Victoria University of Wellington confirmed this week it will demolish the earthquake-prone flats near its Kelburn campus, citing serious safety concerns and the high cost of restoration. …

The Architectural Centre said it was focused on finding a practical solution based on the building’s current condition, and had put designs to the university to show how it could be renewed to avoid demolition. …

“It would use over 90% less carbon than demolition and rebuild, and would include remediation of the building to perform with greater energy efficiency, both a win for the environment.”

The plan showed a mix of high-quality apartments, alongside shared study rooms, communal lounges, social spaces and a rooftop terrace.

“We have demonstrated it is viable to renew the building to achieve Victoria University of Wellington’s goals,” Tse said.

“It can be both flexible for different uses and attractive to modern tastes and trends in the student and non-student markets, here and internationally. Renewal would also honour the social ideals of the original building design. And cost up to 35% less than an equivalent new build.”

This seems like a great plan. I think the architects should approach a bank to lend them money, buy the flats off VUW, and then have their design implemented. That would be a win-win.

If they are really confident in their designs, that should be a no-brainer.

Joel McManus at The Spinoff writes:

Bishop sided with former Wellington mayor Tory Whanau’s call to allow more housing in the capital, even though every conservative councillor was opposed. He made Christchurch zone for high-density housing, which centre-right mayor Phil Mauger called a “kick in the guts”. In Auckland he could barely disguise his glee in forcing the left-leaning areas of Eden-Albert to allow 15-storey buildings around City Rail Link stations. 

He championed the Fast-track Approvals Act, which allowed major infrastructure projects to skip the usual consenting process. It was strongly opposed by environmental groups, but already, 30 renewable energy projects have applied to the scheme. 

If there’s a single idea that summarises Bishop’s actions this term, it’s the abundance agenda. That term was coined by writer Derek Thompson in 2022, then made famous by the book Abundance, which he co-wrote with Ezra Klein in 2025. Thanks to New Zealand’s notoriously fast legislative system, you could fairly make the argument that Bishop has done more over the past two years to advance the abundance agenda than any other politician in the world.

This is probably correct. What Bishop has done in housing and development is absolutely transformational. Both the breadth and pace of change has been huge.

Bishop will get to claim this law as his legacy. And while opposition MPs will raise issues with certain aspects, many on the left will be secretly pleased with the outcome, and glad they weren’t the ones who had to push it through. 

It is interesting (and good) that neither Labour nor the Greens have put out releases opposing the RMA replacement laws. I am sure they will critique aspects of them. However I think they realise the status quo was terrible.

By Lucy Rogers

I read an excellent Herald article today showing that arming cops with lethal weapons is an Utterly Stupid Idea:

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/waikato-police-officer-jacob-collins-gives-up-suppression-appeal-after-pepper-spray-assault-conviction/PFNVGXWPQFFDXFG25PABWFPOJU

You can find it if you scroll down the Herald website for long enough, but most won’t. Here’s a summary for you: some guy in Waikato overtook Constable Jacob Collins while driving along State Highway 3. Collins took exception to this and flashed his lights. The driver pulled over compliantly. Collins had no way of knowing this in advance but it turned out the overtaking driver didn’t have rego or WOF and his licence was expired. Collins demanded the guy’s keys.

The driver refused to hand over his keys, and it turns out Collins had no legal right to demand them anyway. Collins threatened to pepper spray him if he didn’t hand the keys over. The guy held his hands up in a surrender gesture and held out the keys. Collins went to grab the keys but then the guy pulled the keys away from him. At this point Collins pepper sprayed him twice in the face and extracted him from the car.

As the guy was screaming in agony and posing no threat, Collins then pepper sprayed him a third time in the face for no apparent reason. (We know that he was screaming because Collins’ radio recorded it in the background.) Collins then placed him over the bonnet of his car and handcuffed him, informed him that he had been arrested for disorderly behaviour (!), and then drove him off in his police car to Te Awamutu. (There’s a technical legal term for handcuffing someone who has pepper spray in their eyes when there were wet wipes available in the cop car: it’s called Being a Dick.)

Collins had a chat with his boss about it afterwards and said that he thought the driver was a risk to the public and he had no other option but to pepper spray him. His boss found that he had done nothing wrong (sound familiar?) Judge Cocurullo disagreed, saying that the victim “hadn’t done anything wrong” and finding Collins guilty of assault with a weapon. The police are now proceeding with employment proceedings re: Collins.

Dishonest, evil bastards on power trips *LOVE* perceived legal grey areas. (I am not of course saying that all or even most cops are like this, but a minority are.) Arresting people, or hurting them in the name of the public good, is the highlight of their week. All this subcategory of police officer want is sufficient grounds that they think that they can get away with it. It’s irrelevant to them whether the prosecution succeeds: even if someone is found not guilty, there are no consequences for the officer in question. They just want to arrest someone.

They then get referred to internal police oversight whose natural instinct is to side with their own, believe everything the police say, disbelieve anything the complainant says because all complainants are lying anti-police troublemakers, and take the attitude that outsiders (and for that matter, the IPCA) just don’t understand the pressures and practical realities that honest, decent, morally upstanding constables like Jacob Collins face. Don’t believe me? I repeat, that is precisely what happened in Collins’ case: his boss said everything he did was fine. The Herald article says so. But Judge Cocurullo disagreed and found Collins guilty of a criminal offence.

(Again, does any of this sound familiar? )

Anyway, point is: imagine the scenario on the road to Te Awamutu but with guns in the mix. The victim moves his hand with his keys away from the officer: imagine the officer said that he thought he was going for a weapon and that he had to make a split-second decision as to whether to pre-emptively shoot him or not and that people just don’t get the tough decisions cops have to make. Imagine the victim dead on the roadside as Collins makes his excuses to his sympathetic boss. And then ask yourself whether there might actually be good reasons for the centuries-long prohibition on armed police.

Do you think there aren’t people in this world who enjoy killing people?

What if I told you that Officer Q who accused me of screaming at people in a state of “excited delirium” in order to justify arresting me is literally the commander of the Armed Offenders Squad? Because he is, and in the fullness of time I shall name him.

By the way: Collins’ case would not have come to the attention of the public if he hadn’t been stupid enough to seek name suppression, which was (in my view, wrongly) the focus of the Herald article. The article should have focussed not on name suppression but on what it means for police oversight that Collins’ boss was too blind to see that he had done anything wrong, and what the implications of this case are for arming cops.

I think arming cops might actually be even more of an Utterly Stupid Idea than legalising weed, and that’s saying something.

Tova O’Brien writes:

Unrepentant, Labour’s finance team should at least consider being embarrassed by their boorish heckling of the Finance Minister.

Far from presenting a government in waiting to steward New Zealand out of a cost of living crisis, the party’s three most senior money MPs were more ‘Regina George’ than ‘rigorous opposition’. …

But what Barbara Edmonds, Deborah Russell and Megan Woods brought to Scrutiny Week was a het up and, at times, rude heckling that risked undermining their own credibility and Labour’s.

But the hearing won’t be remembered for showing the minister up on the matter, it will be remembered for the chaotic cacophony of Labour MPs yelling: “Which table?! Which table??!!” at Willis, drowning the finance minister out, after she suggested they had misread a table.

National should take the select committee footage and use it in “Vote Labour for more of this” ads 🙂

A great parody of the famous Monthy Python skit where Jews sit around moaning that the Romans took everything from them, and never did anything good for them – except for …

It is very pertinent when you apply it to TPM (and much of the left generally) who portray the colonisation of New Zealand as universally negative for Maori, and ignore minor things like ending slavery, democracy, the rule of law etc etc.

Radio NZ reports:

A controversial piece of artwork that prompted 101 complaints in a week has now been stolen from a Hastings art gallery.

The installation, Flagging the Future, at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery asked gallery visitors to “please” walk on top of a quasi-NZ flag.

Councillor Steve Gibson expressed his displeasure with the exhibition earlier this week. Since then there have been small protests outside, 101 complaints to the Hastings District Council and the gallery and at least one trespass notice issued.

The artist and the gallery probably think they are brave and edgy, but in reality they are cowards. They know what they are doing is hugely offensive to most NZers, but they are banking on the fact that the worst they will get is angry e-mails.

Think of the artist and gallery did a different display. Say they had four flags on display on the floor. The NZ ensign, the Tino Rangatiratanga flag, the Rainbow flag and a flag showing Muhammad on it. And they invited people to walk on the flag that displeases them most.

Would they ever do that? Of course not. They are cowards. They know the outrage would be so massive. They pick the safe option of the NZ ensign. They are not being edgy. They are not being provocative. They are just being sad.

Stuff reported:

Te Pāti Māori MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi has been reinstated after an interim judgment by the High Court.

The Te Tai Tokerau MP had sought the injunction against her party’s decision to expel her, claiming her expulsion breached numerous parts of the constitution.

On Friday, Justice Paul Radich confirmed to Stuff that Kapa-King should be reinstated as a member of Te Pāti Māori, with a full hearing into the matter in February.

I was not surprised by this decision. In fact I predicted it.

The substantive hearing outcome will be harder to predict. Generally speaking parties should be free to expel members who they no longer want to retain. But that right is not unlimited. There are two caveats.

The first is you need to follow your own rules. There is a reasonable argument that TPM did not. However minor deviations may not be deemed consequential.

The second is there should be some semblance of natural justice. This generally would mean allegations are put to you in writing, where you have time to respond to them. It should be explicit that your membership may be terminated, and why.

In this area TPM appears to be seriously lacking. To this day they have not provided details of what Kapa-Kingi did that would require her expulsion. The parliamentary spending was resolved and only became public due to Tamihere. She never attacked the party publicly until they attacked her. She isn’t responsible for what her son says.

I think their actions were so lacking in natural justice, that she does have a reasonable chance of winning the substantive hearing. Of course TPM could remedy that by starting the process anew, and this time using a proper process.