The Media Council has upheld a complaint by Winston Peters against The Post over a fake cost blowout article.

The article claimed the ferry project was $167 million over budget. It said it had blown out from $1.7 billion to $1.867 billion. But it hadn’t.

The November 2025 said the total budget for the replacement programme would be $1.867 billion, of which the government would contribute $1.7 billion. The journalist then saw the $1.867 billion figure and incorrectly thought this mean a blowout of $167 million.

Now everyone can make mistakes. It is worth noting though that if the journalist had checked with the Minister’s office, they could have pointed this out to them.

What is extraordinary is that the journalist and their editor both refuse to accept they were wrong.They are literally arguing the equivalent of black is white. To quote:

“In circumstances where estimated costs exceed confirmed and secured funding, it is entirely reasonable to characterise a project as being “over budget” or under budget pressure in practical terms. That characterisation reflects standard reporting practice on infrastructure projects and is grounded in the documentary record.”

This is just bullshit. The estimated costs are identical to the announcement in November. They are not over budget. You can point out that the funding side is not yet finalised, but you can’t argue that it is over budget.

The Media Council come down on the side of reality:

The central claim in the headline and article is that the total cost of the ferry replacement project is “over budget”. There is no evidence that is true. …

The article reads as if the $1.867b estimate is an over-spend of the government’s $1.7b allocation. It is not. It is simply a restatement of the total project cost. …

As such both the article and the headline are inaccurate and mislead the public. 

The original mistake is forgivable (albeit it, still avoidable by checking). What is unforgivable is continuing to maintain that the article was accurate.

Radio NZ reports:

Teachers specialising in music, physical education, science, technology and history have slammed draft curriculums covering their subjects.

The groups in these areas tend to be dominated by activists who have a very ideological view of education.

A submission from Bay of Plenty science teachers said the curriculum’s “guiding kaupapa of ‘excellent equitable outcomes, reflecting the Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi’ is not evident anywhere in the science draft”.

And they think this is a bad thing!

Physical Education New Zealand managing director Heemi McDonald told RNZ the draft would take physical education back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the subject was focused on sport.

“It drives physical education back down to a skills-and-drills kind of approach,” he said. “If we look back in our past, like maybe in the 50s and the 60s, the PE curriculum was very much sports skills and drills, and the discipline has moved significantly from that time along with the world.”

McDonald said the subject had moved on significantly, and the draft failed to recognise the importance of learning about movement, identity and relationships through physical education.

For example, he said five-year-olds needed to understand how they moved, how to work with other people and skills to move through the world.

“At its most basic level, that’s what our curriculum should reflect – this idea that our bodies are moving, we move in the world with others, we move in different environments and we all have a different experience,” he said.

Sorry but sounds like gobblygook. Teaching identity through physical education to five year olds. Five year olds just need to run around!

Johnston said many schools allowed about three hours a week for each of the eight learning areas, but the new curriculums set aside more time for English and maths, and less for other subjects.

Again, this is a good thing. Our PISA scores have been declining for decades in English and maths.

The Post reports:

A law change designed to make international bank transfers more competitive has progressed in Parliament this evening, without the support of the National Party.

Labour MP Arena Williams’ private member’s bill would require banks and money transfer services to clearly disclose the total fees and foreign exchange (FX) margins they will earn before customers agree to send money overseas.

This seems like a good law change. Markets are not perfect (but way way better than the alternative). Econ 101 teaches you only get perfect markets if you have perfect information. So while I am wary of regulatory burdens on businesses, ones that give consumers better information tend to be laudable.

Winston Peters voted against and campaigned against the China free trade agreement, that came into force in 2008. Look at what happened to our exports to China since then:

Winston called it a “disaster of an agreement”. If there was a prize for being most wrong, Winston would win it for that. And he is trying to do it again.

Winston has opposed every free trade agreement with an Asian country. He was against Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and all the others.

The Herald reports:

The Government will disestablish the Broadcasting Standards Authority after deeming the media regulator’s role “doesn’t make sense” amid an evolving industry.

Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith today confirmed the Government had agreed a process to wind down the BSA and “investigate self-regulation options”.

The Government had been considering the future of the authority, first established in 1989, after it determined it had jurisdiction over online broadcaster The Platform.

“The BSA regime was designed for a broadcasting environment that is rapidly disappearing,” Goldsmith said.

“Today, audiences move seamlessly between traditional broadcasting, on‑demand services, podcasts and online platforms – yet only a small portion of that content is subject to the BSA’s regulatory oversight. It doesn’t make sense.”

This is an excellent decision. Congrats Paul Goldsmith.

There has been a principled case for abolishing the BSA for many years – articulated above by Paul Goldsmith. We already have a media self-regulator in the Media Council. The BSA can disappear and complaints against broadcasters (the vast majority are also members of the Media Counci) will go to them. So I have supported BSA abolition for a long time. I prefer media regulation to be done by industry, not by a government appointed entity.

But also the BSA has acted appallingly in their attempt to unilaterally declare they can hear complaints against The Platform. They have not acted in good faith. And bad behaviour should have consequences, and now there has been one.

I do feel sorry for the BSA staff who will lose their job in due course. But they should blame the BSA board members who signed off on such a bad faith decision.

The Herald reports:

Members of the public are due to get greater insight into the thinking of those on the powerful Reserve Bank committee that sets interest rates.

The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) and Finance Minister Nicola Willis have agreed to a new charter that will see members’ individual views on how to set monetary policy publicised.

So, members’ views on how the Official Cash Rate (OCR) should be set will be disclosed in meeting minutes, as will their rationales – even if they all share the same view.

Currently, the committee discloses if its members vote differently on how to set the OCR. But it doesn’t say who voted for what.

For monetary policy watchers, this will be a useful move. When there is a divergence of views, it will be very useful to see who voted what way, and why.

The NZIER Shadow Board always published the views of individual members, and their rationale. It will be good to have the real decision maker do the same.

The Herald reports:

Labour leader Chris Hipkins says he is open to discussing whether New Zealand’s superannuation should be means-tested. 

Hipkins told Newstalk ZB’s Kerre Woodham he would not want full means-testing of the country’s pension but added “there are questions”. 

“I don’t want to do this on a unilateral basis, I think these need to be conversations across the Parliament about whether somebody who is still working full time, earning a six-figure salary should be claiming superannuation. 

“I am open to a conversation about that, but I think it has to be done in a constructive, bipartisan way.”

Asked how long such discussions between parties could last before something happened, Hipkins said, “I guess it depends whether there is an appetite across the Parliament to even have that conversation”.

I hope there is. I think the current scheme (without means testing) should be locked in for everyone born before 1981. But for those aged 45 or under, the replacement scheme should be:

• Age of eligibility 67, and increases by 1 year for every two year increase in average life expectancy over 82 (so if it becomes 86, then eligibility at 69).
• A non work tested benefit for those aged between 65 and the eligibility age, set at 1.25 times the jobseeker benefit
• Annual adjustments to NZ Super of CPI +0.25% so it increases in real terms, but not as fast as wage growth
• Means testing with NZ Super abating if you earn $180,000 at 25c per dollars above that, so fully abated at $280,000

This would provide a generous but affordable scheme for the future.

Dear MPs

Deeply thankful for those who responded to mt previous email. Well done to those that are genuine interested.

For every list MP, and for every electorate MP you need to know the current state of education in NZ. 

Those that have replied are stunned that the top 50 NZ high schools have an average of 85.6% of their leavers with University Entrance.

They are also stunned that the bottom 50 NZ highschools have an average of 4.8% of their leavers with University Entrance.

Schools, community organisations and MPs are also stunned that the 2025 leavers data will show that we now have 20% of our school leavers have no qualifications at all. Ministry papers also predict that the new qualifications framework will have a negative impact on the achievements of students from marginalised demographics. 

As you head to the stage to defend/promote education policies … you need the most up to date data.

Please be in touch if you are actually interested in the young people of NZ. To many of you have your head in the sand …. our up your butt.

Alwyn Poole

[email protected]

Four members’ bill were drawn from the ballot. They are:

1. Better Regional Boundaries Bill by Tim Costley. Would require all government entities that have regions to align their regions with local government boundaries within five years. Small but useful.
2. Concealment of Location of Victim Remains Bill by Tom Rutherford. Would deny [pa]role to convicted killers who don’t disclose the location of their victim’s remains. Excellent.
3. Criminal Records (Clean Slate) (Additional Eligibility) Amendment Bill by Tangi Utikere. Expands the clean slate regime from those who were given non custodial sentences to include those who received a prison sentence of up to 12 months. Hard no from me, as to get sent to prison you need to have done some seriously bad stuff which should not be wiped.
4. Crimes (Virginity Testing Practices) Amendment Bill by Priyanca Radhakrishnan. Creates a criminal offence with a maximum five year term for virginity testing. In favour of banning this. Five year maximum term might be a bit too harsh though.

Fox News reports:

The State Department is rolling out limited-edition U.S. passports to commemorate the 250th anniversary of American independence. The new passport designs, obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital, prominently feature President Donald Trump’s image on the inside cover. 

His megalomania has no limits. Pity the poor Americans who have to use a US passport.

For those who think this is all fine, just imagine how you would feel if say your NZ passport had a huge photo of Jacinda in it. I doubt you’d be too happy.

As far as I can ascertain, no other country in the world puts an elected politician on their passports.

The Guardian reports:

Teaching pupils in classes grouped by ability improves the results of high-flyers but does not affect the progress of less able children, according to a study that upends decades of debate over mixed-ability education.

The research by University College London’s Institute of Education found that secondary school pupils in England with previously strong maths performances made slower progress in mixed-attainment classes than when they were taught alongside children with similarly high ability.

Crucially, the study backed by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) showed that setting by ability did not “significantly harm the attainment of low-prior-attaining or socioeconomically disadvantaged” pupils.

The study’s impact analysis showed negative effects on self-confidence in maths for pupils in mixed-attainment schools, compared with those in schools using setting – challenging previous reports that setting harms the confidence of those outside the top sets.

This is very important research. It disproves the assertion that grouping students by ability harms less able students. It shows it does not, and that more able students do considerably better.

So those who are very liberal are eight times more likely to say it is acceptable to cheer on the death of someone you disagreed with, than those who are very conservative.

This is no surprise. We saw this when Margaret Thatcher died. We saw it on Blue Sky when Charlie Kirk was murdered.

Politico reports:

Federal authorities have arrested an American soldier who allegedly used confidential information to place a series of wagers on the capture of then-Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro through the prediction market platform Polymarket.

Basically he bet on the prediction market Maduro would be removed from office by a certain date. One of them was a few hours before the mission he was on to capture him.

I was not surprised that Trump said he didn’t have a problem with it, so long as the solider was betting on the mission succeeding, not failing!

Prediction markets are meant to get “inside” information out by moving the market price. But in this case the placement of the bets could have compromised the mission. If you’re a world leader and see the price for your removal suddenly spike at 2 am, well I’d be swapping locations pretty quickly.

ACT released last week:

“An iwi group’s alleged demand for $180 million in order to approve the Bendigo Santana gold mine exposes how New Zealand’s resource management system has been warped by standover tactics and backroom dealing,” says ACT Resources spokesman Simon Court.

Kā Rūnaka say extracting $180 million from Santana has not been their ‘focus’, but they haven’t directly denied the report.

“It’s an outrage, but not one that surprises ACT,” says Mr Court. “Up and down the country, from minor subdivisions to major infrastructure, people are encountering standover tactics and sending me the receipts.

And this week:

Strong concerns have again been raised by iwi regarding a large gold mine in Central Otago proposed by Australian company Santana Minerals.

At a hearing of the Fast-track expert panel in Dunedin on Tuesday, Kā Rūnaka, made up of four rūnaka representing southern Ngāi Tahu hapū, said they opposed the controversial project in its present form.

They oppose it because the submitters refused to give them $180 million in exchange for them not opposing it.

This is why Iwi should have no special status when it comes to resource consents. They should have the same status as any other local group.

I also think any resource consent applicant should have to list all payments they have made to external groups, so we can see if they have been paying objectors off.

Luke Malpass writes:

Despite the rhetoric around savings, what the Government has largely done is cut in some areas to fund increases in others. If successful strategies are about aligning resources to priorities, that may be defensible. But it is not “savings” in any absolute or net sense — it is simply different spending decisions.

There have been no net savings to the Budget’s bottom line since this Government took office. Spending has increased. Willis defends this on the basis that the Government does not want to cut essential services.

Her explanation was: “It is not a saving in the sense that we are spending less as a government; it is a saving in the sense that, in the absence of making those savings, we would not have been able to fund increases to health and education and essential services without borrowing more.”

This is a good analysis. The Government has done a good job in redirecting spending from wasteful areas to frontline services. This should be applauded, and not something that Labour would have done.

However overall spending has remained too high. Labour blew it out from 28% of GDP to 34% and it is still way above the 30% that Labour and Greens promised as a cap in 2017. The Government must commit to getting it back under 30% – soon rather than later.

A guest post by Chris Scott:

 New Zealand’s problem is not simply that government gets things wrong. It is that government often has no reliable way to understand how one decision interacts with another across the whole system. 

That is why the same pressures keep returning in different forms. Housing affects labour. Labour affects immigration. Immigration affects infrastructure and public services. Education affects productivity. Productivity affects wages, retention, and living standards. Each agency sees a portion of the picture, but the state as a whole struggles to see how the parts combine. 

That is an architectural problem. 

Modern government is full of expertise, data, and policy capability. What it lacks is an integrated way to model itself, test changes, and learn across domains rather than inside silos. Ministries produce competent analysis within their own boundaries, but many of the country’s biggest problems are created by interaction between boundaries. 

So the real opportunity is not just better policy within the existing framework. It is to build a system that allows government to simulate itself, evaluate structural changes before rolling them out, and improve its own understanding over time. 

That does not mean replacing politics with software. It means building a simulation that runs alongside government: a living model of the state, continuously updated by real-world feedback, that helps policymakers test reforms, identify trade-offs, and spot unintended consequences before they harden into failure. 

This is where artificial intelligence has a real role. 

AI should not be asked to govern. It cannot supply legitimacy, judgement, or democratic consent. But it can help government do something it currently does badly: connect scattered information, detect patterns across domains, compare scenarios quickly, and keep an evolving model up to date as new information comes in. 

In that sense, AI becomes part of the state’s reflective capacity. It helps government see itself more clearly. 

That matters because the challenge is now too complex for siloed human interpretation alone, but far too important to hand over to automated decision-making. The right model is hybrid intelligence: AI-assisted modelling and simulation, combined with human judgement, democratic oversight, and real-world correction. 

This also helps clarify the top-down and bottom-up question. 

The architecture is necessarily top-down in one sense: a government-wide model has to integrate the whole system. It has to trace how pressure in one area produces effects in another. Without that, the state remains trapped in departmental fragments. 

But a good top-down model should not smother feedback from below. It should make that feedback more meaningful. It should help local knowledge, citizen experience, and domain expertise travel upward into a wider structure that can actually use them. 

So the aim is not bureaucracy tightening its grip. It is the opposite. It is a governing system that becomes more coherent from above while remaining corrigible from below. 

A side-by-side simulation could do exactly that. It could link housing, labour, migration, education, infrastructure, fiscal settings, and health capacity into one evolving model. AI tools could assist by integrating data, surfacing hidden pressures, and stress-testing possible changes. Human decision-makers would still interpret the outputs, weigh trade-offs, and decide what is politically and socially acceptable. 

That would not eliminate politics. It would make politics better informed. 

Singapore offers one useful analogy. Its digital-twin work shows the value of joining up planning, infrastructure, land use, and population data rather than leaving them scattered across separate systems. It is not a full model of government, but it points toward tighter coordination and better system visibility. 

The Human Genome Project offers another. It did not cure disease by itself. What it did was make an immensely complex system legible at a new level. After that, specialists could understand their own work as part of a larger architecture. Government needs something similar: not a genome of biology, but a map of its own interacting structure. 

New Zealand is unusually well placed to attempt this. We are small enough for the machinery of government to be tractable, but complex enough for the gains to be real. Our main problems are not mysterious. They are structural. What we lack is not intelligence in the abstract, but a way of organising intelligence across the whole system. 

A government simulation supported by AI would not solve every problem automatically. But it would allow the state to test itself, refine itself, and learn in a more disciplined way. It would also strengthen democracy by giving citizens, officials, and ministers a clearer view of the system they are actually operating inside. 

New Zealand does not need an automated state. It needs a state that can observe itself, model itself, and adapt. AI should be part of that architecture, not as a substitute for human government, but as a tool that helps human government become more intelligent. 

Radio NZ reports:

The ACT Party leader David Seymour has floated dishing out $500 to every year 11 student for an investment account, to promote investing at a younger age.

It was not an ACT policy “yet”, he said.

Seymour said the idea could be funded by taking about five percent, or $30 million, of the $600 million annual KiwiSaver subsidy – the government’s $260 contribution to people’s KiwiSaver accounts.

“I think most people would say that’s a bargain,” he said.

“For a relatively modest amount of money, we could give a generation a practical introduction to saving, investing, ownership, and financial responsibility.”

Using actual money, rather than a simulator, means students have “skin in the game” and would be more motivated, Seymour said.

I think this is a great idea. I already chat to my kids about the benefits of saving, and even give them an incentive that if they have any chore money unspent at the end of the month, I will match them dollar for dollar if they save it rather than spend it.

Both parties in the US have at times gerrymandered their electoral maps to favour themselves, as boundaries have to be redrawn every 10 years after a census.

Last year the GOP, pressed by Trump, did a gerrymander in Texas, adding four likely seats to the GOP, to try and protect them in the mid terms. There was no requirement to do new boundaries. They just did it because they could.

But the Democrats learned that you fight fire with fire. Rather than be idiots and just complain about it, they said well if you do it, we will also.

Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio did new maps that moved nine seats to the GOP. But California, Utah and Virginia have moved 10 seats to the Democrats, which is a net loss of one for the GOP.

I’m very grateful in New Zealand the Representation Commission sets the boundaries, not MPs. While there are two political appointments on the Representation Commission, the majority are neutral officials. It is chaired by a former judge and members are the Surveyor-General, the Government Statistician and the Chief Electoral Officer.

Audrey Young writes:

There is one verdict that stands out among others, however, his scathing assessment of Dame Jacinda Ardern.

He even weaponises her self-deprecating admission that she suffered from “imposter syndrome” against her. 

“She talked a number of occasions about an imposter syndrome, and I think she genuinely felt that because I thought she was an imposter in the job,” he tells the Herald.

He says he really liked her in the beginning and welcomed the idea of a young liberal, woman Prime Minister, but his view changed quickly.

“She didn’t have the depth to be the Prime Minister of the country and was to me, more than any other Prime Minister, the biggest manipulator of the media.”

Barry Soper has covered 12 Prime Ministers, so his views are interesting – whether or not you agree with them.

Soper rates Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark highest of those he calls the “significant Prime Ministers”

The fact he rates Clark the best and Ardern the worst would suggest his assessmentment of Ardern is not related to the fact she is Labour, or that she is a woman.