A guest post by a reader:
As powerless ratepayers face the ongoing tyranny of marxist councils over rates bills and the local government minister’s repeated demands for sensible spending fall on deaf ears, the Prime Minister continues to ignore the obvious solution.
Requests by Simon Watts imploring Tauranga and other councils to rein in the wasteful spending are ignored as renegade mayors like Mahe Drysdale go crazy (like kids in a sweet shop) giving away taxpayer owned land to Maori and other corrupt, wasteful spending.
Reversing ‘the power of general competence’ legislated by socialist Helen in the early 2000s, would force attention back on delivery of essential services, rein in rates rises and improve the standard of living of long suffering rate payers.
Unlike Trump who goes in like a bull-at-a-gate and changes things, our PM and ministers stand by wringing their hands timidly asking marxist councillors and staff to do the right thing. This is like so much virtue signalling on an issue Simeon Brown was threatening to address before he was promptly moved to the health ministry early this year…. curiouser and curiouser.
Instead a deflecting Willis now turns our attention to a task akin to pushing back the tide: lowering supermarket prices; admirable, but probably impossible.
Luxon showed that he is quite capable of some slick sleight of hand when it suits his purposes. (to get a budget over the line)
Consider the pay parity bill.
Now you see Labour’s old version, then, faster than Dynamo, the new improved bill produced out of Brook van Veldon’s hat, was passed into law under urgency.
If the government genuinely wanted to help struggling New Zealanders they would have begun enacting the bill reversal in 2023. However it suits them to virtue signal and let councils carry out race based policies they profess to be against and can blame them for.
They lie.
The force working in government, so Luxon doesn’t have to, is opportunist Tama Potaka, winning Hamilton West in the 2022 by-election, knowing Labour were heading for the wilderness. Luxon, forgetting his election promises and intent on taking his own path (like Ardern) once in power, has given full rein to Potaka, his Maori spokesperson, a new star.
Speaking out on issues, referring to New Zealand as Aoteroa New Zealand in the House and else where without a murmur of dissent from so called tough commentators like Mike Hosking, who has coined the late Bob Jones’ ‘Maorification of NZ’ as his own.
When questioned Luxon defers from knowning or owning that nasty term. He mostly leaves that unpalatable stuff to his activist Maori spokesperson.
Tut tutting on Twitter (X) when Seymour spoke of ‘racist’ media questions and of Maori targetted spending as ‘racist’. (Seen as the ultimate taboo by the radical media ideologues.) Potaka is all business
Tony Vaughn on Breaking Views opines:
‘Tama Potaka is not a moderate. He is the acceptable face of racial separatism. A handsome cipher in a navy-blue suit, offering respectable cover for policies that are, in effect, apartheid with PR spin.’
I couldn’t have put it better.
No doubt Potaka had a say in forcing the vote forward on Maori wards to this year’s election so even those councils who voted against; their Maori wards have another term before they cease. Seymour folded like a wet umbrella on that one (not being the master of the behind -the-scenes tantrum like Winston)
I know our city voted against Maori wards back in 2019 during the year, so come the election that year, there were none. Easy peasy.
Luxon fires on all cylinders, speaking with authority, when he is one step removed from the decision. Consider the punishment doled out to to the Maori MPs for their ‘Haka of Victimhood’ (to quote Shane Jones) with 3 weeks ban and removal of pay.
I wouldn’t like his chances arguing the point against fiery Collins and Peters. However he can quite rightly say that the powerful privileges committee decision is final. And never waver. In the end they are carrying the can, not him and that is just the way he likes it. He lacks the courage of his convictions, necssary for real leadership.
This decision will count in the government’s favour, with a public sick of the Maori Party’s antics.
And it is a just decision considering the baptism of fire Seymour had gone through, from the shonky running of the Treaty Principles Bill’s select committee; the ungracious behaviour of ‘activists’ Luxon and Potaka; with official records which will conceal corrupt counting methods and processes; culminating in a dramatic intimidating adult tantrum gaining global attention for all the wrong reasons.
Also given the Maori Party leaders’ sketchy attendance record in the House where they get paid whether there or not, losing three weeks pay might just about even it up!
The Maori Party, unused to accountability, are finally finding their actions have consequences.
Hard of hearing Speaker, Mr Brownlee who could have stopped the clown show before it got underway (by cutting the live feed for a start) will be most unpopular if he, in his quest to incorporate all things Maori into parliament, thinks rude imbecilic behaviour like this counts as ‘Te Kanga’ (behavioural guidelines for living with others)
And here was I under the impression that mythical ‘obligations to the treaty’ were to be REMOVED not added, as part of the Coalition Agreement.
If you are to get your point across you will have to brush up on your tantrum technique, David!
I’ve just published on Patreon (paywalled) the May 2025 summary of the polls in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and US.
The Australian and Canadian Governments are having honeymoons for their leaders, while in the United Kingdom the Conservatives are facing extinction as Reform surges to twice their support, and an 8% lead over the governing Labor Party.
I got sent this chart, and found it interesting. The high level of Maori offending is well known. What I hadn’t known previously was the vast difference between Asian and Indian offending. Often these are lumped together, but in this case I presume Asian has been defined to exclude Indian.
The Asian crime rate is under one third of the European crime rate, while the Indian rate is almost twice as high as the European rate, and five times higher than the Asian rate.
Of course the vast majority of all ethnic groups are law abiding. But the differences between Asian and Indian rates are worthy of analysis and explanation. In the category of sexual assaults and related offences, the rates per 100,000 are:
I would not have thought, prior to being sent these charts, that the Indian sexual offending rate was almost the same as Maori, and higher than Pasifika. Now again 57 out of 100,000 means 99,943 are not. So the data isn’t a reason to stigmatise, but it is worth asking what can be done to lower these rates.
The Economist writes:
Consider the economics of the restaurant industry. Alcohol offers higher profit margins than food as it requires less labour to prepare. Indeed, using official American data, your columnist estimates that booze accounts for all the profits of the restaurant industry. Drinkers subsidise non-drinkers. Those who order sparkling water can feel sanctimonious in the short run. But if no one orders a bottle of Bordeaux, many restaurants will go under.
Be interesting if this data is the same for New Zealand.
Second, abstinence makes people lonelier. For centuries alcohol has served a social function. It helps people relax. Taking a drink also signals to others that you are happy to be slower and more vulnerable—that you have left your weapon at the door—which puts them at ease. A study from 2012 in Psychological Science found that alcohol increases social bonding. Robin Dunbar of Oxford University and colleagues find that frequenting a pub improves how engaged people feel with their community, in turn raising life satisfaction. It is not a stretch to say that alcohol has played a big evolutionary role in fostering human connection.
Many couples credit alcohol, at least in part, for bringing them together. So it may not be a coincidence that the alcohol-shunning young are lonely.
People do drink to relax and socialise.
For centuries creative folk, from Aeschylus to Coleridge to Dickens, have relied on alcohol for inspiration. In the 1960s, when productivity was soaring, everyone was drunk all the time. No other drug has played such a consistent role in human innovation. Being intoxicated opens up the possibility of accidents of insight. Purely rational, linear minds have fewer of the flashes of brilliance that can turn an art form or an industry upside-down. It allows brains to disconnect. A study of American painters in 1946 by Ann Roe of Yale University noted that “a nightly cocktail before dinner may contribute to the avoidance of a state of chronic tension, especially…when creative activity is at its height.”
Studies suggest that alcohol, deployed judiciously, can aid the creative process. Andrew Jarosz of Mississippi State University and colleagues have found that intoxicated people solved problems faster and “were more likely to perceive their solutions as the result of a sudden insight”.
Fascinating.
SCOTUS Blog reports:
The Supreme Court on Thursday sent the case of an Ohio woman who contends that she was the victim of reverse discrimination back to the lower courts. In a unanimous ruling by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the justices agreed that a federal appeals court in Cincinnati was wrong to impose a higher bar for the case brought by Marlean Ames to move forward than if Ames had been a member of a minority group.
Note this was a 9-0 decision, and written by one of the liberal Justices.
The United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit threw out Ames’s sexual orientation claim. Because Ames is straight, the court of appeals explained, her claim could not go forward unless she could show “background circumstances” to support her allegations of reverse discrimination – for example, evidence that a member of a minority group made the allegedly discriminatory decision or showing a pattern of discrimination against members of a majority group.
The Court of Appeals had effectively said that there is a higher bar for claims of “reverse” discrimination, where the plaintiff is in a majority group, not a minority group. The Supreme Court has said it is illegal to treat discrimination against members of a majority group, differently than discriminations against minorities.
A great ruling, and again this was a 9-0 decision. Hopefully NZ authorities might take note of this.
Radio NZ reports:
The government has issued its final decision on Christchurch City Council’s bid to carve its own path out of national housing intensification rules.
Minister Chris Bishop rejected 14 of the council’s 20 recommendations and deferred his decision on three more, after the council refused to accept all of the recommendations of an independent panel.
The minister’s decision will mean some parts of the city will be zoned higher-density housing, and the council won’t be allowed to refuse consents based on sunlight access.
The Council got captured by NIMBYism. When the independent panel and Council disagree, the Minister makes the final call.
In both Wellington and Christchurch, Bish has consistently come down on the side of making it easier for housing to be built, relieving pressure on house prices.
Stuff reports:
Tomlinson, who is a former paramedic, had only been in Countdown for a few minutes when he heard yelling and screaming. Initially he thought it was children yelling or a domestic.
A young man ran across the back of the store and said a man was stabbing people. Tomlinson then ran towards where Samsudeen was.
“Just to see if I could help,” Tomlinson said.
To be told that someone is stabbing people, and then run towards the incident takes real courage.
The Economist reports:
This june may be the most harried for the Supreme Court’s justices in some time. On top of 30-odd rulings due by Independence Day, the court faces a steady stream of emergency pleas. Over 16 years, George W. Bush and Barack Obama filed a total of eight emergency applications in the Supreme Court (scotus). In the past 20 weeks, as many of his executive orders have been blocked by lower courts, Donald Trump has filed 18.
Into this maelstrom, The Economist is introducing a tool to help analyse how the high court is acquitting itself under pressure. A year ago Adam Unikowsky, a regular litigator before the justices, enlisted Claude, Anthropic’s large language model (llm), to decide 37 Supreme Court cases. Claude’s decision matched the court’s 27 times. Inspired by this example, we tested several models of our own and settled on o3, Openai’s best reasoning engine for Chatgpt. We fed our scotusbot the main briefs and oral-argument transcripts for ten of the court’s biggest pending cases—plus three cases that have already been decided—and asked it to predict how each justice would vote and why.
It will be fascinating to see how well the bot does in predicting the Supreme Court decisions.
It is possible it might even end up influencing Court decisions. If you’re a Supreme Court Justice, you might not like being predictable, and could even end up varying what you decide or write, just so the AI isn’t correct!
The Herald reports:
Auckland Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson says she will support Mayor Wayne Brown at the upcoming election. …
She said while sometimes Brown used some colourful language, his substance and vision were good for Auckland.
This is a good decision – both for Desley and Auckland. Having two non-left candidates could split the vote.
Brown confirmed that if re-elected, it would be his last term as mayor and that he would serve the whole term.
He also told media he and Simpson had never had a row or an “unpleasant conversation”.
Brown said he and Simpson had complementary approaches to Auckland Council governance.
This sets Desley up as the presumptive front-runner in 2028.
The Whitehouse recently released a document titled: Make America Healthy Again.
The health trends listed are stark – and the needed solutions are clear (even if is going to be like doing an Aircraft Carrier doing a u-turn in the Suez Canal).
In many of the crisis stats NZ is not far behind.
These are the crisis stats for young people in the USA. The themes should be familiar.
For reasons and suggested solutions, the full document is here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/MAHA-Report-The-White-House.pdf
“The health of American children is in crisis. Despite outspending peer nations by more than double per capita on healthcare, the United States ranks last in life expectancy among high-income countries – and suffers higher rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. Today’s children are the sickest generation in American history in terms of chronic disease and these preventable trends continue to worsen each year.”
America’s children are facing an unprecedented health crisis. Over 40% of the roughly 73 million children (aged 0-17) in the United States have at least one chronic health condition, according to the CDC, such as asthma, allergies, obesity, autoimmune diseases, or behavioral disorders. Although estimates vary depending on the conditions included, all studies show an alarming increase over time.
Childhood Obesity is a Worsening Health Crisis
● Today in the U.S. more than 1 in 5 children over 6 years old are obese. This is a more than 270% increase compared to the 1970s, when less than one in twenty children over 6 were obese. Rates of severe obesity increased by over 500% in the same period.
● The U.S. obesity rate is, on average, more than double that of its G7 peers.
● Approximately 80% of obese teens will be obese into adulthood.
● Around 70% of youth with obesity already have at least one risk factor for heart disease.
Rates of Neurodevelopmental Disorders are Increasing
● Autism spectrum disorder impacts 1 in 31 children by age 8 and is estimated to be 3.4 times more common in boys than girls, according to the CDC. Rates also vary significantly by state – from 9.7 per 1,000 in Texas (Laredo) to 53 per 1,000 in California. In 1960, autism occurred in less than 1 in 10,000 children. In the 1980s, autism occurred at rates of 1 to 4 out of 10,000 children.
● Over 10% of children have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), with approximately 1 million more children diagnosed in 2022 compared to 2016.
● Rates of other neurodevelopmental disorders and learning impairments are also increasing. Over 7.5 million K-12 students received special education services in 2023-24.
Childhood Cancer Incidence Has Risen Dramatically
● Childhood cancer incidence has risen over 40% since 1975.
American Youth face a Mental Health Crisis
● Teenage depression rates nearly doubled from 2009 to 2019, with more than 1 in 4 teenage girls in 2022 reporting a major depressive episode in the past year.
● Three million high school students seriously considered suicide in 2023.
● Suicide deaths among 10- to 24-year-olds increased by 62% from 2007 to 2021, and suicide is now the second leading cause of death in teens aged 15-19.
● The prevalence of diagnosed anxiety increased by 61% among adolescents between 2016 and 2023.
● Over 57% of girls report feelings of sadness and hopelessness, while suicidal ideation in teen girls has surged by 60% since 2010.
Allergies are Widespread, and Autoimmune Disorders are Rising
● Today, over 1 in 4 American children suffers from allergies, including seasonal allergies, eczema, and food allergies. Eczema (atopic dermatitis) and skin allergies increased from 7.4% of children under 18 from 1997-1999 to 12.7% from 2016-2018.
● Between 1997 and 2018, childhood food‑allergy prevalence rose 88%.
● Celiac disease rates have increased 5-fold in American children since the 1980s.
● Rates of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), including Crohn’s, have increased by 25% over the last decade.
Alwyn Poole
[email protected]
alwynpoole.substack.com
www.linkedin.com/in/alwyn-poole-16b02151/
Rod Drury lays out his Vision for Wellington:
Some of his specifics are:
The Commuter Greenbelt. We have an amazing greenbelt that is underutilised, and in many areas is undermaintained. Make it a full trail for walking, running, and biking. Imagine having a one hour exercise loop that anyone can walk and ride, getting new glimpses of our beautiful city.
Open up new areas close to town like Te Ahumairangi (Tinakori Hill), which could be designed as a stunning multi-use recreational area. And unleash the potential of Mt Victoria as an urban playground.
Sounds great. People will move to live and work here, if it is an urban playground. This isn’t saying have commuter cycleways that destroy business carparks. This is about mountain biking and walking trails.
Autonomous driving and robotaxies are starting to trial in US cities, despite their complex layers of regulation. Like we have done for Space and VTOL aircraft, New Zealand’s smaller regulatory environment makes Wellington the ideal test lab for small automated transport solutions like autonomous taxis and autonomous network transit systems like Anterra with Lars Herold
We already have a second tunnel through Mount Victoria for buses that could easily accommodate a double out-and-back route for small electric shuttles from the airport. Utilising the existing second tunnel would save billions.
I think the future is autonomous shuttles. Households will give us their private cars if a cheap shuttle can pick you up within five minutes and take you to your destination, for less than the cost of your own car.
Tim Stanley is a former UK Labour Party candidate, and writer for The Telegraph. He reviews the recent autobiography by Jacinda Ardern:
Don’t read this book. You won’t, anyway: it’s by Jacinda Ardern. But if I tell you that it’s a memoir dedicated to “the criers, worriers, and huggers,” you’ll have an idea of the nightmare you’ve dodged. A Different Kind of Power reads like a 350-page transcript of a therapy session: “My whole short life,” the author writes, “I had grappled with the idea that I was never quite good enough.”
Regrettably, she persisted, rising through the two or three ranks of New Zealand society to become prime minister at the age of 37, from 2017 to 2023. And yet the practicalities of the job don’t interest her: this book hinges on how everything felt.
A fairly brutal introduction.
As for what drew her into politics: was it Marx? Or Mahatma Gandhi? Well, one influence came early on: she saw a newspaper cartoon of a Tory stealing soup from children and thought, “that definitely didn’t feel right.”
Few people know this, but this is factually correct. In the 1990s, teams of Young Nationals roved the nation breaking into the homes of poor people, and stealing soup from them.
she wants us to know, too, that she replied to every child who wrote to her
As did John Key, just that he didn’t feel the need to tell everyone about it.
By contrast, the anti-lockdown crowd Ardern describes protesting outside New Zealand’s Parliament, wore “literal tinfoil hats”, flew “swastikas” and “Trump flags”.
This is exactly how centrist dads (and mums) subtly vilify their opponents: set a perfect example and imply a comparison. I am so kind that anyone who disagrees with me must be nasty; so reasonable that my critics must be nuts.
There were a few fringe figures there, but the vast majority were just people angry that they had lost their jobs on the basis of vaccine mandates that turned out to be based on an incorrect assumption that they would stop transmission.
A poll of around a third of the protesters done by Curia staff found that 27% of the protesters were Maori (so unlikely to be Nazis!) and 40% of the protesters voted for Labour, Greens or Te Pati Maori in 2020.
Post-office, Ardern became a fellow at Harvard University, teaching a course in… you guessed it: “empathetic leadership”. The principle that the world would be a better place if we just empathised with each other is nice in theory, but codswallop in practice. How does that work with Vladimir Putin or the boys in Hamas? On the contrary, true leadership is about making tough judgments, guided by sound philosophy: St Jacinda bungled the former, lacked the latter. By reducing all government to thoughts and prayers, she transformed humility into vanity – a softly photographed carnival of her own emotions.
Ouch, and a final jab:
But there is one wonderful moment of zen. It comes when Ardern meets the late Queen in 2018, and asks whether she has any advice on raising children. “You just get on with it,” said the monarch. It must have been a put-down; it sounds like a put-down – and yet Ardern is too naive to notice.
The Queen of course became Queen at age 26, and had two children while in office.
Friends then ….
Elon points out the spending bill increases spending and the deficit and debt, not cuts it.
Trump attacks Elon. Incidentally Musk is on record numerous times saying he supports ending the EV subsidies and mandates.
Trump then says he wants to terminate all government contracts with companies owned by Elon.
Elon goes nuclear.
Elon has 220 million followers on Twitter and is worth around US$420 billion. This is going to be spectacular.
Stuff owner Sinead Boucher has sold 50% of Stuff Digital to Trade Me, which in turn is 100% owned by Apax Partners, a British private equity firm with around US$77 billion in assets.
Good on Boucher. I have no issue with foreign investment in media companies. The discipline they may bring to Stuff Digital could be very good for them.
In 2021, Stuff reported:
Stuff owner and chief executive Sinead Boucher is gifting a 10 per cent share of the media firm to the company’s close to 900 staff.
The stake in the company will be transferred to a trust controlled by employee representatives, rather than the shares being directly owned by staff members.
The arrangement means staff would receive through the trust a share of any dividends Stuff pays out, and 10 per cent of the sale proceeds if Stuff was later sold or listed, she said.
This never happened, as it was later modified to happening if any shares were sold or exited. Presumably this has happened, so we will see 10% of Stuff Digital transferred to a staff trust?
Radio NZ report:
After Boucher bought Stuff for $1 in 2020, she told staff that a 10 percent stake of the company would be put into a staff trust in the event that the business was sold or listed.
A spokesperson said that, while there was still some time until the deal was to be completed, it was Boucher’s expectation that a payment would be made into the staff trust.
A payment? Would it be a payment equal to one fifth of what Trade Me paid? Shouldn’t it be non-voting shares of 10% of Stuff Digital, rather than a payment? After all, that is what was promised?
Not counting students/families opting for private, state integrated and designated character school options – there are five major features of our current enrolment and attendance in the NZ Education system that need sunlight.
1. Enrolments in Te Kura (formerly the Correspondence School) are now at 31,000 – a 32% increase since 2018. The achievement levels of this school are very low with 8.7% of leavers having UE.
2. Our attendance statistics remain in an incredibly poor state:
– full attendance (90%) for all ethnicities in Term 4 2024 was 58%
– full attendance for Maori was 44.1%
– full attendance for Pasifika was 42.4%
3. There is a massive amount of students not enrolled anywhere at all …
“Figures released under the Official Information Act to Newstalk ZB show nearly 10,000 5 to 13-year-olds were not enrolled in the official school system as of 2022 – a significant jump from slightly more than 6300 reported in the year before.”
Please note that the figure is just primary school students.
4. Home-school figures remain very high.
“At the middle of last year there were 10,757 children in homeschooling, about the same as in 2023 and not much less than 2022’s all-time high of 10,899.
Prior to the pandemic, homeschooling enrolments were increasing by 200-300 each year and in 2019 there were 6573 enrolments.”
National are treating all of these problems with their heads in the sand and only making incremental changes that will have marginal effects – at best.
5. Retention until 17yo contiues to diminish.
In 2023, 79 percent of school leavers remained at school until their 17th birthday. This is the lowest retention rate since 2013. Retention of senior students has dropped 6.4 percentage points since the peak rate in 2015.
Alwyn Poole
[email protected]
https://alwynpoole.substack.com/
The House has voted to suspend Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke for seven days, Rawiri Waititi for 21 days and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer for 21 days. The punishment was not for doing a haka. MPs can and do do hakas. It was for doing it during a vote, preventing the House from concluding the vote – and also for crossing the floor to intimidate ACT MPs.
One thing I will almost guarantee – they will not do it again. A 24 hour suspension as Chris Hipkins pleaded for would be a zero disincentive. In fact it would be an incentive. They have never shown one ounce of contrition or apology. A 21 day suspension is long enough to be meaningful and deter them doing it again.
A Radio NZ Reid Research poll has found support for the Privileges Committee recommendation of a three week suspension for the TPM co-leaders.
The co-leaders forgot to turn up not only to speak in the Budget debate, but even to vote on the Budget. Really will anyone notice they’re not there for three weeks?
Anyway the net support for the suspensions (those saying too lenient or about right less those saying too harsh is:
A significant minority of Labour voters, 38%, thought the proposed punishments were too lenient or about right. This is in contrast to Chris Hipkins who said they should be for 24 hours instead of 21 days.
I am a resolute defender of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state (as are all two state solution proponents), and of its right to defend itself after the terrible 7 October attacks which saw civilians, women, children tortured, raped and murdered.
A huge amount of the criticism of Israel’s response has been hysterical and illegitimate. Those who label it genocide just wish to smear Israel, and make the Holocaust seem less uniquely evil. No country in the world would not respond with ferocity and military might to an attack like October 7.
However being a defender of the right of Israel to respond, doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything the Netanyahu Government does. While many of the attacks on the response are bad faith, there is considerable division inside Israel about whether the continued military action is a good idea. The way you can tell a good faith criticism from a bad faith criticism is often by whom the criticism is targeted at. If they refer to Zionists of the State of Israel, it is almost always bad faith. If they refer to the Netanyahu Government, then it is more likely to be good faith – recognising Governments take actions that not everyone in a country supports.
I am now one of those who finds it hard to see a coherent strategic end game from the Netanyahu Government. I can’t honestly say that I see a military strategy that will result in a safer Israel. Look there are no easy options. The longer the military action goes on, the more Palestine civilians get killed, and the more future terrorists you end up with. But leaving Hamas in power isn’t a great idea either. However the ratio of legitimate targets to collateral damage is getting uncomfortably high.
One solution I have been toying with, is to abandon Gaza entirely. Don’t just have one wall, but have a massive DMZ like between North and South Korea. Build two massive walls around a km apart, and have the space in between littered with mines so no attacks can be made through the DMZ.
This would mean abandoning the policy of allowing people to cross from Palestinian territory into Israel for work. It was a noble goal that boost incomes through employment, and working together would lead to peaceful co-existence. Around 200,000 Palestinians were able to cross into Israel every day to work. Peace through prosperity gas failed as a strategy though.
If Hamas remains in Gaza, you can’t have border crossings. So build a huge DMZ to secure Israel’s border with Gaza. Drop bombs on it every so often to take out any attempted tunnels. That will prevent another 7 October. Sure there may still be missile attacks from Gaza, but you just retaliate to those as they occur (as you do with the Houthi etc).
So I am no longer convinced that the current military strategy of the Netanyahu Government is justified. If 21 months of military attacks hasn’t got rid of Hamas, then how confident are you another six months will? Or another 12 months or 24 months? Do you have continual war?
But returning to pre-October 7 settings is not an option either. I think you need to be pragmatic and say that peaceful co-existence is off the agenda for decades. Therefore Israel should effectively recognise Gaza as part of a Palestinian State, and build a huge DMZ to prevent any crossings between Israel and Gaza. This is not an ideal solution, but it works in Korea and has kept the peace for decades.
Stuff reported:
In July 2024 Zara*, a Wellington sex worker, had a sickening realisation when her client went to shower at the beginning of their session: his phone’s voice recorder was allegedly activated.
That client was Michael Forbes, who at the time was press secretary to Minister for Social Development Louise Upston, a former Minister for Women. In February this year he was appointed acting deputy chief press secretary to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.
Asked why it was decided no charges would be laid, Wellington District Manager Criminal Investigations, Detective Inspector John Van Den Heuvel, said, “ Police received a complaint from a Wellington brothel in July last year, after a client was found to have concerning images and recordings on his phone.
While the law may not have been broken, it is of course morally wrong to record someone having sex without their consent – even if it is audio, not video.
It is good that the Prime Minister acted so decisively, with Forbes exiting his role within hours of the PM being informed of what happened.
The bigger issue is why the Police didn’t notify the Beehive last July, as they should under the No Surprises policy. A press secretary for a front bench Minister under police investigation definitely is the sort of thing that should be notified to the Minister of Police.
A reader has read Jacinda Ardern’s autobiography and sent in this book review of it:
Jacinda Ardern has bestowed upon the nation a gift – a memoir as warm as a winter sunrise and just as forgiving of shadows. Every page hums with kindness, the quality that first sent global headlines floating south across the Pacific.
What captivates is the considerate restraint. Entire policy battles slip past like polite strangers while budget lines stay unruffled and statistics remain at home. Ardern spares us the burden of numbers – empathy for those who deem arithmetic discourteous.
She prefers melody to measurement, and her speeches rippling through these chapters are silky and consoling. Outcomes make only cameo appearances, which feel oddly soothing. Leadership, we learn, is about tone, not toil.
That resonance endures. Corridors of Wellington still echo with her gentle cadence while Cabinets yet unborn prepare announcements that glide majestically beyond detail. The belief blooms that spirit alone will close deficit gaps, plant forests and build houses.
Any later occupant of the Ninth Floor will draw from this manual. Each may decide that certainty is overrated and that firmness of vision need never be encumbered by measurable plans. In this, the memoir rebadges itself as an evergreen field guide for administrations that prize applause above arithmetic.
Ardern’s handling of memory is equally elegant. Lockdowns become communal song sessions, quarantine queues a study in national patience. The months when vaccines waited fashionably offshore look like lessons in mindfulness, each omission glowing like a candle left intentionally unlit.
Readers hunting for a critique will find none, and therein lies the mischief. Such abundant praise inevitably frames the absent explanations. The kindness is infectious, the selectivity instructive.
A Different Kind of Power reminds us that feeling good is half the battle and often the whole campaign. Results may fade, yet moods endure. In celebrating that truth, the memoir offers a compass for every government bold enough to govern by hope alone, secure in the belief that smiles travel further than spreadsheets.