Breaking Views Update: Week of 25.1.26

Tuesday January 27, 2026 

News:
The Minister for Children's slamming a new policy position released by Te Pati Maori - to abolish prisons by 2040, and replace them with community-led solutions
Te Pati Maori says it would also close youth justice residences and military-style bootcamps.

Act's Karen Chhour calls the policy insulting and dangerous.

Ian Wishart: Are climate activists ignoring the evidence at Mt Maunganui?

As the grief turns to anger over Thursday’s deadly landslide on Mt Maunganui (Mauao), the blame game has well and truly begun.

The landslide’s immediate cause was a 274mm deluge of rain in the 24 hours to 9 am Wednesday, which Met Service had claimed was the highest rainfall in Tauranga since records began in 1910.

Ani O'Brien: The American immigration narrative & the assassination of truth

How routine law enforcement was rebranded as terror and why facts no longer survive partisan conflict

“In war, truth is the first casualty.”
— commonly attributed to Aeschylus

The claim that the “first casualty of war is truth” is often treated as metaphor. Currently, we are seeing it as a literal description of process. When political conflict is framed and experienced as existential, like when one side is portrayed as no longer merely wrong but morally illegitimate, truth stops functioning as a virtue and becomes an obstacle. Facts that complicate the preferred narrative are too harmful to the goal of winning the info war and so they are erased. History is repeatedly rewritten.

Pee Kay: We are, truly, a nation divided!

In late October last year I posted an article about Northland iwi, Ngatiwai, landing on one of the strictly protected Poor Knights Islands, raising a flag and concreting in a carved pou in protest at the amendment to the Marine and Coastal Area Act.

Dr Oliver Harwich: A new ‘might is right’ era dawns for small nations

I do not get to Münster often these days, but whenever I am there, I feel drawn to its town hall. This is where, in 1648, diplomats signed the Peace of Westphalia. Thirty years of religious war had left parts of Germany devastated. Some regions lost an immense share of their people to war, famine, disease and flight.

Last summer, on a day when temperatures outside climbed into the high thirties, I stepped into the cool interior of that historic place once more.

Dr Benno Blaschke: English, Twyford, Bishop: Reform needs to outlast its champions

Last week's headlines suggested another wobble in housing reform. Signals from the Prime Minister about easing Auckland's intensification settings appeared to undercut Housing Minister Chris Bishop.

One policy adjustment will not break the economics of housing supply. But it will not help either. Density rules are a means, not an end.

Guest Post: The managed decline of the New Zealand economy

A guest post by Harro104 on Kiwiblog:

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.

Roger Partridge: When Intervention Is Justified … or Not

“If not military intervention, then what? And when is intervention justified?” Those were the challenges from readers of my recent essay arguing conservatives should not be too quick to praise President Trump’s removal of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.

My objection was not that Maduro did not deserve his fate – he did. It was that methods matter. The Venezuela operation was unilateral, without congressional authorisation or allied support. Its justification was openly transactional – oil, drugs, the Monroe Doctrine. There was no plan for what follows. The historian Niall Ferguson, writing in The Free Press, praised Trump as a “nineteenth-century figure” returning to the politics of 1900. But that is not a compliment. The politics of 1900 produced 1914, and then 1945. A rerun with nuclear weapons will be worse.

Mike's Minute: There's an anticipation around 2026

Well, week one of the year and I feel there is much to be anticipatory about – perhaps even excited.

As we look about the place the glass half empty operator could argue, "doesn’t this feel a bit like last year?" And indeed, in bits, it does.

But in others it doesn’t. This would appear to be a country at long, long last on the move.

Monday January 26, 2026 

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Ryan Bridge: We all deserve a pay rise

Question: Who wants a pay rise? Who deserves a pay rise? Simple question, easy answer.

Answer: Everybody and most kiwis. By and large we’re hard workers and deserve more.

Teacher, nurses and doctors. By and large, yes. Yes. Yes.

Geoff Parker: Risk, Not Race, Drives Justice Outcomes

Matthew Tukaki’s two-part Radio Waatea series (Part One, Part Two) presents Māori over-representation in the criminal justice system as proof of systemic bias operating “at every stage” — from policing to sentencing. It is a compelling story. It is also an incomplete one.

The core claim running through the series is that disparity equals discrimination. But disparity alone does not establish bias. Any serious analysis must ask a more uncomfortable question: are justice outcomes primarily driven by ethnicity, or by differences in offending patterns, prior convictions, and risk factors that the system is legally required to consider?

Colinxy: The Case for Colonisation

When Associate Professor Bruce Gilley published The Case for Colonialism in Third World Quarterly in 2017, the reaction was nothing short of volcanic. “Controversial” doesn’t begin to describe it. The editorial board resigned in protest, activists demanded the article’s retraction, and Gilley was pressured into issuing an apology. His crime? Violating the unwritten Romantic commandment:

“Thou shalt never say anything positive about colonialism.”

For those interested, Gilley’s original article can still be found here.

This essay is not a defence of every colonial act ever committed, nor is it an attempt to dismiss the harms that occurred in certain contexts.

Matthew D Mitchell: Three Lessons from Venezuela’s Economic Collapse

President Trump has accepted the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to Venezuela’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado. Unlike Machado, however, he does not accept the central lessons that can be gleaned from five decades of Venezuelan misrule. There are three.

Lesson 1: Past prosperity is no guarantee of future prosperity.

Tim Donner: Donald Trump, Master of America’s Destiny

The president has become the most dominant world leader in decades.

Apparently, there is no end to Donald Trump’s global ambitions nor his ability to turn his hopes and dreams into reality. Entering his second term locked and loaded, he removed the most dire threat to the civilized world by obliterating Iran’s nuclear program, coerced NATO countries to finally pay the piper for their own defense, and brokered agreements between numerous long-time enemies. Trump forced a deal to release every hostage held by Hamas, ended the war between Israel and Iran, established a globally inclusive Board of Peace to rebuild Gaza, took down the ringleader of the narco-terrorist regime in Venezuela, and has now established a framework for American sovereignty in Greenland.

Nick Clark: Boring's blessings

The paint was still drying on the Auckland convention centre when Christopher Luxon delivered his State of the Nation speech on Monday. Some of the furniture had not arrived. The venue does not officially open until February.

Six hundred business leaders offered polite applause. Someone clapped at the mention of the India free trade deal, which seemed to startle the Prime Minister.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: To stop megaphone populists triumphing, we need unlikely left-right alliance

To many on the political left, the Mont Pelerin Society represents something akin to a spectre. It is frequently portrayed as a secretive cabal of market fundamentalists operating in the shadows to dismantle the state and privatise the public sphere. The caricature suggests a group of ideologues plotting the erosion of social cohesion for the benefit of the few.

The reality of this international academy of classical liberal scholars is rather different. It was founded in 1947 by thinkers including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Karl Popper.

Bruce Cotterill: How New Zealand can protect itself in a fracturing world

We’ve only just finished the third week of January, and already we are seeing a level of global change that feels unprecedented.

According to the timeline of my holiday reading, it started in Iran, where the people are attempting to overthrow the Islamic Republic’s leadership, which has been in place since 1979. Thousands are reported dead, but the regime appears to be hanging on to power, just.

Rod Kane: Tauranga’s avoidable disaster.

Before the trolls start I’m going to put my credentials up here. Apart from a lifetime interest in geology and landforms, and having an NZCE in civil engineering, neither of which counts for much, what does count in my opinion is the fact that I owned and operated a geotech contracting company specialising in slip remedial work for nearly 20 years. I have worked on and under more dangerous slips than I care to remember. More than once I had to make a run for it.

We have a human tragedy, that is horrific and the terrible drama will play out in the fullness of time. We all feel for the people involved. But something needs to be said right now to avoid all this in the future.

John McLean: Cozy Coffee With Coster

New Zealand’s Public Service Commissioner remains strangely loyal to a disgraced ex-Police Commissioner

On 15 January 2026, Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche met with former Police Commissioner Andrew Coster. They met in public, at Mojo Café near Parliament, six weeks after Coster had resigned as CEO of the Social Investment Agency.

Allow me to refresh your memories. Andrew Coster tried to anoint child and bestiality porn criminal Jevon McSkimming as Coster’s successor as Police Commissioner. Coster did so in full knowledge that McSkimming was, as Deputy Police Commissioner, sexually predating upon a young woman.