Liberty International: Sir Roger Douglas Selected as Freedom Torch Awardee 2026

Liberty International is proud to announce that Sir Roger Douglas will receive the Freedom Torch Award 2026, in recognition of his enduring contributions to individual liberty, economic freedom, and public policy reform.

Sir Roger Douglas, Freedom Torch Awardee 2026

Brendan O'Neill: Islamists have been given a veto over public life

The banning of a UKIP march to appease Islamist hotheads is a scandal.

So now we know: if you want to prevent a public gathering in the UK, just threaten violence. Be menacing. Be intimidating. Let it be known, with a nod and a wink, that you will roundly kick off if those people you don’t like come anywhere near your neighbourhood.

Roger Partridge: The Judge-Made Problem the Government Is Trying to Fix

Just before Christmas, The Post asked for a column on Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk's building consent reforms. They slipped under the radar in December but deserve more attention. New Zealand's consenting system has become an ordeal – and the problem traces back to judicial decisions in the 1970s and 80s that made councils the insurers of last resort for building defects. Penk is trying to fix a problem that should never have existed.

David Thunder: Government-Controlled Digital ID is Not the Optional Convenience It Is Being Sold As

The UK government has pledged to introduce a digital ID system for all UK citizens and legal residents by the end of the current Parliament (so no later than 2029). The integration of digital ID into government services, though already under way, has hitherto been largely voluntary. However, it is becoming steadily less optional, as the government has said it will now be required as a precondition for work in the UK, and a version of it (GOV.UK One Login) is already being imposed unilaterally upon company directors throughout the UK.

Corey Smith: How American Values on Free Speech Became the Gold Standard

The legal giants who paved the way.

Thanks to the Constitution and dozens of Supreme Court cases, we live in a country where you can say almost anything you want – within reason. American free speech means you can tell a crowd of globalists that only stupid people buy windmills or protest peacefully against government actions while shouting four-letter words at federal agents. But, like many things in life, circumstances matter. “The question in every case,” said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. when delivering the court’s opinion in Schenck v. United States (1919), “is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantiative evils that congress has a right to prevent.” Other cases would follow and challenge this theory.

Ryan Bridge: We're all flocking for gold

Have you seen how much gold is worth lately?

Yesterday it hit another new record - US$5000 an ounce.

It’s up 60% on last year.

Dr Jake Scott: India’s Outlook

South Asia’s powerhouse faces challenges.

India has entered 2026 facing more economic challenges than headline growth figures alone would suggest. While the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has upgraded India’s growth projections for the 2025–26 economic year to 7.3% (up from 6%), the composition and durability of that growth is increasingly hostage to external shocks, policy trade-offs, and structural constraints, especially as the global economy grows more volatile. The challenge for New Delhi is not whether the Indian economy can grow—that is clearly evident—but whether it can seize the opportunities to continue this growth in an era of global instability.

Matua Kahurangi: The last Tuesday of January and the speech New Zealand still refuses to confront

Today is the last Tuesday of January. It is a date that should matter more in New Zealand’s political memory than it does.

On the last Tuesday of January in 2004, Dr. Don Brash stood at the Orewa Rotary Club and delivered what remains one of the most important political speeches given in this country in modern times. It was calm, forensic, unapologetic and, most importantly, correct.

Bob Edlin: If Luxon wants to duck out of accepting his Board of Peace invitation.....

If Luxon wants to duck out of accepting his Board of Peace invitation, he should take his cue from Canada’s Carney…

Perhaps it will be announced some time soon, but at time of writing PoO could find no record of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s decision in response to the formal invitation to join US President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” for Gaza.

No doubt he was chuffed to get the invitation, although permanent membership comes with a price tag.

Tuesday January 27, 2026 

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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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