Dr Bryce Edwards: Democracy Briefing - Sleepwalking into the worst crisis since Covid

“Thought Covid was bad? If New Zealand runs out of diesel, Covid will look like the rehearsal.” That line from Matthew Hooton in the Herald this morning lands like a slap. Not because it’s designed to alarm, but because Hooton is making a precise argument, not a rhetorical one. During the pandemic, the circulatory system of the economy kept pumping. He explains today that trucks still delivered to supermarkets, harvesters still picked crops, milk tankers still collected from farms, and ambulances still ran. None of that is guaranteed now.

Guest Post: How AI Can Build a Smaller, Smarter State

A guest post by Chris Scott on Kiwiblog:

Every so often, New Zealand produces a piece of public policy that doesn’t really belong to the left or the right — it simply works. ACC is the classic example. When it arrived in the 1970s, it wasn’t universally adored, but it solved a real problem in a way both sides could live with. The left valued the universality and fairness; the right appreciated the end of endless litigation and the stability it brought to business.

Breaking Views Update: Week of 29.3.26

Sunday March 29, 2026 

News:
Rangatahi seek a voice around Ōpōtiki council table
Rangatahi and youth advocates have presented their aspirations to the Ōpōtiki District Council to have a greater say in council matters.

Founder of youth group Ōpōtiki Rangatahi Pā Alex Le Long brought a group of young people to a recent council meeting to express the need for a youth council for Ōpōtiki.

Ani O'Brien: A week is a long time: 28 March 2026

NCEA is dead, Stanford pulls the plug on a broken system

Education Minister Erica Stanford has confirmed the beginning of the end for NCEA. A system she says had become “fragmented, difficult to understand, and too easy to game”. And that diagnosis will resonate with a lot of parents, teachers, and students who have watched the credibility of the qualification steadily erode. The replacement is set to be more structured with a foundational literacy and numeracy award at Year 11, followed by two subject-based qualifications in Years 12 and 13. It is a shift back toward a system where what you achieve actually signals what you know, rather than how effectively you’ve navigated the credit-collecting maze that NCEA became.

Dr Bryce Edwards: Democracy Briefing - Te Kāika and the broken model of social service contracting

In Dunedin, a charity called Te Kāika has been receiving tens of millions of dollars in government funding to provide health and social services to some of the city’s most vulnerable people. Over the past year, the Otago Daily Times has been methodically pulling back the curtain on what is going on inside this organisation. The picture is not pretty: nepotistic governance, unexplained payments to the leadership, staff fleeing in droves, government contracts unfulfilled, a youth facility shut down over abuse allegations, and a senior manager convicted of domestic violence. The Department of Internal Affairs is now investigating.

Professor Jerry Coyne: Indigenous “ways of knowing” invade Canadian science classes

I’ve spent a lot of time pushed many electrons going after the fallacy in New Zealand that indigenous “ways of knowing”—in this case from the Māori—are just as valid as so-called “Western ways of knowing,” which is what Kiwi progressives call “science”. You can see my pieces here, but there are many.

This sacralization of the oppressed, whereby the beliefs of minorities are given extra credibility, has now spread to Canada, a pretty woke place. Lawrence Krauss, who now lives in British Columbia, was astonished and depressed to find indigenous (Native American) superstitions treated as science in the secondary-school curriculum.

Melanie Phillips: Finish the job, Mr. President!

In the new reality of warfare, winning can be losing and losing can be winning

As the clock ticks away toward US President Donald Trump’s latest “negotiate or I unleash hell” deadline, the Iranian regime thinks that it’s winning.

In the West, the serried ranks of “experts” also think that America and Israel are heading either for a deepening quagmire or a humiliating retreat. It’s not possible to predict how the war against Iran will end — or even what the next day will bring.

Zachary Collier: What Gives Something Value?

Understanding how trade works.

It’s spring, which is bad news if you have pollen allergies, but is good news if you are planning to buy or sell a home: this is typically the busiest season for home sales. If you are buying a home or selling a home, the concept of value is one that is very important to keep in mind. Why is one buyer willing to offer more than another for the same house? Or why would a seller be willing to lower the price of their home?

Net Zero Watch Samizdat: Labour MPs demand a rethink on Net Zero

UK

Up to 40 Labour MPs write to Starmer demanding the party waters down its Net Zero commitments

Dozens of Labour MPs have written to Sir Keir Starmer and three Cabinet members demanding the Government looks at watering down its Net Zero commitment to drive sales of electric vehicles amid fears UK carmakers might have to shed jobs.

Kerre Woodham: Chris Hipkins has got to go

The former Prime Minister, the former Health Minister, the leader of the Labour Party has to go. His position is simply untenable. Chris Hipkins has consistently maintained he never received advice telling him there was a risk involved in requiring 12 to 17-year-olds to have a second Covid vaccination. As the Herald headline says this morning, a Cabinet paper shows otherwise.

Bob Edlin: The nuclear threat that has been obliterated and cut out like a cancer – so what next?

Is there a difference between a precision strike and a surgical one?

We ask because in June last year the White House declared: –

Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News

Yep.

Obliterated.

David Farrar: Hipkins did receive advice he says he didn’t

The Herald reports:

Then-Covid Response Minister Chris Hipkins received advice about the potential risks of a second Covid-19 vaccine dose for teenagers at a time when tens of thousands of them had yet to get a follow-up jab.

The Phase Two report from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Covid-19 response said the advice was never delivered to ministers, but the Herald has unearthed a Cabinet paper, in Hipkins’ name, from March 2022 that includes the advice in question.

Saturday March 28, 2026 

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Victor Davis Hanson: Week 3 - What’s Next In Iran?

By all traditional methodology and criteria, Iran is now inert: naval and air forces eviscerated, missile defenses offline, and an army rendered largely useless, as no one is fighting on the ground.

However, tactical success is not necessarily equivalent to strategic victory.

Click to view

Victor Davis Hanson: Week 2 - Surreal War, Silent Media - Victor Breaks It Down

It’s the Second Week (17 March 2026) of the so-called Iran war, and we’re told that it’s dragging on, we’re losing, and the Trump administration has no real success plan, or clear end in sight.

 
How is it then that Iran has no military, navy or leaders left, asks Victor Davis Hanson on today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.”

“When you look at Iran… it has no military left… All of these special contingents are under enormous assault: The command and control is destroyed, the missile defense is destroyed. And yet people say that it's unconquerable. It doesn't make any sense... So what's going on?”

Click to view

Karl du Fresne: The Last Post

That’s it then. The End. Finito.

That was my immediate reaction to the news that Stuff’s printing plant at Petone will shut down next year and printing operations will be relocated to Christchurch.

The paper most affected will be The Post, Stuff’s Wellington morning paper – known in a previous incarnation as The Dominion Post, a masthead whose name was itself an ungainly amalgam of its precursor titles The Dominion and The Evening Post.

The Post is on its knees already. It won’t survive this upheaval.

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Olympics decision is an 'enormous U-turn'

Now look it may not altogether surprise you today to hear that the International Olympic Committee has banned transgender women from competing in female events because this was so obviously going to happen once Kirsty Coventry was elected president of the IOC. She was clearly going to do it, given that she campaigned on doing exactly this.

Breaking Views Update: Week of 22.3.26

Saturday March 28, 2026 

News:
Gisborne $29.7m recovery funding bid awaits Government decision
Gisborne leaders are awaiting the Government’s response to a $29.7 million funding bid for a joint agency/iwi-led recovery plan after January’s severe weather event.

The letter was co-signed by representatives from Te Runanganui O Ngāti Porou (Tronp), the council and the region’s economic development and tourism agency, Trust Tairāwhiti.

David Harvey: Justice Should Be Seen By All

Why New Zealand's Courts Were Wrong to Abandon X

The courts and Parliament’s support services have quietly moved their social media presence to Bluesky — and in doing so, have made a political statement they had no business making.

The Rule of Law is not a bureaucratic abstraction. It is the foundational promise that the law applies equally to all, that decisions made in the name of the public are accessible to the public, and that no one — not even the state — is above accountability. Central to that promise is something deceptively simple: people must be able to find the law.

JC: Winston up to His Old Tricks

Winston is doing himself no favours by playing silly games.

So Winston is, once again, back to his old tricks of playing the joker in the pack, the wild card if you like. Winston is a bright cookie (and probably the best foreign minister this country has ever had) but has a mischievous streak and that engaging smile he so often beguiles us with. According to the Centrist, he will only not go with Labour if Hipkins is leader, because Hipkins lied to him. This is the Winston we are most familiar with. I would remind the elderly gentleman that a leopard doesn’t change its spots.