Pee Kay: This is a social and financial fraud of massive proportions…

It was no surprise to see the “usual suspects” swiftly turn to their harmonised friends in the MSM to condemn the coalition governments, 2025 announced, review of the Waitangi Tribunal.

“This review is not about efficiency or clarity, it is about control.”

“For nearly 50 years, the Waitangi Tribunal has played a vital role in advancing justice for Māori.”

Colinxy: The Failure of the New Zealand Right - Why National Keeps Losing Even When It Wins

For decades, the New Zealand Right has been trapped in a strange political purgatory: it wins elections, but it never governs. It occupies the Treasury benches, but it never wields power. It campaigns as a counter‑force to the Left, but once in office, it behaves like a timid caretaker for the very institutions that oppose it.

National’s problem is not electoral. It is philosophical, cultural, and moral. It is a party that has forgotten what it is for — and worse, a party that is terrified of remembering.

Mike's Minute: Trump's way or the UN way?

So what is the alternative to what Trump has done in Iran?

The answer was discussed at a meeting over the weekend.

The British appeared to host it. 40 countries took part, including ours, and they were talking about what you might remember is the “global rules-based approach”.

That broadly was the way things were done pre-Trump.

JC: How Low Do National Wish to Go

The poll numbers are not kind to National or Luxon. Why? The answer is simple. National is not kind to its voter base. Can we identify the problem? Yes: it stems from the leadership of the party’s parliamentary team – Christopher Luxon, Nicola Willis and Chris Bishop. These three are driving the party down a road paved with ‘politically correct’ bitumen. Bitumen is a raw and sticky binding agent, now preferred to tarseal in the paving of roads, and National is using a political equivalent when it comes to matters of climate change and race relations. They are binding themselves to these issues in a ‘sticky’ manner that is very much at odds with their voter base.

Steve Gibson: Why Councils Need to Live Within Their Means

Across New Zealand, councils are drifting away from a simple principle that every household understands. You cannot spend more than you earn and expect it to end well. In Hastings, where I serve as a councillor, we are seeing this play out in real time.

Our council has approved a draft annual plan with a 9.1 per cent increase in spending. That is roughly three times inflation. At the same time, ratepayers are being asked to accept higher rates while the council borrows $4.8 million just to fund day-to-day operations.

DTNZ: Wayne Brown to scrap council meeting lunches

Auckland’s mayor has ordered an end to ratepayer-funded lunches at full council meetings after scrutiny of a catering bill that reached $1.4 million in the past year and nearly $5 million over four years, though meeting lunches themselves accounted for a relatively small portion of that total.

Centrist: The kids are alright – but the system still isn’t

First, the good news

Despite showing a sharp drop in serious youth offending and improvements across several frontline indicators, the report appears to have attracted little, if any, attention from RNZ or the wider New Zealand mainstream media.

Read straight, the latest annual report on the Child and Youth Strategy shows that, across several frontline indicators, New Zealand children and young people are doing better.

Youth offending is down. School attendance is up for a third straight year. Substantiated abuse and neglect findings have fallen. Food insecurity has eased from last year.

Start with the clearest good news. The youth offending rate fell to about 140 per 10,000 children and young people aged 10 to 17 in 2024/25. That was down from about 163 per 10,000 a year earlier, a drop of roughly 14 per cent, and down from about 182 per 10,000 in 2019/20, a fall of about 23 per cent.

School attendance also improved. About 59 per cent of students aged 6 to 16 attended school more than 90 per cent of the term, up from about 54 per cent a year earlier. That is an increase of roughly 10 per cent, though it remains below the 65 per cent seen in 2019/20.

There are other encouraging signs, too. The number of children and young people with at least one substantiated finding of abuse in the previous 12 months fell to about 11,400, down from about 12,900 a year earlier, a drop of roughly 12 per cent.

Compared with 14,800 in 2019/20, that is down about 23 per cent. Food insecurity also eased, falling to about 21 per cent from roughly 25 per cent the year before, a drop of around 14 per cent.

One survey measure in the report found that about four in five children aged 0 to 14 lived with a parent who said they were coping well or very well with the day-to-day demands of raising children.

More children are growing up in benefit-receiving households

But then you hit the other half of the report, and the mood changes fast. There were 230,700 children in

households receiving a main benefit in 2024/25, up from nearly 222,300 the previous year and almost 197,600 in 2019/20.

The report notes that children in benefit-receiving households are approximately six times more likely to experience material hardship than children in working households. Material hardship itself sat at over 14 per cent, or about 169,300 children, with the year-on-year change not statistically significant, but the three-year trend heading upwards.

Housing remains one of the ugliest numbers in the report. Among children in low-income households, nearly 57 per cent were living in households spending more than 30 per cent of disposable income on housing. That is worse than the more than 49 per cent recorded in 2019/20. Potentially avoidable hospitalisations also remain stubbornly high at 75.5 per 1,000, compared with just over 58 in 2019/20.

Immunisation at 24 months remains at about 78 per cent, far below the roughly 91 per cent recorded in 2019. Note: Centrist submits that whether this news about lower vaccination rates is good, bad, or neutral depends on your perspective.

Progress is real, but not evenly shared

Material hardship remains far higher for some groups, hitting just over 25 per cent for Māori children, 31 per cent for Pacific children, nearly 30 per cent for disabled children, and 27.5 per cent for children in disabled households.

Those figures are well above the national average, but they point more clearly to concentrated disadvantage than to identity itself. Read in context, the report suggests the deeper drivers are poverty, benefit dependence, housing strain and wider economic pressure, which are not falling evenly across the population.

At the same time, Māori school leavers who learnt mainly in te reo Māori achieved NCEA Level 2 at a rate of nearly 83 per cent, above the all-school-leaver rate of about 79 per cent. That does not prove a single cause, but it does show the picture is more mixed than the usual deficit framing allows. It may also reflect the family support, cultural grounding, and educational commitment often associated with that pathway.

The Centrist is an online news platform that strives to provide a balance to the public debate - where this article was sourced.

David Farrar: Fitch says we need fiscal consolidation

Fitch Ratings released:

Fitch Ratings has revised the Outlook on New Zealand’s Long-Term Foreign-Currency Issuer Default Rating (IDR) to Negative from Stable and affirmed the IDR at ‘AA+’.

The Outlook revision reflects our view that a substantial debt reduction is becoming more difficult to envisage, as fiscal consolidation has been delayed in the past few years. The general government debt-GDP ratio has increased substantially over the past six years as the economy has been buffeted by a number of shocks.

Tuesday April 7, 2026 

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Ryan Bridge: Should we be preparing to go to war?

An interesting article in the Herald yesterday about army training at Waiouru.

The troops are singing from the same song sheet as Winston and Judith in terms of how threatening the world is at the moment.

Taxpayers' Union-Curia Poll - April 2026

Here are the headline results for April's Taxpayers’ Union – Curia Poll:

Dr Michael John Schmidt: Pragmatic Water Management

In my previous article “WCC’s Actions Are a National Moral Hazard”, the objection to transferring water assets was framed in moral and ethical terms: councils hold critical infrastructure in trust for the public, and irreversible transfers undermine trusteeship and create moral hazards by allowing responsibility to be exported rather than exercised.

Colinxy: The Lie of “Endless Growth”

Why Marxists Keep Repeating It — and Why It’s Nonsense

One of the most persistent talking points in Marxist circles — and among their fellow‑travellers in academia, activism, and the bureaucratic class — is the claim that capitalism supposedly promises “endless growth.” According to this myth, economists and capitalists are engaged in a kind of metaphysical delusion, imagining that markets will expand forever until the planet melts, the seas boil, and Jeff Bezos personally blocks out the sun.

It’s a neat story. It’s also completely false.

Peter Dunne: No-frills leadership

Christopher Luxon's mentor Sir John Key quickly and successfully transitioned from international businessman to national political leader when he became Prime Minister. Luxon, on the other hand, is still struggling to do so. And nor is it clear that he even wants to.

Key's smooth transition occurred because he was both driven, and a sponge for new knowledge. He knew what he wanted to achieve, and was always eager to learn the best political ways of doing so.

Dr Eric Crampton: If free parking is a problem, the solution is obvious: Put a price on it

It’s hard to compete with free. Who wants to pay for something if you can get it for nothing?

Unfortunately, sometimes free comes at others’ expense, as it can with on-street parking. Better council parking management, including pricing, would encourage better decisions.

Nick Clark: How to fix RMA Reform

New Zealand's resource management system is broken. Many attempts have been made over the past three decades to fix it. All have missed the mark.

Cue the latest attempt, the Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill.

Dr Michael Johnston: Teachers deserve better than their union

Every two or three years, the Ministry of Education and the teachers’ unions engage in the spectacle of ritual combat known as collective bargaining. In 2025, the Public Service Commissioner took over from the Ministry in the arena. But the exercise remains a ritual.

Everyone knows, more-or-less, what the outcome will be before bargaining even begins. The education budget is fixed, so the government negotiator has very little room to move.

Typically, the ritual goes as follows.

David Farrar: Murder data

I read an overseas article that cross-tabulated homicide data by ethnicity for both the victim and the killer. I thought this was interesting, so asked for NZ equivalent data. Sadly it was declined on privacy grounds, but they did provide the data without the cross-tabulation.

For those interested the breakdown by ethnicity for homicide victims for the last ten years is:

Mike's Minute: I can help Steve Abel

Steve is the Green's agriculture bloke and he wants an urgent inquiry into the Wattie’s and Heinz mess in Hawkes Bay.

He is wasting his time. Not because he shouldn’t be concerned, because he should. We should all be concerned.

But the answers he seeks are already readily available.

Monday April 6, 2026 

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