Geoff Parker: Taxpayer Money Should Never Be Allocated By Race

The eyewatering 2024 - 2025 list of Te Puni Kōkiri investment recipients exposes just how deeply race-based funding has become embedded in New Zealand’s public sector. Tens of millions of taxpayer dollars are being distributed through programmes available only to Māori organisations, Māori trusts, Māori businesses, and Māori landowners.

This is not welfare based on hardship. It is not assistance based on income. It is funding allocated primarily on ancestry.

Damien Grant: The grand solution Wayne Brown believes has New Zealand’s best interests at heart

“They are all mad Damien,” His Worship the Mayor advised me. I wasn’t certain to who Wayne Brown was referring. We were at his victory party so I assumed he was being dismissive of his supporters but I’d misunderstood. Brown’s irritation was at the wider political class. “Idiots. Most of them.”

There are, Brown believes, sensible, competent and moderate people in both major parties. There are also, he has observed, individuals of less outstanding calibre in the minor parties.

Pee Kay: Equal Rights is Being Quietly Euthanised

Last week, I pulled back the curtain exposing a small fraction of the financial reality of Māori privilege. Today I’m endeavouring to follow the trail to the very source of the decay. Today I’m looking at the systemic foundations that sustain Maori privilege.

New Zealand isn’t just drifting toward a two-tier society, I say we’ve already arrived!

While we go about our daily lives, a quiet revolution is being engineered by the very people sworn to represent us. This isn’t a conspiracy; Oh no, it’s a co-ordinated march toward tribal rule, led by politicians and protected by a shield of complicit media, elite academics, and bureaucratic “gatekeepers.”

Ryan Bridge: NZ's isolation is a blessing and a curse

It'd be easy to draw comparisons and parallels between our upcoming election and the local and federal upsets in Australia and the UK at the weekend.

But New Zealand is a totally different kettle of fish. In part, because, unlike the Brits and the Aussies, we run an MMP system.

Breaking Views Update: Week of 10.5.26

Monday May 11, 2026 

News:
New powers for police to take photos of public widely criticised
A bill that gives police the power to film and photograph the public has been criticised for being a privacy risk, disproportionately affecting Māori and directly contradicting recommendations that rules be tightened.

Net Zero Watch Samizdat: Blair steps up his attack on Net Zero

UK

Blair: Britain risks falling behind because of Net Zero

Britain risks “falling behind” global competitors such as the US and China because of Ed Miliband’s net zero drive, Sir Tony Blair has warned. The former prime minister said the UK and EU must abandon their “climate-first, climate-only” approach in favour of cheap and reliable energy.

Colinxy: The Infantilisation of the Citizen

How Bureaucracies and Activist Movements Turn Adults Into Children

One of the most striking features of modern governance, not just in New Zealand, but across the Western world, is the steady infantilisation of the citizen[i]. Adults who were once expected to be treated as responsible agents are now spoken to, managed, and regulated as though they are children in need of constant supervision[ii].

This is not accidental. It is the predictable outcome of a bureaucratic culture that sees itself as the parent and the public as its dependents.

Bruce Cotterill: Netball, cricket, water polo rows expose deeper leadership failings in sport

What is going on with sporting administration in New Zealand?

I’ve been watching from afar the various governance debacles as they relate to the administration of our sporting organisations.

It’s been well reported over the past few years that some of our major sports have been experiencing meltdowns of one sort or another, with CEOs, chairs, board directors and athletes the unanticipated victims.

JC: ‘Family Feud’ Will Be a Good Watch.

Electioneering on the right of politics has begun. Winston Peters, not shackled by the responsibility of being deputy prime minister, is basically a free agent. He is free to create dissent in the coalition and is laying out the policy differences between NZ First and National, some of which pertain to the economy. There is nothing unusual here; it is the politics of MMP.

The media, in their mischievous way, would have you believe otherwise as we observed recently over Winston’s email leak. ‘The coalition is in crisis: it’s about to end,’ they mindlessly and, no doubt hopefully, shriek. One of those shriekers, the Herald’s Thomas Coughlan, thinks the war and its effects, not to mention Winston, mean Luxon has a very difficult path to victory. That might be but Hipkins’ path resembles a dirt track, while Luxon’s looks a more comfortable walk.

Ashley Church: The courage to question compliance

How rules survive long after reason has left the building

Yesterday I pulled into a major-brand service station to fill the tank in my car. (and yes, before anyone asks, I had remembered to arrange a mortgage first).

So there I was, standing beside the pump, doing what most of us now do in those awkward few minutes while liquid gold trickles into the tank, when a female voice suddenly boomed across the forecourt.

David Farrar: An excellent decision

The Herald reports:

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters says the fees-free university scheme, which covers the final year of tertiary education study for students, will be scrapped in the upcoming Budget.

Alwyn Poole: Vocational Education in Schools needs to be thought through VERY carefully.....

Two Reasons the planned increase in Vocational Education in Schools needs to be thought through VERY carefully.

1. Early categorization of students and direction into narrow pathways creates carnage.

When at teachers’ college in the 1990s I came across a text with a photo of a Maori man doing road work and the caption: “Where would we be for roads in New Zealand without the Maori worker?”

Mike's Minute: Should we tax big tech for our news?

The latest cab off the rank in things Australia is doing that we suggested we might, is some sort of deal with tech around local news.

Australia led off the batting with the social media ban that has been picked up and run with all over the world.

Sunday May 10, 2026 

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Penn Raine: Wait for it!

Wait for the howls of ‘Populism!’ when Britain’s red wall of Labour run councils crumbles as Farage’s Reform party marches over the ramparts, giggling as it goes.

No doubt there are similar wails, but of ‘Misogyny!’ and perhaps even ‘Racism!’ sounding around Wellington’s beltway and its bureaucracy’s dim corridors at Maiki Sherman’s announcement that she was stepping down because her position was ‘untenable’.

Brendan O'Neill: The English have revolted

The Reform surge in England is more than a protest vote – it’s a people's blow against the cultural elites.

Here are some phrases I don’t want to hear today. ‘Protest vote.’ ‘The cry of the “left behind”.’ ‘A bloody nose for the establishment.’ For while it’s true that the colourless functionaries of our two-party regime will be holding their bloodied snouts today following a bruising blow from the electorate, none of those trite phrases captures the historic nature of what is happening. This is not just a ballot-box ‘screw you’ – it’s an attempted reordering of politics itself by voters with nothing left to lose.

Roger Partridge: The Roots of the Left-Right Divide....

The Roots of the Left-Right Divide: Whose Suffering? And Who Knows Enough to Act?

In January 2023, Jacinda Ardern resigned as New Zealand’s Prime Minister after five years in office. She left as one of the most celebrated progressive leaders of her generation – and as one of the most domestically repudiated. Labour’s vote virtually halved between her historic 2020 majority and the 2023 election, and the party polled higher in the weeks after she resigned than it did while she led it. She now holds fellowships at Harvard and Oxford, commands global audiences, and has written a New York Times bestseller. She did not tour New Zealand for the launch.

Ani O'Brien: A week is a long time: 9 May 2026

Maiki Sherman resigns

TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman has resigned. In a statement on X, Sherman acknowledged that she had used “an offensive comment” toward another journalist at a function in the Finance Minister’s office last year, apologised the following morning, and said those apologies were accepted. She also stated that the remark came in response to “deeply personal and inappropriate remarks” directed at her that evening, while accepting that this did not excuse her own conduct.

Peter Williams: The Sad Stobo Saga

How the wokerati got to a white male

In April 2024 the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) launched its Matangirua strategy – its formal Māori engagement and capability framework. The strategy was designed to help Māori “participate as Māori” in financial markets. That apparently means “not just as generic consumers or investors, but in ways that recognise Māori economic structures, values, and collective ownership models.”

All up that sounds like a separatist model. Are Maori , or those who call themselves Maori, really that different from the rest of us?

Richard Prebble: Broadcasters should be careful what they wish for

I have a confession to make.

The Broadcasting Standards Authority was my idea.

What is worse, I still think the original idea was right.

To my surprise, after the 1987 election, David Lange made me Minister of Broadcasting. Much of today’s broadcasting system came out of my reforms.