Dr Mike Schmidt: NZ Water Reform EXPOSED - Who Really Controls NZ’s Water Now?

John Kenel chats to Mike Schmidt about the setup and pitfalls of new water entities.

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Breaking Views Update: Week of 3.5.26

Tuesday May 5, 2026 

News:
Repair bill for Wairere Falls Track estimated at $150,000
The popular Wairere Falls Track in Waikato will need at least $150,000 in repairs, the Department of Conservation (DOC) estimates.

The track has been closed since last June following the discovery of a three-metre-wide boulder which was unstable and a threat to users. The Waikato Times previously reported that people are still using the track.

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Is being a 'strong woman' really such a problem?

Judith Collins has two weeks left as an MP and she’s given an exit interview to Audrey Young at the New Zealand Herald in which she says people don’t like strong women - obviously referring to herself.

Now, I don’t disagree with Judith that she is a strong woman. She’s formidable.

David Farrar: Pay us off or we’ll oppose it

ACT released last week:

“An iwi group’s alleged demand for $180 million in order to approve the Bendigo Santana gold mine exposes how New Zealand’s resource management system has been warped by standover tactics and backroom dealing,” says ACT Resources spokesman Simon Court. 

Olivia Pierson: The Renewal of the West and a Reckoning for New Zealand

We in the West are not merely stumbling through the malady of culture wars. We are decaying in our very core. We have ceased to bring forth children in numbers required for our future, shattering the bonds of strong family - especially after Covid insanity saw family members pitted against each other - and we’ve saddled our young with mountains of debt along with a gnawing sense of futility, offering them neither purpose nor the prospect of showing them how to build lives worth inheriting.

Dr Bryce Edwards: Democracy Briefing - National and NZ First are now feasting on each other

For two and a half years it has been just about possible to argue that the National–NZ First–Act coalition was outperforming the predictions of its critics. Stable, if not exactly harmonious. As Winston Peters likes to put it, the coalition is as stable as a “three-legged stool”. That argument is over.

John McLean: UNDRIP On The Sly

National, Labour & ACT are sneaking the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into New Zealand law

The signed Free Trade Agreement between New Zealand and India will come into force in New Zealand when approved by New Zealand’s Parliament. The National, Labour and ACT political parties have each committed themselves to voting in favour of legislation adopting the FTA. It’s therefore virtually certain that Parliament will entrench the FTA in New Zealand’s indigenous law before the next general election scheduled for 7 November 2026.

David Farrar: A Good Idea

Radio NZ reports:

The ACT Party leader David Seymour has floated dishing out $500 to every year 11 student for an investment account, to promote investing at a younger age. 

It was not an ACT policy “yet”, he said.

Mike's Minute: Do we have any choice but to help out the US?

Well the war seems live now, doesn’t it.

The Americans officially want our help.

Which brings us back to the original question - if this encounter ends up ridding Iran of the ability to produce nuclear weaponry, has it been worth it?

Kerre Woodham: ACT's immigration plan is not exactly 'ground-breaking'

It's good to see some parties releasing policies, looking at you Labour, whether you agree with them or not, given it's less than six months to the election.

ACT released its immigration policy over the weekend, a six point plan that ACT says will welcome people with shared values and who play by the rules.

Dr James Allan: What Do You Most Despise?

The great and recently deceased playwright Tom Stoppard was once asked what he most despised. This, by the way, is a terrific question. Stoppard is reputed to have paused and then answered: “What I most despise are conservatives who don’t conserve.” The sting is more acute when you realise that Stoppard was one of a very few conservatively-inclined writers in today’s world. Nor did he live off public grant-giving bodies that uniformly shun anyone on the political Right. Nope, his plays actually made money – a lot of money – because they were so good.

But think about Stoppard’s point. Today’s Right-of-centre political class is so lacking in cultural confidence that it rarely can summon up the will to conserve anything that just 30 or 40 years ago most all of us would have considered to be of great value and importance. An education system that instils a sense of the West’s greatness, and not just its flaws? Nope. Too hard. A university system which didn’t let its standards plummet over the past three decades, drive out any academics with views to the Right of your average Lib Dem MP, become a factory for race grievance politics graduates and didn’t also become a ponzi scheme, visa-granting machine dressed up as an ‘export industry’? Again, nope. In fact, as I have noted more than once in the past, our unis here in Australia got worse every single year of the nine years of Coalition governments before Anthony Albanese came in and supercharged the descent.

Chris Morrison: Net Zero Lunatics Set to Empty Your Medicine Cabinet

Windy entrepreneur Dale Vince thinks there is “no single reason for us to drill more oil and gas in the North Sea”, former UK Green leader Caroline Lucas comments on BP’s recent cyclical profits rise by claiming, “such blatant profiteering from human misery is sickening”, while the headbangers’ headbanger George Monbiot likens Norway’s exports of hydrocarbons to “a curse to be dumped on other countries”. One can only pray that these twaddle transmitting twits do not become ill and have to call on modern, sophisticated, hydrocarbon-rich medicines.

 Monday May 4, 2026 

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Pee Kay: Positive Discrimination?

Few would dispute that the government’s fundamental duty is to safeguard our individual rights, specifically freedom of speech, association, and movement, alongside the right to vote and equal access to public services.

Then the question must be asked; Is the government a proactive defender of our individual rights, or a silent witness to their decay? There is little evidence to suggest that the preservation of these rights occupies any significant space in current policy discussions.

Ryan Bridge: Things are about to get a whole lot more expensive

I have good news and bad news for you this morning.

The good news, I was out shopping on the weekend, which means I didn't actually buy anything but drove halfway across town looking for a bed-head, couldn't find one that fit, and went home empty-handed.

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Here's the real issue impacting local councils

So I was in Christchurch giving a speech to part of Local Government New Zealand - the South Island arm - so the room was full of mayors and councillors from across the South Island.

One of the topics up for discussion was what councils around the country need to do, or could do, to win back public approval. I have to be honest: I left that room - and you know my views on councils - feeling just a little bit sorry for the councillors and mayors I met.

Matt Ridley: We owe our prosperity to 2 men from Glasgow

Hi rational optimist. A special treat for you today: a new Matt Ridley essay that traces mankind’s prosperity back to 2 Scottish men from 1776. Enjoy.

A quarter of a millennium ago, the world was changed by two men from Glasgow. In the spring of 1776, Adam Smith, a former professor of philosophy at Glasgow University, published “The Wealth of Nations,” his extraordinary book about how prosperity is mostly a spontaneous phenomenon deriving from the human habit of exchange and specialisation.

John Raine: Petrol head musings on the shape of our vehicle fleet

No Climate Alarm but a Time Limit on Fossil Fuels

Amid mounting evidence that we are not facing anthropogenic climate doom [1], there has been some relaxation in the push to legislate fossil-fuel powered vehicles off the roads over the next 10 years [2]. But let’s not kid ourselves that fossil fuels are an unlimited resource on human time scales. Their replacement in the Earth’s crust requires geological events over tens of millions of years.

Clive Bibby: Don’t be afraid to put your hand up

The one thing that helps nations overcome times of real uncertainty and threat to a way of life is the moment when all citizens over the legal age of majority realise that they have a part to play in how we collectively solve the problems we face. 

These times are almost always when the nation’s survival is under economic, pandemic or military threats from a source beyond our borders.

Kerre Woodham: The road toll still needs reducing

You'll have heard it in our news, since Monday the 20th of April, 18 people have been killed in 14 separate crashes on our roads. As of this morning, 12 more lives have been lost on New Zealand roads so far this year compared to the same point last year. To give some context though, our road tolls today are nothing like the bad old days. Back in 1973, long before many of you were born, when we had a much smaller population and fewer cars on the road, the road toll was around 850 deaths. And you can only imagine the injuries involved in those as well. In 1975 seatbelts in cars became compulsory and the road toll began to decline. It was around about 625 in 1975 – that was considered cause for celebration. And over time, it's come down to fewer than 300 deaths on the road thanks to seatbelts, thanks to better engineering of cars, thanks to improved medical outcomes and rigorous enforcement of traffic rules.