Geoff Parker: Equality Before the Law - Why Equity Is Dividing New Zealand

RNZ's latest article on "equity versus equality" presents a familiar argument: because Māori experience poorer outcomes in some areas, New Zealand must embrace ethnicity-based policies rather than treating citizens equally.

At first glance this sounds compassionate. In reality, it raises a fundamental question:

Should government assistance be based on race, or on need?

John Robertson: The Tyranny of the Unmeasurable - Why Legislation Must Be Secular

We have completely lost our minds. We really have.

We’ve allowed the language of our law—the very framework that prevents chaos and ensures a predictable, fair society—to be infected by the unmeasurable. We are replacing hard, empirical, scientific reality with metaphysical abstractions. And it is a catastrophe in the making. It truly is.

Ani O'Brien: A week is a long time: 13 June 2026

Labour’s List shows a party looking backwards

Labour released its party list this week and the overwhelming impression is one of continuity rather than change. The top of the list is dominated by the same figures who led Labour through its last term in government. Chris Hipkins, Carmel Sepuloni, Barbara Edmonds, Willie Jackson, Megan Woods, Ayesha Verrall and Willow-Jean Prime all remain firmly entrenched. There are a few notable promotions in Vanushi Walters and Cushla Tangaere-Manuel, but voters looking for a dramatic changing of the guard will struggle to find one.

Roger Partridge: The Market for Doom - Why We Keep Predicting the End of Work

Last month’s Schumpeter Comes to Wellington argued that the outcry over public service cuts in New Zealand sits in a long tradition of failed catastrophism. This month’s Long Read widens the lens and asks why generation after generation makes the same mistake – and why warnings about AI destroying work are no more convincing than the warnings that preceded them.

Thirty years ago, Jeremy Rifkin predicted the end of work. Within a generation, he wrote in 1995, automation would leave most of the world’s workforce without work. The book was a bestseller, was translated into multiple languages and made its author a celebrity. The generation is now up. Global unemployment stands at about five per cent, employment-to-population ratios are at or near record highs across the OECD, and Rifkin has moved on to his twenty-third book.

Dr Eric Crampton: Is Govt really putting the online harm funding before the policy? There’s a hint

It’s a pretty minor budget item all things considered.

Thirty million dollars over four years, when the government plans on core government expenditure of over one hundred and fifty billion dollars in the 2026/2027 fiscal year, isn’t a huge sum.

But I still wonder just how they’re going to manage to spend that much on policy and regulatory work in an area where Parliament has not yet even passed enabling legislation.

JC: In Truth Nothing Is Free

This is one of the most basic facts you should learn in life. But, amazingly, some people honestly believe that if they are told something is free then it is. They seem to lack the power of comprehension to understand otherwise. Everything has to be paid for by someone, either through direct purchase or through a subsidy. Unless you’re bartering an exchange of goods then money must come from somewhere to complete a financial transaction. It’s a fact of life.

Kerre Woodham: Why are people still using meth?

Our meth use continues to break records. According to the latest wastewater drug test, methamphetamine use is up 15% since the last quarter. And wastewater testing is pretty accurate. Consumption of methamphetamine and MDMA both increased. MDMA use does have a seasonal component though, they said, with increases during the summer music festival period from January to March. People pop a pill while they're at the festivals and then pretty much get on with their lives.

Bob Edlin: Media quiet about poll which exposes strong public disapproval of political policing by professional bodies

At first blush, the mainstream media have yet to report the results of a poll which found strong public disapproval of political policing by professional regulators.

The results were set out in a media statement which said:

David Farrar: A useful reminder

Nick Mowbray reminds us of where our tax dollars went under Labour:

OU’RE WEEKLY REMINDER OF WHERE YOUR MONEY WENT UNDER THE LAST GOV. ( a few of thousands of examples)

Saturday June 13, 2026 

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Penn Raine: Northern Ireland finds out

The outbreak of fiery protest in Northern Ireland this week has been called by some commentators ‘muscle memory’. They mean that the anger of The Troubles has been efficiently repurposed to express Irish rage against the cultural and societal imposition of migrants for whom an attempted beheading in a suburban street is acceptable behaviour.

Barrie Davis - Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy

“The Weimar Republic was Germany’s postwar experiment with democracy, and a time of unprecedented intellectual and artistic freedom. But beneath the glamour was a polarized society plagued by economic disasters, populist leaders fuelling culture wars and an uneasy political settlement that would soon spawn the horrors of Nazism.”

Perspective with Andrew Dickens: Has Trump locked America into a 'forever war'?

So, it’s been more than two months since the president announced what he described as a ceasefire with Iran and suggested a major deal was just days away. This was back on April 7.

The president said on social media that the two sides were “very far along”, adding that they just needed two weeks for the agreement to be finalised and consummated. But of course, that never happened.

Breaking Views Update: Week of 7.6.26

Saturday June 13, 2026 

News:
United for Kauri: Major Funding Boost Backs Iwi-Led Protection in Te Tai Tokerau
A significant investment in the future of Northland’s iconic kauri forests has been announced, with Foundation North committing more than $1.2 million to support iwi-led protection efforts across Te Tai Tokerau.

Ani O'Brien: Public transport fallacies and middle class welfare

Good intentions are no substitute for good policy, yet questioning expensive subsidies is increasingly treated as a moral failing rather than a legitimate debate about priorities.

Labour’s proposal to cap public transport fares at $20 per week (in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch; $10 everywhere else) has been touted as a “cost of living” measure, but the policy is politically strategic rather than a solution to a burning problem. It sounds good. Everyone understands that household budgets are under pressure and everyone likes the idea of cheaper transport. Additionally, public transport occupies a privileged position in modern political discourse. It is a left-coded snack they cannot help going back to. Zohran Mamdani in New York made it a cornerstone of his recent campaign to promise “free buses”. But already he has “acknowledged that his plan for fast and free buses isn’t going to happen so fast”.

Pee Kay: It seems that once the public funding tap is turned on, it simply never turns off.

Yesterday I posted an article about Ngati Rangi’s Star Compass in Ohakune.

I did some further digging and found when it came to actually funding this glorified, open-air stone circle in Ohakune, the creators of Te Tatau o Rongonui seem to have hit the local bureaucratic jackpot.

Peter Dunne: Labour's party list

Labour’s recently released party list is a job half-done.

A positive aspect is that it has introduced a small pool of new talent that would be beneficial to Labour’s ranks. However, it has also not only retained, but in some cases, promoted too many of the old guard that contributed so much to Labour’s failure when last in office. While the list ranking process has culled out some of Labour’s deadwood, it has not gone nearly far enough to suggest a future Labour-led government would look significantly different from the one that was so decisively defeated at the last election.

Ashley Church: Who really defends Israel?

Analysing Trump's claim to be 'calling the shots'

Those of us of a certain age will remember Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, even if we don’t remember him by that name. During the 2003 Iraq War, al-Sahhaf was Saddam Hussein’s Information Minister and became a familiar media figure – frequently appearing on TV to insist that Iraq was winning the war and that the invaders were being crushed, even as American forces closed in on Baghdad.

Because of this, Western media dubbed him “Comical Ali” and “Baghdad Bob” because the gap between what he was saying and what everyone could see had become absurd.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Why New Zealand’s 'flexible' labour market fails on youth wages

When The New Zealand Initiative set out 235 recommendations for the next government last month, the one this paper chose for its headline was the proposal to pay younger workers less. The news sense was sound, because it is the recommendation that sounds least fair.

Paying a seventeen-year-old below the adult rate for what looks like the same work offends a plain sense of equal treatment. The Council of Trade Unions objected strongly, presenting it as a return to an older, harsher labour market, and on the face of it you can see why.

Peter Williams: Please don't take the Opportunity

The rising star of New Zealand politics are Marxist re-distributors

Any day now the June Curia-Taxpayers Union political poll will be released. It’s less than five months to the 2026 election, the time that polling numbers start to matter.

Last month a party which rebranded as Opportunity (formerly The Opportunities Party or TOP) scored 2.8 percent in the Curia-TU poll. In April Opportunity cracked through to 3.3 percent in the 1 News Verian survey.