John McLean: Aoteainertia

New Zealand is not in the swim. It’s swimmy, barely able to tread water. The Second Law of Thermodynamics has cuckooed the once-plucky and productive settler nest of New Zealand. Entropy is endemic. There’s little but directionless disorder.

New Zealand is in desperate need of abundant, well-directed energy, both electrical and psychological.

For the whole of civilization, human welfare and progress has been predicated on abundant sources of energy. New Zealand’s paucity of power now translates into crippling electricity prices for New Zealand businesses and citizens. New Zealand has not constructed a major new hydroelectric dam since the Clyde Dam was commissioned over 30 years ago, in 1993.

Rather than construct more electricity generation to alleviate the power crisis, the four major electricity companies – “Gentailers” Genesis, Meridian, Mercury and Contact – have chosen to capitalize on the enervating energy prices by generating extortionate rent-seeking profits. Each Gentailer except Contact is majority owned by the Government, so inflated electricity prices and the oligopolistic profits they generate are a sly way for Zealandia’s shepherds to shear any remnant fleece from their sheeple citizenry.

The Fast Track Approvals Act 2024 is being subverted at every turn by the bureaucratic Blob. There is nothing to inspire confidence that New Zealand will begin to capitalize on its abundant energy-generation potential, any time in the foreseeable future.

New Zealand suffers an extreme strain of consultitis. Take, as just one example, the sorry saga of the abandoned project to build light rail from Auckland’s CBD to its airport. A defensible 2017 initiative of the Labour-led Government, the current National-led Government scrapped the project in 2023. But not before $228 million had been spent achieving absolutely nothing, including $65 million on private sector consultants. To be clear, building the proposed Auckland light rail was entirely feasible. In about the same length of time it took New Zealand took to squander hundreds of millions doing nothing to bring Auckland light rail to fruition, the humble Moroccans built (1986 – 1993) the Hassan II Mosque, an astonishing edifice that my wife and I have recently been fortunate enough to visit.

The current Government can’t even revisit a few legislative references. The National-Party Act Coalition Agreement, entered into shortly after the 2023 general election, commits the current Government to the following:

The Coalition Government will reverse measures taken in recent years which have eroded the principle of equal citizenship, specifically we will:

…

 

Conduct a comprehensive review of all legislation (except when it is related to, or substantive to, existing full and final Treaty settlements) that includes 'The Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi" and replace all such references with specific words relating to the relevance and application of the Treaty, or repeal the references.

The Coalition Government has yet to reverse those statutory references to ‘The Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi’ that erode equal citizenship (not being references that are related or substantive to final Treaty settlements), and the portents are bad.

The Treaty Principles references review did not even begin until July 2025. While the review was required by NZ First as a condition of its participation in the current coalition Government, all reviewers appear to be National Party stooges. (Reminder: It was John Key’s National Government that, without any electoral or Parliamentary mandate, signed New Zealand up to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People – the declaration that undemocratically infected New Zealand with the He Puapua Maori separatist manifesto and Three Waters racial “co-governance” of New Zealand’s fresh water.)

Chair of the Treat Principles Review group is David Cochrane, a former member of that hotbed of Maori separatism and extremism, the Waitangi Tribunal.

Fellow members of the Review Group are James Christmas, glowingly described by Radio New Zealand as “a lawyer and former senior advisor to then-Attorney General Christopher Finlayson, who was also Treaty Negotiations Minister in the John Key government”.

The third in the Review Quartet is Marama Royal, a staunch advocate of the false notion that the Treaty of Waitangi entrenches co-governance between people with Maori ancestry, on one side, and non-Maori, on the other. The fourth is John Walters, a lawyer also blessed with mystically monetizable Maori ancestry.



In early July 2025, Radio New Zealand reported Cochrane as saying:

“the review is largely a book exercise and a pretty routine job"

“No-one's given us any instructions, there's terms of reference and we just follow those"

"We say, 'Well okay, if you were trying to interpret this as a judge or trying to apply it as a public servant, have you got enough of a steer as to what you're supposed to do?'

"That's really the test - is it certain enough that it means something or is it so vague that it's really no help to anybody?"

"We've done the easy ones, some of them are a bit more difficult.”

"Unless something crops up, or someone sends us more things to do or whatever, we'll be out of it by the end of August."

The terms of reference for Cochrane’s Review Group have been kept secret, so the general public has no way of knowing the criteria that the Group have been instructed by Luxon’s Government to apply in conducting its review. And despite Cochrane saying that he expects to deliver his report by the “end of August”, that doesn’t appear to have happened (if it has, then the Government is sitting on the report).

Simple words of advice for you, Mr Cochrane…none of New Zealand’s statutory references to Treaty of Waitangi Principles are required by Treaty Settlements. End of story.

David Cochrane is also on a “Technical Advisory Group” charged with reviewing the Waitangi Tribunal’s legislation. We have the terms of reference for that group, which expressly require:

The ITAG will report its findings and recommendations to the Ministerial Advisory Group (MAG) comprising the Minister for Māori Development (Chair), the Attorney-General, the Minister of Justice, the Minister for Resources and the Associate Minister of Justice by the end of August 2025.

This timeline will enable Cabinet consideration of the ITAG’s advice and the introduction of any legislative amendments before the end of the 2025 calendar year.

The objective is to pass any required legislative changes within the current parliamentary term.

As with the Treaty Principles references review, nothing indicates that the Technical Advisory Group has delivered its report on the Waitangi Tribunal’s legislation.

The Race Gravy Trains just keep rollin’ right along. And it’s a hellishly expensive train for the plebeian non-passengers to fund. Under the Cabinet Manual, the chair of the Treaty Principles Review Group and the Waitangi Tribunal Technical Advisory Group get $1,000 per day, and the other members get $400-$800. Nice work if you can get it.

Sometimes it’s best that these sorts of reports go nowhere. It took 20 years of taxpayer funded obscurantism and fabrication for the Waitangi Tribunal to deliver its “Wai 262” report. That’s the turgid tome proclaiming that people with Maori ancestors have “guardianship” of (i.e., own) all exploitable intellectual property in New Zealand native plants and animals. Mercifully, no Government has acted on that ludicrous twaddle, since the Tribunal delivered its report in 2011.

Most attempts at profound change come outside of formal channels. All Government agencies and main stream media channels now proceed on the basis that New Zealand’s name has organically changed to “Aotearoa”.

NZ First Leader Winston Peters is having none of this anti-democratic attempt to change New Zealand’s name and has introduced legislation to mandate that “New Zealand” be used exclusively as New Zealand’s name, in all official documents including passports.

A few other expensive gems, from Going Nowhere Land…

Well over six years on from the Christchurch mosques massacre, the Coronial Inquiry is no closer to ending. The Coroner, Brigitte Windley, is doing her best to evade the inconvenient truth that the primary cause of the atrocity was the Police unlawfully giving Brenton Tarrant his gun licence, and the New Zealand’s Muslim community’s unfounded assertion that Tarrant did not act alone. The Inquiry reconvenes on 7 October 2025. Don’t expect a credible Coroner’s Report any time soon.

Within an hour North of Wellington along State Highway One, drivers find themselves crawling through Levin, a small town on the Horowhenua coastal plain. That a developed nation has failed to bypass a provincial town within an hour of its capital city is a mystery that would make Lee Kuan Yew scratch his dead head. Under amorphous plans, the no-brainer bypass over simple terrain will take 5 years. Let’s make that a decade, at least - for nothing more than a simple section of motorway.

High Court Judge Melanie Harland has yet to issue her decision on the Ngai Tahu tribe’s claim for co-governance of the South Island’s public fresh water i.e., veto rights over all use of such water, with all the race hustling and shakedown opportunities that would flow from such co-governance. It’s six months since the hearing concluded in early April.

It’s readily apparent, therefore, that New Zealand has become an impotent, lackadaisical little country that is idly squandering its human and natural capital. The consultant class’s engine revs into the red zone, but the car is struck in neutral. NZ’s going nowhere, and rapidly running out of gas. Even if the country gets into gear, New Zealanders have run out of road to sustain their current standard of living.

John McLean is a citizen typist and enthusiastic amateur who blogs at John's Substack where this article was sourced.