There was a lot of policy and promises this week. Labour kicked things off by saying they will freeze planned fuel tax increases and National promptly decided it also rather liked the idea of not putting petrol tax up immediately too, but stopped short of a complete freeze. The 12 cent increase due next January is now gone. Instead, the Government intends to begin raising the tax by 5 cents in January 2028, followed by another 3x 5 cent increases every 6 months. This will reduce expected transport fund revenue by $1.476 billion over the forecast period. About $450 million can be found in an existing fuel crisis contingency fund, but that still leaves a bit over $1 billion to find and David Seymour and Chris Bishop have both acknowledged that unless equivalent spending is cut elsewhere, the money will be borrowed. Labour has an even bigger unanswered question as freezing the increases for the whole next term will cost around $4.6 billion.
Insanely, the Greens are the party taking the fiscally purist position here. Julie Anne Genter says the scheduled increase should go ahead because the transport system needs the money, although she would rather spend it on public transport, walking, and cycling rather than new highways.
Labour is also promising that every New Zealand-trained graduate nurse will be offered a job in the public health system and to double recruitment subsidies for primary care nurses, taking rural incentives from $20,000 to $40,000 and urban subsidies from $15,000 to $30,000. It is unclear which money tree this will be paid from.
ACT, by contrast, is promising fewer public servants and even Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche has argued New Zealand should move from 42 agencies to something more like 15 to 20. ACT has cheerfully seized on this proposing 18 ministers and 19 departments rather than the current 28 ministers and 39 departments.
Labour has gone the other way adopting a proposal advocated for by the Public Service Association which includes a mandatory public good test before restructuring agencies or cutting jobs. The assessment could include the effect on public services, Te Tiriti obligations, health and safety, and disadvantaged groups. Labour also says it is not committed to the $2.4 billion in baseline savings already in the Government’s forecasts. Money. Tree.
And New Zealand First has made an intriguing candidate announcement with Daryl Habraken running for them in Northcote. He was the planted “mole” on the 2020 season of The Bachelorette New Zealand, secretly feeding information back to the Bachelorette about the contestants.
Te Pāti Māori puts the constitution on the table
Te Pāti Māori has decided there is no point nibbling around the edges. Its new Te Tiriti policy proposes entrenching the Treaty in legislation, making Waitangi Tribunal findings binding, spending $220 million over 4 years on a Mātike Mai Fund, and creating a new Te Tiriti Commission with the power to investigate government decisions, issue compliance orders, and, most remarkably, stop or suspend executive decisions it decides are serious breaches of Te Tiriti. Their long term objective is constitutional transformation by 2040.
Mātike Mai, the 2016 report led by Dr Moana Jackson and Professor Margaret Mutu, envisages separate spheres of governance where Māori are distinct from everyone else, with a third “relational” sphere in which the two interact. And Debbie Ngarewa-Packer says the policy is a coalition bottom line.
This presents Chris Hipkins with quite a problem. Labour will most likely need Te Pāti Māori votes, but Hipkins says Parliament must remain the final decision making body and Labour will not support a commission able to suspend Cabinet decisions. However, Hipkins may want to look at his own caucus as Willie Jackson wrote this week that Māori never ceded sovereignty, but hedged the claim by saying that the Crown is sovereign and controls Parliament now.
As part of their announcement Te Pāti Māori somehow managed to inadvertently trigger somewhat of a separation of powers crisis. Rawiri Waititi told reporters that constitutional lawyers, Māori leaders, and “people in the judiciary” had looked over the policy to make sure it was fit for purpose. Te Pāti Māori then declined to clarify whether he meant a current judge or somebody retired from the bench.
This is a pretty significant issue as a retired judge expressing a political opinion is entitled to do so, but a sitting judge privately helping a political party develop constitutional policy would be a very serious matter indeed. Attorney General Chris Bishop said that if Waititi’s claim was true, it could undermine public confidence in the judiciary and would be something he would have to raise with the Chief Justice. If it is untrue Waititi has dragged the judiciary into a political controversy when judges cannot publicly defend themselves. Te Pāti Māori must clarify immediately.
Misinformation is bad, except when the principle is right
Green MP Tamatha Paul gave a fiery speech in Parliament recently attacking Government MPs for personally benefiting from changes to rental property taxation. However, it turns out many of her claims were wildly wrong.
Paul claimed National MP Grant McCallum had bought a Wellington property and was effectively getting taxpayers to help him pay it off through the parliamentary accommodation allowance. He had actually bought a property in Paihia hundreds and hundreds of kilometres away, in his electorate, does not rent it out, and says owning it saves taxpayers money because he no longer needs motel accommodation there.
National’s Tom Rutherford was another target. She accused him of buying an investment property after the Government changed the rules. In actual fact, he added a house to the pecuniary interest register as he got married and his new wife’s existing home became joint property.
And she said ACT’s Parmjeet Parmar had bought 5 new houses, but Parmar redeveloped 2 existing properties into 7 dwellings, creating 5 additional properties on the register, and so did not benefit from any tax changes.
This would normally be resolved by saying “Sorry, folks, I got some facts wrong” and issuing a correction. She had, after all, posted the video online and it attracted more than a million TikTok views. McCallum even asked for an apology, but Paul stubbornly refused to give one. Marama Davidson then defended the “principle” of the speech, describing criticism from property-owning MPs as “crocodile tears” and later telling Ryan Bridge that although the Greens oppose misinformation, the record had been corrected and the bigger argument remained.
So misinformation is dangerous to democracy unless it conveys an emotionally driven higher truth as endorsed by the Greens? The Greens have spent years treating misinformation and disinformation as grave civic dangers. They have promoted a political culture in which incorrect speech is not merely wrong but potentially socially harmful, a threat to democracy, evidence of evil networks, and something platforms or institutions need to intervene against.
A living wage, courtesy of the taxpayer
Labour, the Greens and Opportunity have signed a pledge to extend the Living Wage to all state-sector workers. Chris Hipkins, Marama Davidson, and Opportunity’s Jessica Hammond signed up at the Living Wage Movement’s election forum, with the policy expected to affect around 20,000 workers including school cleaners and caretakers, hospital cleaners and orderlies, and workers in government facilities. Living Wage Aotearoa says it would cost about $100 million over four years, or $25 million a year.
The Living Wage is currently $29.90 an hour, compared with the minimum wage of $23.95. It is a benchmark based on what a household of two adults and two children, earning 1.5 incomes between them, needs for a modest standard of living including housing, food, transport, childcare, and some ability to save and participate in ordinary life. I have never had much objection to the idea as a voluntary benchmark. But governments still have to confront the same tradeoffs private employers do and an extra $100 million over 4 years is still $100 million that has to come from taxes, lower spending somewhere else, or borrowing.
ACT versus Māori and Pacific medical-school admissions
ACT is campaigning on scrapping Māori and Pacific preferential admission schemes at Auckland and Otago medical schools after they say a Ministry of Health review failed to justify them. Unfortunately, the review itself still has not been released so we can not scrutinise this claim.
Seymour says he wanted evidence showing why treating applicants differently by race was justified, particularly where someone with stronger academic results might lose a place. He says the review did not provide it. Auckland medical dean Professor Warwick Bagg says a near-final draft he saw supported retaining the programme. He argues Māori remain only just over 5% of doctors and Pacific people around 3%, and that every medical student, whatever their pathway into university, ultimately has to pass the same clinical and academic standards before becoming a doctor.
That last point does not entirely answer ACT’s objection. Their argument is not that somebody who enters medicine through MAPAS gets handed a stethoscope and waved through their final exams. The question is whether ethnicity should affect which applicants get access to the scarce places in the first place.
Janet Dickson loses the fight against compulsory Te Kākano training
Janet Dickson has lost the latest stage of her nearly 3 year fight over a compulsory Māori tikanga course and now faces the likely end of a 30 year career in real estate as a consequence.
The Te Kākano programme was introduced by the Real Estate Authority in 2023 as a mandatory 90 minute professional development course covering Māori language and development, the Treaty, and Māori land. Dickson sought an exemption because she regarded parts of it as politically ideological, irrelevant to her work, and contrary to her Christian beliefs. The exemption was refused and she went to the High Court and then the Real Estate Agents Disciplinary Tribunal. But she has now lost again.
Her lawyer argued the state should not be able to compel somebody to engage with political or religious ideas contrary to their conscience, but the tribunal’s answer was essentially that she was only being required to listen.
Professionals should not be able to refuse training in relevant law, ethics, safety, or material relevant to customers simply because they dislike it. If the course were teaching real estate agents their legal duties in transactions involving Māori land, that might be more appropriate, for example.
The problem is that a professional regulator is making continued employment or licensing conditional on completing ideological cultural instruction only tangentially related to professional competence.
Minister Nicole McKee has herself said Te Kākano did not meet her expectation that compulsory professional development should be relevant to real estate work. The Government has since removed the 5 year prohibition imposed on agents who fail CPD, but the change is not retrospective and so does not help Dickson.
Winston Peters responded this week by calling what happened to her as “totalitarianism” and “woke cultural cancer”.
Methanex shuts down: the energy chickens arrive home to roost
Methanex has announced it will stop producing methanol at Motonui in February next year and indefinitely idle its New Zealand operations after more than 3 decades. The company is New Zealand’s sole methanol producer, employs more than 200 people directly and exports about 95% of its production. It says years of declining gas availability and the lack of a clear path to meaningful new supply mean it can no longer justify continuing production.
National says this is part of the long tail of Labour’s 2018 decision to halt new offshore oil and gas exploration. However, New Plymouth mayor Max Brough points out that new gas developments can take 7 to 10 years to bring online and says the loss will ripple through Taranaki’s engineering, electrical, and technical industries.
MBIE: another week, another multimillion-dollar IT bonfire
Last week Parliament’s Privileges Committee found MBIE had deliberately misled MPs about a cancelled biometric IT project. Chief executive Nic Blakeley was questioned at a select committee in March about the project’s progress and failed to disclose that it had already been cancelled. The committee found this was intentional and amounted to contempt of Parliament. Blakeley offered his resignation to Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche, who declined it, partly because Blakeley was relatively new in the job and had apologised.
Labour initially seemed content to let the committee’s condemnation stand as punishment, but has since toughened its position. Phil Twyford now says Blakeley’s job is “untenable” and argues a senior official who deliberately misleads Parliament has to face meaningful accountability.
Unfortunately, the cancelled biometric project turns out to be only one entry in MBIE’s exciting catalogue of information-technology adventures.
Stuff revealed this week that MBIE spent nearly $13 million trying to build the New Zealand Research Information System, a database intended to track publicly funded research. The bespoke version failed and was abandoned. A replacement using commercial software is now being built instead. The project is more than 6 years overdue. This follows the $5 million failure of a custom occupational licensing system and an immigration IT project that cost nearly $40 million and achieved nothing.
Foot-in-mouth disease appears to be contagious
It was a particularly bad week for politicians saying things that their party leaders wish had remained inside their heads or botching communications.
Labour’s Ginny Andersen decided to attack Mark Mitchell during their weekly Newstalk ZB slot because he said the National Land Transport Fund paid for road maintenance.
“You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Andersen told him, confidently explaining that the NLTF was for building roads and road maintenance came from a separate pot. Except she was totally wrong and after an ad break Andersen returned, having checked, and admitted she had it “around the wrong way”. The NLTF does indeed fund maintenance as well as the construction and operation of roads.
Former Health Minister Ayesha Verrall also had a moment at a Wellington North student debate. “I want to defend free stuff!” she shouted. “Free stuff is so good.” By “free stuff” of course she meant stuff paid for by hardworking New Zealanders via our taxes.
ACT’s Parmjeet Parmar had a slightly different communications problem in that she simply could not explain (on Newstalk ZB) her party’s immigration policy that would require permanent residents to spend at least 2 years in New Zealand during any rolling 5 year period. This should have been any easy sell as most New Zealanders likely do not want our public services exploited by people who don’t even live here, but she seemed incapable of answering Ryan Bridge’s questions.
In local government, Auckland mayor Wayne Brown was officially found to have committed harassment after joking to a security guard during a visit to RNZ that security could not be very tight if he was being escorted by a “Muslim terrorist”. No sanction was imposed. He also seems to be campaigning against ACT this election calling them Te Pāti Pākehā which is odd since both its leaders are Māori.
Labour’s infamous “Angry Andy” made an appearance in a Newstalk ZB interview when Wellington mayor Andrew Little lost his cool with host Nick Mills. They were disagreeing about Tiaki Wai and Little accused Mills of repeatedly misleading his audience and things got scratchy.
This next one may actually land well with supporters, but it certainly rarked up opponents. Paul Henry, campaigning for ACT at the Black Dog Tavern, roasted other parties with barbs such as “Look at the Greens’ list people. Seriously, look, they’re barely people” and calling Opportunity “dishonest socialists”.
Willie Jackson managed two entries. The first was his entire interview with Jack Tame on Q+A which was an utter trainwreck from start to finish. A particularly spectacular moment was when he admitted that his party were still going to pursue cogovernance policies but will need to call it something else because Kiwis don’t like co-governance.
Later in the week he said one of Labour’s recurring dangers is being too conservative with spending. This is the party that blew tens of billions of dollars during Covid-19 and no one is able to say where it went.
Finally, Labour’s revenue spokesperson Deborah Russell asked in Parliament whether the Government had considered a land-value tax as a way of increasing revenue to fund infrastructure. Russell was asking a minister a question and was not announcing Labour policy. But when your party is already under sustained attack over taxation, voluntarily floating another form of tax in Parliament is like walking into a lion’s den dressed as steak.
🇺🇸 The grim “Queers for Palestine” irony in Tucson
Two men were murdered outside a gay bar in Arizona this week in what police say was a targeted anti-LGBT hate crime. Vincent Anthony Siqueiros and Cameron Davis Capara were shot dead outside by an alleged Islamist Ousman Ceesay who also took his own life. Police subsequently found a note indicating the attack was motivated by hatred of the LGBTQ community, along with a list of other LGBTQ-associated businesses.
Capara was a left wing political activist who participated in pro-Palestine, anti-ICE, and Antifa-associated protests, often wearing a keffiyeh. Capara’s political activism does not make his murder less appalling. But the irony is terrible. It is the natural end point for the “Queers for Palestine” movement which hates when anybody points out that attitudes to homosexuality across much of the Muslim world are profoundly illiberal to say the least.
🇪🇸 Ceuta: Spain loses control of the border, then the story
Spain’s political crisis over Ceuta continues to get more dire. At the end of July an estimated 72,000 people crossed into the Spanish enclave from Morocco during a mass breach of the border and around 5,000 are still believed to remain in Ceuta. At least 145 people reportedly died during the crossing and Spanish prosecutors say 23 sexual assaults have been reported in the town since the breach, 9 involving young children.
Protests have taken place in more than 200 Spanish cities and opposition leaders accuse Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of failing to protect Spain’s border.
Bizarre and tragic stories are being reported day after day including footage showing a group of migrants pulling a stranded baby dolphin from the water and passing it around while local officials tried to intervene. The animal was struck in the head with a stick and residents eventually wrestled it away and returned it to the water, but they were too late. It was dead.
Another bruising week for Police
New Zealand Police could probably have done without this week’s headlines. Although they would have welcomed Commissioner Richard Chambers being cleared of criminal wrongdoing in relation to historic allegations, several serving police officers told the Herald that ordinary staff facing comparable investigations would normally be stood down. But Public Service Commissioner Brian Roche had decided Chambers could remain in his role.
Meanwhile a police staff member is before the courts on 39 charges, including 3 counts of rape, 5 of indecent assault, unlawful sexual connection, kidnapping, assault, and threatening to kill or cause grievous bodily harm. The case is one of 10 active prosecutions arising from National Integrity Unit investigations as of May. Around 40 police staff were under NIU investigation at that point, and 22 prosecutions had commenced since the unit was established.
A former constable was also convicted this week on all 14 charges involving violence against 3 women known to him, including assault, indecent assault, strangulation, and blackmail. His name remains suppressed until sentencing.
And Auckland constable Amanuel Molla has been stood down after being charged with committing an indecent act on a child under 12. His lawyer says he strenuously denies wrongdoing and will defend the charge. His trial is scheduled for April next year.
Ten years is enough for killing your kids, apparently
Hakyung Lee murdered her two children, put their bodies into suitcases, abandoned them in a storage unit, changed her name, and moved overseas. The bodies of Yuna Jo (8) and Minu Jo (6) were not discovered until years later, when an Auckland family bought the contents of the abandoned storage locker at auction.
Lee was convicted of murder last year and sentenced to life imprisonment with a 17 year minimum non-parole period, but the Court of Appeal has now cut that minimum to 10 years.
The court’s reasoning centres on the disparity with the sentence imposed on Lauren Dickason, who murdered her 3 daughters and can seek parole after 6 years. The judges accepted Lee’s severe mental illness played a dominating role in the killings and concluded that requiring her to serve nearly 3 times Dickason’s minimum period produced a manifestly unjust disparity.
They are right because Dickason’s case set a precedent and that is the problem. In my view, the judge ignored the fact that the jury found her guilty of murdering her 3 children and decided to sentence her leniently. Totally unacceptable.
🇺🇸 Gloria Steinem obituary Gloria Steinem, for better and worse
Gloria Steinem died this week at 92 and hers was an extraordinary life. An iconic feminist she was a key figure in mainstreaming arguments for women’s rights and independence. She had a quality which has become rarer in political movements in that she seemed genuinely interested in persuasion.
Unfortunately, Steinem eventually travelled with the movement into gender identity politics. She had written critically about transsexualism in the 1970s but in the past decade got caught up in the wave of sex denialism. But it would be absurd to use that disagreement to write Steinem out of feminism’s history.
Thank you, Gloria. Rest in peace.
Chart of the Week
In short - other stuff that happened
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Ani O'Brien comes from a digital marketing background, she has been heavily involved in women's rights advocacy and is a founding council member of the Free Speech Union. This article was originally published on Ani's Substack Site and is published here with kind permission.
Labour is also promising that every New Zealand-trained graduate nurse will be offered a job in the public health system and to double recruitment subsidies for primary care nurses, taking rural incentives from $20,000 to $40,000 and urban subsidies from $15,000 to $30,000. It is unclear which money tree this will be paid from.
ACT, by contrast, is promising fewer public servants and even Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche has argued New Zealand should move from 42 agencies to something more like 15 to 20. ACT has cheerfully seized on this proposing 18 ministers and 19 departments rather than the current 28 ministers and 39 departments.
Labour has gone the other way adopting a proposal advocated for by the Public Service Association which includes a mandatory public good test before restructuring agencies or cutting jobs. The assessment could include the effect on public services, Te Tiriti obligations, health and safety, and disadvantaged groups. Labour also says it is not committed to the $2.4 billion in baseline savings already in the Government’s forecasts. Money. Tree.
And New Zealand First has made an intriguing candidate announcement with Daryl Habraken running for them in Northcote. He was the planted “mole” on the 2020 season of The Bachelorette New Zealand, secretly feeding information back to the Bachelorette about the contestants.
Te Pāti Māori puts the constitution on the table
Te Pāti Māori has decided there is no point nibbling around the edges. Its new Te Tiriti policy proposes entrenching the Treaty in legislation, making Waitangi Tribunal findings binding, spending $220 million over 4 years on a Mātike Mai Fund, and creating a new Te Tiriti Commission with the power to investigate government decisions, issue compliance orders, and, most remarkably, stop or suspend executive decisions it decides are serious breaches of Te Tiriti. Their long term objective is constitutional transformation by 2040.
Mātike Mai, the 2016 report led by Dr Moana Jackson and Professor Margaret Mutu, envisages separate spheres of governance where Māori are distinct from everyone else, with a third “relational” sphere in which the two interact. And Debbie Ngarewa-Packer says the policy is a coalition bottom line.
This presents Chris Hipkins with quite a problem. Labour will most likely need Te Pāti Māori votes, but Hipkins says Parliament must remain the final decision making body and Labour will not support a commission able to suspend Cabinet decisions. However, Hipkins may want to look at his own caucus as Willie Jackson wrote this week that Māori never ceded sovereignty, but hedged the claim by saying that the Crown is sovereign and controls Parliament now.
As part of their announcement Te Pāti Māori somehow managed to inadvertently trigger somewhat of a separation of powers crisis. Rawiri Waititi told reporters that constitutional lawyers, Māori leaders, and “people in the judiciary” had looked over the policy to make sure it was fit for purpose. Te Pāti Māori then declined to clarify whether he meant a current judge or somebody retired from the bench.
This is a pretty significant issue as a retired judge expressing a political opinion is entitled to do so, but a sitting judge privately helping a political party develop constitutional policy would be a very serious matter indeed. Attorney General Chris Bishop said that if Waititi’s claim was true, it could undermine public confidence in the judiciary and would be something he would have to raise with the Chief Justice. If it is untrue Waititi has dragged the judiciary into a political controversy when judges cannot publicly defend themselves. Te Pāti Māori must clarify immediately.
Misinformation is bad, except when the principle is right
Green MP Tamatha Paul gave a fiery speech in Parliament recently attacking Government MPs for personally benefiting from changes to rental property taxation. However, it turns out many of her claims were wildly wrong.
Paul claimed National MP Grant McCallum had bought a Wellington property and was effectively getting taxpayers to help him pay it off through the parliamentary accommodation allowance. He had actually bought a property in Paihia hundreds and hundreds of kilometres away, in his electorate, does not rent it out, and says owning it saves taxpayers money because he no longer needs motel accommodation there.
National’s Tom Rutherford was another target. She accused him of buying an investment property after the Government changed the rules. In actual fact, he added a house to the pecuniary interest register as he got married and his new wife’s existing home became joint property.
And she said ACT’s Parmjeet Parmar had bought 5 new houses, but Parmar redeveloped 2 existing properties into 7 dwellings, creating 5 additional properties on the register, and so did not benefit from any tax changes.
This would normally be resolved by saying “Sorry, folks, I got some facts wrong” and issuing a correction. She had, after all, posted the video online and it attracted more than a million TikTok views. McCallum even asked for an apology, but Paul stubbornly refused to give one. Marama Davidson then defended the “principle” of the speech, describing criticism from property-owning MPs as “crocodile tears” and later telling Ryan Bridge that although the Greens oppose misinformation, the record had been corrected and the bigger argument remained.
So misinformation is dangerous to democracy unless it conveys an emotionally driven higher truth as endorsed by the Greens? The Greens have spent years treating misinformation and disinformation as grave civic dangers. They have promoted a political culture in which incorrect speech is not merely wrong but potentially socially harmful, a threat to democracy, evidence of evil networks, and something platforms or institutions need to intervene against.
A living wage, courtesy of the taxpayer
Labour, the Greens and Opportunity have signed a pledge to extend the Living Wage to all state-sector workers. Chris Hipkins, Marama Davidson, and Opportunity’s Jessica Hammond signed up at the Living Wage Movement’s election forum, with the policy expected to affect around 20,000 workers including school cleaners and caretakers, hospital cleaners and orderlies, and workers in government facilities. Living Wage Aotearoa says it would cost about $100 million over four years, or $25 million a year.
The Living Wage is currently $29.90 an hour, compared with the minimum wage of $23.95. It is a benchmark based on what a household of two adults and two children, earning 1.5 incomes between them, needs for a modest standard of living including housing, food, transport, childcare, and some ability to save and participate in ordinary life. I have never had much objection to the idea as a voluntary benchmark. But governments still have to confront the same tradeoffs private employers do and an extra $100 million over 4 years is still $100 million that has to come from taxes, lower spending somewhere else, or borrowing.
ACT versus Māori and Pacific medical-school admissions
ACT is campaigning on scrapping Māori and Pacific preferential admission schemes at Auckland and Otago medical schools after they say a Ministry of Health review failed to justify them. Unfortunately, the review itself still has not been released so we can not scrutinise this claim.
Seymour says he wanted evidence showing why treating applicants differently by race was justified, particularly where someone with stronger academic results might lose a place. He says the review did not provide it. Auckland medical dean Professor Warwick Bagg says a near-final draft he saw supported retaining the programme. He argues Māori remain only just over 5% of doctors and Pacific people around 3%, and that every medical student, whatever their pathway into university, ultimately has to pass the same clinical and academic standards before becoming a doctor.
That last point does not entirely answer ACT’s objection. Their argument is not that somebody who enters medicine through MAPAS gets handed a stethoscope and waved through their final exams. The question is whether ethnicity should affect which applicants get access to the scarce places in the first place.
Janet Dickson loses the fight against compulsory Te Kākano training
Janet Dickson has lost the latest stage of her nearly 3 year fight over a compulsory Māori tikanga course and now faces the likely end of a 30 year career in real estate as a consequence.
The Te Kākano programme was introduced by the Real Estate Authority in 2023 as a mandatory 90 minute professional development course covering Māori language and development, the Treaty, and Māori land. Dickson sought an exemption because she regarded parts of it as politically ideological, irrelevant to her work, and contrary to her Christian beliefs. The exemption was refused and she went to the High Court and then the Real Estate Agents Disciplinary Tribunal. But she has now lost again.
Her lawyer argued the state should not be able to compel somebody to engage with political or religious ideas contrary to their conscience, but the tribunal’s answer was essentially that she was only being required to listen.
Professionals should not be able to refuse training in relevant law, ethics, safety, or material relevant to customers simply because they dislike it. If the course were teaching real estate agents their legal duties in transactions involving Māori land, that might be more appropriate, for example.
The problem is that a professional regulator is making continued employment or licensing conditional on completing ideological cultural instruction only tangentially related to professional competence.
Minister Nicole McKee has herself said Te Kākano did not meet her expectation that compulsory professional development should be relevant to real estate work. The Government has since removed the 5 year prohibition imposed on agents who fail CPD, but the change is not retrospective and so does not help Dickson.
Winston Peters responded this week by calling what happened to her as “totalitarianism” and “woke cultural cancer”.
Methanex shuts down: the energy chickens arrive home to roost
Methanex has announced it will stop producing methanol at Motonui in February next year and indefinitely idle its New Zealand operations after more than 3 decades. The company is New Zealand’s sole methanol producer, employs more than 200 people directly and exports about 95% of its production. It says years of declining gas availability and the lack of a clear path to meaningful new supply mean it can no longer justify continuing production.
National says this is part of the long tail of Labour’s 2018 decision to halt new offshore oil and gas exploration. However, New Plymouth mayor Max Brough points out that new gas developments can take 7 to 10 years to bring online and says the loss will ripple through Taranaki’s engineering, electrical, and technical industries.
MBIE: another week, another multimillion-dollar IT bonfire
Last week Parliament’s Privileges Committee found MBIE had deliberately misled MPs about a cancelled biometric IT project. Chief executive Nic Blakeley was questioned at a select committee in March about the project’s progress and failed to disclose that it had already been cancelled. The committee found this was intentional and amounted to contempt of Parliament. Blakeley offered his resignation to Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche, who declined it, partly because Blakeley was relatively new in the job and had apologised.
Labour initially seemed content to let the committee’s condemnation stand as punishment, but has since toughened its position. Phil Twyford now says Blakeley’s job is “untenable” and argues a senior official who deliberately misleads Parliament has to face meaningful accountability.
Unfortunately, the cancelled biometric project turns out to be only one entry in MBIE’s exciting catalogue of information-technology adventures.
Stuff revealed this week that MBIE spent nearly $13 million trying to build the New Zealand Research Information System, a database intended to track publicly funded research. The bespoke version failed and was abandoned. A replacement using commercial software is now being built instead. The project is more than 6 years overdue. This follows the $5 million failure of a custom occupational licensing system and an immigration IT project that cost nearly $40 million and achieved nothing.
Foot-in-mouth disease appears to be contagious
It was a particularly bad week for politicians saying things that their party leaders wish had remained inside their heads or botching communications.
Labour’s Ginny Andersen decided to attack Mark Mitchell during their weekly Newstalk ZB slot because he said the National Land Transport Fund paid for road maintenance.
“You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Andersen told him, confidently explaining that the NLTF was for building roads and road maintenance came from a separate pot. Except she was totally wrong and after an ad break Andersen returned, having checked, and admitted she had it “around the wrong way”. The NLTF does indeed fund maintenance as well as the construction and operation of roads.
Former Health Minister Ayesha Verrall also had a moment at a Wellington North student debate. “I want to defend free stuff!” she shouted. “Free stuff is so good.” By “free stuff” of course she meant stuff paid for by hardworking New Zealanders via our taxes.
ACT’s Parmjeet Parmar had a slightly different communications problem in that she simply could not explain (on Newstalk ZB) her party’s immigration policy that would require permanent residents to spend at least 2 years in New Zealand during any rolling 5 year period. This should have been any easy sell as most New Zealanders likely do not want our public services exploited by people who don’t even live here, but she seemed incapable of answering Ryan Bridge’s questions.
In local government, Auckland mayor Wayne Brown was officially found to have committed harassment after joking to a security guard during a visit to RNZ that security could not be very tight if he was being escorted by a “Muslim terrorist”. No sanction was imposed. He also seems to be campaigning against ACT this election calling them Te Pāti Pākehā which is odd since both its leaders are Māori.
Labour’s infamous “Angry Andy” made an appearance in a Newstalk ZB interview when Wellington mayor Andrew Little lost his cool with host Nick Mills. They were disagreeing about Tiaki Wai and Little accused Mills of repeatedly misleading his audience and things got scratchy.
This next one may actually land well with supporters, but it certainly rarked up opponents. Paul Henry, campaigning for ACT at the Black Dog Tavern, roasted other parties with barbs such as “Look at the Greens’ list people. Seriously, look, they’re barely people” and calling Opportunity “dishonest socialists”.
Willie Jackson managed two entries. The first was his entire interview with Jack Tame on Q+A which was an utter trainwreck from start to finish. A particularly spectacular moment was when he admitted that his party were still going to pursue cogovernance policies but will need to call it something else because Kiwis don’t like co-governance.
Later in the week he said one of Labour’s recurring dangers is being too conservative with spending. This is the party that blew tens of billions of dollars during Covid-19 and no one is able to say where it went.
Finally, Labour’s revenue spokesperson Deborah Russell asked in Parliament whether the Government had considered a land-value tax as a way of increasing revenue to fund infrastructure. Russell was asking a minister a question and was not announcing Labour policy. But when your party is already under sustained attack over taxation, voluntarily floating another form of tax in Parliament is like walking into a lion’s den dressed as steak.
🇺🇸 The grim “Queers for Palestine” irony in Tucson
Two men were murdered outside a gay bar in Arizona this week in what police say was a targeted anti-LGBT hate crime. Vincent Anthony Siqueiros and Cameron Davis Capara were shot dead outside by an alleged Islamist Ousman Ceesay who also took his own life. Police subsequently found a note indicating the attack was motivated by hatred of the LGBTQ community, along with a list of other LGBTQ-associated businesses.
Capara was a left wing political activist who participated in pro-Palestine, anti-ICE, and Antifa-associated protests, often wearing a keffiyeh. Capara’s political activism does not make his murder less appalling. But the irony is terrible. It is the natural end point for the “Queers for Palestine” movement which hates when anybody points out that attitudes to homosexuality across much of the Muslim world are profoundly illiberal to say the least.
🇪🇸 Ceuta: Spain loses control of the border, then the story
Spain’s political crisis over Ceuta continues to get more dire. At the end of July an estimated 72,000 people crossed into the Spanish enclave from Morocco during a mass breach of the border and around 5,000 are still believed to remain in Ceuta. At least 145 people reportedly died during the crossing and Spanish prosecutors say 23 sexual assaults have been reported in the town since the breach, 9 involving young children.
Protests have taken place in more than 200 Spanish cities and opposition leaders accuse Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of failing to protect Spain’s border.
Bizarre and tragic stories are being reported day after day including footage showing a group of migrants pulling a stranded baby dolphin from the water and passing it around while local officials tried to intervene. The animal was struck in the head with a stick and residents eventually wrestled it away and returned it to the water, but they were too late. It was dead.
Another bruising week for Police
New Zealand Police could probably have done without this week’s headlines. Although they would have welcomed Commissioner Richard Chambers being cleared of criminal wrongdoing in relation to historic allegations, several serving police officers told the Herald that ordinary staff facing comparable investigations would normally be stood down. But Public Service Commissioner Brian Roche had decided Chambers could remain in his role.
Meanwhile a police staff member is before the courts on 39 charges, including 3 counts of rape, 5 of indecent assault, unlawful sexual connection, kidnapping, assault, and threatening to kill or cause grievous bodily harm. The case is one of 10 active prosecutions arising from National Integrity Unit investigations as of May. Around 40 police staff were under NIU investigation at that point, and 22 prosecutions had commenced since the unit was established.
A former constable was also convicted this week on all 14 charges involving violence against 3 women known to him, including assault, indecent assault, strangulation, and blackmail. His name remains suppressed until sentencing.
And Auckland constable Amanuel Molla has been stood down after being charged with committing an indecent act on a child under 12. His lawyer says he strenuously denies wrongdoing and will defend the charge. His trial is scheduled for April next year.
Ten years is enough for killing your kids, apparently
Hakyung Lee murdered her two children, put their bodies into suitcases, abandoned them in a storage unit, changed her name, and moved overseas. The bodies of Yuna Jo (8) and Minu Jo (6) were not discovered until years later, when an Auckland family bought the contents of the abandoned storage locker at auction.
Lee was convicted of murder last year and sentenced to life imprisonment with a 17 year minimum non-parole period, but the Court of Appeal has now cut that minimum to 10 years.
The court’s reasoning centres on the disparity with the sentence imposed on Lauren Dickason, who murdered her 3 daughters and can seek parole after 6 years. The judges accepted Lee’s severe mental illness played a dominating role in the killings and concluded that requiring her to serve nearly 3 times Dickason’s minimum period produced a manifestly unjust disparity.
They are right because Dickason’s case set a precedent and that is the problem. In my view, the judge ignored the fact that the jury found her guilty of murdering her 3 children and decided to sentence her leniently. Totally unacceptable.
🇺🇸 Gloria Steinem obituary Gloria Steinem, for better and worse
Gloria Steinem died this week at 92 and hers was an extraordinary life. An iconic feminist she was a key figure in mainstreaming arguments for women’s rights and independence. She had a quality which has become rarer in political movements in that she seemed genuinely interested in persuasion.
Unfortunately, Steinem eventually travelled with the movement into gender identity politics. She had written critically about transsexualism in the 1970s but in the past decade got caught up in the wave of sex denialism. But it would be absurd to use that disagreement to write Steinem out of feminism’s history.
Thank you, Gloria. Rest in peace.
Chart of the Week
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In short - other stuff that happened
- The Government’s rates cap bill, which would limit annual council rates increases to 2–4%, passed its first reading with no opposition after the Greens, Te Pāti Māori, and former TPM MPs Tākuta Ferris and Mariameno Kapa-Kingi forgot to vote against it. About 20 minutes later Green MP Scott Willis corrected the record.
- FMA chief executive Samantha Barrass had been suspended and was preparing an Employment Relations Authority action seeking reinstatement, but now she has announced she is leaving months before her term was set to expire. The FMA, Barrass, and minister Cameron Brewer have all declined to say whether a financial arrangement accompanied the departure.
- Casey Costello has been given ministerial responsibility for a new board coordinating the response to transnational, serious, and organised crime, after an expert group described organised crime as New Zealand’s number one national-security threat and found responsibility was scattered across at least 13 ministers.
- The man accused of last month’s rampage through Epsom can now be named as Shalty Heta (49). He has pleaded not guilty to 17 charges after allegedly assaulting a jogger, stealing a Good Samaritan’s vehicle, hitting 3 high school cyclists, and strangling a dog to death. His next hearing is in December.
- 🇺🇸 Former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom has filed a federal lawsuit after being removed from a Chicago Sky WNBA game. He was wearing a t-shirt with the definition of “woman” on it and argues his ejection violated his First Amendment rights.
- The Crown has finalised its settlement with Ngāti Ruapani mai Waikaremoana. The package includes about 12,000 hectares being added to Te Urewera, the return of cultural redress properties and $24 million in financial and commercial redress.
- A second settlement was completed with Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui after 9 years of negotiations. It includes $30 million in financial and commercial redress, $15.5 million for cultural revitalisation, and the vesting of 27 culturally significant sites.
- Horowhenua District Council has voted 6-5 to give iwi and hapū an exclusive first opportunity to express interest in purchasing 6 council-owned properties on Oxford Street in Levin. The properties were acquired using $2 million from Labour’s Better Off funding as part of the Levin Town Centre Transformation project.
- Former Te Ohu Kaimoana chief executive Graeme Hastilow was sentenced to 12 months’ home detention for child exploitation material offences. Police analysing more than 307,000 files found 136 files in the most serious category and another 1600 in other categories. His offending occurred while he was leading the Māori commercial fisheries organisation.
- Woolworths is proposing to move its New Zealand customer-care operation to Australia, putting around 130 jobs at risk. The proposal came shortly after Woolworths NZ reported $163 million in earnings before interest and tax.
- Winton’s corporate melodrama continues. Michael Stiassny has become its third chair in two months after NZX suspended trading following a cascade of director resignations amid complaints about founder Christopher Meehan’s alleged bullying and sexual harassment, and concerns over his refusal to relinquish control. Trading has resumed following Stiassny’s appointment.
- The Serious Fraud Office has been given wider investigative powers. Legislation passed its final reading allowing the SFO to obtain more digital and cloud evidence, seek oral search warrants, manage its own search scenes and prevent interference during investigations.
- 🇦🇺 Trans-identifying male player Maximillia Kostur has won the Nike FC Cup Golden Boot after competing in Victoria’s women’s football competition. Former professional footballer Addison Steiner and other female players have objected to male players competing in the women’s game, while Football Victoria maintains that inclusion is its priority and does not require players to disclose their actual sex.
- 🇮🇹 In Italy, a shopkeeper accused of sexually assaulting a 13 year old girl was released from custody after 2 days, with judges citing his cooperation, remorse, and apology. Prosecutors are appealing and Giorgia Meloni’s government has ordered the case reviewed.
- The independent review into Wellington’s Moa Point sewage disaster found “deep and systemic” problems built up over decades. The February failure spilled an estimated 14 billion litres of wastewater and the review identified failures across governance, accountability, risk management, ageing infrastructure, and resilience planning.
- 🇺🇸 Nearly 30 years after Tupac Shakur was murdered, Duane “Keffe D” Davis has been convicted of first degree murder. A Las Vegas jury deliberated for just under 3 hours before finding Davis guilty of plotting the 1996 killing. He is due to be sentenced on October 13.
- 🇭🇰 Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong has pleaded guilty to collusion with foreign entities under Beijing’s national-security law. The 29 year old, already imprisoned, faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment over allegations that he and exiled activist Nathan Law sought foreign sanctions or other international pressure against Hong Kong and China.
- 🇺🇸 Erin Piacenti, a 32 year old new mum and Bank of America executive, was killed in a random stabbing in Times Square just after returning from maternity leave. Her killer Pamela Cisneros (49) also stabbed another passerby before being shot dead by officers and is said to have been mentally ill.
- 🇦🇺 Australia celebrated Australian National Flag Day by accidentally flying New Zealand flags outside Parliament House. Two Kiwi flags were hoisted among the 44 ceremonial Australian flags in Canberra before somebody noticed and quietly replaced them.
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Ani O'Brien comes from a digital marketing background, she has been heavily involved in women's rights advocacy and is a founding council member of the Free Speech Union. This article was originally published on Ani's Substack Site and is published here with kind permission.
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