Insights From Social Media: No chance in hell?

Gravedodger writes > Some of the more moronic are talking about New Zealand having a Rock Star Economy again.

The last time this Nation was being suggested as involved with such nonsense it was as good as a stadium of the naive thinking they are being entertained by some aging guitar plucking has been.

Barrie Davis: Children of the Miffed

First published in 1925, Tuhoe: The Children of the Mist by Elsdon Best on Maori lore has just been republished.

The jacket cover tells us that Best was born at Porirua in 1856, worked on a sheep station in Poverty Bay and lived with the Tuhoe people in the Ureweras. “Nine years before his death in 1931, Sir Apirana Ngata said of him, ‘There is not a member of the Maori race who is fit to wipe the boots of Elsdon Best in the matter of knowledge of the lore of the race to which we belong’.”

Clive Bibby: Life is all about setting priorities

I have just watched US Republican Senator John Kennedy being interviewed by his counterpart in the academic world Professor Victor Davis Hanson.

It has been one of the week's most enjoyable personal experiences and has reinforced my own thinking about how the modern world is reacting to a long overdue exposure of some of the world's false doctrines.

Matua Kahurangi: The pounamu laws reveal a racist system hiding in plain sight

I was casually browsing the Otago Daily Times when a headline stopped me in my tracks. A 26-year-old Dunedin man had allegedly been found with 820 kilograms of stolen pounamu [Greenstone]. Nearly a tonne. Whākn’ wild. However, the more I read, the more something else stood out. It was not the alleged theft itself, it was the rules surrounding pounamu that revealed just how racially stacked the whole system really is.

According to the article, pounamu is the legal property of Ngāi Tahu under the Pounamu Vesting Act 1997. Then comes the part that should make any New Zealander raise an eyebrow.

Chris McVeigh: Media bias in New Zealand yet again

If you took a double at the TAB, with the Pope getting married as one leg and Radio New Zealand admitting to a smidgen of left wing partiality as the other, you could be forgiven for thinking that the smart money would be on the Vatican gig bringing home the bacon first.

RNZ is in a permanent state of denial on this. Just recently their flagship Sunday morning show Mediawatch (itself often patronisingly smug about its ethical purity) ran a lengthy item purporting to analyse a recent BSA report which found that public trust in the media was dwindling. The item was notable for a number of reasons: they prefaced their discussion by telling us all that, while public trust in the media might be on the wane, RNZ was the most trusted of all. Secondly the presenter, the redoubtable Colin Peacock (the thinking man's Joseph Parker), adopted a tone of almost stunned disbelief when dealing with these allegations. But most importantly of all, the entire discussion completely missed the point.

Dr Eric Crampton: A Christmas wish

When everything had gone wrong and Homer Simpson couldn’t afford Christmas presents for the family, he took a punt. He went to the dog track and bet on a promisingly named greyhound: Santa’s Little Helper.

The dog lost, but the Simpsons won. Santa’s Little Helper went home with Homer, saving Christmas. It was the very first episode of The Simpsons, which aired at Christmastime 1989.

New Zealand’s greyhound clubs will not be having a festive holiday season.

Dr Benno Blaschke: What Bill English and Phil Twyford agree on

Last week, Sir Bill English told RNZ that New Zealand has reached “amazing, almost bipartisan” agreement on housing. Coincidentally, we recorded Part 2 of our Competitive Urban Land Markets podcast around the same time with former Housing Minister Phil Twyford.

The underpinning consensus is specific: competitive land markets are the durable path to housing affordability because they maintain threat of entry, enabling land to be brought to market easily and abundantly. This creates downward pressure on urban land prices.

Hearing both Sir Bill English and Hon Phil Twyford in the same week brought into focus how unusual this moment is.

Dr Eric Crampton: The taxing problem of zombie and phoenix companies

Damien Grant isn’t normally the one making the case that the government needs to take more in tax. The liquidator and libertarian-minded columnist over at the Sunday Star Times more typically wants what libertarians generally want – a government that spends less and that can let each of us keep more of our own money.

On 23 November, Grant’s column made a different case.

Companies collect GST on their sales and remit the money to the government. They also pay income taxes on behalf of their employees – PAYE.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: NZ’s zombie rock star economy

Walk through Wellington, and you will see plenty of empty shopfronts and shuttered cafes. Switch on the radio, and you will hear experts say this is the best time to buy a house in years.

Talk to shoppers, and they will tell you about cost-of-living pressures. Listen to the Reserve Bank, and they will tell you inflation is back within its target band.

These are contradictory messages. Yet they all make sense, because the New Zealand economy in late 2025 is a complicated mix.

Mike's Minute: The madness of the carbon auction needs to end

It's the definition of madness. And stupidity.

How many times do you have to do the same dumb thing with no result, thus proving your system doesn’t work, before you admit your system doesn’t work and give up?

Kerre Woodham: Productivity and the great Christmas shutdown

This morning, I'm going to pretty much let Toss Grumley do the opener for me.

Who's Toss Grumley? Well, Toss is a New Zealand business advisor and investor. The Post has run an editorial he wrote, bemoaning the Christmas shutdown. In it he said New Zealand's Christmas break has started to become way too extreme, and it's impacting our productivity on an individual business level and at the level of the economy.

Sunday December 7, 2025 

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Geoff Parker: Rebuttal to Ella Henry and Andrew Judd - The Treaty Wasn’t a Favour - It Was a Lifeline

In the video What Does It Mean to Be Pākehā in 2025?, Ella Henry and Andrew Judd present the familiar modern narrative: that colonisation was an unprovoked assault on a flourishing Māori world, that Pākehā are “only here because of the Treaty,” and that Māori could have negotiated their own international relationships — even with the French. But this version of history collapses the moment you compare it to the actual record of the 18th and early 19th centuries.

The truth is sharper, less romantic, and far more inconvenient: British colonisation ended the deadliest period in Māori history, protected Māori from other imperial powers, and introduced the first stable national authority New Zealand had ever known.

David R. Henderson: Giving Thanks for Freedom and Growth

Economic liberty is the foundation of our better lives.

"Why did men die of hunger, for six thousand years? Why did they walk, and carry goods and other men on their backs, for six thousand years, and suddenly, in one century, only on a sixth of this earth’s surface, they make steamships, railroads, motors, and are now flying around the earth in its utmost heights of air? Why did families live thousands of years in floorless hovels, without windows or chimneys, then, in eighty years and only in these United States, they are taking floors, chimneys, glass windows for granted, and regarding electric lights, porcelain toilets, and window screens as minimum necessities?"—Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle against Authority, 1943

Net Zero Watch Samizdat: Energy as a common good

UK

Lord Glasman’s GWPF annual lecture: energy as a common good

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has released its 2025 Annual Lecture, delivered this year by Lord Glasman, founder of the Blue Labour movement. Glasman set out a wide-ranging argument for treating energy as a fundamental common good that is required for national security, industrial strategy and AI.

Breaking Views Update: Week of 7.12.25

Sunday December 7, 2025 

News:
UN on racial discrimination in New Zealand
The UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva has published its findings.

The committee expressed grave concern over the 2019 terrorist attack in Christchurch and was 'especially concerned about the persistence of racist hate-speech by some politicians and public figures.' Also highlighted was 'its concern over continuing reports of racially motivated attacks' on Māori, Pasifika and other ethnic and religious groups.

Ani O'Brien: A week is a long time: 6 December 2025

Two stories the NZ media decided not to touch this week

The first came from an NZ Herald article originally (credit where its due) but then the real story that should have been investigated from it has been ignored entirely. That is that, as far as I can see, the Labour Party has breached Advertising Standards Authority regulations, the Electoral Act, and social media platform rules. They are paying influencer Jordan Rivers a salary to work in Chris Hipkins’ office and he is posting hundreds upon hundreds of undeclared aggressively political and often attack-ad-style posts and videos on social media. He has 200,000 followers on TikTok alone. It is Dirty Politics 2.0 and I wrote about it earlier this week.

Roger Partridge: The Open Mind and the Closed University

Last month, Dame Anne Salmond issued a public challenge to the very idea of reason – the commitment to shared standards of inquiry that has delivered unprecedented human flourishing over the past three centuries.

Salmond is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated public intellectuals. She was writing in Newsroom on 18 November – the same day legislation requiring universities to protect open debate and remain “institutionally neutral” received royal assent. Salmond opposes the reform. For her, neutrality is a fiction: there is no common ground – only competing worldviews.

Elliot Ikilei: When 87% say 'no' and the media calls them the problem

Every now and then, the media produces something so out-of-touch that I have to stop, take a breath, and ask: Do they actually hear themselves? Yesterday was one of those days.

The NZ Herald released polling showing that only 13% of NZ Europeans want to be called “Pākehā.” An overwhelming example of consensus. And how does the Herald frame this story up? That the 87% (the vast, ordinary majority) are scared, racist, or uncomfortable with their identity. Not “Maybe we should respect people’s preferences.” Nope. They choose to view the majority in the worst light. Apparently, the only acceptable answer was the one most people didn’t give.

Mike's Minute: The NZ retail experience, a first hand view

The New Zealand retail experience, as summed up by a frustrated Katherine Hawkesby as of yesterday.

She visited half a dozen shops - one was decent and the rest were useless.

They were useless for a variety of reasons, but the common theme was service, or lack of it.