Pee Kay: Upholding our treaty obligations - Political disguise for ethnic grift?

Just prior to winning the 2023 election, in an interview with Mike Hosking Chris Luxon said – “It’s all about management and my personal experience is that CEOs get different results with different management using the same amount of money. So, it’s what you do with it – and expectations and clarity, and bringing in all those CEOs before Christmas and saying ‘hang on, here’s the new deal, the deal is you have to deliver, you have to deliver’ … that’s what I’m sick of, absolutely sick of, all the talk and no action.”

The CEO’s he was “absolutely sick of” were the public servants heading government departments.

I’ll let you into a secret Chris. So the bloody hell are we!

Breaking Views Update: Week of 26.10.25

Tuesday October 28, 2025 

News:
Rotorua: Te Reo Māori and English course supports migrant integration
After 10 weeks of learning, connection and cultural discovery, a group of migrants in Rotorua have completed a bilingual course in English and te reo Māori, said to be the first of its kind in Aotearoa.

Lindsay Mitchell: Same-old, same-old

The Social Investment Agency is a creation of the National government. It kicked off in July 2024 and is headed by the former police commissioner Andrew Coster.

According to Nicola Willis, “Despite the Government currently investing more than $70 billion every year into social services, we are not seeing the outcomes we want for all New Zealanders... So we’re taking a different approach. We want to look beyond good intentions in our policy-making and use hard evidence to invest in what works. Our new approach builds on better social science evidence and advances in technology."

That sounds promising. A break with the old.

Brendan O'Neill: What the West could learn from Israel

Hostages Square in Tel Aviv is quiet now. The paraphernalia of hope remains. Yellow ribbons dance in the breeze. The flap of a hundred Israel flags breaks the silence. There’s still the burnt-out car that was recovered from the ‘road of death’ in the south, where Hamas slaughtered fleeing families on 7 October 2023. I look inside at its blackened remains, the squelched leather, the warped metal, and wince at the thought of what suffering must have unfolded in this suffocating space. In one corner of the square is an unsteady pile of placards featuring the faces of the 251 Israelis seized two years ago: the retired equipment of a moral movement no longer needed.

Kevin: Some Good News for You Boomers

You now have science on your side.

We know you like to think you’re smarter, wiser and more mature than all those youngsters. The good news is that you now have science on your side.

Bruce Cotterill: Seven long‑term agreements to secure New Zealand’s future

A few weeks back, the Prime Minister wrote a letter to the Leader of the Opposition, urging him to join a bipartisan agreement committing to offshore gas exploration for 10 years.

Unfortunately, the Labour leader dismissed the letter as a “political stunt”. I took the letter a lot more seriously. In fact, it got me thinking.

David Farrar: Not bad for first time

The Post reports:

About one in five ACT local candidates won the seats they stand for and party leader David Seymour says he’s happy more weren’t successful because now they can stand to run for Parliament.

“In some cases, I was kind of hoping they wouldn’t get elected so we can run them next year,” he told The Post.

Damien Grant: Our self-important broadcasting censors need to be reined in

In terms of bureaucratic overreach, few rival that of Sejanus building statues to himself. He was Emperor Tiberius’ man in Rome, while the degenerate sovereign luxuriated on Capri and, left alone for too long, Sejanus believed himself impervious to supervision.

He wasn’t, and his career was ended in a typically brutal Roman fashion.

There are many similar examples in the two millennia since, where middling civil servants assume more power than is good for them. It is a classic principal-agent problem and we have had a perfect example last week in the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA).

Brendan O'Neill: The Irish establishment is fuelling the rage on the streets

Why is no one talking about the alleged rape of a child, by an illegal migrant, which sparked this awful unrest?

Last night, the BBC told one of the grossest lies of omission I have ever seen in the mainstream media. It published a report about the disturbances outside a migrant hotel in County Dublin and nowhere did it mention what triggered the riotous behaviour. Three hundred and eighty-seven words pumped into the gadgets of the masses, every one of them devoted to damning the ‘thuggery’ of those who assembled at the hotel. Not one of the words – not one – addressed the thing that angered them.

Chris Johnson: Surprised by leftwing radical rhetoric? Look closer at the climate movement

Millions of Americans were horrified when Charlie Kirk was murdered in cold blood. Then came an even bigger shock: large numbers of people celebrated his death and danced on his grave.

Sickening as it is, this shouldn’t surprise anyone. The left has long harbored — or at least tolerated — an anti-human streak, and nowhere is it more visible than in its radical environmental wing.

Monday October 27, 2025 

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Geoff Parker: TIMELINE - Of The Foreshore And Seabed saga (Summarised)

Pre 1997 - Under British Common law, the foreshore and seabed were owned by the Crown on behalf of all New Zealanders. This was affirmed in the 1963 Ninety Mile Beach case, when the Court of Appeal found that no common law ‘customary title’ existed in the foreshore and seabed.

David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 4

Asylum seekers and refugees are in the news once more; not only in Europe, where popular exasperation at governments’ betrayal of their own citizens is increasingly openly expressed, but even in our own country. Ministers are talking of new legislation to allow electronic monitoring. Needless to say, numerous groups who make their comfortable livings out of being nice to refugees and asylum seekers are deeply concerned that we may not be welcoming enough.

Net Zero Watch Samizdat: No let-up for the Energy Secretary

UK

Another torrid week for our Ed

There was no let up for the Energy Secretary. His attempt to divert attention away from rising bills by talking about ‘hundreds of thousands of new jobs’ in the energy sector was widely ridiculed, partly because it would cost billions and also because, in his desperation, Mr Miliband had included plumbers among the green jobs created.

Graham Adams: Tikanga inserted into cutting-edge gene bill

In August 2024, the then-Minister of Science, Innovation, and Technology, Judith Collins, announced legislation to end New Zealand’s nearly 30-year ban on gene technology outside the lab. She described the move as “a major milestone in modernising gene technology laws.”

In her Beehive media release, she said, “The changes we’re announcing today will allow researchers and companies to further develop and commercialise their innovative products. Importantly, it will help New Zealanders to better access treatments such as CAR T-cell therapy, which has been clinically proven to effectively treat some cancers. It can also help our farmers and growers mitigate emissions and increase productivity, all of which benefits our economy.”

Professor Jerry Coyne: Mātauranga Māori strikes again

This article from the New Zealand Herald shows what we already know: that “indigenous ways of knowing” in New Zealand, or Mātauranga Māori (henceforth “MM”) are loudy touted as making substantial contributions to scientific knowledge—in this case to predictions of volcanic eruptions. And while it’s possible that MM can make some contributions to predictions of the damage that could result from eruption, even those predictions are nebulous.

Melanie Phillips: Galloping Islamisation in Britain and America

What Donald Trump is helping Israel fight in the Middle East is rampant in his own backyard

In Britain and the United States, there are signs that creeping Islamisation has now accelerated to a gallop.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Labour’s Future Fund - Wrong tool for a real problem

Labour wants to funnel Crown dividends into a new sovereign wealth fund restricted to domestic investments. The stated goal is to boost domestic risk capital, but the design is terrible.

Labour says New Zealand lacks capital for investment. Maybe. But since there is plenty of capital in the world, the real question is what is stopping that capital from coming to New Zealand.

Dr Michael Johnston: I Claude

AI chatbot Claude is a friendly chap. Knowledgeable and helpful, too. Last weekend I discussed the intricacies of psychometrics with it.

Most readers probably won’t even know what ‘psychometrics’ means. But Claude really knows its stuff. The conversation saved me days of trawling through technical papers.

Sadly, it turns out that Claude is a psychopath.

Ele Ludemann: Widespread weather woes

A friend from Southland told us last Wednesday that this spring was worse than last year’s.

He’d had a good lambing percentage but day after day of cold, wet weather had killed not just newborns but week-old lambs.

Then came the wind.