Ani O'Brien: A week is a long time: 23 May 2026

Public service bloat meets fiscal reality

The biggest political story this week was the Government’s announcement of a public sector overhaul aimed at reducing the number of public servants. There were about 47,250 full-time equivalents in 2017 when Labour took office and that had shot up to 65,700 by 2023 when they left. It is now at 63,657 and the plan is to get it down to 55,000 by 2029. The Government says the reforms will save approximately $2.4 billion over four years and involve agency mergers, spending cuts, and increased use of digitisation and AI across the public service. Departments have been instructed to find 2% savings this year, rising to 5% over the next two years, while ministries are being encouraged to propose merger options and shared-service models.

Geoff Parker: Te Ao Māori Values – Now Apparently A Farming Superpower

According to the latest levy-and-government-funded burst of agricultural mysticism, New Zealand dairy farming has finally discovered the secret ingredient to producing milk: whakapapa workshops, cultural storytelling, and endless references to “relationships with the land.”

Apparently grass, water, fertiliser, hard work, genetics, and modern science were only part of the equation all along. The real breakthrough, we are told, is “Te Ao Māori values.”

Ryan Bridge: What's cruel versus fair in the social housing debate

Nicola Willis' Lotto comment yesterday was clumsy, but in the end, much ado about nothing.

The politics of this housing thing are pretty simple. You've got 80,000 social housing tenants who probably weren't going to vote National, who now definitely won't vote National.

John McLean: Pity The Young

The category conspicuously absent from Woke’s hierarchy of victimhood

Youth doesn’t feature in Woke’s whacky matrix of discrimination and privilege, victimhood and oppression. Which says it all about the analytic uselessness of Woke Intersectionality. Because in the Western Word, and in New Zealand in particular, young people are as hard done by as any other group.

David Harvey: Drawing a Line

Personal Beliefs Should be of no Interest to Professional Regulators

Professional regulatory bodies have very wide powers. Some argue that those powers, including mandatory training in areas not directly related to the profession in question, are too wide.

A Regulated Professions Neutrality Bill, which will shortly be released for discussion, addresses those issues.

This article discusses aspects of the proposed Bill. The proposed Bill may be found here.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: A warning from NZ on housing tax changes

When Jim Chalmers stood up on budget night and announced the end of negative gearing on established properties, he assured Australians it was worth breaking a promise for “right and justifiable reasons.”

Grant Robertson, New Zealand’s finance minister, said something remarkably similar in March 2021 when he broke his own promise not to extend the bright-line test on property. Robertson called his earlier commitment “too definitive.” A New Zealand Herald columnist observed that this sounded a lot like “too honest.”

New Zealanders know how this story ends.

Bob Edlin: Disciplinary tribunal shies from delivering knockout blow to teacher who assaulted a woman

What mischief must you do to be deregistered as a teacher?

PoO asks after reading an RNZ report about a teacher, Kahukura Bentson, who has kept his deregistration in spite of convictions which included the assault of a woman.

A teacher who grabbed a woman’s head and slammed it into the floor has been allowed to retain his registration.

David Farrar: The bigger cost saving for NZ Super

Henry Cooke writes:

There are good reasons for our politicians to look seriously at the long-term affordability of superannuation.

It is by far our largest benefit, and largest single-ticket item, taking up around 16.6% of tax revenue and 5% of GDP. It costs close to five times what we spend on the unemployment benefit or more than our entire educational system. And given we are both living longer and having fewer children it seems set to eat up more and more of the wider budget. …

Saturday May 23, 2026 

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Duncan Garner: "$450 Million For One Hapu?" - Port of Tauranga dispute

New Zealand has officially entered dangerous territory with an extraordinary compensation demand linked to one of our most critical export hubs. In this episode of Duncan Garner, Editor-in-Chief, we look into the shocking legal submissions connected to the Port of Tauranga expansion. Representatives for Ngāti Kuku are demanding between 335 million and 475 million dollars over 35 years for cultural impacts and revenue sharing. Duncan labels it a total standover and looks at how these massive financial demands threaten national productivity and scare off foreign investment.

Click to view

NZCPR Newsletter: The End of Climate Extremism

Breaking News: The extreme climate scenario, used by the expert United Nations  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to forecast catastrophic climate change has been withdrawn. 

The international body responsible for IPCC modelling has now officially declared the extreme RCP8.5 scenario is implausible.

This is the doomsday scenario of a world almost totally dependent on coal, with catastrophic warming of 4 to 6 degrees Celsius by 2100, and sea-levels rising well over one metre, that was adopted by our Ministry for the Environment as “business-as-usual” and applied by government agencies and local councils across the country.  

The significance of this IPCC decision cannot be over-stated. 

Ian Bradford: The Planetary Cycles That Affect Our Climate and Weather

A number of articles have mentioned that climate change and weather have always occurred right back in geological time. All occurring long before the existence of humans. For example, how many know that around 232-234 million years ago it rained continuously for between 1 million and 2 million years?

Steven Gaskell: Public Service Expansion

Labour’s expansion of the public service between 2017 and 2023 saw the biggest staffing growth concentrated in a relatively small number of departments and administrative functions. According to figures from New Zealand’s Public Service Commission and reporting compiled from departmental data, the biggest increases came from:

Breaking Views Update: Week of 17.5.26

Saturday May 23, 2026 

News:
Te reo Māori advocate Vincent Olsen-Reeder criticises govt branding changes
A Māori language advocate says the government's move to prioritise English over te reo Māori in official branding sends a damaging message about the status of te reo in Aotearoa and risks undermining ongoing reo revitalisation efforts.

Earlier this week, the government updated its official branding to give greater prominence to English over te reo Māori, following a directive from new Public Service Minister Paul Goldsmith.

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: New Zealand's corruption problem is growing rapidly

For anyone still labouring under the impression that New Zealand is an innocent little place like it was 50 years ago, those prison busts should absolutely shatter that delusion.

What happened was the single biggest bust in our prison system: 20 people arrested and charged across three different prisons - Mount Eden, Spring Hill and Auckland South.

Mike's Minute: Aussie Labor have shown NZ Labour what not to do

Another lesson for our Labour Party if they want to ponder it.

Australia’s Labor have blown their Budget.

It's hard to overstate the anger and pushback on their tax changes made now well over a week ago.

Gary Judd KC: Myth, Memory and the BNZ

Winston should be ashamed

In his column in The Telegraph published on 19 May, “Deluded Labour will never let go of its EU fantasy,” Tom Harris said, “Such is how myths are made in modern Britain. Europhilia is similar to Thatcherphobia – it’s less about actual policies and empirical evidence than about feelings, and the less you remember about it, the stronger you feel.”

I made a note of it because the subordination of historical fact to feelings is so relevant to contemporary New Zealand and Tom Harris’ expression neatly captures the way passage of time and appeal to emotion may result in apparently serious pronouncements being evidence of sheer lunacy.

Such was Winston Peter’s solemn pledge that New Zealand First policy would include buying back the BNZ.

Rodney Hide: China Rising, America Falling? The Delusion Persists in Wellington

In Wellington salons and certain Auckland boardrooms, the conventional wisdom is settled: China is the unstoppable rising power, the United States is in terminal decline, and New Zealand had better hedge accordingly. Smart diplomats, we are told, accommodate Beijing while quietly distancing ourselves from a fading superpower.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Bob Edlin: Count the number of Finnish public servants.....

Count the number of Finnish public servants to see what happens when you trim govt department numbers

Paul Goldsmith, Minister for the Public Service and Digitising Government, was raring to go when asked what action the Government was taking to improve services and deliver better value for money in the public service.

The patsy question was lobbed by National MP David MacLeod.

Insights From Social Media: Why The Word Aotearoa Should Be Discarded

Alfred Johns writes > Fellow New Zealanders,

I want to say about something far greater than politics. I speak about identity, history, truth, and the name of our nation — the name by which the world has known us for generations: that is “New Zealand”.

Names matter.