Heather du Plessis-Allan: Will Australia's social media ban actually work?

So tomorrow's the big day, isn't it? And it is, I think, not an overstatement to say that the eyes of the world, well, at least politicians around the world, are going to be on Australia and whether the social media ban will actually work.

And that is still a live question, isn't it? We're less than 24 hours from the thing taking effect and none of us can totally say for sure that we know it's going to work.

Geoff Parker: Courtesy Becomes Control

New Zealanders have a fatal flaw: we’re too polite for our own good. We don’t like conflict. We don’t like awkwardness. And we certainly don’t like being the one person in the room who says, “No thanks, I’m not doing that.” That national instinct - to keep the peace at all costs - is now being used against the public in a way few fully appreciate.

Polite New Zealanders quietly sit through public gatherings while an opportunistic orator addresses the audience in a language few understand. This isn’t about culture — it’s about control.

Perspective with Ryan Bridge: We're not solving the big problems, and we don't want to

I’ve had it with people running around pretending we’re going to solve big global problems.

Australia’s banning kids from social media on Wednesday. They’re going to lead the world.

Sounds very appealing. Stop the brain rot, etc.

Breaking Views Update: Week of 7.12.25

Tuesday December 9, 2025 

News:
Waikato-Tainui snaps up $10m of ex-state homes for iwi buyers
Waikato-Tainui purchased 18 properties in South Auckland and Waikato for over $10m.

The properties will be sold to tribal members at cost to boost homeownership among iwi.

David Lillis: Fighting Online Harassment

Online Harassment in New Zealand

While most social media is relatively benign or even positive in intent, we do encounter not only bad language and slights of public figures, but online attacks on private people (Lillis, 2025).

Recently, in New Zealand, various people have attempted to call out online abuse and possible defamation on Facebook, including attacks on a person’s character, integrity and even physical appearance.

Pee Kay: A Curates Egg?

On the 1st of December, Prime Minister Chris Luxon, and Local Government Minister Simon Watts, announced Cabinet’s decision on how they will cap council rates.

The rates cap will be a variable target band, starting with minimum increases of two percent and a maximum of four percent. All good, so far.

Professor Kendall Clements, Dr Michael Johnston: The Irony Of Relativism

When new evidence emerges, scientists update their theories, sometimes radically. Good scientists actively seek evidence that could disconfirm their theories.

Scientific uncertainty owes a lot to cross-cultural encounters. For example, when Jesuit missionaries visited China in the 16th and 17th centuries, they were fascinated by Chinese astronomical records.

Matua Kahurangi: One rule for hikoi, another for Brian Tamaki

You know what I find genuinely strange in this country? When the hikoi stormed across the Harbour Bridge to protest David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, there didn’t seem to be any consultation, any endless list of hoops to jump through, any talk of “strict criteria”. The organisers basically said, we’re marching across the bridge, the rest of you can get whūkd if you don’t like it. Just like magic, it happened. No bond demanded at the eleventh hour. No threats. No “very high threshold” rhetoric. No police spokesperson clutching their balls about public safety and risk to infrastructure. Just straight on, off you go, kia kaha, block SH1 if you must!

Matua Kahurangi: Coster exposes Hipkins - The Minister who knew everything and said nothing

Former Police Commissioner Andrew Coster’s interview with Jack Tame on Q&A is a bomb that has blown apart what little remained of Chris Hipkins’ political credibility. The timeline is clean, simple and devastating. It shows that Hipkins was fully briefed about Deputy Commissioner Jevon McSkimming’s affair with a younger woman long before the matter erupted publicly. When the scandal finally broke, Hipkins reverted to his favourite political defence. He knew nothing. He remembered nothing. He was never told.

Coster’s account makes that position impossible to swallow.

Roger Partridge: Fake breath tests are bad - The police response is worse

This week, Commissioner Richard Chambers announced new targets for trust and confidence in police. They will mean little if the organisation continues to treat deliberate dishonesty as a minor employment matter.

That proposition may sound harsh. But what else should we make of a police force that discovers its officers have falsified thousands of breath test records and responds with little more than a warning?

David Farrar: Harvey vs Wilson on western culture

Simon Wilson, like many on the hard left, sees the West as basically malignant, and that its achievements were based on oppression. This is not an uncommon view from the left.

David Harvey does an excellent lengthy response to Wilson’s assertions.

Read it all, but here are some key aspects:

David Farrar: We need productivity gains, not minimum wage rises

Radio NZ reports:

New Zealand’s minimum wage might have increased substantially over the past five years, but it hasn’t helped lift the wages of the population overall.

As a result, the median wage has drawn significantly closer to the minimum, and commentators say it will take a big productivity boost to boost incomes more generally.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Directors who dodge their tax debts

Last year, Inland Revenue wrote off $694.5 million in company tax debt. Much will never be recovered because the companies that owed it no longer exist – at least not in their original form.

Here is how the scam works. A company accumulates GST and PAYE debts. The directors continue to trade, knowing they cannot pay. When the debt becomes unmanageable, they walk away from the company, leaving nothing for creditors. Then they start a new company doing the same thing. The old company dies; a new one rises from its ashes: same directors, same business, no tax debt.

It is called phoenix activity. And our enforcement system cannot stop it.

Monday December 8, 2025 

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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.