Clive Bibby: Rats leaving the sinking ship

The final COP30 report says it all really.

If ever there was evidence that the Climate Change zealots have lost control of their once universally accepted false doctrine, this is it.

Gerry Eckhoff: The past

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” (F Scott Fitzgerald 1896-1940)

The recent opinion piece from Anaru Eketone, associate professor of Otago University challenging the sovereignty of New Zealand cannot pass as having any credibility.

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Is there a positive side to this recession?

Can I give you a positive spin on the recession that we're just coming out of?

I mean, maybe it's not so much a positive spin, but maybe it's an explanation for why this recession was harder than it needed to be - but why it actually did need to be this hard.

Ryan Bridge: What we got from the RBNZ yesterday

So what do we know today that we didn't know yesterday after the big show from the Reserve Bank?

Well not much, really.

Breaking Views Update: Week of 23.11.25

Friday November 28, 2025 

News:
Iwi chairs call for ‘reset’ in scathing letter to Prime Minister
The National Iwi Chairs Forum and the Government are recalibrating their relationship after a period of disengagement at a difficult time for the Māori-Crown relationship

The Prime Minister and senior National Party ministers have emphasised the importance of their relationship with the National Iwi Chairs Forum, as the forum considers whether its engagement with the Crown is still fit for purpose.

Matua Kahurangi: Te Urewera mismanagement.....

Te Urewera mismanagement: Tūhoe leadership failing the land and its people

For years, the Urewera’s have been celebrated as a showcase of iwi stewardship and environmental guardianship. But the reality is far bleaker. Tūhoe leadership is presiding over mismanagement, neglect, and a shocking lack of accountability, turning what should be a model of co-governance into a cautionary tale of waste and incompetence.

Ani O"Brien: The best education news in years and the media buries it

Warning: This is a very frustrated and ranty article!

Sometimes this country feels allergic to good news, especially when that good news comes from a government our media class has decided must never be allowed a win. This week, Education Minister Erica Stanford released some of the most extraordinary education data New Zealand has seen in decades…students are making between one and two years of maths progress in just twelve weeks. It should have led every bulletin. It should have been the headline splashed across every front page. Erica Stanford should be being hoisted above shoulders and paraded through the streets as a heroine. Chris Hipkins would have thrown himself a parade if he had done anything except drive our education system into decline when he was in charge. What Stanford’s reforms are achieving is nothing short of extraordinary.

Bob Edlin: The OCR is trimmed and Govt politicians are cheered....

The OCR is trimmed and Govt politicians are cheered – but savers won’t necessarily be whooping

PoO first heard the news from RNZ: the Reserve Bank had cut the official cash rate to its lowest level in three years – by 25 basis points to 2.25 per cent – to support economic recovery.

That led us to check the announcement on the RBNZ website. This expressed confidence that inflation would ease from where it now sits, at the top of the 1 – 3 per cent target band for monetary policy:

David Farrar: 27,000 fewer Maori are victims of violent crime

The NZ Crime and Victims’ Survey has released its latest data to August 2025, and it is staggering how much violent crime has dropped. When you declare war on the gangs, instead of funding them, the results can be amazing.

Centrist: A well-paid ecosystem takes its grievance to Geneva

Lady Tureiti Moxon travelled to Geneva to ask the United Nations to intervene in what she calls the “political discrimination” of Māori by the coalition.

However, the pattern running through Moxon’s combative narrative, which outlines more than a dozen grievances, is that she starts in the middle of the story.

Brendan O'Neill: The Guardian’s hitjob on Nigel Farage is a sinister new low

Dredging up things he allegedly said when he was 13 years old is despicable and immoral.

The Blob is panicking. It can feel the flames of populism licking at its cankles. How else to explain the latest – and hands down the maddest – smear campaign against Nigel Farage? Now they’re coming for Farage not for anything he’s said or done in his 30 years in the bruising world of politics but for his alleged bikeshed ‘banter’ at school 50 years ago. Trying to drag down a 61-year-old bloke over things he supposedly said when he was 13? That thing you can smell is the rank desperation of a conceited elite worried its world is about to be turned upside down by oiks warming to Reform.

Richard Prebble: When Everything Is Called Corruption, Democracy Suffers

I admire Dr Bryce Edwards. Our universities like to proclaim themselves the “critic and conscience of society” while remaining silent on almost everything. In contrast, Dr Edwards is industrious. His daily email round-up of commentary often alerts me to articles I would otherwise have missed. For that, I am grateful.

His larger venture — the so-called Democracy Project and the accompanying “Integrity Institute” — is less admirable. Both portray themselves as experiments in democratic renewal. In reality, they are sustained polemics premised on a single idea: that politics, business, and the interaction between them in New Zealand are fundamentally corrupt.

Dr James Kierstead: 50 Shades of Grades - Grade Compression at New Zealand Universities

A grades are now only a few years away from becoming the most common grade awarded at New Zealand universities.

The research note, ‘Fifty Shades of Grades: Grade Compression at New Zealand Universities’, builds on the Initiative's August report, ‘Amazing Grades’, which identified a substantial rise in A grades as well as rising pass rates. This new analysis examines what has happened to all grades – not just As – revealing how the entire grading scale is shifting.

Thursday November 27, 2025 

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Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Does Roger Gray have a point about our 'no' culture?

So the Ports of Auckland boss Roger Gray is onto something, isn't he? Because we are a country that loves to say no.

He said in a speech to a crowd at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron in Auckland that he went to Miami to speak to four major cruise liners to find out why the cruise ships aren't coming here as much as they used to.

Insights From Social Media: Maori - An entire money driven industry

Stuart Bennett Clarke writes > The debate surrounding the endless demands and complaints of so-called Maori are all utterly Fallacious and pointless…

These people do not exist. It's a giant con job and a scam.

Maori is merely a name for an outlook and a lifestyle ONLY. ALL other political considerations are a preposterous farce.

Ryan Bridge: We've taken parenting to a level beyond useful

I'm part of the generation that grew up pre-cell phones.

Gifts were usually clothing you needed. Toys were chatter rings, marbles, maybe a skate board.

There was no 'picky eating', as we've heard about this week. If you didn't finish what was on your plate at dinner, you didn't get a treat afterwards.

Ani O'Brien: Government axes Regional Councils in historic overhaul

A necessary reset for Local Government

The Government’s announcement yesterday that it will abolish regional councils and replace them with new Combined Territories Boards, which will be regional bodies made up of mayors, is the biggest shake-up of local government in decades. And it’s about time. Regional councils have been probably the most invisible and least accountable tier of government in the country.

Peter Williams: Replacing Regional Councillors with Mayors Isn’t Reform

It’s a Shortcut

The government’s sudden decision to replace elected regional councillors with panels of district and city mayors has been sold as a bold stroke toward streamlining local government. But bold is not the same as wise, and decisive is not the same as thoughtful. In its rush to simplify a system that undoubtedly needs reform, the government has swung the axe at the wrong trunk.

Rather than fixing the machinery of local government, it has removed the very people elected to oversee that machinery — and installed a group already burdened with full-time jobs of their own.

Pee Kay: Christopher Luxon or someone else?

Heather du Plessis-Allan, in the article below, states, “But if they choose to stick with Luxon, they have to figure out how to limit his damage to the party’s polling.”

What about National asking themselves this question, “If we do stick with Luxon, how can we generate a rapid increase in his popularity?