Ani O'Brien: The Nursing & Medical Councils make political views compulsory

Inside the ideological capture of New Zealand’s health sector

If you are a nurse in New Zealand in 2026, the Nursing Council has decided that your clinical competence is no longer enough. It wants to control your character, politics, beliefs, and how you behave when you are off the clock. In its draft Code of Conduct, the Council states that because nurses must have the trust of the public to undertake their professional role, “they must also have an appropriate standard of behaviour in their personal lives.”

Dr Michael Bassett: Wellington - What's wrong with it?

On Monday 28 July there was a strange story in the New Zealand Herald about advice that had been given to the Attorney-General, Judith Collins, by her officers. They had told their minister that the Justice minister’s intended changes to the electoral legislation banning enrolment during the 13 days before an election when early voting gets underway, breaches the Bill of Rights Act. Weird! Most particularly because it tells us that whoever gave that advice to the Minister clearly had little or no knowledge of the history of the rules that cover enrolment and voting in New Zealand.

Roger Partridge: Rule of law – but for whom? A rejoinder to the NZLS report

The New Zealand Law Society’s new report, Strengthening the Rule of Law in Aotearoa New Zealand, runs to more than eighty pages, includes seventy-eight recommendations, and reflects a considerable investment of time and goodwill. Its aims are noble: to bolster constitutional integrity, improve access to justice, and promote respect for the rule of law. But for all its breadth, the report suffers from a staggering omission. It fails to acknowledge the one institution increasingly responsible for eroding legal certainty and upending constitutional norms: the courts themselves.

Zoran Rakovic - A Bureaucratic Blueprint: Woke Architecture Meets Soft Totalitarianism

The NZRAB’s latest Schedule NZ Consultation Briefing Paper arrives not with the dignity of an architectural manifesto but with the hesitant shuffle of a government department having just discovered adjectives. Drenched in the warm bathwater of consultation rhetoric and spiritual deference, it proposes the introduction of new “performance criteria” that would see architecture in New Zealand surrender its compass to a cultural worldview—Te Ao Māori—not as a complementary influence, but as a central moral axis. The tone is more missionary than managerial. The intent? Ostensibly noble. The implications? Chilling, if we still take the Bill of Rights Act even half-seriously.

NZCPR Newsletter: Cultural Apartheid

King’s Counsel Gary Judd has been at the forefront of a battle to defend New Zealand from the actions of Maori tribal leaders attempting to force their cultural apartheid onto our country.

He’s defending the Rule of Law from attack by those pushing for ‘decolonisation’ by arguing that since ‘tikanga’ is an ‘amorphous spiritual culture’ and not law, it has no place in our Common Law. And he’s appealed to Parliament’s Regulations Review Committee to stop the compulsory teaching of ‘tikanga’ to new law students.

He’s also opposing a Court proposal to commence and end each sitting day with a ‘karakia’ claiming it would breach the 1990 New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Since Court participants would have no option but to sit through the Maori prayers, the proposal would violate their section 13 “right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief, including the right to adopt and hold opinions without interference”.

David Farrar: Equality of suffrage seen as bad by Radio NZ

Tauranga MP Sam Uffindell has a simple proposed members’ bill to amend the Bill of Rights Act to have equal suffrage extend to local government.

Equal suffrage is a fundamental human right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says:

Ele Ludemann: A better way

The intention of the Treaty Principles Bill has my support but I don’t think this is the best way to achieve what is needed. David Farrar has come up with a better idea:

John McLean: Treason, Sedition........Hate Speech

What are these Legal Leviathans, exactly?

In the turbulent seas battering New Zealand, no Leviathan serpents are more ideologically laden and hard to harpoon than “Treason”, “Sedition” and “Hate Speech”. These salty barbs are being bandied around with increasingly gay abandon.

Let’s rise from the inky depths of our ignorance, snatch Poseidon’s trident, skewer the meanings of this trio of terms and breach the surface out into Enlightenment.

Capitalist: You Only Have Rights if Left-Wingers Agree with You

Many years ago at the ripe old age of eight years, I decided to live forever. Apart from an incurable blood disorder (haemophilia), and a rather unfortunate mistake by a pissed surgeon during an operation in 2000 which took three years to recover from, my plan is working quite well.

With eternity in mind; last year I bought Nufarm Finance bonds and today is the date for the latest ‘vig’ payment (which has indeed sailed into the bank whilst I’ve been writing this article). These bonds have a “maturity” date of January 1st 3000 and pay an interest rate of 8.3% – which works out over 977 years to $6.874609890631472e+40 (whatever that means!).

Roger Partridge: Bill of Rights contortions

A funny thing happened in the Supreme Court this week. The Court found that the Bill of Rights breached… the Bill of Rights. Only Justice Kos dissented.

The majority decision did not quite put it that way. But perhaps the judges were blind to the implications of their views.

The perplexing case concerned arguments that 16-year-olds should have the right to vote.

The Court’s decision to hear the case was controversial enough.

But its finding that 16-year-olds suffer unjustified discrimination breaching the Bill of Rights has been met with widespread disbelief.

Peter Dunne: 16 - 17 year olds right to vote

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the government was delighted with this week’s ruling from the Supreme Court that excluding sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds from the right to vote was inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act. Not because of the weight of the legal argument, nor the morality of the cause, but simply because the ruling provided the government with a huge distraction from all the other problems confronting it at present.

Under Section 7 of the Bill of Rights Act, whenever a declaration is made that an action is inconsistent with the Act, the Minister responsible is required to report to Parliament within six months of the declaration what actions the government is proposing to take. In this case, the government has until the end of May next year to advise Parliament of its response to the Court’s ruling.

Cam Slater: Do We Have Dunces on the Supreme Court?

The Supreme Court has added even more judicial meddling to their long list of idiotic decisions. Yesterday they decided that the Bill of Rights is inconsistent with the Bill of Rights. I’m not kidding.

Point of Order: Lots of spending, some foreign affairs initiatives and (be nervous, readers) a review of our electoral laws

Just in case the affected voters and constituencies haven’t bothered to check how much funding they are being given in Budget 2022 (or how much they have lost in some cases), ministers have been letting them know in post-Budget press statements.

At least, they have been letting them know when the sums have been increased. They tend not to draw attention to budgets that have been cut.

Today we learn that –