Damien Grant: The Estonia trip, the ‘Mean Girls’ parody and the fall of an FMA chair

There is an absurdity at the heart of our regulatory state. Civil servants, most of whom have never run a chicken coop, are given the state’s authority to regulate a sector that few have the competence to participate in. Imagine asking me to judge Japanese poetry. You get the idea.

Those that can, do. Those that cannot, regulate.

Peter Williams: The Sad Stobo Saga

How the wokerati got to a white male

In April 2024 the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) launched its Matangirua strategy – its formal Māori engagement and capability framework. The strategy was designed to help Māori “participate as Māori” in financial markets. That apparently means “not just as generic consumers or investors, but in ways that recognise Māori economic structures, values, and collective ownership models.”

All up that sounds like a separatist model. Are Maori , or those who call themselves Maori, really that different from the rest of us?

John McLean: Legal Elite Is Winning In The War For Constitutional Supremacy

Craig Stobo has been forced to resign as chair of the board of New Zealand’s Financial Markets Authority.

On 4 May 2026, National Party MP and Commerce & Consumer Affairs Minister, Cameron Brewer, accepted Stobo’s offer to resign. Brewer’s acceptance was of course code for, “If he’d refused to resign, I’d’ve booted him”.

John McLean: Fonterra Fiasco Finale

My final chapter in a sad serial saga

This is my final Substack of a series I’ve published on the Financial Markets Authority doing nothing about behemoth dairy co-operative Fonterra deliberately cooking its financial books.

I’ve catalogued Fonterra’s gross financial reporting misconduct, and my protracted attempts to use the Official Information Act (OIA) to find out why the FMA let Fonterra off, scot-free.

John McLean: My last fandango in an official information act fiasco

A case study in the breakdown of public transparency and accountability in New Zealand

This Substack has its genesis a decade ago. From 2015 to 2017, Fonterra deliberately cooked its financial books in order to hide bad investments and artificially inflate its net worth and share price. These shifty shenanigans, in which Fonterra’s auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers were complicit, meant that dairy farmers who purchased their mandatory Fonterra shares over this period did so at inflated prices. More particularly, the book cooking significantly boosted the already astronomical pay of Dutch Fonterra CEO Theo Spierings, whose bonuses were significantly based on Fonterra’s share price,.