Pee Kay: Wishful Thinking

Welcome to 2026!

Have you made your New Years resolutions, made plans and set goals for 2026?

Well done if you have.

Barrie Davis: How to Save Democracy

Writ large on the back cover of Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s 2025 book How to Save Democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand, is the claim “New Zealand is a democracy: the people should be in charge”.

I doubt that New Zealand is a democracy in anything but name – which is not ‘Aotearoa’, by the way – and I question whether Sir Geoffrey is participating to make it one.

Roger Partridge: ‘Radical Conservatism’ is an Oxymoron

I have no doubt that Peter Smith loves the West. You can feel it in every line of his writing – the anger at its enemies, the contempt for its betrayal, the frustration at its leaders who lack the courage to defend it.

While Peter is writing in response to my recent essay, I share his frustration. And I suspect we share something deeper still: a sense that we were born into a civilisation worth preserving, and that we now live in a time when that task has never felt more urgent.

Professor Robert MacCulloch: How NZ's economy became broken....

Now We Know how NZ's economy became broken: The Judiciary wrote a Communist-style Constitution with no Consultation; without People Knowing.

The Treaty Debate is great. We've just found out, courtesy of our Kings Counsels, what has broken the economic back of this country. It has only just been revealed, thanks to their letter to the PM, that the judiciary invented their own set of Treaty Principles, the main one of interest to economists being the requirement of "equitable outcomes", which are now fully part of our Constitution.

Judith Collins KC: Speech to the Law Association

Thank you to the Law Association for inviting me to speak this morning. As a former president under its previous name — the Auckland District Law Society — I take particular satisfaction in seeing this organisation, and its members, in such good heart.

As Attorney-General, I am grateful for these invitations to engage you — practitioners at the frontline of the profession — in discussion about New Zealand’s legal and constitutional framework. That is, how powers and responsibilities are shared across our system of government.

Today I wish to speak about a topic that has been front of mind for me recently — comity.

Point of Order: Govt delivers more goodies and a Treaty apology....

.....but the big news is that it has pulled the plug on Three Waters entrenchment clause

The government hadn’t finished a beneficent day or so of handouts, when we filed our previous Buzz from the Beehive on Friday.

Lots of goodies had been up for grabs during that day, but geography, ethnicity and occupations largely determined who would benefit.

The same considerations loomed large in two subsequent announcements –

Cam Slater: They’ve Got Nothing to Campaign On

Richard Prebble explains why it is that Labour has reverted to their Nasty Party schtick and have started attacking Christopher Luxon personally, aided and abetted by the Media Party in their roles as a paid propaganda press for the regime.

Andrew Geddis: What happens when MPs ‘entrench’ legislation, and why does it matter?

A newly added provision to the three waters bill is a potentially momentous change to how law is made, explains Andrew Geddis.

On Wednesday night last week, something very unusual happened while parliament was busy making law. MPs from the Green and Labour parties banded together to make it much more difficult for a part of the government’s controversial “three waters” policy to ever be changed, or even removed altogether. Should future MPs want to smooth the way towards privatising the government’s new bodies for managing our water resources, they’ll have to get 60% support in parliament to do so.

John Robinson: A constitution enshrining racial apartheid in NZ is coming

There is a move afoot to rewrite the basic constitution of New Zealand, unsurprisingly to set in place racism and apartheid.

A meeting has been organised at The University of Auckland’s Business School this month to develop a new constitution. This is announced as a ‘Constitutional Conference Korero’, a national hui “to provide the technical and legal support for constitutional transformation in Aotearoa New Zealand — a ‘national wananga’ to bring together experts from around the world and within Aotearoa to present arguments and options for constitutional transformation to ‘realise Maori rights’.

This is a minority effort, excluding the majority of New Zealanders. It will cause considerable harm and deepen existing divisions between the two racial categories enshrined in existing law, overturning the belief in equality and implicit refusal of race-based separation. The country will be torn apart, as the process of writing a constitution is among the most wrenching any nation can go through, even a nation at peace. It brings every tension, rivalry, prejudice and latent grievance to the surface.

Chris Trotter: Imagining Away The Opposition.

How quickly things change. Three years ago Chile was racked by massive protest demonstrations. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young, mostly poor, Chileans served notice on their government that the moment had arrived for their country to execute a decisive break with its recent past. Politically, economically, and culturally, they said, Chile was ready to ditch the debilitating legacy of General Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year-long dictatorship. Most particularly, “Pinochet’s Straightjacket” – the 1980 constitution he imposed upon Chile as the price it must pay for even a limited restoration of democracy – must go.

Peter Dunne: The dangers of our laissez-faire approach to government

Citizens’ rights are nominally protected through a Bill of Rights Act but that could be overturned by a simple majority and the cause of those seeking more judicial activism will not have been helped by the decision of the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade

New Zealand has a very simple system of government, based on the supremacy of Parliament as both the supreme lawmaker and the highest court in the land. It is a pragmatic approach, very much in tune with the “can do” attitude of our peoples.

Geoff Parker: Important Message from 2012

The following archived letter (2012) was sent to me by a third party, I understand it was sent to a newspaper in 2012 but unfortunately was not published. I am posting it here because I feel it is just as relevant today, perhaps even more so, and needs broadcasting.

AUCKLAND

17 September 2012

Dear Supporter,

I find it curious when some new arrivals in New Zealand, those whose people have suffered historically from inequality and religious strife in their homelands, are opposed to equality and freedom in this country. Being of distant Scot ancestry myself, my lot had our historical complaints but we left that baggage behind us, learnt the lessons and started a new, productive life based on equality for all under law (or so we thought). People always tend to do better when they focus their energies on the future.

Point of Order: The weight of numbers (and opinions) on the bench in Roe v Wade is instructive when we consider the meaning of “treaty partnership”

The way in which judges can grant rights – or remove them – has been glaringly illuminated by the leaked draft opinion of the United States Supreme Court that strikes down Roe v Wade.

A spokesperson for the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand said the ruling was a stark reminder that women’s rights – and reproductive rights more broadly – were “vulnerable to erosion”.

True. Or, on another day in another court, those rights might be expanded.

Roe v Wade had been a landmark decision in 1973, when the US Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction.

Don Brash: Our constitution is being changed before our eyes

Many people seem to think that New Zealand doesn’t have a constitution. And certainly we are one of a very small number of countries which does not have a written constitution, a single document laying out how the governance of the country should be conducted.

But we certainly have a constitution, albeit not one written down in a single document. Rather, our constitution consists of a number of laws and a number of conventions, many of them inherited from the United Kingdom which, like us, does not have a written constitution.

Our constitution provides, for example, for the Queen to be our Head of State, but to exercise her authority through the ministers in Her government who have, in turn, been chosen by elected Members of Parliament. Laws provide criteria for whom may vote in elections, and for how frequently those elections must be held. We have a court system to interpret those laws. All that and more is our constitution.

Tony Sayers: The Report of Matike Mai Aotearoa

What is MATIKE MAI AOTEAROA.

It is the name of the Independent Working Group On Constitutional Transformation.

It sounds like a quasi-official body but it is not.  It is an offshoot of the Iwi Chairs Forum and is funded by the J.R. McKenzie Trust. It is chaired by Professor Margaret Mutu. Moana Jackson is the convenor.

Their mission was to prepare the framework for what has morphed into the He Puapua proposal.

If you are still in the dark, this is a Maori driven agenda to replace our present form of Government, using a radical restructure, that is comprised of a Maori Government and a Government for Non-Maori.

The Maori Government will hold a power of veto over many of the other government’s functions, but there is not a reciprocal power of veto for the non-Maori Government and they talk of equality.

In effect, The Government for non-Maori cannot function without Maori approval.

In short ‘Two Governments for One Country’ this sounds like a recipe for trouble down the line.

Bob Edlin: Why Collins must ignore critics who claim she is playing the race card and keep challenging the PM on the meaning of “partnership”

 

Left-wing commentators are cock-a-hoop.  Labour is up 2.7% to 52.7%; National is up 1.4% to 27%; the Greens are down 0.8%; ACT is down 0.7%.

In the latest preferred leader poll results, Jacinda Ardern is down a bit but Judith Collins’s support has gone down by two thirds.

On The Daily Blog, Martyn Bradbury posted an item under the heading Why National’s Māori segregation bashing has failed in the polls.

He seized on the responses when TV3 asked voters if they thought Labour was being separatist, and National divisive…

Ron Smith: On Constitutions

The proposed constitution for Egypt contains a good deal of contentious material and it will be interesting to see how it fares in the referendum, scheduled for this weekend.  As readers of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research know, there are also constitutional projects afoot here in New Zealand.  There are interesting parallels between the two.

In the Egyptian case, and in the context of a ‘virtuous revolution which has unified all Egyptians’, there is an early affirmation of the object of the exercise.  This is to ‘build a modern democratic state’, in which, ‘Equality and equal opportunities are established for all citizens, men and women’.  But all is not as it seems.  As in Orwell’s celebrated story, some (animals) are more equal than others.  In this case the ‘more equal’ are specifically Islamic and masculine.  On the face of it, there is to be ‘no discrimination’ between men and women (this is in the Preamble); but what are we to make of Article 10, ‘The State shall ….enable the reconciliation between the duties of a women toward her family and her work’?  This seems clearly to envisage a restricted status for women, of a kind that, lamentably, is to be found around much of the Islamic world.  More generally, there is limited constitutional protection (and much threat) for minorities such as the Coptic Christians, and any who desire to live in a modern, secular state.

Fiona Mackenzie: Who are these Maori?

With recent claims of Maori ownership of water, wind and the digital spectrum - combined with the concerning prospect of a new, race-based constitution being developed for our country - I am left pondering: Who are these “Maori”?  Who are these people who want to separate themselves from other New Zealanders while thinking they are entitled to take more than their fair portion of the public pie?

I look around at those I share my life with - in our families, our neighbourhoods, at the shops, in school, at the gym, wherever – and can’t imagine how this separatist policy is supposed to work at street level.

Richard Epstein: How Unions Violate Free Speech

Money is what drives all major election campaigns. In the run up to the 2012 presidential election, sharp knives have already been drawn on the issue of corporate and union contributions. In addressing this issue, virtually all roads lead back to the much-contested Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which made it unconstitutional for the federal government to restrict any “electioneering communication” to the public by a corporation or a union within 30 days of a primary or general election.