Readers who have viewed The Life of Brian (as I have done 20 or so times) will recall how The People’s Front of Judea didn’t just battle the Romans, but also The Judean People’s Front who they regarded as splitters for not being pure enough.

I have discovered the real life equivalent – the World Socialist Website. In it they savage the late Keith Locke for not being left wing enough for them. Their insults include:

• career as a capitalist politician
• defender of NZ imperialism

This is why communism has failed in every country that has tried it. They spend all their time fighting each other!

A surplus or profit that is 24% of your revenue is astonishing. Not just astonishing for a charity that is almost entirely taxpayer funded, but would be astonishing for a commercial company.

Of the top 100 companies in NZ, only seven have a higher profit as a share of revenue than the Waipareira Trust. So this taxpayer funded charity is making a higher profit than 93% of the top 100 companies in NZ.

The Herald reports:

The second-most powerful police officer in the country is on leave pending separate investigations, the Herald can reveal.

Deputy Commissioner Jevon McSkimming is being investigated by the Independent Police Conduct Authority, and the New Zealand Police. …

He was one of the final two candidates to replace the outgoing Andrew Coster as the Commissioner of Police, although he was overlooked in favour of Richard Chambers, who was appointed to the role last month for five years.

The Government will be very very pleased that they appointed Richard Chambers (whose nickname Felix means lucky) instead of McSkimming. It would be a disaster to have the person you just appointed Police Commissioner under an investigation.

Of course McSkimming is only under investigation, and no conclusions have been reported. But the fact he has been on leave for several weeks suggests they are somewhat serious allegations.

After TPM co-leader Te Pati Maori went down the conspiracy nutter rabbit hole on Q+A referring nine times to The Atlas Network (who last year spent a total of $65,000 in the Australasian region), Q+A did something unprecedented. They actually investigated and interviewed Atlas.

The quote which I so liked is:

It looks like a sort of rotary club for excited young free marketers

That is actually a great description of Atlas!

Atlas Chair Debbi Gibbs revealed their last grant to a NZ organisation was to the Free Speech Union to fight against the ban on gang patches!

Definitely watch the whole video.

Stuff reports:

Controversial US speaker and political commentator Candace Owens has had her visa application approved after initially being denied entryinto New Zealand.

Associate Minister of Immigration Chris Penk has granted Owens a visa following a request for ministerial intervention.

A spokesperson for Penk told Stuff that Owens requested intervention from the Associate Minister of Immigration to exercise his discretion and grant her a visa.

Excellent decision.

As I have said before, I think Owens is a grifter and does peddle anti-semitism. But if there are New Zealanders who want to go and hear her speak, they should be able to do so. I just hope they challenge some of the crap she says.

The threshold for not allowing someone to enter NZ to speak should be very high – as in advocating violence etc.

There were 102 murders in Sweden in the last eight months, allegedly committed by children aged 14 or younger. That is a shocking number. Why is it so high.

Well in Sweden the age of criminal responsibility is 15. So if you kill someone and are 14 or younger, you can’t be prosecuted. So the gangs hire children to kill for them.

It is worth remembering this horrific statistic, when the criminologists and others in NZ advocate we should increase the age of criminal responsibility.

More recently, the gangs have sought out girls and children with mental disabilities, as they are less likely to arouse suspicion when they close in on their target.

Lovely people.

Bomber Bradbury writes:

However, maybe, just maybe, the ongoing assassination of CEOs might be a good thing for us all?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not justifying the assassination of Brian, I’m just casually observing maybe it would be better regulated.

Like each December we have a purge of CEOs rather than just picking the odd one off.

A Season of CEO Purge. …

Like Christmas Eve each year for 24 hours we can hunt CEOs of corporations linked to human misery.

While Bomber is (hopefully) trolling with his call for mass murder of CEOs who cause human misery, I do wonder why stop there if he isn’t trolling.

We now have 100 years of data from 60+ countries the communism and marxism causes massive human misery. So if there is to be an annual CEO hunt, why not also an annual marxist hunt?

There will be downsides of course, but also upsides. Scores of junior lecturers will have the opportunity to become full professors, due to a large number of vacancies. The public sector will meet its reduction targets without expensive redundancies. The media will become more balanced, and No 48 on the Green Party List may get to become an MP!

There have been howls of outrage from the usual suspects over the decision of the Government to require what used to be NZ’s premier science fund to focus on, ummm, science.

For several years I have highlighted on KB grants which are basically taxpayer funded woke nonsense. The TU has highlighted them. The media (except The Platform) has largely ignored them. No wonder people are surprised – because the media failed to report that there was huge discontent over the Marsden Fund – including from many scientists too scared to speak out.

To refresh memories, here are some of the recent grants:

• Unearthing stories of early Māori ancestry and adaptation in Te Tai Tokerau
• Ngā Kare-a-roto: The Ripples Within – Māori Understandings and Expressions of Emotions
• It takes a village: Picturing family support for transgender young people in Aotearoa
• Manahau: In search of the original Māori firm and its philosophy of management
• Rangatiratanga and online media: understanding how Māori, create, shape, experience and share our worlds
• It binds us together”: Netball’s enduring role in the intergenerational health and wellbeing of Aotearoa women
• Taniwha: A Cultural History
• Empowering Indigenous knowledge: Decolonisation and Indigenisation of Gallery, Library, Archival, Museum and Records (GLAMR) institutions.
• Networks of power: Gender, race and class in workplace violence
• Dark nudges and sludge: big alcohol and dark advertising on social media
• Misogyny, rhetorical violence and the invisibilised entwining of digital and embodied social worlds
• Kua kī taku puku, ko te waha o raro kei te hiakai tonu: The de-sexualisation of te reo Māori domains
• Kua whetūrangihia koe. Linking the celestial spheres to end-of-life experiences.
• What Roles and Responsibilities for Aotearoa’s Non-Lawyer Advocates
• He Rau Ringa: Engaging ethnic communities in a Tiriti o Waitangi-centred framework of sustainable citizenship 
• Embracing Islam: Conversion, Identity, and Belonging in Aotearoa New Zealand
• Inclusion through difference: Towards a new ethics of engagement with Takatāpui/LGBTIQ+ parents and their families/whānau
• Prisons without Walls: from Incarceration to E-carceration in Aotearoa New Zealand
• Imagining honourable kāwanatanga: preparing for a Tiriti-based future
• Centring Pacific girl gamers’ voices in understanding how gaming contributes to their wellbeing, identity and relationships
• Me aro ki te hā o Hineahuone: the significant contribution of wāhine from Te Tai Tokerau
• Mā te tāke tika, e mau roa te iwi: with a just tax system, the people are sustained. Researching a Te Tiriti-affirming tax system design
• What are the implications of policing climate justice activism?

Now as I understand it, there is no reduction in funding for the overall Marsden Fund. They have just decided to only fund actual science (physics, chemistry, maths, engineering and biomedical) through the fund. So most or all of the above would no longer be funded by the Marsden Fund, but instead there would be more money for these sort of research projects:

• Controlled liquid metal morphologies combining Chladni patterning and frequency regulated printed substrates
• Understanding how lytic enzymes could allow drugs to breach membranes in  bacteria causing illnesses such as salmonella, and pneumonia
• Looking for new pathways in sustainable energy by investigating reactions of glucose under electrocatalytic reduction
• Investigating the threat from earthquakes in subduction zones that also rupture the overlying crust
• Why are tuatara the only known reptile not prone to Salmonella?
• Assessing insect species’ declines and shifts in foraging breadth to understand changes in plant-pollinator networks.
• Elucidating why pyroclastic gas and ash flows cause so many volcanic fatalities
• New ways of extracting and exploiting information from partial differential equations to solve pivotal problems in geometric analysis, representation theory, and fundamental physics
• Understanding how central nervous system clearance could be targeted to intervene in aging brains and those with traumatic brain injuries
• Unleashing the potential of titanium as a replacement for precious metal catalysts by affixing it to solid supports
• Understanding how temperature affects the circadian clock in legumes
• Analysing whether a newly discovered complement evasion factor is useful in developing a vaccine against Group A Streptococcus
• Analysing gastric bioelectrical patterns to develop non-invasive methods for identifying diagnostic biomarkers
• Better ways to accurately model ice thickness and basal sliding in glaciers and ice sheets

So the Government has decided to use the money from the first list to fund more of the second list. Absolutely brilliant. A win for taxpayers, a win for science, a win for New Zealand.

Now this isn’t to say that non-science research won’t be funded. It will, just not from the Marsden Fund. We still have the following:

• Most years there are 10,000 students (with significant taxpayer funding) doing PhDs, which should involve original research.
• There are 31,000 academic staff in NZ universities who are taxpayer funded, and expected to do research as part of their jobs (and they get every seventh years off to just do research)
• Taxpayers additionally fund $315 million of research every year through the PBRF
• MBIE lists 19 other funds available for research
• MSD has funding available for social science research
• Health Research Council has funding available for health research

So there is still a huge amount of funding available for social science and humanities research.

Dame Anne Salmond has been one of many lamenting this great change. She asks:

If Science Minister Judith Collins was concerned about the pertinence of some Marsden Fund grants in the social sciences and the humanities, the sensible thing would have been to ask the Royal Society of NZ (that administers the Fund) to tighten the criteria.

That was an optionI imagine, but to go down that path would require confidence in the Royal Society to be able to make better decisions. This is the same Society that tried to discipne some of its fellows for writing a letter to The Listener defending science. It is well known that the Society has gone ultra-woke, and frankly they are lucky (in my opinion) that the Government has even left the Marsden Fund with them. If I was the decision maker, I’d hand it all over to another body.

It should have been no secret to the Royal Society that there was considerable disquiet over their recent grants. Did they pick up the message of the election result and the new Government, and make better funding decisions in 2024? Nope, they actually just increased even more their funding of woke research, against hard science. So it is no surprise the Government acted to reduce the discretion the Royal Society has by abolishing the non-science categories.

Abolishing the social science and humanities panels and removing their funding is an over-reaction. It seems to have been a knee jerk response to an on-line campaign by a few bloggers about the Royal Society and the Marsden Fund.

Kind of Dame Anne to credit a few bloggers, but it isn’t about the medium. We were the only ones brave enough to speak up, and point out how ridiculous some of the grants were. Many many New Zealanders would be in agreement, including many scientists. In fact the vast majority of my correspondence about the Royal Society and the Marsden Fund comes from scientists.

I have no inside knowledge on this, but I suspect all that was needed to convince Cabinet to make changes, was to send them a list of the recent grants. I’d be surprised if a single Minister could read through some of the tripe that got funded, and think that the responsible thing to do was to do nothing.

Haimoana Gray writes:

The worst racism I have seen and experienced in my life has come from people who have believed themselves to be well-intentioned. …

“I actually saw a pākehā lady turn around to a Māori guy behind her in the checkout line and apologise on behalf of the Government for what they were doing to Māoridom – and a Filipina grandma and a grizzled orange-clad tradie nodded in solemn agreement.”

This is a very brief anecdote, so in depth analysis of the context of this would lead to making implications that the writer didn’t intend, even if they are so offensively glaring that one need to be unfathomably naive to miss them. 

There is a deep narcissism to this story – one in which a complete stranger bothers someone trying to shop, because of the colour of their skin, and assumes this person’s identity and views are exactly the same as they’ve decided every person with said skin tone are, they then proceed to rant at this stranger as if they are doing a great service.

It is stunningly patronising. Deciding on the basis of the skin colour of a stranger they they have political views that agree with you, are oppressed, and that you, a total stranger, apologising to them will help make their lives better.

This woman assumed this stranger’s whole life story based on the colour of his skin. 

Most people would understand this as textbook racism, but the author doesn’t. 

Stuff should be above publishing this, but they sadly aren’t. 

The mindset behind this person’s outburst, that Maori have no agency, drags all Maori down because it doesn’t reflect our intelligence, diversity of thought, or our ability to speak and organise for ourselves.

Such great points.

The worst thing Pakeha have done to me personally is to consistently elevate voices like Verity Johnson’s above those of my fellow Maori even when talking about Maori. 

Maoridom exists for our media commentariat as a form of cat to be saved from a tree by the Pakeha protagonists. For the purpose of making the protagonist look ‘good’.

Saviour complex.

The Herald reports:

Transport Minister Simeon Brown said public transport costs were rising, shifting more of the burden to ratepayers and taxpayers, who subsidised public transport services. In 2017, public transport users contributed 40% of the operating costs, but by 2023 this had dropped to 10%.

Public transport provides a benefit to those who use it, and a wider benefit by reducing congestion. The costs used to be shared 50/50 and that seems a fair split to me.

Those who use public transport are often wealthier, because you have to pay more to live near a public transport terminal. Having public transport users cover only 10% of the cost of their usage, is a wealth transfer from less well off to more well off.

The Listener had three historians rank the 23 PMs we have had since Seddon. They didn’t include the pre-Seddon premiers (which is a pity).

I averaged out the ratings to get a sort of combined rating and it is interesting to see how badly CR Prime Ministers do. This is the same as in Australia and US where the left leaders always get ranked higher.

Few would dispute Fraser in 1st place or Seddon 2nd. But Helen Clark in 3rd place is controversial.

Keith Holyoake in 6th place neglects he was the most successfully elected PM under the two party system.

David Lange in 10th place is over-rated., Great orator but terrible at the actual business of running a Government.

And a sort of sick joke to have one term PMs such as Walter Nash 11th and Norman Kirk 12th above John Key in 15th place – just ahead of Bill Rowling.

Robert Muldoon in 21st place is unfair. Muldoon was a terrible terrible Minister of Finance, but he wasn’t too bad as a Prime Minister.

The Daily Mail reports:

Piers Morgan was left in shock after gleeful former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz said she felt ‘joy’ following the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.  …

Morgan recalled that post with Lorenz and asked her: ‘Why would you be in such a celebratory mood about the execution of another human being? 

‘Aren’t you supposed to be on the caring, sharing left where, you know, you believe in the sanctity of life?’ 

Lorenz, all smiles, replied: ‘I do believe in the sanctity of life and I think that’s why I felt, along with other Americans, joy, unfortunately.’ 

Morgan immediately cut her off and said: ‘Joy?! Serious? Joy at a man’s execution?’

What is astonishing isn’t so much that a journalist like Taylor Lorenz finds joy in the assassination of a human being who is a CEO, but that she feels she can admit this so gleefully on television.

Morgan then pushed it further and asked her if she believed all healthcare CEO’s should be killed because of her reasoning. 

‘Should they all be killed, these healthcare executives? Would that make you even more joyful?,’ he asked. 

Lorenz laughed and then said: ‘Uh, no,’ as Morgan asked her ‘Well, why not?’ 

‘Why are you laughing? You seem to find the whole thing hilarious. A bloke’s been murdered in the street. I don’t find it funny at all.’ 

It is such a disturbing mindset you celebrate the assassination of someone, just because you don’t like the company they work for.

The NZ Herald published an article about David Seymour responding to critics of the Treaty Principles Bill.

It was open for comments and there were 169 comments made. But the Herald then turned around and deleted every single comment, and locked it so no more can be made.

Fortunately someone took screenshots of them all. As you can see there were not obnoxious racist comments. They were mainly people backing Seymour.

I’ve read all 169 comments, and remarkably few would breach normal civil discourse. the Herald could of course have just deleted or hidden that tiny minority, but instead they deleted all 169 comments, including the ones which strongly backed Seymour and had the most upvotes.

And they have the cheek to demand the Government bail them out and force Google and Meta to fund them!

Hobson’s Pledge has released a poll done by Curia on Treaty issues. It shows that despite all the heat, there is a popular simple way forward.

Respondents were asked to agree or disagree with a number of statements, one of them being:

I want New Zealand to honour the Treaty of Waitangi, but only if it can do so in a way that doesn’t undermine fundamental human rights such as equality of suffrage where all votes have roughly equal power.

This had +50% net support (62% support, 12% opposed). The net agreement by party vote was:

• ACT +63%
• National +63%
• NZF +61%
• Labour +45%
• Greens +26%
• TPM -17%

So this is a proposition that a majority of Labour, National, ACT and NZF voters agree with, and a plurality of Green voters. It shows that the vast majority do want to honour the Treaty, but not at the expense of fundamental human rights. And this tension is what has caused such a backlash.

The last Government tried to abolish equality of suffrage for a local council. TPM openly advocate against equality of suffrage. Equality of suffrage is a fundamental human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

A related issue is the notion that New Zealanders who do not have Maori ancestry only have a right to reside in New Zealand because of the Treaty. This conflicts with the UDHR which states “Everyone has the right to a nationality”. People (legally) born in New Zealand who are NZ citizens have an inalienable right to reside in NZ. It is not contingent on the Treaty.

My solution is to not pass the Treaty Principles Bill as it stands, but to amend the Bill of Rights Act so that the rights in that Act are explicitly made to be superior to any purported Treaty settlement.

The poll also asked people who should have the final say on what the principles of the Treaty are, if there is disagreement. The results were:

• Referendum 32%
• Parliament 22%
• Waitangi Tribunal 19%
• Judiciary 8%

So the principle of Parliament or a referendum deciding, where there is disagreement, is a majority view.

Other results were:

• Only 13% of respondents think the Treaty means that 50% of MPs must be Maori
• Only 26% of respondents think the Treaty means water companies must be co-governed

This week, the Government will attempt to ram through Parliament the remaining stages of the seriously watered-down Three Strikes law.  

Whether that succeeds is unclear.

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith and Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee have been running the line that they want a Three Strikes law that Labour won’t repeal – to justify watering it down so heavily that barely 30% of former Third Strikers would qualify under the reinstated law.

Poor argument for a start.  Governments should always pass the most effective law they can unless there is clear evidence of long-term bipartisanship.

Regardless, this argument is fallacious.  Labour have always been fundamentally opposed to Three Strikes or any kind of mandatory sentencing regime.  They are consistent and principled on this – even though most of us would disagree.

But no credible Labour-led Government is possible without the support of both Greens and TPM.  And the chances of them wanting to retain Three Strikes in any form is near zero.  Apparently Three Strikes is a breach of The Treaty of Waitangi also…go figure

Here is the Labour Party’s minority view of the Sentencing (Reinstating Three Strikes) Amendment Bill as reported by the Justice Select Committee.  Does this sound like a party satisfied that Three Strikes has been watered down enough?

Brooke van Velden writes:

Cabinet has agreed to introduce an income threshold of $180,000 per annum for unjustified dismissal personal grievances, meaning employees earning above that will be unable to raise an unjustified dismissal claim.

“This policy is about offering workers and employers more choice when negotiating contracts. Employers and employees are free to opt back into unjustified dismissal protection if they choose to or negotiate their own dismissal procedures that work for them,” says Ms van Velden.

“Highly paid workers such as senior executives or technical specialists can have a significant impact on organisational performance and culture. Having a poor performing manager or executive can have big flow-on effects for the entire business and increase the risk of poor culture and low morale.

A good policy. In fact prior to the ECA, unjustified dismissal procedures only applied to those on collective union contracts.

A chief executive on $400,000 a year who loses the confidence of their board should not be able got force the board to justify their loss of confidence in court.

Liam Hehir writes:

A lot of my readers really, really hate The Spinoff. In part, that’s because it has been such an effective media operation for so many years and it reflects a left leaning sensibility and demographic. Because of its effectiveness, I’ve been approached a number of times about what it would take to get a right wing version going.

The thing is, The Spinoff gained its initial reputation not by shouting its political preferences from the rooftops, but by producing work of quality and depth. Its left-leaning nature was incidental to its content, not the driving force behind it.

I’ve enjoyed a lot of the journalism from The Spinoff, but also have groaned at a lot of it. I admire the business acumen of Duncan in seeing a market opportunity for it, and building up something successful. I don’t think it set out to be a left woke media outlet – that is just the natural order for the staff it hired.

State support for media is a delicate matter. A healthy society requires a diversity of voices, and public funding can, when prudently managed, help achieve this goal. However, public funds should probably only be directed towards journalism that serves the fundamental purpose of informing the public without bias or comment, essentially, the more mundane but essential forms of journalism that focus on factual reporting and not the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice.

Consider, for example, The Side Eye, a cartoon series published by The Spinoff with support from NZ on Air to the tunes of tens of thousands of dollars a year until 2023.

The series had a lively aesthetic and often addressed things in the news. It did so, however, as what amounted to state-funded political advocacy. The series advocated for the orthodox liberal view of things with an unwavering predictability that left no room for counterargument or genuine dialogue.

A great example.

I’m happy to have taxpayers fund areas of journalism such as making sure all local courts and local councils have a reporter covering them. But The Spinoff received many millions of dollars from taxpayers for projects that resembled political advocacy or had little public interest.

Some of the projects funded were:

• $500,000 for 6×15 minutes series about a road trip
• $400,000 for 5×10 minutes about kids growing up in takeaway shops

Most of these shows got under 10,000 views per episode. It was a huge transfer of money from the many to a few.

So I wish The Spinoff well, but I don’t wish to fund them through my taxes.

A reader sent to me the proposed new standards of competence for registered nurse. Sadly few will be surprised that it has a massive focus on woke Treaty speak, and much less on oh medicine and health.

The first para:

Registered nurses in Aotearoa New Zealand incorporate knowledge, concepts and worldviews of both tangata whenua and tangata tiriti into practice. Registered nurses uphold and enact ngā mātāpono – principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, based on the Kawa Whakaruruhau framework and cultural safety, promoting equity, inclusion, diversity, and rights of Māori as tangata whenua. These concepts also relate to Pacific peoples and all population groups to support quality services that are culturally safe and responsive.

And then:

An understanding of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, kawa whakaruruhau, cultural safety and health equity is fundamental to patient safety.

I thought an understanding of bacteria was fundamental to patient safety!

Te Tiriti o Waitangi is a living document shaping Aotearoa New Zealand’s commitment to health equity, diversity, inclusivity and social justice. The Council is committed to Te Tiriti o Waitangi as the overarching framework for the standards of competence for enrolled and registered nurses, ensuring that public safety and culturally safe care are at the heart of the profession.

Am I the only person uneasy that a professional regulatory body is saying to be a nurse, you must sign up to the very politically contentious notion of social justice.

Think if (for example) doctors had to sign up to a commitment to free markets!

Can describe the impact of colonisation and social determinants on health and
wellbeing.

Why stop there? I think it should be compulsory for nurses to describe the impact of socialism on health and wellbeing. The evidence base there is very very strong.

I have published at Patreon (paywalled) the summary of the polls and fundamentals for Australia, Canada, NZ, UK and US. All incumbent Governments tumbled in November.

David Seymour announced:

Associate Education Minister David Seymour today announced Christchurch-based Mastery Schools New Zealand – Arapaki as the first new charter school set to open in term one 2025. …

“Mastery Schools New Zealand – Arapaki is a partner school of Mastery Schools Australia (MSA). MSA provided another option for students who were disengaged from the state system, and the results speak for themselves.

What are those results?

• Reading: 1.6 years progress in 1 year.
• Mathematics:1.5 years progress in 1 year.
• Spelling: Average of 1.5 years growth after 1 year.

Will be great if they can achieve the same here.