Rod Dixon epitomises what it means to be a kiwi.

I am very happy to help any school/organisation to run a Rod Dixon’s Kids’ Marathon.

[email protected]

The Press reports:

“Globally, Meta has invested more than US$20b in safety and security since 2016 and employs over 40,000 people in safety and security roles worldwide.”

40,000 staff!

Meta said that in the first quarter of 2025, it removed “5.1 million pieces of bullying and harassing content globally – 73.3% of which was removed before anyone reported it to us”.

TikTok said similar things in its submission to the committee: “TikTok invests more than US$2b each year in our trust and safety work globally. This supports tens of thousands of trust and safety experts, alongside sophisticated AI tools, who work around the clock, across the globe, to keep our platform safe.”

TikTok said that from the start of 2023 to mid-2025, it permanently banned more than 375,000 accounts and removed more than 1.3m videos in New Zealand for violating community guidelines. It said it removed more than 280,000 accounts in New Zealand of users suspected of being under 13.

Wait – Til Tok banned 375,000 NZ accounts?? That’s a huge number. Why?

Meta said that in the first quarter of 2025, “we found and took action on 6.8m pieces of suicide and self-injury content, including eating disorder content, on Facebook and 9.9m on Instagram, of which 98.9% and 99.1% respectively was found and actioned before it was reported to us.”

The problem with eating disorders isn’t people on Meta promoting anorexia. It is young women and girls constantly seeing images of perfect bodies, and it driving them to thinking their body needs to change, and developing anorexia.

A guest post from a reader in Germany:

Things are more complex than most bloggers (particularly those on the other side of the globe) can see.

The AfD was incorporated in early 2013. Most of the founding members were frustrated former members of the CDU (Christian Democratic Party, the one with chancellors Adenauer, Erhard, Kohl and Merkel) and by some university professors, mostly conservative economists.

Their primary focus was on the fact that Germany was giving up national sovereignty rights in favour of the EU. Their strongest point of critics was the tact that Germany had given up the Deutsche Mark in favour of the EURO.

At that time there were no serious doubts that the AfD was still on the bottom of our constitution although on the right wing of the democratic spectrum. Although some of us did see a risk that they would collect the remains of some success-less small ultra right parties that had recently gone out of the race.

But before the end of the last decade most of the former CDU renegades had already quit the AfD and also the professors were gone because of the AfD moving into a very nationalistic direction. 

Since then a new group of politicians are running the AfD show: persons like Alice Weidel, Tino Chrupalla, Bjoern Hoecke, Maximilian Krah, Stefan Brantner and others are in the driving seat. These guys advocate extremely right positions but of course not by changing the party’s program but by talking in townhalls, on beerfests and by posts in social media.

So we have three levels of political content:

1. The AfD official program which stays on the ground of our constitution (although it calls for some changes of the constitution). 

This program is far right, but not outspokenly fascist and not antisemitic. It is nationalistic and focuses on “traditional values“.

Example: „The AfD commits itself to the traditional family as a guiding principle.”

The fact that Alice Weidel is violating these traditional values by being married to a woman who comes from a faraway culture, raising children with that woman and living in Switzerland thus avoiding income tax payments in Germany looks like George Orwells „doublethinking“ to me. She sees herself as Germany’s next chancellor, but I bet that – in case the AfD will win the next federal election – the old and nasty boys in the party will keep her down. 

2. Speeches by AfD leaders during election campaigning go beyond the words of their official program but are usually staying close to the constitutional grounds. They request „immediate remigration of all foreigners“ and not only of illegal migrants but also naturalised children of previous immigrants. You could possibly interpret hidden antisemitism between the lines of some speeches, but they are not justiciable. 

There certainly is a tendency towards a revisionist view on Germany’s past such that the focus is directed towards Germany’s historical successes and that the „Third Reich“ is described as a minor slip-up which unfortunately lead to damages and sufferings in the world but they never forget to talk about those millions of Germans who were expulsed out of Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Czechoslovakia as a consequence of the war. (One of the founding members of the party named the twelve years of the Third Reich „a bird’s dropping in Germany’s one thousand years of successful history“.)

The most dangerous guy in my view is Bjoern Hoecke. 

He keeps low profile and is waiting for his chance. 

Hoecke seems to believe that he will be Germany’s next strong man.

3. The AfD base: People voting for AfD are typically low educated frustrated male persons living in small towns and rural villages. Their understanding and outspoken expectation of what the AfD will do, once they will come in power, goes far beyond the speeches and the official program of the party and it clearly leaves the constitutional and legal bottom line of our country: they request death penalty, mass deportation even of German citizens with migrational history, alliance with Russia, Exit from EU and from Nato, no support for Ukraine, stop of environmental protection programs, no E-vehicles and back to fossil fuels and many other yesterday’s things. 

It is in these circles that you also find antisemitc comments. 

I live in a village with 40+% AfD voters, their motivation ist caused by frustration, stupidity and a strong backward orientation. 

I do see a parallel to the late 1920s in this situation. We know where it lead to starting in 1933 and where it ended in 1945.

It does happen that AfD adherents display swastika flags during village festivals and sing songs from second world war (both activities being punishable by law but midnight at a village festival can be far away from civilised behaviour). 

And it ist during such events that antisemitic phrases come up regularly.

In fact I am much more afraid of these people being the AfD’s voters, than of Alice Weidel. 

But they are the base of the AfD and they will drive the right extremists within the party. 

In my analysis this is the place for a potential fascist movement to start and guys like Hoecke are pulling the ropes from behind the scene.

No AfD official (and no other official in Germany) will openly state antisemitic phrases or deny the holocaust (which would be punishable by §130 of our penal code with up to 5 years emprisonment). 

However all Jewish organisations in Germany are strongly warning that the supporters of the AfD have a strong but hidden antisemitic mindset.

Allow me a comment on your remark on the „Muslim immigration“ describing two examples:

1. I recently met a young woman from Afghanistan. She had gone to school in Kabul during the 2010s and graduated (B.A. in economy) at the American University there (before it was closed by the Taliban in the early 2020s). She had some work experience with a UN organisation in Kabul but had to leave the country when the Taliban came in power again. 

She fled to Germany in 2023 or 24 and is now trying to continue her studies with the goal of a M.A. 

If she would have stayed in Kabul she probably would be wife number four of some Taliban idiot who would possibly lock her up and torture her and get her pregnant every year.

This young lady is still a Muslim although she wears western clothes and tries to integrate into European society.

2. We have a famous (or rather notorious) islamist preacher in Germany named Pierre Vogel.

As he is a native German speaker he can tell us about the miracles of his religion in a comprehensible way. He is calling to break German laws and rules and violating common sense with each and every word under the cover of being a religious preacher. 

I do not hesitate to name him one of the worst enemies of our free society.

He did not come by immigration but was born in Germany by a German mother.

There is no way to „remigrate“ him: German constitution expressly prohibits the withdrawal of citizenship of a German born citizen (for good reason, because that was what the Nazi did to the German Jews).

In my view the base of the problem is not (at least not only) Muslim immigration: The underlying problem is religion in any of their proselytic variations:

Catholics have killed thousands or millions of people when they were running their missionaries over the world (i.e. in South America and Africa).

Muslims are terrorising Europe, North America and Africa since centuries.

US American Evangelical Christians are terrorising US population and expanding all over the so called Christian world in order to turn back time by at least two thousand years. 

Hindus (together with Sikhs and Jaina) are suppressing all other religions in India.

Any kind of hierarchically organised religion has the tendency to incapacitate the individual.

It is a setup for disaster wherever religious organisations are close to or become identical with the power structures of a state – not only in Teheran and Jeddah but also in Rome, London, Washington, Delhi and Beijing (because hardcore communism is also a religion).

I hear you talking about „human liberty combined with human responsibility“ and I agree with your view as a general rule.

But how can a free and responsible human believe in gods or other supranatural beings and push responsibility up to them?

We are still lagging behind the ideals of the philosophers of the enlightenment who were ready to abolish religion in favour of human reason (they spoke about „ratio“).

So I agree with your scepticism against Muslim immigration but I tend to see it as one appearance only of the big danger of religion in general. 

In real life praxis: How can we set up a community and state organisation that will help the young lady from Afghanistan to escape the terror of the Taliban and prevent guys like the German born islamist preacher to poison the brains of our kids and call for terror in our country and do the right thing for all cases between these two extremes?

I think, humanity will need a very pragmatical and consensual approach to this situation and we need political and social processes looking for solutions rather than principles. 

And we definitely do not have the visionary leaders in the world who could join forces and drive such a process.

Morons like Trump, Putin, the Ayatollahs and pidgin politicians like the actual German chancellor do not have the capabilities nor the balls to drive change and progress.

I have now analysed 46 of the 71 electorate races on my Patreon, and have just started to enter Auckland. So it includes everything south of the Bombay Hills, and five of the seven Māori seats to date.

This is how I have the state of play so far.

Once I have done all 71 seats, and we have all party lists submitted, I will profile who may make Parliament based on the latest public polls.

The Taxpayers’ Union has launched their Bribe-O-Meter, which tracks the cost of party promises. It is useful and depressing. To date, the total cost of party policies are:

1. National $1.94b
2. ACT 2.63b
3. NZ First $45b
4. Labour $50b
5. TOP $201b
6. Greens $237b

The site has details of the costing for each party. Boy a Labour-Green-TOP Government looks fun!

ACT have released their policy on abolishing the Waitangi Tribunal once it has concluded the historical Treaty claims, and remove its jurisdiction. over contemporary issues.

There have been 1,070 contemporary claims made to the Waitangi Tribunal. So far I can only find one of those claims (the 1995 Kiwifruit Marketing Claim) that did not find the Crown or Government had breached the Treaty. So it would seem that somewhere between 99% and 99.9% of all claims result in the Waitangi Tribunal saying the Government is wrong.

David Lupton has said that he thinks the Treaty itself should be put into legislation (as TPM advocates), not the principles. He sets out why below.

By Lucy Rogers

A few days ago I advertised a counterprotest run by NZ Against Hamas against the celebration of the events of October 7 2023 in Auckland. I can now confirm that we will also be holding a counterprotest in Wellington from 11am to 2pm on Parliament Lawn against the anti-Israel protesters. Please come along and invite anyone who might be interested.

Politico reports:

The nation’s major television networks are declining to participate in White House pool duties moving forward in response to the Trump administration’s decision to bar CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO from the White House, Fox News Washington Bureau Chief and current TV pool chair Bryan Boughtonwrote in an email to TV pool subscribers.

It is good to see Fox News withdraw from the pool, because of the ban on other TV networks. Not only is it the right thing to do in principle, it is in their self interest. You wouldn’t want a future Democratic President banning Fox News from the White House pool.

A guest post by Michael Littlewood:

It’s difficult to compare countries’ retirement income systems but, in a new report, I have tried, as I describe the differences and similarities between New Zealand and Australia. We hear a great deal about Australia, probably because most of our financial service providers are Australian-owned and their own incomes reflect funds under their management.

The comparison is worth the effort because the clamour for a compulsory version of KiwiSaver usually draws on the superficially stunning success of Australia’s ‘Superannuation Guarantee’ scheme. Compulsion has been very kind to the retirement saving industry, so we understand why players on this side of the Tasman might want to repeat the experience.

How many times have you heard the A$4 trillion mantra? In fact, superannuation schemes in Australia now own about A$4.5 trillion, while our own KiwiSaver schemes have just NZ$138 billion. The comparison is apparently damning.

However, there is much more to the story if we want to understand what’s really happening under the hood.

Australia’s compulsory system has transformed how household wealth is packaged there: superannuation is 49% of Australian households’ financial assets against 11% in New Zealand.

But it has not made households wealthier, relative to their incomes: net worth is nine to ten times income in both countries, and the median New Zealand adult ranks fourth in the world for wealth, only one place behind Australia.

Meanwhile, Australian household debt has climbed to 177% of income while New Zealand’s has been flat at about 125% for two decades.

The latest numbers show that Australian taxpayers spend almost as much on tax concessions for their superannuation contributions as they spend on the Age Pension itself. Once Australia’s superannuation tax concessions are counted, the true fiscal gap (cost to taxpayers) between the two retirement systems disappears and, over the long-term, is roughly half what the headline superannuation numbers suggest.

Poverty rates amongst the old in each country also don’t establish a ‘winner’. There are no official numbers in Australia but some reports suggest that it has about as many pensioners in poverty as here in New Zealand. So compulsion doesn’t seem to have fixed that either.

Nothing in the available data shows widespread under-saving in New Zealand so what, precisely, might a compulsory KiwiSaver’s objective be?.

However, New Zealand does need a research-led discussion about both public and private provision for retirement. We have never done that before.

My new report suggests that a compulsory KiwiSaver can wait until the data exist to justify it.

You can download the paper at https://www.pensionmatters.nz

1. More good news on attendance now that Term 2 2026 data is official.

“Nationally, 64.3% of students met the criteria for regular attendance (present more than
90% of the term). This is an increase of 5.9 percentage points from Term 2 2025.”

69.5% was the pre-covid high (2015) and it is very good to see the trend going in the right direction.

A lot of effort still needs to go into some groups – but the trend there is positive also:

“In Term 2 2026, regular attendance was 49.1% for ākonga Māori, 51.4% for Pacific students, 76.1% for
Asian students, and 66.5% for European/Pākehā students.

Regular attendance improved across all ethnicities compared with Term 2 2025. Pacific students had
the highest increase in regular attendance of 7.1 percentage points compared to Term 2 2025.
The rate for ākonga Māori increased by 5.4 percentage points compared with Term 2 2025, with
European/Pākehā students showing a 5.8 percentage point increase and Asian students a 6.1
percentage point increase.”

2. I had privilege of being on last weeks Leigton Smith podcast (his intro below).

“Alwyn Poole; Education & More.

“The first point on how to improve all things education in NZ is that, so long as any government thinks that they are the podium of truth in this area, they will fail and all improvements will be marginal (at best)”.

This was written by educational consultant Alwyn Poole.

While improvements in education are promising, there is significant room for growth.

Alwyn Poole is critical where necessary, but gives praise where warranted. 

We reveal  interesting details regarding a new school, a Covid story you won’t have heard before, and we visit The Mailroom with Mrs Producer.”

[email protected]

Forsyth Barr did a survey of businesses, and had around 1,500 responses. Someone sent me a link to the summary. Some interesting aspects:

• 51% say economy heading in the right direction and 19% wrong
• 59% say govt policy is supportive of their business and 14% obstructive
• 77% say the election outcome is important to their business
• The most favourable outcome would be a National-led Coalition that includes ACT
• The least favourable outcome would be a Labour-led Coalition that includes the Greens
• The biggest challenge is cost inflation

The Post reports:

Labour’s leader Chris Hipkins has committed to reviving the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, which has been left languishing on Parliament’s order paper since 2024, and said the party will campaign on it at the election.

This is just another version of the PIJF. The former saw taxpayers funding the media. This sees Internet companies funding the media. The impact will be to make the media even more left leaning, because you get an institutional bias towards parties that offer you money.

The Post reports:

A new paper examining the future of New Zealand Superannuation has found that, if left unchanged, the scheme could consume more than 30% of the Government’s tax revenue every year by 2065 and will be unsustainable in its current form.

The paper, published in the International Review of Public Administration in late August, was authored by outgoing National Party MP Andrew Bayly, his former adviser Leonard Hong, and Emmanuel Jo from the University of Auckland’s School of Medicine.

We must make it more sustainable.

The paper is not intended to provide an intellectual justification for means-testing NZ Super, ending its universality or dismantling the system.

Instead, it settles on gradually increasing the age of eligibility, by one month every year from 2029 until it reaches 68 years and 1 month in 2065.

According to the paper’s modelling, that would mean NZ Super’s share of Government spending would rise to slightly more than 25%, rather than more than 30%, because the increase in the eligibility age would begin earlier than previous attempts to raise it.

This is an interesting proposal. I have generally thought any change in the age must start well in the future, to give people tome to adjust. But a gradual increase of one month a year, starting in three years’ time is quite reasonable. So someone in 2032 would need to be 65 years and three months to start getting NZ Super – not a huge amount of extra time to wait.

The other major change proposed is to move from linking the rate of NZ Super to wage growth to linking it to the consumers price index, effectively tying increases to the general level of prices.

However, the paper recommends a review every five years to ensure CPI-linking did not cause the value of Super to fall too far behind wages.

We absolutely can’t afford to keep it indexed to the average wage, but having it purely linked to inflation could cause too large a gap. I tend to favour a formula say CPI +0.5%, so NZ Super would grow by 0.5% a year in real terms, but become more affordable.

A must read Facebook post from a small business owner, whose business Chloe wants to confiscate off her.

Aroha Tahau writes:

Dear Chlöe,

I have been up since 4am this morning.

It is raining. I am 16 weeks pregnant, and I have left my children at home with my partner, who will get them ready, take them to school and then come straight into work alongside me.

And strangely enough, I am still excited to go to work.

I am writing this because lately I have found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the political narrative I hear about supermarket owners, the supermarket “duopoly”, business owners and profit, with the life my partner and I are actually living.

I don’t pretend to understand every part of the economics or politics of the supermarket industry. I am relatively new to it. But I do understand what it looks like from the floor of a small Four Square in one of New Zealand’s most remote communities.

And I would genuinely like you to understand our perspective too.

Before this, my partner Carl and I lived a very different life.

We spent around a decade in France while he played professional rugby. We lived on the French Riviera. We travelled, we experienced extraordinary things, met incredibly successful people and, by most measures, had a pretty phenomenal life.

We could probably have continued that life for considerably longer.

But at some point, having a good life isn’t enough. We wanted something meaningful.

Through people we knew in the supermarket industry, including seeing the impact people such as Eric Rush had been able to have on their teams and communities, we became attracted to supermarket ownership.

Not because we thought selling groceries sounded glamorous.

Because owning a Four Square puts you in a position within a community where you can actually contribute something positive.

So we packed up our lives and brought our family home.

Our children went from an affluent French-speaking school environment to English-speaking schooling in New Zealand and then, eventually, to full-immersion kura kaupapa Māori on the East Coast. We wanted our children to know their culture, their language and where they came from.

Our first business opportunity on the East Coast didn’t work out. There were plenty of reasons for that, and it would have been very easy to pack up and leave.

Instead, we stayed.

We started working at Four Square Ruatoria.

Then, in January 2026, the East Coast flooded.

That period probably showed me more clearly than anything else why I wanted to be part of this industry.

Our own children had to leave the Coast, so we took them to Papamoa to be with family. Carl and I then left them there and returned to the East Coast, not knowing when we would see them again, because communities here had been cut off and there was work to do.

On my way back, I stopped — completely unannounced — at New Worlds and PAK’nSAVEs along the way asking for help.

The response was never, “What’s in it for us?”

It was:

“What do you need?”

“Your trailer isn’t big enough.”

“We can give you more.”

I returned to the Coast loaded with food.

We sat with whānau and local crisis teams trying to understand what communities actually needed. What people told us was interesting: they weren’t necessarily frightened about that day. Civil Defence and government support were getting food through.

They were frightened about what happened when that support stopped.

Through the Foodstuffs network and charitable support, systems were put in place to continue getting food into isolated communities. At times, transport movements costing thousands of dollars were being made to serve relatively tiny populations.

Was every one of those trips economically sensible in isolation?

Probably not.

Was it the right thing to do?

Absolutely.

And that distinction matters.

A few months later, Four Square Ruatoria became available, and Carl and I were fortunate enough to become its owners.

We now live and operate a supermarket in a community hours from a major centre.

Yesterday is a perfect example of what that means.

Our delivery couldn’t make it to us.

I called a PAK’nSAVE owner in Gisborne and explained the situation.

His response was essentially: “What do you need? Send me the list. We’ll get it ready.”

So my partner got into his truck and drove to Gisborne. We knew he wouldn’t be home until around 10pm.

Why?

Because this morning our community needed fruit and kai on the shelves.

That is the “duopoly” from where I am standing.

It is a cooperative network that means a little supermarket in Ruatoria can access supply, logistics, buying power, knowledge and support that I struggle to imagine could otherwise economically reach us.

I’m not suggesting the supermarket industry is perfect. Of course it isn’t.

Nor am I suggesting that supermarkets shouldn’t face scrutiny, regulation or be challenged to do better.

But I struggle with a narrative that reduces people like us to greedy supermarket owners interested only in profit.

Yes, I want to make money.

I want a good life for my family.

I don’t apologise for that.

I am prepared to work extraordinarily hard for it, too.

For the past three months, Carl and I have routinely started around 5am and finished around 10pm. Often the time we spend with our children is while they are with us at the shop.

One of the reasons we chose this life was because we wanted our children to see what hard work and service look like.

Three weeks after taking ownership, it was our seven-year-old son’s birthday.

He asked me what we were doing for his birthday.

I told him, “Boy, we’re doing a sausage sizzle. You can give away free sausages and kai to the community for your birthday.”

He was thrilled.

Most seven-year-olds probably wouldn’t spend their birthday helping their parents run a free community sausage sizzle.

But I looked at him that day and thought: this is exactly why we’re doing this.

He is learning that success isn’t just about what you can accumulate. It is also about what your position allows you to give.

Since taking over the store, we have invested in improving it because we want Ruatoria to have a supermarket people are proud of. We’ve painted the interior and exterior. We’re investing back into the store while carefully managing the cash flow of a young business. We employ around 20 local people.

One of my greatest ambitions is to develop our team and expose them to opportunities they might otherwise never receive.

We are looking at taking one of our young team members to Auckland for development. When we talked about it, he told me he had never really been anywhere beyond Gisborne.

How cool is it that a little supermarket can potentially open that door for someone?

Even seemingly insignificant things matter.

We bought children’s shopping trolleys for the store. That’s completely normal in plenty of supermarkets around New Zealand.

Here, they’re exciting.

A nanny recently told me she didn’t even need groceries, but the children insisted they come into Four Square because they wanted to push the little trolleys around.

That’s tiny.

But it creates joy.

And sometimes, in a small rural community, tiny things aren’t actually tiny.

One interaction in our first couple of weeks of ownership will probably stay with me forever.

An older kuia approached me in an aisle and asked whether Carl and I were the new owners.

I said yes.

She became teary and asked if she could hug me.

She told me how proud she was that their community had Māori owners of their supermarket.

I cannot put a dollar value on that.

And that is ultimately why I wanted to write to you.

When politicians talk about “the supermarkets”, “the duopoly”, “profits” and business owners, those words eventually land on real people.

They land on us.

They land on a pregnant woman getting up at 4am in the rain.

They land on a husband driving six or seven hours because a truck didn’t arrive and his community needs fresh food.

They land on two parents whose children sometimes spend their birthdays at the supermarket.

They land on the wages of 20 people in a small East Coast town.

They land on a young employee who might get on a plane and see Auckland for the first time.

And they land on an elderly kuia who cried because she was proud that people from her own culture owned an important business in her community.

I am not asking you to stop scrutinising supermarkets.

I am not asking you to believe our industry is perfect.

And I am certainly not asking you to feel sorry for us. We chose this. We love it.

What I am asking is that when we debate the future of supermarkets and businesses in New Zealand, we remember that not every business owner is a faceless corporation sitting in an office calculating how much they can extract from a customer.

Some of us live amongst the people we serve.

Our customers are our neighbours.

Our employees are people whose children go to school with ours.

When the road closes, we are cut off too.

When the community struggles, we see it at the checkout.

And when something goes wrong, people don’t call a corporate office.

They walk down the aisle and find us.

There needs to be room in our political conversation for scrutiny of profit and recognition of enterprise, risk, service and hard work.

Because if we create a country where making money through hard work is inherently treated with suspicion, or where every successful business is assumed to have succeeded at somebody else’s expense, I worry about what we are teaching the next generation.

I want my children to believe they can work hard, take risks, create employment, make money, contribute to their community and be proud of all of those things at the same time.

Those things do not have to be mutually exclusive.

So Chlöe, if you’re ever on the East Coast, come and see us.

Come to Ruatoria.

Come behind the counter. Meet our team. Drive the roads our freight travels. See what happens when the truck doesn’t turn up. Talk to the whānau who shop with us.

You may still disagree with me on plenty.

That’s okay.

But I think you might leave understanding that behind a word like “duopoly” can sit something far more human than our political debate sometimes allows for.

Aroha Tahau

Owner-Operator

Four Square Ruatoria

Roger Partridge writes:

Attorney-General Chris Bishop spoke to the Law Association on August 6. Solicitor-General Anna Adams, KC, spoke to the Legal Research Foundation last Thursday. Both answered emphatically: making the law is Parliament’s job.

I blogged previously on the speech by the Attorney-General. I had not yet covered the speech by the Solicitor-General, which is also very useful. Some extracts:

When I took silk in May this year after being appointed as Solicitor-General, following the ceremony I made a short speech. I expressed my view that the enduring ideals of individual liberty, equality and solidarity are the foundation of justice and noted the particular importance of liberty of thought and expression in the law.

I described myself as an avowedly black-letter lawyer. I said that I believed the law should deliver certainty, predictability and equal application to like cases.

The emphasis on certainty and predictability is important.

The second concerns the common law, which includes enduring and long-protected values.

If the rule of law requires predictability, the common law must develop by the extension of principle to new circumstances, not by judicial revision of settled doctrine. This is important because the common law applies retrospectively – the parties find out the law when they bring their case after the event, and this strongly demands predictability. Parliamentary law- making, by contrast, applies prospectively, and can therefore be more radical without undermining predictability.

A crucial difference.

What the Crown should not be expected to do, is invite the court to read clear statutory language in a manner that is not reasonably available on the text in order to achieve rights consistency. The architecture of sections 4, 5 and 6 of the Bill of Rights Act, and indeed our constitutional architecture, do not permit that.

Sadly, the Supreme Court is very happy to read read statutory language in an unreasonable manner.

Partridge notes:

Twenty years ago, neither speech would have been needed. Yet over the past decade, lawyers have watched the Supreme Court stray further and further outside its lane. Leading barrister and former Law Commissioner Jack Hodder, KC, told the Legal Research Foundation’s 2024 Supreme Court conference that he watched the court’s “mission creep” with “a troubling sense of unease”.

He says further:

Because they bind Crown lawyers rather than judges, the speeches themselves do not change the law. But they end any excuse for ignoring the criticism. The Court has been able to treat its critics as a handful of outspoken academics and King’s Counsel. It now faces law officers and a Parliament that has twice legislated to correct aberrant decisions, first when the court lowered the bar Parliament had set for customary title to the coastline, then with Smith’s climate change claim.

Both speeches are significant, as is the fact Parliament has twice moved to overturn Supreme Court decisions.

I wasn’t going to blog again on the Hager book as it was already clear he had so many things absolutely wrong. But three more things today are too noteworthy to pass by.

1)

Nick Mowbray has denied absolutely that he has ever donated to the Taxpayers’ Union or been inside their office – claims Hager reported as fact. The irony is that Mowbray has now donated to the Taxpayers Union as he is so outraged by the lies in Hager’s book about him. Hager may prove to be the best fundraiser the Taxpayers’s Union has ever had!

2) In the book Hager wrote:

The TU board has paid out money to deal with… at least one sexual harassment case against Williams.

So the book was crystal clear. The Board paid out money to settle a sexual harassment case against Williams.

The TU Chair has stated that she has consulted the two immediate past chairs and board members during the entire tenure of the organisation and that no one has any knowledge of any complaint, let alone a payment.

So what did Hager say on Ryan Bridge this morning:

I wouldn’t make an allegation like that, which is actually only one one line of a book. I wouldn’t make an allegation like that without having very solid information. In this case, it was two separate sources who knew about what had happened. They also knew that that had been very carefully hidden, hidden even from members of their own board, because they didn’t want the the settlement to be known about.

So the book claims the board paid out the money, and having had that refuted, he now claims it was a secret payout hidden from the board!!!

There is no capacity for a secret payout. A minimum of two directors are needed to authorise all payments from the bank account.

3) As I blogged earlier Hager claimed I broke the law and provided a National Party database to the TU for use in a direct mail campaign in 2020. I am outraged that such a serious allegation with no substance was included in the book. The TU has searched its records and found the invoice from the commercial company they purchased direct mail records from.

How anyone can take the book seriously is beyond me.