New Zealand First started the trend in April with former All Black captain Taine Randell announced as the candidate for Tukituki. He won’t win the seat but will surely be in the top ten on the NZF list and take his place in the House of Representatives after November 7^th.

The came Labour with the high ranking police superintendent Rakesh Naidoo named at number 13 on the party list meaning an almost certain parliamentary career.

Now Act are in the act with my old TV colleague Paul Henry (born Paul Henry Hopes) standing list-only but certain to be given a place which will also get him to Wellington.

I don’t regard Michael Laws as really a part of this trend because at heart he’s a serial politician who happens to share his public service with life as a media animal as well.

Henry’s move is hardly unexpected. He was a thoroughly engaging and popular keynote speaker at the Act annual conference a couple of years ago. Although he stood for National in Wairarapa in 1999 and lost narrowly to Labour’s Georgina Beyer I’d always thought he’d left National behind years ago.

His new boss David Seymour was spot on when he said at the public announcement that Henry “infects the room with enthusiasm” whenever he steps into one. Having spent the best part of a decade sharing a TV studio with him I can vouch for that. I can also vouch that if he’s not the centre of attention he tends to lose interest pretty quickly.

But I always thought that of the three great Hs of New Zealand broadcasting in the last forty years – Holmes, Hosking and Henry – he was the best of them all. His wit is swift, nimble and razor sharp. His interviewing is incisive and he’s able to jump the genres between factual and entertainment with ease - hence his remarkable success fronting shows as diverse as Breakfast, occasionally the 7pm Close-Up and more latterly Traitors and The Chase.

A political career is no great surprise because if there’s one consistency in his life it’s that he never sticks at anything for long.

Not for him the slog of a daily radio breakfast show for decades the way Holmes and Hosking did and are doing. Sure he did Radio Pacific in the morning for a while, but not for long and not with any great ratings success.

The Breakfast era was his most high profile and successful gig but he was forever threatening to leave and not come back the next year. While Pippa Wetzel and Tamati Coffey and me would be back to start the new year around the middle of January, Paul would often show up in early March. On one memorable occasion, Pippa and I even went to see him on board his yacht at Westhaven Marina to convince him that he should stay on for at least another year because the show was going so well and he was obviously the anchor of it. We succeeded but it was never going to last forever.

In the end a very timid TVNZ management let him go after he made some not overly polite comments about the name of an Indian politician named Sheila Dikshit.

That was not long after he questioned the appointment of Anand Satyanand as the Governor General by asking why a “real New Zealander” wasn’t appointed to the position.

Satyanand was born, raised and educated in New Zealand.

At the time I thought his value to the company and his day to day performance in the most demanding role on daily TV outweighed the outrageousness of that behaviour, but management thought otherwise. Oh well.

After a few years of not doing much apart from collecting the rent – he was never afraid to let it be known that he owned a few properties purchased with the proceeds of selling a radio station in Carterton in the 1990s – he re-emerged on early morning TV on Three in 2015.

Unsurprisingly he was so successful with that eponymous show that TVNZ moved on its then Breakfast hosts Rawdon Christie and Nadine Chalmers-Ross (Higgins) – and yours truly – because we weren’t competing.

Also unsurprisingly, the early morning Paul Henry didn’t last long. He quit at the end of 2016 and hasn’t had a regular daily gig since.

Even his time on the TVNZ Board hasn’t lasted long. He was appointed – probably because of his Act connections – from July 1 last year. He just made it through 12 months although his position was untenable after the news of his candidacy.

He’ll undoubtedly be in the next parliament and if Act are returned in a governing coalition he’ll probably be in cabinet. For someone who doesn’t suffer fools and gets frustrated with bureaucracy, being a fly on the wall when he meets with ministry officials will be a hell of an experience for the fly.

If Act are not in government I doubt he’ll even last the parliamentary term.

But it’ll be fun while it lasts and his maiden speech will be memorable, although it won’t have a punchline as good as the one he gave at the 2010 TV Awards at Auckland’s Civic Theatre.

In his acceptance speech for TV Personality of the Year or whatever it was called he regaled us with some stories of viewer correspondence.

He told us his all-time favourite finished with the bold type instruction “JUST DIE YOU C**T.”

It brought the house down.

But never, ever, ever have I seen a New Zealand Prime Minister holding hands with a visiting Prime Minister.

Holding hands!

Dear me, it’s what you do when you‘re stepping out with a new squeeze in the first pangs of love, or when that relationship has nicely matured and you’re having a really romantic date night.

But Prime Minister to Prime Minister ? A 75 year old and a fifty something holding hands in full public view for the world to see.

I’m sorry, but that was just weird.

Whose idea was it?

If it was supposed to be a public display of the now incredibly tight love affair between our two countries then why has a New Zealand PM never held hands with the President of China or the PM of Australia or even the President of the US?

It might just be that Modi is a tactile individual, but it’s still weird.

It was also very strange that a visiting PM held a rally where 10,000 of the Indian diaspora filled Spark Arena and where the audience reportedly spent the evening adulating Modi in a way that very few leaders have ever been adulated through history.

Those that have generated such a public response have been decidedly sinister types running North Korea and 1930s Germany.

Has a visiting Prime Minister of Britain ever held such a rally for immigrant poms? Or has a leading man from the CCP ever brought together thousands of New Zealand residing Chinese all in one place at the one time?

That’s why the whole Modi visit was just weird.

Have we just succumbed to the temptation of a market of 1.6 billion and the potential for untold riches that could come from that?

Modi spoke to the rally in Hindi. His English is described as functional rather than fluent, but what of the old saying about when in Rome? According to a reporter who was there, no translation or interpretation was available for non-Hindi speakers.

But what I found really disturbing were Chris Luxon’s speeches, both at the Kiwi India Hall of Fame Awards just before Modi arrived and at the Spark Arena Rally itself. He said on both occasions that Indians in New Zealand are “younger, wealthier and better educated.”

Thanks for backing Kiwis Chris.

Then he talked of the Indian community in New Zealand, quoting Modi himself, as being “a living bridge” to India. As if Indians in New Zealand are not that interested in the future of New Zealand but of using New Zealand as a kind of branch office for the future economic development of India.

Modi himself had said the same, according to a report on an Indian news site.

“Even while living thousands of kilometres away, India continues to appear somewhere in your heart and your daily life. India lives within you .. your body may be here, but your heart remains connected there.”

That’s a worry.

Immigration over the centuries has been about the search for a better life, about leaving the previous life behind. It’s why my ancestors came from Scotland 178 years ago. It’s why I have no significant place in my heart for Scotland these days and why I don’t remit some of my income back to distant relatives there.

Yet Modi appeared to be saying to his faithful you can live here and work here and have a life here but still do your bit for the people back home.

Who benefits from that?

And the strangest words of all from Luxon.

“We should reject outright the voices and the politicians that are wanting to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment.”

Followed by “I know I speak for Chris Hipkins as well, and Chris I want to say thank you for your support of the Indian FTA as well.”

Hmm.

Luxon’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters was coincidentally on purpose out of the country during Modi’s visit. If relations between National and New Zealand First were tetchy before Modi’s visit, our Prime Minister’s comments have only ratcheted up the tension.

And as for the $US20 billion that New Zealand companies are supposed to invest in India in the next fifteen years? Is it a commitment or an aspiration?

Modi and his officials used the c word. New Zealanders insist we’ll just try to do it.

But in diplomacy words matter. Why can something seemingly as straight forward as this not be written in easy to understand language?

Indians have been part of the fabric of New Zealand society for as long as I can remember. The ones I’ve known were often fruit shop or dairy owners, but doctors too. I’ve known them as people, like thousands of other immigrants, who came here for a better life who didn’t look upon the motherland with much affection at all.

But then majority of them were Christians.

The New Zealand-India relationship has reached a new level with the FTA and now the Modi visit and lovefest

Do we really need to be as all-in on this as Luxon wants or should we just take a more dispassionate view?

I prefer the latter.

Otherwise it’s just weird.

According to Golf New Zealand, in 2019 there were 105,967 paid up members of the country’s 390 golf clubs. That number for 2025 was 153,665, a remarkable 45 percent increase in just six years. Somehow thousands discovered a useful way to pass all that lockdown spare time was to take one’s frustrations out on a little dimpled ball.

(These numbers don’t take into account casual golfers who pay as they play, a number thought to be around 350,000 each year. Golf NZ reckons half a million of us play golf at least once a year.)

All that means more playing traffic across the country’s courses and, inevitably, more golf balls hit out of bounds into neighbouring properties.

It’s a problem highlighted in a series on Stuff about the Avondale Golf Club in eastern Christchurch. The club has been on the same site for over a hundred years as the suburbs have risen around it. Now it’s a neighbourhood of affordable homes and social housing, many home to young families.

Stuff has talked to a variety of nearby residents, inevitably dramatising the situation with lines like “it’s terrifying when we realize how close it was to our 9-week-old baby’s head. That would probably be fatal. We had a bit of a cry because were just so shocked, so frightened.”

I haven’t played at Avondale for about fifty years so don’t know the exact scenario of where the problem is but I know for certain this is a problem far from unique to Avondale.

For many years in Auckland I was a member at Akarana, established down Dominion Road in 1927 before there was any population of consequence in Mt Roskill. But as in-fill housing packed residences down the left hand side of the 17^th and 18^th holes, more and more ropey hook shots flew into the neighbours’ backyards, breaking windows and annoying those who lived there.

In 2011 a privately owned nine hole course called Brookfields Park near Palmerston North was forced to close after the organic farm next door complained about the 20,000 golf balls which had been hit onto the farm in previous ten years. In the end a District Court judge ordered the golf course to close because he said the golfing activity “constituted an actionable nuisance.”

In the end the farm bought the golf course.

I now play at Cromwell where properties on the right of the 18^th, which used to be a camping ground, are also being regularly hit by flying golf balls with some damage reported. As President of the club we’ve had to take remedial action to try and steer the direction of play away from the boundary.

We also pay to fix broken windows and damage to house walls.

It’s happened overseas as well. The Holyhead Golf Club in Wales had to spend $200,000 to build a new 18^thhole to keep golfers away from a local resident’s property after he complained and the local council backed the resident on health and safety grounds.

As I remember, the Akarana the situation was sort of resolved by moving the Out of Bounds line in around 20 metres to change the direction of play away from the fence. It’s essentially what we’re doing at Cromwell and what they’ll have to do at Avondale.

But here’s the rub. The golf club was there years before the houses arrived. Golf has been a popular participation sport in this country since the 19^th century and many of our clubs have been on the same property ever since they started. Avondale began in 1919, Akarana celebrates its centenary next year and Cromwell Golf Club has had the same real estate since 1903.

But this is not, according to law, a case of the golf courses having the upper hand because they were there first.

Under the Tort of Nuisance neighbours have a right to “the quiet enjoyment” of their property. Under the RMA though, developers and purchasers of residential land near golf courses must accept some pre-existing effects but the golf club must minimise unreasonable risks.

It’s an argument with fine balance but as was shown in the Brookfields Park case, a judge is likely to favour a home occupier.

Some golf clubs, like Avondale apparently have, might look at selling up and building a golf course elsewhere away from the problems caused by errant shots. But then other neighbours who enjoy the amenity value of living next to a golf course object to it closing down and being developed into yet more housing!

I think that’s called Catch 22.

In the end there’s only one guaranteed solution. Golfers must learn to hit the ball straight.

Yeah right.

Saturday night was a classic. The New Zealand football team lost, predictably, to Belgium by 5 goals to 1 so ending their World Cup campaign.

They began as the tournament’s lowest ranked team and confirmed that position as they were eliminated after group play without a win.

Yet somehow that result on Saturday, traditionally a slow news day, was worth 15 minutes of valuable prime time television! A quarter of an hour of the six o’clock news is an extraordinary weighting, a duration usually reserved for a significant local natural disaster or the passing of an important figure in New Zealand society – such as Sir Edmund Hillary in January 2008.

(For what it’s worth I thought the cricket test series win in England on Monday night deserved far more than just a story in the sports news but then I’m biased, and cricket is only the world’s second most popular televised sport behind football.)

But if the editorial judgement about the respective merits of those sports stories was lacking, then it was completely without rationale and logic when it came to the Michelin star restaurant awards this week.

Let’s face it. Michelin stars are, and have been since 1900, primarily a way to sell tyres. The thinking back a century and a quarter ago was that those new-fangled things called automobiles needed more tyres the further they were driven. So the Michelin marketing department dreamed up the Michelin Guide with all sorts of handy hints like where were the best places to visit, the hotels, car repair shops and fuel stations there and – the fancy restaurants.

But to give them a degree of certainty about the quality of the meals once the driver and passengers arrived at a destination the Michelin Guide in 1926 started grading the best eating houses in France with stars. The idea took on and a hundred years later New Zealand has joined 25 other nations in having its own selection of exceedingly overpriced restaurants, often accompanied by unnecessarily pretentious service, especially when the server comes to explain the origin of the ingredients and the way the chef has cooked them!

I’m staggered to realise that over the years I’ve eaten at six of the 15 “starred” restaurants. The most recent experience was only last week when my wife and I enjoyed a gift voucher at Essence in Queenstown, the only one awarded two stars. Our gift voucher was very generous but two degustation menus and just one bottle of wine meant we still had to top up the four figure bill.

It’s the kind of place you wouldn’t let Shane Jones near with his government credit card.

That night we were the only customers. We could see four working in the kitchen. As well there was a maître’d, a sommelier and a serving assistant.

The quality of the food was outstanding and the service prompt and efficient, yet I had a touch of the guilts looking at a bill which totalled not a lot less than the median weekly wage. Is any meal with wine really worth over $500 a head?

Essence would have lost money that night but according to Mike Hosking the Michelin stars mean the place is now booked out till Christmas. I can’t quite believe it but I’m not bothered following up the veracity of that claim as I can’t afford to go back with my own money!

Anyway, I digress. The only reason we have Michelin stars on some restaurants is because the government paid the Michelin people $6 million dollars to come here and award some. For a government that promised to cut waste and rein in spending that’s about as reckless as it can get.

Louise Upston, the minister responsible, claims that having Michelin starred restaurants here will result in an extra 36,000 international visitors to New Zealand, a claim that strikes me as being spurious in the extreme. No government cost benefit analysis has ever been published to quantify that claim.

When I go overseas the quality of the food I may get to eat is never anywhere near the top of my list of reasons for going. Everybody’s different but when I go anywhere it’s for the activities and the environment. Eating is something you have to do but as every country I’ve ever visited has a range of restaurants from the dirt cheap to the uber expensive, the choice to visit a particular country is never based on the restaurant fare.

Are there really 36,000 extra international visitors to New Zealand each year who think differently?

If a news service is serious about its profession it should be asking questions about the real value for money the Michelin stars provide the country. After all, $6 million is quite a bit more than Shane Jones $60,000 for his trip to Canada yet the alleged profligacy of that spend has been aggressively canvassed.

The coverage of the Michelin stars was not about journalism. It was pure promotion and endorsement. The PR people in Louise Upston’s office and at Michelin must have been laughing all the way to the table at the con job they did on 1 News in particular.

Not only were there live crosses into both the news itself and Seven Sharp on the awards night but there was a follow up story the next night on Tala, the first Samoan restaurant to win a Michelin star, and another live cross with the chef at Essence, the two star winner.

That’s a lot of publicity for what is just an awards show, a government sponsored promotion for 15 expensive restaurants who will benefit immensely from six million dollars of corporate welfare.

If there’s really a cost of living crisis why is the government spending millions on promoting restaurants that most New Zealanders will never get the chance to eat at?

The media has never been slow in its negative coverage of this government. Here was a classic case of unnecessary spending, yet they were lining up to be cheerleaders for it.

The quite remarkable announcement today of columnist, speech writer, PR agent and strategist Matthew Hooton to be the editor of Wellington’s Post newspaper has some overtures of former British cabinet minister Michael Gove becoming editor of The Spectator and one time Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne leading London’s Evening Standard.

Osborne actually tried and failed to join The Times as an Oxford graduate but later became a columnist before entering politics. Gove was a working journalist in his native Scotland, held various portfolios under David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Teresa May before going back to the laptop and the microphone to run the British edition of conservative magazine and website The Spectator two years ago.

Both of those had real life experience in the front line of politics and some in the media, but their editorial appointments, like that of Hooton, undoubtedly had quite a bit to do with their previous public high profile positions.

Matthew Hooton cheerfully admits to never having been a journalist but he has run his own small public relations company. Therefore he has some experience managing people, one of whom was Brooke van Velden. Translating that to management of a large newsroom full of disparate personalities – albeit with shrinking numbers – might present some challenges.

He’s been a serial student too with a B.Com, a BA (Hons), an MA and more recently a PhD. Impressive.

Hooton’s new role at The Post was announced at the same time as political editor Luke Malpass was promoted to Associate Editor. That’s a clue Hooten might not be doing too many of the nuts and bolts jobs an editor is usually involved with like performance reviews and pay negotiations with journalists, the hiring and firing of reporters and opinion writers, and attending weekly meetings of the company’s senior management team.

His appointment signals The Post wants to develop an editorial stance in Hooton’s shadow, using his high profile within the political and business community and a stance that, based on his writings and recent public statements, will be in tune with the paper’s very urban liberal readership.

Matthew Hooton may have worked for the National Party and for ACT but his statements in recent times would represent what so many of the Wellington professional/public servant class believe as well. He submitted on the Treaty Principles Bill saying that the Bill, which promoted principles based on the Articles of the Treaty like one government, property rights and equality for all, “misinterpreted history.”

In 2024 he called Don Brash a “fundamentally bad person” and Brash’s famous 2005 Orewa speech “despicably racist” despite working for Brash at the time and being part of the backroom coup that installed the former Reserve Bank governor as National Party leader.

That led to Brash taking a defamation case against Hooton, which is still progressing – slowly – through the courts. Hooton’s views on Treaty politics appear to have evolved considerably over the last twenty years.

If you needed more evidence of that then look no further than his maneuvering to get the always uninspiring Todd Muller installed as the National Party for a disastrous 53 days in 2020.

The Brash defamation case is the second time his words about a high profile National Party man have landed him in trouble. Back in 2018 he claimed, among other things in an article in the National Business Review, that one-time Finance Minister Steven Joyce had “blackmailed” his way to the top of politics and unfairly favoured network provider Chorus during ministerial negotiations.

Joyce took him to court, Hooton settled with an apology and legal costs but Joyce took on the NBR in the High Court where he won a retraction and $270,000 in costs. The Court of Appeal subsequently overturned that decision with the quite extraordinary explanation that “blackmail” did not mean “blackmail” and did not contain a defamatory context because it was in a robust political column!

Let’s just say that Hooton and NBR dodged one there.

So if Hooton is to be prominent in The Post as a regular opinion writer, setting the editorial direction of the paper, then it’s best he tempers his language and runs his more florid words past the company legal team first.

This appointment suggests the traditional editor’s role of newsroom manager will change at The Post. Presumably Hooton knows little about the technical aspects of the publishing world like layout philosophy or the front page teases for inside content. Maybe that won’t be his role.

I sort of know what kind of method The Post will possibly use Hooton for because years ago I was the editor of a golf magazine. In reality the owner and publisher called the shots, decided who would write and who wouldn’t and what would be on the cover. But because I was a TV face at the time the publisher thought my profile and connections with golf could help boost sales of the magazine. It didn’t.

Hooton joins the paper as it faces a real practical challenge too. It will soon be printed in Christchurch and transported by road to its circulation area in Wellington and the lower North Island. That means ludicrously early deadlines for the next morning’s paper, possibly as early as 2pm. A lot of afternoon and evening news in Wellington won’t be in the next morning’s paper.

Instead I expect the paper to pivot to more of an analysis and opinion heavy publication, without the time and deadline sensitivities of times past.

Hooton’s new job will be keenly watched by the struggling media industry. If it works, as measured by increased circulation and readership, then expect the model to be replicated elsewhere.

Might the days of a career journalist aspiring to be an editor be over?

Last month a party which rebranded as Opportunity (formerly The Opportunities Party or TOP) scored 2.8 percent in the Curia-TU poll. In April Opportunity cracked through to 3.3 percent in the 1 News Verian survey.

For a party with a seriously low profile since the departure of founder Gareth Morgan those figures in themselves are quite astounding. But the real eyebrow raiser was the Roy Morgan result released just after Kings Birthday which gave Opportunity an astounding 6 percent.

When the June Curia-TU result is out in the middle of this month there will be extraordinary interest to see if this party with unknown personnel and Marxist redistributive policy can crack the 5 percent threshold again.

If it does then it positions New Zealand as an outlier in the western hemisphere as political movements of the right elsewhere (One Nation in Australia, Reform in Britain and Rassamblement National in France) surge into positions of strength. Our political ascendant is coming from the other direction.

Because despite their photogenic leader Qiulae Wong’s assertions they could coalesce with both Labour and National, no party of the centre right or right could possibly entertain this bunch of highly educated millennial urban liberals, many of whom were born and sometimes educated overseas.

Their key policy is a reshaping of the tax system. Apparently we don’t have enough breadth and variety in our sources of tax. We only tax income, company profits, consumption and services and just for good measure we slap excise and levies on a variety of substances and services like fuel, vehicles, alcohol and tobacco.

All that means the government collected $172 billion dollars last fiscal year. The problem was they spent $183 billion, much of it inefficiently.

But Opportunity doesn’t think that’s enough. Too many people have too much property and it’s worth too much. So they intend to sting an annual 1.75 percent on all urban property values and 0.5 percent each year on rural land.

If you own a million dollar property – and let’s face it, they’re as common as muck these days - you’ll be stung $17,500 a year in land tax. Oh, you still have to pay rates and insurance on it. There’s no exemption for the family home.

But if you’re retired and have no income you can defer until you pop off and your estate will be slugged as many years as you haven’t paid. Therefore if you’re 70, have little income apart from superannuation and can’t pay the tax on your million dollar house each year but go on living till you’re 90, your beneficiaries will see $350,000 taken out of the estate.

Great eh?

If your farm is worth $3 million, a not uncommon valuation, the annual tax bill will be $15,000. Let’s hope those high meat and milk prices stay.

But do not fret. In return for having an extravagant tax bill, Opportunity want to give you a Citizens Income of $400 a week. That’s everyone. Millionaires to paupers and everybody in between. What’s more there’ll be no forms to fill in, it won’t be taxed and it’ll mean up to two thousand jobs can be done away with at MSD and those people can then move to more productive jobs!

Seriously, this is what Ms Wong told RNZ’s Guyon Espiner.

Even the Opportunity leader admits that property values could reduce at least 10 percent with this policy. That’s OK because more people will be able to afford to buy them.

A land tax, she says, will raise $28 billion. Of that $24 billion will be paid out in the Citizen’s Income.

Why doesn’t she do another rebrand and just call it the Robin Hood Party? Taking from the (sort of) rich and giving to the poor, or rather those who don’t own property. As Ms Wong stated on RNZ, some high earning individuals who don’t own property will effectively get a tax cut because if you’re making $150,000 a year but don’t own a house, Opportunity will slip you another $400 a week just to make it easier to make the rent.

Dear me.

It gets worse. She wants ALL public transport free (eat that Labour), wants to triple renewable energy resources but won’t specify what kind or who’s paying, and just to make a farmer’s day, wants to add agricultural emissions to the ETS.

Oh, and they want to initiate Citizens Assemblies to discuss issues and make recommendations to parliament. Why bother with elected representatives then?

They have identified 43 candidates so far, all of them standing in electorate seats. The party list shows Qiulae Wong at 1, Daniel Eb is number 2 and Kayla Kingdon-Bebb at 3. They were born in Fiji, South Africa and Canada.

Daniel Eb is a farmer from Kaipara and the Opportunity Deputy Leader. Kayla Kingdon-Bebb is “an environmental policy leader” who is CEO of WWF, the World Wildlife Fund.

Oh, and she was one of the co-authors of He Puapua, the Nania Mahuta requested action plan to achieve the goals of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Say no more.

.Qiulae Wong says Opportunity is starting its policy from evidence rather than ideology.

This seventy-something property owning superannuitant can’t quite rationalise that.

Sadly the Opportunity polling trajectory says they could be part of any Labour led coalition government.

National surely wouldn’t touch them with a long and very slippery barge pole would they?

But if we look on the bright side, Te Pati Maori would be on the cross benches.

From the New Zealand Herald website, posted at 4.21 pm on June 11:

Former commissioners defend Labour police candidate Rakesh Naidoo’s integrity, question political motives and fear for ‘damaged’ police reputation

Underneath the headline was a photo of the Police Commissioner Richard Chambers.

So the story is about former Police Commissioners defending Rakesh Naidoo’s integrity and questioning the political motives of those criticising the reality he didn’t tell his boss till way too late in the selection process, right?

Wrong.

Here’s the opening line of the story:

Two former Race Relations Commissioners are throwing their support behind police Superintendent Rakesh Naidoo, who is at the centre of a political feud after his selection as a Labour Party candidate.

Race Relations Commissioners?

There’s a couple of things wrong with the framing of the story. Until the list announcement, nobody ever questioned Naidoo’s integrity in his work as a Police Superintendent dealing with iwi and ethnic communities, a role in which he would have been in contact with Race Relations Commissioners.

Secondly, the two former Race Relations Commissioners (RRCs) quoted were and are never going to say anything in favour of a National Party political attack on a Labour list candidate.

Gregory Fortuin, a South African was Honorary Consul for his homeland in the late 1990s after emigrating here. He was appointed RRC in April of 2001. He resigned under questionable circumstances eighteen months later after it was found he was trying to mediate between various factions of the left wing Alliance Party - at the time in coalition with the then Labour led government. What’s worse Fortuin thought he could do that political work without compromising his role as a government commissioner!

Let’s just say he’s an affirmed leftie.

The man who succeeded him was Joris de Bres who came to the role after previously spending 16 years at the Public Service Association including seven years as head of industrial relations.

In other words, an avowed unionist and supporter of the Labour Party.

There is no issue with Fortuin and de Bres holding their political views. They are now private citizens and can think whichever they want to. But by only quoting their views the story is hopelessly unbalanced.

Would it not have been fair for some former Police Commissioners to be asked for their views as well? Mike Bush perhaps, or Peter Marshall - both of whom were appointed to their roles after Fortuin and de Bres were appointed to theirs.

Perhaps your correspondent’s severe misgivings about the New Zealand Herald headline and unbalanced story telling were noted by others and subsequently, the site’s editors. The story was posted at 4.21 as the lead story on the homepage. An hour later it was off the page completely and only able to be found on the site through a search.

The Naidoo story has been a genuine political controversy since the Labour list was announced earlier in the week. Naidoo’s reluctance to advise his Commissioner until just a few days before the announcement is quite extraordinary.

Years ago, two previous holders of high profile public roles, Don Brash and Tim Groser, announced they would be National Party candidates while in their jobs as, respectively, Reserve Bank Governor and Ambassador to the World Trade Organisation. At the time they were both castigated by Labour for their change of career direction.

As Liam Hehir has reported, the Trade Minister at the time Jim Sutton talked of “a sense of betrayal” by Groser in 2005 and asked for his resignation as ambassador.

Helen Clark called Brash a “loser” and “right on the border of ethics” in 2002 when he left the Reserve Bank to become a politican.

A quarter of a century on, Clark is rewriting history. This was her on X two days ago.

Both Don & Tim held senior public sector positions at the time; Don was Reserve Bank Governor & Tim was senior at MFAT. There was confidence by the Govt of the day in their professionalism. Neither faced the kind of attack that this senior police officer now faces.

Really Helen?

As the old saying goes nobody does hypocrisy like the Labour Party.

That’s because the existence of seven such constituencies is guaranteed through the next two elections and there won’t be a review of their number and boundaries until at least 2030. Now that the census has been abandoned and replaced with otherwise available government data, there’s no guarantee the number of seats will change for 2032 either.

So with that in mind a woman named Katrina Smit, who lives in the Hutt Valley and has been on the Māori roll for over thirty years voting in the Ikaroa-Rawhiti electorate, has decided to switch to the general roll and vote in Hutt South, a seat currently held by National Party heavyweight Chris Bishop by a slender 1332 votes.

Her reasoning is that the seven Māori electorates will be won by either Labour or Te Pati Maori anyway and thus be part of a potential left leaning (almost to the floor!) coalition government.

What that coalition then needs is for many of the marginal general seats to swing to the left too. To help that cause, as many good Māori lefties as possible should get off the Māori roll and join a general seat, especially the close ones like Hutt South, Mt Roskill, West Coast Tasman, New Lynn and Banks Peninsula.

Ms Smit tells us in her opinion piece for the e-tangata.co.nz website that there were 4416 Maori roll voters registered inside the boundaries of Hutt South last election. If a sizeable chunk of them shifted to the general roll to vote in Hutt South the task of rolling Chris Bishop and replace him with Labour’s Ginny Anderson would be a lot more straightforward.

The plan is quite brilliant in its simplicity and if it’s well organized could be stunningly effective. But it is surely another reason to put the question of the Māori seats firmly in the headlights.

The essential folly of the seats is that they are based on the number of Māori in the population, not on the number of Maori who want to vote in those seats. Therefore the average number of voters in the seven Maori electorates is 43,335. The average number enrolled in the general seats is 51,488.

The plan hatched by Ms Smit to get more of her left leaning fellow travellers to ditch the Māori roll for the general in marginal seats – they have till August 6 to do that – could reduce the average number in the Maori seats even more.

That’s not fair to those on the general roll because the difference in the size of a Maori electorate and a general seat mean a vote in one of the 64 general seats has a value equivalent to only 82 percent of one in a Māori electorate anyway.

And that’s the issue. Not all votes are of equivalent value, which I would have thought was fundamental tenet of a democratic system.

The rider is that we have MMP and thus the proportionality of parliament is based on where our party vote goes. But the increase in electorates from 65 to 71 since MMP came into effect three decades ago means many parliaments since 1996 have included extra MPs over and above the designated 120. Indeed the current parliament has 123 MPs because of the number of seats won by Te Pati Maori is out of proportion to its party vote.

We won’t know how successful or otherwise this campaign by Katrina Smit will be. But with enthusiastic backing from the state broadcaster RNZ which takes great delight in republishing material from the activist website e-tangata.co.nz there will surely be some impact.

This attempted manipulation should be a warning sign to the National Party. One of their key people is under enough threat of losing his seat and probably his place in parliament anyway without this kind of campaign coming out of the woodwork.

Maybe his lacklustre leader could use this scenario to finally get the National Party to take a firm stance on the abolition of the Māori electorates and put their existence to the country in a referendum.

But then pigs might fly.

I’ve been with Labour and National and Act but in 2023 I went with New Zealand First. That’s because they promised us a proper inquiry into the covid response and that they would ensure if treaty principles were not to be defined, they would at least be taken out of most legislation.

The Covid Royal Commission Phase Two was a complete damp squib which New Zealand First lost control of when an Act minister set the Terms of Reference. Treaty Principles clauses remain in the vast majority of our recent legislation, albeit somewhat watered down but written in such a way that activists in the judiciary will probably find a way to incorporate them into jurisprudence.

So New Zealand First was really struggling to keep me on board anyway. Winston Peters latest outburst means I’ll be throwing them into the briny.

The idea of buying back the Bank of New Zealand is just preposterous.

Crazy.

Off the planet loopy.

For a start it’s not for sale.

Even if it was it would cost the New Zealand Government between ten and fifteen billion dollars. That’s a back of the envelope calculation of the BNZ’s worth based on its current owner – the National Australia Bank (NAB) – reporting an annual profit of its New Zealand operation of between 1 and 1.5 billion dollars each year. A company’s worth is based on a multiple of its annual earnings and in the banking industry an earnings multiple of 8 to 10 is considered normal.

So let’s go at the cheap end of the estimate. This country doesn’t have ten billion dollars to buy a bank. The money would have to be borrowed. We can hardly afford the 9 billion annual interest on our current borrowings.

If, God help us, Winston Peters harebrained scheme ever came to some sort of reality and the government decided it wanted to buy the BNZ but the NAB wasn’t selling, then the only option would be to nationalise it – or to put it more crudely, steal it.

Any government that indulges in that kind of behaviour quickly becomes one you avoid doing business with.

Yes, there is a long and storied history with the BNZ. It was founded by privateers in 1861 and was immensely successful for thirty years before it over-extended itself and needed its first government bailout in the 1890s. That led to Richard Seddon’s Liberal government taking a substantial ownership role which the post-World War Two Labour government took one step further and completely nationalized the bank in 1945.

It was successful in this time of heavy regulation and interest rate controls. But when the Rogernomics revolution of the 1980s happened the BNZ was in boots and all, despite it still being government owned.

Inevitably poor management and overly ambitious lending put the BNZ back in a hopeless financial position. NAB came to the rescue and took a majority share in 1989. With more losses exposed after the 1990 election Jim Bolger’s National government sold the rest. The total deal cost NAB about $1.48 billion.

Predictably the BNZ has been an outstanding investment for NAB. But it’s run by bankers who’re employed by shareholders.

Governments should not own banks. Exhibit A - Kiwibank. It’s so undercapitalized and so small the government itself doesn’t even bank with it. It uses Westpac.

Mind you there are lots of things governments should not own. Radio stations and TV networks and farms and electricity retailing companies come to mind.

But banking should be top of the list of industries that governments have no business in. In a time of a smaller and more regulated economy maybe there was a case. But that era is not coming back.

New Zealand consumers have massive choice for their retail banking. Sure the big four dominate with an 85 percent market share but whose fault is that?

We must be happy with the service we get otherwise we’d be off to Kiwibank or TSB or SBS or Heartland or Co-operative or even Rabobank. With BNZ, ANZ, Westpac and ASB that’s ten choices we have to save our money with.

I call that competition.

If the government is serious about being in the banking game then sell a decent chunk of Kiwibank, keep a controlling but not majority stake, have it properly capitalized and make it more competitive with the Big Four. It won’t happen immediately but until there’s some serious investment in Kiwibank it won’t make much of a dent in customer share.

So Winston, this plan to buy back or nationalize or steal the BNZ from the Aussies is a pipe dream. We can’t afford it and it’s just bad business.

I do though like your compulsory Kiwisaver from birth idea with the $1000 kick start, even if the second part of that has been tried before. Maybe you can convince your next coalition partners to invoke that policy.

Don’t think I’ll be voting for you again though.

On second thoughts it may not just make your eyes glaze over. It could also make you bloody angry about how some local government political activists, aided and abetted by their bureaucrats, have conned their voting public to adopt the ridiculous voting system known as Single Transferable Vote or STV.

I raise the subject again after the results of a recent by-election at the Dunedin City Council were finalised this week.

There were fourteen candidates to replace the late Jules Radich, a sitting councilor and former mayor who died suddenly earlier this year.

The most popular candidate was another former mayor Aaron Hawkins. Of all those who voted, and there were only 31,629 of them or 33.31 percent of those eligible, Hawkins received 7740 first preferences. Jo Galer was number 1 on 5527 voting papers and in second place.

To me that says Hawkins was the preferred choice of more voters than anyone else and should have been elected.

But no. Using the STV system Jo Galer has ended up winning the by-election and will take her seat at the DCC table next week.

There’s a real irony here. When Hawkins became mayor in 2019 he was second in the popular vote behind conservative Lee Vandervis. Hawkins was about 400 votes behind Vandervis when the number 1 rankings were collated. Vandervis was the city’s most popular choice to be mayor seven years ago but was shafted from the top job by the vagaries of STV.

And just how exactly does STV work?

I wish I could explain it in plain and straight forward language But even the stv.govt.nz website says this: “Votes are counted using specially developed computer software. Because parts of votes are transferred, the counting is too complex to be done by hand.”

That’s just extraordinary.

There are numerous local authorities in this country using this voting system which is essentially opaque and because of its complicated nature I believe it lacks real integrity.

I’ve read various academic and encyclopedic explanations in support of STV.

The basic premise is that STV is a much fairer system because one party or one person cannot dominate an election and that a successful candidate will have at least some modicum of support from people whose first preference was for someone else to have the job.

There is a degree of logic in that but democratic cycles in New Zealand are short and simplicity is always the best answer to any problem. If we have an easy to understand system whereby he or she with the most votes is the winner then that winner can easily be voted in or out in three years depending on their performance in the role.

Wellington City Council has used STV for most of this century. Arguably the most politically aware city in the country voted by referendum in 2002 to adopt STV and reinforced that with another public vote six years later. The system gave them Tory Whanau.

Its popularity in the capital is probably based on the politically active left knowing that even if their support was not enough for a win in a straight out race, having enough of their candidates on a list that need to be ranked by voters will help those candidates get elected when the computer gets to work.

The big issue with STV is its complication. Any election outcome determined by a computer programme that includes fractions of votes can surely not be regarded as a system with integrity.

One academic paper I read suggested even some candidates cannot understand the system. Isn’t that a significant issue?

At last year’s Local Body Elections 15 out of 78 councils used STV. They’d adopted that system either through a public poll, as was the case in Wellington, or because the councilors themselves voted to do it, as happened at the Otago Regional Council in 2023. The then left leaning ORC decided that they could consolidate that block using STV for the 2025 and 2028 elections.

The move completely backfired as the ORC political composition shifted significantly to the right in 2025 – mainly because a ward in the more populous hinterland was installed to replace one in Dunedin – and by 2028 the ORC is likely to be out of existence anyway in local government re-organsiation.

Those changes will require a new Local Government Act to replace the one that the Helen Clark regime put in place in 2002.

Here are two suggestions for that new legislation:

1. Make the duties of local government prescriptive. Tell them what they have to do and nothing more. Remove that woolly clause about the current purpose of local government providing “for local authorities to play a broad role in promoting the social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being of their communities, taking a sustainable development approach.”

2. Insist that all local authorities adopt an easy to understand “most votes win” system, otherwise known as First Past the Post.

If it’s good enough for all our local electorate races in the general election to be decided this way then it’s good enough for local government too.

I sort of feel sorry for Aaron Hawkins this year. But then he shouldn’t really have become mayor seven years ago.

We now have 26 provincial rugby unions.

Currently there are 78 local authorities – 12 city councils, 53 district councils, Auckland Council, Chatham Islands council and 11 regional councils.

It used to be worse, much worse.

Up till 1989 we had about 850 local authorities and special purpose bodies. Remember borough councils, county councils and catchment boards? Our biggest cities were ridiculously separated. I bought my first house in the Christchurch suburb of Burwood but paid rates to, and had my rubbish collected, by the Waimairi County Council.

The Coalition Government are keen to condense our local authorities yet again. There’s no specific total in mind but it seems the relevant cabinet ministers Simon Watts and Chris Bishop want to land on a number somewhere between the old provincial governments and today’s local rugby unions. In other words they want local government reduced to about twenty unitary authorities.

But is reducing the number of local authorities really the answer to cutting the exorbitant cost of local government? The current rates rises all across the country are just not sustainable.

But the biggest single cost on local government is staff wages and salaries. Currently 59,700 staff across those 78 local authorities are paid $3.85 billion a year. That’s 21 percent of all council operating expenditure and cost every New Zealander about $74 a week.

As in the central government bureaucracy, the number employed in local government has ballooned in recent years. In 2021 there were 52,200 workers. So there’s been a 14 percent increase in just four years.

A reduction from 78 councils to say 20 will not reduce staff numbers by three quarters, but there will most certainly be no need to have nearly 60,000 people on the books.

The engineers, the planners, the inspectors, the scientists and many department managers will stay. But reducing the number of CEOs by three quarters would likely save nearly $20 million alone.

Then there’s the HR, Communications and, dare they be mentioned, the Climate Change departments. A scalpel to the head count there is well overdue.

So on the surface taking the clippers to local government authorities and amalgamating them sounds like a straightforward way to save money. But we know it’s not that simple.

The Auckland Council, a 2010 merger of Auckland City, Manukau, Waitakere, North Shore, Papakura, Franklin, Rodney and the Auckland Regional Council is not a poster child for efficiency or cost saving. It alone employs about 14,000 people.

Where I live in Central Otago we’re most likely to be folded into some province-wide conglomerate, with the Head Office in Dunedin administering a population of about 250,000.

Except that the Otago hinterland could not be more different, economically, politically and culturally, than its big city cousin. Dunedin is hard core Labour. The country is National.

The redeeming factor is that if the elected representatives are proportionately spread across the province’s population then there will be more non-Dunedin councilors than those based in the city.

This scenario is likely to be repeated and questioned the length and breadth of the country. Will existing local authorities really be able to merge into enlarged, meaningful and efficient new councils?

For instance, can Wairarapa, with four current authorities from Tararua to South Wairarapa be merged into one and be economically viable? Or will it have to join greater Wellington with whom it has little in common?

Nelson and Marlborough merged their rugby teams to form the successful Tasman Makos. Can the area’s district unitary authorities follow suit?

In many respects the big problem with local government is not the number or size of councils per se but what they’re expected to do and what they can take upon themselves to do.

That stems back to the Local Government Act of 2002 which gave councils carte blanche to essentially do whatever they want.

Section 3 (d) of the Act provides for local authorities “to play a broad role in promoting the social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being of their communities, taking a sustainable development approach.”

Therein lies the real issue.

If Simon Watts and Chris Bishop want to reel in the local government runaway train then they have to significantly change the legislation to make it far more prescriptive.

That means laying out what councils can and must do - and no more.

Maybe they can work on that if they’re re-elected but I doubt Watts especially, as the Local Government Minister, has the stomach or the courage for such a transformation.

In the meantime councils themselves have to work out with their neighbours who they’ll join forces with for the 2028 local body elections. Otherwise Watts, Bishop and their bureaucracy will do it for them.

That is not a good idea.

The locals better get on with it, but expect pushback and arguments no matter what’s finally decided.

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

About a month later Craig Stobo arrived as the new chairman of the FMA, the body responsible for regulating the country’s financial markets and financial services, including the consumer relations of banks and insurance companies.

DISCLAIMER: I’m acquainted with Craig Stobo. We’re both from Oamaru and went to Waitaki Boys High School, although not at the same time. My father taught him at Oamaru Intermediate School and we lived in the same neighbourhood in Auckland.

Stobo is one of the country’s foremost economic and financial brains. For a time he was CEO of BT Funds Management and later invented the concept of the tax efficient Portfolio Investment Entity or PIE which is now the foundation of Kiwisaver schemes and other managed funds. His contribution to the New Zealand economy cannot be overstated.

With a variety of other experiences in financial markets and in company governance he was therefore a logical appointment to chair the FMA for a five year period from May of 2024.

His Chief Executive at the FMA was Samantha Barrass. She’s 59, was born in Britain, came to live in New Zealand from the age of 7, was educated to graduate level here but went back to Britain in her early twenties and lived there until returning to New Zealand for the FMA job in 2022.

When she came back she told the New Zealand Herald that she was “keen to push forward the regulator’s te ao Māori (the Māori world view) strategy and to make sure it is embedding the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi in what it does.”

So when Craig Stobo spoke as a private citizen to the Justice Select Committee in early 2025 hearing submissions on David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, the legislation that set out to actually define just what were those principles Ms Barass was looking to embed at the FMA, it’s not hard to surmise that she was not best pleased.

There were though some red flags waving before and soon after Craig Stobo was appointed to the role. He refused to have a routine credit check done on him because he maintained he was not an employee and his personal finances were of no concern to the FMA. The Commerce Minister at the time Andrew Bayley let his appointment go ahead anyway.

Then only three months after becoming the FMA Chair he took up a director’s job at a small mortgage company called Indi, a company in direct competition with the banks that the FMA oversees consumer relations for. He disclosed the conflict of interest but took over a year before finally relenting and resigning from that role. He should never have taken the job in the first place.

(Intriguingly he had to resign as a director of fund manager Elevation Capital because it’s subject to FMA regulation. Elevation’s founder Chris Swasbrook is still a director there – and still on the Board of the FMA. Hmm.)

Craig Stobo has made regular media appearances for years. When he took up the FMA position he continued to do so, including with his old Otago University debating team-mate Michael Laws on The Platform.

Being Chair of the FMA is a part time, albeit well paid, job. Stobo wasn’t in it for the money. Having been a fund manager and company director he’s no doubt worth a few million. But when you become Chair of a government body do you lose your ability to speak freely, to express your opinions? Especially if they’re opinions at odds with your CEO and of other board members, the majority of whom were appointed by the previous Labour government.

Board members of Government entities are expected to act in a politically neutral manner. The Code of Conduct for Crown Entity Board Members says “we conduct ourselves in a way that enables us to act effectively under current and future governments.”

It doesn’t say anything about past governments, of which Stobo was highly critical, while praising the current one. (It is accepted though the most recent past government could be the backbone of our ruling class in the not too distant future.)

It seems on the surface that when Stobo became FMA Chair he didn’t change his life routine at all. He accepted another director’s role. He kept talking to Michael Laws. He made speeches where he expressed his opinions.

Is it appropriate that he did so? According to the Code of Conduct that he signed up for, the answer must be no.

But here’s the key question. Did his conflicts of interest and his personal opinions affect his output of work regulating the governance of the FMA? There is precious little evidence to say that it did.

His CEO obviously didn’t like him so somehow inside the FMA she allowed the rumour machine about an inappropriate relationship to become very well oiled. Even where I live I heard some exceedingly unsavoury stuff about Craig Stobo which I didn’t want to believe. Thankfully I now don’t have to.

In the end the Wellington wokerati got him. A combination of other board members who went to the Minister, and the Te Ao Maori pushing English CEO did for him. A (female) KC was hired to investigate. Thankfully she dismissed the rumours of him having a bit on the side with a former FMA staff member but decided his public statements were incompatible with the direction the CEO wanted to take the FMA.

Stobo had been reluctant to take the job in the first place. He agreed because as the KC reports “there was a rush to appoint him due to the delay in identifying a suitable Chair.”

The FMA will be the loser in this. Does it really need to have its Matangirua strategy? Wasn’t it part of the Coalition agreements that such activity was no longer needed in government entities?

Yet it happened under the watch of a National Party Commerce Minister.

A man as experienced in the finance industry as Craig Stobo appeared to be a great fit to Chair our market regulator. In his time there he asked very relevant questions, albeit in a very public manner, about about the work it was doing.

Stobo’s departure will now put extra public scrutiny on the FMA’s performance. That’s no bad thing.

All up that sounds like a pretty separatist model. Are Maori , or those who call themselves Maori, really that different from the rest of us when it comes to market investing?

About a month later Craig Stobo arrived as the new chairman of the FMA, the body responsible for regulating the country’s banks and insurance companies.

DISCLAIMER: I’m acquainted with Craig Stobo. We’re both from Oamaru and went to Waitaki Boys High School, although not at the same time. My father taught him at Oamaru Intermediate School and we lived in the same neighbourhood in Auckland.

Stobo is one of the country’s foremost economic and financial brains. For a time he was CEO of BT Funds Management and later invented the concept of the tax efficient Portfolio Investment Entity or PIE which is now the foundation of Kiwisaver schemes and other managed funds. His contribution to the New Zealand economy cannot be overstated.

With a variety of other experiences in financial markets and in company governance he was therefore a logical appointment to chair the FMA for a five year period from May of 2024.

His Chief Executive at the FMA was Samantha Barrass. She’s 59, was born in Britain, came to live in New Zealand from the age of 7, was educated to graduate level here but went back to Britain in her early twenties and lived there until returning to New Zealand for the FMA job in 2022.

When she came back she told the New Zealand Herald that she was “keen to push forward the regulator’s te ao Māori (the Māori world view) strategy and to make sure it is embedding the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi in what it does.”

So when Craig Stobo spoke as a private citizen to the Justice Select Committee in early 2025 hearing submissions on David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, the legislation that set out to actually define just what were those principles Ms Barrass was looking to embed at the FMA, it’s not hard to surmise that she was not best pleased.

There were though some red flags waving before and soon after Craig Stobo was appointed to the role. He refused to have a routine credit check done on him because he said he was not an employee and therefore his personal finances were irrelevant. The Commerce Minister at the time Andrew Bayley let his appointment go ahead anyway. Then only three months after becoming the FMA Chair he took up a director’s job at a small mortgage company called Indi, a company in direct competition with the banks that the FMA oversees on matters of consumer relations. He disclosed the conflict of interest but took over a year before finally relenting and resigning from that role. He really should never have taken the job in the first place.

(Intriguingly he also had to resign as a director of fund manager Elevation Capital because it’s subject to FMA regulation. Elevation’s founder Chris Swasbrook is still a director there – and still on the Board of the FMA. Hmm.)

Craig Stobo has made regular media appearances for years. When he took up the FMA position he continued to do so, including with his old Otago University debating team-mate Michael Laws on The Platform.

Being Chair of the FMA is a part time, albeit well paid, job. Stobo wasn’t in it for the money. Having been a fund manager and company director he’s not short of a dollar. But when you become Chair of a government body do you lose your ability to speak freely and to express your opinions? Especially if they’re opinions at odds with your CEO and of other board members, the majority of whom were appointed by the previous Labour government.

But Board members of Government entities are expected to act in a politically neutral manner. The Code of Conduct for Crown Entity Board Members says “we conduct ourselves in a way that enables us to act effectively under current and future governments.”

It doesn’t say anything about past governments, of which Stobo was highly critical while praising the current one. (It is accepted though that the most recent past government could again be the backbone of our ruling class in the not too distant future.)

It seems on the surface that when Stobo became FMA Chair he didn’t change his life routine at all. He accepted another director’s role. He kept talking to Michael Laws. He made speeches where he expressed his opinions.

Is it appropriate that he did so? According to the Code of Conduct that he signed up for, the answer must be no.

But here’s the key question. Did his conflicts of interest and his personal opinions affect his output of work regulating the governance of the FMA? There is precious little evidence to say that it did.

His CEO obviously didn’t like him so somehow inside the FMA she allowed the rumour machine about an inappropriate relationship to become very well oiled. Even where I live I heard some exceedingly unsavoury stuff about Craig Stobo which I didn’t want to believe. Thankfully I now don’t have to.

In the end the Wellington wokerati got him. A combination of other board members who went to the Minister, and the Te Ao Maori pushing English CEO did for him. A (female) KC was hired to investigate. She dismissed the rumours of him having a bit on the side with a former FMA staff member but decided his public statements were incompatible with the direction the CEO wanted to take the FMA.

Stobo had been reluctant to take the job in the first place. In the end he agreed because as the KC reports “there was a rush to appoint him due to the delay in identifying a suitable Chair.”

The FMA will be the loser in this. Does it really need to have its Matangirua strategy? Wasn’t it part of the Coalition agreements that such activity was no longer needed in government entities?

Yet it happened under the watch of a National Party Commerce Minister.

A man as experienced in the finance industry as Craig Stobo appeared to be a great fit to Chair our market regulator. In his time there he asked very relevant questions, albeit in a very public manner, about about the work it was doing.

Stobo’s departure will now put extra public scrutiny on the FMA’s performance. That’s no bad thing.

But exactly when this relic of the analogue age, brought into existence before TV3 was even on air, will actually be disestablished is unclear.

You’d think a short and concise piece of legislation would take care of a body that hasn’t been needed for years.

But no. Apparently changes have to be made to the Criminal Procedure Act as well as the Broadcasting Act before the BSA’s demise can happen.

Some are thinking it may be 2027 before it’s finally put out of its misery. Oh dear.

Will we miss it? No. Will the media companies, and their managers, producers and governors be relieved? Not especially because they knew that the BSA’s threshold for upholding a complaint was pretty high and the penalties were usually so inconsequential as to be meaningless.

Ironically the day after the announcement about the BSA’s demise, it issued a damning finding on a 1News report about a Donald Trump comment. The broadcast in question, in which a Trump quote was taken out of context and edited to give a meaning at odds with what Trump actually said, is not that far away from what the BBC did in its now infamous Panorama story about the January 6^th riots and the “fight, fight, fight” phrase.

Donald Trump is suing the BBC for 10 billion dollars.

1News has to read an on-air apology.

TVNZ should be thankful that Donald Trump doesn’t watch the news in New Zealand!

If the BSA goes out of existence – although any Labour led government in 2027 will surely give it a stay of execution – then who will make judgements like the one above?

There is the Media Council, a voluntary and self-funded outfit that the likes of TVNZ, RNZ and the NZME and Mediaworks radio stations will probably join. The Media Council has a record of not upholding many of the complaints made to it. Its latest raft of decisions, released on April 20^th, upheld just three of the eleven cases. One of them was the Winston Peters complaint to Stuff about the inter-island ferries.

The other eight cases in this tranche were either not upheld or had “no grounds to proceed.”

This suggests the Media Council also sets a high bar for complaints.

But in any event it only rules on matters that may be affected by its twelve principles. The most important of these is Principle 1 – accuracy, fairness and balance.

Here’s the rub though. The Media Council doesn’t punish the media organisation that gets things wrong. The only punishment incurred is the potential embarrassment of having other media outlets publish the Media Council decision.

But the management and directors of broadcasters, particularly those owned by the government, now need to really step up to the mark. Those companies should be best at self-regulating, but their shareholders, through the board, must ensure there is the appropriate capability to carry out the necessary discipline.

It’s capability that was sadly missing when Paul Henry made not just a racial slur, but a factually incorrect one, about former Governor General Anand Satyanand. It was also missing when the (still current) Breakfast host Chris Chang pointed a toy gun at a Donald Trump toy and made out as if to obliterate it.

The government as the owner of TVNZ, and RNZ, has to ensure the complaints processes at those companies are robust and honest and can be dealt with all the way to board level if necessary.

(Ironically Paul Henry is now a TVNZ board member. Even he might have had a say about the toy gun incident.)

I have serious doubts that robustness will ever develop - but then the BSA did nothing about those two incidents anyway.

The media scene in this country is becoming more and more fragmented by the day. There are thousands of New Zealanders who just don’t bother with what we still call legacy media. They can find out what they think they to need to know from a myriad of on-line sources.

That ignites the “misinformation” calls. But then as the Donald Trump incident shows, the legacy media are far from perfect in their dissemination of information, especially on matters of balance. And we know that BSA ruling on 1News and Trump is not a one-off example.

Internet technology means the media world knows no bounds. It’s impossible to regulate it. That’s why self-regulation inside media companies by sensible and experienced media leaders is the best way forward.

We don’t need the government getting in the way of what the people say.

It was another example of bureaucrats convincing politicians to take a Chicken Little approach to old buildings in the wake of what happened in Christchurch in 2011.

The single storey hall, which was opened in 1960, sat safely and peacefully beside the Kawerau River which became Lake Dunstan after the Clyde Dam was finished 35 years ago. Nothing ever fell off it or into it because of an earthquake.

It’s in a town and region of low seismic activity and relatively sparse population. There have been only two shakes in the Otago province above magnitude 5 this century, neither of them very close to Cromwell.

But nevertheless down it came, and the community was then faced with what to replace it with.

Amazingly, the Central Otago District Council (CODC) and Cromwell Community Board (CCB) went for the full noise. A council with an annual income of just over $80 million and just under 15,000 rate paying properties decided on a replacement for the Memorial Hall which would cost the thick end of $46 million!

The new building, to be opened in July, has a 400 seat auditorium, a movie theatre, a café, a museum and numerous multi-use spaces. Outside is a War Memorial Garden with a Cenotaph where we held the Anzac Day service a few days ago.

Aesthetically, I think the complex is overpowering and completely out of character with its environment but nevertheless, managed well it should be a boon to the community for entertainment, arts and culture activities.

It’s been debt funded, the debt to be funded by ratepayers and sales of council land. The council maintain the debt, around 18 million dollars, will be paid off in five years. We’ll see how that goes.

Here’s another issue. It will cost, in today’s dollars, $1.7 million a year to operate. The income in the first year is reported to be around $100,000 rising to $550,000 in six years. In other words, each ratepaying property, as well contributing to debt repayment, will be on the hook for another $80 a year just to keep the doors open and the lights on.

Sigh.

However a niggling issue has been festering around town for a few months. What will the new facility be called?

Many suspected that because the Ngai Tahu iwi consultancy Aukaha was involved in the design there would be a move to give the new building a Māori name. This despite Cromwell and Central Otago being an area essentially bereft of any Māori history or habitation throughout time.

The community was consulted on the name. The overwhelming majority wanted the words Cromwell and Memorial included. The Cromwell Community Board recommended Cromwell Memorial Events Centre. The Central Otago District Council agreed.

But the CODC had also been “gifted” a name by Aukaha, in other words Ngai Tahu. That name, which emerged yesterday is Te Puna Mahara. Apparently it means the spring of remembrance. Sort of appropriate considering it’s a war memorial next to a lake.

But the CODC now faced another issue. Which of the two names would take precedence?

Logic and the majority of the community would suggest the English name would take prominence. There is no marae in Central Otago, just 9.5 percent of the population identify as Maori, about half the national average, and there is no significant Maori history in Cromwell, a town established after the discovery of gold in 1862.

As my friend Councillor Bob Scott pointed out at the CODC meeting only 23 of the more than 600 submissions on the name for the facility suggested a Māori name should take prominence over an English one.

Another Cromwell Ward Councillor Cheryl Laws, wife of Michael, asked the Aukaha design consultant if it would be rude not to use the gifted name first.

The consultant, a Ms Novak, said it would not be impolite but “..it is also up to your community and I suppose what it can do is devalue the name by putting it second.”

Is that what’s called psychological bullying?

Bob Scott, Cheryl Laws, another Cromwell Ward Councillor Charlie Sanders and Maniototo’s Stu Duncan voted for Cromwell Memorial Events Centre to be the main name

Of course they were outvoted 8 to 4.

It’s another example of the elected representatives disregarding the wishes of the majority of their community.

The Aukaha woman could not have put it better. The name Cromwell Memorial Events Centre is being devalued, insulting the vast majority of their electorate.

The voters of Central Otago should remember that when the next elections roll around.

David Seymour made his distaste for the year-long media silence on the matter very obvious by calling April 28^th “Ani O’Brien Day.” This was in honour of the woman who wrote an online expose about how the TVNZ Political Editor had homophobically insulted another political reporter, her one time TV3 colleague Lloyd Burr, now at Stuff, at a function in the Finance Minister’s office in May last year.

What Ani O’Brien did required some courage. A lot more than the Parliamentary Press Gallery had shown in the last year. The incident in Nicola Willis’s office where the insult took place was reportedly well known around the parliamentary traps. O’Brien thought it deserved some public airing, taking the attitude that if journalists are constantly holding politicians to high standards of behaviour then it surely behoves them to keep to the same standards.

That’s essentially why she blew the whistle. I subscribe to Ani O’Brien’s work. Her Substack “Thought Crimes” is published regularly and displays great insight of the Wellington political and bureaucratic scene despite her now living, I believe, in Auckland. She admits she is far from popular in media circles and in a self-deprecating way describes herself as “just a disagreeable woman who is devastated by the abdication of duty by the media so set up a Substack.”

I’ve met Ani in person once and been on some panel shows with her. She was actually a foundation staff member of The Platform in 2022. But that didn’t end well.

She’s smart and well informed. Our first encounters would have been around 2019 when she was the “Stand Up for Women” spokesperson in the early days of the trans madness. The mainstream media’s distaste for her no doubt stems from that time. Working in Judith Collins office wouldn’t have improved her standing with the Press Gallery cabal either.

When I read her April 28^th “Thought Crimes” over breakfast that morning – it was in my inbox at 6.32am – my immediate thought was can this story be ignored any longer?

But the breakfast talk shows, to my knowledge, never touched it.

It was Shayne Currie from the NZ Herald’s Media Insider who took it mainstream. He had his story on-line by lunchtime and then updated it again late afternoon with comment from politicians and TVNZ.

By the end of the day all major mainstream media organisations were running the story in some shape or form.

But they were followers, not leaders.

The mainstream media had reacted to a part-time writer’s blog. The same happened when lawyer Philip Crump - writing on Substack as Thomas Cranmer - exposed serious issues in Nania Mahuta’s Three Waters legislation in 2022 and when Cameron Slater blew the whistle on Auckland’s Mayor Len Brown and his affair with Bevan Chuang in 2013.

The latest media trust survey came out recently. There was a small bounce in the number of New Zealanders who now trust the media – it went from 33 percent to 37 percent – but it’s still a dreadfully low number.

If the media can’t report a story like this because they may be afraid of the consequences - or just want to look after one of their own - then how are those levels of trust ever going to improve?

There are more than 17,000 paid Substack writers globally and many more who don’t charge for their musings. There are also other self publishing platforms like Wordpress and Patreon plus the well established blog sites like Good Oil, Kiwiblog and The Daily Blog. And we haven’t even mentioned Facebook and X.

It’s well established there is a wide and varied alternative media world out there. But if the legacy or mainstream types want to reassert their previous dominance they could do well to be leaders not followers.

It’s into that category that we must now place the current Prime Minister. We know that Jacinda Ardern was already a certified member.

Christopher Luxon has cancelled his regular appearances on TVNZ Breakfast after being hopelessly ill-prepared for a predictable barrage of aggressive questioning on a trivial topic from Tova O’Brien. He is also a regular decliner of interview requests on the country’s only current affairs show Q and A. He’s never appeared as Prime Minister on the on-line outlet The Platform where he’s sure to be interrupted and talked over by breakfast host Sean Plunket who’d probably want to interview him aggressively about why his government hasn’t removed co-governance provisions from local government and new water entities.

Luxon and his new minder Simeon Brown say they’ve pulled the pin because some TVNZ political staff were asking questions in an area at parliament off limits to the media, and then reportedly threatening to besmirch a National MP for not answering those questions.

If true, that’s unacceptable behaviour and the Speaker, as the boss of the parliamentary precinct, should deal with it. For Luxon, through Brown, to throw a hissy fit and quit a previously regular media appearance is childish.

Ardern, you remember, quit her regular appearances on Mike Hosking’s Newstalk ZB breakfast show when he pointed out to her the difference between GDP and CPI and made her look a fool on economic matters. He was just pointing out the obvious.

I had two and half years as a host on a radio station called Magic Talk. Ardern was Prime Minister the entire time. Despite numerous requests from me and my producer she didn’t appear on the show once, not even during the 2020 election campaign.

Her mate Grant Robertson came on once a week until he had a dummy spit because I asked him about the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. He reckoned it was conspiracy theory. I don’t think it was but the WEF has reduced influence anyway now.

Maybe Ardern didn’t think our ratings were worth the time. Actually they were better than Newstalk ZB in a few provincial markets so I never knew quite what her problem was. I didn’t lose any sleep over it but thought it was a very arrogant attitude to take to the audience we had.

I feel exactly the same about Luxon chickening out of TVNZ’s Breakfast and The Platform. If you want your message to resonate with the public use the media – broadcast and on-line - to reach them.

Other politicians and parties are not blameless either. Act reputedly won’t go on RNZ’s Morning Report because of the attitude of staff toward them when they appear in person on the premises. No doubt they’re not too enamoured either of the aggressive line of questioning they usually encounter when they’re on-air.

An Act staffer once called about what they could do about RNZ’s attitude towards them. I suggested they get some significant change at board level. After all, they’re part of the appointing government. There were vacancies advertised for the RNZ board in February this year. It’s nearly May. There still haven’t been any appointments. The terms of the chair and two other directors expire on June 30.

But if politicians want to progress in their public careers, the best way to prove how able, principled and disciplined they are, is to take the good with the bad. Luxon should show more courage and not resist the hard line of questioning that would come from Tova O’Brien and Sean Plunket. Be prepared to get on the front foot, know what you stand for, be knowledgeable across a wide range of portfolios and most importantly, know who voted for you and what those voters want you to do. It’s not too hard. You campaigned on it and negotiated two coalition agreements.

The New Zealand political media will never be enchanted by Christopher Luxon. But he can show more fortitude by not running from the fight. He should be better briefed. He shouldn’t resort to corny one liners from his “talking points.” He has to be authentic. Provide evidence he has political conviction. Right now he’s not.

And if you want inspiration about how to hose down an aggressive interviewer watch John Key v John Campbell on Campbell Live in 2013 on the proposed GCSB legislation. The Herald’s Colin Hogg said Campbell was humiliated. Even Campbell himself said that Key was “absolutely brilliant.” That was a Prime Minister well briefed and thoroughly prepared on a fractious issue.

Yes, Key had been Prime Minister for 5 years by then and well experienced in the role. But despite his many failings on the policy front (the flag referendum, the UNDRIP signing) Key was a master in front of a TV camera. I saw plenty of it first hand when he made his weekly appearances on Breakfast in 2009-2016 era. We often chatted in the corner of the studio while he was waiting to be interviewed. Often it was about golf, sometimes it was politics. He never had a media minder with him. The DPS men lurked in the corridor outside, the limo waited in the basement beside the lift. But he was a natural as a politician because he had command of issues and had an answer to the criticism he knew was coming his way.

I remember the morning he’d had the word Labour were going to blow the whistle on the illegal GCSB spying of Kim Dotcom before the infamous raid in 2012. His line to me in the corner of the studio that morning was “the shit’s going to hit the fan today.” It did, but he was ready for it, didn’t deny he knew more that he’d previously let on, absorbed the criticism and became more popular than ever.

You could never see Luxon cope with a scenario was well as that. He’d go to ground, issue written statements and then fudge answers at a press conference later in the day.

He’s hired former TV and radio journalist and presenter Rachel Smalley to lift his media game. She has an unenviable task. Luxon is not politically smart the way Key or Helen Clark or Ardern was, nor a natural TV performer. There was hint of Smalley’s influence with his bold appearance after hosing down the leadership coup and reporting the vote of confidence his caucus had given him. He refused to answer questions afterwards. That was smart.

But his statement should have included the word “unanimous” in reference to the vote of confidence. By not, he opened up even more speculation.

Luxon needs to learn to give as good as he gets. His appearances with Hosking are usually pretty boring. That’s because neither will indulge in much beyond economic matters. He should reconsider the Breakfast ban. He should front on The Platform.

In the immortal words of John Key himself in Parliament in 2015, Luxon should “get some guts.”

Thank you for the invitation to be here this morning.

As a recently arrived Central Otago resident – albeit with a long personal and family history in Otago and Southland – it’s a privilege to deliver the first ANZAC Day address outside this brand new and soon to be officially named Cromwell Memorial Events Centre.

The cenotaph that dominates this new Memorial Garden is hopefully here for the long term, but it has a history of being moved around this town. It was first unveiled on Anzac Day 1923 at the Soldier’s Memorial Gardens down by the now submerged bridge over the Clutha into Cromwell’s then main street of Melmore Terrace.

Around 1987 and with the formation of Lake Dunstan imminent, the monument was moved up the street to be placed, appropriately, outside the War Memorial Hall which used to be on this site and where it stood proudly for nearly 40 years till 2024 when it had to be shifted pending the demolition of the Memorial Hall.

So it’s been on the other side of the car park for the last couple of years while this new facility has been constructed, and now it’s back for what we hope and expect to be a long residence in this Memorial Garden outside a building which the Central Otago Council will surely confirm as being called the Cromwell Memorial Events Centre.

War memorials are a common sight around this country of ours – and so they should be. While there is no definitive number for the number of them around our province it’s estimated there are around 180 monuments or cenotaphs and about the same number of other memorial plaques and honours boards in Otago.

They recognize the reality that thousands of New Zealanders, our forefathers, were sacrificed in wars and other military missions over the last century and a quarter.

I spent a few years as an impressionable young boy in the village of Kennington, just outside Invercargill. The defining feature of that village is still the War Memorial Gate outside where the school used to be.

My father was the teacher there more than 65 years ago and although the school is long gone, the gate is still there – standing proud and no doubt hosting some kind of Anzac Day commemoration today.

I’ve been back through the village a few times over the years and especially when I’m travelling by myself I like to stop at that gate and remember not just the days of a happy childhood in the Southland countryside of the early 1960s, but I also think of the young men from the area who went off to war and whose names are engraved in the panels set in the concrete surrounds of that gate.

And I ask myself, why did they go? Did they really want to? Did they know what they were fighting for?

As a child and young teenager, I knew a World War 1 veteran. He was married to my grandmother for the last ten years of his life. I knew him as Uncle Fred from when I was about 5.

His name was Fred Boocock. He came from Annat, a dot on the map on the Canterbury Plains. He was born in 1893 and after Army training in Canterbury left New Zealand on April 17, 1915 on one of the three HMNZTs, Her Majesty’s New Zealand Troopships, that sailed from Wellington that day.

By not leaving till the middle of April, he wasn’t at Gallipoli for the landings on the morning of the 25^th, but he did serve on the peninsula from August that year till the end of that disastrous campaign early in 1916.

He never held high rank. On the army roll he’s listed in the “rank” column among privates and troopers and riflemen as a driver in the Army Service Corp. His brother James was a corporal in the Canterbury Mounted Rifles.

From what I can glean from family members in recent years, Uncle Fred then moved with his colleagues from Gallipoli west across the Mediterranean to the western front, and the awful battles on the fields of northern France and Belgium.

I don’t know exactly where he served. I wish now I’d asked him more about those times when he was alive. But I was 15 when he died and I never found it appropriate or comfortable to pry into someone’s war history, especially when he had been seriously injured.

Because what I do know is that sometime, and I think it was in 1917, he suffered an horrendous injury and had his right forearm damaged so badly it required amputation.

He was taken to an army hospital in England where he recuperated for over a year before returning to New Zealand in 1919.

He had a crude prosthetic brace attached to his arm just below his right elbow and from that brace you could click in other attachments, the weirdest one of all being a wooden hand enclosed in a brown glove which had a screw to which you attached a knife at meal time.

I do remember him showing us a metal cigarette box, which he kept as a memento and which had a significant dent in it. It saved his life because he said it was in his breast pocket and acted as body armour when a bullet hit him.

When he came back from the war, he married and in the 1920s owned a neighborhood shop in Christchurch, but for whatever reason that business didn’t work out. He either could not or would not work again, so for about 40 years, his son told me later, his only source of income was the war pension.

According to the records his injury and disability meant he was awarded 30 shillings a week in 1920, an amount that was surely increased over time as he married and had 2 sons of his own before being widowed after World War 2 and subsequently marrying my divorced grandmother 10 years later.

But as I’ve grown to adulthood and been very fortunate to work in an industry that I mostly enjoyed for pretty close to 50 years, I sometimes think how you would feel about your purpose in life if you were unable to work because of injury and disability suffered in a war that was not your country’s war.

So why were the young New Zealand men of 1914 so enthusiastic about going to battle?

And at the risk of reading the minds of young men from more than a century ago, I suspect there were two reasons – one, it was huge adventure. A trip to the other side world in those days was something only the really wealthy could afford.

And two, there existed in many young men of the time a sense of duty to King and Country. James Hargest, that famous son of Southland who served in both world wars, said that despite his lack of education, that while working on his father’s farm in the Hokonuis, he dreamed of serving the mighty British empire. No doubt the seeds of that thinking had been sown during his limited primary school education.

Which goes to show that indoctrination of our children is not a new thing.

Did these young men really want to go? Early on in World War 1 the answer would surely have been yes. The original ANZACs of 1915 were all volunteers. Hargest was a volunteer. So was my Uncle Fred.

But the number of casualties in Gallipoli and on the Western Front and the subsequent drop off in voluntary enrollments, meant that conscription was introduced in 1916.

It sounds like a time in New Zealand history which might not have been very pleasant.

As reports came back about the horrific slaughter of New Zealand youth at Gallipoli, and then on the fields of Belgium and Northern France, thousands of military age men decided they did not want to go to war.

But the government, under Prime Minister William Massey was hard-nosed. Those who objected to going to war were hunted down.

Eventually 286 men were sent to jail as conscientious objectors. One of them was a future Prime Minister - Peter Fraser.

Another 2320 men were labelled military defaulters and were deprived of civil rights for ten years. That meant they couldn’t have a job in the public service or with a local council, they couldn’t vote in general or local elections and couldn’t be an MP or a councillor.

Over a hundred years later the names of those 2320 men are still published on-line. What must their descendants think?

Even from the distance of more than a hundred years, I find the denial of those basic human rights like having a job of your choice and being able to vote quite repugnant, especially when the so called “crime” was refusing to fight another nation’s war.

But in the end the volunteers completely outnumbered the conscripted by a ratio of 4 to 1.

The official number of New Zealand servicemen who went overseas in World War 1 was 98,950. That was 9 percent of the then New Zealand population.

But that leads to the next question I pose. What were these men actually fighting for?

The actual causes of World War I are still debated by historians even now, but the overall theme is one of nationalism and military expansion throughout Europe because of the competing interests of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

Britain was worried about the potential for Germany to become all powerful in Europe, so resisted the expansion and went to war on mainland Europe, but even so, why did New Zealand have to become involved from the other side of the world?

The answer lies in the ties of the apron strings to Mother England.

25 years later Michael Joseph Savage, the first Labour Party Prime Minister said of Britain when Hitler invaded Poland starting World War 2, “where she goes, we go, where she stands, we stand.”

In 1914 and 1915, the same obligation existed. It wasn’t just a cultural one in this nation - by that time dominated by British and Irish immigrants. It was an economic one too.

They bought our produce, our meat, our wool, our butter. They paid New Zealand’s way in the world. Our political leaders were unquestioning in their military support, and the majority of the population agreed.

But the price we paid as a nation was appalling.

18,058 New Zealanders died in World War I, nearly 2 percent of the entire New Zealand population.

No wonder HG Wells called it “the war to end war.”

Yet barely twenty years later we were at it again, and once again a generation of young New Zealand men went off to stop the military expansionism not just of Germany and Italy, but this time too of Japan, and the real threat that was therefore posed to these remote islands in the South Pacific.

This time percentage of New Zealanders involved overseas during the 6 years of war was similar to World War I – 140,000 from a population of 1.6 million.

For what it’s worth, there were fewer casualties. 11,928 is the official number of New Zealand deaths in the war, but per million of population it was still the highest ratio in the Commonwealth.

As with the 1914-18 conflict, the public support for the war effort was considerable. This was despite conscription again – instigated by that old “conchy,” the conscientious objector himself, Peter Fraser.

Just to prove that left wing Prime Ministers have always been hypocrites, Fraser’s coalition government oversaw the imprisonment of more than 800 conchies in the Second World War for the so called “crime” of not wanting to risk their lives in war.

As well there was strict censorship.

In 1942, a Methodist minister Ormond Burton, who was actually a decorated World War 1 veteran, was jailed for 2 and half years for publishing a so-called subversive document, a Christian Pacificist Society bulletin.

The story of his trial makes for somber reading in the days before we had a Bill of Rights Act.

The Judge, Justice Archibald Blair told the jury it was time the mouths of cranks should be shut.

The sentence for such an act, publishing so-called subversive material, was 12 months.

But the judge invoked a section of the Crimes Act and put him away for 2 and half years.

Ormond Burton was a man ahead of his time. He maintained his Pacifist beliefs and later marched against the Vietnam War. He died in 1974.

So twice in thirty years we sent a generation of young men off to war to die on the battlefields of Europe and Asia.

We have had it instilled into us that these men were heroes. “They died so that we may live” has been a constant catch cry on ANZAC Day most of my life.

But if they died to protect freedom, then what does that say about modern day New Zealand, a New Zealand that many of a self-appointed elite don’t even want to call by its legally constituted name. Even worse they want to take away the freedoms that distinguish a mature liberal democracy.

I don’t know how much the unjustified punishment dished out to the conchies of the world wars contributed to the drafting of the Bill of Rights Act in 1990.

In my mind that Act should be the foundation of life in New Zealand today – the freedom of thought, conscience and opinion, freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly, the right to vote with equal suffrage where every vote is of equal value - and the right to refuse to undergo medical treatment.

What I’ve seen in the last five years is an erosion of those rights, an erosion of those freedoms, and as we approach this year’s election, we should remember just what our options are.

If those 28,000 New Zealanders who died in the world wars were indeed dying for our freedom, dying so that our democracy could be protected, then let us ensure that more than 80 years after the end of the second of those global conflicts that democracy is indeed protected.

Let us ensure that James Hargest and his son Geoffrey did not die so that the value of a vote could be increased for some but not for others. Let us ensure that Fred Boocock did not have his arm blown off on the western front so that we lost our ability to express opinions freely and without disadvantage.

Let us ensure we continue to gather at places like this wonderful new community asset every April 25^th and remember what those wars were about.

Let’s protect democracy, and let’s protect freedom.

Lest we forget.

Thank you.

Democracy, as Sir Winston Churchill once said in the House of Commons (quoting an unknown parliamentary predecessor) is the worst form of government, apart from all those other forms which have been tried from time to time.

Democracy, from the Greek words demos, meaning people, and kratos (rule, power or strength) in its purist form is government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Thousands of organisations, from the smallest membership based incorporated societies to local authorities and central government vote for the people they wish to govern them.

The essential theme is this: one person, one vote and all votes are equal.

(Ok, you pedants will say it’s one person, two votes at central government level and if you’re in one of those local councils with that awful STV system it’s one person and who knows how many votes or preferences.)

But you get my drift. An eligible person votes. The vote or votes of every elector carry equal value. The most popular candidate or candidates in the election take office, govern the organisation, appoint the senior staff, set the policies, approve the budgets - and so it goes.

Not too difficult really. The enlightened world has operated this way successfully for centuries.

So why try and muddy the waters by appointing non-elected outsiders to governing roles?

To be fair, many incorporated societies – New Zealand Rugby is a good example – appoint some directors alongside those elected. But that’s because the society constitution allows for it.

Local government allows it too. And therein lies a major issue.

Schedule 7, Clause 31 (1) of the Local Government Act 2002 says “the members of a committee or subcommittee may, but need not be, elected members of the local authority, and a local authority or committee may appoint to a committee or subcommittee a person who is not a member of the local authority or committee if, in the opinion of the local authority, that person has the skills, attributes, or knowledge that will assist the work of the committee or subcommittee.”

The road to heaven is paved with good intentions.

The Far North District Council (FNDC) believe that the six elected councillors on its Te Kuaka Committee for Maori Strategic Relationships were just not capable of receiving advice and making appropriate decisions so FNDC appointed not one, but ten iwi and hapu representatives with “the skills, attributes or knowledge” to assist the work of the committee.

And gave them voting powers for committee decisions.

It’s a nonsense.

The lone voice protesting this, Councillor Davina Smolders, called it “co-governance on steroids.”

Actually, it’s not even co-governance. It’s a takeover.

Do not believe the council and media spin about how a committee only makes recommendations. The full council makes the final call.

That’s arrant nonsense. A full council meeting anywhere is effectively a rubber stamping exercise for work discussed and voted on in committees.

A council vote to allow one of its committees to be taken over by outside appointees is an absolute insult to the people of the Far North District, Maori or non-Maori. The power has been taken from the people. That’s what happens in totalitarian societies, not enlightened ones – like New Zealand is supposed to be.

Yes the Local Government Act says a local authority must “establish and maintain processes to provide opportunities for Māori to contribute to the decision-making processes of the local authority; and consider ways in which it may foster the development of Māori capacity to contribute to the decision-making processes of the local authority.”

But is also says, much earlier in the Act, that councils must “enable democratic local decision-making and action by, and on behalf of, communities.”

Sadly in the Act there is no definition of “democratic local decision-making.”

Probably because the legislation drafters of 2002 figured we all knew what it means. Silly them.

Democratic local decision making cannot, by any definition, be carried out by appointees with voting rights.

While this is the most blatant use of Schedule 7, Clause 31 (1) it’s not the first. Hastings District gave committee voting rights to members of its Youth Council. Tasman District Council has iwi representatives with voting rights on its committees.

But in those cases the appointed committee members are or were a minority. Not at the FNDC where the elected members might as well have not existed.

Just what calls this Te Kuaka Committee will take the full council meetings in future are unknown. But you can bet the whare on decisions that will be of advantage to Māori, possibly to the disadvantage of non-Māori.

For instance it’s already recommended that that the Council continue with an amended Rating Relief Policy, following a review that brought forward changes regarding papakāinga and Treaty settlement lands to support Māori freehold land.

Put that alongside a recommendation that council support environmental management plans submitted by local iwi and you get the drift of the way governance is headed in the FNDC area, an area with a majority population, according to the 2023 census, who claim Māori ancestry.

Davina Smolders says Te Kuaka now has the power to decide what even makes it to the full council meeting. When elected representatives are outnumbered 10 to 6 that’s a given.

But in such a strongly Māori area why the need for such stacking of important committees? Democracy would say that if the majority of the population in the Far North supported such initiatives as outlined above they would vote in councillors to put those policies into effect.

Democracy is about giving all people a voice. Good democratic government, at all levels, takes into account the interests of all – political supporters and opponents alike.

The FNDC debacle this week has removed democratic process there and someone in central government should do something about it.

The simplest way would be to amend Clause 31 (1) of Schedule 7 in the Local Government Act. Instead of saying “members of a committee or sub-committee may, but not need be, elected members of the local authority” it would read “members of a committee or sub-committee MUST be elected members of a local authority.”

The clause may include another paragraph about expert or appropriate advice being sought from suitably qualified people but in the interests of democracy they must not be given voting rights.

Simple isn’t it?

ACT’s Cameron Luxton is on the case with a bill similar to this. New Zealand First supports it. Why won’t the Minister for Local Government Simon Watts?

Because like his Prime Minister he lacks political courage.

When you can’t defend democracy you don’t deserve to be a politician.

The initial terms of reference specifically excluded an adversarial approach where evidence and submissions could and would be challenged.

Key political figures like Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins were excused from public appearances, as was the then Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield.

During the Commission hearings Counsel Assisting, Nicolette Levy KC, dismissed evidence from a New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science (NZDSOS) official information request. The OIA asked how many cases there were of people with Covid getting myocarditis. The Ministry of Health couldn’t provide any cases. But Ms Levy said to the NZDSOS submitters Matt Shelton and Alison Goodwin “I don’t want to get into the detail of all your submissions.”

Then soon before the report was released, the Commission told us that evidence from Medsafe Director Chris James and the Ministry of Health’s Chief Science Advisor Ian Town would not be made public - ever - despite there being a separate file in the report Pandemic Perspectives which is a summary of public submissions and engagement.

Yes, the report lands a few big blows. In particular there was the advice from the Ministry of Health about whether or not under 18 year olds would be at risk of myocarditis if they took a second dose of the vaccine, and why that advice did not reach the relevant Ministers Chris Hipkins and Ayesha Verrall.

Then there was the line about how around half of the $70 billion borrowed for Covid response projects was not actually spent on the Covid response, but on projects like a 40 million dollar revamp of the new swimming pool in Gisborne, which just happens to be Jacinda Ardern’s husband’s hometown.

But what I was looking for was a really solid analysis of the impact of the Covid vaccine? Did it harm people? Did it cause death? And most importantly, should it be withdrawn because it’s dangerous?

Here’s a few basic numbers. Coroner’s reports have confirmed that two people have died because of the Pfizer Covid vaccine. Young Dunedin man Rory Nairn was one of them while the other remains anonymous. Another death is considered likely due to vaccine induced myocarditis and yet another where a link to the vaccine could not be excluded because myocarditis was found in the autopsy.

So that’s two definite, and probably two other deaths because of this medicine. Yet it’s still being injected, although thankfully not very often. But its use for boosters is still officially being encouraged by some health professionals. Let’s also remember that ACC have paid out just under $17 million in claims by 1,812 people for injury caused by the Pfizer vaccine.

Call me naïve but if a medicine is found to have caused at least one death then that’s strong evidence the medicine is potentially extremely dangerous. If upwards of 2000 people have been paid from a government insurance scheme for injuries received through taking that same medicine then the evidence is even stronger that this is a dangerous potion and should not be on the shelf for public consumption.

But in the last five years do you know how many medicines have been withdrawn by Medsafe because of safety concerns? Just one. It’s called Pholcodine and we buy it in Duro-Tuss cough medicine and Difflam lozenges. The medicine was banned because of the small risk of life threatening anaphylaxis during surgery. Did anybody actually die because they’d taken pholcodine?

No. But it was banned because of the risk.

Yet here is the Covid vaccine which we know has killed at least two people still on the shelf, still being injected into some very uninformed patients’ arms and this Royal Commission produces a report in excess of three hundred pages in which it repeatedly uses the phrase “safe and effective.”

The Royal Commission was presented with much evidence from the likes of NZDSOS and Voices for Freedom (VFF) that Covid was not an especially dangerous disease, that the Pfizer Covid vaccine did not prevent transmission of the disease and that the government knew of the potential for severe side effects because 9 pages of such side effects were published by Pfizer themselves in 2021.

The commission should also have known that Chris James, the Medsafe Director, wrote to Pfizer on January 28^th, 2021 and told them that “having reviewed the information supplied in your initial application and in your further responses, I am not satisfied that I should give my consent to the distribution of the product.”

But under the Medicines Act legislation, he had to pass the decision to the Medicines Assessment Advisory Committee, the MAAC, who then – without any new evidence at all from anybody, approved the vaccine. The members of the MAAC to this day, despite official information requests, remain unknown.

There is also much evidence from late 2020 and early 2021 to say the government was told that vaccine mandates were not justified under the Bill of Rights. Section 11 of that Act says everybody has the right to refuse medical treatment unless a limitation on that right can be justified.

But Ashley Bloomfield told Chris Hipkins on February 10, 2021 that because there was no conclusive evidence at that time of the vaccine preventing or reducing transmission, "mandatory vaccination is unlikely to be a justified limitation of the right to refuse medical treatment.”

The worst aspect of the conduct of the Royal Commission and the subsequent report was the way that organisations such as VFF and NZDSOS were treated by the Commission. These people are articulate, educated and exceedingly well researched on almost aspects of the covid response. NZDSOS presented a 382 page report called A Critique of the official New Zealand covid response with a focus on vaccines: what the evidence says. VFF presented more than 250 pages in The People’s Position.

When both organisations appeared in front of the commission their evidence was constantly challenged. VFF even had the questions they were originally due to be asked changed the day before their appearance, and then the next day the order of those questions was different to what had been advised.

The VFF representatives performance at the hearings has been criticised by those with a different ideology, but Claire, Alia and Katie were made to play on a very sticky wicket. I’ve mentioned before how Counsel assisting the commission brushed off an NZDSOS answer with “I don’t want to go into the details of your submission.”

Yet the Commission appears to have had no problem accepting claims from fringe outfits like FACT Aotearoa - that’s the outfit committed to “fighting against harmful conspiracy theories that harm the very fabric of New Zealand society.”

Then there was Sir Graham le Gros, the immunologist who was the boss of the Malaghan Institute, making claims in front of the Commission saying that Covid 19 had a high lethality.

But as NZDSOS pointed out to the Commission the average age of Covid death was 82. In the UK Covid was downgraded from a High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) as far back as March 19, 2020 -before the first case was even reported in this country.

And the Director of Public Health was quoted in a memo from the Ministry of Health to the Chief Coroner on March 18, 2020 as saying “Covid does not have a particularly high mortality rate and is not particularly transmissible.”

NZDSOS advised the Commission of inconsistencies and other information from both local and overseas sources which contradicted Professor le Gros’ submissions. The Commission has appeared to disregard what NZDSOS reported in favour of Professor le Gros.

As Mary Hobbs has written, the Royal Commission may as well have ripped the intricately prepared pages of proof from NZDSOS and VFF into confetti and thrown it throughout the country.

So what next ?

This Royal Commission report essentially tells us nothing we didn’t know. More importantly, it doesn’t tell us plenty that we do know.

Winston Peters is now talking of a Select Committee but with his Coalition partners not especially keen on further investigations, I doubt we can expect much to come from that either.

And so the vacuum remains. The establishment is holding firm. Accountability for death, injury and economic recklessness remains absent.

All we the people can do is keep fighting, and hope .. and hope .. that one day, justice will prevail.