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.

“Not in the public interest” is one of those phrases which means essentially nothing.

It’s a cover all or more likely a cover-up on the part of the government, civil service or judiciary for a lack of action on an event that the public is actually very keen to see happen.

Such is the case in the extraordinary decision by the Crown Solicitor to drop charges against Te Wehi Ratana, a 31 year old from Nelson, who was charged with damaging an art installation and obstructing police following an act of vandalism at Te Papa two years ago.

The installation damaged was Te Papa’s Treaty of Waitangi display.

He was due to face trial by jury in just a few weeks.

Trial by jury eh? You know, justice in front of your peers. In public. Where the people can see and hear the evidence and where a panel of the public can decide whether or not the alleged actions took place and whether or not they were a crime.

All in front of an interested public.

But this impending trial was not, according to the Crown Solicitor, in the public interest.

How can she say this? How does she know this?

Did she ask the public?

Of course not. She made a unilateral decision because the trial would become an intensely political event. There was sure to have been evidence presented which would have contested the meaning of the Treaty and whether or not the exhibit correctly portrayed what was meant when it was signed in 1840.

But that evidence should have been irrelevant and a strong judge would have made it inadmissible. The case should have been about two questions.

1. Did Ratana damage the installation?

2. Did he obstruct police trying to apprehend him?

Why Ratana did what he did is essentially unimportant. The charges he faced where not about the reasoning behind the alleged crimes. They were about the alleged crimes themselves.

Then into the rationale behind the Crown Solicitor’s decision is something decidedly worrying.

The Crown in recent weeks had reportedly been presented with “expert evidence” on tikanga from the defendant’s uncle – who just happened to be a former MP, one time leader of the Maori Party and the Auckland flanker who played against the Springboks in 1981, Te Ururoa (Jim) Flavell.

I included the irrelevant line about his rugby career because it’s about as important as tikanga is in this case.

This is a criminal case about vandalism to an art installation at a museum owned by the people of New Zealand. As a person of New Zealand I don’t want Te Papa exhibits damaged.

I don’t think anyone should be allowed to do that and get away with it.

Yet the Crown Solicitor, for reasons based purely on political timidity, has allowed an act of vandalism – for which there is photographic evidence of it in progress – to go unpunished.

It is a blight on our justice system and on the government which oversees the Crown Solicitor’s office.

This case was most definitely in the public interest.

I’m embarrassed to live in such a corrupt country.

Mark down Thursday, March 5 as an unusual evening in the long and curious history of television news in New Zealand.

“¿Qué?” you may ask, in the puzzled tone of Manuel from Fawlty Towers.

No, it wasn’t because the bulletin suddenly contained stories that might warm the heart of the Coalition government. Nor was it because the New York correspondent had miraculously overcome his daily bout of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

No, the reason was something much more subtle.

For one night at least, the studio was awash with testosterone.

There they were: Jack, Sav and Dan. Three blokes behind the red light and the concrete door in TVNZ’s Suite 4, delivering the evening bulletin on 1 News. I’m not certain, but I suspect it may have been the first time this year the entire presenting line-up had XY chromosomes.

Now before anyone reaches for the smelling salts, let me say this: in 2026 we pay very little attention to the gender of news presenters. Nor should we. The key requirements remain the same as they have always been — clarity, accuracy, and the reassuring impression that the person reading the bulletin actually understands what they’re talking about.

But the March 5 lineup did prompt an idle thought.

Broadcast news reading, both on television and radio, now appears to be a profession dominated by women.

Take television first. With Melissa Stokes now fronting the main desk on 1 News and Sam Hayes long established at Three’s bulletin, both of the country’s main 6pm news programmes are anchored by women.

Weekend bulletins show a similar pattern. Sure, Jack Tame holds the fort on Friday and Saturday for TVNZ, but over on Three the weekend desk is occupied by Imogen Wells.

With the demise of most other television news programmes in recent years — largely because the audience evaporated — that means three-quarters of the country’s prime television news anchors are women.

Radio, as far as I can tell, follows the same pattern.

On Newstalk ZB, Niva Retimanu reads the morning news before Raylene Ramsay takes the afternoon shift. Across the NZME music stations, updates are frequently handled by Jody Gill or Kaye Gregory.

Over at Radio New Zealand, I understand Nicola Wright continues her long-running role reading the news on Morning Report, a job she seems to have held for about as long as some of us have been paying taxes.

Weekends are similar: Diana Vezich and Sandy Hodge take most of the shifts, before the venerable Joe Gilfillan finally appears on Sunday nights to remind us that men still occasionally read the news.

The role has become so female skewed that it’s a wonder news readers on both TV and radio aren’t joining a pay parity claim.

(I thought for their comparator occupation they could try actor, but then that would probably result in a pay cut!)

None of this particularly bothers me.

The gender of the presenter is irrelevant if the bulletin is delivered well. But the pattern does raise an interesting question: where have the young men of broadcasting gone?

When I was growing up the profession was overwhelmingly male. I was inspired by the likes of Dougal Stevenson, Philip Sherry, Bill Toft, Tom Bradley and Hewitt Humphrey.

That changed in 1977 when Jennie Goodwin broke the glass ceiling by becoming the first regular female prime-time news presenter in New Zealand. She was followed by Angela D’Audney and eventually the most famous newsreader of them all, Judy Bailey.

From that point on the job became what it should always have been: gender neutral.

Through the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s there was a steady mix of male and female presenters. Viewers became familiar with faces such as Richard Long, Simon Dallow and Mike McRoberts — along with a fair number of others, including yours truly.

Reading the news, despite what some might think, is not an especially difficult job. But it does require a few essential skills: a basic level of intelligence, a grasp of current affairs, the ability to pronounce foreign names with at least a hint of confidence, and the knack of moving seamlessly from war in the Middle East to a school gala in Morrinsville.

The old newsroom creed still applies: often wrong, never in doubt.

For most of my career I assumed the job would remain permanently balanced between men and women. It seemed inconceivable that it would ever tilt decisively one way or the other again.

Yet here we are.

So the question remains: where have the young men who might once have aspired to read the news gone?

Are they off doing podcasts? Working in public relations? Becoming influencers on TikTok?

Surely they’re not being discriminated against because they need to shave every day?

No executive will ever convince me that a female face or voice resonates better with viewers and listeners than that of a male.

I honestly have no answer.

But for one brief bulletin on March 5, at least, Jack, Sav and Dan reminded me of what the old line-ups used to look like.

As the old sage Confucius is supposed to have observed around 500 BC, “A healthy man wants a thousand things; a sick man wants only one.”

Two and a half millennia later, that observation feels uncomfortably current. We are living longer, but we are not necessarily living healthier. New Zealand’s average life expectancy has risen by roughly 18 years over the last century—from about 65 years in 1926 to around 83 today.

Yet a quarter of us now live with one or more chronic illnesses, a third of adults are obese, and around one in three of us will receive a cancer diagnosis in our lifetime.

Meanwhile, the cost of treating all this sickness is exploding. Vote Health was $9.7 billion in 2006, $17 billion in 2016, and is heading toward $33 billion in 2025–26. That is a tripling in just two decades, far outpacing inflation and population growth.

Yet we are told daily that the system is “in crisis.” Emergency departments operate at “Code Red.” Patients wait weeks to see a GP. Specialists and nurses burn out. No matter how much money we pour in, the pressure only increases.

The uncomfortable conclusion is obvious: we cannot treat our way out of this problem.

So what if we didn’t get so sick in the first place?

That is the simple, almost radical idea behind a new campaign calling itself “Make New Zealand Healthy Again.”

The slogan is borrowed — unapologetically — from Robert F. Kennedy Junior’s American campaign, but the message transcends politics. If a population eats better and moves more, it will suffer fewer chronic diseases, and the demand for medical services will stabilise or fall. Prevention is cheaper, kinder, and more humane than cure.

The organisers argue that our health system is fundamentally misaligned with modern disease. It manages sickness exceptionally well but does little to create health. That echoes something a Hawke’s Bay GP once told me during my talk radio days: “At medical school they teach you about anatomy and about disease. They don’t teach you about health.”

In plain language, we have built an impressive ambulance service at the bottom of the cliff but neglected to build a fence at the top.

Nutrition sits at the centre of this debate. “We are what we eat” is a cliché, but it is also biologically undeniable. Over recent decades, ultra-processed food has become cheaper, more accessible, and more aggressively marketed than whole food. Sugary drinks often cost less than milk or bottled water. Children are targeted by advertising for junk food in ways that would be illegal if the product were tobacco.

Then we act surprised when diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease, and obesity rates climb.

Physical inactivity is the other silent epidemic. We have engineered movement out of daily life. Children are driven to school, adults sit for eight hours at a desk, and leisure time is dominated by screens. Inactivity is now so normalised that we barely recognise it as a public health threat, despite evidence that it is one of the leading contributors to chronic disease.

This is not primarily a failure of doctors, nurses, or hospitals. They are dealing with the consequences. It is a failure of culture, policy, and incentives. Our system rewards treating illness, not preventing it.

A serious “Make New Zealand Healthy Again” agenda would involve uncomfortable but evidence-based measures. That includes the promotion of unrefined and unprocessed foods that sustain energy and protect long-term health like fresh vegetables and fruit, plant and animal protein products including meat and dairy and nuts, seeds and natural fats.

Conversely the intake of takeaway food and sugary drinks must be discouraged.

Making meaningful physical activity a core part of schooling rather than a dispensable extra is also key. And what if primary care funding was tied to prevention outcomes and not just prescription counts and referrals?

Every credible public health body agrees that diet, obesity, and physical inactivity are among the dominant drivers of modern disease. These are modifiable risks, not acts of God.

Then there is that sector of health care that the medical and pharmaceutical establishment is distinctly unenthusiastic about – the alternative providers and supplements industry. MNZHA believes that the population would be well served by a fully integrated system whereby patients can make their own treatment choice, and still be eligible for public funding.

We have built a 20th-century health system for acute infections and episodic illness, but our disease burden is now 21st-century and chronic. No amount of extra hospital funding will fix that mismatch.

Confucius understood something timeless. A healthy society wants many things: prosperity, culture, innovation, joy. A sick society wants only one thing: to be healthy again.

New Zealand is drifting toward the latter. We can keep building bigger ambulances at the bottom of the cliff. Or we can finally put up the fence at the top.

For more: MNZHA.NZ

Like its Australian namesake, this district was built on gold. In Victoria, large-scale mining never entirely stopped; the Fosterville Gold Mine continues to operate as one of that state’s major producers. In Central Otago, by contrast, the last meaningful gold operations wound down in 1942.

Now the question is whether Bendigo, Otago returns to the industry that created it.

A seven-member expert panel chaired by former High Court judge Matthew Muir KC has today started considering an application from Santana Minerals to establish an open-cast gold mine in the Dunstan Mountains. The panel has more than 9,000 pages of technical evidence and 140 working days to reach a decision. That is not a rushed rubber stamp. It is a structured, quasi-judicial assessment.

Before going further, two disclosures.

I live in Bendigo.

And I own 3,308 Santana shares, currently worth roughly $3,500. If the consent is refused, those shares may be close to worthless. If consent is granted and production proceeds as projected, they might double or better.

Either outcome is financially marginal for me. It might pay for a new set of golf clubs or a modest vehicle upgrade. It will not determine the comfort of my retirement.

What will determine my quality of life is whether any development near my home is environmentally safe and properly regulated.

I am about 15 kilometres from the proposed site. Traffic servicing the mine via State Highway 8 would pass roughly a kilometre from my house. That makes me a neighbour, not a distant commentator.

I cannot see the pit from where I live. I am unlikely to hear machinery. Industrial lighting will not be visible from my property. The principal issue for me is water.

We draw potable and irrigation supply from a private bore about 27 metres deep into the Bendigo aquifer, adjacent to the Clutha River. The water is tested quarterly. Recent laboratory results show nitrate at 0.12 milligrams per litre — compared with the World Health Organization guideline of 50 milligrams per litre. We are hundreds of times below the threshold.

Because of the proposed mine, we have added arsenic and cyanide to our testing regime. Our latest readings show arsenic at 0.0011 milligrams per litre (WHO guideline: 0.01 mg/L) and cyanide at 0.002 milligrams per litre (WHO guideline: 0.07 mg/L). In both cases, our water sits comfortably below international safety limits.

Those are not slogans. They are empirical measurements.

The question is not whether mining uses chemicals. It does. The question is whether modern engineering can isolate and manage those chemicals so they do not contaminate groundwater.

Any tailings storage facility must be designed with liners, seepage collection systems, monitoring bores, and contingency plans. Hydrogeological modelling must demonstrate that contaminants cannot migrate into the aquifer at harmful concentrations. Financial assurance must be sufficient to cover remediation if things go wrong.

These are technical matters. They require expertise in geotechnical engineering, hydrology, environmental chemistry and risk assessment. They cannot be resolved by placards or social media campaigns.

Opposition to the mine is real and deeply felt in parts of Bendigo and Tarras. Concerns about landscape scarring, dust, heavy vehicle movements and reputational impacts on vineyards are legitimate topics for scrutiny.

But emotional intensity is not evidence.

Central Otago’s unemployment rate is about 1.4 percent — effectively full employment. Jobs are available. What are not common are roles paying $140,000 a year, the average annual income Santana’s chief executive has suggested for more than 300 workers once operations are fully underway. More than 1,000 applications have reportedly been received.

Those wages would circulate through Cromwell, Alexandra and the wider district — into engineering workshops, transport firms, cafés and housing.

That economic benefit must be weighed against environmental risk. Neither should be exaggerated. Neither should be minimised.

An open-cast pit will alter a landscape. It will create visual change and temporary disturbance. It will also generate royalties, employment and export revenue. The policy framework exists precisely to evaluate such trade-offs.

The panel chaired by Matthew Muir KC was appointed because of its collective competence — in engineering, ecology, planning law and financial analysis. Its task is to interrogate the modelling, test the assumptions, and decide whether the proposal meets statutory environmental thresholds.

If the groundwater modelling is flawed, if the containment systems are inadequate, if the long-term monitoring is insufficient or the financial bonds too small, then consent should be declined.

But if the evidence demonstrates that environmental risks are quantified and mitigated to acceptable standards, then reflex opposition grounded purely in fear of change should not prevail.

We cannot claim to support evidence-based policymaking and then abandon it when the issue becomes local and emotive.

Bendigo was founded on gold. For more than 80 years it has prospered without it. Whether it returns to mining should not be decided by nostalgia, nor by speculative windfall expectations, nor by environmental absolutism.

It should be decided by experts applying evidence to law.

That is what this panel was appointed to do. And that — not volume of protest nor promise of profit — is what should determine Bendigo’s future.

A political party wants the Maori electorates back on the election agenda. New Zealand First says let’s have a referendum and let the people decide.

The Winston party thinks it knows what the people would decide – we’d vote for their abolition, although probably only by narrow margin.

Total votes on Maori wards in last year’s local body elections actually favoured their retention by 52.3 percent to 48.3 percent but because it was a council by council vote, 25 of the 42 voting on the issue had them removed.

The Maori electorate issue is a tried and true political tactic, designed to make some news headlines and generate a bit of radio talkback. Yet the idea has been mooted and moved, discussed but discarded so many times in the last quarter century that any cynical observer realises nothing will ever come of it.

Because when courage is needed to actually deliver on the policy, no politician in this country has that attribute in the necessary quantity.

The key point is the essential wishy-washiness of the current National Party when it comes to race issues.

Remember that Bill English (in 2003), Don Brash and John Key all promised they would get rid of the Maori seats. English and Brash never had the opportunity because they didn’t make it to power. Key just reneged because he became mates with Pita Sharples and allowed us to be signed up to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

These days Christopher Luxon cowers in the face of Maori criticism of him and his party. Remember last year he said there wasn’t one thing he liked about Act’s Treaty Principles Bill? That was the bill that said the government has the right to govern and that all citizens were equal before the law – and Luxon didn’t like any of that!

Unforgiveable.

After Winston brought the issue back to the election year table, Luxon is fiddling with his cutlery and napkin.

“It’s something we haven’t discussed around the caucus table” he told Newstalk ZB.

For heaven’s sake, don’t you have an opinion on it? Can’t you give us a hint of your thinking?

His avoidance of the topic says it all. He won’t allow National under his leadership to entertain the idea.

However, in the movement to have the Maori seats removed, Winston Peters is far from blameless. In 2017 he campaigned on a referendum being a “bottom line” for his party in any coalition. He went with Labour and the line was quietly erased. It’s reported he never even suggested the idea during negotiations.

Then there’s Act. Their policy has long been the abolition of race based electorates but when they had the opportunity to do something about it in 2023 coalition negotiations didn’t move on the matter .They should be backing New Zealand First’s idea for a referendum or at least pushing for the system they used with assisted dying – pass legislation but make its implementation subject to a referendum.

It’s well recognized that MMP has taken away the need for separate Maori representation in the parliament. Over a third of the cabinet and more than a quarter of MPs now have some Maori ancestry. The 1986 Royal Commission on Electoral Reform recommended no Maori roll and no Maori constituencies.

But the Royal Commission also made what is essentially a racist and unworkable recommendation. It said “parties primarily representing Maori interests” would have the threshold for representation waived. Apart from that definition being extraordinarily ill-defined, the threshold waiver would lead to ineffective one MP parties represented in parliament. That’s why the parliament of the time put the issue in the too hard basket and baulked at Maori seat abolition.

As the voices of the left are allowed to holler louder and louder, and the long march through our educational institutions strides on unabated, politicians from the right and centre-right will have occasional burps about making moves on the Maori constituencies. New Zealand First has just exhaled.

Don Brash and Hobson’s Pledge reckons separate Maori representation will be gone by 2030.

But with the parties of the left not interested in engaging and National shy on the issue, we should tell them they’re dreaming.

The Maori seats will never be abolished.

Batchelor alleges he was defamed in a TVNZ broadcast and accompanying online story in which Dr Hattotuwa offered commentary on Batchelor’s writings. Dr Hattotuwa is the first defendant; TVNZ the second. I was asked by the principal shareholder of NZME, Jim Grenon, to appear as an “expert witness” on issues of news gathering, editorial balance, and fairness in broadcast journalism. Mr Grenon is funding Batchelor’s case.

My evidence was straightforward. In my professional opinion, Dr Hattotuwa’s voice was dominant in the story, while Batchelor’s response was relegated to a perfunctory summary at the end. The written version of the article was roughly 600 words. Dr Hattotuwa’s comments accounted for 205 of those words. Batchelor’s response amounted to a single 10-word sentence. That, I argued, raised legitimate questions about balance and proportionality in a story that purported to examine contested claims.

Ninety minutes in the witness box under cross-examination by TVNZ’s counsel, Daniel Nilsson, was an education. Nilsson is sharp, precise, and relentless — qualities I suspect are highly prized in a courtroom, even if they would make for uncomfortable television interviews. I was questioned closely about my written Brief of Evidence, particularly sections addressing declining public trust in mainstream media.

I had argued that on certain issues — notably climate science and race relations — journalists increasingly present a narrow range of perspectives, often framing dissenting voices as marginal or unworthy of serious consideration. When pressed for examples, I cited two recent cases.

The first was the near-total absence of mainstream media coverage of last week’s visit by renowned physicist and climate alarmism sceptic Will Happer. Happer, a distinguished academic with a long career in physics, was interviewed on Newstalk ZB’s The Country. Beyond that, his visit was effectively ignored. Whatever one thinks of his views, the decision by mainstream outlets not to engage with them at all is itself revealing.

The second example was the unfolding Willie Jackson affair at the Manukau Urban Māori Authority — an issue generating considerable discussion online, yet attracting virtually no attention from major news organisations. To my mind, these silences are not incidental. They contribute directly to public perceptions that the media decides, in advance, which topics and viewpoints are acceptable.

Only one mainstream journalist, Shayne Currie from the New Zealand Herald, was present on the press bench during my evidence, although Joel McManus from The Spinoff also covered the trial. Currie did not include my comments on media trust or selective coverage in his reporting. That is, of course, his prerogative. Editors choose what they regard as newsworthy. But I remain of the view that my remarks about declining trust in the media were more pertinent than questions about my association with Reality Check Radio or its billboards.

Still, I was not the reporter. I was the witness.

I am under no illusion that I covered myself in glory in the witness box. This was my first experience giving evidence in a civil trial, and it showed. My only previous court appearance was 26 years ago as a defendant — guilty, remorseful, and accepting the consequences of a drink-driving charge. That, frankly, was easier. Lawyers such as Nilsson and Dr Hattotuwa’s counsel, Davey Salmon KC, are adept at seizing on any imprecision or stray phrase and turning it into a point of pressure.

My greatest regret came after I had finished giving evidence. My appearance had been delayed, it overran, and I missed my scheduled flight home. While frantically trying to rebook via the Air New Zealand app, Phil O’Sullivan, now head of TVNZ News, popped his head into the room, wished me a Merry Christmas, and moved on.

Distracted, stressed, and careless, I called out to him and made a few comments about the case and my involvement. I may well have referred to Julian Batchelor as “a nutter”, having watched his performance in court the previous day.

Under questioning, Batchelor had defended claims that Māori culture was “lacking in character”, suggested there was pre-Māori habitation of New Zealand, and alleged that “600 farmers in Otago” were armed and ready to act because of Māori privilege. He also refused to disclose who funded his pamphlet, prompting suggestions he may have been in contempt of court. From the public gallery, it did not strike me as a strong showing.

I assumed my exchange with O’Sullivan was private, a conversation between former colleagues. I should have explicitly said it was off the record. I did not. That was my mistake. Mea culpa.

O’Sullivan must have tipped off Davey Salmon about my comments and, under questioning, repeated them in court. They are remarks which will be of no help to the plaintiff’s case.

I retire, somewhat bruised, from the ranks of defamation trial witnesses. The experience reinforced for me just how much power large media organisations wield — and how carefully that power must be exercised if public trust is to be maintained.

It also gave me one more reason to remain sceptical of TVNZ News.

One of the curiosities of modern journalism is not how often stories are missed, but how often they are found, laid bare — and then quietly abandoned.

A week ago, the Otago Daily Times published what I regard as the most substantial piece of investigative journalism produced by a New Zealand newspaper this year. Across four full pages, with a front-page splash, the ODT examined allegations of serious governance and financial failings at Te Kaika, a Dunedin health hub operated by Otepoti Health Limited, a Māori health and social services trust. The sums involved run into many millions of dollars of taxpayer funding. The issues raised went to conflicts of interest, board oversight, accountability, and the blurred line between public money and private control.

It was serious, painstaking work. The kind of journalism editors say they want more of, but so rarely commission. And then — nothing.

Since Saturday December 5, there has been no follow-up reporting in the ODT. No second-day angle. No response piece. No “what happens next”. One letter to the editor. No discussion in the paper’s own “From our Facebook” column, which normally thrives on controversy. And, more strikingly, no pickup by other mainstream media at all.

That silence is extraordinary.

When a newspaper goes as big as the ODT did, it creates an obligation — not just to the story, but to readers. Investigative journalism is not a one-day event. It is a process. It provokes responses, denials, explanations, counter-claims, and often legal positioning. All of that is part of the public interest. When the reporting simply stops, readers are left to draw their own conclusions — and none of them are flattering to the media.

So why the sudden quiet?

There are only a few plausible explanations. One is that the reporting was wrong. That seems highly unlikely. Stories of this scale do not appear without extensive fact-checking and legal vetting. Editors do not run four pages and a front-page lead on a whim. If errors had been discovered post-publication, one would expect clarification, correction, or at the very least a holding position. Silence suggests confidence, not retreat.

Another possibility is that the paper decided, having done the hard work, to move on. That would be a failure of editorial judgement. Good investigative stories are rare. They demand persistence. They do not conclude neatly on a Saturday morning.

Which leaves the most uncomfortable explanation: pressure.

Otepoti Health Limited does not exist in a vacuum. Ultimately, it sits within a network of Māori health and governance structures with significant political influence. Ngāi Tahu, as the dominant iwi in the region, looms large in the background. No allegation needs to be made to observe that legal threats, reputational pressure, or quiet warnings can have a chilling effect — particularly in a small media market, and particularly when issues intersect with race, Treaty politics, and public funding.

If that is what has happened, it deserves daylight. If it has not happened, then the ODT should say so — and continue reporting.

This pattern is not confined to Dunedin.

Consider the Willie Jackson affair. Cameron Slater, through his Good Oil website and podcast, has published detailed allegations about the Labour MP’s conduct, including claims that he trespassed a trade union official from a workplace. These are not trivial matters. They go to the exercise of power, intimidation, and the conduct expected of a Member of Parliament.

We know mainstream media were aware of these claims. Slater has produced an email from Stuff’s Tova O’Brien to the CEO of the Manukau Urban Māori Authority — Willie Jackson’s wife — seeking comment on bullying allegations involving her organisation. That was over a month ago. Since then, nothing. No article. No investigation. No explanation.

Again, silence.

The problem here is not whether Cameron Slater is a comfortable source. He is not. He is partisan, abrasive, and deeply unpopular in newsrooms. But journalism is not supposed to be about comfort. When allegations are serious, corroborated, and already circulating, the job of mainstream media is not to look away, but to verify, contextualise, and report — or to explain why they cannot.

Instead, we get a void. And into that void rush suspicion and cynicism.

The public notices when stories involving Māori organisations, public money, and political power are treated differently. When scrutiny is intense one day and absent the next. When accusations against some figures are pursued relentlessly, while others appear insulated.

None of this serves Māori communities, journalists, or the wider public. Transparency is not racism. Accountability is not colonisation. Public money demands public scrutiny, regardless of who administers it.

The ODT deserves credit for its original reporting on Te Kaika. It was courageous and important. But journalism does not end at publication. If the story stands, it should be pursued. If it has stalled for reasons beyond the newsroom, readers deserve to know.

Because the silence, at present, is deafening.

The timing could not be better for observing how this “world-first” policy is landing among the teenagers it is meant to protect. And based on the conversations circulating through the junior cricket community, Australia’s lawmakers may have overestimated the willingness of adolescents to quietly accept the sudden disappearance of TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and the rest of the digital ecosystem that forms such a large part of their social world.

The New Zealand boys in this touring group are, to put it mildly, bemused. They cannot quite comprehend why their Australian counterparts have been subjected to such sweeping restrictions. But for the Australians, it has been big news—and not always warmly received.

When I turned on the ABC 24-hour news channel last night, the story led the bulletin. The tone of the reporting was decidedly sympathetic to the government’s intentions, which is hardly surprising given the ABC’s well-known reticence in harshly criticising Labor governments.

Still, the coverage did produce one memorable interview with a Canberra schoolboy who looked as though he had not strayed far from a screen in years. He happily conceded that the ban “would be better for his mental health” and might push him toward “more sport.” That, of course, is the foundational logic behind the policy: reduce exposure to addictive platforms, and adolescents might rediscover real-world activities and healthier social patterns.

The ABC also framed the policy as potentially precedent-setting. Australia, they reminded viewers, was among the first countries to make seatbelts compulsory in the early 1970s, and the rest of the world followed. Perhaps, they suggested, the same thing will happen with social media regulation.

But I decided to conduct some “field research” of my own. My grandson tells me that many of the Australians he has been playing with are rather grumpy about the whole thing and have already begun devising workarounds. In fact, several appear to have been strategically preparing for such a crackdown for years. When they first signed up for Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok, they inflated their age by a year or two, meaning the platforms now recognise them as already 16 or older. Their accounts remain untouched.

Even more revealing is the fact that enforcement appears to be wildly inconsistent. Among the boys my grandson has spoken with, those who have been banned from one platform have often retained access to others. A teenager might find his TikTok account deactivated but still operate freely on Instagram or Snapchat, neither of which has yet demanded age verification.

Facebook, as the boys were keen to stress, is strictly for older generations.

The Federal Communications Minister Annika Wells has reported that 200,000 TikTok accounts have already been removed, but even she conceded that the platforms were supposed to have begun their purge days before the ban formally commenced. Ten social media sites fall under the ban: Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, X, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, Kick and Reddit. More may follow. Yet the lived reality on the ground suggests that enforcement is, at best, porous.

An even more intriguing trend is emerging: the shift toward WhatsApp. As my grandson explains, the boys are increasingly swapping mobile numbers and communicating via text or WhatsApp messaging, both of which allow easy video sharing within private groups. In other words, even if the regulated platforms clamp down, unrestricted channels remain readily available, and behaviour simply migrates.

This begs the question: is the ban achieving its intended purpose, or is it merely redirecting teenage ingenuity? Governments routinely underestimate adolescents’ capacity to circumvent rules that they consider unreasonable. Moreover, the policy risks widening the gap between parents who can supervise their children’s digital workarounds and those who cannot. The result may be less a reduction in harmful online exposure and more a shift into less visible, less regulated digital spaces.

New Zealand will undoubtedly watch Australia’s experiment with interest. The threat of $50 million fines for companies that fail to take “reasonable steps” to eliminate underage accounts is certainly attention-grabbing. But defining “reasonable steps” in the constantly shifting world of technology will be challenging. And enforcement, as the first week of the ban has shown, may prove patchy at best.

As for future New Zealand policy, my grandson is nonchalant—he will be 16 next year. His younger siblings, aged 12 and 9, might feel differently. Whether Australia’s bold move becomes a global model or a cautionary tale will depend not on its intentions—which are widely acknowledged as sincere—but on its real-world effectiveness. Early signs suggest the battle between regulators and teenagers may be far more complex than policymakers anticipated.

They have much in common.

They’re all Maori owned and controlled health and social service providers.

They’re all predominantly government funded.

And they’re a blueprint for nepotism.

Consider these facts. The Chief Executive of Waipareira Trust is John Tamihere. The Chief Operating Officer is his wife Awerangi Tamihere.

Labour MP Willie Jackson used to be the Chief Executive of MUMA, following in the footsteps of his mother Dame June Jackson. When he returned to Parliament in 2017 his wife Tania Rangiheuea succeeded him.

Meanwhile in Dunedin Te Kaika was set up with the support of uber wealthy South Island iwi Ngai Tahu. The chair of the board is Donna Matahaere-Atariki. The Chief Executive is her son Matt Matahaere. The General Manager of Social Services is her daughter Winnie Matahaere.

Hmm.

Were the wives and children really the best people for those roles in an open and contestable recruitment process? To paraphrase Oscar Wild one might be acceptable and two a coincidence, but three - really?

What’s worse is that all three organisations are facing scrutiny for a series of either alleged financial irregularities, human resources issues or in the case of Te Kaika, both.

The matters surrounding the Waipareira Trust have been well canvassed. It was investigated for bankrolling political campaigns when, by law, its charitable status expressly forbids that activity.

The Charities Registration Board has subsequently advised the Trust it will be deregistered. That action is subject to court proceedings.

Waipareira’s associated entity, the Whanau Ora Commissioning Agency of which John Tamihere was also CEO and his wife again the COO, lost its contract with the government this year.

In the last week a podcast featuring The Good Oil’s Cameron Slater with trade unionist and sometime political adviser Matt McCarten has exposed alleged bullying by Tania Rangiheuea at MUMA. A report into her behaviour was allegedly written by the then chair of the MUMA board. But Willie Jackson, now an MP and with no official position at MUMA, has somehow – according to McCarten – arranged for that board chair to not only lose the position but also a seat on the board as well. The report into Jackson’s wife’s behaviour has disappeared.

Meanwhile McCarten, as a trade unionist, has agreed to represent disgruntled MUMA employees who feel they’ve been bullied by Ms Rangiheuea.

Jackson is chair of the Nga Whare Waatea Marae where MUMA is based. So Jackson has trespassed McCarten from the Marae because he says his presence there is a “repeated breach of tikanga and Kaupapa Maori.”

Yet the Marae is the landlord, not the employer and it’s against the law to ban a union representative from a workplace. Both the Labour leader Chris Hipkins and parliament’s Speaker have been advised of Jackson’s behaviour yet no action has been taken.

More significantly no mainstream media has covered the story. The Platform did last week when Michael Laws interviewed McCarten. Consequently The Platform received a letter threatening legal action from MUMA’s lawyers Chapman Tripp. The Platform is likely ignore it - and so it should.

This is a matter of considerable public interest and mainstream media should have reported it by now. That they haven’t is cowardly.

In Dunedin the Otago Daily Times has produced the country’s best pieces of investigative journalism this year with a front page splash – that’s after the obligatory Harvey Norman wrap-around – with the headline “Trouble in the Village.”

In short, the ODT says a year-long investigation into Te Kaika has uncovered “a slew of disgruntled former staff members, allegations of misconduct and personal grievance payouts.”

The report, over 4 broadsheet pages, reports how the charity behind Te Kaika, Otakou Health Limited (OHL) has breached its own constitution and is being investigated by the Department of Internal Affairs over unsecured interest-free loans to the board chairwoman and her CEO son.

Ms Matahaere-Atariki is quoted as saying she was “surprised by questions around the finances and the general scrutiny on Te Kaika’s operations.”

She has no reason to be surprised. Te Kaika’s annual revenue is $14 million, most of it paid by the government. The ODT has uncovered much evidence that the money is not being spent wisely. Eventually OHL hired a public relations firm which said no more answers would be forthcoming and complained about the ODT’s “persistence.”

It is surely time for the government to hold serious inquiries into these Maori health and social service providers. How efficient are they? How many others are there with issues like the ones outlined here?

Are there worthwhile results being reported for the money paid, especially in social services like addiction counselling and domestic violence support?

Any publicly funded organization, Maori or otherwise, where blatant favouritism is observed in senior management appointments needs to be closely scrutinized.

When the nepotism is accompanied by reports of staff grievances, financial impropriety and underwhelming delivery results then the case for government intervention is strong.

But has this government got the courage for such intervention?

Sadly, no.

The government’s sudden decision to replace elected regional councillors with panels of district and city mayors has been sold as a bold stroke toward streamlining local government. But bold is not the same as wise, and decisive is not the same as thoughtful. In its rush to simplify a system that undoubtedly needs reform, the government has swung the axe at the wrong trunk.

Rather than fixing the machinery of local government, it has removed the very people elected to oversee that machinery — and installed a group already burdened with full-time jobs of their own.

Take Otago as a case in point. The newly elected Otago Regional Council (ORC) had barely taken shape after October’s local body elections. The majority of the twelve strong council was significantly different in political outlook from its predecessors, with a clear public mandate for change. The council had chosen former ACT MP Hilary Calvert as chair, signalling a shift in direction — particularly around environmental management and water policy, areas that have been contentious throughout the region.

Yet before these councillors could even begin their work, they were gone. In their place now sit the mayors of Dunedin, Waitaki, Central Otago, Clutha and Queenstown Lakes — all of whom were elected mayor for the first time on October 11th!

Being a mayor in 2025 is a full-time job by any measure. They are responsible for multimillion-dollar budgets, infrastructure crises, climate resilience planning, tourism pressures, housing shortages, transport headaches and the general expectations of a community that demands accessibility and leadership every day of the week. To suggest these individuals have the capacity to simultaneously govern a major regional authority is optimistic at best, reckless at worst.

And while the elected representatives disappear, the permanent staff — the bureaucrats who actually run the day-to-day functions — remain exactly where they are. There are good people in regional government, but anyone who has dealt with large public agencies knows that organisational culture matters. Those cultures tend to become resistant to scrutiny and slow to change. If anything needed reform, it was not the councillors but the structure, accountability systems and staffing of the organisations themselves. Yet instead of reshaping the engine room, the government has simply removed the drivers.

What makes this more troubling is the ideological mismatch. The ORC was about to embark on a markedly different policy direction, especially around freshwater management. Otago voters had chosen that direction. Removing the council not only disrupts that democratic mandate — it eliminates it.

Now, key decisions in environmental regulation, land use, and community wellbeing will be made by a group of mayors whose own councils may have entirely different priorities. That is not streamlining; it is dilution. And it leaves significant power in the hands of senior staff whose political leanings, as with much of the public sector, are not always aligned with the direction voters have chosen.

The government’s broader motivation is obvious enough. It wants to push ahead quickly with new resource management legislation, and removing a layer of regional governance certainly makes that easier. But convenience for Wellington is not the same as good governance for the regions. This reform raises more questions than it answers.

Who, for instance, will eventually own the ORC’s subsidiary Port Otago — a major strategic asset with national significance? Who will own the Bay of Plenty Regional Council’s 54% stake in the Port of Tauranga? These are not hypothetical accounting queries. They are multi-billion-dollar issues involving dividends, borrowing capacity, governance rights, and long-term regional economic planning. If regional councils exist only in name, with part-time oversight from already overloaded mayors, the stewardship of these assets becomes dangerously unclear.

Even the one area where this move seems tidy — the removal of appointed councillors from Environment Canterbury (ECan) — is likely to trigger conflict. Ngāi Tahu has long argued for representation commensurate with its role as mana whenua, and removing appointed seats will almost certainly ignite protest and, eventually, a claim to the Waitangi Tribunal. If the intention was simplification, the government may instead have created a fresh constitutional dispute.

Local government reform is needed. Few would deny that the system is overburdened, uneven, and too often paralysed by bureaucracy. But real reform requires careful, structural change: clarifying responsibilities, improving accountability, modernising funding models, and reshaping organisational cultures that have become sluggish or opaque. What we have instead is a shortcut — quick, dramatic, and politically tidy, but lacking coherence and public buy-in.

Replacing elected regional councillors with a panel of mayors may create the illusion of efficiency, but in reality it removes democratic oversight, overloads the wrong people, and leaves unexamined the entrenched systems that truly need change. In the end, the government may find that the simplification it sought has created the opposite: uncertainty, confusion and a loss of trust in local democracy.

Real reform requires thinking. This decision feels like anything but.