somehow new zealand politicians are even worse than the new zealand private sector at allocating capital

no one has written about the almost total collapse of good new zealand writing. which is ironic etc

everything moves so quickly. even two years ago a sustained cycle of negative media coverage could force a government to change direction. now, nothing. it doesn’t matter. and short form video is too diffuse and ephemeral to shift anything (yet?). an age of impunity

And of course, the rent-seeking and market power of the government-blessed monopoly businesses (supermarkets, gentailers, building materials) is effectively a system of multiple private taxes on innovation and creativity across the entire economy.

new zealand’s tightly enmeshed social networks make it hard for chief executives and board chairs to fail any direction but upwards, so i’m sympathetic to bryce and robert macculloch point about the failures of the country’s executives and chairs. but surely there’s a structural answer

henry oliver and simon chesterman did amazing things at metro. anyone could pick it up and find something interesting, but henry and simon somehow bottled the the voice, sensibilities, anxieties, and hopes of the generation shaped between 2008 and 2019. an intensely specific thing that worked

but importantly there is no party in NZ in 2025 that truly represents the working class. they are run by the professional middle classes for the professional middle classes.

you cannot maintain a pan-māori party in a capitalist society: the interests of working class māori will always diverge from the upwardly mobile bureaucrats who run the party and make up its elected officials. TPM, like all of its predecessors, will always fail

māori need to get serious lol. nepotism is a problem, and there’s a whole class of 2nd and 3rd generation no hopers in positions by sheer accident of birth. let’s be honest with each other lol

gee whiz mr bolger was a complex character, but you have to admire the unbreakable conviction on the treaty partnership staring down his own cabinet, his party, his social base, and a majority of new zealanders. no way a politician would have the courage to do the same today x

i maintained at the time the historic march against the treaty principles bill would have the inevitable effect of actually demobilising people: it misdirected organising energy and collective anger toward a bill that was designed to fail. when it failed as was always intended many people either

based henry cooke: 1) reports on shocking infighting in TPM, *gets told to start reporting on the government* 2) reports on a series of disastrous polls for the leading party in government, *gets told to start reporting on TPM* lol

the government is reforming the legislation that TPM was born from, reverting it to a position closer to the foreshore and seabed act than the marine and coastal area act finlayson intended. this is the most significant reform to māori rights in a generation, yet: (1/2)

urbanists are 100% correct on their one Thing but have the worst opinions and the most off putting manner on literally every other thing

the kawerau district is both extremely left wing and extremely māori

sorry i know i’m TPM’s biggest hater (rawiri packing a sad because maiki asked a legitimate question lol) but the american style psychobabble about believing in yourself is so weird. people are starving man

imagine being the MP for southern māori and thinking the party of eruera tirikatene doesn’t have the right to stand in it. idiot

TPM probably leaking the internal budgeting details of their own MP. they’re not beating the “toxic” allegations

Spotted this gem in a footnote on page 62 of Treasury's He Tirohanga Mokopuna "Between 25% and 30% of everyone born in New Zealand is living overseas by age 30, and emigration rates are even higher among those with tertiary qualifications" Radical idea here - how about stop shitting on our young?

this country is so funny: a series of welfare subsidies that end up in the hands of landlords and private childcare providers; a chronically unaffordable housing market; a publicly-owned electricity generation and retail racket; oligopolies in supermarket and telecommunication sectors lol

hate to say it but people like sina and i who’ve been around more than 5 minutes have been warning about the direction TPM’s been travelling in since at least 2023. it’s a highly divisive party, especially within māori society itself. solidarity with eru www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

essential journalism by mani dunlop www.teaonews.co.nz/2025/10/02/t...

having dynamic performance conversations with miriama jean

“at the movies” and the “sunday sampler” were the last best programmes on rnz, so of course paul thompson is cutting them

Govt takes a billion in revenue each year in dividends and tax from the electricity sector. This is a regressive form of taxation that causes factories to collapse. Why cant we just tax capital gains like a grown up country

This cast iron truth also applies to most other areas of Government control and now seemingly to Conservation

inadequate tax settings that fail to raise enough revenue to fund the crown’s annual operations mean that governments will act as a motivated shareholder seeking maximum profit rather than a policy-maker seeking to preserve the industrial base/lower household costs. this is why energy reform fails

hate to have an opinion on wellington’s civic infrastructure but the idea of dumping a hotel in te ngakau between the town hall and library is so offensive. when te manawataki o te papa is finished bloody TAURANGA is going to have a more inclusive and progressive civic space than wellington

probably a greater deterrent to foreign investment is a government minister preemptively threatening to legislate over the top of judicial decisions rather than the emerging role of tikanga within those decisions

it’s hard to overstate how catastrophically bad it is to be a politician seen to be attacking sir john key

1 news needs to open a special investigation into the origin of jason wall’s accent

the thing that gets me about trump is his entire administration is just slop and fan service for online head cases - paracetamol causes autism !! - but we’re all so soaked in their propaganda, our attention spans are so thoroughly destroyed by their screens, that everyone just shrugs

i don’t think the abrupt pivot from “the last government left the books in a mess that’s why we’re cutting spending” to “actually we’re not really cutting we’re stimulating the economy with even more spending” is going to work because most people do have memories slightly longer than a gold fish

still can’t believe the herald’s executives made a conscious decision to turn their homepage into AI slop. easily the worst homepage in nz media

the end point of takuta and JT’s logic: non-māori can’t vote for TPM lol

holding work events across the week to celebrate māori language week. so far the most enthusiastic participants have been sri lankans, filipinos, brits, and even the afrikaners (!!) but takuta wants to send them back ?? completely backwards

comparing labour volunteers in tamaki makaurau to the raj, the opium wars, and trans-atlantic slavery. take a deep breath JT

ferris falsely claiming “the major parties use multiculturalism to diminish māori rights” is just a sop. the qualifier that the “major parties” use it that way is just the cover he’s running to avoid the rightful naming of his statements as racist

Top news on the utterly Listenerized RNZ: but my homies (see what I did there) the falling price of your house makes no difference whatsoever to you if you bought it to actually live there. You knew the size of the mortgage going in. If you have to move, you'll sell and buy in the same market.

TPM’s rhetoric only ends in one place: there’ll be “real māori” (those who support TPM) and there’ll be colonised and plastic māori (those who don’t support TPM)

takuta ferris a straight up racist. bring back a tirikatene !!

weird to stumble on a local group of back to landers (in the new zealand parlance “grunters” and “slayas”) who worshiped the dangerously insane tom phillips

i work in new zealand local government, which is like an outpost of the municipality of pretoria, so monday will be unbearable once the boks dispose of the all black chokers

neither national nor labour are willing to acknowledge the obvious, devastating truth: so long as new zealand and australia maintain a single labour market, wages (and taxes) must rise massively to match pay for doctors, nurses, teachers, police, builders, and other skilled workers in australia

rnz’s proposal to disestablish “At the Movies” demonstrates again how insane management is. this is another one of the station’s cultural and audience touchstones. they’ll probably replace it with some stink “panel” talking about minor auckland obsessions like people who don’t pick up their dog poo

i’m sorry but the consequences of TPM’s rhetoric that they are the only True representatives of māori is, one, the slide into casual racism as per the screenshot, and then two, a sort of inverted blood and soil nationalism