Trans rights are not the rights of a tiny minority, trans rights are everyone’s rights to self-determination, control of our bodies, and a society where opportunity and aesthetics are not restricted by sex assigned at birth You should support and defend trans people because trans people are people

There has never been a “public-private partnership” that provided a higher quality service or cost less money than the public just doing the job in-house. PPP’s exist to transfer more public, taxpayer money to private entities. It’s welfare for the immortal, immoral, unaccountable corps.

I may be a dropkick but surely $300 million of tax buys quite a lot of hospital. www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-dept...

Hopefully the NZ govt will now backtrack on deeply unfair & undemocratic plans to change electoral processes - plans which threaten to erode trust in govt & elections. The National govt needs more experienced MPs to help it regain the middle ground it is losing #nzpol newsroom.co.nz/2025/07/28/a...

Real leadership for women isn’t about suddenly claiming the mic when it suits you. It’s about who you stood alongside when it was hard, who you made room for when you had power, and whether you used your influence when it counted, and not just when you want to hoard power.

THIS. I know this is a really uncomfortable conversation to have, but righteously reading Ray Chung for filth should never obscure that so many of those frantically distancing themselves are only doing so because he couldn't spin his way out of a tumble dryer. #nzpol

#NZPol Australia ahead of us on the curve nact want to take is down. How about we simply don’t make this stupid mistake in the first place? www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03...

northandsouth.co.nz/2025/07/02/t... Feeling safe is a rare feeling…sparse or nonexistent resources make everyone feel like they’re stretched thin, knowing that errors leading to patient harm are more likely. But there’s also a real fear that just speaking out will draw a large target on their back.

Similar to asbestos or unexploded munitions, the fallout of the LLM era will persist long after the apps are abandoned, because their outputs have been snuck into the corpus by copy-pasting fools. The longer chatbots force themselves into every workflow, the longer it will take to decontaminate.

@reneeliang.bsky.social @nualaoconnor.bsky.social

Voila.

So cuts for real people, tax breaks for business, all paid for by stealing from women. Oh, and deliberately conflict the government in its role as regulator for the fossil industry. What a crock of shit. www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

Super chuffed to have these up again: 16 poems/ poetry extracts from poets over 45 years of Poetry Live! Catch them today if you’re in the Auckland CBD. For more : poetrylivenz.wixsite.com/poetrylivenz...

My latest North and South column is live! I talk about why feeding children at school makes sense, health and education wise. I also invoke the word 'fiscal' twice in honour of Budget Day tomorrow - let's hope there are some nice, not nasty surprises in there. northandsouth.co.nz/2025/05/21/s...

You just traveled to the Middle East, Donald. They let you go, no issues.

The last few years have been pretty hard & I’ve largely become a bit of a hermit. But I’ve briefly emerged to talk about the thing that’s reignited my spark - menstrual cups! Thanks to NZ Women’s Weekly and Elizabeth Easther for coaxing me out of my shell. www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/si...

Hey world, remember when you thought this was awesome? (Which, by the way, it was). Yeah well she's been suspended for a week now because of it; it's coloniser rules and forms of expression allowed only, indigenous people must only be angry in white ways. www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

Exactly #nzpol

A reminder that Judith Collins, the defender of Parliamentary "civility" leaked a Civil Servant's personal details to her Dirty Politics attack dogs, who then followed her orders to try and destroy that Civil Servant. "Civility", she calls it.

Hey just a random reminder, as the coleaders of te Pāti Māori are suspended for three weeks over a haka... David Seymour *personally* fought for the rights of anti-choice protesters to scream at pregnant people outside abortion clinics because that's the kind of "free speech" he approves of

Channelled these posts into something longer, linking to the work of black feminist women and highlighting how Brooke and Nicola are performing white womanhood while simultaneously suppressing legitimate resistance to their oppressive acts: open.substack.com/pub/drbex/p/...

So now the women who have disempowered tens of thousands of women with a misogynistic bill rushed through without any discussion are claiming victimhood and wanting 'right of reply' to being called out as sexist by a journalist. Classic bully playbook.

Thinking a hand full of women being called cunts is worse misogyny than stealing wage increases from 10s or 100s of thousands of women is whack as hell and just the kind of thinking you'd expect from Tory women #NZPol

OK, this is wild. In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them. It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*. What the HELL? 1/

This is what a collapsing health system looks like-trying to push thinner, riskier margins of efficiency from exhausted doctors rather than doing the mahi & fronting the resources to support it from the ground up. These moves will only INCREASE costs and REDUCE safety. www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

Impossible to communicate to people that once you decide that a group more vulnerable than you can be sacrificed in the name of your own safety or interests that you have already entered into an tacit agreement that you can also be sacrificed in the interests of a group less vulnerable than you.

Together we must be united as a country make the necessary sacrifices during these hard times so we can help pay for these landlord tax cuts! 🫡✊ yeehawtheboys.substack.com/p/actively-e...

More unemployed people. Removing pay equity. Rising food costs. No infrastructure building. Hmm

We endured six months of submissions and process for the Treaty Principles Bill, a bill cabinet knew would never pass. Yet the Govt gives just 12 hours for radical changes to pay equity laws that directly impact hundreds of thousands of workers, mostly women, & their families.

This government's entire vibe is: - fuck poor people - fuck women - fuck Māori - fuck evidence - fuck the public good - fuck the environment - fuck the economy - lie about it #nzpol

#HikoiForHealth was in Palmy today. Had a great chat with Dr Glenn Colquhoun. He told us that in doing this hikoi he has seen the strength in communities all along the way. They are keen to hear from more people at the link below (bottom of the page). Please help them help everyone. 1/3

Proof this guy is full of SITH.

Week in Review: Comment: Underneath the health ministry's 'milk and honey' report on the regulation of health professions a more sinister picture emerges, writes Ian Powell

The Anzac story warns us of what may happen to a small country that offers unfaltering loyalty to a great power. That loyalty can degrade to servility. Those in uniform pay the price. #auspol #ANZAC

My latest column on @north&southmagnz: why is the govt trying to take control of regulation of Drs and psychologists? What’s their agenda and why is this unsafe for patients? northandsouth.co.nz/2025/04/23/p...

This statement about the transphobic Supreme Court ruling by the UK's Crab Museum (yes a museum about crabs) is better than 99% of the statements I've seen on the topic www.crabmuseum.org/visit 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀

Kenyan #journalist Alvin Kaunda was reporting live from Nairobi when a curious baby #elephant, Kindani, decided to join the broadcast. The playful elephant stuck her trunk in Alvin's mouth, making for a hilarious moment! A joyful reminder of wildlife's charm and the work of the Sheldrick Trust!

Here’s my statement for when I’m a man & get caught out doing something vile… I am sincerely sorry for any offence taken. It was intended as a joke but I now regret my lapse in judgement, which does not reflect my core values or beliefs. This is not who I am. I will reflect on this and do better.

Harvard stood up to the bully — and the bully blinked

Most doctors, certainly senior ones, are driven, dedicated and massively hard working.The level of professional insult it takes to get them to strike is a very high bar indeed.

Kidnapping. Capturing a person against their will without due process is called kidnapping. Transporting them to another country without due process is called human trafficking. A squalid extrajudicial prison for people found guilty of no crime is called a concentration camp.

Sackets Harbor, NY is so small that there’s one pre k-12 school with 475 students. Three of those students were disappeared by ICE. Here is a statement published today by school principal Jaime Cook:

I have tariffed the penguins that are on Heard Island and which you were probably assuming did not export goods forgive me they were taking advantage of us so cunning and so cold

The question of if a country could fuck itself harder than the UK did with Brexit has today been answered.

John Campbell shows empathy for rangatahi in prison, says facts & gets accolades; a young brown woman MP does the same & is subjected to a deranged media circus. Todd Muller's breakdown gets the kid-glove treatment; Golriz is still being hunted like prey. If only this phenomenon... had a NAME??

My latest column has landed: northandsouth.co.nz/2025/03/25/c... It's meant to go with my 2019 essay that has just been republished (was hard to find before) and is still, sadly, pretty much topical: northandsouth.co.nz/2025/03/11/a....

A guy who used to be a comedian & is good at improv and dealing with hecklers and who has also spent the last 3 years in a war zone turns out to be a guy you can’t out-alpha, imagine that

We’re all seeing this for what it is, right? When a man feels entitled to tell someone else what to wear. What they should say, how to say it, and who they’re allowed to be friends with. www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2...

For decades, the US government has painstakingly kept American science #1 globally—and every facet of American life has improved because of it. The internet? Flu shot? Ozempic? All grew out of federally-funded research. Now all that's being dismantled. 1/ www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/21/1...