You know what would free up roads in Wellington without costing a cent? Do what the Japanese do - in order to buy a car you need to prove you have off street parking to store it. Then all suburban roads would suddenly have 1–2 more lanes available.

It almost feels like Labour want to be National's coalition partner instead of a true opposition party. Giving Luxon this win in exchange for nothing right after he tore up their bipartisan climate deal would be the ultimate example of that...

It would be political malpractice for Labour to vote for this because of bipartisanship right after National tore up a bipartisan climate agreement. Labour has leverage: Luxon desperately wants this, and NZF won't play ball. Restoring the climate agreement would be a good price for Labour votes...

It's a real indictment of the horrendous state of NZ media that this actual data gets essentially no coverage. Meanwhile I can't even count the number of "failing cafe owner blames cycleways for his poor business performance" stories...

Government cuts a billion from health.

That's a BILLION DOLLARS this government is underspending in health. A BILLION DOLLARS taken out of healthcare! They have the money, they just don't want to spend it. Not on on hospitals or doctors or nurses or admin staff or regional health care, or anyone of a myriad of needed items. #nzpol

If we're not doing laws anymore, then Democratic governors, mayors and councils can stop recognizing federal authority in the areas of law enforcement and taxation

"the New Zealand public have huge confidence in the New Zealand police and they should have." Wonder if Chris Hipkins still stands by this... If so, he's unfit for office, and if not he should call for some accountability.

Health NZ should be liable for interest on these delays. Yes, historical payroll systems etc, but there's no excuse for years of delay when you're spending 100 million on contractors to sort it out.

I would love for even one MP from any party to put up a member's bill to rein in name suppression. It's a real indictment of the political and legal class here that there's no movement to curb any of this despite repeated examples of harm...

Again and again and again, this coalition government chooses to ignore expert advice and evidence, instead, creating policies focused on ideology and personal beliefs. It's beyond irresponsible, it's beyond negligence, it's actively and deliberately harmful. It's reprehensible that this continues.

These racist remarks from Luxon are very clearly him taking his marching orders from the US and it should destroy him and his party. www.reuters.com/world/us/us-...

Is there anything NZ Police won't fuck up?

TW: Sexual violence and child exploitation I hate this so much. I feel sick. 280 images of toddlers & children. HUNDREDS. Accessing these has an impact on demand, therefore creating more harm to the children and others. This man is a monster and is getting an easy ride.

This country is so embarrassing. Governance here is basically just a bunch of morons doing performative nonsense to rile up their aggressively stupid voters.

BREAKING: The High Court of New Zealand has granted PATHA’s application for interim relief, declaring that the Crown should not take any steps to enforce the incoming ban on new prescriptions of puberty blockers to transgender children and young people. More to come:

Bike lanes for the win! I'll be on RNZ this evening around 6.40 banging on about this new study. www.phcc.org.nz/briefing/pub... @cyclingactionnz.bsky.social @rnzrss.bsky.social

One last thing I'll say about Hipkins' Labour. If you want to see how they'll govern, look at his hand-picked Wellington mayor. Since taking office Andrew Little has promoted a misogynist creep and sided with the right to shelve anything forward-looking in favor of reactionary nostalgia...

Chris Hipkins is running with the 2026 campaign message of "Better things aren't possible." He's literally the centrist rally meme as an actual party leader...

Chris Hipkins: We can’t have nice things. www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

Yep. Hipkins is arrogantly plowing ahead with the same plan he lost with in 2023. He's going to get smashed again and cement his place as the worst party leader in decades. He appeals to no one: National voters won't choose him, and a lot of disaffected left-leaning voters will just stay home.

Well looks like this arrogant and uninspiring loser is going to carry on through the election Putting down my prediction now that he will lead Labour to another loss and cement his place as the worst party leader in generations. Would love to be wrong, of course, but it's not looking good...

So the cops just got caught massively falsifying alcohol test results and have held no one accountable. Seems like a great time to roll out poorly-thought-out roadside drug testing...

this is a general warrant and it's specifically the kind of warrant the framers passed the 4th amendment to outlaw

Predictable Government half-assery resulting in half-assed outcomes. I'm shocked I tell you, shocked. Their ideologically-driven impulsive restructuring left a vital organisation of more than 100,000 workers with 79 IT support staff.

26 months. *26 months*. The New Zealand justice system from end to end doesn't give one single fuck about the victims of sexual abusers. www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

The same Police with a long and undistiguished record of failing to prosecute crimes against women coz of "too busy" "just a misunderstanding" "not enough evidence" "discretionary powers"...

Luxon and Hipkins both agree that there is no need for an inquiry into the Police. Any person not personally implicated in this vile affair can clearly see that the NZ Police are utterly and systemically rotten and need a thorough clean out from the top down. www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

Literally every other rich country has solved these problems and achieves universal coverage with better outcomes at a significantly lower cost than the US...

NZ Police appear to be a thoroughly irredeemable organization. From continuing to harass this poor woman to routinely falsifying evidence to horrendous leadership. Rotten to the core. Tamatha Paul was 100 percent right, and she should demand an apology from Hipkins and Luxon.

NZ Police appear to be a thoroughly irredeemable organization. From continuing to harass this poor woman to routinely falsifying evidence to horrendous leadership. Rotten to the core. Tamatha Paul was 100 percent right, and she should demand an apology from Hipkins and Luxon.

I wish there was more public recognition of how batshit insane it is to call the president a dangerous authoritarian and then give him a $1 trillion military budget

Not at all surprising. Higher speeds lower productivity: what the data shows crash delays really cost Auckland www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

I've been on the "don't run the guy the electorate said no to already" sauce since Hipkins didn't decide to leave. If Labour wants to win, it needs to ditch the guy who lost as leader. Otherwise the electorate won't have a choice between Luxon and something new and different.

This. Hipkins had a year to run a campaign. He was so bad that he made Luxon seem charismatic. His big ideas were "scrap all Labour policies" and "gst off fruit" And after that disaster, the Labour Party thought "let's run it back". Well Hipkins is going to get his ass kicked again...

This is vile. It shouldn't matter, but Somalis voted overwhelmingly for Harris. Meanwhile, white people voted decisively for Trump. It's likely @helenkennedy.bsky.social has some family members who voted for Trump, and I'd be interested to know if she makes nice with them around the holidays...

their goal is to kill children and every Republican senator who knew better and voted to confirm him anyway has that blood on their hands

I’m not expecting Labour to be Te Pati Māori or Greens, but for my money, don’t mention “rainbow whānau” in your speeches and fail to mention your opposition to an ideological act of active harm. These attacks will widen their scope if the coalition remains - staying silent now doesn’t serve anyone.

It's very obvious that Hipkins would rather work with raging bigot Peters than with Swarbrick and Davidson. He seems to have a real problem with progressive women (contrast his instant over-the-top condemnation of Tamatha Paul with his silence whenever Peters says something awful)

Somehow the lesson Dem leadership and electeds took from Iraq was that they should just duck and hide the next time Republicans are drumming up an unpopular war. It definitely doesn't help that a lot of those leaders were literally Iraq War supporters and paid nopl personal price for that debacle

This is what uninspiring centrism and coddling the far-right gets you. And yet Chris Hipkins is looking at this and doubling down on that strategy...

The President of the United States is trying to throw Mark Kelly in prison and Mark Kelly's response is to confirm judges who have committed to putting him in prison

You can see just how much NZ's right-wing government has fucked everything here. They can't even make stocks go up. Of course a related issue is that NZers only want to invest in rental properties for some reason...

Given the decision on puberty blockers, I do want to note an objective fact that I think has been lost: Eight MPs voted to keep conversion practices legal. All were National MPs. *Every single one* of the five who remained in Parliament after the 2023 election was given a Ministerial warrant.

Good, the sooner this blight gets demolished, the sooner new student accommodation can get built. The amount of heritage protections in Wellington is absurd. This isn't Paris - the buildings here aren't that old, and they almost certainly weren't well built...

Seymour: let's not make "assumptions" that a serious food safety incident is the responsibility of a company with a record of food safety incidents so bad that officials strongly warned against contracting it. Maybe it was the person who reported it! What a prick. www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/christchu...

You have to assume at this point that they aren't planning to repeal most of it - they just don't want to say it. The excuse for the last year has been "just wait until our annual meeting, we'll announce a bold platform" and we got a wet fart instead...

Chris Hipkins won't criticize Winston Peters for this rank bigotry. But he instantly came out firing at Tamatha Paul for some fairly mild criticism of the police. Unfortunately it doesn't really matter if an individual Labour MP is good. The whole party owns this transphobia as long as he's leader

Based on how much NZers complain about rates, you'd think they were unaffordably high. But they're much lower than other places globally - around 1/3 what they were in the US, for example...

Wonder if restoring this program is now something Labour "can't say yes" to. Hipkins probably wants to provide low interest loans for school lunches instead...