When farmers have a better idea of whats needed for Northland than the New Zealand Transport Agency: “Instead of doing the roading, they should do something about the rail ... or just put an extra couple of lanes on what’s there now. www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-adv...

🔥

It’s hard to avoid stepping on all of the rakes when you’re wearing clown shoes.🤡

“It is as bad as the Treaty Principles Bill in its attempt to erase the Crown’s duty to comply with the agreement made between Māori and the Crown in 1840. It may even be worse, because the Treaty Principles Bill in theory was never going to be enacted.” - Waitangi Tribunal. #NzPol

A follow-up to the last post about the Carrington shambles. You can and should ride your bike to/from Avondale and the southwestern path along the nice lanes on the west side of the site, past the Mason Clinic. Leaving them blocked is just negligence.

How awesome is it that kids in Auckland are creating literal grassroots versions of cyclovia and five-boro bike events? I'm kinda inspired to join! www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/mass-stre...

Argh. This reminds me of the dangerous crossings on the New Lynn to Avondale path in Auckland – wrecking the overall utility of a project because it's easier to say tricky bits are "out of scope". www.rnz.co.nz/news/regiona...

Lemee get this straight: $3m subsidy for Robbie Williams is a $50/head subsidy on Eden Park tickets. Nick Sautner says big events see 3000 people employed on the night - but that works out at only 8 FTEs. $375k an FTE is truly "job rich".

#NZMusicMonth #NMM 31 days of jazz history. The Beresford's (Aileen, May, Percy & Walter) were known in 1920s Auckland for teaching & performing jazz (dance & music). The sisters school of music and dance start up a jazz club on Saturday evenings: paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/...

Miraculously unpaywalled. #NzPol

The extent to which the governing coalition wants and needs people in Auckland to be angry about three months of Level 3 Covid restrictions five years ago is remarkable. www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/...

President Obama: “We pulled it off without firing a missile. We got 97% of their enriched uranium out. There’s no dispute that it worked and we didn’t have to kill a whole bunch of people or shut down the Strait of Hormuz.”

Wrote a Listener column about playing records for the kids and remembering the places that were where Goblin is now. The print headline (at my request) was '3am Eternal'. Look out for another great Mum 'n' Dad Disco outing soon! www.nzherald.co.nz/the-listener...

A decision on Auckland’s next Waitematā Harbour crossing is expected (maybe) next month. Worth remembering: bridge traffic still hasn’t returned to its 2018 peak, and 50% of commuters now cross the harbour by bus. So why is the current process focused on more road capacity? Move people, not cars.

Could someone come and get Uncle Wayne? He's going on about his bridge over Meola Reef again. www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland/...

Every single decision now seems subject to "what will play with a specific group of voters we need to win over in a few months' time, regardless of whether it is wise, sensible or in conflict with our previous positions".

Consider what Clare Curran resigned for. NZ is teetering on the brink of competitive authoritarianism and an alarming number of people are fine with it because they view any alternatives to status quo Pakeha power as aberrant threats to their identity. www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

“Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, which could threaten American warships and oil tankers transiting the narrow waterway.“

Mamdani has demonstrated something that Democrats have largely forgotten. You can't just do good things for voters and expect to be rewarded for it. You have to tell them about it, over and over again. You have to advertise your work in office just as much as you did on the campaign to win it.

Polling numbers low? Just hit the 🚨 IMMIGRATION PANIC SWITCH ⚠️

It's a nice day, so I thought I'd take a detour on my bike ride through the Carrington site. I discovered that there are not one but *three* hi-spec children's playgrounds on the site, all completed, all fenced off from use. As are parts of the nice new internal roads and paths.

Kia ora koutou.

I made some comparisons, ACT voters are almost twice as likely to be men, while National voters more than twice as likely to be over 50. Green voters are twice as likely to be women, and three times as likely to be under 50.

🧵You don't have to read far between the lines to see that external support – of the lack of it – was the killer here. My understanding is that Banished Music was told The Others Way wasn't eligible for any of the government's major events funding. www.rnz.co.nz/life/music/t...

With all due Roy Morgan caveats, the demographics here are striking. National is polling 14% with women under 50 and 18.5% with men under 50. We're heading towards being a retirement village. www.roymorgan.com/findings/102...

Now that @bsky.app has changed it's gif host to Klipy, & wanting to fight cultural imperialism, I've begun the process of uploading my extensive #Kiwiana Gif collection we used on Twitter... Soon you can post John Campbell, NekMinute, A Dogs Life, Billy T James, Blow on the Pie etc Gifs here.

Saw the headline about Jason Momoa DJing in Queenstown and assumed it would be just another celebrity hitting the mix button between MP3 files. But he's spinning 7" singles! Nice. www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/jason-mom...

Helpful and interesting. Matt explaining why "savings" on the CRL – principally, not supporting nine-car trains – would have pushed cost and disruption out to other parts of the network. A whole lot of short trains means crossings down most of the time. www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2026/05/13/t...

Matt does a very good job of explaining the complexities here. TLDR: Tamihere dragging everyone else down into the mud with him.

An OIA document delivered up by MBIE after 54 working days. It shows MBIE officials advised that the cheapest response to gas decline is to help users switch, not to import LNG. Based on more recent EECA information, this overstates the cost to government of a switching programme.

Winston Peters was a practising lawyer for 4 years; he's been an MP for 45yrs

The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.

So you're telling me that cutting tariffs leads to lower prices? Fascinating.

Ex-Labour staffer from years ago does social media skits & is called a troll by Stuff's Jenna Lynch, wife of ACT Chief of Staff. But ex-National staffer & current Jordan Williams employee Ani O'Brien consistently runs troll campaigns against media & opposition MPs, but is legitimate? F*** Stuff

As a former Labour govt staffer I wish to disclose that any mockery I spray at Prime Minister comes from: 1% old loyalties 1% ideology 1% enjoying a joke 97% astonishment anyone could be this shit at it

Being asked for the source of false information you shared in your capacity as a minister is not "a hypothesis". What a prick. www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/5...

These two headlines are in no way related. #nzpol

My friend in Seattle found (and had to buy) the original 1990 cassette promo for The Chills' Submarine Bells, still sealed with its free chocolates. Very cool, but the chocolates must be really stale.

In his latest, @connorsharp.bsky.social looks at another cost of the government's RoNS mania: deaths and serious injuries that could have been avoided with low-cost safety improvements that were sidelined by "a myopic focus on over-scoped highways". www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2026/05/12/t...

OMG, is 🥝🥝 now the de facto balls emoji?

The purposeful abuse of bureaucratic processes in an attempt to torture people and deny their rights is a disgusting evolution of US immigration policy under Trump. And the New Zealand Government's failure to advocate for a New Zealander caught in this process is a profound disappointment.

AudioCulture is sad to learn that legendary keyboardist Stuart Pearce has died. He played in Street Talk, Hammond Gamble Band, Hello Sailor, and Coconut Rough, and arranged and/or played on many classic Aotearoa songs, such as ‘Sierra Leone’ and ‘Poi E’. www.audioculture.co.nz/profile/stua...

This is par for the course in terms of what is happening to legal residents of the US, who have literally done everything by the book. Is the Big Fat Nothing that the NZ govt is doing to help her - other than letting Winston lie about it - par for the course for what we can expect of our own govt?

Every NZer should be shit-scared that if they get unlawfully and arbitrarily detained by an authoritarian regime overseas, their Minister of Foreign Affairs For Life Winston Raymond Peters will just tell them that they shouldn't have been wearing a skirt that short in the first place

This is a good point, and the implications are stark. NZ has no external checks on parliament, so the public's ability to meaningfully weigh in via select committee is crucial for democratic legitimacy. If that process is a farce (as it is now), it delegitimizes the entire government.

NEW ANALYSIS: What's going on in Spain? Spain's wholesale electricity price in early 2026: €44/MWh. Italy: €127. Germany: €96. UK: €103. Wind+solar now deliver 44% of generation. Gas sets the price in just 9% of hours, down from 55% in 2022. Full analysis: janrosenow.substack.com/p/spain-just...

99.1% of select committee submitters said don't do it. #NzPol