Submission on the Covid-19 Public Health Response Amendment Bill (No.2)

A new CDC report confirms America is now reproducing at the lowest rate in recorded history, with fertility dropping 5.7% since 2021 alone. · by Nicolas Hulscher, MPH · A newly released CDC report confirms that the U.S. fertility rate has declined to the lowest level ever recorded in modern American history. · In 2025, the general fertility rate fell to just 53.1 births per 1,000 women aged 15–44, marking yet another historic low. · At…

The fallout from war between the United States, Israel and Iran has dominated global oil markets. And not just because the Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries about 20% of global oil and gas, remains effectively closed to shipping traffic. · Author Flavio Macau - Associate Dean - School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University · Deep uncertainty about how long the disruption will continue has added a persistent “risk premium” – an…

Election year is ten weeks old and already the donations register at the Electoral Commission tells a familiar but uncomfortable story. Nearly a million dollars in large donations has been declared so far in 2026. The coalition parties have opened the year with a commanding fundraising lead. The opposition parties are barely visible. And the people making the biggest donations are the same sorts of donors who usually dominate this terrain:…

Ximena Nelson, University of Canterbury -Ximena Nelson, CC BY-NC-ND · Bruce the kea is missing his entire upper beak. Yet he is the alpha bird of his circus (the apt collective noun for a group of New Zealand’s famously playful alpine parrots). · As our latest research shows, Bruce achieved his alpha status not despite his disability, but because of it. · In a remarkable example of behavioural innovation, he has developed a novel…

Arguments about the current energy crisis have shifted. It is no longer just about what ministers are doing now. It is also about what they chose not to do when they had the chance. This morning brought the clearest accountability journalism to this debate. Kate MacNamara in the Herald and Edward Miller in The Post both zero in on the same issue: New Zealand was left more exposed than it needed to be, and ministers were warned about the…