MAY IN PAPAKURA

Inflation has moved back above the Reserve Bank’s target range, driven less by discretionary spending than by unavoidable household bills. Council rates and electricity costs are now biting hardest, pushing inflation higher even as families cut back elsewhere. *Summarised by Centrist* Statistics New Zealand figures show the consumer price index rose 0.6 per cent in the December quarter. This has lifted annual inflation to 3.1 per cent. That…

Next week, Brenton Harrison Tarrant, convicted for the Christchurch mosque attacks, will appear before the Court of Appeal. He will argue that his guilty pleas were extracted through coercion and abuse rather than entered freely. *Summarised by Centrist* Tarrant was sentenced in August 2020 to life imprisonment without parole after admitting to murdering 51 people, attempting to murder 40 others, and committing a terrorist act during the 15…

Shahid Butt has urged his young supporters to knock their enemies’ “teeth out” *Shahid Butt speaks to the Core LIbrary podcast, 2025 © YouTube / Core Library* [RT] A convicted Islamist terrorist is running for local office in the British city of Birmingham. Shahid Butt has urged voters to overlook his past *“mistakes,”* which include conspiring to bomb the British consulate in Yemen. In an interview with Birmingham Live this week, Butt…

New Zealanders are badly ripped off by profit-gouging companies in some of the country’s most important sectors. The Big Four banking oligopolies make super profits totalling about 3% of GDP. The supermarket duopoly makes excess profits of $1 million a day. The lack of competition in energy, building materials, and other sectors is also gouging consumers. These are all “broken markets” contributing to the “broken New Zealand” we are currently…

The bodies are being recovered. The memorial services are being held. The inquiries are being announced. But as New Zealand moves from the immediate horror of the Mount Maunganui tragedy into the familiar ritual of official review, a harder set of questions is emerging. Not just *“what went wrong at 9.30am on January 22?” but “why does this keep happening?” and “what, exactly, is the plan?”* The answer to that last question, as far as anyone…