Articles by Dr Bryce Edwards

In my last column, I laid out the sorry state of the Green Party as 2026 kicks off. Scandals piled up, staff jumped ship, polls slid south, and the leadership clung to excuses about algorithms and the Coalition Government being responsible for turning people off the Greens. All this despite a coalition in chaos and a Labour Party that’s barely visible. The symptoms are clear, but what’s the disease? Today, I’m digging into the deeper mess: a…

The Green Party should be flying high right now. They’re not. As the 2026 election year begins in earnest, the Greens find themselves in a deeply anomalous position: polling has slumped, internal organisation has been shaken by staff departures and scandals, and the co-leaders seem strangely detached from the scale of their problems. The political conditions could hardly be more favourable for an opposition party like the Greens. The…

After six columns dissecting the MisManageMyHealth debacle, the diagnosis is clear. Decades of privatisation built a fragile system, leaving our health IT infrastructure splintered and under-resourced. A near-monopoly concentrated the risk, handing 1.8 million New Zealanders’ records to a one-man private empire. The watchdogs were ignored and muzzled: successive Privacy Commissioners’ warnings went unheeded, and regulators were kept toothless…

Vino Ramayah, the CEO of Manage My Health, couldn’t have summed up the contradiction at the heart of this mess any better. In one interview, he told RNZ last week that the doctor-patient relationship was “sacrosanct”, insisting his company would never compromise it. Then he admitted they’d “dropped the ball” on security, allowing hackers to stroll in “through the front door” with a stolen password. This wasn’t some elaborate cyber espionage; it…

In my previous column, I argued that the Manage My Health breach revealed a hollowed-out state. But there’s something even more damning than the structural failures I outlined. This wasn’t a bolt from the blue. It was foreseeable. And it was ignored. Previous column click here · The most uncomfortable fact about the theft of 430,000 medical documents isn’t that hackers got in. It’s that someone tried to warn us six months earlier, and nothing…

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, New Zealand responded with unusual speed. Sanctions followed. Condemnations were issued. The language was unambiguous. We were told this was about defending the “rules-based international order” – a phrase our politicians have grown remarkably fond of. Winston Peters has deployed it frequently in his time as Foreign Minister. So where is that principled clarity now? · On Saturday, the United States…

How much taxpayer funding will politicians spend this year on election advertising? It will be many, many millions of dollars, but we won’t know much about it, because the rules have been written to help MPs electioneer with parliamentary funding, without transparency. You would have already seen plenty of billboards and election ads for the various parties. National MPs have recently been carrying out a blitz of billboards and online ads, but…

New Zealand First is in the ascendancy, and there are signs that 2026 could turn out to be the party’s best in its three decades of existence. Could it even lead to Winston Peters winning his ultimate prize role: Prime Minister? Political commentator Matthew Hooton is very well connected to insiders in the New Zealand First party, and as a result, produced an insightful column on Friday for the Herald about the party’s internal thinking and…

Can the wealthy donate money to politicians to get a knighthood in New Zealand? We associate the idea of “Cash for Honours” with controversies in countries like Britain where businesspeople were found to have given millions of dollars to political parties in power in exchange for knighthoods and other official titles. But does the same sort of corruption occur in New Zealand? Today, the Government has announced its New Year Honours recipients,…

Veteran political journalist Richard Harman summed up 2025 in one bleak line: “This has been the year of our discontent. It has been an awful year at Parliament, dominated by petty point scoring and a determination to hang on to the past.” That feels about right. We’ve watched endless parliamentary skirmishes that go nowhere, with politicians more interested in scoring hits than solving problems. And it hasn’t just been a bad year for whichever…