Articles by Penny Marie

A new investigation argues that Sir Ashley Bloomfield’s transformation from anonymous health bureaucrat to “Saint Ashley” was not organic fandom, but a carefully curated propaganda project – and that Stuff’s new Quarantine Nation podcast is part of the same effort to lock in an approved Covid narrative just as the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Covid‑19 Lessons Learned releases its report. The article, Saint Ashley: Propaganda, Personality…

Stuff’s Quarantine Nation podcast sells itself as sober reflection on the Covid years. Read through the lens of Edward Bernays, it looks more like a second wave of propaganda: regret without reversal, fear and heroism without accountability, and a tightly controlled story about what we’re allowed to question. Quarantine Nation presents itself as a reflective oral history of New Zealand’s Covid years. It’s marketed as “a mostly serious history,”…

Let Kids Be Kids is welcoming a quiet but significant change to national school policy templates after challenging the legal accuracy of SchoolDocs’ “Inclusive School Culture” policy. SchoolDocs – a private company supplying policies to 80-85% of New Zealand schools – has been writing into school policy that discrimination could be based on “sex, … sexual orientation or gender identity, … listed in the Human Rights Act 1993 (s 27)”. This…

Independent journalist Penny Marie has released a new investigation warning that UN‑aligned “gender equality” frameworks adopted across New Zealand are quietly redefining what it means to be a woman – with far‑reaching consequences for policy, data, and everyday life. In a detailed article on her Substack, pennymarie.nz, Penny examines the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs), Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG 5), the NZ WEPs Survey…