Articles in ‘Opinion’

New Zealand likes to see itself as a principled nation — small, independent, and willing to stand up for public safety even when powerful interests object. We banned nuclear weapons when others told us it would be economically reckless. We rejected certain trade pressures when they conflicted with national values. We pride ourselves on sovereignty. Yet when it comes to COVID-19 and the unprecedented deployment of mRNA technology, New Zealand…

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 Millbank Quarterly (a multidisciplinary journal of health and health policy) published an article on 2 February 2026 entitled “From Tobacco to Ultraprocessed Food: How Industry Engineering Fuels the Epidemic of Preventable Disease”. The authors explain how ultra processed foods (UPFs) and beverages are specifically designed to heighten chemical rewards in order to develop addictive eating behaviours among consumers that bypass the…

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…

For ordinary households, the “energy crisis” is no longer a headline—it’s a permanent line item. The price shock that began during the COVID era and intensified after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not cleanly reversed. In many Western countries, energy costs have settled into a new, higher plateau—one that acts like a stealth tax on families, small businesses, and national competitiveness. Some will argue this is merely the unavoidable price…

When Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced today that Judith Collins would become the next President of the Law Commission, he reached for familiar talking points about her “astute legal knowledge” and her service to the country. What he didn’t mention was far more significant: this marks the first time in the Law Commission’s 40-year history that a current serving politician has been appointed to lead this supposedly independent…

History leaves patterns. When money creation is examined not as an abstract theory but as a mechanism of power, a consistent record emerges — one rarely discussed in mainstream economics. Nations that attempt to reclaim monetary sovereignty, restrain debt-based banking, or challenge reserve-currency privilege tend not to be debated on their merits. They are pressured, isolated, destabilised, or destroyed. Neo-Piracy Preface — Part 3: When…

The picture is firming up, and it’s devastating. Six people are dead at the foot of Mount Maunganui because, over four critical hours on the morning of 22 January, New Zealand’s emergency management system failed. Not just failed, but failed repeatedly, in ways that now look systemic. And what’s becoming clearer with each new revelation is that this wasn’t just bad luck or an unforeseeable tragedy. This was a disaster waiting to happen, built…

This week Chris Hipkins gave us the clearest picture yet of how Labour plans to fight the 2026 election. His speech at the party’s caucus retreat in West Auckland, and then a rally-style address to party activists, revealed a strategy that combines class-based attack lines, relentless positivity, and a narrowed focus on kitchen-table concerns. But can this rebranded Labour convince voters it’s genuinely different from the party they rejected so…

For more than five decades, New Zealand has been trapped in a quiet, grinding decline. Productivity has flat-lined. Living standards have slipped down the OECD rankings. Wealth has concentrated upward while poverty has spread downward. Our young and capable leave in record numbers, chasing wages and opportunity elsewhere. Those who remain are told this is normal, inevitable, and global. It isn’t. And it doesn’t have to be this way. At Davos…

The starting gun has been fired on the 2026 general election. There are now 277 days until voting starts in the New Zealand general election. And it’s 290 days of campaigning to endure, until voting closes. Then there’s the weeks of waiting for official results after polling day, and probably weeks more of coalition negotiations. It’s going to be a long year of politics. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon confirmed yesterday that the election…

If the first step is exposing neo-piracy, the second is asking a harder question: what replaces it? Critics of the current monetary order are routinely dismissed with the same lazy retort — “fine, but what’s the alternative?” The implication is that debt-based, privately issued money is the only system possible, and any deviation would mean chaos. That is simply false. *In Part One of this series, Neo-Piracy, we traced how modern financial…

“New Zealand should learn from the problems emerging in Australia's new anti-hate legislation, not seek to replicate them, says the Free Speech Union. *"Australia's Parliament passed sweeping new laws in an emergency late-night session with barely three days of public consultation,"* said Jillaine Heather, Chief Executive of the Free Speech Union. The Bondi tragedy was horrific and antisemitism is a genuine problem. But when legal experts,…

Christopher Luxon is back from holiday. And if his State of the Nation speech is anything to go by, it might actually be a very boring election year indeed. The Prime Minister delivered his first big set-piece address of 2026 on Monday to a 700-strong business audience at Auckland’s newly opened International Convention Centre. Hosted by the Auckland Business Chamber and former National leader Simon Bridges, the speech was long on slogans but…

The most revealing moments in Christopher Luxon’s “State of the Nation” address were not the confident passages on growth, exports, or geopolitics. They were the subjects never mentioned at all. Across more than forty minutes, the Prime Minister offered a fluent defence of fiscal restraint, export-led recovery, global engagement, and security alignment. But on two foundational questions facing New Zealand—money creation and energy…

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…

The release of the United States’ 2025 National Security Strategy under President Trump is more than a geopolitical reset — it is a brutal mirror held up to countries that dismantled their own economic sovereignty while assuming globalisation would protect them. *View the U.S. 2025 National Security Strategy here* For New Zealand, that mirror is unforgiving. Once ranked **#3 in the OECD in the 1960s**, New Zealand now hovers closer to…

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…