Articles in ‘Opinion’

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 40, with…

In my previous article I discussed at length how the Treaty of Waitangi has been weaponised by a small group of radicals and used to cast the blame onto early settlors for all of the so-called harm suffered by Maori as a result of colonisation. I also discussed how this process seems to have accelerated over recent years particularly since the passing into law of the Treaty of Waitangi Act in 1975. · The Treaty which the Maori chiefs signed…

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…

According to the people of Ngapuhi (tribe of the Far North), the first Maori to reach New Zealand was their ancestor, Kupe who ventured across the Pacific on his waka hourua (voyaging canoe) from his ancestral Polynesian homeland of Hawaiki, making landfall at the Hokianga Harbour in Northland. You will not find Hawaiki on a map, but it is believed Maori came from an island or group of islands in Polynesia in the South Pacific Ocean. · New…

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…

The image we are taught is romantic and obsolete: ragged men, black flags, cannon smoke, plunder taken at sea. That version of piracy was crude, inefficient, and ultimately unsustainable. What replaced it was far more sophisticated—and far more destructive. The modern pirate does not board ships. He boards balance sheets, parliaments, and central banks. · To understand neo-piracy, we must begin where it was perfected: the British East India…

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…