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The new “Parent Boost Visa” announced by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Immigration Minister Erica Stanford, will offer migrants’ parents an initial five-year stay in New Zealand with one five-year renewal allowed (ten years total). · However, applicants must secure comprehensive health insurance, meet character and medical tests, and show they have either substantial savings or a sponsor earning at least the median wage. · “This is about…

Trade Me, owned by UK private equity firm Apax Partners, is taking a 50% stake in Stuff Digital. · This gives it major influence over NZ’s largest digital newsroom, with a shared board and integrated property content. · Yet unlike Jim Grenon’s 13% NZME stake, there’s been no panic over editorial independence. · Boucher gets a pass, but Grenon was vilified. The difference? One shares the media worldview. The other challenges it. · Where’s the…

The annual National Business Review Rich List dropped this morning like a glossy brochure for extreme wealth concentration. While the NBR frames its yearly celebration of the ultra-wealthy as recognising “wealth creators” who generate jobs and economic activity, a closer reading reveals something far more troubling: a roadmap of oligarchic power in New Zealand, complete with policy wishlists, political connections, and breathtaking displays of…

Michael Forbes was Christopher Luxon’s acting deputy chief press secretary. Before that, he worked for Social Development Minister Louise Upston, a former Minister for Women. Now he’s out of a job – accused of secretly recording sex workers, collecting photos of women at the gym, and filming others getting changed through windows. · The scandal broke when a sex worker spoke publicly to Stuff about realising in July 2024 that Forbes had…

Te Pāti Māori MPs Rawiri Waititi, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke were suspended for up to 21 days for breaching parliamentary conduct during a vote on the Treaty Principles Bill. · They interrupted a Parliamentary vote and advanced on ACT MPs; their actions were described as “intimidating”. · Yet, rather than apologise, the trio are planning a national protest tour, railing against what they claim is systemic racism. ·…

9 June 1868 · Ngā Ruahine fighters led by Riwha Tītokowaru killed three Pākehā settlers near Ketemarae, north of Hāwera, signalling the resumption of fighting in south Taranaki. · Tītokowaru was both a tohunga and a Wesleyan lay preacher. In the 1860s his opposition to land-selling led him to support the King Movement (Kīngitanga). He lost an eye in the Pai Mārire attack on Sentry Hill, near New Plymouth, in April 1864. · In 1867 Tītokowaru…

The runny yolk of the fried egg melds perfectly with the squeaky cheese and fiery chilli paste · Here, the halloumi is marinated in sambal (a chilli paste – you can find great ones in Asian grocers) until it soaks up all of that flavour. The squeakiness of the cheese sings brilliantly with sambal, and the runny yolk of the fried egg melds with all the fiery flavours. · Ingredients · - 250g halloumi - 2 tbsp sambal belacan (chilli paste with…

New research has identified the mechanism by which air pollution damages the lungs’ self-cleaning system, leaving us vulnerable to infection. In doing so, it has also identified a way to reverse that damage and restore lung function. · We already know that exposure to air pollution is bad for us, and it’s particularly damaging for our lungs. However, what happens at the molecular level to cause that lung damage hasn’t been well known until now.…

St Jacinda - yeah right! · Jacinda Ardern’s memoir: In "A Different Kind of Power,” is like some sort of virtue-signalling, pat on my own back, rubbish. · The former New Zealand Prime Minister advocates for empathy in politics, but she didn’t show much for her own colleagues when she quit office just before the 2023 general election; in my honest opinion because she already predicted the worst defeat for an incumbent government in decades. ·…

5 June 1866) · The future prophet and military leader was deported to the Chatham Islands with Pai Mārire prisoners. He had been accused of spying for the enemy while fighting alongside government troops. · As a young man Te Kooti (of Ngāti Maru and Rongowhakaata) acquired a reputation as a troublemaker and made powerful enemies among both Māori and Pākehā. His own tribal leaders described him as a ‘terror to the district’, while he upset…