Written By:
- Date published:
6:00 am, September 23rd, 2026 - 31 comments
Categories: open mike -
Tags:
Open mike is your post.
For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Step up to the mike …
Reading RNZs reporting of Dirty Work there are links to the aftermath of Dirty Politics.
This includes Cameron Slater being found bankrupt and agreeing with the court decision concerning defamation. Carrick Graham's fulsome apology to three senior health academics.
Also… Katherine Rich from when she was head of the Grocery Council, paying a confidential sum to those affected.
Funny how she pops up now, often on Wallace 'Never met a Tory I didn't like' Chapman's The Panel. Always introduced by whatever respectable moniker she goes by now.
Phew, got that off my chest. What I am getting at is while we may want big ramifications from Hagers book pre election, that may not happen.
Unfortunately these things take time and in the mean time, RNZ is a useful platform for those with dirty hands to be sanitized. Farrar, Williams, Seymour, Luxon etc.
Anthony Ellison, in the New Zealand Listener, 14 July 2025
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/1526577/1000-percent-wrong-hilarious-how-david-farrar-reacted-to-nicky-hager-s-new-book
An interesting article, in Stuff this morning, on the supermarket issue:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/money/361036654/supermarkets-arent-problem-issue-far-bigger-deal
The author claims there is no foundation for the politicians' attacks on the supermarkets, and compares this with their "deafening silence" on the question of trading bank profits.
Are we back on track yet? Where might the nACT1 CoC take New Zealand Aotearoa next?
Chris Slane, in the New Zealand Listener, 9 Feb 2026
Sharon Murdoch, in The Post, 26 April 2026 – They all get Winston’d in the end.
Thanks DMK for great images – cartoonists are great humans and these ones tops and that's from the dictionary sort of top.
There seems to be cross party support for separating the gentailers and resellers in the power industry. That's probably OK providing the 51% / 49% division of shares between the government and others is maintained.
https://www.interest.co.nz/public-policy/140359/nationals-nicola-willis-says-breaking-new-zealand%E2%80%99s-major-power-gentailers
Cheap energy is essential for an economy to successfully flourish.
Instead of profiting directly from the generation and sale, driving up the cost of production. We should be profiting from the low cost of production it can provide
Therefore, nationalisation structured in a way that better fosters this aim is the solution
The Resource Management Act has been repealed and replaced by two new Acts:
* Planning Act
* Natural Environment Act
Greenpeace and other conservation groups saw the legislation as hopelessly flawed and called for it to be canned: https://eds.org.nz/resources/documents/media-releases/2026/last-minute-amendment-papers-take-us-even-further-towards-environmental-destruction/
But Chris Bishop and friends see the whole business as a way of cutting red tape and improving GDP. Under the current government the environment exists only to fuel economic growth.
Better enjoy the outdoors while you still can, folks.
Hipkins should can it and go back to the almost-ready-to-go Parker legislation, but like the CoC, he is in thrall to developers. Party Vote Green for a Left-Wing government.
HT II. you might have seen the Tarakihi decision by Shame Jones ?
I made comment on same….#8
And the latest on ending the Canterbury Nitrate Emergency…
Canterbury well over 1,000,000 cows ?! WTF : (
rather than giving up…Vote Green '26 !
We used to have millions of sheep, should we change back to that flock and promote wool as a useful thing, plus meat, with alternative flocks of goats so that pastures don't get eaten to the ground as sheep do?
I bet someone does that already but it doesn't provide the gold from the dried milk rush. (And that of course utilises cheap electricity prices, or enables deals to be cut so that we pay higher prices, and they use our resources for export earnings and profit to foreign business owners.)
Interesting that Federated Farmers called the nitrate emergency a media stunt and scaremongering, yet they are complaining about Wanaka's sewage sludge being dumped on rural land in Central Otago (ODT, 23 Sept).
The dumping is 3km from land owned by a provincial president of the Feds.
Obviously the farmers don't like the regional council cutting through red tape and taking decisive action by making a non-notified decision.
+100.
Clearly an existential difference between human and cow waste spread over rural fields.
If both versions of a Parliament are going to have a proper crack at the two Supermarkets, then that government needs to gear up for the scale of attack that the Clark government endured in 2004-8 when it forced the structural separation of Telecom. It was dirty.
The New Zealand Initiative have pulled together the first list of businesses and their leaders who will happily donate and put their names to stopping supermarket reform. They are collectively formidable in scale and are listed here:
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU2609/S00276/fifty-one-business-leaders-ask-political-parties-to-respect-property-rights.htm
The supermarket issue* is a diversion to stop discussion of the many terrible/extreme policies the CoC has implemented in the last three years.
*the CoC has done nothing effective to increase supermarket competition.
Not a diversion to the millions of New Zealanders who shop. It's also core policy of three electoral parties in this election.
Iran war aside, oligopolistic consumer pricing is the primary driver of household spend inflation that New Zealand has.
It's an issue that has been well-debated in the MSM over many days….time to move on to other vote-rich issues.
For instance Labour's excellent foreign affairs policy released this morning which, among other things, accepts that genocide has occurred in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and would recognise Palestine.
Vanushi Walters was excellent on Midday Report.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/middayreport/audio/2019053058/vanushi-walters-discusses-labour-s-foreign-policy-announcement
No votes will change on foreign policy.
They say
“When parties talk about forcing owners to sell, breaking up companies and rewriting signed contracts, investors are listening”
Good. Then they will understand this is not being done for no reason.
People have been squeezed for far too long and the numbers feeling the pain is growing.
Political parties are starting to realise there is a change in the wind, thus their more hands on proposals.
If those concerned want this to stop, then they will need to take the squeeze off the wider public. If things don't improve, these hands on calls will more likely grow than go away
The Supermarkets in particular need to get beyond Denial and into Bargaining ASAP.
If you go through the signatories to that letter, many of those companies get the majority of their work from the government. They might want to think again before they sign on to this scale of full frontal lobbying.
This open form of lobbying is largely done to win over the public.
But the main thing that is going to appease the public (which this letter doesn't offer) is lower costs
High energy costs add to the cost of food and to wider production costs. Thus, they should also be looking to act with pace to get those costs down.
Yes it's quite perplexing, because it's pretty clear once the next government successfully cracks open the supermarket duopoly by any of the proposed manifesto statements, the field is then open for the new Government to have a crack at any of the following where near-cartel conditions exist, and in different levels of regulation:
– domestic airline tickets
– airport landing charges
– commercial carparking charges
– port berthing charges
– electricity lines charges
– Council rates
– water rates per litre, with the new water entities formed
– public transport ticketing charges
– transport fuel rates
– electricity generation charges
– car and house insurance premiums
– health insurance premiums, including pet insurance
For a few of them there are tiny NZ competitors, and a few have had a go through the High Court at seeking to prove near-cartel behaviour, but for many of those industries they have had a go at standing up to the near-cartels, and lost their shirts.
It probably needs a post by itself on the dead hand of NZ oligopolies both public and private, with the historic example of the telco breakup and the massive resulting growth of that industry through both public good investment and private sector initiatives.
Thanks for the memory – I mean the list of concerns that we have here in NZ.
Song for today – I'm reminded of The Mikado and the English National Opera have rendered The List song highly theatrically, with updated concerns. A brief laugh, soon missed.
Yes, it is plausible it could spread.
Capping Council rate increases is one example
Talk of buying BNZ is another
Yes – and naturally the NZ Initiative frames any of the suggested structural changes to the supermarket industry as a property rights infringement. Wagging their finger disapprovingly at us, and trying to make sure that supermarkets are not going to be used as the thin end of the wedge to crack open and legislate against other sorts of collusion against the public by NZ businesses.
Property rights are sanctified in this process. It is a pretense that property rights are absolute and not limited by the common good or democratic will – which turns them into an exploiter's charter. The public need their own set of rhetorically powerful 'rights' to huff and puff about – based on the common good, and the right to be free from economic exploitation.
What is this group Pillar NZ? https://info.scoop.co.nz/PILLAR_NZ They state this about themselves:
A recent report:
PILLAR's Foreign Influence Transparency Bill Enters Parliament’s "Biscuit Tin" (Tue. Aug.4/2026, 2:04pm) | PILLAR NZ
"We're proud to be contributing to our legislative system in ways that strengthen our national sovereignty, protect our civil liberties, and foster a freer, more resilient democracy," said Nathan Seiuli, Executive Director of PILLAR…
[Having read the above I am twice as concerned as before; about meddling in our affairs in this country by zealots and smart arses going beyond good scruples and reason. I would like to be free – to join with citizens who have knowledge, experience, commitment to their locality, who can ration our consumer economic positioning proclivities to a simpler model than now. With a government service-minded to taxpayers, not a product to be farmed – haughticulture!]
Here’s an interview they did with Family First. Looks like a chap previously at Free Speech Union involved.
‘So things like digital surveillance, digital id, facial recognition, technology number, plate scanning, a lot of these more modern threats to our rights, especially our right to privacy. They all sit just outside the remit of what speech allowed us to engage with before.’
https://familyfirst.org.nz/2025/11/12/family-matters-nathan-seiuli-on-the-new-civil-liberties-group-in-town/
The founder appears to be a fan of Thomas Haidt, a conservative moral philosopher who, according to wiki, 'has suggested that the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields is due to an innate difference in interests between men and women, and that the disparity is not necessarily an indication of discrimination.'
So right-Xtian leaning.
Nathan Seluli – Sounds like someone imbued with USA? moralising groups mostly about women and their place in society, (somewhere – they're so useful.) I don't trust their embracing of philosophies; ones that suit them.
A cool look at how things are going with the Left. https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2609/S00054/on-the-nicky-hager-book-political-donations-and-another-fine-mess-from-chris-hipkins.htm