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This provides Standardistas the opportunity to review events of the day.
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Daily review 01/10/2026
19 comments on “Daily review 01/10/2026”
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Many good things in Chris Hipkins’ speech to the Law Association, but this pledge stands out for me!
https://www.labour.org.nz/news/speech-trust-in-government-chris-hipkins/
The schooling of Mowbray and Son.
Making toys in China and exporting them is sharp business practice, but it is not really innovation – Apple computers and I phones is it?
Nor did it create jobs here, or deliver tax revenue.
The Mowbray's are a little like the latter day oligarchs of the Trump era (though Charles Koch preceded them by decades with his right wing version of philanthropy). They think wealth gives them competence in areas where they have none.
FACT
TPM routinely wins more seats than it would get from the party list – unlike ACT it was not given a seat to be in parliament. They have well known internal issues and are now concerned about holding their seats, thus making this their focus.
Mowbray portrays this as
Manufacturing an excuse for a right wing-cheat because of the polls more likely. This follows on from the GOP move to gerrymandering
But it also is indicative of his risible political analysis – and one suspects this is commensurate to the paucity of knowledge about Labour's economic record and the importance to political society as a foundation to a working economy in a democracy. Something he has little experience with – by choice.
https://www.tickaroo.com/e/GXJetpehzY7Piqok
All that really matters for this campaign is that there is now open warfare between people on the Right. This stops National rising in the polls.
Mowbray and various self-appointed strategists, versus Luxon, Key, DPF etc. Two opposite approaches.
Let's hope they keep at it.
Don't give away strategic positions observer.
Winston blows it, "I was in A&E and looking at a long, long wait, but a doctor walked past and recognised me, said, I know you, come with me" – arrrrrrrsssseeee!
Make him pay for his privilege!!!!
He delivered a few shots in foot (for the coalition, not him personally).
Luxon is not in the same league as Clark, Bolger, Ardern (not named but implied). The disdain extends to Hipkins as well but that bridge is burnt so it doesn't matter. Admitting that your current boss is a 3rd rate PM, that must be an unprecedented slam by any senior Minister.
The biggest lies in tonight's debate.
Number 1
David Seymour claimed there was a link between government debt levels and its cost and the cost of business finance.
Number 2
David Seymour claimed freezing the MW was not a cut (it certainly is in real terms with inflation at 4%).
In a class of his own.
Seymour and Peters
Tax cuts
Seymour we have to be able to afford tax cuts.
Peters wants a lower rate of withholding tax on small businesses (not as big an impact as an outright tax cut).
MW
Seymour freeze on MW, Peters said no – the middle position is an increase at half the rate of inflation (as it has been the past 3 years)
Whenever NZF has been in coalition with National (1996-98 2023-2026) the real value of the MW has fallen and when with Labour (2005-2008 2017-2020) it has risen.
ACT
Big 3 issues – debt, cost of living (except for those on the MW and those in state housing – 25-30% income related rent) and health (would increase health spending on medicines from 5% now to 12% at 1% per annum – closer to the international norm).
On topic because more medicines and primary care investment reduce total health cost (also healthier people is good for the economy)
Peters and Waititi did not disagree (on Pharmac) but placed more emphasis on better primary health care. Seymour also valued better primary care.
Some convergence of the 3 on health.
NZF
Peters managed to avoid the issue of state housing – they presided over market rents 96-98 and an increase in rent from 25 to 30% of income. And their poor record on MW when in coalition with National.
What supporting National means.
Did say he supported an increase in WFF tax credits.
Big Missing Issue
Pay Equity and Fair Pay Agreements.
TOP
raised free PT as important.
SUPER
Seymour wants to increase the age (debt focus). Peters says our spending on Super is lower than many nations and will remain so for some time.
Qiulae Wong calls Opportunity's UBI policy as being a new form of superannuation for over-65s
.
Waititi wants a lower age for Maori based on statistics (does not mention Polynesians – but then they a party based around contesting the Maori electorates).
Greens and TPM
Obviously had some focus on greater better taxation revenues and reducing poverty.
Coverage issue.
My quote above
But here The Post says
Asked about the future of superannuation Wong said the party's universal benefit or citizens income would be topped up for pensioners
Some difference
More.
He wanted a lower age for Maori and cited many Maori not being able to work to age 65
https://www.thepost.co.nz/politics/361091151/press-kingmakers-debate-peters-crowned-winner-night-both-chris-savaged-not-league-leaders-past
From what I recall he called for reduced tax for those on lower incomes funded via wealth taxation.
A very sobering interview by The Telegraph with Robert ‘Magyar’ Bróvdi, Commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces in the Ukraine army. From 26 min in this youtube vid he discusses how the war forced a paradigm change, over just the course of a year, in the way that war is fought – to drones, then counter-measures, and so on, in rapid evolution.
While ai allows for almost instantaneous battlefield decisions, Bróvdi is uncomfortable with the likely development of fully-autonomous robotic armaments. He cautions this war is a crucible which pushes unregulated development. Internationally, the US has a president careless of ai safeguards; while who knows what China is up to?
Bróvdi states outright that Russia is now at great strength militarily, that it will mobilise another 300k troops in the next 3 months. He cautions that it is wrong to write off the apparently random Russian drone strikes into European areas as 'accidents'. "A drone is a precision military instrument". He says that NATO may be too slow to act if/when Russia strikes.
He believes also that the Ukraine-Russian war cannot be finished on the battlefield, only by negotiation, and the job of the armed forces is to put Ukrainian negotiators in the best position to talk terms.
As a counterpoint to this interview, Mykhailo Fedorov, the defence head recently fired by Zelenskyy, who went off in a huff, is now going to work with Karp of Palantir to develop an 'army of robots' in Ukraine via private company investment (from 10.30 min).
The Telegraph does seem to do high-quality in-depth reporting on this region. It’s so refreshing not to have to pick up crumbs of information about World News.
Although The Telegraph's equivalent UK reporting is a rw mish-mash of rubbish: "Burnham will destroy Britain!" Liz Truss Unleashes… being an example title.
This is very interesting. A different view than looking along our normal sight lines.
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2609/S00067/the-quiet-general-my-interview-with-sco-secretary-general-nurlan-yermekbayev.htm
Well yes… because our normal sight lines do not usually include the remarkably uncritical views of an entirely self-described “journalist” who visited the site of what the UN says may constitute crimes against humanity as part of a Chinese-government-sponsored trip.
A “different view” is certainly one way of describing it.
I, for one, would pay rather more attention to what Mr Doyle was not shown: the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs, the political “re-education” camps, mass surveillance, forced labour allegations, and the rest of the rather less picturesque side of Xinjiang that the UN and many other bodies have spent years documenting.
A government-sponsored tour of Xinjiang may tell you many things. What Xinjiang looks like when the Chinese government controls the itinerary is certainly one of them.
I don't like anything that happens these days Res. Not really. But I don't hold out hope for a new line, one may get to be tried, is hovering in the air. But a lot of uncertainty as to practical changes from the set, known meme.
I want to look beyond the known knowns because they have found to be failing. Don't put down the 'journalist'. I looked up Julian Assange reports to see how he is getting on now. He tried to look in a different corner and was punished, and I consider him a great tryer. Eugene D is giving us a different view through our camera obscura.
You didn't read the article: it's mostly about the SCO, with Kazakh Yermekbayev as the chair of the multi-country alliance, and goes well beyond China to describe a power/trade bloc in opposition to trad western powers.
I agree with GWS that it's important to understand the realignment of world blocs. I for one would love to see the US's control of world finance broken.
The US has used its economic fist to sanction unilaterally Iran, Venezuela and Cuba, as examples, causing financial havoc, then claiming them to be failed states. It can do this outside of the UN at a whim because of the petrodollar and the way the US dollar underpins trade, and because it just fines organisations that break its embargo hundreds of millions of dollars.
The riots in Iran in early 2026, for example, were about the collapse of one of Iran's banks, plus massive inflation, outcomes that Scott Bessant said the US deliberatedly engineered via sanctions over the previous year.
“What we [have done] at Treasury is created a dollar shortage in the country,” Bessent said, adding that the strategy came to a “grand culmination in December, when one of the largest banks in Iran went under … the Iranian currency went into freefall, inflation exploded, and hence, we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/2/13/us-says-it-caused-dollar-shortage-to-trigger-iran-protests-what-that-means
Oh, I read the article. I actually find the SCO and China's growing influence in Central Asia extremely interesting.
What I find rather less convincing is the hagiography.
Doyle is on a Chinese-government-sponsored trip through Xinjiang and just happens to come across the Secretary-General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, just happens to discover who he is, and then finds him conveniently available for an interview.
Who among us hasn't run into a senior diplomat while on holiday who just happened to want to talk to some foreign press?
Perhaps it really was entirely serendipitous. China and Kazakhstan are, after all, famously relaxed about independent journalists wandering around, bumping into senior officials and asking them unscripted questions.
Personally, I might have been just a little curious about whether my hosts wanted me to meet him.
And that's really my problem with the article. I'm extremely interested in how China and the SCO see themselves and the world. But understanding someone's worldview and uncritically reproducing it are two very different things.
If the Secretary-General of the SCO tells you that the SCO represents a fairer, more democratic multipolar world order, that's interesting. It tells us how the SCO wants to present itself. It isn't independent evidence that the SCO actually represents one.
The same problem is rather harder to ignore when you're writing from Xinjiang on a Chinese-government-sponsored trip and manage to discuss China's approach to terrorism, separatism and extremism without seriously engaging with the enormous human-rights controversy surrounding precisely those policies.
Looking beyond our “normal sight lines” is valuable. I actively want to understand China's view of the world.
But changing which government's narrative you accept uncritically isn't changing the way you look at the world.
It's just changing what superpower you're shilling for.
Oh blah, with all your true stuff in mind, it is still interesting. Let's look at what he said and see what seems new and possible. It makes a change from Trump, I called him a golden gargoyle earlier. Now I see there is a reprint of an Asterix book 'The Golden Menhir'; Trump could be Obelix if he only grew plaits, it might start a new fashion de rigeur! They may in the USA be constructing a megalith – which can be a construction of many great stones; already the crushing effect is felt all over.
It's like a bit of fresh air to see some other country's blandishments or earnest ventures in comparison with the usual pap coming out of USA.
Don't worry RP, I am capable of reading between the lines/ignoring the glazing. I just said that any attempt to break US economic extortion is worth noting, Elements like the BRICS initiative, and clearly this SOC thingy are just some of the tools in play.
But if your objection to American foreign policy is its use of economic weight to coerce smaller countries, then maybe shifting that power toward another superpower isn't the solution.
Because “multipolarity” doesn't magically abolish power politics. Weakening American dominance while strengthening institutions in which China has enormous economic and political weight may give countries more options (which could be a good thing) but it also increases China's ability to shape the international system around its own interests.
And I don't see any particular reason to assume Beijing will be uniquely reluctant to use that power when it suits it.