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6:00 am, September 3rd, 2026 - 90 comments
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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 …
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/b6sPrfL3toE
Andy Burnham tells 40 years of decline like it is.
My bet is he goes for Thames Water, a real sharemarket Shockwave and also a signal over fresh civic empowerment.
Do you have shares in Thames Water, and are looking for a government buyout to line your pocket? The government just needs to enforce fines for non-delivery, as in 2025. Let the company collapse, and the State scoop up the assets for nothing.
Thames Water under MacQuarrie management borrowed against assets to pay dividends. It now has debt of £13 bi, around 85% of assets. It has only been used as a cash cow, not run as a utility provider.
But Burnham wants only water management under better government control, not ownership, according to his most recent statements. Even fining hard and screwing down on service delivery clauses is better than the nothing that previous governments did, though.
This is the future 3 Waters was designed to save us from.
No you moron I don't have shares in Thames Water.
We will get the direction from the UK government at their 28 October budget release.
DEFRA's Minister Emma Reynolds will likely put it into temporary ownership with a Special Administrative Regime, which of course tanks the share price and makes future private loans to it prohibitively expensive.
Thames Water is the obvious first standard to measure Burnham's new state activism by. Let's see what he ahs the appetite for in reality.
Ah, nek minnit Burnham walks it back, once the bond markets inform him how things are done in London:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/sep/02/burnham-tries-to-calm-bond-market-fears-as-sell-off-threatens-budget
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c629p9rvel3o
Fine and let the market force bankruptcy.
Well I'm not holding my breath. Apparently he's already caved in to the big-money boys on another issue:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/02/andy-burnham-mistake-political-donations-wealthy-britain
Burnham was never going to be the solution to the problems they face.
And those thinking he was will end up being disappointed
Now that the OCR us up to save ourselves from higher prices by making prices higher the Crown will increase the amount they pay commercial banks on their balances at RBNZ by another 1.2m per week.
Imagine what 60 million a year could do for homeless people? But no lets pay the Aussie capitalists more $$$ by choice!
Until we really get sick of capitalism and stop believing that there is a nicer version that doesnt make rich people richer and consign poor people to the waste bin of society then this is par for the course.
You might want to set out your reasoning between the RBNZ paying more for its debt and your claim of the entire failure of capitalism.
Thats the problem right there, what exactly does labour stand for again? For all intents and purposes it's national lite. The failed neo liberal policies that have slowly ground down the middle class and utterly failed the poor and minorities stem from the tightly held believe that there is no class system. Instead of reversing the handover of public institutions to the private sector it does more or less nothing, labour should be standing for something not trying to reclaim the central ground. Lets face it Labours performance led to the current crop of clowns who are greedily dismantling whatever they can get their grubby fingers on as we inexorably erode the quality of life in NZ.
There is a short circuit in peoples heads between the failures of capitalism; the ecological devastation, inequality, social damage and the inability to do something that is taken as a given; ergo the status quo is the best we have so lets work with it. Milksop politics that offends no one and achieves very little.
A nicer kinder capitalism still extracts its profit from the worker is somehow overlooked- whether it be financial or industrial capitalism. Thats why the media can proudly trumpet kicking 18-20 years olds of jobseeker, announce a billion dollar profit by Meridian in a power crisis etc. You know the drill, labour will get in power and squander its goodwill by engaging in identity and cultural politics to the degree that it wont address the rotting elephant head in the room which it that it has abandoned the working class in favour of being a soft and comfortable middle manager.
Unfortunately for your thesis – there doesn't appear to be any marked or renewed appetite for socialism, or environmentalism, either.
Indeed, the resurgent political parties, internationally, appear to be populist/nationalist parties (Farage, OneNation, Le Pen, etc.)
Certainly Green parties are not experiencing increased popularity.
The Green Party has the highest support ever in the UK.
Not according to the polls. Where they seem to be joining tge LibDems in a race to the bottom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
The Green Party had never been anywhere near 10% in polls before 2024. They rose over 15% because of the Starmer decline and back to 10% with the Burnham. If they poll at this level, it would be their best ever result.
It has 100,000 members, the LD have 90,000.
I wouldn't regard an increase of 3% (from 7% at the last election to possibly 10% at the next) – as terribly significant.
Especially as Labour (the left-wing competitor) shed 15-20 percentage points during the same period. Where did all of those votes go? It certainly doesn't appear to be the Green Party.
Compare to Reform/Farage – who went from 14% at the last election to mid 20s – and are regularly the highest polling party.
In addition – it appears as though the GP may have shot it's bolt – certainly the coverage is not all positive (I acknowledge that The Telegraph is not the home of green-centric politics)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/09/02/how-polanski-destroyed-green-party-popularity/
https://archive.ph/ERR9h
260,000 members. It is likely that the next election will force Labour into a coalition government with LD and Greens.
Reform 280,000
Labour 260,000
Conservatives 125,00
A far better tool than increasing mortgages would be .
Compulsory kiwisaver and when the government needs to reduce spending increase % of money being placed into kiwisaver.
Has anyone written a book on the Thames Water stuffup?
NZ equivalent is the Moa Point debacle, of course. Today's DomPost (3 Sept) carries a report on the Crown review of that outfit.
NZers excel at gross mismanagement of a project, but they get lotsa practice at report writing after a disaster.
Nobody wants to address the elephant in the infrastructure room.
That generations of local government candidates sold the idea of keeping the rates as low as possible. And generations of voters bought it. The investment can was constatntly kicked down the road.
Yet neither cohort are mentioned. Nobody wants to blame the victim, I guess.
The other elephant in the room is how the professional bureaucrats employed by local authorities, will ignore the advice and recommendations from highly qualified engineers.
I think you'll find that, rather more often, it's councillors ignoring the advice and recommendations of their own bureaucrats and engineers.
PNCC is a pretty good example. It spent millions of dollars over the better part of a decade investigating, consulting on and designing options to replace its non-compliant wastewater treatment arrangements.
Then, in 2024, councillors effectively dumped the options that had gone through that process because they didn't like the cost.
Which rather illustrates Stephen's point. Engineers can tell you what needs replacing and officials can put forward options, but neither can make elected representatives raise the rates or take on the debt required to actually build it.
I can offer an anecdote from my own experience, here.
Many years ago, when I worked in local government, we had a new director – appointed from outside the local government sector.
At her first Council meeting (I was present as a technical resource – to be called on, if required) – she was shepherding through a recommendation for expenditure on a project. She was utterly horrified when a Councillor took the floor to embark on a hobby-horse only tangentially related to the project – and made a whole lot of untrue assertions about expenditure, standards, and delivery in this area. This comprehensively derailed any mature discussion about the pros and cons of the project (or the affordability and/or opportunity cost), and it was defeated. It took another 18 months for exactly the same proposal to be finally approved by the Council.
She was gobsmacked that she had to sit there, and was unable to correct any of the untrue rubbish that the elected representative was spouting.
But PNCC would have gone ahead with the plan under 3 waters, or with some government cofunding.
It's a very good council, and has managed the city well.
Bomber last night on this BHN clip, from 20 min, has a strong analysis of the various overhangs caused by the entry of OP and National's slump and how that affects voting strategies. He thinks OP has attracted young voters who find Seymour and Peters unpalatable and are “too rich to vote Labour, and not Maori enough to vote Greens”.
In typical National-style, Simeon Brown has dug his own pothole and done a runner at the increased speed limit near schools, in a limo and not in a NZDF plane because the meeting was just across the road from his office. Mind you, those roads are impossible to cross for a patronising pedestrian.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/03-09-2026/simeon-brown-pulled-out-of-a-senior-doctors-conference-heres-what-theyd-have-told-him
None of the Coalition parties have ever been interested in a genuine conversation between mature adults with open minds, not about health, education, environment (and climate change), pay equity, the public service, etc. They’re only interested in ramming down our throats their ideological agenda that offers no real durable solutions and tends to make things worse in the longer term.
Agree 100%
Yesterday's Roy Morgan poll:
Lab 24 Gre 15.5 TPM 1.5 =41.0
Nat 31 ACT 10.5 NZF 7.5 =49.0
Opp 9,5
Luxon may be ruing ruling out Opp if this causes them to talk to Labour first.
A GOLM coalition would have a working majority with a couple of TPM overhang seats.
Men favour a Nat/ACT/NZF coalition 58.5 to 27.5-incredible.
https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/10321-nz-national-voting-intention-august-2026
BTW that is 58.5 of men favouring Nat/ACT/NZF versus 27.5 of men favouring Lab/Gre/TPM excluding Opp voters.
Male numbers are Nat /ACT/NZF 65.0 versus Lab/Gre/TPM 40.0 when Opp voters are added in.
Opp men favour the Left 12.5 to 6.5.
How is Labour going to cobble that together with TPM currently insisting on their 5 new taxes and radical transformation of our constitution by 2040 as bottom lines?
And that is before you add in the GP bottom lines.
Good luck!
You’re Right and for that reason alone we should all vote for Coalition Mark II, so that they can complete their destruction and destroy what’s still Left standing.
Alan is clearly one of the many "men" voters.
He is upset that there is still a clear path to power for a Leftish government despite him and his ZB-listening mates preferring the macho, racist, drill baby drill, women-despising, Trump-loving CoC.
witty!
But please address the issue
I am being serious, with Labour insisting that they will balance the books by 2030 and introduce only their CGT, how on earth are they going to successfully negotiate with the seemingly adamant TPM?
As serious as an Upston apology.
That is the decision for the voters.
It has better than even odds on the poll-of-poll tracker that a once-in-50-years 1-term government is occurring.
Assuming that the OP wants to get into bed with clearly divided left, and that is a very big assumption.
The Left has a diversity of opinions.
The Right has a diversity of grudges.
Alan: Are you being ironic in accusing the Left of being divided compared with the alternative?
On planet CoC all is sweetness and light.,,,(irony)
What these polling numbers tell us is actually pretty simple:
So I wouldn't be especially worried about TPM's negotiating position at 1.5%.
If anything, I'd be more interested in how Luxon (or his eventual replacement) manages the ideological demands of both ACT and NZ First if National needs every one of their votes to govern.
Coalition negotiations are about leverage, not just manifestos. And on these numbers, National may have considerably less room to manoeuvre than Labour does.
I don't know if voters haven't made up their minds yet, or they are simply not telling the pollsters what they've decided.
Although, I agree that all the results this year have been within the margin of error – and don't actually tell us anything. Any result which comes down to a couple of seats and speculation about the size of an overhang – is really meaningless.
If you believe the Roy Morgan polls, I have a bridge to sell you.
Which poll do you believe?
Important legislation (the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill) await their third readings by Parliament. They are to replace the Resource Management Act which Hon Chris Bishop, in a Radio NZ interview, said was a disaster that has wrecked the housing market and prevented anything being built.
The new laws are slanted towards advancing economic growth at the expense of the environment. The pro-development bias is so great that several environmental NGOs have given up trying to get the bills amended and are now calling for them to be dumped entirely: https://eds.org.nz/resources/documents/media-releases/2026/environment-ngos-call-for-dumping-of-the-governments-rma-replacement-bills/
The CoC will want to get these laws passed before the election so it can trumpet what a fantastic job it has done. Voters, especially those with grandchildren, will take a different view.
I think Hipkins should dump the laws entirely and go back to the Parker version as a coalition concession to the Greens.
Unfortunately, I think that would be a spectacularly dumb idea.
That doesn't mean Labour has to accept everything National puts into these Bills. If it forms a government, it can amend the parts it thinks have gone too far, including as part of negotiations with the Greens.
But at some point we need to stop completely rewriting the planning system every time the government changes. Going back to the Parker reforms would just begin the cycle again.
Not sure I agree Res. Parker's legislation was pretty much ready to go. The CoC version, while it will be law, will not have been implemented at all by the election.
So that could be repealed and Parker's version replace it within say 3 months.
Bishop's legislation is atrocious, especially in terms of protecting landscapes and the public's right to have a say in planning. It may be difficult to amend in a way that makes it anywhere near workable or acceptable.
But I accept that Hipkins has committed to amending Bishop's crap.
p.s. The RMA works just fine. It has been a beat-up by Bishop and Seymour that its doesn't work. The Queenstown Lakes District has seen massive growth in the last 30-odd years, all under the RMA.
Ah the glorious hills real estate agents choose to die on:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/361028592/real-estate-agent-loses-bid-avoid-compulsory-maori-culture-course
It does seem silly.
All she had to do was attend online.
She didn't have to submit anything (i.e a written exam) – so she was free to ignore, or furiously disagree (in her own home) – with anything presented – and wasn't required to change her opinion, behaviour, or philosophy at all.
[Indeed, finding anything which would change her opinion, would appear to require an intervention from a personal deity]
Yes – she should follow the advice of Groucho Marx: "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them… well, I have others"
It's easy to sneer at the idea of real-estate agents allegedly having professional integrity, but this isn't the only current case involving professional bodies trying to impose ideological positions as a condition of professional registration, ie it genuinely is a serious issue.
It's also easy to say "Well, comrade could have just attended the re-education session, then comrade wouldn't have this problem," but again that isn't how a liberal democracy should be running professional bodies.
Nope, she went for full culture victim, and just immolated herself.
Amusing that you think real estate agents have ethics.
The relevant standards are well set out, and they are low enough in REINZ.
There's a reason I wrote "It's easy to sneer at [that] idea…"
The standards are the issue. If a professional body sets standards that prescribe attendance at "professional development" sessions that are ideologically motivated and irrelevant to the practice of the profession, its membership and its powers to compel should be reviewed. There's too much of this going on and it's ruining people's careers for the sake of enforcing pointless dogma.
You go right ahead with your anti-pc crusade. But you might just want to check what country you're in.
the outcomes are interesting though. The tribunal is saying she is free to express her beliefs. But professional development is required for registration (reasonable) and I assume she can't pick and choose other topics either.
That is different from her registration being threatened if she for instance posts on her SM that the course is a crock of shit.
…and "professional development" is anything the people running the REAA say it is.
This REAA approach is all too common in the educated middle class: a smooth, instant step from "This is a good idea, it has obvious benefits" to "We must mandate this and anyone who disagrees with mandating it is a hateful bigot."
Well, yes. Within the limits of its statutory authority, "professional development" is ultimately what the body charged with regulating the profession reasonably determines it to be.
That's what its job is.
If you disagree, fine. Then make an argument. But there's nothing self-evidently "irrelevant" about it simply because you think it is.
I know where you are coming from with this, and as always I think about what it would be like if the REAA for instance was mandating professional development that upskilled people in the needs of say MRAs (to take a completely ridiculous example to make the point clear).
However, having been dealing with a number of people this year who could do with some professional development, but don't have it, and that having impacted on me, badly, I'd like to know where the line is. For something like registration, and standards of practice, who decides what matters? Wouldn't that be the professional body?
Irrelevant according to who? Isn't that what we have professional standards bodies for?
You might think cultural competency is irrelevant to practising as a real estate agent in New Zealand. The professional body responsible for setting the standards of that profession evidently disagrees.
As I suggested in my earlier reply, there is certainly a legitimate argument about where the limits of that authority should lie. But individual practitioners can't simply declare a professional standard irrelevant and thereby establish that the regulator has exceeded its authority.
Otherwise, we don't really have professional standards at all. More like opinions.
It's what we have professional bodies standards bodies for, and it's why we have to ensure those bodies don't let the authority they have go to their heads. If they start mandating things that aren't essential to being able to practice in the profession, that's a problem.
Everyone's saying it's a good thing for real estate agents to have an understanding of te reo Māori, tikanga Māori and te Tiriti of Waitangi. Well, duh – of course it is. The REAA is right to offer it as prof dev, would be right to recommend it even. What it shouldn't do is claim that such understanding is essential to being competent to sell real estate (it objectively isn't), and threaten the careers of anyone who disagrees.
If the regulator can't decide what competence within the profession requires, what exactly is the point of having a professional regulator?
Of course that authority should have limits, and its decisions should be open to challenge. But you're still assuming the very thing that needs to be argued: that tikanga, te reo Māori and Te Tiriti are somehow extraneous or ideological additions to an otherwise neutral conception of professional competence.
Why should that be the default?
A regulator might reasonably conclude that practising competently as a real estate agent in New Zealand includes some understanding of the legal, cultural and institutional context in which property transactions actually take place.
You can disagree about how much understanding should be required, but simply asserting that it is "objectively" irrelevant doesn't establish that.
And there is a much older New Zealand habit lurking behind that assumption. Justice Prendergast's reasoning in Wi Parata effectively treated Māori political and legal institutions as incapable of generating obligations the "default" (i.e. Pākehā) legal system needed to recognise. The supposedly neutral position was therefore the imported English one; Māori institutions were the deviation that had to justify themselves.
I'm not suggesting a CPD requirement is remotely equivalent to Wi Parata. But the logic of treating the absence of Māori concepts as neutral, while their inclusion requires some extraordinary justification, is worth being rather wary of.
There isn't some objective scientific test for where "cultural competence" begins and ends. Professional competence is necessarily defined in context: by the nature of the profession, the society in which it operates, the people practitioners deal with, and the standards a reasonable regulator considers necessary.
That judgment can absolutely be challenged as unreasonable, disproportionate or beyond the regulator's statutory authority. But disagreement with the content of a professional standard doesn't, by itself, establish that the standard is an ideological project.
If that's the test, then almost any professional standard touching ethics, culture, discrimination, public obligations or social context can simply be dismissed as "ideological" by anyone who objects to it.
At some point you still have to make the actual argument: why is this standard outside the regulator's proper conception of professional competence, rather than merely one you don't like?
You answered it yourself: "Of course that authority should have limits." We entrust authority over people's careers to these regulators, so we have a right to expect they won't just mandate things because they feel strongly about those things.
Clearly, one has. But what cultural knowledge is it reasonable to conclude a real estate agent requires? Is it reasonable to conclude real estate agents should be required to attend a professional development course on the centrality of private property, property rights and the personal ownership of land to the real estate industry, and that they should be barred from the profession if they won't sit through it? I hope not.
I don't believe there's any kind of test for something as vague as "cultural competence" that's robust enough to deprive people of their careers over. If someone comes here from a foreign culture and learns the rules that apply to selling real estate, why shouldn't they be allowed to sell real estate? Professional registration is about protecting consumers against fraud and incompetence, not about promoting particular cultural values.
Professional standards aren't just about whether you can perform the narrow mechanics of the job without defrauding someone.
They're also about preserving the profession's social licence to operate: public trust, ethical conduct, appropriate behaviour, and some shared understanding of the society in which that profession exercises its privileges.
That's why professions regulate things that aren't strictly necessary to complete the immediate technical task.
"They're also about preserving the profession's social licence to operate…"
Yes, which is why it's important for the people running these regulatory bodies to think about that when considering whether to mandate things that needn't be compulsory and trash someone's career for refusing to comply with an unreasonable mandate.
Right back at you. It's up to the REAA to explain why someone who hasn't sat through this session is incompetent to sell real estate in NZ. They can't just say they're the regulator so they get to prescribe whatever requirements they feel like, they have to demonstrate that failure to meet the requirement renders someone unfit to practice.
Sure. The REAA should be able to justify the standards it imposes. I've never argued otherwise.
But you've quietly set a much stronger test: that it must demonstrate that failure to meet each particular requirement renders someone individually unfit to practise.
Why?
Surely we should begin with at least some presumption that the statutory body specifically charged with regulating a profession has a reasonable idea of what competent professional practice requires.
That presumption isn't irrebuttable. The REAA can be wrong, unreasonable, disproportionate, or exceed its authority.
But if the alternative is that every professional standard must be proven "essential" to the satisfaction of every practitioner who disputes it — or, for that matter, any random person who wants to weigh in — then we've effectively given individuals a veto over professional regulation.
If a regulator says someone who fails to meet a particular requirement is unfit to practice and deregisters them, depriving them not just of their income but their professional career and their reputation, you bet they'd better be able to demonstrate that not meeting that particular requirement genuinely does render the person unfit to practice. This isn't a game.
I agree that it isn't a game. That's precisely why regulators should be subject to statutory limits, due process, proportionality and review.
But you're still asserting your test rather than explaining why it's the right one.
Suppose the REAA requires compulsory ethics training and an agent refuses to undertake it. Must the REAA demonstrate that this particular person is literally incapable of selling houses without that training before it can enforce the requirement?
Of course not. Ethics can legitimately form part of the standards we collectively expect of the profession, even though an unethical person is perfectly capable of completing a property transaction. Indeed, dishonesty might sometimes make selling one easier.
So again: why is your test that every individual requirement must be demonstrated to be independently necessary for someone to be capable of practising?
Can you demonstrate that ethics is necessary to sell a house?
That's a much narrower conception of professional regulation than I'm using, and repeating how serious deregistration is doesn't establish that it's the correct one.
".. professional career…"
Sounds a little over egging. I understood professions had degrees attached to them.
According to Fred Dagg:
"If you’re going to enter the real estate field you’ll need to acquire a certain physical appearance which I won’t bore you with here, but if you’ve got gold teeth and laugh-lines around your pockets, then you’re through to the semis without dropping a set."
I would have thought an understanding of Te Tiriti important for anyone involved in buying and selling of land.
Seems to me also it would be pretty useful, however that isn't the issue. At issue is whether someone who hasn't sat through a session on it is unfit to sell real estate in NZ and should have their licence revoked.
The topic, however, doesn't appear to be mandatory this year.
It seems as though the REAA have a different mandatory topic each year (this year's one is "Use of digital technology in RE transactions") Supplemented by 9 hours of pick and mix CPD training opportunities – in order to maintain registration.
https://www.rea.govt.nz/real-estate-professionals/education/topics-for-verifiable-cpd/
Which rather weakens the argument that the topic is absolutely essential professional development for REAA members.
It also seems… odd … for any professional organization to have mandatory CPD topics. The mandatory stuff is taught in the initial qualification/training, and CPD brushes up skills and knowledge in areas directly relevant to individual professional practice. For something to be mandatory, would usually be handled by re-certification (typical for health-related and IT qualifications).
I still think that she was making a silly fuss over nothing (it doesn't hurt to sit through an hour-long seminar – even if you don't think you'll learn anything.
But, I also don't think the REAA have made a strong case for why the topic was mandatory that year.
Once you start looking for 'ideological positions' in any corpus of compulsory professional education, you're likely to find them all over the place, if you're clever enough.
So that in practice, any professional education will contain enough assumptions about the world that virtually everyone will find something within it to disagree with. The bigger problem here is that some things are deemed 'ideological' and others are not. If you can find someone who is permitted to define the 'ideological' and the 'not ideological', you are looking at someone who has power.
Which is exactly why it's really important that you don't try and mandate particular professional development programmes unless there can be no dispute they're essential to being competent to practice in that profession.
The far more serious issue here is that if you can find someone who is permitted to trash your career because you disagree with them about something, you are looking at someone who has power.
Not doing a course online that takes 90 min for a slow person, and needs a few multichoice answers to pass? Not as if she had to overnight on a marae.
The level of convenience or inconvenience of a mandated requirement isn't the issue here.
Really you fail to acknowledge PM, that each country is right to have its own rules that consider important aspects of their composition. In NZAO we are upping our game on being less po-faced and stiff-necked (leading to joint problems). Understanding Maori law and tikanga would on the business side, make one more competent to talk about NZAO property matters, and also acknowledges their position as tangata whenua which includes much history beyond your and tauiwi knowing. Even some Maori will have lost knowledge of some history because of brash foreigners taking over.
We are unaware of now going through a similar process, all of us Kiwis, at the hands of foreign incomers swooping in and sweeping us all before them. This new broom approach tends to ride roughshod over us to our detriment.
Our culture makes us different in our own ways, part of the mass of population yet each with slightly different understandings,. If we try to maintain individual thought and cherish others' unique traits and experiences also, we put interaction and understanding of humanity before the economic imperative.
I understand the concern. There is a serious debate to be had about how far professional bodies should be able to prescribe cultural or ideological standards.
But at the end of the day, we expect self-regulating professions to maintain their social licence to operate. Part of that is demonstrating that their standards reflect the society they actually serve.
In New Zealand in 2026, that reasonably includes some degree of Māori cultural competency. That doesn't require compliance with some predetermined ideology, or agreement with everything presented in a course. It simply means that, in order to practise as a real estate agent, you're expected to demonstrate a bare minimum of cultural competence appropriate to practising that profession in New Zealand.
And I note that the agent in question immigrated here from South Africa. I don't think it's particularly outrageous to expect someone choosing to practise a regulated profession in New Zealand to acquire some familiarity with the culture of the country they've chosen to practise in.
Integration does work both ways.
Her freedom to criticise the course remains intact. She can disagree, argue and post about it as much as she likes. But if she doesn't like the CPD requirements of her profession, she can choose another career.
I hear NZ First are recruiting.
Liberal democracy. Anyone who starts quoting old accepted myths shows a crack in thinking. A fancy name for a past hegemony. Mud wrestling is the new rage.
Hipkins has signed a pledge to extend the living wage to all workers in the state sector if elected.
Hipkins said the process would not be quick or easy, given some contracted sectors, such as integrated schools, were not controlled by the Government.
The pledge was also signed by the Greens and The Opportunity Party.
TPM did not attend. Can someone ask them to please explain?
To be expected, NZ First, National and ACT also failed to attend
A recent poll found 73% of respondents strongly or somewhat supported paying the living wage to state sector workers.
The Living Wage increased yesterday to $29.90 up from $28.95
The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions is challenging every party contesting this year’s election to say how they will lift pay for the hundreds of thousands of workers who are not currently receiving the living wage
Links for the sources of info
https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/361028417/labour-signs-pledge-extend-living-wage-all-state-sector-workers
https://union.org.nz/living-wage-rise-shows-whats-possible-now-parties-need-to-say-what-theyll-do-about-low-pay/
https://www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/361063603/most-kiwis-support-state-sector-living-wage-new-poll-lobby-says-20000-could-benefit?_gl=1*xyx2jo*_gcl_au*MTE2OTgxOTQ3Mi4xNzg3MDEyNjk1*_ga*OTM4MjA0NzQ1LjE1NzYxOTU2NjU.*_ga_P3Q4DDZ07F*czE3ODgzOTY5MTgkbzEzODIkZzEkdDE3ODgzOTczOTYkajYwJGwwJGgw
What is notable is that this extends to everyone working in the sector. No longer any ability to employ cleaners at cut rates by contracting out.
Interestingly, we have had several contract negotiations with local governments, where payment of the minimum wage to all employees is a condition of the contract (not an issue for us, but interesting).
Yes some councils have the living wage as a contract term.
Apologies for the unintentional error, which you caught. I meant to say "Living wage"
What I found interesting was the living wage only went up 95 cents.
That’s shy of the increase in the rate of inflation.
$28.95 multiplied by 4.1% (annual inflation rate) is $1.19 (rounded).
And some say real inflation is higher than that (power, rates, insurance and meat etc)
So it seems even the living wage is failing to keep up.
And this (below) seems to be why it doesn't match up with the rate of inflation
https://assets.nationbuilder.com/nzlivingwage/pages/5437/attachments/original/1788216401/Living_Wage_update_2026_FCSPRU_3_26_%281%29.pdf?1788216401
.
https://www.thepost.co.nz/business/361073900/labour-joins-nats-playing-down-methanex-gas-dividend
Simeon Brown is ignoring other options
one outlined here (bio mass)
https://thestandard.nz/open-mike-02-09-2026/#comment-2071481
and this development
Meridian secured fast-track approval to lower the minimum operating level of Lake Pūkaki by an additional five meters (drawing it down from 518 meters down to 513 meters above sea level).
This allows Meridian to pull an extra 545 Gigawatt-hours (GWh) of reserve water from the very bottom of its primary storage "pool" during winter dry spells, a decision that required installing permanent rock armouring at the Pūkaki Dam to mitigate wave erosion at these historic lows.
For those who have missed this.
https://thestandard.nz/daily-review-02-09-2026/#comment-2071501
The Search function is sort of back up.
It includes data of posts up to September 1 2026 – but is not updating to include recent posts.
Winston Peters wants New Zealand to pull out of the Paris Accords.
He makes the claim that food production was never meant to be part of the agreement as reason to leave.
What the Paris Agreement Says
How This Applies to Farming
His other rationale – New Zealand is so small it should be exempt from any required action.
In this, he totally repudiates the concept of a rules based international order.
This places his position as Foreign Affairs under question.
He is outside the Peter Fraser internationalism of our foreign policy tradition – he has gone Trumpian.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/361028804/winston-peters-wants-leave-paris-agreement-his-ministrys-spent-millions-helping-other-countries
People seek but cannot get apprenticeships. There are not the employers (many businesses have lost skilled workers – Oz bound).
When the demand for workers rises, the first supply move will be for migrant labour.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/education/1238083/apprenticeship-numbers-hit-15-year-low
Example
A plumber shortage
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/1094565/plumber-shortage-not-enough-people-in-the-pipeline-to-fill-the-gaps
Was just reading that.
This government could and should have done more IMO. But alas, that ship has sailed
Chinese infrastructure companies can supply workers from China for overseas projects