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6:00 am, July 11th, 2025 - 41 comments
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Corporate profit and Gaza
David Seymour’s hypocrisy over drugs and poverty | The Spinoff
Roughly 3 billion to alleviate child poverty. With a well researched and proven economic benefit of at least 14 billion.
Seymour is however being self interestly consistent. Free weight loss drugs benefit Epsom voters. Any societal benefits are incidental. The same voters would rather have tax cuts, than benefits to wider society and the wider economy.
The… huh… he say what?
"…Tamihere declined an opportunity to explain the legal action, what it cost his charity in legal fees, or whether he intended to further appeal to the Tax and Charities Review Tribunal if the judicial review was unsuccessful.
“Your caucacity never fails to amaze me,” was the totality of his response to the Herald…"
Caucacity? WTF? Is that even a word? What did Tamahere then do, slap the reporter with his glove?
The degree in Maori leaders in the correlation between pomposity and having the worst atitude to everything is incredible.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/waipareira-trust-goes-to-court-to-block-charity-deregistration/55YHGM2IQFBN7BU3IP3OY3VBAE/
Inventing memes is the way to go for postmodernism in the 21st century: his blend of audacity and caucasian was likely intended to confound the Nippert.
Generalising that stance to one typical of Maori leaders seems a bridge too far, so you may get pc folk nipping at your heels. Most of them seem more pragmatic than whimsical. He could have said "Flibberty-gibbert, Matt the Nippert!" Academics all over the world would have sat up and paid attention. So full marks to that Maori leader for keeping his eye on the Supreme Court ball instead.
Well you've got Shane Jones, who moves and talks like he swallowed a thesaurus and it's half digested remains are stuck sideways in his large instestine, and old Jonno getting in on the vibe???
Shane Jones, who after you look closely at what the content of the actual feasible actions he proposed, rather than the waffle and energy with which he proclaims it – always comes up empty. He has been like that since I first heard him in the early to mid 00s.
Like his proposals for searching for oil and gas. It takes decades to bring a field into production after it is discovered. Just searching for one may take a decade in NZ's shattered geology (unlike Jones, I actually trained in earth sciences, including the geological history of Zealandia).
It takes at least a decade to prove that it is worth investing in after discovery, both to figure out the extent and pressures. Then you put in the wells, platforms, distribution and processing plant and employees.
So you're making a bet on 20-30 years ahead for investment. to deal with an immediate shortage. In the meantime tech advances. Just have a look at NZ geothermal power plants, solar power, batteries, and EVs over the last 30 years for examples.
Shane Jones is a 1970/80s child living a in a dream he is back in the 1950/60s and wanting to imitate his hero Robert Muldoon in his success at picking winners.
Far better to simply cut off stupid low profit (for NZ) uses of the remaining gas – like the methanol plant or some of the more inefficient industrial processes like baking lime to cement. Switch what can be shifted to electrical. Buy in gas if there are shortages and let the customers wear the price difference over the next decade to sort out profitable uses.
Concentrate on upgrading the electricity grid to the point where it is reliable and can have connections made into it to provide power without destabilising it.
Don't rely on Shane Jones. He is clearly a technophobe with no skill in technology or science – and who is also too lazy to learn.
"caucacity" certainly does not mean in John Tamihere's case "the wisdom of staying with and abiding by caucus decisions"!
https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/07/07/govt-continues-its-blunt-refusal-to-acquire-knowledge/ [Rob Campbell]
Luxon and the Coalition are acting like worthies:
I know what I know
The sheer arrogance and deception of these neo-authoritarian ideologues in forcing their partial and inconsistent [channelling Anne Salmond] views upon NZ.
That’s a very poor and sorted defence of a dishonourable position – I like to see Luxoff try it in a Hardtalk interview. What gives – does our CoC CEO not give a flying f***?
Careful now RNZ, and cheer up Dr Joy, at least Key didn't diagnose you with 100% pure, clean and green derangement syndrome – that's a thing for ACTing PMs only.
ACTing PM Seymour (RSB) is in full flight, defending division by wealth.
Looks like some kind of classic rw screw-up is happening, and Richard Harman is on the case: https://www.politik.co.nz/national-gets-a-warning-from-its-friends/
That's the problem with being on the right: you actually have to get it right to achieve credibility, and that's ever so rare. Luxon would probably claim that the select committee process will get the right result and his govt are merely supporting the public service by putting its product out there for consideration. Caringly.
Yet folks are habituated to expecting such design flaws from govt lawyers. Perhaps the minister in charge told his troops to be as wacky as they liked: "Just toss the buggers a bunch of red meat, huh? You know, as many little cubes as you can cut it."
I've been thinking about semi-autonomous drone robots for defending NZ. Both in the air, on and under water. Way cheaper than frigates, which are primarily there for trade route protection anyway.
I suspect that the days of having relying on distance as a defence are probably getting dated and in a couple of decades may be completely obsolete. The range of aerial or naval drones will keep expanding as battery and charging (solar / wave / temperature difference energy) tech extends. Satellites are cheaper to put up, including low-altitude clusters.
We already have the naval capacity from a number of nations that could project capability logistically into our waters, including the US, PRC, and Australians. But also Japan, the Korean states, etc. Drones just make it cheaper.
Please remember in responding that military capability has nothing to do with intent. As Trump is demonstrating at present, intent can turn on whim. Military capability takes decades to accumulate the gear, training, and expertise
We have considerable expertise in-country for producing both aerial and underwater drones – currently mostly for observation and scientific reasons. Certainly there are a number of jobs available for coding on those kinds of platforms popping up – mostly outside. (They generally would require me to move and my partner hasn't released me from a location leash (yet) ).
The article that David Axe just wrote musing on defending the Taiwan straits was interesting on the same ideas, and he was just considering current capabilities.
In NZ we're starting to build the kind of stratospheric drones that with less weighty solar collectors and batteries could stay up almost indefinitely, and reduce a reliance of satellite comms out of our massive EEZ.
That would allow control of a aerial and water drones that would be hard to jam (think about altitude geometry and non broadcast lasers and masers).
Probably a better use of our military spending than buying time on other (dubious) allies satellites. We may actually be able to start defending and controlling our enormous EEZ for the first time. Being able to watch fishing boats in real-time alone would probably pay some pretty enormous benefits (and stop having to close fisheries).
Thoughts? I'm thinking of later post. I will give rude sarcastic replies to religious peaceniks when I have time (I have little interest in unthinking dogma – I like dealing with reality). But expect delays in me responding anyway because I have code to debug.
Two questions: (asking for a friend..)
1)..is not the militarism you advocate a dogma..?..an ideology..?..and therefore requiring a belief system in adherents..?..and aren't belief systems..be they in unicorns..or militarism..by definition..unthinking..?
2).. isn't it pretty much a given that any other military could invade/defeat the paltry defence we could mount…droned up or not..?
So..us spending billions on arming up..when those monies could be used so much better.. isn't nz arming up an exercise in military futility…and just pissing those billions away…
Yes..use drones for peaceful purposes..
..my friend would also like to note that the we are no longer too far away ..is a nz pro militarism argument stretching way way back…
…when such arguments drove us to build those bunkers etc ..on North head..to stop the Russians ..whose hoving to on the horizon…was imminent…according to the militarists of yore…
More of an observation. There isn't a strong historical basis of undefended societies lasting without being gobbled up. But by all means, if you'd like to link to examples, then please filter them by how long they lasted (say a minimum of 2 centuries?) and how many citizens they had
Sure, if they wanted to exert themselves. But that isn't how you measure relative security in any sphere. Any defense can be overcome if you want to waste a lot of resources to breach it. But typically building defenses are cheap compared to building an offensive force – as the Russian Federation are demonstrating against Ukraine, especially in the first 6 months of that was.
This same approach works across many areas. For instance the standard that all of the financial systems use for measuring defenses against external attack is to look at the cost of setting up and doing the breach. Like card readers or ATMs or bank trading networks. See https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/standards/ for an overview. When you look down into the actual standards, it is all about the relative costs of defense against attack.
Needless to say I've been building code in this kind of development spaces since doing this kind of work for nearly 4 decades.
Think of insurance. Doesn't that fulfill exactly the same space?
You cough up money for disasters that may never happen – until they do. Defense systems of all kinds operate in exactly the same way.
Storm water system are designed for events that shouldn't happen more than once in 50 years – because when they do happen the results are catastrophic. Same with roading, rail, power, water, and every other system that were have.
We have civil defense targeted at the volcanic field that is Auckland, the earthquake disaster region that is most of the lower North Island and the whole of the South Island, or the ignimbrite of the central North Island
Are you seriously arguing that these systems shouldn't be maintained? We have hundreds of billions of dollars tided up in infrastructure and systems to deal with relatively unlikely events.
Because the same religious logic (ostrich mentality) that you're using about military defense capabilities – also applies to natural disasters as well. If you aren't? Then please tell me why your logic about natural events shouldn't also apply for military defenses. Or for medical defenses, or any other kind of defenses against uncertain futures.
All are about probabilities of future events that we have no way of controlling, and building the capability early for something that might happen at any time, often without much warning.
The only certainty about low probability events is that they are certain to happen eventually.
I am aware that you have a history deficit about NZ. But which ones are you talking about?
The ones that deterred the German merchant raiders in WW1 from entering our ports in search of prey. Like the SMS Wolf which was raiding off our coast. The SMS Emden or SMS Seeadler that was hitting our merchants en-route to our customers markets. Or the Orion, Komet, Atlantis, Michel, and Penguin in WW2 disrupting critical supplies to us or from us?
Not to mention the Japanese attacks on Australia in WW2 and the attacks on merchant shipping heading North.
It took decades to build port defenses initially against potential Russian or Americian Pacific fleets. But they were useful as upgraded defenses decades later because they made it dangerous for predators to come into the harbors where they could do more damage faster and more thoroughly.
All of that was done with ships and aircraft with minimal capabilities to what are currently available. But the same principle of defense as now applies. Yes other military forces may have far bigger offensive capabilities than us. But we require far less capability to mount a defense when those offensive forces have to project themselves across vast distances with minimal support. If we don't have any defenses, the we are just a much much easier target.
Absolutely agree.
If Ukraine and Iran have taught us anything, it’s that while precision long-range munitions remain out of reach for countries like ours (unless our allies are willing to lend us the capability), a combination of low-cost FPV and one-way attack drones provides a viable and scalable alternative for deterrence and asymmetric warfare via saturation rather than performance.
For New Zealand, the reality of our vast EEZ means any viable defense strategy must be layered and intelligent: persistent UAVs for recon and early warning, integrated with a few potent manned platforms like the P-8s (or their equivalents), each carrying their own missiles or strike drones.
That combination offers reach, survivability, and lethality without needing a massive surface fleet we can neither afford nor man.
That said, I do see a continuing role for modern frigates: not just legacy holdovers, but purpose-built control hubs, drone carriers and VLS platforms.
They’d form the backbone of maritime coordination and strike capacity in higher-threat environments.
And if we’re going to rely on a distributed web of autonomous drones, it becomes equally important to invest in our own (relatively) hardened space infrastructure: low-earth orbit comms and sensor constellations that we own and control.
Not just to reduce dependency on allied networks, but to guarantee resilience if geopolitics gets ugly.
Far better to build sovereign capability suited to our geography, budget, and national interests than to spend billions on someone else’s satellites or systems designed for conflicts we’ll never fight.
Trade routes mostly.
Problem with them is that they're expensive to launch and not exactly stationary, so you have to have lot of them which most of the time won't be near our region.
I'd prefer to invest in stratospheric drones specialized for surveillance and comm tasks. Once you get up above the troposphere the weather gets pretty predicable and less turbulent. You have all of the advantages of satellites without the problematic orbital mechanics. 20+km upwards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-powered_aircraft
Solar powered aircraft with lifting gases as well as lifting surfaces should be able to stay up almost indefinitely. If not now then in the near future at the rate that solar and battery tech is developing, and so is the computing and senor tech. They can be made to be quite stealthy, especially if you minimize the metal parts.
The tech for these is pretty well developed. They started putting them in the 70s.
A very erudite and worthwhile candidate for the Wellington mayoralty – NOT. I suspect this has sealed Andrew Little's tilt at the job.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360753982/ray-chung-says-neighbour-was-source-salacious-new-years-party-gossip-email-about-mayor-tory-whanau
Urrgh.. What an arsehole.
If you wanna hear someone who should not be near the levers of power, listen to the interview.
Amongst the silly things he says is that the email is being released for political reasons as opposed to the reason he wrote it?
Another gem is that he is not opposed to the idea of apologizing to Whanau.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/566607/ray-chung-defends-sending-gossip-about-tory-whanau-to-other-councillors
You have to be pretty naive to believe second hand stories from "young bucks" out on the town on New Year's Eve.
Pretty brave for Tory to have published the email. Isn't there something dodgy about Chung's team?
Better Wellington : Some interesting commonality/personnel with other RW conspiracist groups…
And the RW never far from it. Dirty
deedsPolitics and Tactics. Caught..out !Seems mayoral hopeful Chung has lost his rich lister backing.
Oh, dear….
I heard that interview…
I felt 'the last post' should have been played under it..
Signalling the end of his political career..
Listening to the radio and the record numbers of skilled folks headed to Australia.
It got me thinking maybe Luxon still has shares in Air New Zealand and this Prime Minister lark is just a means to bolster his dividend return.
It's not like he would enact laws that would benefit him personally or remove rebates once he had claimed them…
I've had a change of heart over the 3 vs. 4 yr parliamentary term ..
I was leaning towards the four year option..
..but the experience of this cart of clowns ruling over us…has driven me back into retaining the 3 yrs term ..
I was thinking about the election next year..as an opportunity to toss the clowns out…
…and I had the dread realisation that if we had a four year term…it wouldn't be until the end of 2027 that we could make that change…(!)…yikes..!
So..I am now firm that a three yr term is more than enough time for us to be able to decide if they are any good ..and deserving of a second term ..
..or to find out they are totally crap…
..and in that second scenario..with a four year term…why should we have to wait another year before we can do anything about it…?
It's as simple as that.. really..
The only benefit I can see from a four yr term…is only two elections a decade is cheaper than three elections a decade ..
..and that ain't enough…to counter the above downsides…
So… IMHO retaining the status quo…
..is the only way to go
I’ve come to the same conclusion. The desperate hurry to push ill-considered legislation into place in the first 100 days.
Their clear inability to do things that are good for the economy is driving our younger skills out of the country. I’m thinking about departing, and I have been resisting doing that since the 1990s.
We do need more constraint on parliamentary powers to force them to stop running around like they have bees in their pants.
I think that a selected upper house with a mandate to slow the advance of unwise legislation. Can’t see any point in electing them. Treat them like judges are – proposed by peers and on a basis of a general acceptability.
For instance (spit-balling here) proposed by professional communities with a required balance across ex-MPs, ex-Judges, ex-Bureaucrats, and ex-NGOs, requiring a parliamentary majority of 70% to appointed sounds like it would be viable.
They are there to review on selected crucial legislation in public. With limited rejection powers (but a low no vote – something like 40% votes to do so) and a long minimum time delay before they must review a re-submitted legislation in public. They should probably also have the review powers on treaties.
That upper house (non-elected) makes sense..
The only check and balance we have now is the next election…
And re leaving here..if I were younger I'd be gone..my son has gone..
Nz now feels like it did when Muldoon was in power…
The reason why now is like Muldoon days..is that there is that same sense that everything is going in the wrong direction…
No matter where you look..
..driven by dinosaur politicians..with their eyes fixed firmly on the past…and as corruptable as fuck..
..who are doing terrible damage to our environment…our culture ..many of our people..
It is easy to see how/why the young…despairing of this government doing what needs to be done…are throwing their hands in the air..and departing..in droves…
And as always…they are our brightest…those with the ability to see just how fucked up these reactionary fools are…
Agree totally Phillip…like you I've changed my mind from 4 to 3.
The question is will the electorate have the sense to dump this corrupt, racist, lying dinosaur regime.
(calling them a cart of clowns is being far too nice)
Just a thought.
What about increasing the number of electorates and reducing the size of the list. Or would that bugger proportionality?
I'm quite keen on a system where Mp's must stand in an electorate to be able to enter parliament and proportionality is retained by allocating 'list' spots to the best preforming but unsuccessful candidate from each party.
Needs a little bit of thinking but something along the lines of percentage of vote gained in the electorate as the way of measuring best preforming. I like that it makes all MP's directly accountable to an electorate.
I get the appeal, really, I do.
Tying all MPs to electorates feels like a way to enhance accountability and connection to local communities. But I think there are some real risks in using electorate performance as the mechanism for allocating list seats.
For example, they aren’t level playing fields. Some are safe seats for one party. Some are battlegrounds. And some parties don’t campaign seriously in all of them due to resource constraints.
So, a system that rewards the “best performing losers” would inevitably end up disproportionately favouring candidates from marginal or high-profile seats, mostly from the two major parties.
That would nudge us back toward a rigged two-party duopoly. Which is exactly the problem we are trying to avoid.
The genius of MMP is that it separates representation from geography, allowing Parliament to reflect the full diversity of political opinion across the country: not just where support happens to be concentrated.
Sounds like STV with multi-member (probably 2) constituencies.
Isn't that just FPP with extra steps?
The whole point of MMP is to ensure that the overall makeup of Parliament reflects the proportional support each party receives nationwide. Not just the preferences of voters in a few geographically concentrated electorates.
Reducing the list would shift the balance back toward electorate results, and that could seriously distort proportionality, especially for smaller parties that have broad but diffuse support across the country.
I also don’t buy the argument that list MPs are somehow less accountable or less democratic. They’re just accountable in a different way: to party members, to nationwide voters, and often to very specific communities of interest that aren’t tied to geography. Electorate MPs aren’t inherently more responsive: they just have a more obvious set of constituents.
If anything, the list ensures diversity, representation, and fairness in a system that otherwise risks overrepresenting a few swing seats.
Not necessarily – would depend on how many list MPs were dispensed with. Under MMP (1996 onwards) it's been 72 electorate MPs and 48 list MPs, plus any overhang MPs (no more than 3 so far).
https://teara.govt.nz/en/interactive/33702/number-of-mps-over-time
It should be a simple exercise (so too complicated for me) to see how much the number of electorate MPs could increase by at the expense of list MPs and still maintain proportionality (with a reasonable safety margin) from the first MMP election on. Maybe 40 list MPs would be sufficient to ensure proportionality, although the 2012 MMP review opined that "problems might well arise" with only 40 list MPs.
The recommendations to abolish the one electorate seat threshold for the allocation of list seats, and to lower the party vote threshold from 5% to 4% (if not lower) should be adopted, imho, even if this might throw NZF a lifeline – in the MMP era, NZF has been under the 5% threshold in three elections, and out of Parliament twice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_First#Election_results
Too easy to gerrymander really small electorates. Have a look at the report of the Royal Commission on Electoral Systems 1986 for some egregious examples. Hamilton City in the late 70s and early 80s (when I was a student at Waikato Uni) was classic, about 5 electorates each with a small slice of urban population and a large hinterland of rural voters to dilute the urban votes.
The advantage with having a decent sized electorates is that it gets rid of all of that tomfoolery at a party level. With MMP area based general electorate grew from about 25k to more than 40k population (check me on that – old memories).
Problem now is that the general electorates are getting too big (about 70K now) because of population growth. Gets hard to represent people you can never meet more than a tiny number of.
Th reason is obvious. The number of general electorates in the South Island is legally wired at 16 and its burgeoning population is pushing the electorate sizes up. North Island electorates are set to about the same size.
Increase the number of SI seats and adjust the rest proportionally to increase the size of the house. They are doing too much work so we have fewer MPs actually learning how to be good politicians on the back benches. Which is why we're getting piss-poor ministers.
The 16 South Island electorates smells like a National gerrymander, expecting the SI population to continue decreasing form the 80's and allowing a lot of smaller NI electorates, which they would have wonderful fun manipulating the boundaries of.
Now that the SI is growing very strongly, particularly in Canterbury and Otago outside of Dunedin, 16 electorates is just an arse. Really Te Wai Pounamu should have a few more to get effective representation based on communities of interest. West Coast and Tasman having a common interest? Big ask of an MP to represent that without contradicting themselves on a daily basis, or being despised by half your electorate on an equally daily rotation. And Central Otago gets split between Southland and Waitaki, well the only community of interest there is that both provincial centres tried to get clip of the goldfield wealth that came out of Central in 1800's, and pretty much failed. Today the only connection is if you're in Queenstown and have to go to hospital. I'd presume there's similar aberrations up North as well.
Along with ditching the South Island 16, we probably need to loosen the population size variation, to respect communities of interest, to give more, smaller electorates, along with enough list seats to give proportionality. Which would head us toward a 150 seat Parliament.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_electorates#Distribution
Better than the fixed number of seats of 80 in the Representation Act 1900, which was later raised to 100.
National government 1969 and was put in at a time when the migration patterns looked like the South Island was going to have a relatively slower growth than the North Island so they hard fixed the number of SI seats. Everything was made proportional to the 25 SI seats. So that meant that the total number of seats grew with the population.
It had hit about 100 by the time MMP arrived..
The change to MMP dropped the SI seats to 16 (in line with the list/total seats mix at the time). But a hard limit on total seats was imposed of about 120 seats with overhangs. It is the combination of those two limits that is causing the problem.
Rising population means that the total SI general seat voting population divided by 16 determines the rough seat size. That is applied to the NI and Maori seats and determines the number of NI and Maori seats. The it is 120 – total geographic seats = number of list seats.
Over time and population growth this means that the number of list seats diminishes, and the number of voters per electorate increases.
In 1996, the electoral population of NZ was 3,367,308.
with 55 list and 65 electorate seats = 120 seats total
In 2023, the electoral population of NZ was 4,694,214
with 51 list and 71 electorate seats = 122 seats total (because of overhang)
About a 40% increase.
A rough calc shows that we wound up with 51.8k voter per electorate seat in 1996 and 66.1k in 2023 – roughly 28% increase in size.
The electoral distribution method is currently in S35 of the Electoral Act
Good figures there lprent. The expectation in 1996 was probably that the SI 16 would lead to more, and less populated electorates, eventually undermining the MMP ideals as the assumption then was everything would move north. didn't quite pan out that way with SI pop growth exceeding NI.
To have the same representation as 1996 we would have a 170 seat Parliament with 92 electorate and 78 list MPs. A Parliament that big probably wouldn't be politically possible, but surely we need to look at getting rid of the SI 16 and the 120 seat restrictions.
Of course magats are losing their shit over the state acquiring ownership of the means of production.
/
The Defense Department will become the largest shareholder in rare earth miner MP Materials after agreeing to buy $400 million of its preferred stock, the company said Thursday.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/10/pentagon-to-become-largest-shareholder-in-rare-earth-magnet-maker-mp-materials.html
— President Donald Trump will control the so-called “golden share” that’s part of the national security agreement under which he allowed Japan-based Nippon Steel to buy out iconic American steelmaker U.S. Steel, according to disclosures with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
https://apnews.com/article/trump-us-steel-nippon-golden-share-pittsburgh-china-7981a41d2e518fad07c347042f9fdc38
https://theconversation.com/the-special-envoys-antisemitism-plan-is-ambitious-but-fails-to-reckon-with-the-hardest-questions-260914
We haven’t had the overt anti semitism yet, but it’s probably not far away. And we still haven’t resolved the argument over was exactly is, hate speech.