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6:00 am, July 30th, 2026 - 66 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 …
Bayleys donated $164,000 to National in 2023. They have been one of their big regulars like Barfoot and Thompson.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/361012822/major-national-donor-paid-25m-selling-state-houses
The current head of Commercial is a previous National cabinet minsiter.
This election Lloyd Budd the previous CEO of the Bayleys Auckland business, is standing for National.
This is just a scam.
I am not a big fan of Rafael Behr's columns in the UK Guardian but today he had some cracking lines that relate as much to NZ as they do to the UK. To paraphrase:
"…the radicalisation of the (New Zealand) right through exposure to Maga influence(both cultural and financial) in recent years amounts to cognitive surrender. Political fandom has usurped judgment; craving validation from a foreign power takes precedence over loyalty to the national interest…. …What (New Zealand) conservatives either fail to observe or refuse to acknowledge in their mindless orbit around Planet Trump is that Maga politics contains more heresies against the sacred Thatcherite creed than anything centrist Labour or the Greens propose…"
The importation of shameless Maga graft and scams like the stinking cronyism of this Bayley's contract jack up and the stacking of professional public bodies with unqualified ideological bedfellows like the racist wierdo Dr Manoja Kalupahana are just two very recent examples of poison of Maga politics coming to even the mainstream conservative right in NZ.
Their donors have always been massive, but at least during the early years of Key's leadership they were more discrete.
It is Key ascention to power as PM that really let loose donor power – and corrupt deals like the Sky City deal – directly against getting Labour or any other form of property regulation policy back in.
That’s a very tough column to read Sanctuary: foreign observers seeing the depths of unrestrained power that now rules us here.
One last cracker line from Behr that is worth plagerising for NZ when our clueless press gallery and neoliberal pundit class talk about the need for reform of the neoliberal hegemony you'll hear them endlessly invoke Polish shipyards, unions holding the country to ransom, and six months waits for a phone…
"..This is more incantation than argument, a ritual fondling of beads on the Neoliberal rosary…"
The minor notes of heretical complaint against Fast Track are so far unable to resist real estate capitalism here in Central Otago.
Sure, there was a public meeting in Arrowtown last night where the Mayor voiced concern. But back in my day a real local politician would have organised marches and got some serious tv.
And with the economy being what it is over the last few years, subdivision is one of the very very last ways that those falling behind can grasp a bunch of grass to ensure they only dangle over the pit of economic despair, rather than fall.
I know what it takes to win, even against real estate capitalism. But to continue the Catholic analogy, we are more in deeper Inquisition than we are heading towards a full resistance figure like Luther.
Not a scam, pure corruption.
Looks like corruption to me. And as a renter, if my property manager was Bayley's I'd be doubly incensed that they are prepared to buy an election via a party that favours landlords and property investors at the expense of renters.
I'd be gritting my teeth, and holding my tongue each time a Bayley's person turns up to do a routine inspection.
Estate agents shouldn't be SOOO politically biased and willing to benefit from such corruption.
However, it is not 'your' property manager. The property manager is employed by, and works for the property owner.
Do you equally think that a right wing parent should be 'outraged' over a teacher belonging to a union which materially supports the Labour party?
Of course the property manager works for the landlords, and the landlords select the company they want to be property manager.
Donations to Labour from Unions are a going to drop in the ocean compared with the vast amount of funds NACTFirst.
https://www.democracyproject.org.nz/p/annual-audit-of-political-donations
A 2025 audit of the funding for the last election shows:
That extra funding enables more sophisticated promotion of right wing parties via media, social media etc, compared with Labour Greens & TPM.
And the Labour Unions are not rewarded with the kinds of influence and commercial gains and skewed selection that is seen in this case of Bayley's.
I think it's directly comparable.
I think that the Labour Unions gain the same kind of influence and policy gains from a Labour led government, as commercial donors do from a National one.
Indeed the Labour party specifically recognizes trade unions as affiliate members.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/labour-party/page-7
Labour unions relationship with the Labour party you say is much the same as wealthy business to National. You do see through a dirty glass darkly Bella.
Labour turned at a right angle from the labouring people when they opened the door to neoliberalism, extreme capitalism and free trade, sliding down what has been a slippery slope.
Whereas National and its phalanx are busy firming their position, seeing upwards as their main direction, and if they slide a little, then their wealthy friends help them or boot them. The red carpet is there at the end of the slide ready for another ascent. You must know about this Bella, haven't you tried or some compatriot lobbied, for favourable taxes and regulations that enable your interests?
maybe Bayley's should adopt that model
One of the oddest and most remarked upon aspects of Nazi Germany was how the nation was gripped by the delusions of a collective madness which was only dispelled by total defeat, at which point many Germans awoke from a psychological dystopia, blinking blearily if they'd awoken from an appalling nightmare. Many of their conquerors wryly remarked it was very hard to find anyone who supported Hitler in June 1945 Germany.
Watching the levels of the screaming madness of MAGA Republicans trying to get Anthony Fauci to answer their questions on the farrago of half baked conspiracy theories and debunked anti-science makes me think of the vulgar and debased Roland Freisler, screaming at Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben "You dirty old man, why do you keep fiddling with your trousers?" during the July 20 show trials, and makes wonder what it will take to end the grip of the collective madness the US has descended into.
Interesting thoughtful Sanctuary.
It is always difficult to find people willing to support a comprehensively defeated leader, following a war.
Is this in reference to Fauci being questioned about Covid data?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdx85vkk0gko
Bish tries a wackydoodle play. Doesn't go down well. Something to do with lack of inherent logic…
Coalition requiring councils to become big spenders whilst being prevented from getting more money to spend does seem nuts. Labour has even signalled action! To arouse Labour from somnambulance took extreme provocation.
Leverage seems to be the Nat intention. Make councils useful for a change. To the Nat hammer, all councils are nails. Morality? Optional extra. Fairness rules!
Bish is being devilish here: enforcement is the hinge! The cost of protecting the environment is thus made optional. If councils doan wanna, they need not pay. Likewise landowners. Rules are made to create the impression in the public mind that something is being done about the problem. That they don't work doesn't matter.
Any variation on Ministers being satisfied or relaxed when journalists raise issues with them?
"I make no apology for x,y,z" is right up there for me.
Say the shittiest thing (looking at you Luxon, van Velden, Peters, Jones) then double down with,
"I make no apology!"
Tribalism continues to stir the pot. Culture wars update: https://unherd.com/newsroom/jk-rowling-has-forced-amnesty-into-retreat/
Any social activist nowadays is likely to be on a steep learning curve around tribalism and whatever group meaning nexus they get sucked into.
You may a gender-critical person who only believes in there being two sexes. An opinion. Fine. However, when you as a government only believe in two sexes, it's not a belief, but a trans-exclusionary political movement enshrined in law.
From 4th August it will be illegal in the UK to include trans people in ANY sex-segregated organisation, hobby group, sport club, etc, according to their gender. Even when that organisation/workplace is happy to include them, even welcomes them. Trans people will be excluded from gender-appropriate public or workplace facilities like toilets. Trans women will have to use the mens', and trans men will be excluded from both the mens' and the womens' facilities, double whammy. Trans people will have to disclose to their employers they are trans, even if they have effectively been living as their gender for decades.
This is the interpretation of the 'biological sex' law via policy of the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission.
As for intersex people, some of whom only found out their physiological sex at puberty, they will have to use facilities of their 'sex assigned at birth'.
Additional to the UK's trans-exclusion from facilities and organisations, trans people's access to NHS healthcare is being limited. Any NHS puberty-blocker care was abruptly cancelled by the government a month or so ago. Vulnerable trans teenagers will be forced into puberty. Families have left the UK because they fear their trans kids will kill themselves because of this. It is becoming harder for older trans people to access the NHS gender-affirming care that has been available to them since the 1960s.
Transgender rights in the United Kingdom – Wikipedia
Rowling has responded to a query asking, ' “How are you planning to police public toilets?” Her reply: “Quite easily, really. Decent men will stay out, as they always have, so we can assume all who don’t are a threat, given their disregard for women’s and girls’ safety, privacy and dignity. Photographing, reporting and disseminating such men’s images online will be a piece of cake.” ', behaviour which is illegal in the UK. She REALLY dislikes trans women, and funds multiple anti-trans ‘lawfare’ suits.
https://gayexpress.co.nz/2025/06/j-k-rowling-faces-criticism-over-toilet-surveillance-comments/
Rowling founded Beira's Place (an advocacy and referral service for domestic violence) specifically to exclude trans women.
this is misleading.
In the UK, any organisation can provide mixed sex toilets alongside single sex ones. This already happens. What they won't be able to do is provider mixed sex toilets can call them single sex.
I think there is some additional legislation governing workplaces that mandates provision of single sex spaces. This is for safety, dignity and privacy reasons. The absence of concern for women and girls' safety, dignity and privacy is noted.
Afaik, those workplaces can *also provide mixed sexed toilets.
But what about small workplaces that can't afford to build new toilets you say? Well, small workplaces in NZ tend to have single room toilets with the handbasin contained behind the locked door, and serve as single sex and mixed sex because they are rooms not shared toilets.
None of this is difficult except in the minds of people who don't give a shit about women's needs and rights.
I don't know if you really meant to imply that JKR set up Beira's Place to be vindictive and hateful (I suppose you did), but in reality, as a survivor of rape she set it up because there were no women's only rape crisis left in the area.
That meant a woman who had just been raped had no access to female only acute support, counselling and group work. Once the public understand that gender identity replacing sex means that women and girls will have to share spaces with men, at the worst and most vulnerable times in their lives, they tend to support sex realism. Let me know if you want the UK stats on that.
The really sad thing here is that there is also now a backlash against trans people because most people have had enough and the right understand how to play this politically much better than the liberal left who still think they can force people to think like them. It doesn't work.
The gender critical movement in the UK, of which JKR is a latter part, was started largely by left and centre left feminists. Those feminists would have been quite happy to find common ground with trans people and work out solution for everyone. But the patriarchal parts of the trans movement insisted on deny women's rights and here we are.
There are too many legal cases in the UK to keep up with, and GCs don't win them all, but they are consistently making gains now.
In case there are people reading who care about strategy and progressive values, what's happening with the Amnesty UK situation is they published at least two reports defaming many UK women's organisations, including Beira's Place and Sex Matters, as "anti-rights". Those organisations have written to AUK asking for an explanation and notifying of legal action if AUK don't retract and apologise.
Some of these organisations are grass roots with little funding, but there are also those with enough funding, lawyers and court experience to take this as far as it needs to go.
Amnesty International appears to be distancing themselves from AUK's actions thankfully, but AUK have a choice. They can stopp attacking women's organisations and make amends, or they can go to court and have it play out in court and the media.
This is a win/win situation for women's orgs. Even if they lose the court cases (UK does have clear defamation of organisations legislation), they will win in the media, because when it comes down to it, nearly all people know that biological sex is real, and most people think there are important areas where understanding sex matters.
I will also note that in NZ it appears we no longer have women's rape crisis support. Only mixed sex now. That is appalling and anyone who doesn't understand why is an arsehole.
Women only RC of course doesn't mean trans women can't have RC services, except in the heads of the most ardent of TRAs. Which begs the question of why liberals in NZ pushed to remove women's spaces instead of setting up spaces for trans women.
UK has become very teutonic in its approach to trans people: all their rights are forbidden unless explicitly stated. The EHRC policy removes rights from trans people that they have had until now. It's a pink-triangle policy in terms of forced disclosure of yrans status to employers.
This removal does not empower or protect women better, because there simply is no significant evidence of harm to women due to the presence of trans women in sex-segregated spaces. GCs cannot come up with any hard numbers to prove harm in prisons, hospital wards, rape crisis centres and other contested spaces.
https://translucent.org.uk/four-years-seven-surveys-four-complaints-what-our-foi-data-actually-shows-about-trans-women-using-womens-single-sex-spaces/
Most GC organisations in the UK simply focus only on trans-based issues in a not-very-nice way. The Good Law Project has referred Sex Matters, for example, to the UK Charity Commission because they think 'Sex Matters are breaking charity law, going beyond anything that could be deemed charitable. They target individuals, offensively conflate trans people with predators and fetishists, and seem set on dehumanising an already vulnerable minority.'
Your case for GCs fighting the anti-trans fight for all women sounds good on paper, weka, but doesn't hold up to scrutiny. And it’s worrying that you’re putting my factual posts on pre-moderation.
Nope, that had nothing to do with Weka, so chill!
you are not in premod. If you were in premod by me I would have told you.
My previous post said ‘waiting moderation’. Unlike any I've put up recently.
a number of reasons that can happen, but it was nothing to do with me. I didn't see it until it appeared in the front end.
which rights are you talking about? Be specific.
All people have the same human rights. There are some exceptions, and yes they have to be explicitly stated. For instance, there are exemptions in NZ law to the HRA, because some people need specific protections.
No, it doesn't. The EHRC policy provides guidance to society on how to interpret the Equalities Act since the Supreme Court judgement in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers.
The Act itself hasn't changed. What has changed is that organisations who interpreted the law outside of its intention have been told to pull their heads in i.e. the SC said the EA relates to biological sex,
https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2024-0042#judgment-details
that may well be an issue and again, had liberals worked with GCFs at the start, we would have found accommodations and ways forward that provided protections for trans people.
But if you want to look at that one specifically, please provide some scenarios.
this is a profound misunderstanding of the issues.
1. there is no evidence that trans women don't have the same pattern of violence as other males. There is some evidence that they do. The onus is on society to prove that trans women are safe, not for for women to prove they are not.
But even were it true, that TW have the same patterns/rates as women rather than men, women are still entitled to privacy and dignity.
2. because 'trans woman' has no independent definition outside of self ID, there is no way for any woman to know if a male person claiming to be trans is trans or not. Shifting from single sex spaces, makes those spaces mixed sex by definition. Which means that men pretending to be trans can can entry.
It's also a problem where single sex spaces are removed entirely because some people in positions of power believe that sex doesn't matter. Those people are struggling in the UK with teh actual law now.
We know there is a rise for instance in men putting cameras in women's changing rooms and toilets. If we say that males are now allowed in those spaces, how on earth is this not a removal of protections. Are you suggesting that trans women don't commit such crimes? Are you suggesting that other males won't take advantage to commit such crimes?
3. Women in prison have no choices. Women have already been raped by trans identified males. We don't know if those males were TW or men taking advantage of self ID, but anyone can look at the Isla Bryson case to see the obvious problems.
Bryson is a convicted rapist (a crime that in Scotland can only be committed by a male). He raped two women, and later transitioned while awaiting trial.
The idea that a rapist who was also a trans woman should be put in a woman's prison is what led to Nicola Sturgeon's demise when she defended the idea. Because nearly everyone else can see the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isla_Bryson_case
As for evidence, there are two things here. One is that No Debate was successful enough for a period of time that research has been suppressed.
But there is some limited evidence about the patterns of violence. I will find that shortly. I've posted it before.
I for one welcome an open attitude to research and debate on this topic.
We also know from media reports that women have been raped by trans identified men in prison.
There is ample anecdotal evidence eg trans women taking sexualised photos of themselves in women's toilets and refuges, and talking about wanking there. Let me know if you want the links.
Girls talking about having trans identified males staring at them in changing rooms.
And women are allowed privacy and dignity, it's one of the reasons we have single sex spaces (men are allowed this too btw).
"UK has become very teutonic in its approach to trans people: all their rights are forbidden unless explicitly stated."
UK law has recognised that if you call something a single-sex space, it must actually be a single-sex space. There is no human right to enter a space designated for the opposite sex, so no rights have been "forbidden" by this.
Actually, the UK GRC legislation, not rescinded, recognises trans people who applied for and received a Gender Recognition Certificate as LEGALLY being the sex they were living as, for things like passports, marriage, and inheritance purposes.
Part of the GRC application process included proving you were living completely as the gender you identified as for two years, including use of gender-specific facilities. Paradoxically, now trans people cannot actually prove they are living committed to their gender fully, due to the new guidelines.
Trans and intersex people now fall into some shadowy illegal third sex. That is the conclusion you must make when trans men, "biologically women at birth" will be banned from both womens' AND mens' spaces. otherwise there should be ‘no problem, sex at birth’. That is part of the case in legal appeals being made against this trans-exclusionary judicial definition.
DEFINITELY taking away trans rights.
Opportunity-ists could be the next big thing, so Toby Manhire bets on the merit of ugly terminology. https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/28-07-2026/what-we-know-about-the-opportunity-party-vote-in-six-charts
37 commentators appraised the possibilities emerging, but I rate this one best:
Aotearoa is on the tipping point right now. Next poll that shows them over the threshold, most penguins will jump aboard (they'll seem like another floe, bumping alongside).
Luxon should sack Peters as Foreign Minister, but of course Luxon is gutless. This, said by Peters to Green MP Laurence Xu-Nan yesterday, who has lived the last 29 years in NZ, is simply unacceptable:
"…go back to your own country. This is called a democracy, unlike what you're used to. Go back to where you've come from, you loudmouth, and maybe you'll learn something about the political system of New Zealand."
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/ambassador-reacts-after-peters-tells-green-mp-to-go-back-to-your-own-country-lc3tgyol
I was just reading the RNZ report: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/837502/china-s-ambassador-weighs-in-as-winston-peters-tells-green-mp-to-go-back-to-your-own-country
My compliments go to the Chinese ambassador, who was subtle and most apt!
https://www.chaldeannews.com/2025-content/2025/6/30/the-politics-of-scapegoating
Scapegoat is a Biblical concept. It seems to represent a dark strand of human social psychology that victimises the weak.
A human victim often secludes themselves. The path to recovery is contingent upon realising that carrying community guilt personally is unfair, regaining self-control & ditching the load, thereby regaining self-esteem. So in politics it gets down to if a victim leverages group mutuality or flies solo. Lawrence can play the medial line between in-crowd & out-crowd with finesse, probably, but Lange beat Muldoon in the house before he did so electorally. Lawrence could upskill to that level.
False equivalence there, DF. The 1% rich elite in the US and UK, for example, aren't being unfairly scapegoated. They have used their influence to manipulate the electorate and wiggle out of paying tax, while sucking up a ton-load of corporate welfare. Instead, they have been correctly identified as the enemies of the 99%. As Zack Polanski says, end Rip-Off Britain.
Agree.
Yet the other crowd will stick with seeing their collective status as earned due to the simplicity of capitalist thought around entitlement.
I adopted the `know your enemy' stance in '76 when I realised belatedly that capitalists could be more of the problem than fascists or statists, read Ayn Rand's famous novels and have been studying how the system works ever since.
Milton Friedman was spouting `free to choose' all over the global media that year. Thatcher explained that the nation of shopkeepers had succumbed to bureaucrats, then the fight-back began & 8 years later Labour here jumped to the right by ditching socialism. That got us the 1% control system in the ensuing half a century, in all western democracies, plus global warming. Clever collaboration by the political left and right can work wonders!
Evie of Dangerously Informed charmingly covers the special category of the UK migrant 1% elite. "I found the actual migrants destroying Britain"
A kiwi? Her spiel is accurate. Labour's privilege system exposed! Copying the right by competing for wealthy immigrants. A collaboration period of left/right govts for 14 years. Then realising it did more harm than good, and the u-turn.
A saga of left/right hypocrisy, never to be allowed to show up in the msm where the illusion of competing between left & right must be perpetually enforced.
Evie is an ex-RNZer who lost her music/podcast job there, lost her next policy-writing job, both due to Coalition cuts. So then thought, bugger it, nothing left to lose, and set up this podcast site to earn some money, any money.
Evie researches, writes and presents the content here in NZ, and editors on the other side of the world add the graphics in a 24-hour turn-around. She built up her international audience initially via Epstein summaries and relentless content creation.
I found all this out from her BHN interview (from 55 min). Evie is clearly super-sharp. She creates reliable thumbnail summaries on complex topics. In the past we got these fact-filled backgrounders from full-page articles in credible print media, or from 60-Minutes type programmes. So Evie's filling a useful hole in the podcast media ecosystem.
Evie's the news equivalent of a garage band. Citizen-journalists like her and Paul the Other One are the new-growth saplings emerging as the hoary old media giants die and fall. It’s no easy life, though.
Agree. Just watched more of it. She can get resonance globally, I suspect. Style is nicely rapid yet coherent, lurches a bit at times but not too clunky. I'm speaking as someone who spent a decade crafting propaganda for capitalists from '75, then a decade doing news & current affairs stories.
That garage-band ethos is key too. You don't see whoever she's working with so it's personality driven but with likely teamwork-driven extension of influence. My focus nowadays is the algorithmic sub-text of media.
A social media influencer algorithm is the system of rules that apps use to choose which posts people see. https://ic4ml.org/blogs/algorithms-everyones-an-influencer/
Garage bands copied role models, then did a style twist. Replication is a dyad and the twist is tertiary, forming a triad. She's using that formula: pace, narrative-building, sociopolitical context analysis is another triadic frame that conveys her method. Has impact.
And the algorhythmic sub-text's the glaring weakness of this media landscape. Youtube can throttle access in a heartbeat to these citizen-journalists. Censorship by corporates or governments will happen sooner or later, starting as small as being chucked out of the push feed.
BHN reported this happening to them last year, as their meteoric growth noticeably slowed. Evie says she somehow abruptly lost some 10s of thousands of followers at one stage. The trick, BHN Pat said, is mercilessly flogging your product across multiple platforms, tiktok, X, etc.
'sometimes, a statement says more about the person that makes it than anything or anybody else".
So, what do the following quotations from his attack on the China-born Green MP tell us about Peters?
"go back to your own country".
Peters is no friend of immigrants as he has used a similar attack on a Green MP from Mexico in 2025. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/542438/luxon-allowing-mps-to-run-rings-around-him-with-anti-migrant-sentiment-menendez-march-says
"That's where they lie like a flatfish, but they don't lie like that here, all right?" he said.
"This is called a democracy, unlike what you're used to."
This was said to a man who has lived for 30+ years in NZ since childhood. What he is used to is a person like Winston Peters who went into parliament in 1978.
Peters went on: "Go back to where you've come from, you loudmouth, and maybe you'll learn something about the political system of New Zealand."
Peters with this outburst dares to call someone else a 'loudmouth'?
Later Peters doubled down on his comments- no retraction or regret here- "calling Xu-Nan an arrogant "twit".
Peters rather deserves the term 'arrogant' and 'twit' which is a foolish and silly person.
"He's only been here for five minutes, can't even speak the language properly," he told reporters."
Peters does not research but makes it up as the MP in question emigrated to NZ over thirty years ago. The second part slags people with accents.
Ironically, Winston Peters's mother emigrated from Scotland……..
Winston Peters is a dangerous politician in NZ as he gives moral support to a bigoted and nationalist minority similar to Trump's core following. His party name, NZ First, has connotations of the MAGA. His denigration of people who oppose him as "virtue signalling" "wokesters" and "communist" is just part of his use of name-calling and putdowns as a political tool.
Dangerous, too, for the attraction that Peters has to other like-minded aspirants to the populist cause, to become NZFirst MPs. He will be followed, as has already happened, after his decades in NZFirst by more of the same ilk.
He and his creation are for me the one serious flaw in MMP, that such can come into Parliament as our leaders, find their way continually as so-called centrists into coalitions of left and right, whilst representing some our most bigoted, racist, socially and intellectually narrow-minded citizens, to act as a brake on coalition partners, as with Labour, or as a proponent of right wing policies with sometimes willing accomplices in National especially- all with a far greater influence than their voting strength should allow.
There's the flaw with democracy. The vote of the other idiot is equal to your own.
Even causing a major diplomatic incident with our largest trading partner and people keeping New Zealand afloat, isn't enough for the Human Rights Commission to speak up about the direct racism from Winston Peters.
Winston Peters faces calls to be sacked after ‘racist’ comments directed at Green MP – NZ Herald
Or the Prime Minister.
It's almost like Winston wants a re-run of his time accelerating the end of the Shipley government.
They could be still considering the issue. May have to run a focus group. These things take time! Anyway, we got titfertat like in a game of tennis…
It is a mere formality that there has been no formality. Another 1 of them paradoxical thingies. Brownlee should know the right way to think. No, not like a leftist, like a constitutional lawyer. Does racism breach our pseudo-constitution? If so, FM is guilty.
Brownlee, Mr Speaker, explains…
"he hadn’t taken action as it was a “tit-for-tat situation” "
Yeah, on ya, Gerry!
Xu-nan "heckles", inaudibly, and Peters', microphone-
enabled, responds.
Tit-for-tat' my a*se.
Ugly anti-Chinese support/cover, Right there.
The "diplomatic incident" is entirely performative. The Chinese Communist Party will hold an even stronger view than Peters that Lawrence Xu-Nan is Chinese. And it sure as hell doesn't consider any white person living in China to be Chinese, so let's not be taking any moral lectures from its functionaries.
China's ambassador Wang Xiaolong's response wasn't a "moral lecture".
99% of diplomacy is performative. It's what you do instead of war.
China was at first prepared to let it go, using their usual "we don't interfere with internal politics line."
But yesterday that changed, with a much stronger statement and a complaint to MFAT.
China has shut down trade for less, and we are one of the most trade-reliant, in fact most China-trade-reliant, countries in the world.
Even more importantly for politicians months away from an election, the chinese ex-pat vote in NZ has been 70% National. Hundreds of thousands of votes and, I'm guessing, with a high turnout. Which is why Key so assiduously courted their community.
Change the feelings of that demographic, that's a big chunk of the electorate to lose.
If Luxon sacks Peters, that vote will go to National.
Is that what we would wish for?
Xu-Nan is a Green MP. Is the Chinese Ambassador generating sub-text? One side to chinese expats, other sides to various political parties? One side to NZ Dairy? Other sides elsewhere? Oooh, delicious fun speculating!
Disclaimer: These sentences do not represent financial or political advice, but are purely for entertainment purposes.
The Might of the Chinese People swinging in behind The Green Party ō Aotearoa?
Why not?
National have had Americans since forever and ACT the Venusians.
Rather, the Americans have had the Nats forever. And now we just do as they say at the UN. Along with other countries desperate to curry favour with the US.
No skin off Winston's nose. It's hard to imagine any Chinese in NZ have voted NZ First since "Two Wongs don't make a white."
I can't imagine Luxon would want to get himself into a position where NZ First candidates are making fiery speeches on the campaign trail about his alleged policy that MPs must submit to the will of the Chinese Communist Party.
There's money and wiggle room in being NZ Human Rights Commissioners, yes there can be five of them.
Human Rights Commission
https://tikatangata.org.nz › about-us › our-people
Our People – Human Rights Commission
The Human Rights Commission can have up to five Human Rights Commissioners at one time. This includes the Chief Human Rights Commissioner, Race Relations Commissioner, Equal Employment
Apply now for when there is a vacancy. If however the person wanted appears to be vacant, perhaps they are on fishing leave (if there are any left of the preferred type; a cupfull of whitebait even.)
Winston Peters – racist.
Jones too:
"Jones said. "We're not worried about these mummified Green people. The less we see of them, the better."
So, Greens – keep being in front of them – the more the better!
Mummified?
Mummy-fied, I think was meant, mummy's boys and mummy's girls.
Jones is a bloated blow-fish.
mummyfied!
Jones can't make fun of mummified; I think the real ones are anointed on the outside with fat, his is on the inside, And it's not the sort of fat that is actually muscle; he even is a fathead. People will queue up in the future to view the Grand Honcho Big-leaguer of Kiwiland laid in state.
He's so biggly!
If I was labour or the greens I'd be brutal on winston, just a senile old mutt of a dog barking at the fence,
To my shame I voted nzf in 2008, because of keys dorty political attacks, but maybe key was trying to do us a favor