The first technocratic centrist party under MMP was the Māori Party 2008-2017, not Opportunity. It will eventually end the same way for Opportunity as it did the Māori Party. Some interesting historical context if you need: e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-...

Did the Māori electorates decide the 2017 election? | E-Tangata

“Labour’s Māori MPs live and work in two worlds, relating to Māori voters as Māori, but also as workers, citizens and more. The problem for the Māori Party is it never did the same.” —Morgan Godfery, ...

e-tangata.co.nz

That guy who shall not be named is not only dumb as a sack of hammers, he’s also a piece of shit

I didn’t miss Twitter until someone described to me this incredible new poster, Joseph Mooney MP

Another round of infrastructure-destroying storms. Not even a few months after the last round of destructive storms. These rain events are quarterly now. But no one in politics or media is prepared to say it

My observation of Labour and National government frustrations with the public service is that, contrary to what the last Labour government believed, the public service didn’t resist their agenda. Instead the PS institutional inertia, sclerosis, meant they simply didn’t have the know how to do it

The Golden Mile looks like total shit, which is uniquely offensive to New Zealand’s ancestral (English) instinct for orderly and tidy town square spaces. Unfortunately, equally offensive to our ancestral instincts is spending any money whatsoever in order to improve any given situation

Every serious socialist will nominate the Financial Times as their newspaper of choice because of its ideological clarity. In New Zealand, every serious socialist may soon see the Post as their newspaper of choice because of the ideological clarity Mr Hooton will imminently bring

The speeding ticket story has arrived in just in time to arrest the Green Party’s decline in the polls

Drop a huge take. Log out for a period of time. Return. Oh yeah. Still hits just as good as it used to

AKL: held together by the Axis of Asian

there are only two cities in new zealand with cosmopolitan cultures: dunedin, because of the historic role of finance and the contemporary role of higher education; and wellington because of its dense urban core and role as a government town. auckland is a series of small town cultures in one city

easily getting defence spending to 3.5% of GDP by counting the RONS as arterial routes for the military

New Zealand is probably the most successful settler colony: the demographic weight of the Māori population is significant, so too the length and potential of its grievances, but all resistance has been institutionalised via the Māori seats, Waitangi Tribunal, Treaty settlements, RMA, and so on

Among a certain cohort, TVNZ is simply a cipher for “woke”, so the incentive for confrontation is in the government’s favour if it wishes to reinforce the loyalty of said cohort

It’s low IQ behaviour to compose a racist haka denigrating Indians as a people as opposed to simply criticising one specific individual whose race and ethnicity is actually irrelevant

Barry, just let it go x

I assume the complaint about the conduct of a TVNZ journalist in Parliament involves Benedict Collins, who is a picture of civility compared to the Mad Dog days of 3 News under Duncan Garner, Patrick Gower, and Tova O’Brien

Every election year I think about the time Curwen visited the grave of Sir Robert Muldoon in 2017 to ask for his spiritual intervention in coalition negotiations, pleading for his statist hand to guide the preferences of New Zealand First

Half of the votes National has lost since the election have gone to NZF, so National has to say NZF will go with Labour. Half of NZF new votes have come from National, so NZF has to rule out Labour (at least until the day after the election). This dynamic will repeat until election day

Th government isn’t amending Treaty clauses in good faith, obviously, but it’s true that descriptive/specific clauses are preferable to general/operative clauses

The age of, to use the British parlance, “big beasts” is over: Clark, Key, and Ardern’s dominance of their parties and PPM polls seems like a relic now

NZ First is cutting the left’s lunch: structural separation of both the gentailers and the supermarket duopoly. This is actually based

It may not be scientific and yet it’s an empirical fact that the Scottish genetic material will overpower any and all admixtures. Intermarriage between Māori and the Scots is proof of this

I remember I once missed an AKL-WGTN flight and I was on the “final call” list of shame and people were tweeting at me to get on my flight. This is a very small country

Blockbuster start by John Campbell on Morning Report. In the course of a single morning he’s back to serving triple shot black coffee. The cold, soggy porridge of old is off the menu

Let’s say that I’m on a 9.30am flight from Dunedin to Auckland (scheduled landing at 11.20am). What do punters reckon the chances are this flight will actually still go ahead tomorrow?

In the midst of the war on Iran, it’s clear the end of the Long 2016, and its attendant interregnum, was October 7. It wasn’t Trump’s first election, or the pandemic, or AI-led growth. The end of the Western artifice was in Gaza in 2023, and history will remember it as the turning point of the 21C

We just read news stories from RNZ and forget the concept of political columns even exists.

Now that Stuff’s mastheads are behind a paywall, and the Herald’s premium content too, where do normal people get their political news when Stuff’s website is just a portal to TradeMe Property and the Herald’s to OneRoof? The political journalism is usually behind the paywall…

Asking for a factcheck on the following vibes - highly developed countries are unlikely to experience dramatic *physical* fuel shortages, but they’ll pay through the nose - these huge price rises will be felt across almost every product in the economy; and - the least developed countries will starve