Homepaddock

For years now, New Zealand has been stuck in a messy legal and institutional web where the most basic category underpinning women’s rights (sex) has been treated as optional, subjective, or simply too awkward or “bigoted” to define. But if the law cannot clearly say what a woman is, then it becomes increasingly difficult to justify why women-only spaces, protections, or opportunities should exist at all. Women’s rights exist for a reason and they are grounded in sex-based differences in physical vulnerability, in reproductive biology, and in the long and very real history of discrimination on that basis.

New Zealand First’s Bill doesn’t “remove rights” from trans people or from anyone. It simply restores clarity and certainty and reinforces the foundation upon which all of our sex-based rights sit. –  Ani O’Brien 

On one side, you have frontline firefighters escalating strike action, walking off the job for an hour twice a week after months of stalled negotiations and an Employment Relations Authority finding that FENZ failed to properly consult on sweeping cuts affecting hundreds of roles.

On the other side, at the very moment tensions reach peak hostility, the board signs off on pay rises of up to 79%… FOR THEMSELVES. Seventy-nine percent. The chair jumps more than 40%. This was waved through on the basis that it’s needed to “attract talent” which is a claim that might carry more weight if the organisation wasn’t, by almost every account, struggling to function properly. – Ani O’Brien 

Water is made up of countless molecules, each comprising two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. As far as I am aware, no scientific experiment has ever established that water has a spirit or memory. Such beliefs may of course be sincerely held but must not be taught as science in our schools. It is quite incredible that in recent years they have been.

The water cycle, which all children should learn in school, involves water returning to the atmosphere by transpiration from plant life, evaporation from the land, waterways, lakes and seas, and returning to Earth as rain, hail and snow. This continual cycling of water means that there is constant mixing and transfer of water molecules widely from one geographical region or local catchment to another.

As water is constantly precipitated elsewhere through atmospheric processes, it is nonsense to see its “mana” being compromised if it moves to a different catchment. Conversely, arguments about not mixing with other bodies of water of course become valid, but on clear environmental science grounds, if water is contaminated, for example with sewerage or with nitrates from agriculture.

It is a responsibility for everyone to ensure that water quality is preserved. We delegate this responsibility to government and local government, but Iwi do not have special knowledge that is otherwise unavailable through environmental science advisors to our elected officials.

Management of water in our natural environment should not be based on spiritual arguments that rest on a single cultural authority, and which is not representative of the country’s wider population. It must be science- and evidence-based, and this management must not incur costs that rest on cultural or spiritual beliefs. Such beliefs should be respected but not be embedded within our water management policies and processes. – John Raine

The coalition Government was elected with a mandate to restore practical, science-based and cost-effective regulation. This means that the only option in their present deliberations over water is to go for Option 3 and scrap Te Mana o te Wai. The Government must also rein in Councils who are enabling a rentier culture to develop around the nation’s water resources. Ultimately, water is so essential as to be sacred to all of us. No single group in our society should be able to control it on cultural grounds, or derive income from it without adding value. – John Raine

While Kiwi businesses are facing economic uncertainty, the Ministry supposedly responsible for helping businesses has been spending our money on Workplace Waiata – i.e. staff singing sessions in their Wellington offices.

MBIE waiata And this isn’t just a one-off thing: At their swanky Wellington offices, MBIE were hosting 30 minute sessions every work day, every week! MBIE employs 5,892 bureaucrats (it’s grown from 4,676 in 2020), literally being paid to sing, clap, poi, and recite Māori proverbs and hymns. – Rhys Hurley

Management eventually agreed through a “cultural negotiation” that the 30-minute sing-along sessions would not be abolished. Instead, they were reduced from five to three 30-minute sessions per week.

Only in the public service could something so ridiculous require this level of executive time, negotiation, and outcome.

This isn’t about cultural respect, it’s about the priorities of people who are funded by us, the taxpayer. Whether it is religious or cultural, you don’t go to work to be paid to sing along. Let me be crystal clear: this isn’t a criticism of waiata or Māori culture. This is about a Ministry that has lost sight of its purpose.  – Rhys Hurley

In fact, we shouldn’t really be shocked that Oxford is now threatening to prosecute locals for pinning their national flag on lampposts. If the past few years have taught Britons anything, it is that the only acceptable expression of national pride is Paddington Bear. – Hugo Timms

None of this is to say that the British establishment doesn’t like flags. It loves them – just as long as they have nothing to do with England or the United Kingdom. – Hugo Timms

There is an even greater irony in Oxfordshire, of all places, issuing a progressive fatwa on the English flag. Every year, millions of tourists descend on Oxford to essentially pay homage to the nation’s history and culture. They can see it all: England’s oldest university (which predates the Aztec Empire), the Radcliffe Camera, Christ Church college, the pub where CS Lewis and JR Tolkien drank – so much that is great about England is on display, except of course the national flag.

There is some consolation in the thought that the war on the English flag is almost certain to end in failure. Because, if the Raise the Colours campaign showed us anything, it is that the English have well and truly had it with the kind of national self-loathing Oxford remains committed to. Patriotism, at long last, is no longer a dirty word. Oxford should get with the programme. – Hugo Timms

How can it be that, as a child here, it almost never crossed my mind not to be openly and fearlessly Jewish, and yet I now wait in trepidation for the day one of my young children returns home from school or an outing, asking me to explain Jew hatred? Naomi Firsht 

Anti-Semitism has had a rebrand and, honestly, activists have done a fantastic PR job. Say whatever you like about the Jews and carry out as many petty acts of anti-Semitism as you please – as long as you take care to use today’s euphemisms of ‘anti-Zionism’ or ‘Israel criticism’, you’ll get away with it. – Naomi Firsht 

The Jewish community does not have the privilege of looking away. While I can shield myself from terrifying video footage of anti-Semitic murder and destruction, I cannot avoid reckoning with the daily reality of life for Jews in Britain today.

This week, Jews celebrate the festival of Passover, when we recall how Moses led us to freedom from slavery in Egypt. It is one of our most important festivals. It celebrates the privilege of not just freedom itself, but also the ability to live freely as Jews. It is a message that has always resonated strongly with me. But this year I find myself asking: when does living with unease become living in fear? In the past, I always believed myself to be truly free, as a person, as a Jew. Today, I’m not so sure. – Naomi Firsht 

‘We’re not anti-Semitic, we’re anti-Zionist’, they’ll say. The irritation of Greens for Palestine at having to say Zionist rather than Jew surely explodes that crap once and for all. But more to the point, what do people mean when they say they’re anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic? All I hear is: ‘I don’t hate Jews, I just want to deprive them of a right enjoyed by every other people and bring about the destruction of their homeland so that they will once again be scattered across the Earth.’ – Brendan O’Neill

I’m sick of pussyfooting around this: if you dream of the Jewish nation’s destruction, and chant for the death of Jewish soldiers, and demonise Jewish nationalism as uniquely barbarous, then you have a problem with Jews. It might take 10 years, maybe 30, perhaps longer, but I am confident we will one day look back at the people who said, ‘I’m an anti-Zionist’, in the same way we look at those who said, ‘Round up the Jews’. – Brendan O’Neill

On Friday, the Herald exclusively revealed on its front page that Hipkins, the former Covid Response Minister, was made aware of the potential vaccine risks in March 2022, when tens of thousands of 12- to 17-year-olds had yet to get a second jab.

Hipkins had earlier claimed he never got the advice. – NZ Herald

In isolation, this Cabinet paper being revealed brings Hipkins’ credibility into question.

But it also follows a string of other incidents involving the former Prime Minister, who hopes to be in the top job again come November. – NZ Herald

Before Friday’s Cabinet paper scandal, this newspaper said Labour had to win back the middle ground to win the election. That job has only become more difficult with Hipkins at the helm.

Ultimately, each swing voter will ask themselves in the ballot box: can we trust Hipkins? – NZ Herald

From a timeline perspective, we now have three conflicting positions sitting side by side in official messaging. The Ministry of Health determined “standard”13 spacing was six weeks in August, then in early October it said “optimal”14 spacing was six to eight weeks, but then on 6 October operational urgency was used to justify returning to a three week minimum so that people could be “fully vaccinated sooner.”

The timing of this sudden halving of the recommended interval between doses appeared to come out of nowhere and is puzzling considering elsewhere in the world the trend was that intervals were being elongated. New Zealand was back to three weeks between doses when the UK was waiting four times as long.

It is difficult not to somewhat cynically note that the Health Ministry later described Super Saturday as the culmination of a “10-day campaign launched by Minister Hipkins at the 1pm stand-up on Wednesday 6 October,” aimed at increasing uptake.15 – Ani O’Brien

In fact, on 21 December 2021, Chris Hipkins declared that COVID-19 “far outweighs” risk of myocarditis in response to questions about 26 year old Dunedin plumber Rory Nairn who died from myocarditis caused by the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.21

This is significant also because just this week Chris Hipkins claimed to have never given the public medical advice.

In reality, Chris Hipkins frequently gave medical advice and asserted to the public that the Pfizer vaccine was “very safe,” arguing that “any small risk associated with the vaccine is by far outweighed by the risk of getting Covid-19” and that taking the vaccination was “absolutely the best course of action.”23 This reflects the orthodox public health position at the time, but contradicts the regulatory expectations of New Zealand’s medicines law. – Ani O’Brien

No pharmaceutical company could dream to get away with anything like the sweeping and emphatic claims about the efficacy and safety of the vaccine. Especially since, by mid 2021, both domestic and international authorities had identified a specific, non-trivial pattern of risk of myocarditis.

The issue, then, is whether repeatedly describing the vaccine as “very safe,” while collapsing the risk discussion into a generalised comparison with COVID-19, met the standard of balanced communication required under the Act. The obligation is to communicate risk with sufficient specificity that individuals, especially those in higher-risk groups, can make an informed decision. Instead, the Minister for the COVID-19 Response mandated that a double dose of the vaccine was required in order to partake in public life.

What this paper trail shows is a sequence of decisions made in full view of evolving evidence, where the known trade-offs were increasingly clear, and the policy response consistently favoured speed, targets, and compliance over caution. – Ani O’Brien

The issue is no longer whether they knew everything. It is whether, given what they did know, they chose to act in a way that minimised risk or simply in a way that maximised vaccination numbers. – Ani O’Brien

You couldn’t ask for a better state-of-the-nation snapshot than the one coming out of Clapham in south-west London right now. Those clips of young, dumbfounded cops trying and failing to stop a mob of masked TikTok twats from running riot is Britain summed up. The dystopic vision of families barricaded inside shops as entitled delinquents swarm the streets for sport speaks to our crisis of social order. To see what lunacies the corrosion of adult authority can unleash, look no further than Clapham. – Brendan O’Neill

There were serious incidents. Three girls were arrested on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker. Mistreating public servants is proper lowlife behaviour. The same group were also arrested for shoplifting. In one video, smoke can be seen billowing from Clapham Common: the fires of asocial arrogance. The police lamented the ‘disorder’ and issued a dispersal order for the youths. But I won’t be the only one wondering if those clips of masked brats escaping the clutches of floundering officers tell a worrying story about the state in the 21st century. – Brendan O’Neill

We must not turn a blind eye to such a brazen display of contempt for social norms. It speaks to a simmering nihilism among sections of our youth, one likely emboldened by adult society’s wilful abandonment of its duty to discipline, reprimand and guide the next generation.

To me, the events in Clapham flow from the breakdown of adult authority. Everywhere now, discipline is frowned upon as a borderline fascistic pursuit. Parenting experts warn mums and dads not to scold their littl’uns. Schools long ago abandoned their core duty of admonishing bad behaviour, replacing the stern telling-off with a therapeutic hand on the shoulder. And out in the wild, in everyday society, you hardly ever see adults giving kids an earful. Teens yell and swear and play their tinny music, and few if any of their elders bark: ‘BEHAVE.’ – Brendan O’Neill

There was an infrastructure of discipline that extended from the home to the school to the world itself.

That’s gone now. It feels like adults have been decommissioned, subtly instructed by society that their wisdom and firmness are no longer wanted. This mad deactivation of yesteryear’s social custodians has let infantile antics flourish. Even petty crime is now pretty much permissible. – Brendan O’Neill

If they have got the message that they can do whatever they like, whose fault is that? A society that refuses to say ‘NO’, loudly and resolutely, has no right to be shocked when its members behave like entitled children, even after childhood. Whether it’s the boy in a skirt who thinks he has the right to waltz into the girls’ bathroom or the boy in a mask who shuts down Boots for a laugh, this is what happens when we fail to tell the young to get a fucking grip.

It has bizarrely become a ‘progressive’ virtue to be anti-discipline. So what if youths steal beer or don’t pay their Tube fare – it’s no biggie, say the hipster nihilists of the bourgeois left. – Brendan O’Neill

As Slavoj Žižek says, there is unquestionably a ‘growing decay of manners’, and it really matters. Such ‘everyday insecurity hurts the poor much more than the rich who live calmly in their gated communities’, Žižek says. Well, now one of London’s better-off boroughs has been targeted by the post-manners madness stoked by the faux-progressivism of the elites. Clapham confirms that when adults vacate the terrain of moral guidance, they normalise mob behaviour. We need to get a grip before we can tell the kids to. – Brendan O’Neill

Except for Africa, the panic about population is now about its decline, not its increase. Whether this panic is more justified than was the one about overpopulation, I leave to people of the future to decide.

Two things are certain, however. The first is that mankind cannot get anything just right. The second is that man is the only species that derives pleasure from contemplating its own extinction. – Theodore Dalrymple

You do not have to agree with Sean Plunket. You do not have to like The Platform. But a four-person Wellington panel, armed with a statute older than the World Wide Web, should not be deciding what New Zealanders can say on the internet. Parliament has been declining to give the BSA this power for over 20 years. The BSA has now simply helped itself – Jillaine Heather

The BSA cannot have it both ways. If the technology is irrelevant, it is irrelevant for YouTube too. If clicking play on The Platform is not on demand, what exactly is clicking play on Netflix? The gymnastics required to claim jurisdiction over some internet publishers but not others is, to borrow a phrase, mumbo jumbo. – Jillaine Heather

The BSA has also helpfully explained that there is no audience to which it is appropriate to direct misleading and materially inaccurate information. Translation: the BSA would like to be the body that decides what counts as true. That is not the job of a broadcasting standards regulator. It is not the job of any regulator. – Jillaine Heather

If New Zealand wants to regulate online speech, that is a decision for elected representatives. Not an unelected panel reinterpreting a law from the year the Berlin Wall came down. – Jillaine Heather

From our “don’t waste a crisis” file, is it possible this Government’s handling thus far of oil events might well see them rewarded with an increased level of support as the election draws closer?  – Mike Hosking

As I said last week, New Zealand v Australia in terms of messaging, organisation, reaction, and action is not even a contest. Australia is a hot mess of confusion, claim and counterclaim, and a growing bitch session between state and Canberra. 

Here, it would seem close to faultless. 

For those upset over the lack of free money, you might not agree with it, but you can’t blame the messaging or say it hasn’t been explained.  – Mike Hosking

The oil numbers yesterday seem reassuringly well organised. We are clearly hustling and so far, it’s clearly working.

There’s messaging about what it isn’t, i.e. this isn’t Covid, this isn’t about sourdough, or animals in windows. This isn’t about hugs and kindness and all the other BS.

It’s about adults, and organisation, and getting stuff done as best you can in an environment that is largely beyond your control and in a country that is at the end of a very long supply chain at the bottom of the world.

Although we wouldn’t wish any of this on our worst enemy, it’s so far so good from what looks like a seriously competent Government and one that might get some support simply because when it hit the fan they were up for it and not making it up. – Mike Hosking

The Broadcasting Standards Authority’s interlocutory decision in WK v The Platform Media NZ Ltd (Decision No. ID2025-063, 31 March 2026) has attracted controversy for good reason. In finding that it has jurisdiction to regulate The Platform’s internet livestream under the Broadcasting Act 1989, the Authority has made an interpretive leap that is difficult to reconcile with the text of the Act, its legislative history, and basic principles of statutory interpretation.

The decision is not, as some have portrayed it, a straightforward application of a purposive approach to a technologically evolving medium. It is a significant — and arguably ultra vires — expansion of regulatory power that raises serious questions about institutional overreach, rule of law, and the proper role of an administrative tribunal. – David Harvey

Beyond the doctrinal problems, the decision raises broader concerns about institutional legitimacy.

The Authority has been calling on Parliament to update the Broadcasting Act for over twenty years. It openly acknowledges there is currently no code of broadcasting standards for online content. It has not sought levies from online content providers. It has not issued any guidance specifically applicable to internet broadcasters.

And yet it now asserts jurisdiction over an online media entity based on an expansive reading of a 1989 statute — in the context of a specific, politically contentious complaint, after the complainant’s name was released and he received threats. But a tribunal’s jurisdiction cannot expand or contract based on the sympathetic nature of the complaint before it. – David Harvey

If the law genuinely covered internet broadcasting, one would expect the Authority to have acted on that position consistently over the past two decades.

Instead, it explicitly declined to seek levies from online providers and described its 2019/2020 position as provisional and subject to legislative reform. The now-abandoned policy of waiting for Parliament is difficult to reconcile with the claim that jurisdiction over online content was always clear under existing law. – David Harvey

None of this is to say that there is no public interest in regulating online broadcasting. The Platform’s talkback content reaches a substantial audience. The comments that prompted this complaint — described as “unacceptable racist” — are precisely the kind of content that broadcasting standards are designed to address. And the complainant’s experience, including having his name published and receiving threats, illustrates the real-world harm that can flow from unmoderated online content.

But the remedy for a regulatory gap is legislation, not interpretive expansion by a statutory tribunal. – David Harvey

The Broadcasting Act 1989 was enacted for a different technological era. Its language reflects that era’s assumptions about how content reaches audiences. Applying it to a 2025 internet livestreaming operation requires the kind of legislative recalibration that only Parliament can legitimately provide.

The Authority’s decision, however well-intentioned, substitutes the Authority’s policy preferences for Parliament’s role — and in doing so, undermines the institutional foundations on which its own authority rests. – David Harvey

The obvious problem with the BSA starting to redraw its own boundaries is that it may continue to do so whenever the spirit takes hold.

What if the next outrageous complaint that lands at the BSA is a popular podcast? Will it change the rules again to catch that complaint?

The fact that the BSA is trying to find work to do tells you that it is already irrelevant. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

The BSA is irrelevant. If Minister for Media and Communications Paul Goldsmith had the courage, he’d shut it down to save us all the admin costs of dealing with the body.

He doesn’t. It will continue to exist. But it is like a pair of leg warmers. A great idea in the 80s that – no matter how you try to contort it – no one wants any more. – Heather du Plessis-Allan