The right solution for the wrong problem

The regime has been taking a bit of stick about its "policy" of 10,000 new EV chargers, which seemed to have no tracking and no actual means of achieving it. So they've finally been forced to announce something: $50 million in loans to Meridian and ChargeNet to build a quarter of the chargers they'd promised. As a policy it doesn't stink, and has the virtue (to National) of being cheap (a loan from the government is just creating a pair of matching asset and debt entries in the government books, and costs nothing). It might even see some chargers built, which would be good. But its also a solution to the wrong problem.

National's "10,000 new chargers" policy is from 2023, which was a different era as far as EVs are concerned. And its rooted in thinking which is even older, when EVs were short-range luxury vehicles for urban elites. That wasn't really true in 2023, and its certainly not true now; when new EVs have comparable range to fossil vehicles, "range anxiety", the problem the new EVs policy was supposed to solve, simple ceases to be an issue. Sure, we want a comprehensive nationwide network so that vehicles can always get to a charger if they need one. But with most people charging at home, its not the big problem it once was.

So what is the problem? The same as it was before: price (though this is less of an issue now than it was in 2023, because EVs are cheaper as well as better). We had a perfectly good policy targetted at that problem, in the form of the clean car discount, which was self-funding (or meant to be) by charging dirty vehicles to fund clean ones. And that was a good idea, reflecting the significant positive externalities for EVs (and negative ones for fossil vehicles) in the form of emissions, air pollution, public health, and energy security.

But National scrapped that policy. And "10,000 new chargers" was meant to be just rhetorical cover for doing so. "Sure, we're refusing to act on the biggest barrier, but we'll totally act on the imaginary one our outdated preconceptions have invented, and we'll pretend that's the same". But it wasn't the same, and then they didn't do shit about it for two years anyway. Now they've finally been forced to do something, but all it does is expose the massive inadequacy of their policy and the paucity of their thinking. And looking down the barrel of an American fossil fuel crisis, that is something we should absolutely hold them to account for.

Corrupt, criminal secrecy

Fishing is a criminal industry. Fishers routinely lie about catch sizes, illegally dump bycatch, and cover up the murder of protected species. After a long campaign by NGOs in the 2010s, the Ardern government was finally dragged (kicking and screaming, against the wishes of two corrupt fisheries ministers) into putting cameras on boats to ensure criminal behaviour could be monitored and deterred. The fishing industry felt that this was unjust, and immediately began lobbying and bribing to have the footage declared a state secret, so it could never be used by NGOs to hold them to account. And they've got what they wanted. The new Fisheries Amendment Bill, introduced today, includes one of the most draconian secrecy clauses I have ever seen, with protections exceeding those given to classified security information.

First up, all fisheries camera recordings are declared exempt from the Official Information Act. But that's not enough for the fishing industry. There is also a clause that they cannot be disclosed outside the ministry, except to certain agencies or for certain purposes. Any other disclosure, or disclosure by anyone it has been lawfully passed on to, is a criminal offence, with a penalty of a $50,000 fine. And naturally, there's no whistleblower exemption (so if a recording exposes serious wrongdoing, and the ministry refuses to act on it, reporting it to appropriate whistleblower authorities is a crime. Which is one way of the criminal industry preventing anyone bypassing its captive regulator...)

This information isn't a threat to national security. It doesn't endanger the maintenance of the law, or any any person's safety. Its not even commercially sensitive. If it was any of these things, the law wouldn't be necessary. Instead, its potential exposure - and the potential for the exposure of their crimes, and for oversight of MPI to ensure they enforce the law properly - hurts the poor widdle fee-fees of the fishing industry. And that, to this regime, is "an important public purpose", proportionate to the consequent destruction of our BORA-affirmed right to free expression (which includes the right to receive information), and the least infringement on that right, and so a measure which can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

That is simply bullshit. Protecting a corrupt criminal industry and its captive regulator from public scrutiny is not an important public purpose. It is the very opposite of a public purpose. But its what happens when you put a man who has taken tens of thousands of dollars from that industry in the position of regulator.

This bill is simply an affront to democracy. It is an abuse of our human rights, an insult to transparency, and the product of corruption. It should not be allowed to pass.

More tyranny

The regime introduced a bunch of bills today: an Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill to introduce a "papers, please" regime for anyone MBIE (which also means the police) suspects they may be liable for deportation or in breach of their visa conditions; a Corrections (Management of Prisoners, and Prisoners’ Property) Amendment Bill to enable them to torture prisoners with solitary confinement more easily and stop them from writing books about it; a Fisheries Amendment Bill to make the Quota Management System a matter of ministerial fiat and introduce a secrecy regime for boat camera footage; and a Policing Amendment Bill, to allow the police to arbitrarily close public places and spy on people without warrants. There's a couple of themes across these bills. The first is overturning court decisions, including some that have affirmed quite significant protections for human rights. The second is replacing statutory protections with executive discretion, which means executive arbitrariness and corruption. And the third, linking the two, is tyranny. Because that's what we call an arbitrary executive which does not respect human rights: tyrants.

The Fisheries Bill secrecy clause deserves its own post, so I'm going to talk about the policing bill here. And it is awful.

One part of this is the creation of a new regime allowing any police officer to close access to any "accessible area" - meaning "an area of land that is accessible to the public, or a section of the public, by motor vehicle", and apparently including private property. So anywhere that is a road, or connected to a road. They're probably thinking of car-parks, but of course the definition also applies to your backyard, and even your house if you have an indoor garage. These closures can be done for a variety of reasons, some of which are good (for example, if there is a danger to the public, like a gas leak or incipient landslide, or a serious offence has been committed and there is a need to secure the crime scene). But most of it is of course aimed at one of the regime's perennial targets: boy-racers. So they can close roads to everyone if an "antisocial road use offence" is being committed or might be committed; if people are operating (or are expected to be) motor vehicles in an antisocial way; or if people are creating (or are expected to create) excessive noise with a motor vehicle, or if there is (or is imminent) "public disorder". If they close an area, its an infringement offence not to leave immediately.

The regime will be looking at this and thinking "anti boy-racer law". But the public disorder and noise clauses also make it an anti-protest law, because the police have a history of regarding public protest as inherently disorderly, and noise (say, from a vehicle-mounted PA system leading a protest march) which upsets those in power as "excessive". Naturally, there's no protection against this - no Terrorism Suppression Act-style clause saying "for the avoidance of doubt, protests, strikes, lockouts, and industrial action are not 'disorderly', and their noise is not 'excessive'". The drafting is so shoddy they haven't even excluded dwelling-places or marae from the definition of "accessible area". And given the regime's anti-protest noises, this should be regarded as deliberate until proven otherwise.

That all stinks, but its not the worst of it. The other part of the bill "reaffirms" the rules about the police collecting intelligence and recording people in public places. I put "reaffirms" in quotes because it does nothing of the sort. The courts and the Privacy Commissioner, in a long series of judgements (Tamiefuna v R, but also Hamed v R), have said what the law is, and that the police have been systematically breaking it. The regime's response is to dramatically broaden the law, and legalise the police's unlawful behaviour.

The new amendments start with a list of "purposes for which Police may collect information", which is a good start. It then says that the police can record anything they can see or hear in or from a public place, or anything they can see or hear on private property if they are lawfully there. No warrants required. To see how much of an intrusion this is, we have only to look at the police's illegal photographing and databasing of young Māori, or the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamed v R, which found that the police could not just covertly film and record people on private (but generally publicly accessible) property under "implied licence" without a warrant. That ruling led to a temporary law change, which was later incorporated into the Search and Surveillance Act 2012, which set limits on the police's ability to spy from public places without a warrant. The amendment bill would void that long established law.

If this passes, the police will be able to park outside your house with a camera and spy on you in your yard or through your windows, and record anything visible (to what wavelength?) or audible (with how much amplification?), without needing any type of warrant. They won't even need to be physically present, because the "by any means" allows remote cameras and microphones. Or they can use a drone, with thermal cameras and high-gain directional microphones and just spy on you 24/7, without any warrant, oversight, or reporting. Those are unquestionably "searches" in terms of the BORA (clearly being interference with a reasonable expectation of privacy) - but they'll be lawful. And of course they can hassle people on the street, photograph them, database them, and record their conversations without any suspicion of a crime.

This is obviously very convenient for police. But it is not the sort of thing done in a free and democratic society. We need to stop it. We need to topple the tyrants at the election.

A government without a plan

Today the regime held an emergency, covid-style one o'clock press conference to announce its response to the US-caused global fuel crisis, at which they announced... nothing. Oh, they're monitoring the situation, and might consider cost of living assistance at some unspecified time in the future, if Rimmer lets them, but for now its strictly do nothing. Which is what you get in a crisis when you elect a bunch of anti-government weirdos who believe that government can only be a problem, and never a solution.

Meanwhile, there's a rising tide of commentary calling the regime's 2023 decision to shitcan the clean car discount, and subsequent decisions to weaken the clean-car standard, shortsighted. This would indeed be the week to be driving an EV, but thanks to this regime's fossil ideology, there are less of them on the roads than we would have had if they'd left it alone. And as we're all learning, electrified transport (and electrified everything else) isn't just about the climate - its also about the cost of living, energy security, and social resilience. National's shit decision-making has locked our country into a high-cost dependency on unstable foreign regimes.

So what should we be doing? Greater Auckland has a list of both short-term and longer-term measures. And while the focus is understandably going to be on getting us through the immediate shortages, now would be a great time for Labour to rise to the occasion, and stand up and tell us how they're going to crash-electrify all the things so that we don't have to deal with this issue again (the Greens of course already have, years ago). But I guess that would require them to have an actual position on something, and that seems beyond them at the moment.

Good Riddance

Methanex is one of Aotearoa's largest polluters. It burns 45% of our total natural gas supply to produce low value methanol and millions of tons of carbon dioxide. In the process, it also receives millions of dollars in pollution subsidies - roughly $40 million worth last year. But now, finally, its going bust:

Methanex has written down the value of its New Zealand operations to zero reflecting the challenge it’s facing to keep its Taranaki methanol plant operating.

In its recently released 2025 annual report, the Canadian-owned company said future earnings from the Motunui plant were not enough to justify its value on the books, leading to a non‑cash write‑down of about US$71 million (NZ$120 million).

The company’s annual report said the “recoverable amount of nil” was due to declining natural gas supply in New Zealand and uncertainty over whether contracted gas volumes would be delivered or future gas exploration would be successful.

Methanex still had agreements with gas suppliers, some extending until 2029, but the company said it could not be sure these contracts would deliver the volumes needed.

Meanwhile, a report from the Gas Industry Co says that Methanex is expected to close early next year due to the inability to source gas. Good riddance. Its not like these foreign parasites pay taxes. Instead they just gouge us for subsidies and export them as dividends. So the sooner they shut down and fuck off, the better. We'll all be better off when they do.

There is a name for this

The Auditor-General has tabled their report on former MP Paul Eagle's spending while chief executive of the Chatham islands Council, and its not good, exposing serious management and integrity issues at the Council. Including this:

Auditor-General Grant Taylor and Assistant Auditor-General Melanie Webb said a project to refurbish the home which housed the council's chief executive was not well managed, and changes Eagle requested "increased the costs beyond what was necessary".

Quotes and contracts for the work on the property were found to have been created or edited by Eagle, as well as procurement memorandums created by him in 2025 had been backdated to the previous year.

[...]

"The information that the chief executive provided was misleading. Specifically, it created an incorrect picture about when certain events occurred (for example, when a contract was signed) or whether they had happened at all.

They decline to give a position on the legality of Eagle's actions, but there are a number of names for it: corruption. Fraud. More specifically, forgery, altering documents with intent to deceive, and using altered documents with intent to deceive. These are serious crimes, and Eagle needs to be prosecuted for them. When a person in power abuses their position to enrich or advantage themselves, then that is corruption, and they need to be held to account.

An ever-worsening fiasco

Back in 2021, the then-Labour government signed contracts for two new Cook Strait ferries. Costing $551 million for the ferries, it would have come with improved, future-proofed port facilities, making it a generational investment in core infrastructure. The first of them was meant to arrive last month. But it didn't, because National cancelled them out of spite the moment they got elected, at a cost of $671 million.

So now instead of two new, improved ferries operating from improved ports, we have no rail link across Cook Strait, two old rust buckets which are breaking down all the time, and National's planned replacements aren't scheduled to arrive until 2029. And they're already over-budget:

The Cook Strait Ferry Replacement Programme is already $167 million over budget, newly released documents reveal.

The current cost estimate has hit $1.867 billion, already exceeding the $1.7b Crown-tagged contingency approved by Cabinet in March 2025.

The Government is relying on council-owned ports to plug the gap, but the amounts are unknown or not yet approved by ratepayers.

However, as The Post revealed last month binding commercial deals with the port companies are yet to be finalised.

So, they might not have the required port infrastructure, because National is too busy complaining about woke to do the job properly. Assuming they don't just cancel the whole thing again so they can give even more money to landlords.

This fiasco just gets worse and worse. The regime has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars of public money, and destroyed a critical transport link. If you or I did that, it'd be terrorism. But smashing shit and leaving others to pick up the pieces is just how National "governs" now. The sooner we're rid of these muppets, the better.

Payment for services rendered

Back in 2021, in the wake of the Tamarind disaster, the then-Labour government passed the Crown Minerals (Decommissioning and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2021, ensuring that the oil and gas industry was responsible for its own cleanup costs. The industry of course hated that, so when the new regime was elected in 2023, they started lobbying hard for its repeal. The regime obediently brought a bill to Parliament to reduce the liability, and got it to the verge of enactment, but it didn't go far enough for the gas industry. After further lobbying, they forced the regime to recall the bill to committee and amend it to lower liability even further, allowing the gas industry to walk away from its mess and leave us with the costs again. And that law eventually passed in July last year.

The gas industry was pleased. So pleased that Greymouth Petroleum, one of the chief lobbyists for the change, has just given $100,000 to each coalition party though one of its subsidiaries, GMP Environmental. Why did they launder the donation in this way? I guess because seeing a gas company giving huge amounts of money to politicians would make it just a little too obvious what was going on. But its no great effort to use the companies register and follow ownership up the chain to see who is really paying - or to consider the legislative history to see what they're paying for.

And that's what this regime means: naked corruption. Bribery. Law for sale.

Its not enough to throw them out of office. We need to ban large donations, get money out of politics forever, and break the power of the rich over our political parties. Otherwise, no matter who we vote for, we'll get the laws the billionaires want. And that's not democracy, but plutocracy.

National's energy security plan looks even stupider

A month ago, the regime announced its big plan for keeping New Zealand addicted to fossil fuels "energy security": a giant LNG terminal, importing expensive foreign high-emissions fuel, to be paid for by people who don't use it, and bulldozed through with a special law. It was always a stupid plan, more expensive than simply reducing gas demand, while leaving us dependant on imported fuel which could simply disappear in a crisis. And the events of the last week, which have seen the strait of Hormuz closed to shipping and international supplies of LNG cut off (causing a bidding war and price increases) show just how stupid it is. If National had their way, then in future crises we would face having LNG supplies - and therefore electricity prices - massively increase in price overnight. They would effectively link our domestic electricity prices to the stability of the Persian Gulf. And that is not anyone's definition of "security".

What would real energy security look like? reducing exposure to dirty foreign fossil fuels. Which in this case means a massive increase in renewable electricity generation, combined with a crash program to electrify gas-dependent industry. Obviously, that would be terrible for the gas industry, who wrote National's plan. And it would be terrible for the government's finances, because power cartel dividends mean they profit from our artificially high prices. But it would be good for the environment, and good for us. We would have significantly lower power bills as a result. And that is exactly why national, the party of gouging cartels, won't do it.

IN other words, if we want this, we need to kick them out. The sooner we do it, the better.

"Papers, please" for the internet

Yesterday the Education and Workforce Committee released its report into online harm to young people, recommending (among other things) a ban on social media for young people. Which, in practice, means "age-verification", mandatory identification and registration of social media users, and banning VPNs to prevent evasion. Basically "papers, please" tp use the internet. There are all sorts of reasons why this is a terrible idea - not least because the companies doing it are poor custodians of our personal information, if not trojan horses doing shady shit for fascists - but I'll focus on the simple one: there are already countries where people are forced to register and be identifiable to the state to use social media, and which ban VPNs to prevent evasion. They're tyrannies like Russia and Iran. And while "making sure the state can tell who says what" is not the ostensible purpose of the policy, its a very obvious side-effect, one which needs to be seriously considered. And when you look back at its history - press licensing, government observation of public meetings - its tyranny all the way down. But apparently tyranny is the bipartiasn position of our two status quo political parties now...

Meanwhile, we have an example from right next door in Australia that none of this works, and that it drives kids to use even more dangerous technologies (ChatGPT, FFS, which sycophantically reinforces user delusions, driving them to psychosis and suicide, or Roblox, which is so notorious as a site for predators that child safety on it has its own wikipedia article). And we also have examples from the UK, where the regulatory burden of complying with moderation requirements of their Online Safety Act has forced the shutdown of small internet forums. This has a very real impact on the freedom of expression of adults, but apparently, none of that matters: any amount of collateral damage is acceptable to our parliament of tyrants.

I was lucky enough to grow up in Aotearoa when it was still free. When the state couldn't say "papers, please" to you on the street, or on the internet. Our two major political parties now seem to be colluding to eliminate that freedom. Neither of them deserve your vote. And if they pass this law, like other tyrannies, their state deserves neither your support or your loyalty.

(There are other suggestions in the report which are worth pursuing, such as adopting the EU Digital Services Act model of making platforms responsible for online harm, regulating algorithims so they can't shovel shit onto our feeds, banning non-consensual deepfake pornography, and aligning online and offline advertising restrictions. Sadly, those are the bits parliament is likely to chuck out, in favour of the stupid, simple and intrusive age ban / identification requirement, because our MPs prefer easy headlines to doing the actual work of designing good regulation...)

Pushing on an open door

RNZ has polling today on taxing billionaires, and its not good for the plutocrats:

The second poll commissioned in February 2026 revealed that 66 percent agreed that New Zealand's economic system was not set up to effectively to address issues like housing, healthcare and climate change.

Half of New Zealanders also agreed that billionaires shouldn't exist while people still struggled with basic necessities like food.

Sixty-eight percent supported billionaires being taxed more to fund public goods like healthcare, housing and climate action.

And another 37 percent were in favour of introducing a billion-dollar wealth cap to minimise the amount of wealth any person could legally hold.

This level of economic dissatisfaction and support for taxing billionaires means that taxing wealth fairly is pushing on an open door. The public is waiting for the government to do it, but so far only the Greens and Te Pāti Māori have committed. Meanwhile, Labour is still flailing around with its weak and pathetic "let's not actually tax anybody" capital gains tax. Will they rise to the occasion and lead people where they want to be led? Or put their own property portfolios before the public and continue to be toadies for the wealthy?

"Unnecessary and excessive" secrecy

Back in December the regime introduced the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. While doing various other things - including introducing whistleblower protection for those providing evidence tot he Commerce Commission - the bill also massively expands the Commission's statutory secrecy powers, effectively giving it a ten-year exemption from the OIA. The bill is currently before select committee, and some of the submissions on it have been released, including that of the Ombudsman. Who is... not impressed.

The Ombudsman essentially argues that the secrecy clause is not justified as the information it seeks to protect is already strongly protected under the OIA:

Successive Ombudsmen have held that, in the OIA context, information provided by informants to regulatory bodies such as the Commission attracts protection on grounds of confidentiality on the basis that its disclosure under the OIA would have a chilling effect on the willingness of future would-be informants to come forward. In circumstances where the OIA already protects the relevant considerations, the creation of multiple mechanisms which, in essence, create a 10-year blanket carve-out from the OIA appeared unnecessary and excessive.

They suggest a number of ways of highlighting this to give reassurance to informants which would be less restrictive and infringe the BORA right to receive information less.

They also note that the "because we want to" clause - which allows the Commission to ignore its own secrecy clause for anyone it thinks has a "proper interest" in receiving the information - will apply to parties under investigation, as the fundamental right to natural justice means they must be able to know the nature and origins of allegations against them in order to properly respond. Which in turn completely guts the Commission's primary argument for secrecy (protecting the identity of informants to prevent retaliation). So, as I noted earlier, the bill won't do what its meant to, and the only people it will hide information from is the public.

There's also submissions from the New Zealand Law Society Te Kāhui Ture o Aotearoa and law firm Chapman Tripp which make similar points. The latter in particular highlights the public interest in transparency, so that the Commission's investigations are procedurally fair, its evidence properly tested, and its decisions seen to be robust.

The question now is whether the committee will listen, or whether they'll continue mindlessly following the trend for increasing secrecy and reduced accountability.