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.

Our outdated anti-corruption laws

Last year a group of VTNZ staff were fired after being caught taking bribes to falsify driving test results. This isn't the first time this has happened, and it suggests there's a systematic problem (and there's a big government report on that). But one of the issues is that our anti-corruption laws no longer match the shape of our public service.

In the 2019 case, corrupt VTNZ staff were prosecuted for obtaining by deception, essentially for misleading NZTA about whether people had passed the test. Which got the job done - they went to jail - but the actual offence here is bribery, corruptly using an official position to extort a personal benefit. The two offences have a similar penalty (at least if the amount of money involved is large enough), but very different elements. And one actually recognises what happened and goes on corruption statistics, and one does not.

So why weren't previous offenders prosecuted for bribery? Because they couldn't be. Aotearoa's anti-bribery law applies only to "officials", defined as:

any person in the service of the Sovereign in right of New Zealand [sic](whether that service is honorary or not, and whether it is within or outside New Zealand), or any member or employee of any local authority or public body, or any person employed in the education service within the meaning of section 10(7) of the Education and Training Act 2020.

And despite the name, VTNZ is not a public body, and its employees are not public or state servants. They used to be, but Jenny Shipley privatised them in 1999. They're just an ordinary company, providing a service to the government under contract. "Management by contract" was meant to give greater accountability and transparency. But it turns out that when push comes to shove, it means less of both.

Such relations have become pervasive throughout the New Zealand state. Contractors perform all sorts of private functions. But our anti-bribery law was written in 1961, and is still framed in terms of a monolithic state with a clear distinction between public servants and others. It desperately needs to be changed, to cover anyone performing a public function on behalf of the state. That way, when they take bribes, we can at least call the crime by its name, and recognise that we have a corruption problem, rather than pretending that that's something which only happens elsewhere.

Papers, please

At the moment the Trump regime in America is running a pogrom against non-white Americans, with ICE invading cities, disappearing people off the streets and dragging them from their homes to be dumped in concentration camps. And our local Trump-wannabes clearly want in on the action, with a proposed law to allow immigration officers to demand proof of identity from suspected overstayers:

Immigration officers will soon have the power to ask people suspected of overstaying their visa for proof of identification at their homes and/or workplaces.

The powers are part of a legislative proposal introduced by the Government in September last year.

The Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill was announced to strengthen the tools available for immigration officers to respond to serious immigration breaches.

This includes “expanding the ability for immigration officers to request identity-based information from an individual when there is good cause to suspect they may be in breach of their visa conditions or potentially liable for deportation.”

Immigration Minister Erica Stanford told RNZ the Bill would be introduced by the end of the month, with the intention of passing it into law by the end of the term.

Who's a "suspected overstayer"? I guess that's up to the racism of the immigration officer and whatever quotas for detention that might have been set. Meanwhile, it also means they can demand identification from anyone else in those locations as well. And if like many kiwis you don't bother carrying it - because this is a free and democratic society - then I guess its off to the gulag.

This bill is yet another piece of tyranny from our nasty, authoritarian regime. We should not accept it. As for immigration, remember, if they ask you anything, you don't know. You don't know where, you don't know how, and you don't know who. The state depends on cooperation to enforce its will. Refuse to collaborate, and make it hard for them.

A flagrant abuse of power

When the regime rammed through its law gutting pay equity and stealing $13 billion from the women of Aotearoa, it didn't bother with a select committee process. That might have let people have their say - and worse, seen the media report on what they were saying, which would have been bad for the regime. But a group of former MPs organised their own select committee process to do what parliament had refused to. Now, it has reported back, calling the process an abuse of power, a breach of human rights, and a violation of the rule of law:

The committee described the processes of planning for and enacting the legislation as a "flagrant and significant abuse of power".

It also found the law breached the Bill of Rights, the Human Rights Act, and the Regulatory Standard Act principles, as well as a number of international conventions that New Zealand was party to, including International Covenants on Civil and Political, and Economic and Social Rights, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

[...]

Committee members also said it could find no evidence in available Cabinet documents or parliamentary debates to support scrapping the scheme.

There are a lot of recommendations, chief of which (of course) is limiting the use of urgency for laws restricting fundamental rights, as well as statutory consultation requirements and constitutional recognition of pay equity as a human right. All of which would be a good start. Both Labour and the Greens have pledged to repeal the Act and restore pay equity if elected; it would be good to see them also commit to constitutional reform to prevent such an abuse from ever happening again.

You can read the full report here.

An attack on democracy as well as the homeless?

Over the weekend the regime announced its long-expected policy of "move on" orders for homeless people. Having massively increased homelessness while slashing emergency housing, National's "solution" is get get the police to kick its victims round our cities, threatening them with fines or jail if they don't "move on". Which is pointless and cruel and far more expensive than actually housing them - but the regime clearly thinks there are more votes in performative cruelty than in actually solving problems.

Its a terrible policy, of course, which is going to further ruin lives and waste a lot of time and money doing so. But its not just the homeless under threat. The regime's proposed amendments to the Summary Offences Act allow orders for "disorderly, disruptive, threatening or intimidating behaviour" and "[o]bstructing or impeding someone entering a business". Which, given both common protest tactics and the prevailing interpretation of police that public protest is inherently "disorderly, disruptive, threatening or intimidating", seems like a clear threat to the public's right to protest. While the bill hasn't been published yet - the regime doesn't like to do that in advance, preferring to spring its legislation on people by surprise - unless it includes significant safeguards, we should regard it as an attack on our democratic rights as well as an attack on the homeless.

Submit!

The Environment Committee has called for submissions on the Environment (Disestablishment of Ministry for the Environment) Amendment Bill. Submissions should be made tot he link above, by 4.30pm on Wednesday, 11 March 2026.

(Yes, they're going with a middle-of-the-day deadline rather than the usual midnight one, in an effort to make it just that much harder for people to submit. Because that's the sort of "democracy" we are now).

There will no doubt be proper submission guides from various NGOs in due course, but the TL;DR is that the bill does exactly what it says on the label: destroys the Ministry for the Environment. While the regime is pitching this as a minor, technical change, part of folding it in to a new mega-ministry, the effect will be to silence the voice for the environment, reduce it to a budget line and an internal debate within an overwhelmingly development-focused agency, avoiding embarrassing notes in Cabinet papers with formal warnings of environmental impacts and consequences. And of course it will enable the shreds of that voice to then be quietly cut.

This is how the regime sees the environment: something which should be kept out of sight and out of mind, while the big boys pay to play with their bulldozers. I don't think kiwis feel this way. And if you don't, submit, and tell them so! Sure, the regime will ignore you and pass the bill anyway, because autocrats gonna stomp on your face. But speaking up still matters. National hates headlines like "100,000 oppose bill; government passes it anyway", they hate everyone seeing that everyone hates them, and that's why they try so hard to stop people submitting. And that's why we have to. Every voice raised against this bill imposes a political cost on the regime. It encourages the present-opposition to commit to restoring an independent MfE, and it encourages other voters to vote out the regime and get one which respects the environment.

An avalanche is made up of pebbles. Be a pebble, and help crush this government. Submit on the bill.

A victory for the environment

Trans-Tasman Resources has withdrawn its fast-track application to pillage the Taranaki seabed. Good riddance. As the fast-track panel pointed out, there was a credible risk of harm to protected species and uncertain environmental impacts, and TTR had done no work to clarify them, even when sent a clear message by the courts that they needed to. This was just a bunch of lazy foreigners wanting to pillage our natural resources, and relying on corruption to get their way. But it turns out that the panels the regime appointed were committed to doing their job.

Sadly, its unlikely to be the end of it:

Eggers says the company is now considering its options, but isn’t ruling out lodging a new application – especially if Shane Jones gets his way to amend the fast-track process to make ministers the ultimate decisionmakers.

So, if you fail under one decision-maker, withdraw, then reapply, and get another one (and ideally, one who has publicly indicated both their bias and that they can be bought). That's not a proper process by any measure, but its what this corrupt, dogshit vandal regime has given us. The next government needs to not only end it, but legislatively revoke any "consent" obtained by such a corrupt abuse of process.

(And meanwhile, we've had a reminder today of the hazards of such ministerial decision-making, with the Waimea Dam - rammed through by Labour with a Muldoonist special law to overturn a court decision - turning into a complete financial disaster, and the farmers who pushed it are now wanting a handout to bail them out. Because of course they are. Because it turns out Ministers aren't great decision-makers, and make decisions based on lobbying rather than evidence or business-cases. Which is what scammers like TTR rely on. And meanwhile, the public inevitably gets left to pick up the tab, either direct (in the case of the dam), or indirect (in the case of TTR's proposed environmental destruction)).

Brownlee is a partisan, misogynistic hypocrite

Yesterday parliament saw one of its worst incidents of racism, as Winston Peters questioned the right of Teanau Tuiono to ask questions because he is "someone who comes from Rarotonga". Tuiono is from Northland, like Peters, but even were he from Kent, like Winston's colleague Andy Foster, it doesn't matter: he's a New Zealand citizen and an elected MP, and that's the end of it.

This rightly caused outrage, but Brownlee claimed not to have heard it and promised to review the Hansard and get back to the House on it. Today he did, and made the obvious ruling that this sort of racism is unacceptable and will be treated as highly disorderly (which you'd hope would mean apology or ejection). But he refused to require Winston to apologise because "the moment has passed". People with a political memory longer than a goldfish may recall that he made a completely different ruling back in August, when he required Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick to apologise for something he had already punished her for the day before, and named her and banned her for a week when she refused. But there are obvious differences between the two cases: specifically, Winston is a member of the regime, and he is a cis-man.

In other words, Brownlee has one rule for the government, and one for the opposition; one for men, and one for women. He's nothing but a partisan, misogynistic hypocrite, and his continued presence in the chair brings the House into disrepute.

Good riddance

The regime has finally decided not to push for a referendum on a four-year term this election. Good. But the bill isn't dead, and apparently won't be withdrawn - it's still on the Order Paper, hanging around to be picked up and advanced in future, by whoever wins the election. And they're not stalling it because they've decided its a bad idea; rather, the three components of the regime simply don't quite agree, so it got set aside because it's not really anyone's priority.

...except apparently Chris Hipkins. Faced with a regime which is a poster boy for why we need more accountability, not less, and which is making people hate the entire political class in a way we haven't seen since the 1990's, he's willing to put himself out there and go on record as being in favour of a proposition which has repeatedly been defeated by two-thirds margins. Because he's just that keen on being less accountable to us plebs. And then you think about what he did with an absolutely majority when he had one - nothing - and how he talks about that time now as the government "trying to do too many things". So he wants an extra year so he can do even less? (But I guess its an extra year to collect his fat salary, putting him even further into the millionaire-class while pretending to represent ordinary people...)

This regime has been a potent reminder of why we need to keep our politicians on a short leash, whatever the colour of their tie. With a unitary state, a highly-centralised government structure, and no real institutional checks and balances, the only safeguard against an executive run amok is the chance to throw them out on their arses as often as possible. I'm glad we'll get to keep that right, for the moment. But it is disturbing that so many of the political class subscribe to the elitist, anti-democratic idea that they shouldn't have to face our judgement, that they should be less accountable to us. That's not good enough. They're not good enough. They've shown by their enthusiasm for dictatorship that they cannot be trusted, so we need to shorten the leash. It is time to cut the parliamentary term to two years, and bring them back under democratic control.

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day - the first of the year. First up is a the Ōtautahi Community Housing Trust (Trust Variation) Bill, a private bill to expand the area where a community housing trust can operate. Worthy, but the fact that this requires an actual law in the first place is a bit broken. Next is the third reading of Carl Bates' Juries (Age of Excusal) Amendment Bill, followed by the second reading on Kieran McAnulty's Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Sales on Anzac Day Morning, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, and Christmas Day) Amendment Bill. If the House moves quickly, it should make a start on Kahurangi Carter's Copyright (Parody and Satire) Amendment Bill, which would insert fundamental fair use protections for taking the piss into copyright law. There are nine first readings on the Order paper at the moment, so there won't be a ballot unless things move a lot faster than expected.

100% pure vandalism

Aotearoa is in the middle of a giant environmental disaster, caused by climate change. So naturally, the regime thinks this is the perfect day to introduce a bill to disestablish the Ministry for the Environment. Because nothing says "we care about this problem" like shutting down the agency which warns us about such things and devises policy to avoid them.

While some staff will be merged with other agencies to form the regime's new development and infrastructure ministry, they will very much be sidelined, taking a back seat to the new agency's core functions of housing, transport, and local government. The rest will simply be sacked. Which means all that policy expertise will be lost to Aotearoa forever, and will take decades to rebuild. Which is the point. National wants to silence the institutional voice for the environment, so they don't have to admit in their cabinet papers that MfE told them it was a terrible idea with terrible consequences. So they're going to just rev up the bulldozer and crush it all, so nothing can stand in the way of them bulldozing everything else.

Again, this dogshit vandal regime has to go. The question is how much of Aotearoa they'll outright destroy before we can get rid of them.

An empty suit

Another weekend, another climate change disaster in Aotearoa. Flooding, people without power, roads blocked, people dead. And the Prime Minister is announcing a fucking foreign football game. And when asked about the disaster he says shit like "it's raining here too".

We used to have prime ministers who understood that their job, in times of national disaster, was to show up. Express the country's shock and anguish, provide reassurance that the government was going to help. But this regime is doing less than nothing to help, and is in fact doing everything it can to make things worse. And instead of reassurance, its just "make sure you have your personal survival kit ready" - in other words, you're on your own. He's not a leader; he's an empty suit. And rather than empathy, he just projects contempt for everyone else, us "bottom-feeders" who can't run away to Waiheke when disaster strikes.

This isn't the first time that Luxon has done this. His repeated absenteeism in times of national disaster makes it clear that he is fundamentally unfit for office. The sooner we vote this prick out, the better.