A victory for trans kids!

In November 2025, out of the blue, weirdo fundie Simeon Brown banned the use of puberty blockers in trans (but not cis) healthcare, over-riding the medical decisions of doctors. The decision was swiftly enjoined by the courts, ensuring it did not come into effect, and today it was officially overturned on the grounds that the Minister had failed to consulted queer kids, and that it was discriminatory. Interestingly, the latter was not on the basis of sex - Crown Law has long held that the Human Rights Act's prohibition on discrimination on the basis of sex includes trans people - but on the basis of disability. Trans kids are seeking healthcare for clinically recognised mental disorders; the ban would have denied them access to appropriate healthcare on the basis of those disorders, and this is pretty obviously discriminatory. The regime's arguments that there was no discrimination and that this was just about the effectiveness of the medication and that the ban was a justified limitation on the basis of side-effects (a concern which somehow does not apply to cis kids) were laughed out of court. This allowed the court to sidestep the entire question of the definition of "sex" in the Human Rights Act, and leave it for another case.

This seems like a pretty good result, and one we should celebrate. The question now is whether the regime will accept the decision of the court, appeal it, or (if re-elected) pull their usual stunt of over-ruling them by fiat legislation. The risk of the latter makes the election all the more important: if you support trans people, vote this hateful regime out!

MMP was not designed for major party weakness

Back in 2012, in its Review of MMP, the Electoral Commission identified a significant flaw in the system: the number of electorate seats was increasing, while the total number of seats was capped, meaning fewer list seats. If the ratio got too bad - somewhere around 75 electorates to 45 list seats, something expected to happen around 2026 - this would lead to an increasing chance of disproportionate outcomes. To prevent this and preserve proportionality, the Electoral Commission recommended fixing the ratio of electorate to list seats at 60:40.

That didn't happen, of course, as the major parties bickered and refused to implement the Electoral Commission's recommendations for partisan political reasons. Meanwhile, changes in population distribution delayed the predicted armageddon: we currently have 72 electorates, the ratio the Commission recommended, and it will shrink to 71 at the election. But we still face the problem, from the other direction. Why? Because everyone hates Chris.

Most electorates are won by the major parties. Effectively, give or take the Māori seats and a general seat here or there, the electorates are reserved for the major parties. National and Labour won 60 of the 65 general electorates last election, though only one of the seven Māori seats. Worse, electorate results are massively disproportional. While Aotearoa is a multi-party system, our electorate results between the two major parties still roughly follow the cube-rule, which sees small differences in electorate vote share magnified to huge differences in seat share. So last election, Labour won 31% of the electorate vote and 17 seats, while National won 43% of the electorate vote and 43 seats. This election the polls are closer, but an e.g. 37:33 electorate vote split is likely to mean a 1.4:1 split in the share of electorates (so 35 seats to 25, assuming major party electorate share is retained), and even 36:34 leads to 1.2:1 (so 32 seats to 28). None of which mattered when the "major" parties were big and collectively winning 75% of the vote. But when everyone hates Chris, and the major parties are polling 57% between them, it is going to cause problems.

We're aware of the "danger" of National not getting any list seats because its vote share is so low. But its not just National, because both "major" parties are polling in the shitter. A 28% party is only entitled to 34 seats in Parliament. it takes only a slight preference in the electorate races to get more than that, and if a major party expands its lead over its rival while the overall purple vote remains static, the problem gets worse. A 30% party is entitled to 36 seats, but a 38:32 electorate vote split will probably see it win 38.

Basically: major party weakness is a recipe for disproportionality. And disproportionality isn't just undemocratic: if it matters, if it keeps or puts people in power, then it is a recipe for government and state illegitimacy.

How can we fix this? The problem is due to electorates, but we probably can't eliminate them and move to a pure list system. Electorate service is one of the things Aotearoa's MPs have traditionally done well, and retaining it is worthwhile. So we're left with the Electoral Commission's solution: fixing the ratio of electorate to list seats and expanding the size of parliament to fit. The Commission's suggested 60:40 ratio is already problematic, so we need to go lower - to 50:50, or even 40:60 to allow room for growth. On the latter point, expanding Parliament to its optimum size of ~175 MPs while retaining current electorates gives us close to 40:60, while giving all the other advantages of a larger parliament. And it should protect us from electorate shitfuckery for a long time to come.

National is murdering our health system

A tale in three headlines:

Nursing workforce growth has stalled despite Government claims vacancies are falling, The Post, 28 July 2026:

The number of nurses employed by Health New Zealand has barely changed in two years, despite the Government pointing to falling vacancy rates and an active recruitment drive to address workforce shortages.

Analysis of Health NZ workforce data by health economists Bill Rosenberg and Jacqueline Cumming shows nursing numbers increased rapidly through 2023 and early 2024 but have since plateaued.

[...]

Nursing FTEs increased by more than 3000 between March 2023 and March 2024, but have grown by just 54 positions in the two years since, Health NZ’s quarterly workforce reports show.

Government tells nursing schools to stop training so many nurses, Stuff, 14 october 2026:

The Government has told nursing schools to train fewer nurses next year.

The edict came from the Tertiary Education Commission, to the surprise of many nursing professors and lecturers last week. And it arrived at a time when nursing levels have become a charged election issue, with nurses at hospitals raising alarm about “crisis” level staffing and growing concern about aged care too.

In a letter to nursing schools last week, the Tertiary Education Commission instructed them to revert nursing student numbers back to 2025 levels for the 2027 year. That would mean fewer people would be training to be nurses, according to academics Stuff spoke to.

Starship hospital delays child cancer treatments for up to a week amid nursing shortage, Govt confirms, New Zealand Herald, 15 October 2026:

A “horrified” nurse says Starship children’s hospital has suspended chemotherapy treatment and bone marrow transplants for cancer patients as it grapples with a staffing crisis.

[...]

The nurse told the Herald that management informed staff of the development last week. Hospital bosses were “terrified” the information would be made public “because of how bad it will look”.

The nurse said she and other staff were “horrified and appalled” at the postponements, which had the potential to adversely affect patient outcomes.

Refusing to hire people to cut costs. Refusing to train them to avoid stories about graduates unemployed because of the hiring freeze. And now, we get the consequences: staff shortages causing service collapse.

Its pretty clear now that the collapse of Aotearoa's health system isn't a passive thing which "just happened"; it is a deliberate act of murder by the regime. And like all austerity, it will have a bodycount. The Starship hospital collapse is likely to make that bodycount explicit.

Which invites the obvious question: when are we going to start prosecuting politicians for the social murder they commit?

Showing us their priorities

When almost-Police Commission Jevon McSkimming was convicted of possession of child sexual abuse material and the IPCA found a concerted cover-up among senior police, the government's response was full of thunder. Police Minister Mark Mitchell called it "utterly disgraceful", and promised they were "acting decisively to install the strongest statutory oversight mechanism available to it – an Inspector-General of Police."

You'd have expected that would result in quick action, but instead it resulted in... nothing. Six months later there was no timeline for when the change would be implemented. Legislation was only just introduced last month, right before parliament rose, but wasn't given a first reading or sent to select committee. And today the Herald reported why: because after promising decisive action, the regime simply hadn't bothered to fund it:

The introduction of a new police watchdog, aimed at building back trust after the Jevon McSkimming scandal, has been pushed back with the law-and-order portion of Budget 2026 “heavily over-subscribed”.

Officials had sought an “urgent invitation for priority funding” in this year’s Budget to help set up the Inspector-General of Police – which went unfunded.

That's right: when we are getting near-daily headlines about corruption and criminality within the police, when senior cops are being convicted of serious crimes, when police conspire to cover all this up and hide it behind a cloak of "employment matters", the regime doesn't think this is a priority. The police appear to be rotten to the core, a sewer of bullies and rapists and child abuse fans, and Mark Mitchell thinks it isn't worth spending any money to stop that.

"Show me your budget, and I'll show you your priorities" indeed.

TOP betrays its supporters

TOP - now the Opportunity Party - was founded for one purpose: to promote a radical shift in Aotearoa's tax system, from taxing income to taxing land. The right hate the idea, saying it will lower house prices (boo hoo) and drive farmers out of business (showing they were shit at business to begin with). Chris Luxon had ruled out any coalition with the party because they promoted it. And in the face of this pressure, TOP has surrendered and complied in advance - first leaving tax reform off its list of coalition bottom lines, and now saying they're willing to agree to abandon it for a term in order to keep the door open with National:

Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong says agreeing to no progress on tax reform in the next term would be “worth considering” if there were other significant policy wins from negotiations as part of a potential National-led coalition.

Wong is also not ruling out publicly accepting those terms ahead of negotiations if National leader Christopher Luxon continues to insist he won’t talk to Opportunity after the election.

It comes as the party, which prides itself on being able to work with Labour or National, could hold the power after the November 7 election with two of three polls this week putting Opportunity in the kingmaker position.

Which raises two obvious questions. The first is what is the point of TOP, if they're willing to abandon their core policy, the reason for their existence, so completely? I am not a TOP supporter, but I take their policy position seriously, and expected them to fight hard for it in any coalition. And while I didn't expect them to win - 6% only gets you so much leverage, unless you're ACT - I expected them to get some progress: an inquiry to produce a clear statement of tradeoffs and an implementation pathway, which could then be used to build further public support and beat future governments with. Or a smaller shift, a tax-switch from income to land, to build the infrastructure and demonstrate viability. Offering to rule even that out means the party is effectively abandoning its core policy. So why bother witht hem at all?

The second is why are they so desperate to do a deal with National? Because pretty obviously, if (as the polls show) they are in the "kingmaker" position, and get to decide who the government is, they can just say "This is what we exist for as a party. You've ruled us out, but we'll get what we want from Labour". And since any Labour coalition will mean working with the Greens, who also want tax reform (albeit direct taxation of wealth, rather than only land), they'll have powerful allies to force concessions. Instead, they've publicly set fire to their ostensible principles, while reinforcing every narrative about them simply being a trojan horse for the right, intended to remove or siphon left votes.

Effectively, TOP is betraying its own supporters here. The onus is on those supporters to punish them. If not, well, I guess what you vote for: insincere, deceitful opportunists who will lie to your face about what they supposedly stand for, them ignore every promise they made in order to prop up a cruel, corrupt, tyrannical regime.

Election-rigging violates the BORA

Last year the regime attempted to rig the election, overturning 77 years of settled law to cut off enrolment two weeks before the vote, in a desperate effort to stop 100,000 mostly young, mostly opposition supporting people from voting. It was naked American-style election-rigging, of a sort not seen before in Aotearoa, and even at the time the Attorney-General said that it violated the bill of Rights Act, because it overturned longstanding expectations around enrolment. And now, the regime has formally admitted that in court. But they don't think the court should do anything about it, because Parliament already knows it has violated the law:

Courts do not need to declare recent electoral changes breach the Bill of Rights Act (BORA), because any future government would already know, according to the Crown.

But Christopher Carrol - who is seeking a declaration of inconsistency in the High Court regarding the government's controversial 13-day voter enrolment deadline - says given the concession from the Crown the Bill of Rights Act had been breached, there was a need for the court to both acknowledge and respond in some manner.

Justice David Boldt, presiding over the case, said he would not be silent on the "seriousness" of the breach: "The only question is whether that needs to be a declaration, or whether something… a bit lower voltage will do the trick."

But parliamentary knowledge isn't the problem - its parliament's refusal to act on that knowledge. And that's where a formal declaration of inconsistency is valuable, because it sets in motion a formal process where the government is notified and has to publicly respond, while creating clear pressure for it to remedy the breach.

Which is also why I find the judge's statement that he "likely would not reach a decision ahead of the election" to be completely unsatisfactory. To see this, just imagine a situation where the regime narrowly holds power because its self-admitted illegal "law" worked as expected, and 50 to 100 thousand kiwis were denied the right to vote. In such a situation, a declaration of inconsistency will effectively be a statement that the election was rigged and the resulting "government" is illegitimate. That will be hugely inflammatory (and rightly so!), and the judge may be deterred from making it, no matter what the law requires.

This is why we must know early. The actions a free and democratic society must take in advance of a potentially rigged election are hugely different from those it must take afterwards. While a declaration of inconsistency will not in and of itself change the law, it will allow us to change our behaviour, and vote accordingly. And that is something we deserve to be able to do.

(In the meantime: don't let the regime steal your vote. Enrol to vote or check your enrolment status here.)

A clear choice on transport

There were a couple of campaign announcements today, showing that Aotearoa has a clear choice on transport this election. From national, we have - of course - m0ar roads! Even in the South Island this time, though of course they're spending the big bucks up north, where nobody actually wants the things. Meanwhile from the Greens we have a promise to make the trains run on time - or indeed, run at all - with new intercity routes, light rail or busways in major cities (whichever the Infrastructure Commission recommends), and more regional buses to connect it all. And while its focused on passenger transport, the infrastructure renewal required will help freight too, helping to get trucks off the roads. Its a pretty compelling vision of the future, even if it draws on the past, and one which would massively improve life in our cities and regions far more than a handful of truck mega-highways would.

Labour, meanwhile, is left out of the conversation. All they have is a collection of stronger consumer rights and some policies for marginally cheaper petrol. Its hardly rising to the occasion, and the latter seems to be desperately missing the point. But I guess that's what you're left with when you don't actually want to spend any money, and want to suggest that everything will really be just the same, only with different people in charge. And then they wonder why they're polling so badly...

Labour on democracy and trust in government

Labour released its democracy and trust in government policy today, and it looks like a good start. They're promising:

• A lobbying register and code of conduct, and stand-down periods for Ministers;
• Limiting urgency and requiring post-enactment referral to select committee of any bill which skips the select committee phase;
• Lowering the voting age for local body elections and abolishing the landlord vote;
• Mentioned in the full speech, reform of the OIA to codify proactive release and include penalties for ministers who conspire to hide things

Which is all good, but note what's not included: caps on political donations or public funding to get money out of politics; stopping the revolving door for senior public servants as well as Ministers; a lower voting age for general elections. I'm also suspicious of any effort to "reform" the OIA which is government- rather than civil society-led, because their interests are not aligned with ours and they will write the law to suit themselves and enable more secrecy.

Lowering the (general) voting age will be because it is hard, but they're unwilling to say "we will put a bill before the House and make National pay the price if they vote it down". As for donation capping, Labour has never really wanted money out of politics, because they're stupid enough to think they'll get a share of it when they're in power. This election's statistics should disabuse them of that notion: the uber-rich are using their money as a weapon to undermine our democracy, and a genuinely democratic party would wage war on that bullshit. You can draw your own conclusions about what Labour's refusal to do so says about them.

On the other hand, with a donation cap a bottom line for TOP, Labour is going to have to attack the rich if they want to be in government. So they'd better start getting used to the idea.