The difference is that in America they will get things done a lot faster, and they don’t employ people to stand around or sit in truck cabs to watch Tik-Tok videos all day.

by Karl du Fresne from his blog

“I’m not going to play that game,” Christopher Luxon said – rather lamely – when Tova O’Brien asked him how many Maori National MPs were in his cabinet.

“It’s not a game,” countered O’Brien, doubtless trying hard to conceal her glee at having so easily caught the prime minister out.

Oh, but it is a game. The game is called scalp-hunting and it’s commonly practised by journalists and broadcasters who mistakenly think their role is to make politicians squirm.

The funny thing is, no-one can recall the game being played when Jacinda Ardern was PM. Ardern appeared to be surrounded by an invisible but impenetrable shield that protected her against awkward questions.

It wasn’t so much that such questions harmlessly bounced off her. They just weren’t asked. And if they were, as happened sometimes on Mike Hosking’s breakfast programme, her response was to stop going on his show.

O’Brien would have been thrilled at causing Luxon to stumble yesterday when he couldn’t answer her question. It was the equivalent of a bowler stumping the opposing team’s opening batsman with the first ball. You could almost see the thought bubble above her head: “Howzat!”

Luxon should have seen it coming. O’Brien has built her reputation on hatchet jobs and would have been eager to make an impact in her new role as presenter of TVNZ’s breakfast show. The hapless PM obliged by walking straight into her trap.

Then he compounded his mistake by saying that the newly promoted James Meager, who is of Ngai Tahu descent, is a cabinet member when he’s actually a minister outside cabinet. O’Brien pounced again and left Luxon looking like a possum in the headlights.

It was depressing evidence that even after four and a half years as leader of the National Party and two and a half as prime minister, Luxon still hasn’t got the hang of politics.

His rise to the top of the corporate ladder was no preparation for the shark tank he now swims in. He still exhibits two fatal frailties: he lacks a killer instinct and he’s far too keen to be liked. Those are dangerous political weaknesses that leave him vulnerable and make him an easy target for aggressive broadcasters and journalists, to say nothing of his political opponents.

Far from developing the agile – and sometimes necessarily forceful – verbal and mental responses essential in his position, he appears to rely on stilted, formulaic talking points supplied to him by his communications advisers. Not only do these not resonate with the public, but rigid adherence to them leaves him exposed and floundering when an unexpected question lands.

A more street-smart politician would have known how to deal with O’Brien’s mischievous query (and it was mischievous, since its clear purpose was not to enlighten viewers so much as to catch Luxon out).

Yes, it might be argued that Luxon should know how many Maori National MPs are in his cabinet. But his response should have been that the ethnicity of cabinet ministers is irrelevant. It’s competence that matters.

He said he wasn’t going to play O’Brien’s game, but he did. Rather than feebly protesting at her question, he should have gone on the front foot and challenged her attempt to reduce cabinet appointments to a matter of identity politics. Luxon and his ministers need to constantly remind themselves that one of the reasons New Zealanders so emphatically rejected Labour at the last election was that they were desperate to be extricated from that ideological morass.

For all his faults (and God knows, there are plenty), Winston Peters wouldn’t have given O’Brien the satisfaction of claiming his scalp. That’s the difference between the two coalition party leaders, right there: Peters is a born politician whereas Luxon is still on trainer wheels.

After the unpleasantness we report, mostly caused by Leftist politicians, grifters and civil servants (snivel servants as they used to be called), here’s something to enjoy. As long as as you can avoid the undesirables like the bag, purse and cellphone snatchers, Paris remains a very nice city.

A French Frye in Paris (!) looks at the facades of Rue Réaumur here

And it’s the Leftist ABC (Australia) saying that. Of course, it ignores the impact that unrestricted Third World immigration has had on that and blames things other than what is really responsible.

This was recorded on Reality Check Radio or RCR on 28 March. It is the second of what is now a regular Wednesday Webinar, held on Zoom. Kathryn was involved with the Local Government Act of 2002 so knows her subject.

ThIs piece is from 2018, the first year of Dougherty’s tenure as boss of Nelson Council. Sadly Bruce has since passed away, well into his 90s. The last time Roger Childs spoke to him his crackling intellect was fully evident.

by John Ansell

Today one of New Zealand’s only honest historians, my indefatigable 88 year old friend Bruce Moon, was due to address the Nelson Institute on the twisting of New Zealand’s history to advantage tribal separatists.

A few days ago, having meticulously researched and rehearsed his address, Bruce received the following letter…

_________________________________

Hi Bruce,

I am sorry but your talk has been called off. At the Library today NCC, Library officials, and two of us from the Nelson Institute met to discuss your planned talk. All 3 of these groups had been contacted by persons saying you should not be allowed to talk on this topic, in the Library. Both the NCC and the Library felt a talk could disturb the peace and become a Health and Safety issue.

I made as strong a case as I was able to go ahead, but there were too many dissenting voices and it is, after all, the Library who has to make the final decision as to who may talk in their rooms.

Thank you for offering to give the talk, perhaps one day we may be able to find a venue without such restrictions.

Yours Sincerely,

Paul Lunberg

_________________________________

Bruce later learned that the people who bullied the three groups into cancelling his free speech were “known to them”.

One does not have to be Lord Rutherford of Nelson to deduce who would feel so threatened by the truth to cower a cowardly council into gagging an 88 year old man.

The question is now what we do about it. Your thoughts?

UPDATE: Bruce’s speech was written to be spoken, not read, but here’s his script: https://sites.google.com/…/bruce-moon/nelson-city-library.

Food for thought from Judy Gill, and while we don’t fully concur, feel it’s a good discussion piece.

NEW GODS FOR A DYING CHURCH

Or syncretism preparing the path for a one-world religion?

Judy Gill

CONTENTS

1. Syncretism and the absorption of Matariki into Catholic language and liturgy

2. The construction of spiritual authority: atua / deities / gods, manuscript mystique, and modern religious manufacture

3. From religion to public system: imagery, thresholds, altars, education, and cultural normalisation

4. Global convergence: syncretism and the path toward a one-world religious framework

1. SYNCHRETISM AND THE ABSORPTION OF MATARIKI INTO CATHOLIC LANGUAGE AND LITURGY

This is a story about syncretism, about the manufacture of antiquity, and about the public marketing of a modern spiritual system.

It is a story about how something modern is framed as ancient, how something sectarian is repackaged as universal, and how something once dark, esoteric, and forbidding is softened into something beautiful, child-friendly, and publicly untouchable. It is a story about how a religion is marketed first through books, art, museums, education, and government recognition, and then offered to the Catholic Church as though it were spiritually compatible, enriching, and even sacramentally resonant.

That is the real issue here.

This is not only the making of a modern Māori religion. It is also the making of new gods for a dying Catholic Church.

Culture has become spirituality.

Spirituality has become liturgy.

Liturgy has become syncretism.

And syncretism is being marketed as beautiful, precious, rooted in deep spiritual roots, and as having strong links with the sacramental nature of our faith.

That is what makes the New Zealand Catholic bishops’ Matariki language so revealing. The National Liturgy Office described Matariki as having “deep spiritual roots” and “strong links with the sacramental nature of our faith.” [1] In the later text, the language becomes explicitly devotional, referring to “the wondrous mystery of Atua,” “the Eternal One,” and “the Holy One,” and ending with the prayer formula, “Through Christ and in the perfect unity of the Holy Spirit, we pray.” [2][4]

This is not mere civic acknowledgment. It is not simply politeness toward a public holiday. It is an attempt to absorb another spiritual framework into Christian language and prayer.

This is not a small matter of wording. To describe Matariki as having “strong links with the sacramental nature of our faith” is not a gesture of cultural courtesy. It is an astonishing theological claim that a belief system publicly constructed from 1995 onwards should be linked back to a faith two millennia in age. [1][2][4][8]

And the problem goes further. The Catholic text does not stop at polite acknowledgement. It speaks of “the wondrous mystery of Atua who loves you” within a ritual specifically created to honour and celebrate Matariki. [2][4] In Catholic language, mystery is sacred language. Bread and wine are sacred mysteries. Sacraments are sacred mysteries. So when this language is placed inside a Matariki liturgical framework, the boundary between cultural acknowledgement and theological incorporation has already been crossed. [2][4]

That is syncretism.

The problem is not that a church notices a national holiday. The problem is that boundaries which should remain clear are gently dissolved. A distinct cosmology, with its own sacred beings, sacred narratives, sacred symbolism, and sacred claims, is brought inside Christian speech and presented as spiritually harmonious. What should have remained separate is now blended, and the blend is marketed as reverent, inclusive, and morally elevated.

2. THE CONSTRUCTION OF SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY: ATUA / DEITIES / GODS, MANUSCRIPT MYSTIQUE, AND MODERN RELIGIOUS MANUFACTURE

And once that happens, an obvious question follows:

Who, exactly, are these atua / deities / gods?

Te Papa’s Matariki material does not present the stars merely as astronomical markers. It says each visible star has unique characteristics that Māori acknowledge and honour, and it assigns them domains and meanings. Pōhutukawa is linked with the dead and Te Ara Wairua. Hiwa-i-te-Rangi receives wishes and aspirations. Matariki herself is presented as the mother of the others. [5][6] This is not neutral sky-watching. It is a cosmological and spiritual system.

So this is not simply culture being celebrated. It is religion being spiritualised, beautified, and universalised for public consumption.

A great deal of the modern presentation rests on mystique. The word manuscript is part of that mystique. It sounds ancient, solemn, and self-authenticating. A 400-page family document described as a manuscript is made to sound like something comparable in aura to the Dead Sea Scrolls — something ancient, weighty, and inheriting its authority from age itself. But what is actually being described is a family-held written record, passed to Rangi Mātāmua in 1995, and brought into public circulation only then. [8] That does not make it worthless. But it does mean the atmosphere around it is inflated. Something recent is being presented with the solemnity of something timeless.

Who copied it down, compiled it, or passed it along is not the point. The point is that the religious content itself appears to trace back to one originating voice. What is now being treated as a spiritual framework of public significance seems to rest, at its source, on the recollections and narratives of one old tohunga. That is an extraordinarily narrow base for something now being elevated into national reverence. [8]

What had largely been treated in public writing as an astronomical and seasonal event is now being repackaged as a spiritually saturated religious system and then presented as though it had always stood in that form. [7][8]

The same pattern appears in the imagery.

The human-faced Matariki imagery now circulating publicly is not ancient inherited iconography. Te Papa credits the key Te whānau Matariki image to Te Haunui Tuna, 2016, supplied by Rangi Mātāmua, and links the framework to Matariki: The Star of the Year, published in 2017. [5][7] Te Papa’s later teaching resources use personified illustrations which are visibly more polished, more educational, and more classroom-friendly. [6]

A pattern emerges. What began in a harsher, stranger, more forbidding visual form has been steadily beautified, softened, and sanitised. The tattooed heads become more luminous, more approachable, more teachable. The whole thing is reshaped into something suitable for children, schools, public institutions, museum displays, and church settings. What was once dark and esoteric becomes a spiritualised Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star — a marketable religious aesthetic for a modern audience.

3. FROM RELIGION TO PUBLIC SYSTEM: IMAGERY, THRESHOLDS, ALTARS, EDUCATION, AND CULTURAL NORMALISATION

The same process can be seen not only in language and imagery, but in physical space.

Outside a Catholic youth centre in New Zealand, the figures on display are not Christ, not Mary, and not the saints, but Māori pou representing tūpuna / ever-present ancestral spirits. The point here is not decorative style, but spiritual symbolism. In that worldview, tūpuna are not religiously empty motifs. They are understood as spiritually present, spiritually real, and still able to be addressed through karakia.

So what is being honoured at the threshold of a Catholic site is not merely culture in the harmless civic sense, but ancestral presence drawn from another spiritual system.

That is syncretism in visible form.

And the threshold matters. What stands at the entrance tells you what is being honoured. A church, school, or youth centre declares something by what it chooses to place at its gate. If the imagery at that threshold does not witness to Christ, but instead gives visual honour to another sacred order, then the issue is not ethnicity, not style, and not artistic diversity. It is spiritual symbolism.

More serious still is St Joseph’s Church, Hiruhārama / Jerusalem, on the Whanganui River Road northwest of Whanganui, built in 1893, where comparable symbolism appears in the altar itself. [9]

This is why the whole exercise increasingly looks like marketing.

A modern spiritual framework is dressed in the language of antiquity, supplied with contemporary art, popularised through books and museum interpretation, amplified by state recognition, softened for children and classrooms, and then offered to institutional Christianity as something spiritually enriching and morally beautiful. It is marketed to government as heritage, to the public as identity, to schools as education, and to churches as reverence.

Let us also be clear about something else.

This is not a racial critique. It is a religious critique.

Not all Māori believe this. Not all people of Māori ancestry accept this spirituality as truth. And not everyone promoting it is Māori.

What is being criticised here is a belief system — one with sacred beings, sacred narratives, sacred symbolism, and expanding claims on public life. It is therefore open to the same scrutiny, criticism, and rejection as any other religion. The constant attempt to shield it from criticism by wrapping it in ethnicity and cultural sensitivity is part of the strategy. A religion is being protected from scrutiny by presenting it as identity. That confusion should be rejected.

And like all religions, it appeals to some of the deepest instincts of the human mind: the desire to believe in an afterlife, and the desire to believe that life carries some higher meaning, sacred purpose, or hidden order.

That is part of its appeal. It is also part of its power.

4. GLOBAL CONVERGENCE: SYNCHRETISM AND THE PATH TOWARD A ONE-WORLD RELIGIOUS FRAMEWORK

Nor is this pattern confined to Catholicism. In much of the historic mainstream — Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian — the drift has often been toward race politics, equity ideology, grievance moralism, Polynesian spirituality, and syncretism, all sanctified under the language of justice, reconciliation, and inclusion.

In parts of the charismatic and Pentecostal world, the drift often runs in another direction: toward Zionism, Americanism, prophetic theatre, and Israel-centred geopolitics. Different idols, same collapse. Different symbols, same surrender. Christianity is no longer standing over the world in judgment. It is being colonised by rival political and spiritual systems from both left and right.

But the Catholic example is especially revealing because of its sacramental claims. Once a church says that another sacred system has deep spiritual roots, that it has strong links with the sacramental nature of our faith, and that it can be folded into blessing and prayer, the boundary has already fallen. Then anything can be absorbed. Any symbol can be harmonised. Any sacred vocabulary can be blended and blessed. What cannot be defended doctrinally is softened rhetorically and sold as beautiful, precious, and spiritually enriching. [1][2][4]

And this follows a very old pattern.

Rome built empire not only by conquest, but by absorption — taking in the gods, cults, and sacred symbols of the peoples it ruled and reorganising them within a wider universal order. The Pantheon stood as a monument to that habit of integration. After Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312, the Edict of Milan in 313 established toleration for Christianity within the empire, and by 380 Theodosius I had adopted Nicene Christianity as the Christian norm. [10][11][12][13] The political form changed, but the old Roman habit of absorption did not simply vanish. Too often, where the Catholic Church spread, local spiritual systems were not cleanly rejected, but absorbed, reframed, and renamed.

The language of universality remained. But the substance of that universality changed.

And this is where the analysis must widen.

Because what is happening here is not confined to New Zealand, and it is not confined to Catholicism.

Across international institutions — including those operating through the United Nations system and forums such as the World Economic Forum — there has been an increasing emphasis on shared global values, cultural convergence, interfaith cooperation, and the language of one human family. [1]

This is not about Māori people in general, but about a narrow class of university-based “prophets”, cultural theorists, and institutional promoters. Antarctica, the wairua of water, the airwaves, 5G, outer space — the scientific proof may never come. But science is not the point. Religion is. If “mātauranga Māori science” fails, Te Ao Māori spirituality may still win. Its ultimate victory would be a chapel to the Matariki atua / deities / gods at the Vatican — the Roman and universal heart of a converged one-world religion.

At one level, this language appears benign. It speaks of unity, sustainability, inclusion, and mutual respect.

But at another level, it creates the conditions for something else.

A world in which distinct religious boundaries are softened.

A world in which spiritual systems are blended, harmonised, and made interchangeable.

A world in which local belief systems are elevated, standardised, and woven into a broader global narrative of shared meaning and identity.

Alongside this has come the increasing elevation of what are described as ways of knowing. These are not simply alternative cultural perspectives. In many cases, they are explicitly spiritual and religious frameworks — involving cosmology, sacred beings, ancestral presence, and metaphysical claims about the nature of reality.

Yet in education, public discourse, and institutional policy, these frameworks are often presented not as belief systems, but as equivalent — or even superior — forms of knowledge alongside science.

That shift matters.

Because once spiritual frameworks are reframed as knowledge systems, they are no longer treated as matters of belief open to acceptance or rejection. They are normalised, institutionalised, and taught as part of the intellectual landscape itself.

The boundary between religion and knowledge dissolves.

And when that happens, a deeper change takes place — not only in institutions, but in the habits of thought of those moving through them. A population accustomed to treating multiple, incompatible spiritual systems as equally valid ways of knowing is a population being prepared, consciously or not, for the acceptance of a broader, synthesised spiritual framework.

In that sense, syncretism is not just a theological development.

It becomes a psychological and cultural preparation for convergence.

CONCLUSION

This is why this is not just a seasonal curiosity, and not just a New Zealand dispute about Matariki.

It is a case study in how syncretism works.

A modern religion is marketed as ancient.

A narrow source is elevated into public authority.

Severe imagery is softened into beautiful art.

Spiritual systems are renamed as culture, heritage, and knowledge.

Thresholds, schools, churches, and public institutions are furnished with rival sacred symbolism.

And what begins as local accommodation becomes preparation for something wider.

That wider movement is not necessarily announced as a world religion or a world government in any formal sense. It comes clothed in softer language: shared values, one human family, mutual respect, convergence, inclusion, global cooperation. But the effect is the same. Distinct truth claims are weakened. Sacred boundaries are softened. Religions become increasingly interchangeable. Spiritual systems are harmonised rather than judged. Populations are trained to regard incompatible cosmologies as equally valid forms of knowledge and meaning.

That is how convergence advances.

Not by abolishing religion, but by blending religions.

Not by denying the sacred, but by managing many sacred systems within one moral and institutional framework.

Not unity of truth, but unity of accommodation.

Not one faith, but a synthesised spiritual order in which differences remain only so long as they no longer exclude one another.

In that sense, syncretism is not merely a local theological error. It is a cultural preparation for a one-world religious framework, and perhaps for the broader political order that such a framework would serve.

Same pattern. New land. New gods.

REFERENCES

[1] National Liturgy Office, NZ Catholic Bishops Conference. “Matariki – unifies us as one human family.” 21 June 2022.

http://nlo.org.nz/news-and-events/media-releases/matariki-unifies-us-as-one-human-family/

[2] National Liturgy Office, NZ Catholic Bishops Conference. “Ma tātou katoa a Matariki – Matariki belongs to all of us.” 14 July 2023.

http://nlo.org.nz/news-and-events/media-releases/matariki-a-space-for-us-all/

comment by Donna Buck

From this week’s Farmers Weekly (April 6) as a front page article. Here comes the slow boiling frog approach to force 3 Waters on rural water tanks at our cost — continuing to force their agenda on us.

The last sentence in quotes from this piece to try to lead us into believing their rubbish about rural water says it all: “There is a real need for the government to extend that to all households”. Not me, ever.

Study finds two-thirds of rural NZ self-supplied water unsafe

by Richard Rennie

Study finds evidence of contamination of domestic water supplies, particularly in farmhouses relying on rainwater runoff into metal water tanks.

A researcher has described the quality of many domestic rural water supplies as confronting and surprising for a country as developed as New Zealand.

University of Auckland postdoctoral researcher Aayush Raj Joshi’s recent thesis on domestic self-supplied water quality has revealed two-thirds of the 800,000 people relying upon it in NZ have water exceeding safe E coli bacterial levels.

The study, the first of its kind for over two decades, highlights how the poor state of domestic rural water supply is often driven by roof-harvested rainwater introducing a host of quality problems to the water supply.

“E coli is the main indicator of water quality, but we also found 86% of households surveyed also exceeded limits for enterococci bacteria, and 58% failed on pH guidelines,” he said.

Now working for the World Bank in his native Nepal, the Manaaki New Zealand scholarship recipient said the results caught him by surprise. 

He said coming from a lesser developed country with its own range of infrastructure and health challenges, Nepalese people tend to look to NZ as having a high standard. 

“To find the results we did was quite confronting.”

His study evaluated the water quality of domestic self-supplied households across four regions – Northland, North Auckland, Gisborne and Taranaki.

The study found some aspects of where the water was held, and its immediate environment, heavily influenced its quality.

“A big one was proximity to trees. The more trees over a roof collecting water means more birds, and with that more contamination off that roof.”

Tank type also has a role to play. Metal tanks and tanks with lower water levels are likely to be the most contaminated.

The region with the worst E coli levels in its water was North Auckland at 78%, and Taranaki the lowest of those studied, at 58%.

New Zealand has long reported gastrointestinal infections above the global average, with between 5000-6000 cases notified annually for the likes of campylobacter, norovirus and salmonella, resulting in about 600 hospitalisations a year. 

While institutional outbreaks affect dozens at a time, a study released last year from University of Otago’s public health department indicated rural populations also report rates twice that of urban. 

The researchers found that Waikato, Taranaki, Canterbury and Southland were at greater risk for infections.

Joshi said his team had asked households informally if they had been sick with such diseases.

“But in many cases they did not use the water directly for drinking; they would filter it – there was awareness there.”

An area he is keen to explore further when he returns to NZ is the elevated levels of PFAS (per-poly fluroalkyl substances)  or “forever chemicals” proven to be harmful to the environment and people and found in water supplies.

“Even rainwater cannot be considered clean today as it contains PFAS chemicals that are dangerous even in small amounts. It is an area I would like to examine further.”

He points to a gap in NZ’s water legislation that means domestic home-supplied water sources are not subject to the same regulated standards as council-supplied households.

“But there are 800,000 people in NZ sourcing water this way and the failure rate against council-supplied water is high. 

“There is a real need there for the government to extend that to all households.”

The full thesis report can be found here.

The latest Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll shows National up 1.4 points to 29.8 percent, while Labour is down 1.0 point to 33.4 percent. New Zealand First surged 3.9 points to 13.6 percent while ACT has 9 percent.

On this basis the Coalition would have 65 seats of the 120 seats, compared to 55 for the opposition bloc.

Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori all lose ground, while The Opportunity Party sits at 2.6 percent outside Parliament. The Greens are down 2.7 points to 7.8 percent, while Te Pāti Māori is down 0.6 points to 2.6 percent.

In preferred prime minister rankings, Chris Hipkins leads on 21.7 percent despite a dip, followed by Christopher Luxon on 20.5 percent, with Winston Peters rising to 12.1 percent.

A more detailed breakdown of the results is on the Taxpayers Union website.