by Steven Gaskell

According to the latest fashionable academic theory coming out of the University of Auckland, Māori housing struggles today can largely be traced back to colonialism introducing private property, debt and home ownership systems that supposedly “reshaped Māori life”. In other words, the modern housing market is now apparently responsible not only for interest rates and rent increases, but also for rewriting centuries of history into a permanent grievance narrative where every social problem somehow traces back to Captain Cook personally inventing mortgages.

The problem with these theories is they conveniently skip over an awkward historical reality: pre-colonial housing standards were hardly the utopian communal paradise modern academics like to romanticise. Traditional Māori housing largely consisted of small raupō, timber and earth structures with dirt floors, smoke-filled interiors, little insulation, minimal sanitation and limited protection against disease or harsh weather. Life expectancy was dramatically lower than modern standards, tribal warfare was common, and entire communities could be displaced, enslaved or wiped out through conflict, famine and scarcity long before Europeans arrived.

Pretending nothing improved post European requires wilful blindness. Colonisation also introduced large-scale infrastructure, modern medicine, sanitation systems, permanent timber housing, steel tools, roads, plumbing, electricity, literacy, organised commerce, banking and legal property rights. Over time New Zealand went on to achieve one of the highest home ownership rates in the developed world during much of the twentieth century. Millions of ordinary working-class families, Māori included, benefited from those systems.

Yet modern academia increasingly talks as though private property itself is some sinister colonial conspiracy imposed on innocent collectivist societies living in harmony until capitalism arrived to ruin everything. Apparently having legal ownership of your own home, the ability to borrow capital, accumulate wealth and pass assets to your children is now considered evidence of oppression rather than progress. By that logic, the bank manager is basically the new imperial governor.

The real issue facing Māori, Pacific and non-Māori families alike today is not “colonial housing structures” but the same brutal economic pressures hammering every working household in New Zealand: inflated house prices, endless bureaucracy, restrictive planning laws, mass immigration pressures, construction costs, stagnant productivity, high interest rates and decades of political cowardice from governments terrified of upsetting the property market. None of those problems are solved by another taxpayer-funded thesis blaming nineteenth-century colonisation for twenty-first-century zoning regulations.

But universities keep circling back to the same ideological comfort blanket because it is easier to blame history than confront present-day policy failure. The formula is now painfully predictable: capitalism bad, colonialism worse, Western systems inherently oppressive, more public funding required for further research. Entire academic careers now appear to depend on stretching colonialism far enough to explain literally everything from housing affordability to supermarket prices.

At some point New Zealanders are entitled to ask whether universities are still researching solutions, or simply producing increasingly elaborate ways to turn the past into a permanent political industry.

Steven is an entrepreneur and an ex RNZN diver who likes travelling, renovating houses, Swiss Watches, history, chocolate art and art deco.

The hide is a little hut with unglazed windows that allow people to watch the birds.

Breaking news: Trump administration officials have pressed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to design a $250 bill featuring the president’s portrait, in what would be the first appearance of a living person on U.S. currency in more than 150 years. https://t.co/S8sqdKSB7i

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 28, 2026

The law currently states no living president can appear on currency, but the administration is preparing for the possibility that Congress will pass legislation authorizing the special Trump bill.

“It’s all in the hands of… Capitol Hill,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in the White House briefing room Thursday. “We prepared things in advance… but we will stick to the law.”

It does smack a bit of what dictatorships do and thus is not a good look. Even the 3rd Reich didn’t put Hitler’s portrait on banknotes and the 4th Reich hasn’t put Merz or von der Leyen’s portrait on EU banknotes (yet). Neither did the Soviet Union put Stalin’s portrait on its banknotes. However, Queen Elizabeth’s portrait has long been on British and Commonwealth banknotes. —Eds

Mad Muslim thinking.

by Tony Orman

Beekeeping is the world’s second oldest profession. The first apiarists were the ancient Egyptians. Bees were royal symbols, the tears of Ra, the sun god.

This is one very good instruction book, ideal for the amateur or expert beekeeper. Don’t be deterred by the fact that it’s Australian-based, not New Zealand, for it’s equally applicable. 

The father and son authors are behind the incredible invention of the Flow Hive which took years of trial and error in its development to currently having sold over 130,000 units in 130 countries and in the process transforming beekeeping everywhere.

Great initiative by the two brothers 

It took tons of intelligence, ingenuity, patience and perseverance by father and son.

An topic which is particularly impressive is the conservation of bees because they have been and are, under constant threat from pesticides. Bees are vital as pollinators, an integral part of the earth’s dynamic ecosystem.

While this 285 page book is eye-opening for any reader concerned about the environment, it is especially aimed at the beekeeper, beginner or seasoned. Included are sections detailing the complete beginner set-up, year-round bee care, honey harvesting, expert pest control, trouble-shooting solutions, honey recipes and environment impact.

The book is delightfully written, brilliantly and profusely illustrated and revealing of the wonderful world of bees — it will give you a real buzz.

Flow Hive’s Bees and Beekeeping by Cedar and Stuart Anderson, published by Murdoch Books (NZ distributor Allen and Unwin) has an RRP of $49.99.

Greedflation: Inflation that is driven by or attributed to corporate greed and price gouging.

from Daily Telegraph NZ

A bombshell collection of internal government files, calendar entries, and Official Information Act (OIA) responses has exposed active executive concealment of decisions about youth vaccine safety data at a meeting that included former Prime Ministers Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins and other Ministers of the New Zealand government.

This was shortly before the government’s “Two Jabs for Summer” campaign which was designed to coerce young New Zealanders to get Covid mRNA shots.

“Instead of warning families about the risks from the mRNA shots for young people’s hearts, the government actively decided to hide important information and press ahead with its campaign that targeted our youth. It just defies belief” says Aly Cook from the NZ Outdoors and Freedom Party, who has spent months with party leader Sue Grey obtaining official information and piecing it together.

The documents track a critical timeline around Friday, 13 August 2021, the day the previous Labour Government finalised its strategy to enforce rigid two-dose vaccine mandates on adolescents aged 12 to 15, and discriminate against any New Zealanders who did not have a vaccine passport. The assembled evidence proves that senior Ministers were present at a high-stakes, unminuted zoom meeting where they decided to hide youth vaccine safety data from the public. “The decision to force vaccination on your people was so wrong” says Sue Grey.

“The government knew it was neither safe nor effective at preventing infection and transmission, yet they met and agreed to hide information about risks from their own experts. Whatever happened to informed consent, human rights or ethics? Then, when we started asking hard questions, we got contradicting formal government denials and altered public records in a failed and clumsy attempt to cover up their participation”.

Key Discoveries in the Leaked Timeline

• The Expert Warning (1 August 2021): Chief Health NZ Science Advisor Dr. Ian Town forwarded an urgent assessment from Professor David Skegg explicitly advising that it would be “sensible to defer making a decision” on the youth rollout until more clinical evidence was available.
• The Single-Dose Strategy (13 August 2021, 1:07 PM): Just 23 minutes before Ministers met, internal briefing bullet points prepared by Dr Town explicitly suggested a “one dose schedule in 12–15 year olds.”
• The Directive to Suppress (13 August 2021, 1:07 PM): The same briefing paper delivered a direct instruction to sanitise public messaging: “It was suggested that the wording around the potential benefit that an extended dosing interval may have with regard to myocarditis risk should be removed or re-worded…”
• The Concealed Meeting (13 August 2021, 1:30 PM): A Ministry of Health agenda confirms a “Vaccine Ministers Meeting” was locked in via Zoom, chaired by Hon Chris Hipkins and attended by PM Jacinda Ardern, Finance Minister Grant Robertson, and Health Minister Andrew Little to implement the 12–15 rollout strategy.

Subsequent OIA requests to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) were met with flat denials, claiming records of such a meeting “do not exist.”

Exceeding the Failures of the Royal Commission

While the Royal Commission of Inquiry’s Phase Two Report heavily censured the state for structural flaws and a lack of transparency, this new evidence points to an active subversion of democratic oversight.

“The executive branch was directly driving a political narrative to suppress risk communication just minutes before sitting down to mandate a two-dose framework on our children,” says NZ Outdoors and Freedom Party Media Spokesperson Aly Cook. “They then took active steps to ensure no minutes were kept, diaries were fragmented, and formal OIA requests were falsely denied to hide the fact that they were ever in the room. Then MOH finally sends an Agenda that shows they were all in the meeting and it was chaired by Hipkins, Ardern was present, Little was present. Yet all of their diaries do not have this vital and important meeting and Robertson’s diary is altered on that meeting only and out of chronological order.This appears to move the needle from pandemic overreach into a calculated subversion of the public archive.”

Original article

We know that Mr Z is a cocaine head and it’s almost certainly supplied to him by the CIA.

The famous pictures below of Starmer with Führer Merz and Napoleon Macron inside a railway carriage from a meeting with the Z in Kiev back to Poland in May 2025 show what is believed to be a bag of cocaine, despite the expected official denials. At the time an unnamed Ambassador said that snorting the white powder is a common practice among the elite, see this post.

Comrade Jacinda probably was and still is a user:

Europe’s cocaine use has skyrocketed over the last few years. It’s the third-most used psychoactive substance on the continent, surpassed only by alcohol and cannabis. One gram of cocaine costs between €50 and €80 for end-users, DW reported last June. This can be divided into around 15 portions, with a so-called line, therefore, only costing around €4 – about the price of a glass of wine in a bar.

So are the EU’s warlords fuelled by cocaine highs? And thus does it obscure in their heads that without the US, Nato is a paper tiger incapable of conducting a successful invasion of Russia? The EU members of Nato and Starmerland have sent hundreds of projectiles to Mr Z and his Nazis to fire at Russia and they have run low. That explains why they didn’t partake in Trump/Netanyahu’s attack on Iran — they just weren’t able to.

The US burned through about 45% of its arsenal in the 40 day war on Iran — and that may resume — it has no projectiles to spare for the EU’s plans for war on Russia. Many years of Green Party ideology have seen Europe deindustralise itself and its ability to make enough new missiles, tanks and warplanes for its planned invasion of Russia is severely limited. Führer Merz has made much of his sending 1,800 German soldiers to Lithuania to strut around, and plans to send another 3,000 soldiers and 200 civilian staff by the end of next year! Does he know that his predecessor Adolf Hitler had 4 million troops in the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941?

That’s where things are at now, we’ll see what Nato does with the escalation of their war that the EU and Starmer have obsessively sought to achieve: will they back down?