Sunday, even though it was an accident, the Greens reminded us why New Zealand needs an ACT party (and the National Party helped a little, too).
Yesterday morning the Greens accidentally put their new tax policy on their website, and the Herald found it.
If you believe the Herald, it’s a doozy. The whole policy is based on a dismal idea: ‘your problems were caused by someone else’s success, if you vote for us we’ll take their money and give it to you.’
They want a 45 per cent top tax rate on incomes, a death tax on inheritances, and an annual ‘wealth tax’ on your home. It’s as if they wanted to highlight what ACT stands for in reverse.
There are few problems in New Zealand that wouldn’t be easier faced if we were a wealthier country. Affording healthcare. Building infrastructure. Paying pensions to retirees. Defending the fourth largest maritime territory in the world (yes, that’s a fact). It’s all easier if we are wealthier.
Some might say we are wealthy, but need to tax more. The truth is that, among the 40 developed nations in the OECD, we are at the average for taxing, but in the bottom quarter for incomes. Squeezing the pips harder won’t work, we need to grow.
We need ACT to represent all those New Zealanders with a different vision, where we are a nation or winners who celebrate success.
We actually need more wealth in New Zealand. More investment and more success. Every billionaire from Rocket Lab to Xero to Zuru has made us a better country. Every success story built from blood, sweat, tears and imagination means more jobs and higher incomes that we wouldn’t otherwise have.
It does something else. It inspires some Kiwi, somewhere to be the next success story. That is the cream of a New Zealand with its potential unlocked. But, if tall poppy syndrome becomes official policy and Government goes on a witch hunt for ‘undeserved’ success, the golden goose either flies or dies.
Nobody has to build up a small business by risking equity from the home their children sleep in. They take the risk because they’ll be rewarded if it works out. The Greens’ approach says you’ll be taxed harder if your risks work out, and given more if you don’t try at all.
Make no mistake, though, the Green Party have shown the alternative vision. If they succeed, they are coming for our money in pursuit of that vision. Even dying won’t be an escape. They will promote the dark underbelly of our culture, tall poppy syndrome, to official Government policy.
That’s why the number one job this election is to lock Labour and their outriders out of power. But that won’t be enough.
The National Party has decided, after 50 years, that it supports Compulsory Super after all. In National’s famous ‘Dancing Cossacks’ ad (mandatory watching for political nerds, here) Muldoon declares Labour’s eight per cent compulsory super contribution will be nixed because it ‘won’t pay out its full benefit until 2028.’ Now they want to campaign on 12 per cent.
Everyone loves compulsory super until they’re asked where the money comes from. For many people, it will be the money they were using to pay down their mortgage or invest in their small business.
There may be some appeal, but at the very least there needs to be carve-outs for investing in business and paying off mortgages, otherwise the only winners will be banks who get more fees for managing Kiwisaver and more interest by lending money longer. Ordinary people will be no better off, just have fewer choices.
The campaign has barely started, and New Zealand needs an ACT Party more than ever.
and while on that theme — quitting Quebecin Canada…
The sort of thing we can expect with a Labour/Green government: lots more taxes and government funding of people who dislike you.
In a totally disingenuous speech today outside 10 Downing Street, showing just how delusional, insular and tone-deaf he is, he said he’s going — nominations within his party for his replacement open on 7 July and the process will be complete ‘by the summer recess.’
Clearly he’s been told forcefully that he is a disaster and must go, but for only his party’s showing in the polls: his cronies probably have the same policy beliefs as he does.
Just as Comrade Jacinda’s destructive legacy is still with us in NZ after more than 3 years, Starmer’s will be with Brits for a long time.
… the ‘Canes racked up 60 points in what was a truly dominant thrashing of the second-best club in the tournament this year, who managed just five points in reply. –Planet Rugby, 20 June 2026
They led the competition for most of the season, but could they win the finals? The Wellington Hurricanes astounded the pundits with finals scores of 66-16, 57-12 and 60-5: an average of 61 to 11! Over 30,000 fans in the capital’s Caketin couldn’t believe Saturday night’s fnal – nine tries, six conversions and a penalty to one try that may have been short! The home side played with the wind in the first half and Chiefs’ kicker Damian McKenzie got an early lesson in coping with the weather when his kick off didn’t make the Hurricanes 10 metre mark and drifted back to the half way.
Playing with the wind works on the principle of getting runs on the board and letting the opposition play catch-up. The ‘Canes duly scored 29 unanswered points in the first 40 minutes but then amazingly added 31 in the second half!
Not matching the power play on the park
The best that can be said of the Chiefs is that they never gave up. But their times of dominance were very few and they just couldn’t match the power, possession and precision of the home side. Stars during round-robin matches such as Quinn Tupaea and Damian McKenzie were nullified by close marking, and not allowing them the freedom to run any distance. In the forwards Luke Jacobson, Josh Lord, Samisoni Taukei’aho toiled hard, but never gained dominance in the tight play.
Was there a problem with the coaching strategy? Jono Gibbs seemed to be content in playing into the wind to focus on keeping the Hurricanes’ score down and wait for the inevitable Chiefs surge after the break. This compared with the home’s team’s determination to keep scoring tries in the second forty with the wind in their faces.
Unfortunately with what limited possession they had, the visitors turned over a lot of ball and sometimes kicked it away.
Playing to a winning formula
The Hurricanes have waited 10 years to win the Super-Rugby trophy and they were not going to let the opportunity slip. They were strong up front getting plenty of ball in the set pieces and this possession was used very effectively by half back Cam Roigard who distributed it quickly. At first five, “player of the match” Reuben Love, had a brilliant game feeding his outsides efficiently and running with speed and unexpected changes of direction. He capped off the match by scoring the final try with a dramatic dive into the corner.
Jordie Barrett was the key man in mid field and often threw long passes wide to the wings – a tactics that has resulted in so many tries to wingers Josh Moorby and Fehi Finenangaofo in the 2026 games. They ended the final with each having a scored a record 18 tries for a Super Rugby season.
All the forwards played well with Asafo Aumua throwing accurately into the lineout and running powerfully in the loose; Warner Dearns taking plenty of lineout ball and charging effectively in the open, and co-captain Du’Plessis Kirifi leading by example in the tight and loose.
The fitness of the Hurricanes was a key factor in their success, as was their understanding of what their fellow players were going to do and their shear enjoyment in setting their team mates up for breaks and tries. It was no surprise that the capital team slaughtered the next best side on Saturday to take the country premier rugby trophy! It may not happen again.
Apart from the people attractions — 🙂 — you notice the clean, well-maintained streets and buildings, without trash, graffiti, homeless and panhandlers…
There are quite a few YouTube videos on this theme.
The shortest day of the year has passed, readers. Today we are around the corner and heading to a new season.
June is the first month of winter and the month that most of the different types of strawberry plants become available in garden centres.
Strawberries are a woodland plant and the modern strawberries such as Monterey have been bred from the original wild ones. This is important information to use when you come to plant strawberries in containers or in strawberry beds. Strawberries do best in a partly sunny situation, with ample woodland debris such as rotting leaves and decaying wood.
As there are ample fallen leaves available at this time, you can collect these and put them through a shredder or lay them on a bit of lawn (where it does not matter) and run over them with a rotary mower.
Your catcher should be full of nicely shredded leaves. Mix with this about a similar amount of untreated sawdust for the decaying wood.
A good sprinkling of Wallys Real Blood and Bone incorporated will become your woodland mix.
This should be spread into the area where you are going to plant your strawberries and covered with a layer of good purchased compost.
If you are going to plant into containers or into troughs, then add your woodland mix to an equal amount of compost.
Incorporate all together well for the potting medium.
Plant up your strawberry plants and then drench them with Mycorrcin, MBL and water. The Mycorrcin has been proven in trials, to increase the yield of strawberries by 200 to 400%. A 2-weekly spray of the plants with Mycorrcin is the on going treatment (MBL can be added to this if you like).
For those who like to obtain the most health benefits from their home grown produce, add some Ocean Solids and Unlocking Your Soil to the above mix. Those gardeners who have existing strawberries — now is the time to collect the rooted runners to start off a fresh strawberry patch.
Existing plants that have done well and are free of disease can be left in the beds and drenched with the Mycorrcin. Any plants that have not done well or have disease should be removed from the bed. I like to lift my strawberry plants about this time of the year out of their raised gardens. The old plants will have formed clumps and with a sharp knife you can divide up the plants.
Ensure that while the plants are out of the ground the roots are kept moist.
A basin with water in it is ideal for this so as the clumps are separated they can be placed into the basin.
Once all the plants are lifted and sorted you can refresh the bed with the mix described above.
Then select the best of the plants from the basin and plant them into the fresh bed along with any runners that you have not put into a separate new bed.
The earlier you establish your new strawberries the better the crop you will achieve this coming season. Late plantings in spring or early summer will never be as good as plantings now.
Here are some new types to look out for:
forget-me-not Monterey which has a large red strawberry, which is deliciously sweet as well an outstanding flavour. Monterey also has a good disease resistance. Importantly it is also a Day Neutral strawberry variety, which ensures a long harvest starting from October and all the way to March.
This variety is protected PVR. which means unlicensed propagation is not allowed.
You can find Monterey in you favorite M10 store with the name Sweet As, or in your The Warehouse store the retail label will say Sweetie and in the Bunnings store it is just called Monterey. also available at most in Group garden centre members.
Ventana, a variety with medium sized bright red strawberries, with a delicious sweet juicy flesh.
It has a good yield from October to December. Large upright growth habit and is also protected by PVR so unlicensed propagation is not permitted. It’s available from Bunnings over the months of July and August.
Cabrillo, a large bright red strawberry, also with a delicious sweet juicy flesh an excellent flavour with a good yield.
A day neutral variety fruiting from October to March, Cabrillo has a good tolerance to rain and weather damage. Available from Bunnings over June and July.
TENDER PLANT PROTECTION
There are a number of garden plants that do not like the cold or frosts that they will have to face through the next few months.
Some also detest wet soil conditions which can led to wet weather diseases such as root rot.
Citrus trees are a good example of this, wet feet will cause root rots with the loss of leaves and crop, in some cases the loss of the tree.
Newer foliage can also be blackened by frost nipping the tree back.
All your evergreen garden plants that resent wet conditions can be assisted to cope better with a monthly spray of Perkfection.
Remove any mulches around citrus or other plants that dont like wet feet.
If you don’t, they may die during a wet winter.
Those plants that are cold or frost tender can then be sprayed with Wallys Spray on Frost Protection at 50 ml per litre of water to give them frost protection down to minus 16, for one months within 24 hours of spraying.
Then a month later apply a maintenance spray at 25 ml per litre of water. Repeat maintenance spray every 4 weeks.
If you are interested here is a link to my last gardening program with Rodney Hide:-
“After years of lies, censorship, and cover ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability”
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Thursday evening declassified hundreds of pages related to the coverup of the theory that the Covid-19 virus leaked from an American funded lab in Wuhan, China, and the involvement of the nation’s most powerful public health official, Anthony Fauci, in that coverup.
Gabbard said in a statement that Fauci and his allies in the scientific community and intelligence community ripped a page right out of “the deep state playbook.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation first reported on Fauci’s influence on the intelligence community last year.
Today, on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I’m releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr. Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicized elements… pic.twitter.com/ZMdliW4zyS
The investigators on Gabbard’s task force sorted through the documents and heard testimony from whistleblowers who reported retaliation for challenging the narrative preferred by Fauci.
“The covid-19 pandemic caused tremendous hardship and pain for millions of our fellow Americans and for countless people around the world. After years of lies, censorship, and cover ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability,” Gabbard said in a statement.
E-mails Show Fauci’s Extraordinary Influence On The Intelligence Community
Fauci had a conflict of interest as someone whose institute had funded and promoted research to create novel coronaviruses in pursuit of universal vaccines, including at the Wuhan lab, Gabbard said.
But that proved no obstacle when he sought to mold the understanding of the U.S. intelligence community about the deadliest pandemic in a century.
“Given Dr Fauci’s background we absolutely would like to follow-up on his outreach suggestions,” wrote one intelligence official. “In this case he’s not a policymaker … he’s a [subject matter expert] with a wealth of knowledge about current and historical research who probably knows better than most who the real Coronavirus experts are.”
An influential March 2020 scientific paper called “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” that dismissed a lab origin as implausible and that Fauci influenced behind-the-scenes shaped the understanding of the NIC, the documents show.Fauci’s involvement in the inception of the paper only came to light through documents unearthed from the Freedom of Information Act. Those FOIA documents also showed that the virologists argued publicly for a natural origin and sought the approval of Fauci despite harboring secret concerns about a possible lab origin.
The new documents reveal in new detail that during a 90-day review of the intelligence ordered by President Joe Biden, Fauci repeatedly directed the ODNI to his favored experts, the “Proximal Origin” authors and their colleagues.
In June 2021, Fauci advised that the IC consult Scripps Institute virologist Kristian Andersen, the lead author of “Proximal Origin.”
In May 2021, the National Security Council briefed Fauci on a Presidential Daily Brief titled “Worldwide: Origin of covid-19 Pandemic Remains Elusive,” the new documents show.
In that briefing, Fauci appears to have steered the IC to the conclusions of a Tulane virologist who had written about the virus having two separate lineages, suggesting a natural origin. Tulane University virologist Robert Garry, another coauthor of the “Proximal Origin” paper, had written just that sort of analysis that month.
Credit: ODNI
Fauci received another intelligence briefing in June, in the midst of a 90-day review of the intelligence ordered by President Joe Biden, the documents show.
Credit: ODNI
When higher-ups in the intelligence community briefed members of Congress on their analysis of the origins of Covid, they refused to specify which scientific experts they had consulted in their analyses. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chair Brad Wenstrup chastised the intelligence community higher-ups for their lack of transparency, while even Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi said the secrecy made the IC look bad.
Andersen and Garry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Z Division Report
The Z Division, specialists on foreign weapons generation within the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, assessed by May 2020 that the Wuhan lab had all of the ingredients for a lab accident, including a precursor virus genetically similar enough to Covid.
In order to make this assessment the Z Division read the papers authored by the lab’s scientists but also used “additional intelligence information from a CIA Field Analytic Conversation.”
Many of the virologists who have for years dismissed the lab origin theory as a “conspiracy theory” have argued that the lab did not have a virus genetically similar enough to serve as a progenitor virus. The Z Division report — which relies not only on scientific papers but also on classified intelligence, the Department of Energy’s premier weapons experts — appears to challenge that assumption.
Credit: ODNI
“We assess that all the necessary conditions for an accidental release of a laboratory-modified coronavirus — specifically a coronavirus adapted to recognize human cells receptors — were present at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in mid-to-late 2019,” the team wrote in their analysis.
Some members of the IC disagreed with the assessment that a precursor virus was present at the WIV, other records show.
Other documents show that higher-ups at the National Intelligence Council and ODNI dismissed the biological weapons experts within the intelligence community, not only within the Z division, but also within the U.S. national laboratories and in other agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Center for Medical Intelligence.
Credit: ODNI
Ralph Baric Met With U.S. Intel Four Times
Ralph Baric — a virologist who worked on a coronavirus engineering experiments with the WIV — advised the intelligence community at least four times in the first two years of the Covid pandemic, the new documents reveal. One 2018 grant proposal on which Baric and the WIV were collaborators involved the generation of coronaviruses with the same unique features found in the genome of the Covid virus, which some experts have likened to a blueprint for Covid.
Baric serves on the Biological Science Expert Group (BSEG), a group of advisors to the U.S. intelligence on biological weapons, according to his CV. Baric sat for a transcribed interview with congressional investigators in 2024. A typo in the transcript of that interview accidentally revealed the classified information that Baric had in his role as a member of the BSEG advised the intelligence community in the winter of 2020, the DCNF reported last year.
Gabbard’s newly declassified documents reveal that the BSEG advised the intelligence community at least three more times during the 90-day review of the intelligence ordered by Biden, suggesting Baric would have had an invitation to repeatedly weigh in on the IC’s assessment despite the conflict of interest.
Credit: ODNI
A separate e-mail shows someone with an email signature from the NIC recommending that the intelligence community seek Baric’s counsel on the question of whether the virus had been engineered.
An e-mail to Baric’s former email at the University of North Carolina, the institution from which Baric recently retired, bounced back. DCNF emailed his wife and scheduler for comment, but did not receive a reply.
Sick Wuhan Researchers
Several readouts of classified briefings refer to intelligence about researchers in Wuhan who fell ill in in the fall of 2019.
While the declassified documents do not include summaries or any raw intelligence about these researchers, the allusions to the researchers appear to at least in part confirm news reports that virologists in Wuhan working on coronaviruses in the fall of 2019 became sick with a respiratory virus.
Whistleblower Report On Fauci’s Testimony
A whistleblower requested an investigation in 2021 by the intelligence community’s internal watchdog into Fauci for lying to Congress under questioning by Paul about the ties between his institute and research at the Wuhan lab.
Fauci had falsely claimed under oath that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had never funded research at the Wuhan lab that met the definition of “gain-of-function” — research that makes viruses more infectious or deadly.
Despite Fauci’s influence on the IC at the country’s top biodefense official, the IC passed the buck to the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), documents show.
“We determined this complaint does not meet the urgent concern standard because the allegedly false statement was made by a non-IC official and it pertains to an activity that the IC [inspector general] has no reason to believe is related to an intelligence activity or has a direct impact on any IC element, personnel, or capability,” an intelligence official wrote.
It’s not clear that the health department’s watchdog, then under Biden HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, ever acted on that referral.
🇫🇷🇷🇺🇺🇦 Long-range strikes on Russia are prolonging the war and weakening Europe, it was stated in France
➖"This is the path to total war", — said the head of "Unbowed France" Jean-Luc Mélenchon, one of the leaders of the French left. ▪️According to him, the aim of this war is… pic.twitter.com/SQsUrlzaO5
The inquiry alleges that girls were often befriended by young Muslim men who supplied them with alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes as part of the grooming process. It’s surprising that Starmer hasn’t ordered the report supressed.
Rotherham. (This image was processed using digital filters.) A teenage girl, who claims to be a victim of sexual abuse and alleged grooming, poses in Rotherham on September 3, 2014 in Rotherham, England. South Yorkshire Police have launched an independent investigation into its handling of the Rotherham child abuse scandal and will also probe the role of public bodies and council workers. A report claims at least 1,400 children as young as 11 were sexually abused from 1997–2013 in Rotherham. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
The report, published on June 16, calls for a national response to what it describes as decades of institutional failures by police, local authorities, and successive governments.
The 219-page report was produced by the Independent Rape Gang Inquiry, a privately funded initiative chaired by Lowe. According to the report, the inquiry gathered evidence from survivors, relatives, whistleblowers, experts, and former officials.
The documents establish the outcome, but not whether the decision was based on scientific caution, politics, or a communications strategy (based on their belief that the populace is too simple-minded to handle even minor distinctions?).
