Just one of millions of cases worldwide:-

by Andrew Korybko

Instead of waiting for Pashinyan to hold a referendum on joining the EU, which he might never end up doing in order to retain the advantages from membership in the Eurasian Economic Union for as long as possible, Putin might cut Armenia off right away if Pashinyan wins re-election by hook or by crook.

A journalist asked Putin over the weekend about his reaction to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan hosting Zelensky last week and giving him a platform to threaten Russia. Putin dodged that part of the question but elaborated on the future of their ties. Russia wants only the best for Armenia and will respect its people’s wishes, he said, in connection with which he proposed that they hold a referendum on Pashinyan’s plans to join the EU since that policy risks ruining economic ties with Russia.

As a reminder, Putin said that a little less than one-quarter of Armenia’s GDP comes from trade with Russia, around $7 billion out of $29 billion last year. The advantages that it derives from membership in the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union apply to “agriculture, the processing industry, customs and other duties, and so on and so forth. This also applies to migration.” If its people decide to end them, Putin said, then Russia will begin the process of “a gentle, intelligent and mutually beneficial divorce.”

Putin hosted Pashinyan for candid talks in early April that were assessed here as representing the moment of truth in their relations. The day after, “A Top Russian Official Rang The Alarm About Deteriorating Relations With Armenia”, specifically condemning last August’s “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP) for upsetting the regional geostrategic balance. This was followed last week by the EU solidifying its influence in Armenia ahead of next month’s elections.

The writing is on the wall and it reads that Pashinyan, whether by hook or by crook, will win re-election and consequently subordinate Armenia to the West for turbocharging the TRIPP-driven expansion of its influence along Russia’s entire southern periphery. Their mutual Azeri neighbor’s new de facto alliance with Ukraine naturally spikes Russia’s threat assessment of it and raises the risk of protracted instability across the broader region for the reasons explained here.

What’s unfolding along Russia’s southern flank is the outcome of what can be described as the Neo-Reagan Doctrine, or Trump 2.0’s accelerated rolling back of Russian influence across the world, with a special focus on its “sphere of influence” known as the “Near Abroad”. If this isn’t reversed in Armenia through the patriotic opposition’s victory against all odds, and if Pashinyan swiftly moves to harm Russian interests even more than he already has, then their “divorce” might not be so “gentle”.

The rise of Russia’s hardliner faction that was touched upon here reduces the likelihood of Putin agreeing to retain Armenia’s previously mentioned benefits from the Eurasian Economic Union. Instead, if Russian influence in Armenia is irreversibly lost for the indefinite future (with or without a referendum on Pashinyan’s policy of joining the EU), then he might just cut it off right away. The goal might be to spark a last-ditch patriotic uprising and then let Russia’s foes take care of wayward Armenia if that fails.

Far from a “gentle” divorce, it might be a very nasty one, and the end result could be the Azeri-Turkish Axis formalizing Armenia’s status as their joint “Neo-Ottoman Sanjak” with all the socio-cultural costs that were predicted here. If that’s seemingly inevitable in the event of Pashinyan’s re-election by hook or by crook, the hardliners might argue, then it’s better to radically speed everything up in the hopes that shocking Armenians might get them to resist instead of letting it slowly unfold till it’s too late to reverse.

by Shane Murray

You think the speed camera on State Highway 1 is about road safety. That’s what they told you. That’s what the media release said. That’s what the minister repeated when someone asked. Road safety. Saving lives.

Keeping Kiwis safe.

Here’s what they didn’t tell you.
The company operating those fixed average speed cameras is not a New Zealand company. It’s not even Australian anymore.

Redflex — the name on the hardware — was swallowed up in 2021 by Verra Mobility, a corporation listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange in New York and headquartered in Arizona. The cameras on our roads are American-owned infrastructure. Every ticket issued. Every plate read. Every vehicle tracked.

That’s the first thing.

The mobile speed cameras — the ones parked on the side of the road watching you drive past — are run by a different company.

Acusensus. Listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. Their NZ contract runs to December 2029 and is worth up to twenty million dollars a year of your money. Twenty million. Per year. To a foreign-listed company that is not accountable to you, to your council, or to your parliament.

And here’s where it gets interesting.

Acusensus isn’t just measuring speed. Their camera systems are actively testing detection for seatbelts, mobile phone use, and fatigue monitoring. These are AI systems watching the inside of your vehicle as you drive past. Not just clocking your speed. Watching you. That is confirmed in their own documentation.

Now follow the data.

Every plate read by every speed camera feeds into a system called Alcyon. That’s Verra Mobility’s cloud platform — built and managed in the United States by an American corporation. Alcyon is directly integrated with New Zealand’s Motor Vehicle Register. Your vehicle’s registration history.

Integrated with the Traffic Offence History database. Your infringement record.

Integrated with the Ministry of Justice. And integrated with the Common Payments System — the government’s payment infrastructure.

A US corporation has direct live access to those New Zealand government databases. That happened. That is live right now.

Where is your data stored. Not in New Zealand. Verra Mobility stores all of it on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure servers located in Australia. Not here. Over the Tasman. On servers operated by American technology companies that are legally required under the United States CLOUD Act of 2018 to hand data to US authorities on demand. No New Zealand court order required. No notification to you required. Your vehicle movement data. Gone.

NZTA’s own consultants saw this coming. In 2022 they flagged that there was — and I’m using their exact words — “little or no national oversight of the camera system.”
They identified four separate data risks rated red. Not amber. Red. Rated as almost certain to occur with severe impacts if they did. The advice was documented. The risks were named. The system was deployed anyway.

Originally the plan was 800 cameras generating three million infringement notices a year. They scaled it back — for now — to 204 cameras and 1.1 million notices. The infrastructure though. The infrastructure was built to the bigger number. It is sitting there.

Ready to scale.

And it’s already being used for more than speed.

The same Automatic Number Plate Recognition network that reads your plate at a speed camera is the same network feeding the tolling system. The same network that will power the congestion charging bill currently moving through parliament. The same network used for commercial vehicle monitoring. One physical camera network.

Multiple control functions. All running through the same American corporate data infrastructure.

New Zealand Police have documented publicly that they use ANPR data for what they call “intelligence analysis that can build a pattern of life picture of a particular vehicle’s movements over up to 12 months.”

Not just catching speeders. Building a picture of where you go. When you go there. How often. Over a year. Your life. Mapped.

That is what this network is. That is what it does.

One road camera. Three foreign corporations. Two American cloud platforms. Four government databases.

Twelve months of your movements on file. Zero New Zealand data sovereignty.
They called it road safety.

Part Two coming. We’re going deeper into who built this, who approved it, and what congestion charging means for the next phase of this network.

Do your own research. Ask your own questions. Share this if it matters to you.

Here is a Hantavirus Fact sheet from the early 90’s from a Government Health Department. It CLEARLY states Hantavirus is NOT contagious! Everyone learn this and pass it on. This is so maddening to me. pic.twitter.com/PS86zqQILP

— Whiplash347 (@Whiplash437) May 11, 2026

by Muriel Newman

The recent appointment of ten unelected iwi representatives with full voting rights onto a Council Committee of just six elected Councillors is a stark illustration that the tribal takeover of Local Government in New Zealand is now well underway.

But before we examine a prominent King’s Counsel’s findings that this development as unlawful, we should first ask a more fundamental question: how on earth has it come to this in a supposedly democratic country?

To answer that question, we need to revisit the egregious betrayal of voters by Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party after the 2020 election, when they campaigned on one set of promises only to deliver something entirely different once elected to office as a majority government.

At the behest of their powerful 15-strong Maori caucus, Labour unleashed an effective tribal takeover of New Zealand – without any mandate whatsoever from voters.  

The blueprint for their betrayal had, of course, been mapped out a year earlier under the guise of a plan to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. However, the He Puapua strategy to replace democracy with tribal rule by 2040, was deemed to be so radical that it was kept secret from their New Zealand First Coalition partner – and from the public – until the 2020 election delivered the Party the opportunity to implement it without scrutiny.

The mainstream media was even silenced, through the announcement of a new $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund that required recipients to promote the “Te Tiriti partnership” fabrication – which was the central tenet of He Puapua – as a condition of their funding.

Naturally, the cash-strapped, largely left-leaning media sector welcomed the handouts and were only too willing to facilitate Labour’s wishes.  

To embed the “Te Tiriti” agenda within the state sector, Labour turbo-charged the Office of Maori-Crown Relations, which had been set up in 2019 as an agency co-managed by tribal leaders, giving iwi power brokers access to the entire State sector. Over 200 staff were deployed to undertake a mass “re-education” campaign, forcing Government agencies to adopt “Te Tiriti”, and compelling employees to sing waiata, call New Zealand “Aotearoa”, and speak the Maori language.

A key objective was to embed the partnership agenda within State sector decision-making bodies, since that gave unelected and unaccountable tribal representatives the balance of power through the right of veto in all “co-governance” arrangements.

It was through this mechanism that Labour orchestrated an effective tribal takeover of our country.

As the demands of iwi leaders escalated, major public sector reforms were undertaken.

Without warning – and right in the middle of the pandemic – the country’s District Health Boards were disestablished and replaced by a centralised system co-governed by Maori that elevated race above clinical need as a deciding factor in patient health care. 

Maori control of the country’s freshwater was orchestrated through Three Waters, which centralised community water infrastructure and assets to enable co-governance.

And the long-standing democratic right of communities to reject council decisions to establish Maori wards without public consultation was abolished to enable the tribal takeover of Local Government.

Private sector agencies were also targeted through new laws that required regulatory bodies to impose Te Tiriti partnership requirements onto real estate agents, nurses, doctors, pharmacists, charities – and even re-registering societies.  

As the 2023 election approached, the public became increasingly alarmed by these developments, but were reassured by pledges from National, ACT and New Zealand First, that if elected, the tribal influence would be removed.

Coalition Agreements promised the Maori Health Authority and Three Waters would be abolished, local government petition rights would be restored, Treaty principles would be removed from legislation, He Puapua would be stopped, no race-based laws would be enacted, and equal rights would be restored.

But the new Government underestimated just how deeply public officials had been captured. Many of the nearly 20,000 extra bureaucrats hired under Labour were committed He Puapua advocates who are now pro-actively sabotaging the Coalition’s attempts to dismantle it.

While some flagship projects were axed, the ideological machinery remains firmly embedded in the State sector, which explains why so many Coalition Bills – even those supposedly designed to reject race-based provisions and restore equal rights – still end up prioritising tribal influence.

The much‑vaunted Fast‑track Approvals legislation is a glaring example. Despite all the tough talk, it still mandates that local Maori are notified of projects, and that ‘expert panels’ include a member ‘qualified in a Maori worldview’ – which in practice means someone sympathetic to iwi demands.

This has now resulted in a five-month delay for the Santana Minerals application for a gold mine on the West Coast – and an alleged demand from iwi for a $180 million payoff.

In other words, instead of the new legislation treating iwi the same as everyone else – the race-based privileges included in the law are now creating the same problems of delays and blackmail that crippled the Resource Management Act.

It’s the same story with the Marine and Coastal Area Act amendments that were introduced by the Coalition last year. Instead of removing “tikanga” or Maori custom from the legislation – since that was the reason the law went off the rails in the first place – it was retained. The predictable result is that the Coalition’s reforms are on track to make no material difference at all to case outcomes, leaving New Zealand’s coastline still likely to fall into tribal hands.     

In fact, if future claims follow the pattern as the first case heard under the new law, the only option to save the coast is if ACT and New Zealand First pledge to repeal the Marine and Coastal Area Act and restore Crown ownership of the coastline – in the national interest – by reinstating the 2004 Foreshore and Seabed Act.

The RMA reforms are following the same disastrous pattern. Instead of terminating all Treaty-related agreements with iwi that councils have entered into over the years, the Planning and the Natural Environment Bills intend carrying them through into the new legislation. This means favoured iwi will still be able to demand cultural assessment reports – at the applicants’ expense – and hold out their hand for “compensation” to sooth their cultural needs, like $180 million from a mining company.  

And with the draft legislation signalling all existing iwi agreements with councils will be carried forward, there’s now a rush of new arrangements being established up and down the country, ahead of the law change, as iwi engineer themselves a privileged status in Local Government decision-making into the future – not to mention the gravy-train of lucrative financial rewards that brings.

All of this is in spite of the 2025 High Court ruling in Hart v Marlborough District Council confirming that local councils are not part of the Crown and therefore have no Treaty obligations beyond what Parliament explicitly legislates.

In other words, these far-reaching “partnership” agreements between iwi and activist councils are not required by law. Yet because the Coalition has failed to make this explicit, many local authorities – including activist councils like Whangarei, where voters deliberately removed Maori seats – are now about to “embed” Te Tiriti partnership obligations across their entire operation.

As mentioned earlier, the latest egregious power grab involves the Far North District Council’s decision to appoint 10 iwi representatives with voting rights onto its Te Kuaka Committee for Maori Strategic Relationships, which had just six elected council members.

While appointing a majority of iwi representatives to over-ride decision-making by a minority of elected councillors, would appear to be undemocratic, it is, however, permitted under the law: Clause 31 (1) of Schedule 7 of the Local Government Act states “members of a committee or sub-committee may, but not need be, elected members of the local authority” and 32(1) enables the granting of voting rights.

This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator, King’s Counsel Gary Judd, argues that the appointment of those ten iwi representatives is however, unlawful:

“The first purpose of local government, stated in s 10 of the LGA is to enable democratic local decision-making and action by, and on behalf of, communities, and the role of a local authority such as FNDC is to give effect to its purpose (s 11). A local authority must act in accordance with principles set out in s 14. The first is to conduct its business in an open, transparent, and democratically accountable manner. Another principle is that it should provide opportunities for Māori to contribute to its decision-making processes. That doesn’t mean, hand over decision-making to iwi and hapu. That runs completely counter to the requirements for democratic decision-making and democratic accountability.”

He accuses Councillors – apart from whistleblower Davina Smolders – of “engineering a transfer of power to iwi and hapu, no doubt in pursuance of the claim to have sovereignty over the north. The mayor and all but one of the elected members are promoting or supporting this unlawful transfer of power or are cravenly standing by and allowing it to happen.”

What’s worse, is that the Minister of Local Government, Simon Watts, has been persuaded by his public service advisors not to act: “I have received advice on the Far North District Council, and it does not meet the threshold for Ministerial intervention. It is a local matter, and it needs to be handled locally…”

This is not what people voted for when electing the National-led Coalition Government in 2023.  

Voters expected the Coalition to defend democracy and prevent the iwi takeover of councils. Since the Local Government (System Improvements) Amendment Bill is currently in front of Parliament, a Supplementary Order Paper amending Schedule 7 of the Local Government Act to read “members of a committee or sub-committee MUST be elected members of a local authority” could be included in that Bill to fix the problem.  

Furthermore, by making the change retrospective, all existing arrangements between iwi and councils would be abolished.

And to be sure that no iwi agreements are carried forward to corrupt the new Planning and Natural Environment legislation, since those Bills are still in front of Parliament, an amendment could be added to the effect that any iwi arrangements with Councils would lapse as soon as the new laws take effect. This would ensure that activist councils cannot continue to advance an iwi power-grab through the back door.

These recent attempts by iwi leaders to control local government show just how serious this tribal takeover has become. Just because the government changed, it doesn’t mean New Zealand is safe. Quite the opposite. With the framework for tribal rule already in place, iwi are now proactively hunting for every opportunity to impose their controls onto an unsuspecting public.

This is why other related election pledges, yet to be addressed – such as repealing or replacing Treaty principles in twenty-three pieces of legislation and overhauling the Waitangi Tribunal – need to be completed before the election.

It’s also why any party that pledges “to remove all race-based initiatives from legislation” as a bottom line during the election campaign, should be supported – because they understand that the only way to guarantee equal rights is for a nation to have colourblind statutes.  

It’s what a number of OECD countries have already done – including Sweden, Finland, Austria, Holland, France, and Belgium. New Zealand now needs to now follow suit.

What this disastrous chapter in our history reveals is not only that the Labour Party can longer be trusted, but that tribal leaders have become increasingly deceptive and greedy in their relentless push to undermine democracy and grab power and public resources for themselves.

Furthermore, this saga underscores how critical courage and resolve are in any political party that claims they are defending our democracy – and it also reminds us just how vital independent voices like Gary Judd KC have become in calling out unlawful overreach and standing up for the rights of all New Zealanders.

From the NZCPR website

Note that the river that runs through Lyon is the Saone, not the Rhone.