Tag: new zealand

Why are people driving around this city in fake foreign police cars?

When Stella* saw a car parked outside a café in the Auckland CBD on Thursday with Chinese police insignia, she was shocked.

“I lived in China for a number of years and seeing a Chinese police car there wouldn’t raise alarm,” she said. “But seeing it here is quite intimidating.”

Across the side of the white Toyota RAV4 were the characters 公安, meaning “public security” and commonly used by police in China. There was a police-style emblem on the door and blue and yellow markings running along the body.

“It made me immediately think, what are the Chinese police doing here?”

I sent one to Freeman Yu, an outspoken critic of the Chinese government’s influence in New Zealand, to see what he made of it.

“I am aware of this matter. I have already reported it to the 105 police online.”

Yu said he reported it because he believed it could be an offence and a potential public safety risk.

In his report to police in July, which Stuff has seen, he said: “The fact that this car is painted to look like a Chinese police vehicle is disturbing and highly inappropriate.”

But the car Yu reported had a different number plate than the one seen by Stella, and was a different make – a white Tesla Model 3.

Images of the Tesla have circulated on Chinese-language social media.

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Greens promise to nationalise 120 supermarkets, costing $2.8 billion

The Green Party is promising to nationalise 120 Woolworths and Foodstuffs supermarkets to create a new Government-owned supermarket, KiwiMart, if elected.

The Greens say the Parliamentary Library costed the policy at $2.8 billion, comprising the cost of nationalising 120 stores and two distribution centres at $1.3b, with a further $1.5b to capitalise KiwiMart as a commercially viable competitor. KiwiMart would have a mandate to prioritise affordability.

Green Party co-leaders Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson announced the policy this morning in Auckland, saying it would help break up the power of the supermarket duopoly. The Green Party would create its supermarket chain by forcing the sale of 120 stores to the Government.

“Two companies control what almost everyone in this country eats, and they take about a million dollars a day in excess profit out of our shopping baskets. That is money that should be in people’s pockets,” Swarbrick said.

“Everyone agrees we need competition in the grocery sector to drive down prices, but successive governments have failed to lure one. That’s why today we are announcing the real solution: a supermarket owned by all New Zealanders, for all New Zealanders.”

In 2021, the Commerce Commission’s market study into the grocery sector draft report suggested a Government-backed new supermarket chain might be an option to increase competition – although the final report, published a year later, did not recommend it.

Overseas, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is a popular figure in the global progressive movement, ran on a platform of establishing publicly owned grocery stores in the city. The first stores are set to open late next year.

KiwiMart was one of several in the Greens’ wider policy targeting food affordability.

Other policies included a bill to ban excessive pricing at supermarkets, which could be extended to other sectors like energy and fuel; increasing funding for the Commerce Commission and hiking penalties for firms; a National Food strategy that would include legislating people’s right to “adequate and nutritious food”, establishing a $150 million a year “Fair Food Fund” for community foodbanks and expanding the school lunches programme, Ka Ora Ka Ako to 150,000 more children.

Co-leader Davidson said the Greens would also revert to the old school lunches model with locally made meals that had high nutritional value. The cost of expanding the programme and reverting to the old model would be $2.2b over the four-year forecast period.

“One in five children in this country live in a household that runs out of food. The Luxon Government’s response was to cut what it spends on a child’s lunch, hand the job to a handful of big companies, and destroy up to 2000 local jobs doing it,” Davidson said.

“Half of those lunches now fail to meet nutrition standards. Children who miss meals are two to four years behind their classmates in maths, reading and science. We will restore Ka Ora, Ka Ako, put it back in the hands of schools and local providers and expand it so 150,000 more tamariki [children] get a decent lunch every day,” she said.

The total cost over four years for the plan was about $6.2b.

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New Zealand: Deaths up, fertility down; is this the legacy of covid “vaccines”?

The births and deaths figures for the year ended June 2026 have just been released by StatsNZ. Compared to the previous year: 

  • Births were down 3.6% 
  • Deaths were up 1.9% 
  • Fertility per woman was down 3.8% 
  • Infant mortality was up by 2.7%, although this last statistic was inflated to some extent by late registrations. 

The rate of deaths per thousand population had been declining since a peak of 7.59 in 2022, falling to 7.02 in 2025. The 2026 figures reversed this trend with a rise to 7.10. This compares to the 2015 – 2019 average of 6.84, meaning that deaths are currently running at 3.8% above pre-pandemic levels. This equates to an additional 1,411 deaths in the year to June 2026, which would not have been expected if pre-pandemic trends had continued.

The New Zealand (“NZ”) fertility rate has been declining every year since 2008 and is now at a historic low. The 2026 figures are 28% below levels necessary to maintain a population. Despite this, the NZ population is continuing to grow as a result of net immigration.

The most concerning figure in the latest data is therefore the upward movement in the rate of mortality. This increase in levels of excess mortality is very concerning. Although the 2026 rise does not yet amount to a trend, it should be a red flag. It points to a drop in the underlying level of immunity which is affecting the whole population.

In this light, it remains disturbing that Health NZ are not closely investigating the possible causes. A comparison of health outcomes of the covid-vaccinated with the unvaccinated is long overdue. Studies published overseas which we have covered have pointed to differences in rates of cancer and cardiac problems, for example. These have disproportionately affected younger age groups.

RCR has produced a comprehensive report showing that 311,257 NZ teens were exposed to an elevated risk of myocarditis from covid injections despite the government having been warned of this risk before rolling out vaccination for this age group. We have previously reported high levels of chest pain presentations for under 40s at emergency departments. Prior to the pandemic, it was recognised in the literature that there is a five-year elevated risk of complications following a myocarditis diagnosis. Five years have now passed since these injections. Health NZ should be following up and producing a very detailed picture of cardiac health outcomes as a precautionary measure. 

A great many published studies have focused on investigating an immune deficit following covid vaccination. Since the year-to-June figures were compiled, more evidence of a health deficit in NZ has emerged. You must have read about the depth of the current flu and winter illness seasonal health crisis. Hospitals are overwhelmed as never before.

On 15 August the NZ Herald reported ‘Middlemore Hospital hits ‘terrifying’ record as paramedics treat patients in corridors’. In one 24-hour period nearly 500 patients presented to the emergency department at Middlemore, beating the previous record of 280. 

According to Stuff newspaper, the St John ambulance service activated its major incident response and emergency operations centre after a week of sustained exceptional demand culminated in its busiest day on record.

This week Stuff headlined ‘Flu wards set up, elective surgery cancelled as hospital admissions surge’. The NZ Herald reported high rates of student absences due to sickness and parents unable to cope at home. The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners has asked practices nationwide to reinstate some covid-era infection controls, including phone-first triage and separating patients with respiratory symptoms.

Without a detailed investigation of the causes of the higher levels of sickness among the general population broken down by age, vaccination status and disease type, it is not possible for Health NZ to understand and respond appropriately to the current health crisis. A task force should be set up to undertake this analysis as a precautionary priority and make their findings public. This will inform and potentially reassure the public by determining how much of this effect is due to covid infection and how much to vaccination or other factors.

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A Law That the People It Targets Can Defeat With a Felt-Tip Pen

The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill was introduced on 24 August 2026 – the very day I arrived back in New Zealand after nearly a month away.

Readers of “A Halflings View” will be well aware of my views about bans or restrictions on access to social media platform by the young. Although the news media have trumpeted the present proposals as a “ban” it is not. It actually constitutes a form of limited restriction.

This article is very much a “first impression” view of the Bill. Much of the material and commentary is gathered from earlier writings I have produced on the subject as well as from other sources among them Ani O’Brien, “Thought Crimes” (Substack) — “Hear me out: Ban the hardware not the software”; the New Zealand Initiative; Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster; UNICEF Aotearoa (Susan Glasgow); Australia’s eSafety Commissioner three-month evaluation (July 2026); UK Ofcom/House of Lords material and reporting on the Online Safety Act; and US litigation (NetChoice; the Louisiana and Arkansas decisions).

Furthermore, this article (and indeed the Bill itself) will not be the final word.

The Bill has not yet had its First Reading and that is unlikely before Parliament rises. But Prime Minister Luxon and Erica Stanford were determined to push this ill-advised proposal ahead at pace, even although what it really amounts to is an announcement until the Bill has its First Reading. And it may even fall at that fence. If it makes it, Select Committee submissions and further commentary will accumulate quickly.

Hence the critique reflects the position as at the time of publication of this article.

What the Bill actually does

The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill, introduced to Parliament on 24 August 2026 by Education Minister Erica Stanford, is a stand-alone statute built on two load-bearing duties.

The first (clause 11) requires operators of “age-restricted platforms” to take reasonable steps to stop New Zealanders under 16 from holding an account. The second (clause 14) requires those operators to produce an annual, written child safety risk assessment covering all under-18s who use the platform.

Behind these sit an enforcement apparatus of warnings, enforceable undertakings, corrective notices, tiered pecuniary penalties (up to the greater of NZ$40 million or 10% of global turnover), and, as a last resort, service restriction orders and access restriction orders that would conscript ISPs, app stores and ancillary providers into preventing access to the platform from New Zealand.

The regulator is the Secretary of Internal Affairs — the chief executive of the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA). More on this disturbing aspect later.

Much of the drafting is careful.

It regulates the account, not the child, so no penalty falls on minors or parents.

It explicitly forbids treating manual date-of-birth entry as a “reasonable step”.

It goes beyond the Privacy Act by requiring destruction of age-assurance data.

The Bill is also more sophisticated than the “ban” it is marketed as. As I have argued on earlier occasions about similar proposals, this is a set of managed restrictions on account-holding, not a prohibition on children seeing content. Publicly available material remains reachable.

But the care in the drafting cannot rescue the concept.

The Bill imports a policy model that has already been trialled next door in Australia and in Britain, and the trials are in.

What follows is the case against it — a case now supported by a striking amount of hard evidence rather than speculation — followed by the specific problem of handing the whole scheme to the DIA.

The central flaw: a “targeted” measure that touches everyone

The Bill’s rhetorical appeal rests on the idea that it targets under-16s. Its mechanism does not.

To reliably prevent a 15-year-old from holding an account, a platform must satisfy itself about the age of every account-holder — which in practice means age-assuring the entire adult population as well.

Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster made the point bluntly when the policy was first floated. Keeping under-16s out means everyone over 16 has to prove they are over 16. The New Zealand Initiative put it the same way — everyone will have to demonstrate they are not under sixteen, including you.

This is the paradox the Bill never resolves, and it is not a drafting quibble but the whole problem.

Clause 11 forbids the “cheap check” (a manual date of birth entry) and forbids relying solely on formal ID or a digital identity service, which forces platforms toward either document upload, facial age-estimation, or “age inference” from behavioural and device signals.

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New Zealand vaccination records show 50% higher-than-expected all-cause mortality after vaccination; Health New Zealand refuses to investigate

I just independently validated Barry Young’s standardized mortality rate (SMR) analysis in my github. I used independent methods and came out with an SMR of 1.5, slightly less than Barry’s numbers (1.65).

In short, people in New Zealand who were vaccinated should be dying at a lower rate than average (SMR <1) due to the healthy vaccinee effect, not at a rate >50% higher than normal.

The refusal to investigate

The fact they are dying at >50% higher than normal rates after their vaccine should trigger Health New Zealand to investigate what is causing the excess deaths.

They refuse to do so. They don’t even want to analyze their own data.

Instead, they are trying to throw their former database administrator, Barry Young, into jail for seven years for exposing the truth about the mortality in New Zealand for those who were vaccinated.

Easy to replicate

Anyone can replicate Barry’s results. It took me only about 15 minutes. All the data is in my github.

An SMR of 1.5 doesn’t mean that the COVID vaccine killed these people. But the health authority refuses to identify what caused the excess deaths. It can’t be COVID because the health authority says that if you get the shots, you can’t get COVID or die from COVID.

And it couldn’t be any of the mitigation measure is recommended by the health authority because we all know that those decrease deaths.

So the excess deaths Barry calculated were all in the vaccinated who were protected against the COVID death.

So why were they dying 50% higher than normal?

Silence from Health New Zealan

It appears that we’re never going to find out the answer to that question because the health authorities are keeping the records under wraps and they refuse to investigate to find the cause of the excess deaths.

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Police officer charged with possessing objectionable publications can be named

One of the police officers charged with possessing objectionable publications after investigations arising from a rapid review of police information security controls, has appeared in court and can be named.

Earlier this month, police announced three officers had been charged after the rapid review in the wake of the McSkimming scandal.

On Wednesday, officer Matthew Rogers appeared at the Manukau District Court facing nine charges relating to alleged offending spanning from 2023 through to 2025.

The 59-year-old’s lawyer, Todd Simmonds KC, confirmed name suppression was not sought, and asked Rogers to be remanded without plea to reappear in court at a later date.

The second officer, who faces 11 charges of possessing objectionable publications, some of which depicted child exploitation, bestiality and rape, appeared in court on Wednesday afternoon.

He was also represented by Todd Simmonds KC, who sought interim name suppression to continue.

Judge Frances Eivers granted the interim application, remanded the officer at large and without plea until a court date in August.

Another Wellington officer has had an initial appearance.

Acting Deputy Commissioner Tim Anderson previously said the decision to prosecute police employees was a “serious but important step to take”, and it reflected the seriousness of the allegations uncovered during the investigations.

Anderson said three investigations remained ongoing as part of the rapid review.

In total, police investigated 22 cases connected to the rapid review. Of those, 12 have been resolved through disciplinary action or performance management processes.

Four people have resigned during the review process.

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Satellite station takes shape on city rooftop for secret US broadband provider

The first of dozens of dome-shaped antennas for a controversial satellite earth station in Auckland have been installed on an inner-city rooftop. 

2degrees has been contracted by an undisclosed US satellite broadband company to build the ground station on the roof of a building at 43 College Hill, Freemans Bay, the telecommunications provider told the Herald. 

The facility will eventually house 30 of the mushroom-like structures, each about 2m tall, and be used to relay swathes of data to and from satellites. 

A 2degrees spokesperson said the telco’s unnamed US client would “operate and maintain the ground station” once construction was complete. 

2degrees announced a partnership with AST SpaceMobile, a US company building the first space-based cellular broadband network, in March 2025, with plans to launch a satellite-to-mobile service that they hoped to begin testing from the middle of this year. 

The Kiwi firm was granted non‑notified consent from Auckland Council to build the rooftop station on June 24 last year, but the project courted criticism from nearby residents and community groups after construction began in January. 

Opponents told the Herald in February they were concerned about the scale and appearance of the installation, potential side effects from the radiofrequency technology and, more broadly, the council’s decision to approve the project without public notification. 

The council’s head of resource consents James Hassall said its staff had since met with two of the concerned residents but were unable to address their concerns, given the project was approved in line with regulatory standards. 

“Once a consent is granted, the only avenue for challenge is through an application for judicial review in the High Court,” Hassall said. 

“The council will monitor the site to ensure that the consent holder meets the conditions of the consent.” 

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Government facing up to $5 billion bill over carbon credits, Treasury reveals

The Prime Minister has doubled down on his insistence that the government will not spend billions of dollars offshore to meet New Zealand’s climate commitments.

Treasury estimates it could cost up to $5 billion to pay for the overseas carbon credits New Zealand needs to honour its Paris Agreement commitments.

An additional $1.6 billion may also be needed to pay for credits to meet a subsequent commitment, due by 2035.

The government was “gonna do everything we can” to honour the country’s Paris Agreement pledge to halve emissions by 2030, Christopher Luxon said.

“But just reassuring everybody, we ain’t shutting down farms and we certainly aren’t sending billions of dollars offshore.”

The Green Party said it was impossible for the government to meet the target with domestic climate policies alone.

It was time for Luxon be honest about whether the government was still committed to the Paris Agreement, and – if so – to explain how it would do that, co-leader leader Chlöe Swarbrick said.

“Are we genuinely, honestly going to meet the [target], do they genuinely, honestly commit us to doing that? Because if so, the reality is we will need to pay for offshore mitigation.”

New Zealand has the option of meeting its pledge to halve net greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 entirely with domestic policies.

However, the most recent analysis from the Ministry for the Environment showed that there was a shortfall of 84 million tonnes of emissions, that would need to be made up by paying other countries to offset their emissions instead.

Treasury has identified the potential cost of offshore credits to make up the gap as a specific fiscal risk to the government’s finances for several years now.

However, it has never put an official figure on the government books, because there was “no legal obligation” to meet the target and successive governments had not committed to any purchases.

A previous one-off analysis it prepared in 2023 put the cost at anywhere from $3 billion to $24 billion.

Last year, Treasury secretary Iain Rennie gave Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick an undertaking to update that analysis.

The new estimate narrows the range to $4.4b-$5 billion to meet the 2030 pledge, and $0.2-$1.6 billion to meet New Zealand’s next pledge to lower emissions by 51-55 percent by 2035.

That was based on the Ministry for the Environment’s 2025 emissions projections, with and without extra policies to reduce emissions.

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Facial recognition watchlist made permanent in Christchurch supermarkets after trial

A Christchurch supermarket trial of facial recognition technology has been made permanent and extended to another store after showing measurable safety improvements.

After a three-month trial, Foodstuffs South Island has decided to keep the technology at New World St Martins and Pak’nSave Papanui and Moorhouse, while expanding it to New World Stanmore.

The initiative, which ran from October 2025 to January 2026, was designed to identify and manage individuals with a history of serious and harmful behaviour in stores.

Foodstuffs South Island retail head Kent Mahon said the results gave the co-operative confidence that the system could be deployed carefully and responsibly.

“The focus has always been on reducing harm. The trial showed we can do that while keeping accuracy high and respecting customer privacy,” Mahon said.

The facial recognition system scans images of everyone entering participating stores and compares them with a watchlist of known offenders.

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New Zealand Ex-Top Cop Avoids Jail for Child and Bestiality Porn Offences

A New Zealand court sentenced the country’s former deputy police commissioner to nine months of home detention on Wednesday, after he admitted to possessing child sexual exploitation and bestiality material.

Jevon McSkimming, who until late last year was New Zealand’s second-highest ranking police officer, was arrested and charged in June with eight counts of possessing objectionable material.

The 52-year-old admitted to three charges in November, including possession of child sexual exploitation and bestiality images which were stored on his work devices.

Judge Tim Black handed down a nine-month home detention sentence in the Wellington District Court on Wednesday, ruling McSkimming would not have to register as a child sexual offender.

The judge adopted a starting point of three years’ prison, but gave deductions for McSkimming’s guilty plea, remorse and attempts at rehabilitation.

He said McSkimming was of low risk to the community.

McSkimming’s lawyer, Letizea Ord, said her client was deeply ashamed of his actions.

One of the original charges said the offences happened between July 2020 and December 2024.

McSkimming was suspended from his job on full pay in December 2024, when an internal investigation into his conduct was launched.

He was on leave for six months before his resignation in May.

New Zealand police commissioner Richard Chambers in November described the case as “disgraceful” after McSkimming’s guilty pleas.

“The outcome shows all police, no matter their rank, are accountable to the laws that apply to us all,” he said.

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