New Zealand has a rare public figure who can claim censorship while appearing in headlines, leading marches, and generating controversy on demand. This piece uses dark satire to examine the “victim” narrative often deployed by Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki, framed against reporting of a liquidator’s first report for a Destiny-linked entity showing significant debt and minimal cash on hand.

Instead of treating accountability as persecution, this article asks the obvious questions that real communities care about. Where does money go in complex structures. Who carries the risk when entities collapse. What happens when rhetoric becomes a business model. And why do some leaders treat scrutiny as oppression, rather than the basic price of operating in public life.

This satire reveals the yawning gap between political romance and geological, economic reality. Even government advisors quietly admit new offshore finds are “unlikely to be economic.”

As wind and solar ramp up, Jones is left pitching to an empty ocean, his hard-hat in hand, the dream long gone. The only thing getting “re-erected” is his press schedule.

New Zealand is a nation of SMEs, but our economic structure has not translated into top-tier productivity or consistently high wages by international standards. This article positions New Zealand’s SME sector in a global context using five practical lenses: productivity, pay levels, worker rights and worker voice, job security, and employer-supported training and development. It then explains why the gap is structural, including low capital intensity, weak diffusion of innovation through the long tail of smaller firms, limited scale economies, and investment settings that can steer capital toward property rather than productive capability.

You will also find six practical innovations that can lift SME performance in ways owners can actually use, such as sector training compacts designed around real-world time constraints, management capability programmes as economic infrastructure, regional productivity extension services that help firms implement improvements, and capital incentives that make productivity-enhancing investment easier. The goal is a stronger SME economy that supports better pay, stronger capability, and higher-value output, without drowning small businesses in complexity.

Shane Jones promised New Zealand a wild oil and gas revival - rigs on the horizon, fast-tracked projects, and a government head-over-heels for fossil fuels.

But as he makes grand speeches and waves legislative wish lists, the industry has already moved on, leaving dust-covered proposals and polite “no thanks” replies.

This satire reveals the yawning gap between political romance and geological, economic reality. Even government advisors quietly admit new offshore finds are “unlikely to be economic.”

As wind and solar ramp up, Jones is left pitching to an empty ocean, his hard-hat in hand, the dream long gone. The only thing getting “re-erected” is his press schedule.

Summer 2025 - two café owners, eight years in, facing the same brutal question. One is quietly thriving after a handful of small tech and process changes. The other is drowning in rising costs and exhaustion. This is the invisible line forming across New Zealand small business right now - energy shocks, interest resets, and owner burnout are coming. The owners who reluctantly change one thing this summer will shape the next decade. A raw, real story every Kiwi SME owner needs before January hits.

A darkly satirical look at the Free Speech Union’s AGM, where the loudest people in the room claim to be silenced while calling for others to be shut down.

This article looks at those small, stubborn acts of decency – the ones that don’t make headlines but quietly reshape lives. It traces the ripples from one decision to care, and asks what our communities, workplaces and daily lives could look like if more of us chose grace, dignity and compassion as our default setting.

We were the “fair go” country. Not perfect, but basically decent. Nobody got too rich without someone taking the mickey. Nobody was left too far behind, because “we look after our own”.

Jesus arrives in late spring and walks the places that rarely feature in ministerial talking points. He steadies a pushchair on mouldy stairs and steps into a flat where the power has been cut again by a prepay meter. He sits in an emergency-housing motel with a kuia who is skipping blood-pressure pills because every $5 charge competes with food for the kids. He waits in a hospital corridor with a man whose “rationalised” care has turned treatable illness into permanent damage.

By nightfall he sees the country’s modern altars everywhere: the glowing TV promising salvation, the stock-market ticker treated like truth, and the spreadsheet that reduces human lives to unit costs. The next morning he visits the Prime Minister and delivers the First Commandment for our age: no other gods before people - certainly not GDP, bond markets, or wealthy comfort.

Jesus arrives in late spring and walks the places that rarely feature in ministerial talking points. He steadies a pushchair on mouldy stairs and steps into a flat where the power has been cut again by a prepay meter. He sits in an emergency-housing motel with a kuia who is skipping blood-pressure pills because every $5 charge competes with food for the kids. He waits in a hospital corridor with a man whose “rationalised” care has turned treatable illness into permanent damage.

By nightfall he sees the country’s modern altars everywhere: the glowing TV promising salvation, the stock-market ticker treated like truth, and the spreadsheet that reduces human lives to unit costs. The next morning he visits the Prime Minister and delivers the First Commandment for our age: no other gods before people - certainly not GDP, bond markets, or wealthy comfort.

Jesus rides the InterCity bus to Hamilton beside a Health New Zealand worker who has just lost her job. He joins a food bank queue that now opens only twice a week, then shares a thin parcel on a park bench. That night he hears “Christian compassion” preached while supports are cut. Jesus calls it plainly: when leaders cloak cruelty in piety, they take the Lord’s name in vain.

Jesus goes to Waiheke looking for rest and finds a country where the poor work through weekends so the rich can holiday. He sees prepay power, removed penal rates, and a Cabinet that treats public holidays as a productivity problem. He names it. The Sabbath is not a luxury. It is protection.

Picture this - you could fund New Zealand’s flagship Marsden Fund - the one that’s meant to discover the next big thing - 320 times over… or you could build one really expensive road in Northland. Guess which one the Government picked? In a week when the Nobel Prize in Economics literally proved that investing in science and technology drives growth, we decided to prove the opposite. The fallout is already here: top researchers are leaving, labs are closing, and the silence from universities is deafening. Want to know how we got here and the very different future we could still choose? Keep reading…

There are many ways for a government to trample human rights. You can crush unions, surveil citizens or, if you are truly committed to tyranny, you can take away a person’s Vegemite.

In a concrete box somewhere in Australia, one lone prisoner has drawn a line in the toast crumbs. Andre is not just an inmate. In his mind, he is the last defender of civilisation - a man standing between the state and its war on the sacred morning smear.

This satirical piece follows Andre’s “constitutional crusade” and the absurd, almost religious story of how a simple yeast spread became a cultural sacrament – and what it says when governments decide to control even that.

What do you call a Government that looks at the Supreme Court backing Uber drivers and seems to decide the real problem is the law, not the exploitation? In this piece I take a darkly humorous walk through the gap between what our leaders say about “fairness” and “flexibility” and what they actually do when a court dares to recognise gig workers as employees. From the worship of “business certainty” to the creative re-branding of control as “choice”, it asks a simple question: when the Minister moves faster to protect Uber’s business model than workers’ basic rights, whose future is really being looked after?

On a cool Taranaki morning you might see them out on the whenua, checking traps, hauling spades and listening for kiwi in the dark. They look like any bunch of teenagers in hi-vis. But these rangatahi are part of something quietly extraordinary – Tupu ā Nuku, an iwi-led environmental workforce programme that brings people, training, employment and the environment together in one powerful kaupapa. In a time when so many life-giving programmes are being quietly defunded, Tupu ā Nuku feels like a candle in the dark, proving that when you invest in rangatahi and whenua together, everyone wins.

When news broke that the Michelin Guide was coming to New Zealand, most people looked to vineyard restaurants and polished city bistros. Budget Tyres looked at its logo and said “surely it is our time.” What followed is one of the most gloriously unhinged acts of Kiwi ingenuity you will ever encounter. Using nothing but workshop tools, staff lunches and a worrying amount of imagination, the team created a seven-course degustation among the tyre racks – and somehow, it works. Here is what happens when fine dining meets wheel alignment.

In the 1980s, New Zealand handed over its public assets in what was sold as reform but played out more like a fire sale. Rogernomics and Ruthanasia weren’t just policy shifts - they were economic shock therapy dressed as fiscal responsibility. We weren’t just broke - we were told we couldn’t be trusted. The crisis ended. The heist didn’t.

By 1999, we weren’t rebuilding - we were adjusting. The reforms of the 80s and 90s left a legacy we quietly accepted: high power prices, sold assets, and silent resignation. Even as governments bought back broken pieces, nobody dared question the model. “The Long Silence” is the story of how we were burgled, cleaned up, and convinced ourselves it was normal.

In 2025, we’re not reforming - we’re relapsing. Public assets are up for sale again, this time dressed in the language of "recycling" and "unlocking capital." From Kiwibank to KiwiRail, we’re watching the last few levers of public control get price tags. This isn’t fiscal responsibility. It’s déjà vu with a PowerPoint deck.

New Zealand is full of clever people and hungry problems. Yet time after time, great ideas crawl out of the lab, blink in the sunlight and then quietly disappear. This piece looks under the hood of our science and innovation system and asks a simple question: why do we grow so much knowledge but so few world-class ventures, and what does that do to the people inside it?