Newsletter
Prologue: The Photograph We Keep There is a photograph that haunts progressive politics in Aotearoa. It shows Jacinda Ardern shaking hands with EU officials, beaming at the cameras. Historic Trade Deal Signed Mountain Tūī has written a love letter to this photograph. The essay celebrates Ardern and Shaw as “ultimately
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When Labour’s finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds declared on 16 December 2025 that “the Government have lost control of the economy,” she performed a masterclass in opposition politics’ most cynical art: the drive-by critique. When pressed repeatedly by journalists to name even one immediate action Labour would take to
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Paywalled Article When Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour called Chlöe Swarbrick a “demagogue” in his pre-Christmas interview with the NZ Herald, the irony was thick enough to choke on. Here was a man whose entire political project ticks every box in the textbook definition of demagoguery—anti-establishment rhetoric,
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The Ministry of Corporate Plunder
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Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has fashioned himself the political equivalent of a tenant who moves into a house, smashes the windows, floods the bathroom, then stands in the wreckage screaming about how terrible the previous occupants were. Newsroom’s December 15, 2025 interview with Luxon, promoted on Newsroom’s Facebook
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Cui Bono? Jim Grenon, Canadian billionaire and now director of NZME (the owner of the NZ Herald, Newstalk ZB, and 40+ news outlets), is directly funding a defamation lawsuit brought by Julian Batchelor—a promoter of racist pseudoscience about Māori origins and what he describes as Māori “character flaws.” The
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The Gatekeepers Critique Each Other
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The Health Minister sings two songs, neither in harmony with Te Tiriti
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THE SEYMOUR PLAYBOOK
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A Millimetre from Catastrophe
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THE $5 MILLION BETRAYAL
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Paywalled article They thought they could hide in the shadows of the Companies Office. They thought a “zero rates” slogan would distract us from the smell of old money and decaying colonial entitlement. But the Ring sees all. The taiaha of truth strikes not at the person, but at the