Author: Rodney Hide

OPINION: Rodney Hide. Everything government monopolises, it botches. Roads: potholes and gridlock. Schools: a decade of the kids’ lives and too many still can’t read or write. Hospitals: you wait, and sometimes you die waiting. Welfare: we pay people — crooks included — not to work. The state’s core jobs are a mess. Always another review. Always another failure. Now walk into a supermarket. Clean. Stocked. Thousands of lines. Fresh fruit, veg, meat, milk — today, not next financial year. No ballot for bananas. No waiting list for bread. If the price is wrong or the service is rude, you…

OPINION: Rodney Hide Here’s a simple question. If you had known what was coming, and you had the chance, should you have killed Hitler? Most people, after a moment’s honesty, answer yes. The industrial murder of six million Jews, the war that killed tens of millions more, the deliberate machinery of extermination — once you know the scale, the moral arithmetic changes. Pre-emptive violence against that particular evil becomes thinkable. Now watch how the contemporary Left uses exactly this logic. Last week in Parliament, Green MP Steve Abel reached for Adolf Eichmann and Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” He told…

OPINION: Rodney Hide Remember when questioning the origin of SARS-CoV-2 got you banned, branded a public-health threat, and cast out of polite society? For years New Zealanders were told to accept the “Single Source of Truth.” Suggesting a laboratory origin in Wuhan was dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory. The official story was simple and sacred: a bat met a pangolin at a wet market. Anyone who asked about high-containment labs researching bat corona-viruses a short distance away was peddling dangerous disinformation. That narrative has now been destroyed by hard legal facts. On 18 August 2026, Dr David Morens —…

OPINION: Rodney Hide. There was a moment when Prime Minister Christopher Luxon lost the plot. During the last election campaign he declared that anyone wanting to talk about women’s toilets was “on another planet.” He did not need to make bathrooms the centre of the campaign. He needed only to stand on a clear principle: that girls, women, daughters, sisters, wives and mothers are entitled to private spaces for modesty and safety. He could not do it. That single comment revealed everything. Luxon is a manager. He sees politics as the balancing of competing interests and the avoidance of difficult…

Opinion: Rodney Hide. Last year in New Zealand 486 people had their lives ended under the End of Life Choice Act. Of those, 459 received a lethal injection administered directly by an approved medical professional — not self-administration or an oral drug. A doctor or nurse practitioner delivered the fatal dose. To be an approved provider requires specific training and registration. There are currently only 121 practitioners on the SCENZ Group (Support and Consultation for End of Life in New Zealand) lists — roughly one in every thousand qualified doctors and nurses. The full list is not public. Your own…

OPINION: Rodney Hide. Sitting through karakia I am invariably reminded of the book of Daniel in which faithful Israelites found themselves serving in the courts of pagan Babylon. They showed respect to the authorities, excelled in their duties, and contributed to the empire’s good order. Yet when the king’s table demanded compromise with idolatry or when the law forbade prayer to the true God, Daniel and his companions drew a firm line. They would not bow. That ancient precedent speaks directly to Christians in today’s New Zealand, where state institutions are steadily importing elements of pre-colonial Māori cosmology into schools,…

OPINION: Rodney Hide. In Wellington salons and certain Auckland boardrooms, the conventional wisdom is settled: China is the unstoppable rising power, the United States is in terminal decline, and New Zealand had better hedge accordingly. Smart diplomats, we are told, accommodate Beijing while quietly distancing ourselves from a fading superpower. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Victor Davis Hanson pointed out in his recent podcast, this narrative is historically illiterate. America has been written off repeatedly — in the 1930s, after Vietnam, during the 1970s stagflation, and again in the 1980s when Japan was supposed to eat their…

OPINION: Rodney Hide. TVNZ Political Editor Maiki Sherman — the first Māori women to hold the job — repeatedly shouted the homophobic slur “faggot” at openly gay journalist Lloyd Burr during a pre-Budget drinks event in Finance Minister Nicola Willis’s parliamentary office on 13 May 2025. Multiple witnesses, including parliamentary staff and journalists from rival outlets, confirm the exchange was loud, ugly and disruptive enough to shut the gathering down. Sherman claims it was retaliation for a racial slur; Burr denies it. The facts are clear enough: a senior state-funded journalist used a vile anti-gay epithet in a professional parliamentary…

OPINION: Rodney Hide. Christianity didn’t just arrive in New Zealand—it built the place. Missionaries planted the first permanent settlement in 1814, translated the Treaty, ran the early schools and hospitals, and gave us a moral framework of personal responsibility, stable families and covenantal duty. For a century and a half it was the cultural default. Then the 1960s secular wave hit. By the 2023 Census only 32.3 per cent called themselves Christian; 51.6 per cent claimed no religion. The collapse is not coincidence. It is the root of the social decay now choking the country. Start with the family. Marriage…

OPINION: Rodney Hide. In March 2023, Green co-leader and then-Minister for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence, Marama Davidson, openly declared: “I know who causes violence in the world. It is white cis men… who cause violence in the world.” This wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It reflects her core belief, rooted in Critical Race Theory. In Davidson’s twisted worldview, white cis men are guilty of all violence — not because they commit it, but because they hold power. Any violence by Māori or Pasifika men is ultimately the fault of white men and the “oppressive structures” they…

Opinion: Rodney Hide On Tuesday 21 April 2026, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon called for a formal confidence vote in his leadership and won it decisively. The issue, he stated, was now settled. Yet in the preceding weeks, the New Zealand Herald, under the direction of its political editor Thomas Coughlan, had conducted what amounted to a sustained, calculated campaign aimed at destabilising and ultimately removing a democratically elected Prime Minister. This was not ordinary political reporting. It was a deliberate effort to manufacture and amplify a leadership crisis where none needed to exist. From 16 April 2026, when Coughlan wrote…