Author: Rodney Hide

OPINION: Rodney Hide. My daughter asked her friends a question. Your dog and a stranger are both drowning. You can save only one. Which do you save? Half of them chose the dog. I thought that was the young. So I asked a few of my own friends. One said the dog. Another said they would be conflicted. The third, the stranger. In 2013 American researchers led by Richard Topolski put a version of the question to 573 people. A bus is bearing down on your pet and a foreign tourist. You can save one. Forty per cent chose their…

OPINION: Rodney Hide Here’s my election night prediction, for what it is worth. We will get a centre-right government. National will win an overhang. ACT and NZ First will come out on top. Opportunity will not make it into Parliament. The big losers will be the New Zealand media. The media are finished The media ran a narrative all year. They said it was close. They said the government was in trouble. They said change was coming. The Opportunities Party was the Kingmaker. Night after night, the same story. There was no other story. It hasn’t worked. Voters aren’t listening,…

OPINION: Rodney Hide Another day, another Chris Hipkins fact check. His complaint today (Friday) was that Māori MPs are held to a different standard. And that it was racist. “There is an element of racism in this as well that is just ugly,” he said. Different standard? Whose standard? His. When Green and Māori Party candidates visited a Mongrel Mob pad, Mr Hipkins called it a “huge error of judgement”. He ruled their MPs out of police, Corrections and justice in any government he leads. That was the bar. Then footage turned up of his own Tāmaki Makaurau candidate, Kerrin…

Chlöe Swarbrick wants “decolonisation” language for Palestine and a map with no Israel on it. Apply her own standard honestly, and Israel is the decolonisation. At Auckland Domain in November 2023 she led the chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” When challenged, she did not drop it. She called the objection a “purposeful distraction… being used the world over to shut down peace activists.” On Q+A she kept the same talking point: “Palestinian freedom is necessary if we are to have longstanding freedom and justice in the region,” and treated pushback as an “intentional misunderstanding”…

OPINION: Rodney Hide Stuff has tried everything to rouse a falling readership. Quizzes. Live blogs. Explainers. Podcasts. Vertical video. Then they let the kids take over the keyboard and reach for sweary words. First it was Andrea Vance with the c-word — aimed at female ministers, carefully reviewed by experienced editors, of course. Now it is Verity Johnson, already exhausted by an election that hasn’t started, taking the Lord’s name in vain. I doubt she would use Allah as an oath. She’s not that brave. Or that progressive. Will it work? Nope. Swearing in print is the last trick of…

OPINION: Rodney Hide Chris Hipkins wants to outlaw “price gouging.” He has no idea what it is. Companies found guilty would pay penalties and “hand back every dollar of excess profit.” Labour’s Arena Williams supplies the soundtrack: butter up 58%, bread up 45%, mince up 30%. Nearly one in three households couldn’t afford enough food. Ostensibly, big business is ripping off households. Underlying, Labour has discovered a new crime: charging what the market will bear. What price is gouging? Nobody knows. That is the point. A price is not a moral verdict. It is a signal. It matches what is…

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…