Author: Rodney Hide

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…