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ACT Justice spokesman Todd Stephenson is disappointed, but not surprised, at the Green Party’s plan to release criminals in order to partially fund their latest socialist manifesto.

“Buried in their proposed budget is a $770 million ‘saving’ from ‘averting increase in prisoner numbers’ – with no further explanation.

“That’s just doublespeak for opening the prison gates and letting thugs and thieves back onto our streets.

“Even taking the most inflated prisoner cost figures at face value, this amounts to 3,850 criminals being released into the community.

“I’m disappointed, but not surprised, that this is the latest wacky idea from the Greens. This is the same party that fundraises for prison and police abolition groups, criticises increased beat patrols and lies about how many people are in prison due to non-violent offences.

“Even then, their soft-on-crime plan wouldn’t pay for more than a third of their $2.5 billion hiring spree for bureaucrats. It’s a dangerous and unserious idea from a party that clearly doesn’t care about public safety.”

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“The Greens’ proposal to blow out the national debt to 54 percent of GDP shows why we need financial literacy in schools,” says ACT Leader David Seymour.

“Anyone with a mortgage understands that when you’re deep in debt, you end up spending so much on the interest that you can’t cover the essentials. We’re already burning through nearly $9 billion a year just to pay the interest on Government debt.

“At last count, our national debt is growing by almost $2 million an hour, or more than $47 million a day.

“Now the Greens want to heap on more than $40 billion in new borrowing compared to 2024 – a staggering figure that will fall on the shoulders of young people and children that aren’t yet born. That means billions more in interest payments, siphoned away from the very services the Greens claim to care about.

“The Greens reckon their numbers will add up by just taxing Kiwis harder – 39% for income above $120,000, 45% at $180,000, a new tax on assets, a higher company tax rate, and an inheritance tax that would force farming families to sell their generational land.

“Anyone with the financial sense the Greens lack would simply take their career, their business, and their money overseas.

“A private jet tax isn’t a serious policy proposal; it’s an empty display of the Greens’ eat-the-rich mentality. They want us to believe all our problems are caused by other people’s success, because they can’t be bothered coming up with any ideas that would generate new wealth to meet our country’s challenges.

“The Left’s ideas are all about telling successful New Zealanders ‘you’re not welcome here’, dividing the wealth we have rather than creating more, and siphoning off more money for the Wellington bureaucracy. It all adds up to a poorer, more miserable New Zealand.

“ACT says we need to put power back in the hands of people, not bureaucrats. That means choosing freedom over control, responsibility over excuses, and aspiration over resentment.”

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ACT Conservation spokesperson Cameron Luxton is welcoming the Hunting and Fishing Minister’s moves toward designating wapiti as a Herd of Special Interest in Fiordland National Park, calling it a win for conservation, regional tourism, and common sense.

“The Fiordland Wapiti Foundation has spent years doing what government departments struggle to do. They manage the herd, trap pests, maintain huts, and protect native species like the blue duck/whio. And they do it all without asking taxpayers for a cent,” says Luxton.

Forest and Bird has opposed the move, comparing it to creating a ‘sanctuary for stoats.’

“That sort of rhetoric says more about Forest and Bird’s eco-fundamentalist ideology than the facts. We’re never going back to a pre-human ecology. Allowing hunter-led management of the wapiti population frees up DoC resources to deal with greater threats to native wildlife, such as stoats and rats.

“Forest and Bird needs to wake up and realise that hunters are conservationists too.”

Luxton says ACT backs the Government’s move to ensure Herds of Special Interest can be recognised in national parks, as originally intended.

“When passionate hunters are already getting the job done, the role of government should be to get out of the way. Or at the very least, provide legal certainty so they can keep going.”

Editor’s note: Cameron Luxton is the sponsor of the Conservation (Membership of New Zealand Conservation Authority) Amendment Bill, which would ensure hunters and fishers are represented on the Conservation Authority, just as Forest and Bird is already. The Bill is currently in Parliament’s member’s bill ballot.

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ACT is welcoming confirmation that public service reform will put merit, not identity, at the heart of what it means to be a public servant.

“If you’re vying to become a public service boss, it shouldn’t matter whether you’re brown, white, or blue. What matters is whether you are competent to deliver the services we expect for our taxes,” says ACT Public Service spokesperson Todd Stephenson.

“A creeping focus on people’s identity over merit in the public sector is corrosive. It distracts from service delivery, elevates less competent candidates, and is fundamentally racist.

“Now, with ACT in government, we’re cutting out the ideological rot. Our coalition agreement commits to amending the Public Service Act ‘to clarify the role of the public service, drive performance, and ensure accountability to deliver on the agenda of the government of the day.’

“New Zealanders don’t care about the identity of the person procuring life-saving medicines, improving the education system, or responding to natural disasters – so long as it’s the person with the best skills and experience doing it.

“Real inclusion means treating people as individuals, not representatives of demographic groups. It’s difficult to convince public servants to treat all New Zealanders equally when their own organisation hires people through a lens of identity.”

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ACT has formally invoked the “agree to disagree” provisions of its coalition agreement in relation to the firearms registry, Nicole McKee says.

“Earlier this month, I asked Cabinet to consider that the recent review of the firearms registry did not meet the commitment in ACT’s coalition agreement. I also asked that a more thorough and independent review be conducted in the 2025/26 financial year. Unfortunately, these proposals were rejected by National.”

“I also sought Cabinet agreement to delay the upcoming ‘activating circumstance’ that would apply to ammunition purchases from June 2025.

“There is currently no clear definition of ammunition in the legislation, creating confusion. Pushing back the date to December 2026 would have provided time to build public trust in the registry and ensure clarity in the law. This recommendation was also rejected.”

The ACT Party’s coalition agreement includes a commitment to review the firearms registry to determine whether it is effectively improving public safety. However, the review that was conducted fell short of that standard.

“The purpose of the review was to establish a clear evidence base, covering public safety impacts, government costs, compliance burdens for licensed firearms owners, and international comparisons. In my view, the review failed to deliver on these objectives,” Mrs McKee says.

“Although the review acknowledged there was limited data available to assess the registry’s impact, it makes only limited use of domestic data, such as enforcement trends prior to the registry, or the experience of the 20 percent of licence holders already registered. Nor did it meaningfully examine international examples that could have provided further insight.

“These are not gaps in available information but gaps in the analysis which was undertaken.  One of the key conclusions – that the registry is justified if it prevents just two fatalities a year – is speculative and unsupported by evidence. Without a clear model of risk reduction or causal link to public safety outcomes, that claim is difficult to defend.”

 “The review focused narrowly on operational costs to government but gave little weight to future changes, such as the inclusion of a dealers registry – projected to cost an additional $20 million – and the ongoing compliance costs for responsible firearms owners.”

“Significantly, the review also failed to account for privacy concerns.  Given past breaches of firearms owners’ personal data, it is troubling that the review did not assess the risks associated with centralising sensitive information in the registry. This despite the fact I am aware of six breaches of data since 2019.”

“Despite these differences on the registry, our coalition partners continue to work constructively together to ensure the rewrite of the Arms Act delivers effective, evidence-based regulation that reflects best practice. As we push ahead with that process public safety remains at the heart of what we are doing.”

Source: New Zealand Police

Nayland Road is closed while Police respond to an incident in the area.

Cordons are in place at Songer Street and Whakatu Drive.

Some nearby schools have been placed into lockdown as a precaution.

There is not believed to be any threat to public safety at this time.

Members of the public are advised to avoid the area.

ENDS

Issued by Police Media Centre

Source: New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF)

The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) has joined 18 other nations for a large French-led multinational training exercise scenario of a hypothetical cyclone striking the islands of Wallis & Futuna.

Exercise Croix Du Sud was based in New Caledonia, about 1900km southwest of Wallis & Futuna, and involved about 2000 personnel.

New Zealand Army Captain Zoe Williamson and a small number of Kiwi staff officers bolstered the exercise headquarters.

“This has been a great opportunity allowing us to work with our partner nations in a likely humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) scenario, developing relationships and an understanding of how we work individually but are able to come together as a whole,” she said.

Source: CTU

This Thursday 15 May at 8am a delegation of working women and their whānau will attend a multigenerational pay equity forum at Parliament to share the impacts on their lives of the Government’s decision to gut the Equal Pay Act.

The event will be hosted by Labour and the Greens in the Labour Party Caucus Room. One of the families will be available to speak with media.

“Pay equity is about ending pay discrimination for working women and lifting the wellbeing of whānau. We’re so grateful that some of the most impacted families have agreed to share their pay equity stories with MPs,” said NZCTU Secretary Melissa Ansell-Bridges.

“We will keep fighting to ensure the voices of working women stay front and centre in the campaign to protect pay equity,” said Ansell-Bridges.

Source: UNICEF

Wednesday 14th May 2025 – New Zealand has ranked fourth lowest out of 36 OECD and EU countries for child well being in a new report just released by UNICEF.

For mental wellbeing, New Zealand was the lowest ranking country, in 36th place out of 36 countries with available data.

New Zealand showed the single highest youth suicide rate in the analysed countries during the reporting period – almost three times higher than the average for high-income countries.The report cites suicide as the fourth most common cause of death globally among adolescents aged 15-19 years.

The latest in a UNICEF Innocenti research series spanning 25 years, Report Card 19: Fragile Gains – Child Wellbeing at Risk in an Unpredictable World uses globally comparable datasets to provide critical insight into child wellbeing in the world’s wealthier countries between 2018-2022. While it is encouraging that recent domestic statistics on suspected suicide indicate that rates may be slightly decreasing, New Zealand is still a notable outliercompared to other countries and our rates are much too high.  

The report also shows where Aotearoa is falling behind on other key issues facing children – including physical wellbeing, where New Zealand has the third highest percentage of overweight children, and bullying, where the percentage of bullied children is the second highest.

UNICEF Aotearoa CEO Michelle Sharp says the data should be a wake-up call and the upcoming Budget is an opportunity for the government to create positive change.

“Too many children in Aotearoa are missing out on their childhood. We’re calling on the government to direct funding towards addressing these problems and to shift the dial, so New Zealand is not ranked so alarmingly close to the bottom of the table when it comes to child wellbeing. The government can act now, and act quickly to make positive impacts if it chooses to,” she says.

UNICEF Aotearoa is deeply concerned about what the report tells us on children and young people’s wellbeing in our country, and the trajectory this continues to take since 2022.Recent data captured in the Government’s own Annual Report on the Child and Youth Strategy, as well as the most recent child poverty data from Statistics NZ, indicates that on major themes relating to poverty and mental wellbeing, the data has not improved in the last two years.

Food security, affordable housing, hospital admissions and material hardship all continue to show negative trends.  

Faced with this stark data, UNICEF Aotearoa is calling on the government to address economic inequality and to prioritise funding for suicide prevention in the upcoming Budget, particularly for Māori and Pacific youth, who are disproportionately represented in negative statistics.    

UNICEF Aotearoa Director of Advocacy and Programmes Teresa Tepania-Ashton saysthere are several measures that could be implemented quickly.

“Immediately expanding eligibility for the Best Start payment to all children up to the age of five and laying out a roadmap for expanding eligibility up to the age of 18 would help tackle economic inequality and make a positive difference to many whānau in Aotearoa who are doing it really tough at the moment,” she says.

“We also support calls for the government to address food insecurity by fully funding an expanded Ka Ora Ka Ako healthy school lunches programme, ensuring that all children across every school and early childhood centre have access to nutritious meals, thereby tackling food insecurity quickly”.

Sharp says child wellbeing in New Zealand is a political choice.

“The quality of life being experienced by the tamariki and rangatahi in this country is down to political choice, and we urge our decision-makers to make the right choices and directly invest in children in the imminent Budget and beyond”.  

Sharp says child wellbeing in New Zealand is a political choice.

“The quality of life being experienced by the tamariki and rangatahi in this country is down to political choice, and we urge our decision-makers to make the right choices and directly invest in children in the imminent Budget and beyond”.