Mark Avis

All that’s impressive is that your energy policies — supported by all major parties — have decimated our energy-intensive industries, thanks to giving us the most expensive industrial energy costs in the world. Well done. Quite an achievement.

If renewables are so cheap… why are the states that mandate them the most the least affordable? Look at the data. The most affordable electricity in America is in places like North Dakota, Louisiana, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Texas… all under ~10 cents/kWh. Minimal mandates. No cap-and-trade. Lower costs. Now look at the bottom. California… Connecticut… Massachusetts… New York… Vermont. 18–27+ cents/kWh. Heavy renewable mandates. Cap-and-trade programs. Same pattern… over and over. This isn’t about the cost of a solar panel. It’s about the cost of forcing an entire grid to run on intermittent energy. Backup systems. Overbuild. Transmission expansion. Grid balancing. Subsidies layered on subsidies. That’s what shows up on your bill. You don’t pay for panels… you pay for the system built around them. And the more mandates… the higher the price. Energy policy doesn’t live in press releases. It shows up in your monthly bill.

@TaxpayersUnion Get mining! But that does not require a deal with the US, unless it is a competitive deal.

The Government is considering a potential mining deal with the United States. Those for it argue — the investment could boost jobs, strengthen the economy, provide needed resources and deepen ties with a key ally. Those against it argue — the environmental risks may be too high, and the benefits may not outweigh the long-term costs to New Zealand. What would you argue?

@kellyenz There are nearly 500 million barrels of oil sitting in storage in Singapore and about 170 million in Korea. Presumably more in Malaysia. So, in the short term, in principle, it is possible to keep supply. However, that is without a bidding war, etc.

I didn’t want to rip off the Goldman report too much but it seems like everybody else is so take a look at the precarious position our Asian suppliers are in.

(Democracy Action).

Here’s Ben Stein in 1979 describing television as an engine of cultural demoralization. He argues that a small clique of producers and writers pushed a left-coded inversion of reality onto the public. They despised traditional power centers and hated figures like Buckley. They propagandized the nation into accepting a fake world where businessmen are villains, criminals are the good-guys, small towns are sinister, military officers are proto-fascists, and work barely exists.

Climate campaigners tell you green is cheap It isn't Global green transition cost is now $14+ trillion, rising with over $2 trillion/year (2% of global GDP) 105x our spending to avoid hunger Still, CO₂ emissions set another record last year assets.bbhub.io/professional/s…

79% pay increases for board members of Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) while our firefighters go without proper equipment. A full independent review is needed.

Essential reading on the absurdity of the Broadcasting Standards Authority's nonsense.

Here’s some interesting data from our internal cards data. Spending on fuel is up and more recently the average spend per transaction is down. This could be indicative of demand destruction but personally I think it reflects people not letting their tank run down so far. That’s what we are doing. My non economist wife said “why would you wait to buy petrol when the price just keeps rising”. Cogent analysis that!

@MHReddell Absolutely hopeless. When will we see a government that will actually stop this nonsense?

The Minister of Finance appears to have done nothing to ensure that the Reserve Bank focuses on its core statutory roles - price stability and financial stability - rather than the whims and political preferences of the Governor and board.

𝗕𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝗩𝗼𝗹𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗰 𝗖𝗼𝗿𝗿𝘂𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝗚𝗹𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗹 𝗧𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝟱𝟬 𝗬𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 A single weather station in Costa Rica, reporting temperatures over 300°C, has inflated global warming trends by nearly 0.9°C since 1975. Standard data checks failed, and homogenization spread the error worldwide. Unbelievable how one volcanic anomaly could distort the whole record. Dive into the details to see how deep this goes. Read the full article: wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/01/bre…

If New Zealand was a village of 100 people. 18 would be children. 18 would be elderly. That leaves 64 adults of working age. Of those adults, about 12 would work for the government. About 8 would be on a main benefit. Around 44 would be working in the private economy. Those 44 people generate most of the wealth that funds everything. The hospitals. The schools. The police. The military. The roads. The benefit system. And the entire government structure. A country only works when the productive base is strong. If the number producing shrinks while the number dependent grows, the arithmetic eventually stops working. This is not ideology. It is mathematics.

I guess people will just be like "haha take that Sean Plunket" but the BSA decision it has jurisdiction over livestreaming is really bad. Even if you accept at face value its claims that its reasoning (for some reason) does not apply to personal livestreamers there are so many absurd consequences it's hard to know where to start. Funeral directors livestream funerals all the time. It's become an important part of their work. Churches stream Mass and Sunday worship. Both are transmitting audiovisual content to the public over the internet. Neither are doing it in a personal capacity. If that is now “broadcasting” under the Broadcasting Act 1989, then they are, in law, “broadcasters”. And if they are broadcasters, sections 30A–30G kick in: annual revenue returns must be filed. Failure is an offence. The Authority says not to worry, but it has no more authority to suspend statute law than Robert Muldoon did. Either the definition means what they say it means, or it doesn’t.

This morning, Tova O’Brien showed exactly why TVNZ is paying her the big bucks. While RNZ and the Herald NOW pressed Chris Hipkins over the ongoing Covid saga, O’Brien sailed through the entire interview without asking him a single question about it.

The Greens want to know why their anti-business global-warming madness is making manufacturing impossible in New Zealand. Who's going to tell them? #google_vignette" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">nzherald.co.nz/hawkes-bay-tod…

@2ETEKA As some of us have been saying for a long while, they are Labour-lite.

Garner : “labour built the bloated, high tax state .. National are admiring it, managing it and expanding it” National have not stopped co-governance with insiders saying behind closed doors Luxon has been bending over to Iwi. Public servants have increased under National not including contractors. 13.2% of working age kiwis are on a benefit The private sector has grown by 3.5% the public sector by 6.9% National are paying half a billion a week to service debt - further blown out by then borrowing for tax cuts. Alarmingly their borrowing is outpacing labours ! NZ tax is now 34% of GDP higher than the average OECD Luxon thinks ‘as the CEO of NZ’ by subsidising pop concerts and footy games he’ll fix the economy.. And this morning it has become clear that Luxon & Goldsmith will not stop the BSA from overreach, allowing them to determine they have jurisdiction over any digital communication.. this ties in nicely with the social media ban. As Garner says National have betrayed voters with their pathetic Labour-esque bullshit. This is the reason they’ve sunk themselves in the polls, the reason why every Nats voter I know is disgusted with Luxon and National and why swing voters are going to Labour.. and this will only accelerate as the economic reality from fuel shortages, high electricity prices come home to roost. Thanks Te Gimp, you are handing this election to Labour on a platter.

The decision of the Broadcasting Standards Authority that it has jurisdiction over The Platform is breathtaking in its audacity. It has singlehandedly decided it knows better than the regulatory framework it operates under and that it should regulate the entire internet in New Zealand. The BSA even acknowledges in its decision that there is a regulatory gap between the Act and the modern world of communications - but has decided it can make the staggering leap to bridge that gap by ‘interpreting’ the law. This is not interpretation – this is obviously a case of targeting an outlet, in this case The Platform, not because it believes the regulatory framework applies to it, but because it disagrees with the content of what it is communicating. That is an egregious case of overreach and total fascist behaviour. The BSA has crossed a line. As far as New Zealand First is concerned, this decision commences a process that has to see the end of the BSA. It is no longer fit for purpose, and decisions like this are frankly dangerous to democratic discourse.

@SamaHoole Where is the reference for the study?

India ran the most important cardiovascular study of the 20th century by accident, and then immediately forgot about it. In 1967, Dr. S.L. Malhotra published a study in the British Heart Journal examining heart disease rates among 1.5 million Indian railway employees. The population was extraordinarily useful for research purposes: same employer, same healthcare access, comparable income and working conditions, spread across the entire country. The only meaningful variable was geography. Which meant diet. North Indian railway workers: Punjab, Rajasthan, UP, ate a diet built around ghee and dairy fat. They consumed up to 19 times more fat than their southern counterparts. The fat was primarily saturated: clarified butter, milk fat, the short-chain saturated fatty acids that Ancel Keys had recently been telling the Western world were arterial death. South Indian railway workers ate a diet based on rice, sambar, and seed oils: groundnut oil and sesame oil, primarily. They ate considerably less fat overall. By the standards of dietary advice being formulated in the 1960s, they should have been the healthy ones. Heart disease mortality in South India: 135 per 100,000. Heart disease mortality in North India: 20 per 100,000. Seven times higher in the population eating seed oils. Among railway sweepers specifically, the lowest-paid, most physically active workers, the gap was even wider. Heart disease was fifteen times more common in the South Indian sweeper population than in the North Indian sweeper population. Malhotra controlled for everything he could reach: smoking, where Northerners actually smoked more. Activity levels, where the relationship was inconsistent. Socioeconomic status, where executives died more often than sweepers regardless of region. He found no variable that explained the gap except the type of fat in the diet. He published the data. In a peer-reviewed journal. In 1967. The study was cited periodically, acknowledged as methodologically interesting, and then set aside. The decade in which Malhotra published was the decade in which Ancel Keys's fat hypothesis was being converted into policy. The American Heart Association was issuing guidance recommending polyunsaturated vegetable oils as replacements for saturated animal fats. The food industry was producing seed oils at industrial scale. The infrastructure of seed oil promotion was being built, expensively and with great institutional momentum. A study showing that populations eating animal fat had a fraction of the heart disease of populations eating seed oils was not, in that context, a study that anyone particularly wanted to follow up. Nobody followed up. Almost sixty years later, the finding stands unrefuted in the literature. It is not in the dietary guidelines.

@KatrinaBiggs2 Agreed.

@MarkavisOrg If there was a consistent criteria applied, that could be respected, but when the criteria appears to be based on a whim, then it's open to be challenged.

The Speaker's Office in NZ has shown a questionable level of inconsistency in their decision to refuse to fly the Women's Suffrage flag on 19 Sept each year. A lawyer's letter has been sent asking them to either grant the request, or provide a better explanation for refusing to do so⬇️