iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The totally foreseeable consequences of one’s own actions. Crazy stuff

Reposted by morgan godfery

Eddie Clark @dreddieclark.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Reasonably good example with electricity distribution lines, which have been price path regulated for decades. They may have gone up more slowly than otherwise but they HAVE gone up significantly. Because the investment is, ultimately, needed and justified. & that's even more true of pipes.

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I’m not sure people realise yet that a regulated price path is more likely to deliver even higher prices which, in the absence of government financial grants or otherwise mechanisms, actually must occur in most cities and districts

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Reposted by morgan godfery

deb te kawa @debtekawa-ao.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Add the roll to this. The Māori roll is 7.3% above its 2023 election count (311,547 against 290,300) with three weeks of enrolment left, mostly Māori choosing it over the general roll. Since April, the biggest rise on it has been among 18 to 24s.

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Given Labour’s complete and total dominance of the Māori vote for almost a century, even in the MMP era, this is an enormously significant shift

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I think the Mata poll showing a surge in support for the Greens among Māori voters signals a structural shift as millennials/Gen X Māori rapidly outnumber the older population. This shift was emerging 10 years ago, and for the foreseeable Labour/Greens/and TPM will roughly share support in thirds

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Reposted by morgan godfery

Jolisa Gracewood @nzdodo.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Another busy day at the all-you-can-eat word salad bar… 🥗 www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/3610... #nzpol

Prime Minister addressing a State of Auckland event on Friday, as reported by Jonathan Killick for The Post (1/4)

“The challenge for all of us in this room is to come together, get it gripped up, sorted and joined up with one plan and then execute and execute.”

“It’s a mindset thing,” he told them.

(2/4) Luxon repeatedly returned to what he called five “strategic thrusts” – world-class education, science and technology, modern infrastructure, less red tape, and more trade and investment.

“Let’s take those thrusts and execute like hell against them, and get it done. That would be my advice,” he told the city’s business leaders.

(3/4) Luxon said New Zealand had a “really big problem” reaching long-term agreement on infrastructure, pointing to the Cambridge to Piarere expressway as an example.

“It’s on, off, on, off … It’s not sending men or women to the moon or doing Middle East peace or anything. It’s like, building a road.”

(4/4) “And remember we’re really bad at asset management, you know, the worst of the world … Don’t freak out or take that as criticism. It’s just, you’ve got to know where you’re starting from so you can actually try and professionalise the joint.”

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

And so because there’s no discernible politics behind the party, of course they can’t see the longer term danger to their invitation for Māori voters to hack or gamify the electoral system. There is no substance beyond a play for short term advantage

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

TPM is a party largely without political content. The pitch - “believe in you, believe in me, believe in Māori” - is a local version of American-style psychobabble that defined 2010s social media. JT’s speech to the conference, which he published on FB, is largely meaningless psychobabble too

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Reposted by morgan godfery

Lew @lewsos.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

If you wanted to undermine public confidence in MMP and give life to Luxo's wacky referendum notion, probably the easiest way would be to do what Te Pati Māori is proposing here and exploit the overhang to try to game MMP for cynical partisan advantage thespinoff.co.nz/the-bulletin...

The overhang
This electorate-seat focus connects to a mechanism The Spinoff’s Toby Manhire explored last month: MMP’s overhang rule. If Te Pāti Māori wins more electorates than its party vote share would normally entitle it to, those extra MPs don’t get taken away – they expand parliament beyond 120 seats.

Political scientist Lara Greaves told Manhire that some had floated encouraging supporters to split their vote – Te Pāti Māori for the electorate, Labour for the party vote – potentially generating several extra left-leaning MPs via overhang. But she warned the tactic carries real risk in the public’s view of the legitimacy of our electoral system.

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

The risk is fatally undermining trust in an electoral democracy reserved for Māori. The faint reward is a three year ministerial warrant (almost certainly outside of Cabinet). If TPM had a serious policy platform they could implement, sure, maybe the reward better matches the risk. But they don’t

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

TPM’s implicit strategy to engineer an overhang is, of course, genius - and I think it’ll be enough to return the Māori electorates (except IR and TTT) to TPM. But I worry the democratic cynicism within it will, in time, sink the strategy and maybe the electorates too. So classically JT

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Labour’s small target strategy will probably mean they can cobble together a government post-November, but it guarantees a loss in 2029 in the same way Jacinda’s small target strategy in 2020 meant Labour had no mandate for even the limited changes they pursued

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Unfortunately the coffee in Australia is, on average, and in my experience only, considerably better than Auckland and Wellington

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

I’ve been in Sydney this week, and Melbourne and the Sunshine Coast earlier in the year, and the downturn is apparent here too, albeit softer. The wages are better, but house prices seem higher (even relative to incomes), and food costs don’t appear dramatically lower than in New Zealand

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

There are well theorised critiques of the public service as the “permanent government” and what that entails, but that structural critique is entirely separate from impressionistic judgements of bloated and overpaid individuals within the public service

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Reposted by morgan godfery

Keith Ng @keithng.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

And that's the rub: Technocratic rationalism as an ideology leads us to believe we don't need to do the messy work to make it a reality, because the merits of the policies are so self-evident.

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Reposted by morgan godfery

Keith Ng @keithng.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

More of an admission than an accusation, but: the thing that makes them attractive (techocratic rationalism) is also what makes them questionable. I *love* "why don't we just do things gud"! But what I've discovered is that trying to do rationalism without relationships and community is a dead end.

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Erica Stanford will almost certainly lift National’s party vote, and almost certainly enforce her will upon the Act and New Zealand First parties. She will make mince meat of Mr Hipkins

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I hope Sir John Key is working the phones not on behalf of Luxon, but in preparation for his own return to the leadership

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Please tell me the photographs of Kieran in communist memorabilia are not AI. Please,

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Because history is funny the bloke who benefitted most from this iteration of the Māori Party is now the president of the reborn and fiercely leftwing Te Pāti Māori lol

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

This party’s signature policy, Whānau Ora, was predicated on the outsourcing of social services to private and community providers on the assumption they could more accurately identify need and deploy resources. In typical technocratic centrist fashion, it became a racket for a private duopoly

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

The first technocratic centrist party under MMP was the Māori Party 2008-2017, not Opportunity. It will eventually end the same way for Opportunity as it did the Māori Party. Some interesting historical context if you need: e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-...

e-tangata.co.nz

Did the Māori electorates decide the 2017 election? | E-Tangata

“Labour’s Māori MPs live and work in two worlds, relating to Māori voters as Māori, but also as workers, citizens and more. The problem for the Māori Party is it never did the same.” —Morgan Godfery, ...

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Failing upwards, all the while trampling on people he thinks should be falling downwards

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

That guy who shall not be named is not only dumb as a sack of hammers, he’s also a piece of shit

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

I didn’t miss Twitter until someone described to me this incredible new poster, Joseph Mooney MP

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Another round of infrastructure-destroying storms. Not even a few months after the last round of destructive storms. These rain events are quarterly now. But no one in politics or media is prepared to say it

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

My observation of Labour and National government frustrations with the public service is that, contrary to what the last Labour government believed, the public service didn’t resist their agenda. Instead the PS institutional inertia, sclerosis, meant they simply didn’t have the know how to do it

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

The Golden Mile looks like total shit, which is uniquely offensive to New Zealand’s ancestral (English) instinct for orderly and tidy town square spaces. Unfortunately, equally offensive to our ancestral instincts is spending any money whatsoever in order to improve any given situation

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Every serious socialist will nominate the Financial Times as their newspaper of choice because of its ideological clarity. In New Zealand, every serious socialist may soon see the Post as their newspaper of choice because of the ideological clarity Mr Hooton will imminently bring

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

The speeding ticket story has arrived in just in time to arrest the Green Party’s decline in the polls

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Drop a huge take. Log out for a period of time. Return. Oh yeah. Still hits just as good as it used to

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Reposted by morgan godfery

Tze Ming Mok 莫志明 @tzemingdynasty.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

AKL: held together by the Axis of Asian

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

christchurch is somewhere in between wellington and auckland, and hamilton and tauranga are smaller version of auckland

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

there are only two cities in new zealand with cosmopolitan cultures: dunedin, because of the historic role of finance and the contemporary role of higher education; and wellington because of its dense urban core and role as a government town. auckland is a series of small town cultures in one city

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

easily getting defence spending to 3.5% of GDP by counting the RONS as arterial routes for the military

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

New Zealand is probably the most successful settler colony: the demographic weight of the Māori population is significant, so too the length and potential of its grievances, but all resistance has been institutionalised via the Māori seats, Waitangi Tribunal, Treaty settlements, RMA, and so on

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Of course it’s woke coded, among the cohort in question: a girl boss CEO, a Māori political editor, increasing use of the Māori language across all broadcasts, diverse casting on most NZ-commissioned shows (e.g Shorty). For NZ, this is as woke coded as you get

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Among a certain cohort, TVNZ is simply a cipher for “woke”, so the incentive for confrontation is in the government’s favour if it wishes to reinforce the loyalty of said cohort

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

We should welcome our brothers and sisters from India. One of my ancestors jumped ship at a New Zealand port to escape indentured labour, and ended up marrying into a Maori family. This is not uncommon

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

It’s low IQ behaviour to compose a racist haka denigrating Indians as a people as opposed to simply criticising one specific individual whose race and ethnicity is actually irrelevant

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

I assume the complaint about the conduct of a TVNZ journalist in Parliament involves Benedict Collins, who is a picture of civility compared to the Mad Dog days of 3 News under Duncan Garner, Patrick Gower, and Tova O’Brien

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Every election year I think about the time Curwen visited the grave of Sir Robert Muldoon in 2017 to ask for his spiritual intervention in coalition negotiations, pleading for his statist hand to guide the preferences of New Zealand First

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Half of the votes National has lost since the election have gone to NZF, so National has to say NZF will go with Labour. Half of NZF new votes have come from National, so NZF has to rule out Labour (at least until the day after the election). This dynamic will repeat until election day

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Th government isn’t amending Treaty clauses in good faith, obviously, but it’s true that descriptive/specific clauses are preferable to general/operative clauses

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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

The age of, to use the British parlance, “big beasts” is over: Clark, Key, and Ardern’s dominance of their parties and PPM polls seems like a relic now

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