Bernard Hickey & Peter Bale chat with regular guests Cathrine Dyer & Robert Patman about the week's news in geopolitics & the climate, plus special guest David Farrar
David "Dirty Politics" Farrar! Thank you Peter for calling him out. Farrar has been a corrosive force in NZ politics and his op-ed definitely felt like it had an ulterior motive.
On this occasion I strongly encourage people to watch the hoon episode on youtube, especially the part where they discuss NZ becoming part of Auzzy(starting at the 44min mark). Peter raises an excellent point about this matter that has been completely edited out of this post.
For those of you who want to see the uncut version please go to this link.
Thank you, Cristina, for pointing me to the Complete and Unexpurgated podcast, in which Peter Bale hijacks an amiable fantasy about accession to the Australian federation and turns it into an Outing of Dave's Dastardly Designs on the Treaty of Waitangi.
Thanks Cristina for flagging the edit and for sharing the uncut link. I will not watch it again though. Once, live, was enough.
I agree the topic itself is worth debating, but if the edited post cuts past the key challenge, it also changes what readers think the debate contained. You cannot seriously talk about New Zealand giving up sovereignty, or becoming a state of Australia, while brushing past Te Tiriti and the constitutional reality it represents. That is not a side issue. It is the centre of the argument.
The calibre of a person and their thesis is often seen in moments of disagreement, not when everyone is nodding along. We can disagree strongly, but we should still listen, and we should be able to challenge each other without sneering, talking over, or trying to shut the conversation down.
What stood out live was how quickly the tone shifted once that Treaty point was raised. Shortly beforehand, Professor Patman disagreed with David’s framing that we need to be bigger because the rules-based international order is gone. He did it quietly but with an astute ‘I do not completely agree, and here is why’. However, by the end of The Hoon Farrar was visibly angry and told co-host Peter Bale to ‘shut up’.
If that exchange has been edited out of the post, it matters, because it removes the moment where the constitutional stakes were forced into the open.
I also thought Farrar’s economic claims did not hold together. On The Hoon he argued NZ wages would rise to ‘Australian levels’, and then, when challenged, acknowledged that pay and wage outcomes vary significantly between Australian states (NSW versus Tasmania was his example). Both things can be true in a broad sense, but you cannot make ‘wages will rise’ do the work of the argument unless you explain the mechanism, and why NZ would converge upward rather than simply sit at the lower end of the Australian spread.
This morning I found David Farrar’s opinion piece in The Post. There is no mention of Māori, Te Tiriti, or the Treaty of Waitangi anywhere in Farrar’s opinion article. Peter was right to note what was not mentioned, both in that article and in Farrar’s live appearance.
The history in the piece also felt selective. Farrar framed Seddon’s stance as basically about not wanting to lose his premiership, and he referenced the 819-page Royal Commission report while giving readers almost nothing about what it actually concluded and why.
That might be fine for a provocation, but not for a serious constitutional proposition.
And I do wonder if this is part of a broader pattern we have seen in New Zealand politics before: using high-voltage culture and sovereignty debates to distract from policy accountability on everyday issues. I am not interested in assigning motives, but I am interested in what gets displaced when this sort of argument is floated.
If The Hoon wants to revisit this, I would genuinely welcome a structured follow-up: pros and cons, the security claims tested properly, with the Treaty, economic, socio-cultural, and constitutional implications dealt with directly. It deserves a more careful, transparent, and civil debate than we saw.
Points of view are only as strong as the person arguing them; seated next to Patman, Farrar was always going to come across as an intellectual lightweight.
Farrar comes across as an intellectual lightweight seated next to his cat, or a milking cow, or a rock, because he IS an intellectual lightweight. He is a patently dishonest person with horrible, racist motives.
Also from me thanks for flagging this. I always listen to the edited version, and was surprised when DF’s treaty comments seemingly went unchallenged. This explains it!
Yes I guess was good to have someone with a different point of view, however David farrar just a little too far out there I thought. The hoon got a little tetchy, for a good reason however it did spoil this weeks hoon. I would have been happy just to listen to Bernard’s point of view on closer ties with Australia. Look forward to next week.
They were not talking about "closer ties" with Auzzy, they were talking about becoming part of Auzzy(which Bernard was in favour of). Two VERY different things with very different implications.
I would like to hear Robert;s take on what is happening with internal US politics and efforts to use the 25th Amendment of their Constitution to remove Trump from office. Anything about Putin's hold over Trump in relation to Epstein files which seems Trump will do his utmost not to have revealed.. I have long thought that Putin has been manipulating Trump to do his (Putin's) will.
Perhaps David Farrar needs to be reminded the reason solar farms are being delayed is absolutely NOT iwi or Te Tiriti but NYMBYs putting obstacles because the thing they fear more than Māori taking whatever away from them, is a reduction in their precious property value.
David Farrar sounded like he approved of taxing higher incomes more. Would have been great if Bernard could have asked if he supported the Green's tax policy as it is very close to Australia's.
I have now watched the YouTube video and I agree that the podcast version need to include the cutout parts.
It is OK to challenge someone like David Farrar who absolutely has an itch about Te Tirit so
Peter thank you for calling him out on this. It is also OK to disagree and one who has such strong opinions should not assume he will only be asked questions he is comfortable with.
People like him like telling women in politics that if they don't like the heat they should get out of the kitchen but always fail to apply this to themselves.
For the sake of the integrity of The Hoon, Bernard, please add this part to the podcast version.
Well said! I watched Robert’s face full of amusement when Peter looked like thunder and DF played the school-ground bully who doesn’t like being challenged! The phrase in these circumstances that springs to mind is that they should ‘disagree agreeably!’
I posted this comment after hearing the podcast version. After seeing mentioned here that the YT (which I usually watch) was different I looked at that and applaud Peter’s questioning of DF’s motives. The soft ‘It will be better for everyone’ approach is a standard TPU FSU tactic for attacking Treaty issues and needs to be challenged at every opportunity. I appreciate BH has editorial control but think removing that section from the podcast was a poor decision.
The entire cast of this Hoon, with the possible exception of Catherine Dyer, are fully committed to the established hegemony, notwithstanding it is on the precipice of collapse. Specifically the two centres of financial gravity- Wall Street and the City of London- are held up by an unrepayable debt bubble, the collapse of which is not an 'if', but a 'when'.
All this talk of joining the Commonwealth of Australia is nothing but a 'hold mummy's hand while crossing the dangerous road'. Trouble is, mummy is going to get smashed in the traffic too. In particular, the huge pool of private superannuation investments, $4.2 trillion or 150% of Australia's GDP, will be turned to dust. Because the schemes are mandated by the government as a replacement for, rather than a supplement to a state pension, government will be expected to make good. Many retired Australians are paying large mortgages out of large private super incomes- what happens to them when this income dries up?
My "join BRICS" in the side-chat got one response- "NZ would be a small Lego-brick in BRICS". Well NZ is a very small brick in the western financial system which is not only stressed in the way I previously mentioned, but mired by Trump's tariff-mania and IMO, the possibility of the repudiation of foreign-held US debt. God-knows what will come out of the City of London when Farage gets in power- which he will.
Bernard, I am deeply disappointed that the meat of the "join Australia" conversation is edited out of the Substack version of The Hoon this week. I am further disappointed that the comments have been disabled on the full conversation on YouTube. What is the thinking behind this editorial choice?
Seeing David Farrar listed as a guest was my first disappointment, actually. Farrar has shown repeatedly over a great length of time that he is not a good faith actor in any debate. His broken philosophical agenda includes abolishing Te Tiriti o Waitangi, keeping non-male and non-white voices out of public debate, and running a thumb-on-the-scales polling outfit to spread his bigotry and hatred in major media. This cretin already has his platform and hearing his weaselly musings on The Hoon is deeply disturbing.
Peter took the only acceptable tack of directly challenging Farrar on his ugly, destructive views and how his flimsy opinion piece about joining the explicitly racist country to the north is informed by them. Peter was more civil than Farrar deserved. Racism, sexism, bigotry and authoritarianism deserve only to be called what they are, hate-filled ideologies that cannot be tolerated. To edit out that necessary interrogation on Substack with a Nazi problem seems especially egregious.
I hope to hear from you, Bernard, as to why you made this set of decisions to platform a known bad faith actor, to actively stifle the flow of the journalistic interrogation by Peter, and then to edit out the whole story for Substack. I suspect fear of legal action from Farrar may have spurred these choices. To which I suggest, don't platform bad faith actors. But certainly do NOT help mask their horrible beliefs and actions if you do.
Bernard - I do actually want to know why you platformed David Farrar and why you made the editorial choice to withhold the full conversation from your Substack audience and paying subscribers, of which I am one. Forgive me if I missed your response elsewhere, but do kindly point me to it if you did address the concerns and questions I and others voiced.
Another thinly veiled assault on Te Tiriti dressed up as an economic prescription and a very narrow view of an economy.If Farrar’s anti Tiriti agenda is to be supported through the Hoon imperative to hear others on this - Professor Margaret Mutu, Dr Carwyn Jones, Jane Kelsey ,Ganesh Ahirao for example.
David "Dirty Politics" Farrar! Thank you Peter for calling him out. Farrar has been a corrosive force in NZ politics and his op-ed definitely felt like it had an ulterior motive.
On this occasion I strongly encourage people to watch the hoon episode on youtube, especially the part where they discuss NZ becoming part of Auzzy(starting at the 44min mark). Peter raises an excellent point about this matter that has been completely edited out of this post.
For those of you who want to see the uncut version please go to this link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmzUJBXUEDA&t=1s
Out of the norm for the measured tones of Hoon granted, but a joy to watch none the less, bravo Peter
Thank you, Cristina, for pointing me to the Complete and Unexpurgated podcast, in which Peter Bale hijacks an amiable fantasy about accession to the Australian federation and turns it into an Outing of Dave's Dastardly Designs on the Treaty of Waitangi.
Thanks Cristina for flagging the edit and for sharing the uncut link. I will not watch it again though. Once, live, was enough.
I agree the topic itself is worth debating, but if the edited post cuts past the key challenge, it also changes what readers think the debate contained. You cannot seriously talk about New Zealand giving up sovereignty, or becoming a state of Australia, while brushing past Te Tiriti and the constitutional reality it represents. That is not a side issue. It is the centre of the argument.
The calibre of a person and their thesis is often seen in moments of disagreement, not when everyone is nodding along. We can disagree strongly, but we should still listen, and we should be able to challenge each other without sneering, talking over, or trying to shut the conversation down.
What stood out live was how quickly the tone shifted once that Treaty point was raised. Shortly beforehand, Professor Patman disagreed with David’s framing that we need to be bigger because the rules-based international order is gone. He did it quietly but with an astute ‘I do not completely agree, and here is why’. However, by the end of The Hoon Farrar was visibly angry and told co-host Peter Bale to ‘shut up’.
If that exchange has been edited out of the post, it matters, because it removes the moment where the constitutional stakes were forced into the open.
I also thought Farrar’s economic claims did not hold together. On The Hoon he argued NZ wages would rise to ‘Australian levels’, and then, when challenged, acknowledged that pay and wage outcomes vary significantly between Australian states (NSW versus Tasmania was his example). Both things can be true in a broad sense, but you cannot make ‘wages will rise’ do the work of the argument unless you explain the mechanism, and why NZ would converge upward rather than simply sit at the lower end of the Australian spread.
This morning I found David Farrar’s opinion piece in The Post. There is no mention of Māori, Te Tiriti, or the Treaty of Waitangi anywhere in Farrar’s opinion article. Peter was right to note what was not mentioned, both in that article and in Farrar’s live appearance.
The history in the piece also felt selective. Farrar framed Seddon’s stance as basically about not wanting to lose his premiership, and he referenced the 819-page Royal Commission report while giving readers almost nothing about what it actually concluded and why.
That might be fine for a provocation, but not for a serious constitutional proposition.
And I do wonder if this is part of a broader pattern we have seen in New Zealand politics before: using high-voltage culture and sovereignty debates to distract from policy accountability on everyday issues. I am not interested in assigning motives, but I am interested in what gets displaced when this sort of argument is floated.
If The Hoon wants to revisit this, I would genuinely welcome a structured follow-up: pros and cons, the security claims tested properly, with the Treaty, economic, socio-cultural, and constitutional implications dealt with directly. It deserves a more careful, transparent, and civil debate than we saw.
Completely agree Paul. Very well put.
Points of view are only as strong as the person arguing them; seated next to Patman, Farrar was always going to come across as an intellectual lightweight.
Farrar comes across as an intellectual lightweight seated next to his cat, or a milking cow, or a rock, because he IS an intellectual lightweight. He is a patently dishonest person with horrible, racist motives.
Interesting
This is really well put. It's interesting that Peter's comments were edited out and honestly quite disappointing.
Also from me thanks for flagging this. I always listen to the edited version, and was surprised when DF’s treaty comments seemingly went unchallenged. This explains it!
The divine blood clot! If only…
Yes I guess was good to have someone with a different point of view, however David farrar just a little too far out there I thought. The hoon got a little tetchy, for a good reason however it did spoil this weeks hoon. I would have been happy just to listen to Bernard’s point of view on closer ties with Australia. Look forward to next week.
They were not talking about "closer ties" with Auzzy, they were talking about becoming part of Auzzy(which Bernard was in favour of). Two VERY different things with very different implications.
I would like to hear Robert;s take on what is happening with internal US politics and efforts to use the 25th Amendment of their Constitution to remove Trump from office. Anything about Putin's hold over Trump in relation to Epstein files which seems Trump will do his utmost not to have revealed.. I have long thought that Putin has been manipulating Trump to do his (Putin's) will.
Perhaps David Farrar needs to be reminded the reason solar farms are being delayed is absolutely NOT iwi or Te Tiriti but NYMBYs putting obstacles because the thing they fear more than Māori taking whatever away from them, is a reduction in their precious property value.
David Farrar sounded like he approved of taxing higher incomes more. Would have been great if Bernard could have asked if he supported the Green's tax policy as it is very close to Australia's.
I have now watched the YouTube video and I agree that the podcast version need to include the cutout parts.
It is OK to challenge someone like David Farrar who absolutely has an itch about Te Tirit so
Peter thank you for calling him out on this. It is also OK to disagree and one who has such strong opinions should not assume he will only be asked questions he is comfortable with.
People like him like telling women in politics that if they don't like the heat they should get out of the kitchen but always fail to apply this to themselves.
For the sake of the integrity of The Hoon, Bernard, please add this part to the podcast version.
Well said! I watched Robert’s face full of amusement when Peter looked like thunder and DF played the school-ground bully who doesn’t like being challenged! The phrase in these circumstances that springs to mind is that they should ‘disagree agreeably!’
I stand by my Bluesky comment on the DF article discussed: “NZ would benefit if David Farrar fucked off to Australia”
I posted this comment after hearing the podcast version. After seeing mentioned here that the YT (which I usually watch) was different I looked at that and applaud Peter’s questioning of DF’s motives. The soft ‘It will be better for everyone’ approach is a standard TPU FSU tactic for attacking Treaty issues and needs to be challenged at every opportunity. I appreciate BH has editorial control but think removing that section from the podcast was a poor decision.
I endorse this comment 😎🙏
Without a hint of irony Farrar places a caveat for Aotearoa becoming the seventh state of Australia: “retaining sovereignty”
😶
The entire cast of this Hoon, with the possible exception of Catherine Dyer, are fully committed to the established hegemony, notwithstanding it is on the precipice of collapse. Specifically the two centres of financial gravity- Wall Street and the City of London- are held up by an unrepayable debt bubble, the collapse of which is not an 'if', but a 'when'.
All this talk of joining the Commonwealth of Australia is nothing but a 'hold mummy's hand while crossing the dangerous road'. Trouble is, mummy is going to get smashed in the traffic too. In particular, the huge pool of private superannuation investments, $4.2 trillion or 150% of Australia's GDP, will be turned to dust. Because the schemes are mandated by the government as a replacement for, rather than a supplement to a state pension, government will be expected to make good. Many retired Australians are paying large mortgages out of large private super incomes- what happens to them when this income dries up?
My "join BRICS" in the side-chat got one response- "NZ would be a small Lego-brick in BRICS". Well NZ is a very small brick in the western financial system which is not only stressed in the way I previously mentioned, but mired by Trump's tariff-mania and IMO, the possibility of the repudiation of foreign-held US debt. God-knows what will come out of the City of London when Farage gets in power- which he will.
Well that was certainly an interesting set of conversations this week. Much food for thought
Bernard, I am deeply disappointed that the meat of the "join Australia" conversation is edited out of the Substack version of The Hoon this week. I am further disappointed that the comments have been disabled on the full conversation on YouTube. What is the thinking behind this editorial choice?
Seeing David Farrar listed as a guest was my first disappointment, actually. Farrar has shown repeatedly over a great length of time that he is not a good faith actor in any debate. His broken philosophical agenda includes abolishing Te Tiriti o Waitangi, keeping non-male and non-white voices out of public debate, and running a thumb-on-the-scales polling outfit to spread his bigotry and hatred in major media. This cretin already has his platform and hearing his weaselly musings on The Hoon is deeply disturbing.
Peter took the only acceptable tack of directly challenging Farrar on his ugly, destructive views and how his flimsy opinion piece about joining the explicitly racist country to the north is informed by them. Peter was more civil than Farrar deserved. Racism, sexism, bigotry and authoritarianism deserve only to be called what they are, hate-filled ideologies that cannot be tolerated. To edit out that necessary interrogation on Substack with a Nazi problem seems especially egregious.
I hope to hear from you, Bernard, as to why you made this set of decisions to platform a known bad faith actor, to actively stifle the flow of the journalistic interrogation by Peter, and then to edit out the whole story for Substack. I suspect fear of legal action from Farrar may have spurred these choices. To which I suggest, don't platform bad faith actors. But certainly do NOT help mask their horrible beliefs and actions if you do.
🙏🙏🙏
Bernard - I do actually want to know why you platformed David Farrar and why you made the editorial choice to withhold the full conversation from your Substack audience and paying subscribers, of which I am one. Forgive me if I missed your response elsewhere, but do kindly point me to it if you did address the concerns and questions I and others voiced.
Another thinly veiled assault on Te Tiriti dressed up as an economic prescription and a very narrow view of an economy.If Farrar’s anti Tiriti agenda is to be supported through the Hoon imperative to hear others on this - Professor Margaret Mutu, Dr Carwyn Jones, Jane Kelsey ,Ganesh Ahirao for example.
Friend, Have you watched it on youtube? If you haven't I recommend, as insufferable DF is. It's worth it. 🙏 starts at 44mins into the episode.
Thanks just watched it.
Thank goodness for Peter .