Why do all new builds have these tiny little kitchens, sometimes with no capacity for a larger fridge and zero cupboards for food and zero space for a food cupboard. Its just bizzare.
I had a bit of a wake-up call recently and thought it was worth sharing...
Several months ago after a four day sailing trip north of Auckland, I noticed I’d caught a bit of sun and had a small weird “pimple” on my cheek. It didn’t go away. After a few weeks I took close-up photos of it, thought it might be a wart, and stupidly(?) tried to burn it off with pharmacy cryo wart treatment. By week 5 it still hadn’t resolved, so tried another round of home administered wart treatment.
Then 6 weeks in I loaded the photos into ChatGPT. It flagged squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) as a real possibility and pushed pretty hard that I needed to get it checked properly and quickly.
That was honestly the turning point. I spent the night sleepless reading about SCC and started calling around the next morning for the earliest available appointment. I refused to settle for anyone who couldn’t see me within the week.
I first went to MoleMap for a spot check of only this one concern. They photographed it with their special camera and sent to their dermatologist - the report came back as that night as essentially benign / self-monitor (seborrhoeic keratosis). I wanted to believe that, but I the nurse didn't seem very thorough in capturing all the notes I had shared with her and so something still didn’t sit right / instil me with much confidence.
So I pushed further and booked in with a specialist skin clinic/surgeon (The Specialists Takapuna). That turned out to be the right call. Pathology has now confirmed today it was a cancerous SCC (squamous cell carcinoma in situ) - caught early enough before it spread / became invasive. The team there did a fantastic job - I cannot rate them all highly enough!
A few takeaways from this:
In my case, NIB health insurance has covered most of the surgical cost, but it has declined the MoleMap spot checkup (which ironically could have killed me / cost NIB a lot more if I had stopped there). I’m also checking my trauma cover with AIA because my policy appears to include "carcinoma-in-situ" as a partial payment condition.
Not posting this to scare anyone - more just to say: trust your gut, use the tools available to you, and don’t muck around with new or changing skin lesions, especially after sun exposure.
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Edit 1: Molemap - A few people have asked whether I’ve gone back to MoleMap. When I have their response I’ll update this post.
Edit 2: Molemap - To be fair I’m not posting this to start a pile on. Dermoscopy/imaging is not the same as pathology. In my case the MoleMap report came back as benign/self-monitor, while The Specialists Takapuna theory of SCC was later confirmed through pathology - so I do think it’s worth asking them to review how that call was made and the information at the Molemap nurse didn't include to their expert..
Edit 3: Mole mapping services - Since a lot of the comments are about how concerning some mole mapping and skin imaging services can be, I should clarify and give a plug to the entire team at The Specialists Takapuna. They were the ones who took the original lesion seriously from the get go - first on the phone with reception, then over email also with reception I believe, then in person on the day with the nurse and the surgeon. They were the team that removed it and sent it for pathology, which is what confirmed the SCC in situ. They also handled the preapproval with my private health insurer, which came through just in time while I was waiting in reception for my scheduled appointment.
Also worth sharing; I went back for their VECTRA 360 / 3D whole body imaging. It’s basically a detailed full body photographic baseline, similar in purpose to mole mapping... To be clear, the VECTRA 360 appointment itself is imaging only and is not a replacement for a physical human check. I’m also planning on going back to TSTakapuna for a separate full clinical skin check - feels like a much better ongoing surveillance setup now that I’ve had one confirmed skin cancer scare!
^Not an ad - just genuinely impressed with how thorough (yet quick) the process is there, and 16 days on my scar is near invisible.
Edit 4: Photos / timeline / background context - I’ll upload as much supporting context as I can shortly - provided I can do it without sharing anything personally identifying.
I think the this matters here a lot for educational purposes because this didn’t start as an obvious “cancer-looking” lesion. It looked like a small inflamed pimple/spot at first, then changed over a few weeks. I had someone tell me their mate similar age thought was a pimple on their chin and they forgot about it - and they're dead now.
Hells is superior in almost every way to their competitors but their bases are genuinely bad and it’s not a new thing either. They have always been bad. As the prices rise and they start skimping on the toppings, it just makes their shit bases more obvious lol. Anyway, if someone can get this message to Old Nick himself, that’d be great.
I have never been this desperate to go and vote. I cannot wait to send National, Act and NZ First packing.
I applied for a role recently and spent proper time on my CV and cover letter, tailoring everything to the job like I always do.
Then the next step came through:
“Please record yourself answering these questions on camera.”
I’m just not sure about it.
I’m not really a camera person, especially when there is no one on the other side and you’re just talking into a screen. It feels unnatural to me.
I understand interviews are part of the process, and employers need to assess communication skills. But asking for a video recording this early made me pause.
I decided that if this is how the process starts, it probably isn’t the right company for me.
I’m applying for a job, not auditioning to become a YouTuber or influencer.
How do others feel about this? Are video answers a fair part of hiring now, or does it put too much on candidates too early?
You may have heard about the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill. It passed first reading on 20 May 2026 and now goes to select committee.
The Bill would impose "woman" as "an adult human biological female" and "man" as "an adult human biological male" across every Act of Parliament in New Zealand.
The framing has been that this is about "clarity" or "biological reality." Here is what it actually means for real people, day to day.
Healthcare
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Trans women on long-term oestrogen therapy develop breast tissue and have a documented breast cancer risk. Clinical guidelines recommend mammograms accordingly.
If the law no longer recognises a trans woman as a woman, what happens when she presents for screening that is set up around the legal category "woman"? What happens when she needs treatment and her insurance assesses her as a man because the law now insists she is one?
Trans men face the mirror version of this for cervical and ovarian cancer screening.
This is not hypothetical. It is the predictable downstream effect of legally splitting medical reality from administrative categorisation.
Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guidelines, the international standard, including screening recommendations for trans women:
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/102/11/3869/4157558
Insurance
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Health insurers use legal sex for eligibility, risk assessment, and treatment coverage. If the law says a trans woman is legally a man, insurers can deny coverage for screenings and treatments her actual body needs. Trans men can be denied gynaecological care. Real people pay real money for real cancers that the state has just told them they cannot legally have.
Identity documents and travel
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Trans New Zealanders currently have the right to amend the sex marker on their passport, driver licence, and birth certificate under the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021.
A bill that imposes "woman" and "man" across all legislation puts that right in conflict with itself. You become a walking contradiction at every border crossing, bank, hospital, and police interaction. Your passport says one thing. The new law says another.
This is not just an administrative inconvenience. It is a genuine safety risk.
There are over 60 countries that still criminalise being LGBTQ+, and several where being trans can carry the death penalty or imprisonment. Trans New Zealanders travelling overseas already navigate this carefully, relying on consistent NZ identity documents to move safely through airports, customs, and hotels. If our own law decides their passport gender is no longer legally recognised back home, that inconsistency can be exposed at any border, in any country. A discrepancy between documents in a hostile jurisdiction is not paperwork. It can mean detention, refusal of entry, outing to local authorities, or violence.
This isn't theoretical. Trans travellers from countries with similar legal contradictions have been detained, deported, and harmed.
A New Zealand government has a duty to protect its citizens abroad, not to undermine the documents those citizens rely on to stay safe.
ILGA World, the international authority on LGBTQ+ legal status by country:
https://ilga.org/maps-sexual-orientation-laws/
Human rights protections
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The Human Rights Act 1993 prohibits discrimination on the basis of "sex" (section 21). Since 2006, the Crown Law Office has interpreted "sex" to include gender identity, following the opinion of then-Solicitor-General Cheryl Gwyn. That interpretation is the reason transgender people are protected from discrimination in NZ law today.
This protection is implicit, not explicit. It has held for 20 years.
In 2025, the Law Commission's IA Tangata report recommended adding "gender identity" and "having an innate variation of sex characteristics" as new prohibited grounds in section 21, to clarify what is currently implicit. In 2026, the government said implementing those recommendations was "not a priority."
This Bill makes the situation worse. By imposing a single legal definition of "woman" and "man" as biological female and biological male across all NZ legislation, it directly undercuts the Crown Law interpretation. The Bill is specifically targeting the legal basis on which trans New Zealanders have been protected from discrimination for the last 20 years.
Human Rights Act 1993: https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0082/latest/DLM304475.html
Law Commission IA Tangata report (2025): https://www.lawcom.govt.nz/our-work/ia-tangata
Dignity and mental health
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When the state itself misgenders trans people in law, every institution downstream follows. Government forms. Employment records. Aged care. Schools. The everyday cost of being misgendered by your own government is documented in peer-reviewed literature as increasing rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality among trans people.
This is in the medical evidence. It is also in the lived experience of every trans, takatāpui, intersex, and non-binary person in Aotearoa right now.
RANZCP, the peak psychiatric body across Australia and NZ, explicitly states being trans is not a mental health condition and that affirming care is appropriate:
https://www.ranzcp.org/clinical-guidelines-publications/clinical-guidelines-publications-library/role-of-psychiatrists-working-with-trans-gender-diverse-people
Workplace, school, family
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Single-sex provisions in workplaces, schools, and sports clubs currently work because legal recognition lines up. This Bill creates contradictions every employer, principal, and HR department then has to navigate. Trans parents face complications around birth certificates, custody, and family law.
The trans person pays the cost of every uncertain interaction.
The Bill solves nothing. So why is it here?
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Stop and ask: what actual problem in New Zealand law does this Bill fix?
* The Human Rights Act 1993 already protects sex-based rights AND gender identity rights, and has done so for decades, side by side, without breaking anything.
* The Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Act 2021 already provides legal certainty on how someone's sex is recognised.
* Sports eligibility is set by international sporting bodies, not NZ legislation. This Bill does not change a single eligibility rule in any sport.
* Women's refuges and other single-sex services already manage access case by case. They are not asking for this Bill.
Schools, employers, and community clubs already navigate gender and identity in practical ways every day. This Bill does not help them. It creates new legal contradictions where none existed.
ACT, National, and NZ First have not pointed to a single concrete harm in current NZ law that this Bill fixes.
So what is this bill actually for?
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* It is a Trump-style culture-war import. The playbook is the same one being run in the US and the UK: pick a small, visible minority. Manufacture a crisis around their existence. Pass laws that "solve" the manufactured crisis. Use the noise to distract from the real failures of government.
* It is electoral positioning. NZ First and ACT are competing for the same culture-war voter base. The Bill exists because that audience needs to be fed, not because trans, takatāpui, and intersex New Zealanders are causing any real-world problem.
* It is also a distraction. This Bill arrived alongside major public sector cuts and ongoing failures on housing, healthcare, cost of living, and wages. Trans people are being used as a smokescreen.
We are doing this to people. For nothing. To win a culture war that didn't need to be fought, in a country that didn't ask for it, imported from politicians overseas who have no stake in our lives.
Why this matters even if you are not trans yourself?
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This is not just about a small group of people you may or may not know. This is about what kind of country Aotearoa is.
A country where the state can decide overnight that a category of people no longer legally exists is a country where rights are conditional. Today it is trans people. The same machinery, the same playbook, can be turned on anyone.
The WHO confirmed in 2022 that biological sex is not limited to male or female:
https://www.who.int/news/item/06-07-2022-who-updates-widely-used-gender-mainstreaming-manual
What you can do
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The Bill now goes to select committee. Submissions is opened now.
Please submit here: https://www3.parliament.nz/en/pb/sc/make-a-submission/document/54SCSSC_SCF_9E8E8A14-A51C-4567-AB33-08DE9053A7D1/legislation-definitions-of-woman-and-man-amendment-bill
Anyone can submit. Any age. No citizenship required. English, te reo Māori, or NZ Sign Language. Takes about 10 minutes.
I will post again the moment submissions are open.
Save this. Share it. Send it to one person who needs to know.
🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈
EDIT: I used the word "redefine" incorrectly. It is not being redefining, it is imposing one incorrectly at best.
EDIT: Added the link bill
EDIT: Clarify about Human right protection
EDIT: I used the AI to help me improve the writing and gather my thoughts. All the concerns I raised in this post is genuinely what I feel as a transwoman in this situations. i don’t usually interract or even do much social media but staying silence is no longer an option. Most of the information I mentioned included the source. The nature of this post is personal expression anyway. I am not a fake person with "woke" agenda. I am not hiding my identity either. You can easily search me.
EDIT: SUBMISSION IS OPENED NOW. PLEASE VOICE YOUR SUPPORT BY MAKING A SUBMISSION HERE : https://www3.parliament.nz/en/pb/sc/make-a-submission/document/54SCSSC_SCF_9E8E8A14-A51C-4567-AB33-08DE9053A7D1/legislation-definitions-of-woman-and-man-amendment-bill
As title suggests some kid is posting themself pissing on floors as well as throwing milk and eggs on cars/busses, throwing lime scooters in rivers and off of roofs breaking them all in Christchurch. Pissed me off so I wanna be petty and report it but I’m not sure how to report a TikTok account and if there’s anything that could be down that’d make it worth it?
This morning I arrived at work and our deliveries had arrived early and 3 large boxes were left outside on our deck. As I was carrying one box inside a NZ Post courier driver also pulled up with another package which he brought inside. Then he went outside and kindly brought in the other 2 boxes left on our deck (from another courier) for me.
Pure kindness and thoughtfulness in action.
I work for a multinational corporation that interacts with Government, NGO's, Corporate/Business clients and the public and I've noticed something extremely worrying over the last few months.
We receive information requests and respond to the query with internal information or links to other agencies but we're receiving more queries from people who have lost their basic reading skills, the ability to understand information and/or not supplying enough relevant information to assist them, requiring further administrative work
We're seeing more people following up and complaining that the information is too much, too hard to understand and then asking for an abbreviated version of said info (this is all easily digestible public information and not government/corporate/business jargon) but coming from everyone from Senior managers to the public.
I feel like Tik Toks, insta reels and 128 character tweets are dumbing down the public, people are no longer able to sit, read and absorb information unless it's in a similar fashion. I had a follow-up email today asking to compress a short media statement into a single sentence or literally have our staff translate/summarize the information for them.
Is anyone experiencing this phenomena?
First world problem i know but this one hurts
He took this on his very old, very bad phone. Magic
Going from the signals from this government, the likelihood is that once Road User Charges apply to all vehicles, the NZTA would no longer directly manage them but instead outsource the work to private companies like EROAD.
I should start by saying I support the move to universal RUC's as it seems to be the only way to make sure all road users are paying their fair share. The petrol FED is no longer fit for purpose.
Shifting the admin of this process to a private company though feels like another privatisation move by this government to help out their rich mates.
Also the talk about requiring electronic devices to be installed in private vehicles seems a bit... well not New Zealand.
What are other people's thoughts on this?
For those interested, there is a consultation process open until 12 June:
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/submissions-open-regulations-modernise-ruc-system
As if some people didn’t need another excuse to vote this government out. Here’s a list of things I have complied that the government failed to deliver on or have done that erodes our ability to function as a normal and healthy society.
•Promised 500 extra frontline police within two years. These targets were missed or delayed.
•Promised major cost-of-living relief. Many households still facing high food, rent, insurance, and mortgage costs with these further increasing.
•Promised stronger economic growth. New Zealand experienced weak growth/recessionary conditions.
•Promised improved employment conditions however, unemployment increased and has continued to increase.
•Promised meaningful tax relief. The final tax package was smaller/altered after coalition negotiations and provided little to no benefit with public services suffering as a result.
•Planned foreign buyer tax to fund tax cuts policy abandoned.
•Promised government efficiency without harming services. Services have been significantly harmed and reduced with no real savings cost.
•Large public service job cuts which has led to worse outcomes in the public services.
•Promised better healthcare outcomes. Hospital wait times and staffing shortages remain major issues.
•GP shortages and access issues persist.
•Emergency department pressure remains high.
•Mental health service demand still outstripping supply.
•Prison capacity pressures continue despite “tough on crime” policies.
•Promised housing affordability improvements. House prices remain unaffordable for many.
•Rental affordability still poor in many regions.
•Reinstated landlord tax deductibility with little benefit to first home buyers.
•KiwiBuild-scale replacement housing policy not clearly realised.
•Homelessness and emergency housing demand remain significant.
•Promised reduced bureaucracy. Unable to identify any areas where bureaucracy has meaningfully contributed to cost reduction or efficiency
•Heavy use of parliamentary urgency despite no urgency for the bills put through.
•Fast-track legislation criticised for limiting consultation.
•Treaty Principles Bill debate. Waste of time and money.
•Infrastructure delivery slower than promised in transport and water sectors.
•Public transport funding uncertainty in some regions and cancelled school buses while trying to fix school attendance rates.
•Ferry replacement programme disruptions and cost blowouts despite no evidence changing the original plan was going to be more cost effective or beneficial
•Climate policy rollbacks has been criticised domestically and internationally.
•Oil and gas exploration policy reversals
•EV incentive removal
•Emissions reduction progress backpedaled
•School attendance and achievement issues remain significant despite education reforms.
•Teacher shortages persist in some subjects and regions.
•Promised better fiscal discipline. Some policies increased long-term fiscal pressure.
•Tobacco policy reversal and tax break
•Māori health sector restructure of abolishing Te Aka Whai Ora.
•Infrastructure resilience concerns remain after severe weather events and no indication to improve this.
The coalition priorities focused more on reversing previous government policies than delivering new transformational programmes.
With some more absurd election promises coming out by the current government it’s a wonder why people will vote for them again when they are clearly trying to speed run our country into the ground for their own ego and ideology.
If I have missed anything please add it to the list.
Forgive me in advance for my ignorance here, but I am genuinely interested in this discussion and whether or not anything like this would ever be viable.
Tech companies like Meta, Google and Amazon are proven to be shipping billions of dollars in New Zealand revenue into offshore tax havens like Ireland, allowing them to show little to no taxable revenue here.
If it's not possible to tax them thanks to that loophole, what if the government introduced a tax on every dollar of ad spend from New Zealand advertisers? If you knew that an advertiser was spending $1000 per week on ads which is 100% profit for the tech company given it's almost always programmatic, is it possible to introduce a tax on every dollar before they ship it out to their tax havens?
There's got to be some way to get these oligarchs to pay their fair share, surely?