Parent, husband, conservative. Despair at Leftist bias in MSM and academia. Respect Tangata Whenua. 54% tax is outrageous. Let Women Speak. King/Highness.
Joined August 2018
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David the Etruscan retweeted
This all started with a Sales Rep sending an email to a GP with the typo “Ate Marie” instead of “Ata Marie”. The Dr comments in his email reply that there’s too much Te Reo in emails these days. The author takes offence and the whole thing is escalated to the Medical Council. The Dr is ordered to take a 12 month cultural course as penance. No wonder he left NZ. What an utter joke. Thank you @NZFreeSpeech
In November 2022, Waikato GP Dr David Smylie received a dinner invitation from a sales rep that opened “Ate Marie Everyone”. Late that night, he fired back a four-sentence private reply, joking about the typo and grumbling about the amount of te reo in her email. You might not agree with what Dr Smylie said, but it wasn’t sent to a colleague or a patient.
Her manager complained to the Medical Council. Within days, Dr Smylie had written an apology. The Council never passed it on, at one point claiming it would “interfere with an active investigation”. When the rep was later interviewed and the committee chair floated a meeting with him, another member warned her off: “it’s tough calling out racism.”
The Professional Conduct Committee found his comments “objectively racist, offensive, and insensitive”. Whether he meant any harm was “of little consequence”. His four sentences had “the potential to contribute to current health inequities”.
The penalty was a year of what the Council called an “Educational Programme”: monthly sessions with a supervisor who reported back on him, readings on colonisation and institutional racism, and strategies for managing his “implicit biases (which are inevitable)”. He was expected to pay for it, at $125 an hour plus GST. To finish, he had to write two essays, including 1,000 words on structural racism in New Zealand health care.
In almost 40 years of practice, nobody had complained about his care. The committee’s ruling noted he had “not yet” received a complaint.
He sat through all twelve sessions and refused to write the essays, on a matter of principle. Dr Smylie now practises overseas.
Health NZ is short of doctors and recruiting from abroad. The Medical Council has driven one out over a private email.
Dr Smylie tells the full story on Free to Speak:
In November 2022, Waikato GP Dr David Smylie received a dinner invitation from a sales rep that opened “Ate Marie Everyone”. Late that night, he fired back a four-sentence private reply, joking about the typo and grumbling about the amount of te reo in her email. You might not agree with what Dr Smylie said, but it wasn’t sent to a colleague or a patient, and was remarkably minor.
Her manager complained to the Medical Council. Within days, Dr Smylie had written an apology. The Council never passed it on, at one point claiming it would “interfere with an active investigation”. When the rep was later interviewed and the committee chair floated a meeting with him, another member warned her off: “it’s tough calling out racism.”
The Professional Conduct Committee found his comments “objectively racist, offensive, and insensitive”. Whether he meant any harm was “of little consequence”. His four sentences had “the potential to contribute to current health inequities”.
The penalty was a year of what the Council called an “Educational Programme”: monthly sessions with a supervisor who reported back on him, readings on colonisation and institutional racism, and strategies for managing his “implicit biases (which are inevitable)”. He was expected to pay for it, at $125 an hour plus GST. To finish, he had to write two essays, including 1,000 words on structural racism in New Zealand health care.
In almost 40 years of practice, nobody had complained about his care. The committee’s ruling noted he had “not yet” received a complaint.
He sat through all twelve sessions and refused to write the essays, on a matter of principle. Dr Smylie now practises overseas.
Health NZ is short of doctors and recruiting from abroad. The Medical Council has driven one out over a private email.
Dr Smylie tells the full story on Free to Speak: youtu.be/Hn1ahDIwf6k?si=eeHh…
Promoted by Free Speech Union, PO Box 91811, Victoria Street West, Auckland 1142.
youtu.be/Hn1ahDIwf6k?si=eeHh…
Promoted by Free Speech Union, PO Box 91811, Victoria Street West, Auckland 1142.
David the Etruscan retweeted
Just last week I fronted up to RNZ to debate Labour’s health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall, head to head and on the record. I’d encourage everyone to have a listen, because the contrast could not be clearer.
In that debate she conceded that Labour would keep National’s health targets. Finally, an admission that they are working.
Today Chris Hipkins has torn up that promise.
This is the same Chris Hipkins who, as Health Minister and then Prime Minister, oversaw exploding waiting times, worsening emergency department performance, and a serious decline in childhood immunisation.
Now he wants to scrap the very targets fixing the mess he left behind, targets his own health spokesperson committed to keeping only days ago.
In that debate, I stood behind the progress we’ve made as a country over the past three years in our healthcare system, while acknowledging there’s more work to do. Chris Hipkins should be far less comfortable defending his record, and clearly he knows it.
That’s why he’s so desperate to distract from Labour and their mates' nine new taxes, which Kiwis are rightly concerned about.
New Zealanders remember the mess he left behind, and no amount of spin will convince them he’s the one to fix it.
Perhaps he missed the debate. He should go back and watch it.
David the Etruscan retweeted
#BREAKING: The Greens have just released their ‘fiscal plan’ and it reveals they are literally campaigning on nine new taxes.
Their fiscal plan shows it would undo all the progress Kiwis have worked so hard for the past three years.
The Green Party is literally campaigning on nine new taxes to pay for $49 billion of additional spending, which will make every New Zealander worse off.
That is on top of the new taxes and billions of dollars in spending that Labour, Te Pati Māori and Opportunity are also campaigning on.
With some polls showing the Greens have more than half of Labour’s support, Chloe Swarbrick wouldn’t just be a minor partner. She would have real leverage and a legitimate claim to be Finance Minister, which she has been clear she wants.
A Labour-Greens coalition with Chloe Swarbrick as Finance Minister, backed by Te Pati Māori and Opportunity, would undo the last three years of progress and make everyone poorer with at least nine new taxes.
Our economy is getting stronger and outpacing Australia, the US and the UK, thanks to the hard work of households and businesses, backed by a National-led Government managing the books responsibly.
National’s plan is working, and we need three more years to finish the job.
The only way to stick with the plan that is working and to stop Chloe Swarbrick getting her hands on the country’s finances is to give your party vote to National.
David the Etruscan retweeted
In case people need reminding of how Labour did last time against their promises.
David the Etruscan retweeted
Think carefully which way you vote this election. France is a welfare state. 57.3 % of GDP is Government spending. Welfare states rarely go well (unless you have a large oil funded sovereign wealth fund) People are trained to expect more and do less. Soon enough you have less people wanting to work and be productive and wanting more and more. Its a slippery slope. Countries with these settings will always decline.
David the Etruscan retweeted
Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene."
It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why.
First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created.
So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?"
And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied.
Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake.
Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation.
Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it.
Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better?
The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians?
A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite.
Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences.
The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions.
The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem."
Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing.
Government is the fourth box. By design.
Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it.
And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money.
The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet.
Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it.
So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear.
China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build.
India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie.
South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines.
Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian.
Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%.
No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build.
And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years.
Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity.
Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek.
A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018.
Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years.
One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world.
Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades.
If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet.
It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week.
And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out.
You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake.
Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little.
The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery.
Choose.
David the Etruscan retweeted
Systemic discrimination is the definition of apartheid. 92% of Maori applicants to the University of Otago's medical school are accepted, compared with only 31% of non-Maori applicants, DESPITE the latter group having better grades. How is this not racial discrimination?
David the Etruscan retweeted
If I were National I’d make a few things even clearer in this campaign and keep doubling down on the below. @NZNationalParty
1.) You’re voting for a whole team. Not just a leader.
Put the talent front and centre. Who can run the portfolios and drive improvement and hold people accountable? In my view National wins this head to head hands down. Keep highlighting the comparisons. Show people why the team matters.
2.) Someone has to generate the wealth that pays for everything.
We need entrepreneurs and talented people waking up every day determined to build great companies. They create jobs and investment and the tax revenue that funds our public services. Make New Zealand a place where those people want to stay and build and succeed. That’s how we lift living standards. Make this connection clearer for voters.
3.) Don’t let Labour escape scrutiny of its record.
Keep bringing the debate back to outcomes on crime and education and spending. Use clear figures and concrete examples. People need to be reminded of what went wrong and what’s improving and what’s at stake
4.) Make accountability for spending a central issue.
Keep highlighting documented examples of waste. What was spent? What was delivered? Who took responsibility?
Specific examples land much harder than general statements. That was my takeaway from Chris raising foreign aid spending in last night’s debate. Give people the example and the context so they can judge for themselves.
Make the debt and annual interest bill real. Use verified figures with clear timeframes and compare the interest costs with spending on essential services like policing. Show people what that money could otherwise pay for.
Apply that same scrutiny to your own spending.
Keep reminding people: every dollar comes from someone who worked for it.
5.) Paint a much bigger picture of what New Zealand could be.
A highly productive country punching above its weight with companies winning on the world stage. Businesses bringing offshore revenue home and building entire ecosystems of suppliers and skills and well-paid jobs around them.
There’s a reason people move to strong economies. Let’s build one that attracts talent and gives our own people a reason to stay.
6.) Never let “free” go unchallenged.
When Labour says “free” remind people it means taxpayer funded. Free to use still means someone pays. What does it cost? How will you fund it? What will you stop spending on to afford it?
7.) Keep doubling down on no new taxes.
8.) Make it clear what people will actually notice in their daily lives.
For every policy answer one question: how does this make my life better?
A shorter wait for treatment. Less time getting consent to build a home. Better progress in the classroom. Talk about results people can feel and measure.
9.) Show how people can get ahead here.
Connect the bigger economic vision to a young person’s first job. A family’s first home. Someone starting a business.
Give people a clear path from working hard to building a better life in New Zealand.
I’m probably missing plenty. But I believe National should stick to its core values and make the case for them with confidence. In my view getting drawn into attacks on supermarkets does little to persuade voters that you have a credible plan for prosperity and moves away from
core values.
Back enterprise. Reward effort. Demand accountability. Show people how those principles will improve their lives
David the Etruscan retweeted
One could say that Cornell is infantilizing its female students. President Michael Kotlikoff, following up on his maudlin video performance of Oct. 3, has just banned all fraternity social events for the remainder of the 2026-2027 academic year. Doing so is necessary, Kotlikoff said, to strengthen campus safety.
This measure is wildly overinclusive. The number of “sexual assaults” (we will merely bracket the term for the moment) that would have come out of the dozens of future frat gatherings is minute to non-existent. The more efficient measure would have been to let females evaluate the risk of attending, and if they decide the risk is too high, boycott the parties. Or don’t show up roaring drunk. Or don’t get into bed with a guy whom you have no deep relationship with. Or don’t get into bed with a guy at all, unless you are engaged or, god forbid, married.
But Kotlikoff is implicitly right about one thing: He is presiding over a bunch of helpless, nauseatingly self-pitying co-eds who eschew all personal agency and who thus appear to need Cornell’s intercession. Cornell’s females expect everyone other than themselves to safeguard them.
David the Etruscan retweeted
Here are the lowlights of the @nzherald leaders debate - which shows why both leaders are tanking in the polls
(with one or two exceptions)
🧵....
Who can pull the dumbest face about Trump
David the Etruscan retweeted
If you're on a benefit you have an obligation to those paying taxes to fund it. You must be work ready, like they are.
Many New Zealanders face random drug testing as a condition of work, so should the beneficiaries they fund.
If values like this were stated clearly an unapologetically more often the whole country would be much better off.
David the Etruscan retweeted
when you just listen to the audio of this video without watching it... what do you imagine?
David the Etruscan retweeted
brashandmitchell.com/post/mu…
"It now appears that largely under the radar of public awareness, three coordinated initiatives are driving constitutional transformation: the Labour Government’s He Puapua agenda delivered a political roadmap for implementing tribal rule by 2040; the Maori elite’s Matike Mai has provided the constitutional model; and the Waitangi Tribunal’s Wai 3300 is expected to legitimise these ideas by directly challenging Parliamentary sovereignty and our electoral system.
By shifting far beyond its original purpose of investigating historical grievances, and by extending its reach into constitutional, political, and governance matters, this subversive body is now challenging the supremacy of Parliament — the cornerstone of New Zealand’s Westminster democracy – undermining the principle that ultimate power rests with voters."
The Waitangi Tribunal poses a serious threat to democracy in New Zealand. This election will determine whether New Zealand survives into the future or is replaced by an apartheid, tribalist sh#thole.
David the Etruscan retweeted
🇸🇬 Singapore was colonized until 1965
Average IQ in Singapore: 108
🇸🇴 Somalia was colonized until 1960
Average IQ in Somalia: 68
Spot the difference…
David the Etruscan retweeted
We put nine women in charge of a jury for two weeks and they tried to let a mom get away with strangling her kids. Then they launched a vicious smear campaign against the one black man who stood in their way.
So I’m confident Obama is full of shit here.
David the Etruscan retweeted
Derek Chauvin
> Arrested & restrained George Floyd
> Sentenced to 22.5 YEARS in prison
Q'Laundra Hood
> Killed a pedestrian and then fled
> Sentenced to 30 DAYS in prison
David the Etruscan retweeted
Weekly reminder - we should never FORGET labour. Just a small fraction of their wasteful ways. @NZNationalParty @actparty
1. 18 wallabies - $2.7 million
A eradication programme costing $153,000 per wallaby and 26,000 hours of labour. Cheaper to fly each one business class back to Australia.
2. Three Waters - $1.2 billion torched
Spent on a policy nobody wanted, that was immediately scrapped. Included $14,500 to write a single job description for a CEO who never existed.
3. RAT tests - $531 million sitting in warehouses
Costing $100,000 per day just to store. Most never used. Private businesses could have managed this themselves. RATS were also approved over a year too late.
4. Mongrel Mob meth rehab - $2.75 million
Including $239K on catering, $157K on Marae hire, and $100K hiring a van.
5. Virtual job expos - $835,000
Over two years. 126 people attended. That’s $6,626 per person to attend a Zoom call.
6. Shorter shower campaign - $2.8 million
Printed in 7 languages. To tell people to have shorter showers.
7. Health recruitment ad campaign -$514,000
Launched globally to attract health professionals. Result: 3 interviews.
8. Overseas recruitment ad for Kiwis-$10,000
Spent promoting Australian citizenship to Kiwis already living in Australia.
9. Wig tour - $73,000
Taxpayer money to fund the Arts Minister’s husband’s “Ulu Cavu Wig Tour of New Zealand.”
10. Abandoned China immigration office - $3 million
Kept paying rent on an office that had been closed for over a year.
11.) 2.Auckland Harbour cycling/walking bridge -more than $50 million spent before the project was cancelled
12.) Auckland light rail 229 million spent wjth not a single meter of track put in the ground before scrapped. ( over 1 mil a week )
13.Workforce Development Councils 65 million a year for bodies critics said delivered little tangible value; subsequently disestablished.
14.)RNZ/TVNZ public media merger -about $20 million spent before the merger was abandoned
15.)Let’s Get Wellington Moving -around $35 million spent on consultant fees while only about $250,000 went to actual construction before the programme was wound down
16.The Taliban publicly praised the NZ Labour government after receiving a $3 million donation framed as humanitarian aid.
17.)11. $842,000 to research ethnic women in NZ politics
Nearly a million dollars to study the experiences of ethnic women as politicians within NZ’s political system. A topic that could’ve been handled with a university research grant for a fraction of that
18.).... could keep going and going.
David the Etruscan retweeted
The bureaucracy has grown by 39% since Ardern became Prime Minister, has the quality gotten any better?
Or have we simply thrown more money and more people at the problem without seeing the results taxpayers deserve?
Jordan Williams was on Q+A this Sunday explaining exactly what’s in our Taxpayer Manifesto and what we should be asking every party seeking to form the next Government.
More spending isn’t the same as better government.
Listen to full interview on Q&A's YouTube channel, link in comments.