If Churches Are Optional, So Is the Tax Break
If Churches Are Optional, So Is the Tax Break
We are on fire!
Bottom line:
Plenty of cock-ups.
A few comebacks.
Endless process.
Occasional competence.
MEGA Says - Wellington remains the city where satire isn’t written — it’s scheduled.
In a stunning display of confidence, Cabinet has confirmed it is absolutely not using AI — while surrounded by software quietly finishing sentences, summarising emails, and gently asking if it can “help improve clarity”.
This position is known as Strategic Denial with Autocomplete.
Ministers assure us they don’t use artificial intelligence in their official roles. They merely use Microsoft products that suggest wording, organise thoughts, prioritise tasks, rewrite drafts, and flag inconsistencies. That’s not AI, obviously. That’s just… modern stationery.
Behind the scenes, departments are rolling out “approved AI tools” at scale. There are policies explaining how not to trust them, training sessions explaining how not to rely on them, and disclaimers explaining how not to admit you used them. Whether AI-generated material counts as “official information” remains undecided, which is handy, because it means no one has to answer for it yet.
In parallel, the public is being told to future-proof their livelihoods. Office workers are advised to upskill, retrain, diversify, and possibly learn plumbing. Tradespeople, meanwhile, discover they’re the new elite, as AI continues to struggle with spanners, pipes, and crawling under houses.
So let’s recap:
• AI is everywhere
• No one is using it
• Everyone is benefiting from it
• And nobody is responsible for it
It’s a bold strategy.
The government wants the efficiency of AI, the deniability of ignorance, and the optics of caution — all at once. A classic Wellington trifecta.
Meanwhile, workers are told to adapt now, even as institutions insist they’re still “looking into it”.
Rest easy, New Zealand.
The future is being carefully managed.
By people who swear they didn’t ask the computer to help.
MEGA NOTE:
Spot the Beach, Miss the Reality
A small reality check for Stuff, who somehow managed to frame Days Bay / Eastbourne as bleak — using a single windy Christmas moment — while quietly ignoring the rest of the actual summer.
Yes, the photo shows people rugged up at the beach.
Yes, that’s normal here.
No, it doesn’t define the season.
What didn’t make the cut:
Over the same period Eastbourne and Days Bay had stunning blue-sky days, the biggest beach crowds in the region, packed cafés, no carparks, and the kind of traffic jams that only happen when everyone’s heading seaside at once.
Locals know the rhythm. One breezy day doesn’t cancel out a run of cracker summer weather. Windbreaks and layers aren’t misery — they’re Wellington competence.
Stuff saw one photo and reached for a mood.
We lived the rest of the summer.
Same beach. Very different story.
MEGA NOTE:
Funding Secured for Advanced C-Word Analysis
Reassuring news from academia: public money has been safely allocated to the formal evaluation of the C-word.
Panels assembled. Context weighed. Feelings calibrated. The nation’s linguistic temperature taken — all to determine whether deploying a single, blunt Anglo-Saxon syllable really captured the mood.
And yes, it did.
While plumbers, nurses and ratepayers get on with life, universities proved once again they can turn raw public frustration into a multi-step intellectual exercise, complete with judging criteria, cultural framing, and a certificate at the end.
To be clear: this wasn’t about policy, outcomes, or fixing anything.
This was about the C-word as an academic artefact — analysed, ranked, and archived for future theses titled Profanity as Democratic Expression, 2025.
Comforting to know that when people snap, swear, and vent, someone, somewhere, is being paid to write it up.
Money well spent.
The C-word has been processed.
Every so often, New Zealand politics gets haunted by a former finance minister emerging from the past, waving a spreadsheet and reminding us how tough they once were.
This week’s apparition: Ruth Richardson, explaining — again — that everyone else is weak, the “middle way” is an illusion, and only her era understood fiscal reality.
Noted. Logged. Archived.
Here’s the problem: this isn’t 1990. The economy isn’t the same, the world isn’t the same, and voters aren’t interested in relitigating ideological wars fought with overhead projectors and fax machines. Experience is useful; nostalgia dressed up as inevitability is not.
Enter Nicola Willis, who is actually doing the job — in the present tense. She’s dealing with real budgets, real constraints, real politics, and real consequences, not writing op-eds from the comfort of historical certainty. That matters.
Willis doesn’t need lectures from ex-politicians who already had their turn, made their mark, and now insist history must endlessly validate them. The country isn’t crying out for reruns. It’s asking for competence, restraint, and decisions that fit now, not 35 years ago.
By all means, contribute to the archive. Write a memoir. Do a podcast. Give a speech to people who already agree with you.
But stop pretending today’s leaders are obligated to perform reverence.
Politics moves on. So should its ghosts.
Nicola Willis is governing in reality.
Ruth Richardson is arguing with history.
Only one of those pays the bills.
We were told it was a shared pathway. What we got was a live infrastructure experiment.
A few questions the community keeps asking — loudly, repeatedly, and without answers:
• Where exactly are you meant to pull over in an emergency when the route is lined with dragon-teeth concrete curbs and almost no breaks?
• Why are there at least seven different fence designs, all different heights, like a catalogue of rejected options?
• Why are there multiple coloured strips painted on the pathway with no explanation of what any of them mean?
• Why does the surface change so often — smooth, rough, ribbed, patched — as if each bay had its own project manager?
• Why are most bus stops not recessed, meaning buses still stop traffic anyway?
• Why do pathways carefully detour around trees, but not around bus stops?
• Why has this taken so long to complete?
• Why is traffic management chaotic, inconsistent, and constantly changing?
• Why is there an ugly yellow patch dumped outside the Hut in Lowry Bay?
• Why do some bays get stairs, others get ramps, all in completely different styles?
• Where is the Days Bay Design and Plan? It was there then disappeared.
• And the big one: how much is this costing — and is it still in budget?
This isn’t anti-cycle.
It’s pro-logic.
If you’re going to reshape the coastline, people deserve clarity, consistency, and answers — not a scavenger hunt of design decisions.
Shared path?
Let’s start with shared information.
Chef Gordon Ramswine
The pig with a palate sharper than his tongue. Known for turning slop into haute cuisine and never holding back on a fiery snort of criticism, Ramswine runs the kitchen like a battlefield. His signature dishes? Swine-dine perfection, seasoned with equal parts brilliance and barnyard bite.
Each month he delivers a new and original offering for you to try. If you like the dish then please let us know.
Gordon Ramswine’s New Year Summer Special.
By Chef Gordon Ramswine
Summer
Squeal-Salad
Gordon Ramswine’s Summer Squeal-Salad:
Peaches kissed by the pan, prosciutto snapped to attention, burrata doing its best “melted ego” impression — fresh, crunchy, and just smug enough to be delicious.
Some images don't need explanation. MEGA found this phrase and could let it go 'un-imaged'.
Meet Stuffed.Kiwi — where our music lives, our videos escape to, and original Stuffed Kiwi productions do their thing.
No messaging. No meaning. Just fun.
We’re not a political party—just a bunch of locals with a low tolerance for waffle and a high tolerance for mischief. MEGA is part neighbourhood fix-it crew, part satire squad, and part spontaneous parade.
No jargon. No committees. Just Eastbourne, steering its own ship—with a kazoo in one hand and a to-do list in the other.
For the full MEGA experience, visit our website on something bigger than your phone.
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