The Rob Report

A disintegrating asphalt road surface north of Auckland, has been grabbing the news in recent days. It will probably turn out to be a bad batch, because anyone observing the laying of this material shows that it sets very hard after much roller work and as the product cools down.

It is fitting that the blog I write immediately after the item posted about Miet Wnorowski, is about another refugee - Bruno Romanowski. It is one of those incredible outcomes of world turmoil (WW2), that Bruno and Miet wound up working in the same organisation 12,000 miles away from

I met ‘Dr Wnorowski’ (I can think of only one occasion that I used his first name), when we both worked at the NZ Dairy Board. This was in the seventies. I was a junior analyst and although Dr Wnorowski was in the same office, I was never sure of

On 23 November, I wrote this letter to the Dominion Post” ‘Every few years, we hear the tragic tale of four or five teenagers killed in a car crash. If one of them has a licence, it will be a Learner grade, at best. A few months later we read

Some pre-season publicity for Oscar Kightley’s ‘Pacific Brothers and Sisters’ sports programme, is currently appearing on national television. One of the interview ‘teasers’ is a snippet from Dame Valerie Adams. Her words: ‘I participated in a white-dominated sport. I had to learn to play that game’. What? Val, your

I must confess a quiet chuckle when I heard the news that funding for the Winn Shakespeare Festival was being cut.The reason cited, is that Shakespeare depicts monarchical structures inappropriate to modern NZ.I recall when I taught English in China, a distraught, under pressure student knocking on my

However transitory, it is always a pleasure to see a glimmering of understanding of the low esteem Islam has in the West. So it was when I discovered a piece by a Kuwaiti journalist and former university lecturer Su'ad Fahd Al-Mo'ajel Ms Mo’ajel begins her

Since its introduction in 1971, China’s One Child Policy has always been the subject of misinformed reporting in Western media. Certainly there were abuses, but to read local papers one would think that on the stroke of midnight on ‘D Day’ any woman carrying a second child would be

I am heartily sick of John Carter's rant about faceless Wellington bureaucrats and the Northland lockdown.Throughout the pandemic Northland has shown one of the lowest uptake rates for vaccination - often over 10 percent less  than the national average. Northland is touted as an 'underserved community&

I have previously noted that in the Stuff/Dominion Post stable, there is a protected species of commentator. Joe Bennett is one such. In a column published on 18 May, he noted that golf is: 'Capitalism in civvy clothes’ and isn’t Bennett in his element! Using golf as

You know what it’s like. Hanging around with nothing to write about and you’d do anything for a juicy racism story. Well, the Dominion Post (Stuff), won’t let you down. A recent piece in that paper (link below) featured Maori activist Tame Iti. Known as much for

Donna Miles gets it wrong and not for the first time. There is an emerging and worrying trend in the ‘Dominion Post’ which is to give certain Opinion writers carte blanche, as if they are some kind of unimpeachable super class. Even though editorials, opinion pieces, reprints from other newspapers

As we near the halfway point in the US Presidential election cycle, it’s time the Left started brushing off its anti-Electoral College rhetoric. Given the disaster of the Biden presidency thus far, it is fairly certain that a Republican candidate will win in 2024. If it’s not Donald