“Let's be clear about what AUKUS actually is: the greatest military protection racket in modern history. Washington looked at its own crippled submarine industrial base—17 boats short, yards choking, Congress screaming—and found the perfect mark. A wealthy, eager, insecure middle power with a bipartisan fetish for great-power relevance and a defense minister who treats strategic questions like a classified state secret The deal? Australia pays half a trillion dollars. In return, it gets used Virginia-class hand-me-downs—Block IV boats with a decade of wear already on the hulls, probably smelling faintly of its previous crew.”

As an older gen z, I find this to be especially true. Partying was a thing my friends and I did from about 16 to 22. It was fun, it was social, it was just “what everyone did”. What changed it for me was watching the effects on my older peers and friends. Seeing people a few years ahead of me visibly degraded from that lifestyle was a real wake up call imo. The skin, energy, and health issues showing up way too early. For some reason, I find my generation caring about this stuff a lot more. Club culture itself also just stopped being appealing. Everything started looking sloppy dirty. But the shift is probably bigger than personal preference: → we grew up on the internet w/ full access to what alcohol actually does to your body and your overall health. → everything is filmed now. every night out is documented on someone’s phone so the cost of being sloppy became permanent evidence. → going out got absurdly expensive. a single night at a club can run hundreds, meanwhile a gym membership is $50 /month and a run club is mostly free. → the pandemic forced everyone to stop going out & a lot of people realized they didn’t miss it. → mental health awareness got REALLY normalized for our generation. Therapy, self care, etc. → aspirational content shifted. The coolest thing on social media used to be bottle service/ club photos. Now it’s gym progress, run clubs, morning routines, clean girl aesthetics, wellness. → Dating apps replaced bars. You don’t need to go to a club to meet people anymore. Overall just think our generation collectively realized that taking care of yourself isn’t boring, and we’re more skeptical on what we waste our money on since the future we were promised as kids doesn’t really exist anymore.

Want your house to be worth up to 20% less than what you paid for it? Vote for the Opportunities Party. TOP wants to drive property prices down by 10–15% through their 1.75% Land Value Tax, but in reality the policy could easily trigger a sharper correction of 20% or more — hammering retirees on fixed incomes and first-home buyers who stretched to get into the market. For the 100,000 Kiwis who bought near the 2021–2022 peak, imagine a deliberate 10–20% policy-driven drop layered on top of any correction your property has already suffered, plus a permanent 1.75% annual tax on the land value. The Opportunity Party calls itself centrist, but this is classic left-wing, Green Party-level interventionism.