NZ Skeptics Articles

NZ Skeptics 2024 AGM Chair's Report

Bronwyn Rideout - 9 December 2024

Tena koutou katoa. This is my first end-of-year report as Chair, and I want to begin by thanking the 2024 committee and acknowledge the contributions of those who left over the year: Sara Passmore, Josh Voorkamp, and Louise Richardson.

2024 has been an interesting year for the NZ Skeptics. Last year Jim Ring, a frequent contributor to the Skeptics Journal, passed away and left our organisation with a sizable collection of books and a generous financial bequest of $100,000. The books have found a new home with the NZARH in Auckland, while the committee is considering its options regarding the optimal use of the funds. Rest assured, the bequest size does not impact our charity status, and we are taking a measured approach towards its disbursement.

We experimented with our annual conference this year by co-hosting it with the NZARH at the Fickling Convention Centre in West Auckland. We had three events across three venues: The Friday night social and quiz at Rationalist House, the main conference at Fickling, and the Saturday night dinner at Little Jimmy restaurant. According to our recent records, Auckland has been a challenging location to host in; the last conference held there in 2018 only had about 35 attendees. Despite securing a venue and date early on in the year, accommodation and travel were difficult for many to secure due to the other major events that booked the same weekend as us over the rest of the year.

Nevertheless the event was successful, despite being an solely in-person event. We had 56 paid attendees over both days (including 7 NZ Skeptics committee members), which was better than anticipated, and a total of 10 speakers.This is comparable to 2016 and 2023 numbers. Historically, our best-attended conference is the 2019 conference, where we had the SGU as guests. There were 143 attendees who paid between $160 and 235, plus $85 for the gala dinner. Ticket sales for the conference and dinner this year totalled $8.913.30, and subtracting costs we have had our third profitable conference in a row, with a profit of over $3,600. I want to thank Sara Passmore, Jude Eliassen, and Hema Paterson of the NZARH for their support and collaboration with the conference planning. Discussion and venue scouting has begun for the 2025 conference, which we hope will be in Christchurch.

We continued to offer our mainstay activity, Skeptics in the Pub, at least once a month in Auckland and Dunedin, and twice a month in Wellington. A sincere thanks to Auckland organisers Robin Capper and Craig Shearer, Wellington organisers James Kerr and Mark Honeychurch, and Dunedin organisers Josh Voorkamp and Paul Campbell for the gift of their time in hosting these events. We also continue to offer Skeptics in Cyberspace every four weeks. Kudos to Mark Honeychurch and James Kerr for keeping the conversations going on ZOOM.

There have been significant changes in the delivery of the newsletter and podcast. At last year’s AGM it was announced that the newsletter and podcast would shift to biweekly publication, as Mark became the sole editor. For most of the year, the newsletter and podcast were released within days of each other fortnightly. Due to work and personal commitments in the later half of the year, Craig has had to step away from both the newsletter and the Yeah…Nah! Podcast. Mark and I want to officially thank Craig for his contributions to these two major ongoing projects. We still hope that Craig is willing to be a special correspondent and file a report or two as he visits sundry skeptical conferences and groups during his trips abroad.

With the newsletter’s content used for our fortnightly official podcast, Yeah…Nah!, It was crucial to secure a new roster of newsletter contributors and podcast co-hosts. Katrina Borthwick and Brad McClure jumped feet first into these roles, and have done swimmingly thus, with Brad and I sharing editing duties. To keep the workload sustainable between the newsletter and the podcast, we now release the newsletter and the podcast on alternating weeks. The newsletter has maintained an email subscriber of approximately 1,000, but appears to secure a larger overall audience of around 1,400; this is possibly due to links to the newsletter being included in our show notes and shared with journalists or wider audiences on Facebook/Twitter. We cannot report on podcast audience size at present, but we still receive positive feedback from our listeners.

We continue to encourage submission from members and skeptical allies. This year, we published articles by and/or had on the podcast the following individuals:

Due to our relationship with other organisations, newsletter articles are sometimes reprinted in the NZARH journal and the Australian Skeptics magazine (appropriately called The Skeptic). Members of the committee continue to collaborate with journalists across the country on topics of a Skeptical nature.

Membership levels remain stable, and our subscription fees ($40 annually, or $20 if you’re unwaged) remain unchanged. Our membership system (Memberful) has streamlined the process of communicating with members and collecting subs when they are due, which makes lapses of membership less likely. Each year we still remind members that memberful will automatically review their membership on the anniversary of your registration, so please review your memberful profile so that you are not taken unawares.

We took out an indemnity insurance policy last year to cover us against things like being sued for speaking out against a person or organisation. We have (thankfully) yet to have utilised this policy, and have renewed it for another year.

The $100K skeptic challenge is still active, although the three 2023 targets remain mum to our challenge. Ken Ring continues to make predictions, Kevin Cruickshank has ingratiated himself into the tragic coronial inquest into the death of toddler Lachie Jones, and Sleep Drops is still seeking research legitimacy, recently promoting a partnership with smart ring company Oura to conduct the “largest sleep study” ever in New Zealand. Trust that we will be pulling this project apart in the new year.

The committee continues to collaborate and champion the work of others, while beavering away on our own background projects. For those who have not caught up with our recent newsletter, podcast, website updates, or Facebook posts, our annual Bent Spoon, media Bravos, and Skeptic of the Year were announced at the 2024 conference. Our Bent Spoon went to King Charles, for his ongoing platforming of pseudoscientific practices; media Bravos were awarded to several journalists at Stuff for their reporting on cults and gurus in Canterbury, and Skeptic of the Year was awarded to Anke Richter, for the labour of love that was the DeCult conference. It was heartening to see many skeptics stepping up to volunteer at the DeCult event. In turn, Anke has been promoting our work, which has brought with it a small increase in inquiries. I and other skeptics who have put themselves forward will continue to wave the NZ Skeptics flag within the DeCult collective that is starting to form. Our organisation also participated in the 24-hour global Skeptics in the Pub meeting, an online event held in the run-up to the SkeptiCal conference in Northern California earlier this year. The NZ Skeptics both started and closed off the event, and it was interesting to see other groups take a more formal approach when using their allotted time slots, whereas we treated it like just another casual online Friday meeting.

Next year is shaping up to be an exciting year. You may have heard us talk about the Skeptical calendar, the hair analysis project, and the plagiarism project on the podcast. These are long-running projects that we are winding up, and we hope to make them public in the first half of 2025. With an eye to the future, we have more projects in the pipeline. This includes a family tree/timeline of cults and spiritual/religious groups in New Zealand, and we are also exploring the possibility of developing New Zealand-centred educational materials covering skeptical topics like critical thinking, scams, and pseudoscience.