NZ Skeptics Articles

2025 AGM Chair's Report

Bronwyn Rideout - 8th December 2025

Tena koutou katoa. Before I commence my report, I want to begin by thanking the 2025 committee and acknowledge the contributions of those who left the committee since the last AGM: Daniel Smith, Brad MacClure, and Margaret Coe.

The NZ Skeptics have been admittedly a little quiet in 2025. Both the Skeptical Calendar and another, larger project have been paused over this year due to competing demands. For the calendar, that has been delayed due to this year being the final year of my graduate studies; for the latter project, Mark has instead been busy behind the scenes resolving IT challenges around our website. This has been fruitful as now all of the journal and newsletter articles are available through the articles.skeptics.nz website. We’ve seen a very modest increase in inquiries from university students and members of the public, although the level of credulity has been surprising.

Longtime members will notice that there is no conference this year. Due to availability of our 2026 overseas guests, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, we have had to reschedule our conference to July 31st-August 2nd. A survey that was sent to our members indicated that this timing would have made attending a 2025 conference less appealing. I want to thank the 64 society members who took the time to respond to the survey; your feedback was incredibly insightful and helped us with early decision-making. The 2026 conference will be held in Christchurch with committee member Jonny Grady at the lead. We anticipate having early-bird tickets available for purchase shortly for anyone wanting tickets to see the SGU for their 2025 Christmas/holiday/Newtonmas/Secret Sagan gift.

We continued to offer our mainstay activity, Skeptics in the Pub, at least once a month in Auckland and twice a month in Wellington. Dunedin’s pub meetings have been on hiatus this year but Josh Voorkamp has ambitions to reinvigorate the group in 2026. A sincere thanks to Auckland organisers Robin Capper and Craig Shearer and Wellington organiser James Kerr for the gift of their time in hosting these events. We also continue to offer Skeptics in cyberspace every four weeks. For the second year in a row, I want to acknowledge Mark Honeychurch and James Kerr for keeping the conversation going on ZOOM. The cyberspace meeting was started during the pandemic to keep our skeptical community connected. However, attendance numbers have become unpredictable, with many weeks seeing anywhere between 1 to 3 people aside from Mark, James, and myself. This is not to say that there isn’t a place for the cyberspace meetings; The NZ Skeptics participated for the second year in a row in the 2nd Global Skeptics in the Pub, which is a very successful event itself. However, we are considering changing the current scheduling. If members are interested in keeping the four-weekly pace, having more volunteers to facilitate the Friday night meetings is appreciated. Please reach out to us at committee@skeptics.nz if this is something you wish to do.

The release of the newsletter and the podcast on alternating weeks has continued swimmingly this year, with myself, Mark Honeychurch, and Katrina Borthwick regularly contributing to both. Brad MacClure stepped down from the podcast and the committee early in 2025 due to other commitments but continued to provide editing support until March 2025, and gave us a new theme song. Editing the podcast audio was a thankless task, but since we started to use the AI audio editing software Descript, a 3-5 hour task can now be done in half that time - depending on the length of the original episodes. It has also made it easier for Mark to transform the podcast into a video appropriate for YouTube. Descript’s capabilities also mean that we can start making short videos to other platforms like Facebook and TikTok or even a video podcast on Youtube. This is something we will consider over 2026 as a means to promote our work and just increase the amount of skeptical content on social media.

The newsletter has maintained an email subscriber count of approximately 1,000, but our metrics tell us secures a larger 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 mostly positive feedback from our (tens of) listeners.

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

With a special acknowledgement to Patrick Mendlicott for his ongoing article submissions regarding climate change.

Due to our relationship with other organisations, newsletter articles are reprinted in the NZARH journal and the Australian Skeptics magazine, appropriately called The Skeptic. However, the Australian Skeptics have decided to discontinue the publication of their print magazine, and are looking to move to publishing online. Concurrent to that change was the retirement of their editor, Tim Mendham, who has long been a link between our two organisations and supportive of our activities. I wish Tim a rich and restive retirement, and would like to thank him for his contributions to trans-tasman skepticism.

Membership levels remain stable at around 220 paid subscribers, and our subscription fees ($40 annually or $20 if you’re unwaged) remain unchanged. Our membership system (Memberful) continues to streamline 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 you are not taken unawares. We took out an insurance policy in 2023 to cover us against claims such as being sued for speaking out against a person or organisation. We have yet to utilise 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. We continue to receive unsolicited claims of psychic or telekinetic abilities, but so far nothing compelling has appeared.

The $100,000 bequest we received from Jim Ring remains untouched at present, although the 2026 conference may be a cause for some outlay. The committee plans to purchase audio and visual equipment. We are interested in becoming more self-sufficient and either recording and/or stream future conference presentations. Further, if we commence regular video production with the podcast, then having slightly better equipment available to both the regular hosts and frequent contributors would be advantageous. We are going about this process in a cost conscious way, finding discounts were we can but without losing quality or warranty.

The committee continues to collaborate and champion the work of others while beavering away on our own background projects. Without the setting of the conference, we will announce the winners of our annual awards - Media Bravos, Bent Spoon, and Skeptic of the Year - later in the year.

This year we have said goodbye to two long-running outreach activities. First, skeptical activism in the pub ended after 12 years. Second, both Skeptics facebook groups have been put on pause at the request of the admins due to inactivity. The groups remain accessible for archival purposes, The NZ Skeptics facebook page is still operational and I will endeavour to post more throughout 2026.

2026 is a milestone year for NZ Skepticism, as the 40th year of organised skepticism in our country. Here’s to a year of celebration, and to laying the groundwork for making it to our 50th anniversary.