Royalty at our AGM
Mark Honeychurch - 8th December 2025
We had our AGM last night, which was well-attended and ran smoothly. We now have two new committee members, Dave la Rooy and Tony Lord (and as a skeptic I have to assume it’s just coincidence that our two new committee members are a Lord and a King). It’s great to have them on board, and as a committee we look forward to working with them both over the coming years. Bronwyn will continue on as our capable Chair, and it was pointed out that our new constitution has a five year limit for the Chair role - as a way to ensure we have fresh blood at the helm. This means that we only have three years left to squeeze all we can out of Bronwyn’s amazing abilities, although I’m presuming from her passion for skepticism that she’ll stay on the committee long after her term as Chair is over. Tim Wright has been reconfirmed as our Treasurer for the next year, and I’m staying on as Secretary - mostly because nobody else seems to want to take on either of these roles! If you’re interested in what happened at the AGM, you can read Bronwyn’s report on our last 12 months below. I’ll also try to remember to add the minutes of our AGM to a future newsletter, once I’ve written them up properly.
Our recent efforts to help fundraise for Siouxsie Wiles was a huge success, and our members managed to hit our $2,000 donation-matching limit just a few days before the campaign ended. Thanks to all of you who stepped up and helped Siouxsie and also let us know of your donations. We had some great feedback to our initiative, and here are some of the comments we received:
- Thank you for doing this.
- Great to see the Skeptics’ support for Siouxie. She did a great job during Covid.
- Great stuff supporting Siouxsie.
- Wonderful that the NZ Skeptics are pledged matching. Thank you.
- Thanks for suggesting it.
- Good work helping Siouxsie!
- :)
At the start of next year the Jehovah’s Witnesses are holding their annual International Convention in our humble little country, and thankfully this event is attracting some attention from detractors of this widespread religious group, a sect that is often likened to a cult due to its high-control behaviours. Read from Anke below to hear about Plåt, a goat farmer from Norway who is travelling all the way to little old New Zealand to protest the event, and who is also planning to tell some cult-themed jokes as part of his comedy show. You may even be able to help him find a venue for the show in your city.
Also in this week’s newsletter we have some more conventional articles. Firstly Katrina looks into the science of 3D printed food, seeing whether we can expect to be printing our own food in the near future. I’ve written about an old nature documentary I saw a 5 minute excerpt of a few months ago, and how it set me off down a trail of skeptical questions about how much alcohol it would take to get an elephant drunk. And, finally, Bronwyn has written part two of what will now be a four part series on the weird goings-on in and around a very strange house in Ireland.