I didn’t think it was going to go like this. But here we are. And I’m sorry. 

The long and the short of it is that I was playing with time travel and it has all gone terribly wrong.  

I thought I’d fixed the mess. But then I read Bryce Edwards’ column in the Post this week.  

The column claimed that The New Zealand Initiative drafted an early version of the Regulatory Standards Bill, which Roger Douglas introduced to Parliament in 2006.  

That might seem odd. Douglas wasn’t in Parliament in 2006, and the Initiative didn’t exist until 2012.  

You might have thought that was an innocent error introduced by subeditors trimming things to length. 

But the claim would have been right - if things had gone according to plan.  

The Initiative’s time machine is among its more closely kept secrets.  

We went back in time to try and make a few things better.  

With our tweaks, the Business Roundtable and New Zealand Institute merged to form the Initiative in 2005 rather than 2012. We installed a National-ACT coalition government that same year. Sir Roger passed the Regulatory Responsibility Bill the following year. And New Zealand’s per capita income passed Australia’s in 2016.   

Normally, this kind of thing is impossible. Time-travel geeks know that the Novikov self-consistency principle makes it impossible to change the past. Otherwise, you’d wind up with paradoxes and collapsing realities. Standard drill in science fiction.   

That’s why we bought a Novikov Attenuation Field Generator along with our time machine. We wanted to change the past to deliver a more prosperous future for all New Zealanders.  

But, stupidly, we bought a cheap model on Temu and it malfunctioned.  

Things got really weird.  

I thought I’d managed to reset the timeline, almost.  

We knew about the big glitch. Mitt Romney was supposed to have been elected US President in 2016. That was baseline reality, and I couldn’t get it back.  

But things otherwise looked mostly stable. At least until I read Edwards’s column.  

So, I checked the Field Generator. It had turned itself back on and was displaying an error message: “DO NOT MESS WITH TIME”.   

We don’t know how to fix it.  

Temu’s customer support line can’t help either. 

Now, the timelines are degenerating more quickly. The US might wind up invading Canada.  

I’m scared to read the papers to find out what else is our fault.  

Maybe Bryce Edwards knows more.