Bob McCoskrie called the submissions against the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill fake. He never filed one himself.

Bob McCoskrie called the submissions against the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill fake, but he did not even file one under his own name. I analysed all 12,052 of them.

On Sean Plunket's show, Bob scrolled through a few alphabetical pages of public submissions. He saw a run of women named Zoe and a run named Abigail who all opposed the bill, and he decided the opposition must be fake. He claimed it was one person pretending to be Zoe and changing the surname, or bots, or AI. He chose to believe anything except the fact that thousands of New Zealanders meant what they wrote.

He did not read the submissions. I analysed all 12,052 of them, classified with a documented method anyone can check. Let us put his theory on the table and drive over it.

The Zoes are 38 different women. There are 38 submitters named Zoe or Zoey, with 38 different surnames. There are 96 named Abigail or Abby, with 93 different surnames. Nobody is recycling a name. These are real, separate people, and pretending otherwise is an insult to every one of them.

His own example blows up his theory. He said every Zoe and every Abigail thinks the same, so it must be manufactured. However, five of those Abigails submitted in support of the bill. The names include people on both sides. He claimed he looked for supporters and could not find any, but they were right there. He just did not look.

A common young woman's name is simply common. That is all. 89.4% of everyone who submitted opposes this bill. Zoe and Abigail are names that peaked from the 1990s to the 2010s. These are young women, which is the exact group most against it. Cis women and feminists in the data oppose the bill at 94.8%. It is not suspicious that a pile of young women named Zoe said no. It would be suspicious if they had not. The reason they appear on the same page is that the list is sorted by name. That is not a conspiracy, Bob. That is the alphabet.

It is not AI and it is not a form campaign. He cherry-picked the shortest one-liners and pretended they were representative. The Zoes averaged 210 words each. The Abigails averaged 247 words. Across the whole dataset, people gave 2.1 reasons on average. 69% gave more than one reason, and a scan for duplicated text found under 1% in identical clusters. Copy-paste campaigns produce high duplication, but the opposition's duplication is near zero.

As an engineer who has built AI systems for the last two years, I can tell you that mass-producing 12,000 highly unique, high-quality, multi-paragraph submissions that avoid standard duplication sweeps is not trivial. Besides, making thousands of fake submissions is not nearly as easy as he makes it sound. If it were that easy, Bob would be the first one doing it.

This exact same select committee and submission process is used for every other bill throughout New Zealand legislation. If Bob is right, are we supposed to believe that every submission ever made on past New Zealand bills is invalid too? Are you calling Parliament a scam, Bob?

Here is the part he left out. Bob did not submit on this bill under his own name. His organisation did, and Family First submitted in support. It is likely one of his staff did that for him. The guy claiming to "protect women" cannot be bothered making a submission under his own name. Their submission runs on distinctive template language like "an adult human female", "production of ova and spermatozoa", and a "savings provision". Twenty-one other supporting submissions copy that exact same wording. That is a genuine, coordinated, copy-paste operation, and it belongs to him. He described exactly how Family First runs it, using a prepared sheet reworded just enough so the select committee cannot flag it as a form.

The man warning you about fake, coordinated, copy-paste submissions runs the fake-detection-proof copy-paste operation himself. He did not put his own name to this bill, and he smeared thousands of real women as bots because they disagreed with him.

The submissions are real. The reasons are real. The women are real. What is not real is his story about them.