In February, New Zealand’s PCR Covid testing system fell apart. The Ministry of Health, the Director-General of Health, and the Ministers should have known it would happen. Read more

Just before 3 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, about a dozen NZTA and Ministry of Transport officials received a weekend-ruining email. Subject: “Cabinet paper: Urgent”. Read more

Bring on the bondholders. New Zealand’s proposed Three Waters Reforms, which would force the amalgamation of council water services into four large providers under convoluted governance arrangements, is an attempted solution to a real problem. Read more

Hades, God of the Greek underworld, decreed that Sisyphus, for trying to cheat death, must forever push a heavy boulder up a hill. It would roll back down again every time. Read more

A lot of problems have no good solutions – just ones that are bad in different ways. Pricing greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture is important, and every way of doing it is going to have problems. This week, the agricultural sector put up its proposed solution. Read more

It’s hard to solve a problem like Working for Families. The most frustrating thing, for an economist who watches policy, are the policy dollar bills left lying around on sidewalks. Read more

Pew’s latest survey is not cause for despair – if you know a little bit about the state of public knowledge. Pew finds that only 56% of Americans know that Ukraine is not part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO. Read more

Tune in to enough climate change events in Wellington, and you’re bound to hear someone claim that nobody living in a city needs an SUV. Leave aside for now that fuel companies must hand in carbon credits through the Emissions Trading Scheme to cover every bit of carbon dioxide coming from tailpipes. Read more