OPINION

Voters are rightly worried about the cost of living. How can they balance the household budget? Read more

Last week, we co-hosted a dinner with the Selwyn Foundation. Its chair, former Labour health minister David Cunliffe, led the Government's aged care advisory group and presented their report, A place to grow old. Read more

Greater Manchester's 2014 devolution agreement included powers over transport, housing and skills, with matching funding. That was my model for New Zealand two years ago, in a research note for The New Zealand Initiative. Read more

We hear a great deal about the Bank of Mum and Dad. The Bank of the children gets rather less attention, although we have been drawing on it for years. Read more

Here is a paradox that ought to trouble ministers more than any single threat named in the NZSIS’s 2026 Security Threat Environment report, released in August. The New Zealand Government has never had more useful intelligence available to it than it does today. Read more

Here is a paradox that ought to trouble ministers more than any single threat named in the NZSIS’s 2026 Security Threat Environment report, released in August. The New Zealand Government has never had more useful intelligence available to it than it does today. Read more

It is election time in New Zealand and as such, political tragics like myself cannot have any meetings without the conversation turning to the question “And, who will win on 7 November?” But something is different this year. Not just because the election is so tight with both the centre-left and the centre-right bloc neck and neck in the polls. Read more

Unless you’ve been living under a rock and avoiding the internet entirely (and really who could blame you in an election year) you’ll have seen the controversy about Kiwibank’s new mascot. The problem isn’t the mascot itself – a cute little sheep named Buck. Read more

Virtuous and vicious cycles in policy are both entirely possible. Sometimes at the same time. Read more

This year's NZSIS Security Threat Environment report lists many threats facing New Zealand. But one of the biggest is not on its list: the Government has more useful intelligence than ever before, yet it is not digesting that intelligence fast enough to matter. Read more

Human beings have a tendency to blame and punish others for their misfortunes. The ancient Greeks turned this tendency into a ritual called pharmakos. Read more

New Zealand has faced many crises. Few have inspired such quiet resolve as the campaign to save our most productive soils from houses. Read more

It matters in its own right, as part of the basic bundle of civic, economic, and personal freedoms that we all should be able to enjoy. The State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation, and it shouldn’t have much place in its boardrooms either. Read more