Celine Dion's two Auckland shows have sold out, thanks to ticket scalpers. General release tickets went on sale midday Monday and sold out hours later, with tickets appearing on resale sites immediately at double the price. Read more
Sunday's "Save our charter schools march" was a moving experience. It wasn't just the hundreds of people who turned up in torrential rain to protest. Read more
Almost a century ago, the great sociologist Max Weber defined the ideal politician in his lecture Politics as a Vocation. As Bill English just announced his retirement from politics, we may well measure his record by Weberian standards. Read more
New Zealand exports about 95 percent of its dairy production. The receipts make it a major overseas earner. Read more
Week 1- After years of campaigning, I knew it was only a matter of time before our government ramped up its efforts tackling child obesity. Like my counterparts in Chile, I will be offering the government my technical expertise to crack down on junk food advertising to children. Read more
In the 1940s, a different Lipson (that one an English political scientist) famously remarked that if Wellington or Auckland harbours were ever to have a statue akin to that in New York, it would assuredly be a statue of Equality. The ideal of a fair-go runs deep in the New Zealand psyche, and rightly so. Read more
Read The New Zealand Initiative's submission to the Finance and Expenditure Committee on the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill. Read more
I love Perpetual Guardian's experiment with a four-day work-week, but that does not mean I think it will work. The great thing about flexible labour markets is that it does not matter whether I think it will work, whether you think it will work, or whether the labour regulators at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) think it will work. Read more
The Global Financial Crisis now seems such a distant memory, it is easy to think of it as an historical episode. But this week’s stock market troubles are a timely reminder that the world economy is not in a healthy state. Read more
New Zealand school principals should add to their skills repertoire: ‘Magician’. In the week leading to the first day of school, leaders were reaching into their hats of creative tricks to fill vacancies. Read more
This week saw a nation divided. While there were no protests in the streets, snarky comments were rife. Read more
James Shaw’s State of the Planet speech called for a new economic model – sustainability economics – to meet environmental and equity challenges ahead. While his call comes from the left, it reminded me of earlier criticisms of mainstream economics from the right. Read more
Wellington (2 February 2018): A review of sugar taxes commissioned from NZIER by the Ministry of Health, released this week under the Official Information Act, finds that sugar taxes are unlikely to improve health outcomes. The report finds that: “No study based on actual experience with sugar taxes has identified an impact on health outcomes.” “Studies using sound methods report reductions in [sugar] intake that are likely too small to generate health benefits and could easily be cancelled out by substitution of other sources of sugar or calories.” Earlier studies significantly overestimate the effect of sugar taxes on sugar consumption due to “fundamental methodological flaws,” and these estimates have contaminated later modelling trying to assess the health benefits of sugar taxes. Read more
It’s too easy to take things for granted. In Monty Python’s classic Life of Brian, John Cleese’s Reg asked what the hated Romans had ever done for the people of Judea – and was rather annoyed to hear a long list of things like medicine, sanitation, education, wine, irrigation and more. Read more
Lyndon Johnson once said of his unrelenting critics that if he walked on the Potomac, headlines would criticise him for not being able to swim. I was reminded of this when I read Oxfam New Zealand’s comments surrounding the release of the latest Oxfam report “Reward Work, not Wealth”. Read more