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FIRST PUBLISHED OCT 31, 2022 Updated Jan 19, 2023 Jacinda Ardern swept to office in 2017 on the back of public anger over New Zealand’s long-simmering housing crisis. Rightly or wrongly, there was a perception that the previous National government had failed to address the problem. Read more

FIRST PUBLISHED OCT 31, 2022 Updated Jan 19, 2023 It was an exciting night in New Zealand politics. With bated breath I waited for Winston Peters, the perennial kingmaker in the country’s proportional representation system, to announce which of the two major parties would govern. Read more

FIRST PUBLISHED OCT 31, 2022 Updated Jan 19, 2023 In June 2020, the Labour government strengthened New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme, ensuring it would be effective in getting the country to net zero by 2050. The government then promptly forgot how an Emissions Trading Scheme works – if it ever understood the ETS in the first place. Read more

Budget 2023 is an election year budget. Many voters want to be fed (bigger) hand-outs. Read more

Bad constitutional processes are necessarily worse than bad policy processes. Constitutions, whether written or unwritten, are our basic rules about how we make laws and elect representatives. Read more

A job you didn’t get that would never have been fulfilling. A breakup that turned out to be a dodged bullet. Read more

A rowboat drifts at sea, water seeping in from a hole in its side. Its captain has engineered all kinds of ingenious devices to bail out the boat and to dry sodden things. Read more

The Royal Commission announced this week will not help voters provide better-informed brickbats or bouquets in 2023. The inquiry will focus instead on lessons for future pandemics and will report back well after the election. Read more

The first principle of medicine is “do no harm”. It should be the first principle of economic policy too, especially heading into an election year. Read more