Sittings in the House of Representatives have been suspended for a week. Whether our government’s actions can still be properly scrutinised largely depends on whether backbench Labour MPs can set aside their party loyalty.
Read MoreTrying to organise the electricity system around a competition model based on financial markets does not make sense.
Read MoreHeading into another level four lockdown with delta finally loose in the community, it looks like our luck might have run out. But maybe not. Maybe this will be the lucky lockdown; the kick up the bum this country needs
Read MorePolitics in New Zealand is presented to the general public as theatre or sport. What is really going on is often misunderstood.
Read MoreGeoffrey Palmer has said that the public service has been so run down since 1984 that it could not today implement changes of the magnitude that the Lange-Douglas Government did.
Read MoreInside the Nudge Unit by David Halpern, provides new insights into behaviour which New Zealand public policy is steadily taking into consideration.
Read MorePhilosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
Read MoreMichael Cullen’s memoir Labour Saving provides one of the most coherent defences of social democracy written by a New Zealand politician.
Read MoreAnalysis of the housing market is difficult, so superficial solutions do not work. Perforce, this column has had to go into more technical detail than usual. It concludes, ‘The lesson is that the mainly neoliberal regime for the housing market since the early 1990s does not work: it has under-supplied quality housing, generated unsustainable house price inflation and excluded many “worthy” people from home ownership (and given a rough time to those who depend upon rental accommodation). That should not surprise any properly trained economist; many of the assumptions which underpin the standard market analysis do not apply to the housing market. The nostrums based upon such simple analyses will continue to fail no matter how plausible they sound.’
Read MoreLabour’s Covid-19 response is losing its sense of urgency, something that’s becoming increasingly clear in the vaccination rollout, testing, immigration and much more
Read MoreAs the new podcast Red Line makes clear, China is changing before our eyes and New Zealand faces some increasingly stark, challenging, and maybe defining, choices
Read MoreIn trying to defend their decision not to make a special extension of the ACC scheme to include victims of the mosque attacks, the government seems to be pushing a narrative that the ACC scheme is about physical injuries. I have two objections to this. First, it’s ahistorical. Second, the physical/mental divide is dubious and problematic.
Read MoreNewsroom’ recalled Édith Piaf’s ‘je ne regrette rien’ to head an article in which Don Brash expressed much the same sentiment.
Read MoreThe Black Caps won the hearts of a nation this week with one of the great sporting triumphs. Another supposedly proud New Zealand sports team… not so much
Read MoreProviding for the redundantly unemployed is admirable but difficult and expensive to implement.
Read MoreChild Poverty Levels Are only Slowly Coming Down, What Next?
Read MoreWhat was the big change the Treasury saw in its budget 2021 forecasts? (Treasury GDP graph Shown above.)
Read MoreIf you know the answer to how much public debt New Zealand should bear, you do not understand the issue.
Read MoreDo some offshore trends presage the future of New Zealand politics?
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