When Wellington Airport installed licence plate readers to streamline parking and passenger pickup and drop-off, it did not have to beg Wellington City Council to find room in the council’s 10-year plan for funding. Though partially council-owned, the Airport funds its own operations out of its own revenues and makes its own decisions. Read more

One of my grad school professors recommended Yes, Minister for better understanding the British public service. The series was superb. Read more

The same supervolcano that provides one of the country’s bigger sources of catastrophic risk could well prove part of the answer to one of the country’s bigger problems on the path to 2050. It also helps to illustrate one of the problems in New Zealand’s approach to planning for net zero. Read more

Medsafe targets a 100-day initial evaluation for drugs already approved elsewhere. It took longer than 176 days for half of the drugs assessed over the past year. Read more

If New Zealand required local crash testing for every new car model, dealerships would be late to stock a small number of mass-market vehicles at higher cost. It would be stupid. Read more

When a new pharmaceutical is so successful that it blows out the national income accounts, it’s probably safe to call it a wonderdrug. Semaglutide, marketed as Ozempic when treating Type II diabetes and as Wegovy for weight loss, turned a half-year 0.3% decline in Danish GDP into a 1.7% year-on-year increase. Read more

“There is no alternative” is a powerful framing if you want your alternative to prevail – even more so when regulations make it too easy for other options to be far too hard. Wellington’s Council got a dose of it over the past week. Read more

No election platform survives contact with post-election coalition negotiations. But one outcome of the current negotiations seems rather obvious. Read more