Chris Bishop asked an excellent question during last week’s Select Committee hearings into the government’s proposed Natural and Built Environment Act. “Where does local democracy stop and the legitimate …national interest kick in?” The question cuts to the heart of one of the debates around resource management reform. Read more

Peaches come from a can. They were put there by a man. Read more

When the government says reducing living costs is its highest priority, it seems a bit crazy to impose punitive anti-dumping duties on imports. And yet, here we are. Read more

There’s a special kind of mental contortion that seems required in politics. A politician has to be able to hold mutually inconsistent beliefs in their head and not notice that they don’t really work well together. Read more

When the government broke for the summer, Prime Minister Ardern told her Cabinet to cut its legislative cloth to suit the government’s election-year capacity. The government was attempting complex reform of the resource management system, council water infrastructure, and the entire health system. 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

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

Perhaps the timing was simply a coincidence. But not long after central government firmed up its intention to take water infrastructure away from local government, and its intention to shift planning up from local councils to regional bodies, Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta opened a review of local government. Read more