OPINION

After spending an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out whether paying NZ Steel an enormous amount of money to install a new electric furnace made any kind of sense, I have finally come to a conclusion. If the subsidy does make sense, it would indicate severe problems in how industrial allocations have been handled. Read more

The eight days since last Thursday have not been kind to Minister of Finance Grant Robertson’s budget. Initial assessments flattered to deceive. Read more

Spread out over 8, 000 acres (hence ‘the Farm’), Stanford University’s campus is an impressive sight. Palms line the triumphant main drive. Read more

As we get older many of us are a bit forgetful. Keys, glasses, schools and Crown entity subsidiaries. Read more

“There is a lot of ruin in a nation.” It is one of those sayings that is easy to misinterpret. Taking Adam Smith’s famous quote literally, there are so many ways for a country to go wrong. Read more

Last week’s government Budget increased projected government operating spending over the next four years by $8.4 billion while projected revenue fell by $10.7 billion. Projected government borrowing rose by $20 billion. Read more

Let’s imagine a computer game, shall we? It is called ‘Master Lobbyist’, and your job is to play the governments of two countries off against each other. Read more

If a lot of the government’s health policy people started looking warmly at homeopathy and other kinds of medical pseudoscience and woo, we’d all recognise that as a problem, right? Maybe we would want to test our intuitions about it. Read more

Meet the new public health. Same as the old public health. Read more

It is two decades since NCEA became New Zealand’s qualification system for secondary school students. It replaced a very traditional, exam-based system – School Certificate and University Entrance-Bursary. Read more

New Zealand has just received its 2023 Budget. Our Government has a clear predilection for spending. Read more

Perhaps he never quite played in the same league as Trump, Putin and Xi, but Turkey’s long-serving President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is cut from the same strongman cloth. Yet after Sunday’s first-round of Turkish presidential elections, there is a chance his time in power may soon come to an end. Read more

Anyone hoping for an end to the country’s housing affordability crisis should despair. Or at least they should if they live in New Zealand’s largest city. Read more

Federated Farmers and Beef & Lamb New Zealand have stepped-up their campaigns against carbon forestry. Federated Farmers objected to a Dutch company’s purchase of two sheep and beef farms for tree-planting, arguing it would mean fewer jobs and people in rural towns. Read more

The classic British TV series Yes, Minister put the problem well. Any incoming Minister faces a nearly impossible task not only in getting their head around the policy issues in their area, which can be formidable, but also in getting to grips with the machinery of state. Read more