I don’t know why people are getting so worked up about private details being leaked to MPs. If the Covid-19 crisis taught us anything, it’s that privacy has no place in the “new normal.” The mantra of the internet is that information “wants” to be free, as if data itself has agency. Read more
Use of the disembodied “we” in official policy documents usually suggests a false agreement about future resource use when, in fact, there are deeply entrenched opposing interests. To fail to acknowledge the conflict is to fail to resolve it. Read more
The Green Party has declared its wealth tax will be a red line in any coalition negotiations. And because Labour knows this, the larger party left the door wide open. Read more
The Government’s plan to recover from the Covid-19 crisis has essentially been about finding new ways to spend. As a result, public debt is expected to increase from 19% of GDP in 2019 to a whopping 54% by 2024 and remain elevated for decades to come. Read more
The Green Party’s “Poverty Action Plan” is all about tackling poverty, although the outcomes may differ from what the party expects. While it is meant to help struggling New Zealanders, the plan will instead disincentivise work, saving, investment in education and skills, capital, enterprise and innovation. Read more
As a Millennial, a worrying new trend among my generation is to simply cancel what you don’t like. Sure, some things might be outdated and it isn’t for me to tell a private company what it can or can’t do with a product. Read more
Some conversations are difficult, but critical. This week, Sir Peter Gluckman, the Rt Hon Helen Clark, and Rob Fyfe released a short ‘conversation paper’ called Re-engaging New Zealand with the World. Read more
The proverb “All that glitters is not gold” is a line from William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Any doubts about the Bard’s wisdom were dispelled this month when New Zealand’s “gold standard” quarantining was shown to be fool’s gold. Read more
We all know the analogy about barring gates after the horse has bolted from the barn. It speaks to the futility of doing something too late solve a problem. Read more
When Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled on the legality of the European Central Bank’s asset purchase programme on 5 May, it sent shockwaves through financial markets. In one fell swoop, the red-robed judges accused the ECB of going beyond its mandate of monetary policy and the European Court of Justice of covering up the breach. Read more
When in the US earlier this year, I came across many souvenirs mocking the country’s leader, including a card game called, Trump Cards: The Wackiest Game of Fake News. It looked like a fun party card game in which players tried to pick out 'Fake News' from real quotes by President Donald Trump. Read more
It says a lot about this economic crisis when a forecast of -4.5% annual growth is regarded as good news. Yet that was the forecast the International Monetary Fund released yesterday. Read more
The public health system is a political football. Every change of administration is an opportunity to boot the ball at a different set of goalposts. Read more
It’s been hard to get a decent night’s sleep lately. Stories of the Government’s mismanagement of its quarantine facilities and of the pandemic worsening abroad make for restless nights thinking through safer ways of running those operations. Read more
The Cold War is mainly history today with more people remembering the spies than the ideological warfare. But at its heart, it was an ideological battle, which makes comparisons with today’s tensions between China and the West natural. Read more