OPINION

Panic ensued this week after it was revealed that young people have been going to summer music festivals, listening to music – and in some cases even getting drunk. As a report for RNZ revealed, there has been a crackdown on outdoor festivals all through the summer, with four postponed and another four cancelled outright. Read more

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says he wants a bureaucracy that says “yes.” He is right to want that of course, but a lot of current rules would need to change. Under current rules, far too much is too hard. Read more

When US President Donald Trump called Vladimir Putin on 12 February, he made history – but not in a good way. Following a 90-minute conversation, Trump announced he would meet Putin first in Saudi Arabia and then visit Moscow, while Putin would come to Washington. Read more

The Supreme Court’s decisions late last year in A, B and C v D and E Limited as Trustees of the Z Trusti (the Alphabet case) and Whakatōhea Kotahitanga Waka (the Edwards case) v Ngāti Ira O Waiowekaii (the Edwards case) offer a striking study in contrasts. Both decisions have drawn attention for appearing to resist judicial overreach. Read more

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has promised everything his government does this year will focus on creating growth. That is great. Read more

In 2002, the ‘Corngate’ controversy broke in the media. Journalist John Campbell blindsided then-PM Helen Clark with allegations that genetically modified (GM) corn had been accidentally released in New Zealand. Read more

Some people think we live in relatively safe times. Those people are naïve. Read more

When a councillor in New Zealand’s Carterton District was elected on a platform of fiscal responsibility, she could not have expected to be barred from participating in budget deliberations. Yet that is exactly what happened when council bureaucrats deemed her campaign promises a “conflict of interest” that disqualified her from key financial decisions. Read more

It is hard to believe today, but a TV interview about genetic modification (GM) once upended an election campaign. That interview cast a long shadow over the use of GM in New Zealand. Read more

Some essays are timeless. In 1964, Richard Hofstadter diagnosed what he called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. Read more

Perhaps geography is still destiny after all. The closer a Pacific nation sits to American shores, the more Washington seems to care about Chinese influence. Read more

It wasn’t that long ago that New Zealand’s housing market made international news because of its insanity. In 2016, The Guardian tagged Auckland as the “hottest property market in the world” – and part of a housing crisis. Read more

Jordan Peterson’s recent keynote at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in Sydney laid bare a critical divide within classical liberalism. Peterson champions individual responsibility and free markets. Read more

A few years ago, when I was still a classics lecturer, I started to notice a disturbing trend. Scholars were being denounced on Twitter (RIP) for wrongthink. Read more

I’m Barbara Oakley, and I’m delighted to be spending nearly six months with The New Zealand Initiative. My husband, Phil and I are thrilled to return to New Zealand. Read more