Reports & Media

It does not happen often that I set my alarm to just before 4am to watch the results from a provincial election in Germany. But that is what I did yesterday for Saxony-Anhalt, in Germany’s east. Read more

In April 1901, a Bavarian immigrant baker named Joseph Lochner was arrested in Utica, New York. Unlike the larger bakeries, which worked two shifts, Lochner employed a single crew: his bakers arrived in the evening, prepared the dough, slept a few hours on the premises and baked before dawn. Read more

What is politics? According to Max Weber’s classic definition, politics is “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” Having worked around politics for over two decades has given me a good idea of what Weber meant by that. Read more

For practical purposes, not emitting a tonne of carbon dioxide is equivalent to pulling a tonne of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and securely sequestering it, so long as the accounting is sound. The Zero Carbon Act consequently requires net zero for greenhouse gases other than biogenic methane. Read more

Most news clips from Parliament are from Question Time. It is at least as much performance theatre as a mechanism for holding government to account. Read more

In November 2018, officials at Immigration New Zealand began work on replacing the ageing biometric systems that verify identities and manage immigration risk. Seven years later it was dead, having delivered no measurable benefit. Read more