Reports & Media

There is no chance it is deliberate. Deliberateness would require more coordination than government is able to manage these days. Read more

New Zealand’s roads are in the political headlights, as opposing camps clash over the delicate balance between road safety and road efficiency – think of it as the policy equivalent of Ford vs Holden. Advocates of greater efficiency point out that potholes have turned our state highway network into a lunar landscape, a phenomenon I had the opportunity to acquaint myself intimately with during a road trip to Gisborne over Matariki. Read more

It was a perfectly executed transition from one Prime Minister to another. When Jacinda Ardern announced her resignation in January, it took the New Zealand Labour Party only a few days to anoint her successor, Chris Hipkins. Read more

Meetings of the Australia New Zealand Leadership Forum (ANZLF) are a regular fixture in the calendars of Australian and New Zealand business leaders and politicians. But their content has also become regular – which is to say, repetitive. Read more

Last week’s NATO summit in Vilnius was supposed to be about Ukraine’s needs and whether they would be met. Zelenskiy wanted guarantees for future NATO membership and the military alliance wanted to present a united front to Putin. Read more

The early decades of the 21st century may be remembered as the great age of misinformation. From false assertions about the size of the 45th President’s inauguration crowd to science-free claims about nano-technology, 5G cell phone towers and COVID-19, fake news abounds. Read more

One bit of the Climate Commission’s draft advice, released in March, seemed particularly strange. The Commission worried that a surge in forest planting over the coming years would bring about a collapse in ETS prices in the 2030s and put New Zealand’s net zero commitments beyond 2050 at risk. Read more

NZQA would like help deciding what excellence means. The trouble is, too many students have been achieving it. Read more

According to American folklore, Irish gold miners were notorious for striking it lucky. Yet, historian Edward O’Donnell claims the phrase ‘The luck of the Irish’ comes with a hint of derision. Read more

Experimental psychology was a bit wild in the 1960s. Scientists would run experiments on beagles, giving them painful shocks. Read more

The Prime Minister has ruled out a wealth tax so long as he is leader of the Labour Party. The promise may have been driven by recent polling, but it is sound economics nevertheless. Read more

Sometimes, a debate over the school curriculum gets so heated, it is dubbed a ‘curriculum war’. A new draft science curriculum has been the subject of a national conversation over the past week or so. Read more