New Zealand Politics

The Australian 2022 election has some startling commonalities with Aotearoa in 1984. Could fundamental change be coming for our economy again? Reading the news this morning and catching up on the Australian election, I wonder if you can feel déjà vu for a cultural memory, rather than just as a personal experience. There is one historical factoid that everyone in Aotearoa who has ever paid attention to politics has: Robert Muldoon…

An abridged version of this article was published by Newsroom. There is a maxim amongst lawyers that ‘hard cases make bad law’. It stemmed from the wrestling with, and straining of, doctrine and precedent within lawmakers’ minds that inevitably occurs when they are faced with an exceptionally sympathetic case. …

How to think about uncertainty in the NZ election — A new poll, and a lot of takes flying around, I figured I’d try something longer than a Twitter thread on what could happen to the parties from here, and how confident/despairing you should be. What just happened We finally got a poll from a public pollster that is post-Level 2, post-Muller, and…

“Memorials aren’t memories, they don’t just appear. They have motives and they are put there for a reason.” — Let me talk about power for a moment; because there is something on my chest. It is a large stone statue on Symonds Street which I walk past most days, a twelve-foot obelisk to which a bare-breasted woman extends a palm leaf in her right hand. The woman is ‘Zealandia’…

Every election is important, although some more than others. The election announced last week for September 19 is not set to be an unusually significant one. The polls are close, but the safer bet is in on the crowd-favourite Prime Minister winning a second term with a coalition that could…

New Zealand’s current policies on assisted suicide are outdated and immoral, as well as relevant to every New Zealander “I don’t want to ever be like that. If that happens to me, just shoot me!” It was a casual, albeit morbid, comment from my grandmother one afternoon late in 2001…

Donald Trump, Peter Thiel and a Kiwi passport — This has my head spinning. Yesterday the Herald revealed that American billionaire and major Trump campaign donor (we’re talking millions of dollars, not just a few thousand), Peter Thiel, has been granted New Zealand citizenship. Usually to become a citizen (if you’re not a billionaire) you have to either be…