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Incredible as it may seem, there was a time when many serious-minded people were asking if David Cameron, who unintentionally removed the UK from the EU, was the worst prime minister in modern history. His replacement, Theresa May, swiftly put an end to that debate, as she almost immediately replaced him in that unwanted spot. But she was forced out by Boris Johnson, who in turn was widely thought to have set new standards for poor leadership, necessitating his replacement by Liz Truss. Now, after just a few weeks of her premiership, the nation is nostalgic for Johnson, and May and Cameron seem by comparison to be towering figures of competence. No sooner had the official mourning period for the Queen ended than Truss, via her Chancellor of the Exchequer, “Kami-Kwasi” Kwarteng,…

When Stefan Atkinson had a modest financial windfall a couple of years ago, he could have bought a used car. Instead, he plumped for an NCM Milano city e-bike. But he wanted to carry more, so then came the cargo bike, a Radkutsche Rapid, which now occupies the car park in the Kāinga Ora home he shares with his partner, Ngawini Hohaia. For Hohaia, it was a significant step up from her unpowered bike. “I said, ‘I’m not going back to a normal bike any more,” she recalls. “It’s just awesome.” When that bike was stolen, they used the insurance payout to upgrade to a fat-tyred ET.Cycle T1000. The latest addition to the family is a Boostbikes Scout 750, which has a 750-watt motor and requires a licence to ride. “Typical journeys…

Global food prices hit an all-time high in March, and in Europe, as elsewhere, everything – from bread to bananas – got more expensive. Happily, when it comes to grocery shopping here in Germany, many of us have the “supermarket caste system” to fall back on. When you first arrive in Berlin, as an impoverished Kiwi with grand dreams of artistic freedom, lashings of beer and cheap rent, you usually have no idea how this system works. Due to the two companies that dominate New Zealand groceries – Foodstuffs and Woolworths – the same kind of supermarket hierarchy isn’t so obvious in Aotearoa. Often, it’s not until you accidentally spend your last €20 (NZ$32) on five good-looking tomatoes at a Berlin eco-supermarket that you figure that out. It turns out the many environmentally…

The English summer is by tradition a gentle kind of season: mild, green and full of soft, cooling breezes and refreshing showers. Not this year, and certainly not today as I write. The mercury has just gone north of 40⁰C for the first time in these islands’ recorded history. The climate activist group Extinction Rebellion has stormed the offices of News UK, publisher of the Sun, in protest at its upbeat coverage of the heatwave. The grass in the parks is parched brown, like hay; Londoners have been advised to stay at home, and fires have broken out around the city’s edges. The air is so hot it’s sweat-inducing just to walk to the end of the street. Alas, there are very few places in which to find any respite. I was…

Clearly no one has explained to Christopher Luxon the “togs, togs, undies” gradation that applies to politicians once they clear Customs abroad. However massive and valid one’s catalogue of complaints about New Zealand may be, it must be strictly stashed with one’s duty-free purchases and not opened again until repatriation. “Snark, snark, gush” might be the best way to shorthand it. Bagging one’s country overseas is not a great audition piece for someone wanting to become its next prime minister. What the opposition leader has said, both in a London speech and a newspaper think piece, was perfectly fair comment: that New Zealanders have become fearful and inward-looking, and that our businesses had become “soft” after government support through the pandemic. His approach to the world stage is certainly a bracing antidote…

In the immediate post-Muldoon era, the National Party held a wound-licking annual conference, among the hoop-la of which was a specially commissioned song about rebuilding. At the time, it seemed there might never be another spectacle quite so desperate as a hall full of late-middle-aged people singing “Reee -jooo-ven-AY-shun!” But many years later, the silly song came true. Along came Jake Bezzant, Andrew Falloon, Hamish Walker and Todd Barclay. Talk about being careful what you wish for. National achieved its demographic reset, but at staggering cost. Sex-pest texts, ugly infighting, petulant leaking, vanity, boorishness and weapons-grade immaturity – the exercise has been less rejuvenating than youth-enising. The party’s besetting problem has been trying to force the pace of its rejuvenation, at the same time as mounting a touchingly earnest quest for the next…

Driving to Los Angeles airport, I thought of the classic comic Frank Sargeson story in which the narrator asks his uncle if it’s right to take all the bananas for yourself at a picnic. I’d just seen a woman wrapped in a piece of black rubber, like a car mat. The mat kept slipping, and underneath it she was completely naked. She didn’t even have shoes. There were other things she lacked: mental health and health care, a benefit, a home. As she picked her way along the sidewalk, her nakedness unveiled, she was right in your face. She was what it looks like if you really lower the taxes. The non-achievers don’t fester out of sight; they do their dying in the street, and it’s hard not to notice that…

As The Hobbit author JRR Tolkien observed, it does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations if you live near one. New Zealand, with the extremely live Delta variant of the Covid dragon rampaging next door, is now finding out whether its calculations have been adequate – not least its political reckoning. It’ll be a while before it’s known how far Delta has spread from the first case discovered at large in Auckland, but already it has caused a salutary outbreak of hindsight. It always seemed inevitable Delta would get loose, but something changes in the human psyche when near-misses keep happening. There have been several skirmishes with potential Delta sources here, not least the infected crew of a ship that docked at Tauranga, but we appeared to…

If you want to sleep well, get a dog. Those early morning walks provide regular exercise, which we know is good for sleep. But as Russell Foster, a British neuroscientist who specialises in the study of circadian rhythms, points out, they also expose you to the early morning light we all need to keep our internal body clocks – most of which run at about 24 hours and 10 minutes – aligned or “entrained” with the 24-hour day. The result: better, more regular sleep. “People who own a dog have been shown to have better sleep, and you might think, ‘What’s that all about?’ Of course, it’s because they have to take their dog out in the morning and that’s where they get their photon shower – their entraining light,” says…

When I left Parliament in 2019, I thought it would be a good idea to write a couple of books. So, my first book, He Kupu Taurangi, co-authored with my former colleague James Christmas, was published in 2019. That book was about Treaty of Waitangi settlements. Then I wanted to write a sketch of my time in Parliament. That book, Yes, Minister, was published a couple of months ago and talks about my time as a minister in the Key administration from 2008 to 2017. I now want to write on the rule of law that is threatened everywhere. Yes, Minister has attracted a number of comments. Some people, for example, have suggested I have been disloyal to the National Party because of my criticism of some members, particularly those who…

I was driving home on the Capital Beltway, our local road-rage and distracted-driving headquarters, when I caught the last few minutes of then prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s parting press conference. I realise it’s easy to fling civics lessons as you head out the door, but the way she talked about governing, and the most important qualities of those who practise it, was so alien to the American experience that I almost missed my exit. The top tiers of Ardern’s political personality pyramid are kindness and empathy: words you’re far more likely to hear in a Friday the 13th sequel than in Washington DC’s halls of power. So much poisons our body politic–money, media (social and otherwise), racism, sexism, fearmongering and more – that it’s hard to isolate the most cancerous force.…

As New Zealanders marvelled at Britain’s daring and rapidly doomed experiment with tax cuts this month, few dreamt this country was about to try something comparably jaw-dropping. The government’s proposed farm-gate emissions charging regime is the sort of policy Yes, Minister’s Sir Humphrey was wont to lament as being “courageous”. It will certainly make New Zealand look a principled, self-sacrificing paragon of climate-change leadership. It could also make the country poorer and have the net effect of pushing up global emissions even as politicians here get to preen at meeting their domestic targets. Two years after starting work on the farmer-government partnership proposal He Waka Eke Noa (HWEN) – translation, “we’re all in the same boat” – farmers are now left paddling their own boat, into the hull of which the government has…

There was a time, in the Ancient Greek city state of Sparta, when votes were measured using acclamation voting: whichever side shouted the loudest, won. This practice, though undoubtedly invigorating, eventually yielded to the rather more logical system of counting. However, this ancient system now appears to have been resurrected, in the form of social media. As National MP Simon O’Connor found out, there is now such a thing as a conscience which dare not speak for terror of being pilloried by an electronic cacophony. In a week that provoked horrifying echoes of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade threatens more than the rights of women. It’s hard to read the court’s action as anything other than a massive betrayal of all citizens, given previous…

Close to my Otago Peninsula home there’s a creek called Smith’s running into Otago Harbour, and I walk to it most mornings. By the bridge one crisp autumn day, I was astonished to see a scattering of strange fish lying flat and stranded in the rocky intertidal zone, a dozen of them, unearthly silver with forked tails and big eyes suggesting they inhabit the ocean’s dim-lit depths. Turns out they were a school of youngish Ray’s bream, a species more usually found offshore in northern waters up to 1000m deep. Since then, during winter, there have been more strandings of these fish at several Otago beaches and inlets, including hundreds of them washed up near Waitati. Bream do migrate, and maybe large numbers were enticed south by ocean warming or changes…

Chris Bishop, the Opposition’s Covid spokesperson, is, according to the Deputy Prime Minister and the Government’s chief wise-cracker, Grant Robertson, “a shiver looking for a spine to run up”. So, how could you not look forward to meeting a shiver? We met in Petone; the shiver arrived looking like a history teacher at a posh boys’ school. He goes for the preppy look, which sits slightly incongruously with his square-jawed face. We were going to have lunch. He wouldn’t have a glass of wine – “it’s dangerous” – and he wouldn’t have pizza because he’s “trying to stay off the carbs”. I grumbled: what a fun lunch guest he was turning out to be. He had a glass of wine and his crumbed chicken came with a big pile of mashed…

When former cabinet minister Christopher Finlayson recently offered to start a new National Party branch in Khandallah, there was a bit of umming and ah-ing. The man Sir John Key once warmly hailed as “my legal beagle” was eventually offered the role of party planner instead. “The message came back that I was a bit hot to handle, and would I like to be a ‘functions co-ordinator’?” The Wellington barrister beams mischievously at the memory. Having offered excoriating criticism of many National MPs after his retirement from politics, he understood the tactful counter-offer. After trying to organise a function or two, he decided there were still too many “nincompoops” in the party, and says he has since “moved on” – but not before delivering a more considered critique of where his…

When I became a television current affairs producer, I had to learn the tricks of a new trade, having arrived from the very different world of print journalism. One key lesson was recording an interview using only one camera. For cost reasons, crews nearly always consisted of a single cameraman, and the camera was pointed at the person we were interviewing. The reporter was off-camera. How then, when the edited programme appeared on screen, did you see the reporter asking questions and their reactions to what the interviewee was saying? The answer was we would turn the camera around at the end of the interview and point it at the reporter and get them to repeat the questions. Then we would record their reactions to the interview as if they were reacting…

Recently, there have been media stories about Māori customers who have complained about being racially profiled when visiting local businesses. This has made them feel extremely uncomfortable and angry. One example was last month when Taranaki woman Te Waka McLeod went into Spotlight, an arts and crafts store in New Plymouth, to buy patterns to make her own clothes. She made her way around the shop carrying the patterns with her to help decide what material to buy. She was told by one of the workers that she wasn’t allowed to walk around with the patterns and was asked to write down everything she needed on a piece of paper. McLeod accused the shop assistant of racism and took to her Facebook page to express her anger and frustration. “It’s either my skin…

‘Democracies can deliver.” That was how the leader of the world’s biggest democracy, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, summed up a virtual summit with the leader of the world’s second-biggest democracy, US President Joe Biden. The two men were in full agreement on most things, including the need to end the horrors in Ukraine. But Modi refused to accuse Russia of war crimes, instead calling for an independent inquiry. This is part of a pattern. India has abstained 11 times on United Nations resolutions criticising Russia. It has continued to buy Russian oil, at a discount, and Russian weapons. The world’s largest democracy has not joined other democratic nations in coming to the aid of Ukraine. India’s military is reliant on Russian spare parts and it has a long tradition of neutrality in global…

Besides causing death, long-term illness and indefinite home detention, Covid-19 turns out to play merry hell with its sufferers’ workplace safety, in unexpected ways. The much-pilloried woman who went on an illicit whistle-stop tour of the North Island accompanied, did she but know it, by the delta variant, may have have had a compelling reason for evading the authorities for so long. Officials are being fascinatingly coy about the nature of her employment, but former MP Hone Harawira has claimed to have some idea as to why she didn’t want to give account of herself. “She didn’t want to get hammered.” It should be noted that the PM has attempted to scotch such speculation. But as the woman’s plight shows, Covid and the workplace have a fiendishly complex future ahead Even for more conventionally…

Like many people, the British are not immune to the consolations of schadenfreude, particularly when it comes to the US. However bad things get, we can always find reassurance in the misfortunes of the most powerful nation in the world. Thus reports of American police shooting people – especially black people – tend to inspire not just condemnation, but also the unstated solace that at least things are not that bad at home. And they’re not: black people tend to die more frequently in police custody in the UK than white people, proportionately speaking, and they are certainly stopped and searched at a much higher rate than the general population. But as appalling as the statistics are, there’s no real comparison with the lethal threat posed by American police forces. However, there…

When I was a producer for Assignment, the long-form current-affairs programme at TVNZ, we had one memorable visit to our offices by an Australian who was then head of news and current affairs for TVNZ. He wanted to talk about the stories we were developing and, of course, the ratings for our show. His greeting went as follows: “What paint-drying hour are you going to put on next?” He then went on to complain that he could make more money out of our time slot by programming an hour of infomercials, instead. He was right about the costs. We did long-form current affairs. We took our time, spending, for instance, six weeks travelling the country looking at the inner workings of our health system – a memorable assignment that included watching open-heart surgery…

One of the unexpected benefits of expressing which pronoun you prefer to have ascribed to you is that many people who previously could not have identified a pronoun in the wild now can. In this matter, my libertarian “Call yourself whatever you like” instincts conflict with believing that the point of grammar is to help make meanings clear. Thus, “Jack (he/him) and Ella (they/them) overdosed on their prescription drugs” leaves ambiguity about whose drugs Jack and Ella took. Did they both have prescription drugs, or were they Ella’s only? It might matter if they need their stomachs pumped and someone has to identify what they swallowed. I do not have pronouns on my work email signature. People tell me that the primary point is to make more comfortable those people for whom…

Patience is a virtue, but in politics, it’s one easily mistaken for lack of commitment. The government’s generally successful first term in office was nonetheless sandbagged by having a housing minister who could barely scare up two new houses, yet seemed relentlessly upbeat about his progress. Phil Twyford’s legacy is now under threat – from a foreign minister who seems allergic to leaving the country and a police minister exuding beatific serenity despite nearweekly gun sprays in suburban Auckland. Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta is an immensely capable politician, and Police Minister Poto Williams may well be. The mystery is their refusal to look as though they’re doing anything about the crises in their portfolios. Even allowing them the benefit of the doubt, that there’s a frantic swan-feet paddle of urgent new policy below the…

When it became clear, a couple of years ago, that the government was serious about reforming the way council-run water services are managed and governed, I was concerned. This meant big things for the role of local government and our communities. What would local government do, or even be, without “big infrastructure”? Then we had the report from the Water Industry Commission for Scotland (WICS), suggesting there could be significant benefits to a new way of structuring the “three waters” – drinking water, wastewater and stormwater – in New Zealand. I have been involved in local government for more than a decade, but I certainly don’t count myself as an expert in big infrastructure. We have engineers and other specialists for that, and they were keen on investigating the WICS proposal…

I have to go to a work do on Friday. No doubt it will be very pleasant, but when it comes to work events, my London-based sister trumps me every time. Her reports are usually excellent. Introduced at one event to Bono from U2, she noted there was something “slightly pointless” about him. Meeting Mick Jones from The Clash, she told him, “We grew up with The Clash.” He replied, “I did too.” Her latest work-related social evening involved going to ABBA Voyage with members of the Swedish publishing company she works for, 55 of whom had jetted in for the party. She described the show as strange, uncanny and brilliant fun. Swedish pop group ABBA have built an auditorium in the East End and created avatars of themselves using CGI. The…

There’s a weaselly dictator in our midst. A fleshy-faced despot, he has curbed media freedoms, bent local judiciary to his will and boasted about being a defender of “family values” who opposes “gay propaganda” and “mixed-race” relationships. And no, it’s not Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. Please welcome to the stage the European Union’s very own Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary. The US’ extreme right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference did exactly that this summer. Invited to Texas for the conference, Orbán told the global, liberal order to “go to hell” to applause from a rabid conflagration of racists, bigots, trucker-cap-lovers and Trump supporters. Querying why US conservatives are fanboying so hard for Orbán, experts have come to this conclusion: he has shown the world how to turn a democracy into an…

Brian Tamaki is in merger talks with Winston Peters. Is this a Duco Events fixture or, given that the two share dominance of a particular rump of voterdom, a matter for the Commerce Commission? It’s highly unlikely these two titans of barely viable electoral kingdoms will ever share a throne, let alone become major political players in the eyes of more than a small percentage of voters. A canny promoter could clean up selling tickets for their negotiations, particularly if the self-appointed “sheriffs” among Tamaki’s followers attempted to reeducate lawyer Peters about the “real” nature of jurisprudence in this country. Alas, the comedy potential can only provide so much whimsical distraction before the ramifications dawn. We could wake up after the next election to find that Tamaki is in command of the balance…

The arts bureaucrat said, “Everyone’s terrified of being called a racist.” He looked depressed. I’d been turning over an ancient memory: when my brother and I were kids waiting for a movie to begin, we’d got up on our knees to look around. Two girls started glaring at us and one said loudly to her mother, “Those Maoris keep staring at us.” I had obviously been thinking about race, too. The arts event that the bureaucrat and I and others had just sat through had seemed weirdly drab and oppressive. It had the tone of long-ago school assemblies, where the aim was to enforce conformity, with much prayer and singing of the school song and performance of hokey rituals, and emphasis that none of us should think bad thoughts, a routine…

‘Mistakes were made” was famously unconvincing as a quasiapology for the Iran-Contra scandal, the Exxon Valdez environmental catastrophe and the collapse of multinational Enron. It was therefore strange to see the Prime Minister wheel out this banality to explain the latest water-reform pothole. Perhaps Jacinda Ardern’s choice of a passive, subject-free admission of error was for brevity. Had she recited the names of all those asleep at the wheel before, during and after the ill-conceived decision to put public ownership of water infrastructure beyond the usual reach of democracy, it would have taken several hours. Talk about elephants in rooms. Last month, the Greens proposed an entrenchment, which is the constitutional equivalent of leading an eight-tonne woolly mammoth into Parliament, and no one so much as asked if its name was Babar,…

No sooner had I accepted the Facebook friend request than the new post arrived. There was a photo of Police Commissioner Andrew Coster and this comment: “Funny enough, and I am sure this is pure coincidence, he’s the cousin of Jacinda Ardern.” It went on to say “they even look alike” and that Ardern paid herself $500,000 a year and so had accumulated a fortune of $25 million while in office. None of this was surprising. As part of my research into disinformation and misinformation, I sometimes engage with conspiracy theorists, including, in this case, the mathematically challenged. For the record, Coster and Ardern are not cousins, either. I read it as I contemplated the mass slaughter in Uvalde, Texas. Then came the followup posts, diverting to a favourite fringe topic: the…

The housing crisis is leading to a law-and-order crisis and it is time to acknowledge the link. In Wellington, where vacant premises in the CBD are increasingly being used for emergency housing, violent crime in the inner city has risen 35% in five years, according to police figures. In Rotorua, with 2000 residents placed in up to 45 motels, the overall tally of crime might have gone down but the incidence of social disorder offences has shifted to the motel district. And in Auckland’s Viaduct Harbour, there has been a rise in antisocial behaviour following the housing of unemployed people in a block there, with locals noting an expanded gang presence, including in top-price bars. There are other factors at play, not least the increasing commercialisation of gangs and widespread availability of…

‘It was like a form of therapy for them,” Andrea Vance explains when asked why so many current and former members of the National Party spoke to her, both on and off the record, for her new book, Blue Blood. In it, she documents the bizarre, gothic psycho-drama of National’s recent political history – a horrible torrent of coups, leaks, betrayals, vendettas, tantrums, blunders, resignations and breakdowns. Vance is an award-winning journalist known for high-profile political scoops and scandals, and is probably the last person in the world that people in National should talk to. Now the party is clawing its way out of the deep and bloody hole it had dug itself into by the end of Judith Collins’ leadership, the timing is particularly unfortunate. Why were they so willing to…

Now all we need is an alien invasion. One can’t be far off. After all, alien ships were recently sighted above the United States. Possibly. And what did the Americans do about the alien invasion? They shot down its balloon and blamed the Chinese for spying on them. I’d have thought that both the aliens and the Chinese would have had more sophisticated space or spy craft, but I am not an expert on either aliens or the Chinese. I might ask Mike Hosking and Kate Hawkesby, those world-renowned meteorologists, seers, soothsayers and mentalists, as well as partners in life and in theories about everything. They confidently predicted on their Newstalk ZB programmes, not an impending alien invasion, but that Cyclone Gabrielle was possibly propaganda and would likely never happen. We want…

My wife’s cousin was in town last week with her three children – ages nine, six and three – and when we dropped by for a visit, the adults minus one gabbed in the kitchen while I caught up with the kids. I tend to prefer the company of wee ones anyway. Age has drained me of the energy needed to cope with the subtlety of adult relationships; subtext wears me out. Her kids are dazzling – smart, funny, silly, curious, and kind – all qualities that can be easily nurtured in children lucky enough to be born to the right parents in the right postal code. Sadly, millions of American children live where they are simply not a priority, at least when it comes to public policy. You may have noticed…

Anyone who’s ever had a child, dog, or recalcitrant Roomba knows that without the ability to dole out consequences, domestic tranquillity is as elusive as a balanced diet in Willy Wonkaland. Imagine for a moment a home with kids, pets and other wilful creatures where there are no consequences, no matter how obnoxious the behaviour, then quickly dash the image from your mind, as it will haunt you, I promise. Sadly, that’s pretty much where US politics lives right now. The latest and most egregious example involves Kevin McCarthy, minority leader of the House of Representatives and one of Donald Trump’s most treasured sycophants. The New York Times recently reported that McCarthy, shortly after the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, told fellow Republicans he’d “had it with this guy”,…

With all the government’s handbrake turns and wheelies, the Beehive may soon rival tracts of the Hutt Valley as a hot venue for boy racers of a Friday night. A fair amount of rubber was burnt halting the Rotorua Māori wards legislation, and the skid marks from reverse laps around the Three Waters reforms are still smoking. It’s all pedal to the metal and hang the speed cameras now Labour has decided grocery regulation is urgent after all. With Labour’s re-election chances hairier than ever, more backtracks on controversial policies are likely, with potentially popular ones reaching ear-popping acceleration rates. But oh, the whiplash when something unexpected shows up in the road. Revenue Minister David Parker’s new mission to soak the rich came as a spray of road spikes. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern…

Travel in Europe during Covid can offer inconveniences, but probably not as many as masked-up New Zealanders might think. That’s because – and this bears repeating for those at home who are frustrated with the whole palaver – the countries we’ve been in, Sweden and the UK, have passed peak Covid and the rates of infection, hospitalisation and death are declining rapidly. In the UK, vaccination rates are lower than in New Zealand – about 85% with two jabs, 67% with the booster – but seven-day-average cases have fallen from 140,000 in late December to 60,000 and are still dropping. When we decided to travel to Europe, because family couldn’t come to us (some partners still can’t), we – in the argot of the age – exercised an abundance of caution and did…

Some years ago, I found myself backstage at a Paris fashion show talking to the designer Jean Paul Gaultier. He kept telling me how much he loved London. “It’s wonderful!” he exclaimed. It’s always nice to hear your home town praised, but I was intrigued about what in particular he liked about it. “I love ze fat people everywhere, and zay are so happy. In Paris, zay are not allowed out on the streets!” He was joking, of course, but only slightly. In Paris, almost everyone looks like they live on Perrier and Gitanes, whereas in London, the diversity on which the city prides itself very definitely includes waist size. Yet behind the understanding that we ought to celebrate different sizes and lifestyles is a growing problem of obesity. Britain has the highest…

This column is about a statue and a country. As I write this, the BBC World News has finally ended more than a week of leading its news bulletins with the death of the Queen, hours of coverage that carried on even when there was very little new to say. The story of a discovery of a mass grave in a pine forest in Izium, Ukraine, finally broke the royal spell. Izium was an important hub for the Russians during five months of occupation before Ukrainian forces took back control of the city. As excavations proceed, many of the bodies show signs of torture. Another news report breaking through the royal haze revealed Russia spent hundreds of millions on overseas disinformation operations in a campaign to weaken democracy and promote extremist groups. The New York…

Beware the speaker function on your device. In an airport down south, just prior to the lockdown, I pondered what I’d heard when a nearby phone lit up and the caller, seized by a furious need to communicate, gave a rapid, audible sketch of a scene in the time it took the receiver to think about turning off the speakerphone. “Never seen such paralysis. Such dysfunction. They couldn’t work together. They just stared at their shoes.” The spiel went on like that, until it switched to this: “She’s going to do as much as she can, and then she’s going to disappear. Poof – gone!” The first part described a private meeting of the current National Party caucus. The second referred to the Prime Minister who would, the caller predicted, “do…

In a few months, Americans will mark the centenary of the death of Warren Harding, regarded as one of the worst presidents in US history. (It obviously goes without saying that the worst is the toxic narcissist of Mar-a-Lago). Warren Harding achieved nothing in his time as president but he did make a significant contribution to the English language. Often, he referred to his tendency to bloviate, which means to talk at length, using inflated or empty rhetoric. Waitangi Day this year, and the usual performance of Ngāpuhi leaders, made me wonder whether Warren Harding has relations in Ngāpuhi. Every year, we get the stuff about the fact they were never colonised and that they deserve a massive Treaty settlement. It goes without saying that they always allege the crown is…

Politics is one long congaline of double standards. A man who, as an adult, boasted of groping women’s bodies, and conspicuously declined to repent, went on to become president of the United States. A Tauranga man who, at 16, was asked to leave his school for beating up a 13-year-old may lose his right to be a mere backbencher. The inquiry into the past deeds of new National MP Sam Uffindell may or may not end his political career, but his predicament illustrates the considerable grey area around public figures with ugliness in their pasts. At the time of writing, allegations of further bad behaviour as a university student had also made it into the public domain. At least Uffindell is contrite, to some extent at least. Donald Trump, in contrast, is past 70…

This column has taken a short break from London, in composition if not content. I’m writing in an idyllic setting, on the terrace of a charming villa surrounded by bougainvillea and perched on a pine-filled Croatian hillside above the translucent waters of the Adriatic. Back home, the news is almost unremittingly of the pessimistic kind – inflation is up, productivity down, transport strikes are everywhere, flights cancelled, with a prime minister so deeply mired in his lies and indulgences that even his own ethics adviser has quit. But here, the big issue is whether to swim in the pool or walk down to the sea. On the surface, there is an obvious disconnect between the cloudless beauty of my family holiday and the darkening reality of life in the UK that, by…

New Zealanders justifiably anxious about the country’s fight against Covid are right to be perplexed: what’s the point of the Government and the Ministry of Health having new powers to contain the virus if they’re not used? The recent revelations that border and isolation facility workers could dodge Covid tests without consequences or records being kept were a shock. So, too, was the lack of contrition or sense of urgency from officialdom. Kiwis assumed those most at risk of catching and transmitting Covid would be scrupulously tested in a verified process. Yet when Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield was asked why this wasn’t always enforced, he gave a staggering response: he “would have hoped” all workers were having their regular tests by now. Hope is not a strategy. This is…

As a country, we’ve just flunked that test psychologists set for small children, offering them one marshmallow now, or two if they wait five minutes. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern decided delayed gratification wasn’t the right strategy for the much-anticipated European Union free-trade agreement (FTA) and returned from her travels with just the one marshmallow. After a couple of days’ hearty talk about how marvellous the deal was, Trade Minister Damien O’Connor conceded, “It’s probably fair to say that no one likes it, so we probably have it about right.” The trouble with settling for the bird in the hand in international trade is that it leaves all the other, plumper birds in the bush for one’s competitors. This FTA means, according to the Dairy Companies Association of New Zealand, that 98.5% of Europe’s dairy…

We are not a very happy country but we are still a complacent one. After five years of studying, writing and speaking about mis-and disinformation, and sounding the alarm, it would be nice for me to think Kiwis were taking the threat seriously. We are discussing it, it’s true, but we are actually doing very little. Many people think it can’t happen here when it is already happening here. We could be the Finland of the South Pacific, teaching critical thinking to our children, but with better weather. Instead, we may end up as just a colder version of Queensland, where I once had to explain to a popular radio host that the moon landings were not faked. To leave the university city of Dunedin for a trip around the South Island is to…

Mum will be 99 this year. She lived in the same bungalow in Andersons Bay in Dunedin from 1948 to July 2022. Dad died in 1987, so she lived alone for 35 years. She coped magnificently while continuing to delight in everything about her married life. The only concessions to her independence were Meals on Wheels and once a week a woman to do the vacuum cleaning. Mum has always referred to this as doing the “luxing”, named after the Electrolux, even though the model for the past decade or more has been a Mitsubishi. Mum said the woman was hopeless. Of course. At the annual get-together with my Dunedin cousins we talk briefly about our ailments. We’re all on medication of some sort. Mum is on none. In July, she got…

When your neighbour’s in trouble, you don’t think twice. You lend a hand. So a big “onya!” is due to Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison for observing that our latest Covid move is akin to living in a cave. Given Australia’s calamitous handling of the Delta variant outbreak, it was supremely gallant of him to tickle up trans-Tasman rivalries at his own expense like that. The Delta strain has been ripping through our neighbour with all the butt-crack-flashing rudeness of the unruly British tourists of 2019. The political response has been a chaotic Hokey Tokey of states putting themselves into purdah, and rackety gangs of citizens putting themselves out again and shaking it all about. Still, it’s a little troubling that New Zealand is getting a reputation for ovine docility, staying meekly…

I thought I had better spoil myself before arriving in New Zealand, so I upgraded to business class. After all, I was going to be locked up in quarantine and I had read about people bawling their eyes out in the bathroom. Were my 50 expeditions to the Himalayas and Antarctica going to be sufficient to prepare me for the privations of MIQ? My arrival at Auckland Airport is a taste of what’s to come. We are directed straight into immigration and customs processing, double-masked, and asked to sanitise our hands every 20m or so. Then we’re shepherded on to a bus and driven to downtown Auckland. It feels strange not veering off the motorway to my house in Epsom. The hotel is surrounded by barricades. “This could be grim,” I think…

C goes with D to meet an orthopaedic surgeon, who outlines D’s intended procedure. It’s absolutely worth it, he assures them. C and M and D have it all worked out, how C and M will wait while the surgery is performed, the times they will visit. But after they arrive at the hospital they’re told, “Due to Covid there is no visiting at all.” D follows the nurse through the doors. They will not see him for days. His shoulders are bowed, and he is towing a tiny suitcase. C faces the dermatologist. She suspects he won’t remember this, but when she first met him years ago, he asked the worst and funniest question a doctor has ever put to her: “Have you done any recent nursing in the Third…

s we get older, it can be comforting to think of age as just a number. But it’s also true. We all know someone who looks years younger than their chronological age – and, of course, the reverse happens to some people. Now the Dunedin Study, which has been following 1000 people born in the city 50 years ago, is delivering new insights into why the pace of ageing differs widely between individuals. It has found that ageing processes are well under way by the time people reach their 30s, decades before any age-related symptoms appear. The speed at which we age depends in part on early life experiences, and our ageing trajectories become clear by midlife, says study director Richie Poulton. “In the past, researchers tended to focus on the life…

An e-bike is a bicycle with an electric motor and a battery either bolted on or built in. Unlike Europe, New Zealand has no specific speed limits for e-bikes, but the Ministry of Transport stipulates that motors must be limited to 250 watts of “sustained output” – more than that and it’s a moped and requires a licence to ride. Before buying an e-bike, you need to decide how you’ll use it. If you’re going to commute or make shopping trips, you’ll want a bike that’s primarily designed for the road. If you’d also like to spend your weekends trail-riding, you’ll need a hybrid or “rail trail” bike. Beyond that, it’s e-mountain bikes, which are specialist machines. Then there are cargo bikes, which are a class of their own. It’s important to…

The Government will quickly rue its announcement of an Auckland harbour crossing for cyclists and walkers as being highly socially divisive – without moving the dial on emissions. Within hours of its announcement, New Zealanders the length of the country were calculating the disproportionate privilege conferred on a few thousand Aucklanders from our wealthiest suburbs, at the expense of hundreds of thousands of less privileged commuters elsewhere whose transport upgrades were scrapped or deferred in favour of the $785 million crossing. This project is not only risibly far from being a transport priority, but is likely to be seen as a cynical political move to shore up votes in privileged Auckland electorates. In fact, given official calculations that making cycle and walking access available on the existing harbour bridge would benefit only…

It was not especially surprising when Minister of Health Andrew Little recently resisted using the word “crisis” about the present condition of the health system. Governments are traditionally reluctant to acknowledge the c-word on their watch, even when everyone else is saying it. And perhaps Little has some sort of point: our hospitals were spared the outright nightmare that some other countries experienced in the first year of the pandemic, when there were no vaccines or antivirals. Late last year, a World Health Organisation paper estimated that the Covid death toll among healthcare workers globally was between 80,000 and 180,000. It is also true that there is a global shortage of nurses and doctors. As the Financial Times observed recently, the WHO declared a staffing shortfall of nearly six million nurses even…

At the height of the post-George Floyd-murder boom in books highlighting white privilege, I was going to interview Layla Saad, British-born author of Me and White Supremacy. Her book featured the standard analysis of several similar bestsellers, which was that racism was based on an idea of white supremacy–all white people were white supremacists, whether they recognised it or not, and any resistance to that fact only proved the racism of the denier. What fascinated me most was that Saad mentioned she had left Britain some years before and moved to a place where she didn’t suffer racism or sexism, somewhere she felt at home: Qatar. I remember looking forward to discussing this unlikely Gulf utopia with her – after all, Qatari women cannot leave the country without the permission of…

The understated politician sounds like an oxymoron, but as tributes to the recently deceased Stan Rodger remind us, there’s a lot to be achieved under the radar. Rodger, nicknamed “Sideline Stan”, was a steely, wily reformer in the Lange Labour government, but his affability and old-fashioned reticence about showing off masked his efficacy, making him all the more effective. The art of good stealthbomber politicians is that even when they talk softly but carry a thumping great stick, everyone discounts the stick because “that’s just good ol’ Stan”. Few would have guessed the Beehive’s current custodian of the lethal invisible stick is Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister David Clark. Clark has the irreducibly mild air of a knitting-pattern model, so now that he has emerged from the phone booth wearing Lycra and a cape,…

‘I made certain,” the Uber driver said, “that my wife-to-be shared my goals: financial, social, spiritual.” Outside, beyond the line of palms, the sky had a fierce, pale sheen, the light was all blaze and glare, and the temperature had reached 38 degrees. It was a heatwave, fitting for a day of high drama. We were driving at high speed towards Beverly Hills. “My car,” the driver continued, “is a Tesla. I call it Kit. When my wife and I shop, it parks itself. After shopping in the mall, we summon it. I geolocate my wife’s position when she drives, to keep her safe. By the way,” he added, “I’ve been to New Zealand myself. I was there with a mentor who was in the business of high-end property. He checked…

The “told you so” exponents who have hailed the Taliban’s sudden brutal resurgence in Afghanistan as evidence of the futility of that country’s 20-year foreign occupation will not be basking for long. Some – including a number of New Zealand commentators – may have been able to harden their hearts to a resumption of the regime’s virtual enslavement and frequent mutilation and murder of the women and girls for whom foreign occupation and democracy had won precious freedoms, such as education and the right to work. But the world has just become a much more dangerous place for all. Afghanistan already harboured a thriving community of terrorists. They will now feel more emboldened than ever to try to export with violence their hatred of modernity and Western society. Those fastidious about…

Sometimes, in a taxi, say, people will say to Susie Ferguson after hearing her voice: “Do I know you from somewhere?” Or, “Have we met before?” She is on the other end of the phone from Wellington. I know her, or think I do, from somewhere. We have, after all, met before, most mornings, via the wireless, where she has been for eight and a half years, the calm, crisp, Scottish-accented co-host on RNZ National’s Morning Report. The relationships we have with those voices on the wireless are weird, really. We do know what the face behind the voice looks like these days, but they are, as she says, different from the relationships we have, or think we have, with the faces on the telly. “I’m probably a friend and an enemy of all…

I witnessed my first supermarket mask confrontation the other day. A man had wandered in unmasked and a second man, who turned out to be my old neighbour, was shouting legally actionable threats at him. After he was done shouting, he saw me and greeted me cheerily. He’s a lovely chap. But clearly, what we do and don’t do about Covid still raises passions. For all the controversy it has generated – more among the commentariat than the masses – the extension of the MIQ system by a few precious weeks did save lives. More than three-quarters of eligible adults received booster shots and our peak Omicron mortality was half that of Australia’s and vastly lower than in the US. Most crucially, we got nearly all of the elderly boosted. Hong Kong,…

What a luxury the concept of “any port in a storm” now seems. Thanks to the pandemic and Russian imperialism, it’s now “any place in a port queue – and you might get to berth eventually”. Sadly, it’s in the thick of this supply-chain madness that the government is making a decision on how, or even perhaps whether, to replace Auckland’s long-overtaxed port as the country’s prime international dock. Notwithstanding the current global crisis, the port is rapidly outgrowing its capacity, but for both environmental and populist reasons, its physical expansion is out of the question. Its freight worsens Auckland’s chronic congestion. And a probable majority of Aucklanders want what Sydney so gloatingly has: the use of all that beautiful harbourside land. They believe they have more right to it than containers,…

The action of a nuclear power invading a European country in the 21st century must be weird to witness from almost any place around the world. There are some things that we thought were consigned to the history books, and to see them enacted with all their dreadful consequences is a shock to the system. However, there is something particularly unnerving about watching Russia’s actions in Ukraine from London, and not because Russia continues to have nuclear missiles aimed in this direction – although that’s not an entirely relaxing thought. No, what adds a more proximate perspective to the whole terrible saga is that London is a city with a lot of major Russian players. There are estimated to be 150,000 Russians living here, and some of them are extremely influential. That…

Most people who contract Covid-19 will not be treated in a hospital intensive care unit; they will be treated at home. It’s easy to forget this as concerns about overwhelming hospital services ramp up. Currently, Covid-19 cases not in managed isolation are under the care of regional public health services. As case numbers increase, community providers (mainly GPs) will care for mild to moderate cases, managing some patients at home via telehealth. Mild to moderate symptoms last from five to 14 days and can include any or all of the following: fever (72%), cough (46%), sore throat (34%), shortness of breath (19%) and nasal congestion or runny nose (16%). About 80-90% of these patients will recover without any treatment other than that for symptom relief. They will likely take paracetamol, maybe head to…

It is difficult to believe today but in the relatively recent past, medical experts believed vigorous exercise might be bad for our health and that elite athletes risked an early death. Ironically, just as it was becoming accepted that we are biologically designed for movement and that physical activity, without overdoing it, is absolutely crucial for our mental and physical health, the human race was starting to become less active. The constant invention of more labour-saving devices means that now even minor exertions, such as getting off the sofa to change the TV channel or walking around a video store to choose a movie, are unnecessary. We have created what medical journal the Lancet described as a “pandemic of physical inactivity”. “We are the undermuscled generation,” University of Auckland nutrition professor David Cameron-Smith…

After this war in Europe, nothing will be the same. That was the message from Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Union’s decision-making body, after she held a video conference with China’s President Xi Jinping last month. The Europeans were trying to convince China that supporting Russia in its two-and-a-half-month-old invasion of Ukraine was a bad idea. Despite the EU being China’s biggest trading partner – the two did €586 billion worth of business last year – it’s unclear whether Beijing will see it Brussels’ way. Gradually, many Europeans are coming to see the Ukraine war as the beginning of a new kind of ideological battle, a global fight between democracy and autocracy. So what they want to know is this: whose side are the Chinese really on? The Germans don’t…

The country’s public water services are not a “patchwork shambles”, as Listener writer Jane Clifton asserts. This is the same type of exaggerated claim the government has used to push through its politically motivated reforms. There are several reasons for the nationwide angst over Three Waters. First, underlying distrust. The government has arguably brought much of its misery upon itself by not being upfront in its election manifesto about the type of radical reforms being proposed. It therefore had no mandate to pursue them without extensive community consultation, which has not occurred. Second, constitutional change. It is widely acknowledged that Three Waters has major implications for both our constitution and the future role of local government. That being the case, any reform proposals should at least have awaited the current “Future for…

The vampires arrive every day about 4am. You can hear their trolley wheels rattling on the hard floor as they come into the ward. At least they check the vital signs are good before they take our blood. We know vampire is a harsh term for hard-working nurses, but it isn’t exactly a social hour of the day. The blood samples will dictate today’s medications and infusions. What will be the magic recipe for each of us today, I wonder? I am one of four blood cancer patients in Motutapu ward Room 3, or Red Cell 3 as we like to call it, thinking our double meaning very clever. Call us patients or inmates, it doesn’t matter; we were total strangers before we arrived. But in three days, we have formed…

A few years ago, a journalism school received a stark health warning from my GP. Unless I changed my diet and lifestyle, he said, I was on my way to being diabetic and I would be booking an appointment with a cardiac surgeon in about three years’ time. I took him at his word and embarked on a vigorous regime of diet and exercise. Soon, my test scores returned to normal. Back in New Zealand, I resumed my lifelong love affair with Kiwi-style baking (infinitely superior to the Australian equivalents). Raspberry buns, Sally Lunns, cream-filled chocolate profite-roles – I love them all. But I was exercising every day and confident I had it all under control, so when I received my latest HbA1c result – the test of your blood glucose (sugar)…

I have a freighbour (that’s friend and neighbour) who is among the planet’s most relentlessly optimistic organisms. She manages this magically, without ever being saccharine or making me want to punch her in the kneecap. Of late, amid the maelstrom of misery enveloping the US, she has experienced brief but indelible moments of discouragement. It’s understandable, as we are regressing on all the top items on any society’s letter to Santa: peace, justice, safety, prosperity, happiness and goodwill. There seems to be an almost endless supply of fear, anger, bitterness and mistrust, and it’s all way cheaper than petrol, so the folks we’ve mistakenly chosen to lead us keep throwing gallons of it on to the fire they started. The parade of apocalyptic news is unavoidable, and while “doomscrolling” may be one of…

When my first book, about conspiracy theories and fake news, was published, it was followed by a profile of me in our local paper, the Otago Daily Times. In it, I quoted from a bleak study: “In any given week, 25% of social-media users will have passed on false information. And half of those will have done so knowing it was false.’’ I declared, hubristically, that I was going to devote the next stage of my career to battling disinformation and misinformation. The headline was “The war on truth”. Just before the piece was published, we had to redo the interview after a deranged gunman, who believed ridiculous anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, attacked two Christ-church mosques. Looking back at the interview, three years later, I am struck by my sense of optimism, the belief…

It’s about six months since I started coming home from the pub and watching urbanist videos. It didn’t take YouTube’s algorithm long to notice. Oh, it said, you’ve just watched all 40 minutes of someone biking around Amsterdam praising the intersections and talking about mixed-use development – here’s some more of that for you. It occurred to me I was being radicalised. The same mathematics that show people more and more videos full of stupid vaccine conspiracy theories and revolting far-right polemics had come into play. Soon, it wasn’t just the Not Just Bikes channel, it was City Beautiful and Strong Towns. I came to believe that single-family zoning had ruined American cities and that “stroads” were the Devil’s doing. (Wikipedia characterises “stroad” as “a pejorative portmanteau of street and road”, coined…

It’s a well-known fact – there must be an academic paper on it by now – that appliances break down in groups. It’s never just the fridge, but the fridge and the toaster and the Sky remote and Nan’s fiddly hearing-aid thingy. The printer – if it deigns to work at all – is usually the ringleader. It has a new recidivist offender buddy in the “rechargeable” vacuum cleaner battery that no retailer ever warns people is purposely doomed to die tragically young, so as to have to be replaced at a handy markup. Now, thanks to Chinese ingenuity, all this domestic surliness comes with new menace. A governmental report from a Washington security consultant says Chinese-made fridges and light bulbs are now highly likely to come with a secret spying implant.…

The best response to confronting speech is more speech, not less, according to philosopher John Stuart Mill. Seldom has that advice been more pertinent. The Government’s proposal to strengthen hate-speech laws has quickly degenerated into cacophonic confusion, so it’s important New Zealanders clarify exactly what we seek to be protected from. The answer used to be violence, not speech itself. Now the proposal is to reduce the prosecution threshold from violence to hatred, tipping its ambit into a dangerously subjective zone. Under existing law, only speech that leads to, or is clearly intended to lead to, violence is unlawful. The proposal to move these provisions from the Human Rights Act into the Crimes Act and toughen the penalties is uncontroversial. It’s the proposed wider net to catch speech that “intentionally incites/stirs up,…

Watching Groundswell NZ protests around the country, people might think farmers are indeed hard done by and over-regulated. In fact, the sector is booming. Dairy prices are at record highs and horticultural products are demanding high prices in the supermarkets. As for the regulations railed against, they are not only essential but also need strengthening. The regulations of concern to Groundswell are on freshwater, indigenous biodiversity, climate change and the High Country. First, freshwater quality is bad. Many of our rivers, lakes and groundwaters have unnaturally high levels of nutrients, chemicals, disease-causing pathogens and sediment. This pollution renders many of them unable to sustain aquatic life and unsafe for swimming. The public has been calling on the Government to clean up these waterways. Since 2008, farmer representatives have been working with others in…

Thoughts and prayers and the vague promise of an exit visa. That was about all Europeans could offer while watching an era ending in Afghanistan this month, with dangerously hopeless young men clinging desperately to the underside of a giant, grey US military transport plane as it prepared to take off. That and shouting, “For God’s sake, somebody do something!” at the telly. As ultra-conservative Islamist group the Taliban was taking over the Afghan capital, several European ambassadors, including British, French and German representatives, remained at Kabul airport as the city was evacuated. The diplomats were processing visas to facilitate the exit of Afghans in danger of punishment because they’d worked with foreigners. German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested that her country accept as many as 10,000 Afghans who had worked with, or…