It was the NZSO’s birthday this week – it turned 70 – and so it threw a big party, in the form of a free concert featuring a kind of ‘greatest hits’ snippets of the last seven decades. So is our national orchestra in good shape, now that it’s a septuagenarian? Mostly, I’d say, it…

NZ Opera is currently staging a production of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera The Mikado (which I’ve reviewed here). It was written in the 1800s as a satire on British high society, but set in Japan so that the satire could be more biting (they were limits to what you could say directly about…

It’s become received political wisdom that John Key was a superhumanly popular politician, someone without parallel in modern history, an unmatchable asset for the National Party while he was its leader. Not so, it turns out. Data from polling firm UMR, which has been referred to previously but not as far as I know published,…

Previous polling data about what’s on the public’s mind has often run together poverty and inequality, and sometimes even conflated them with housing. So what happens when you split the three issues out, as polling firm UMR has helpfully done for the last six months and summarised below? Well, when you ask people what they…

Gareth’s Morgan’s The Opportunities Party (TOP) yesterday announced its ‘Democracy Reset‘, tapping into the growing public sense that democracy isn’t working the way it should. And it’s right to identify concentrated power within Cabinet, falling voter turnout and vested interests as key threats to the system. But while it has some good ideas, it doesn’t…

Local Government New Zealand’s Mike Reid has an interesting piece in the latest Policy Quarterly about local council turnout. (Short version: it’s low largely because councils don’t have many powers, and this is set to get worse as central government reforms strip even more power from them.) One of the other factors behind low turnout,…

Gareth Morgan’s The Opportunities Party yesterday (re)announced its first policy, Morgan’s long-standing plan for a comprehensive capital income tax. In effect, the policy argues that all forms of wealth generate – or should generate – income, just like savings accumulate interest, and that that income should be taxed, just like interest is. Most controversially, the…

Stuff reported last week that young New Zealanders were “losing faith in democracy”, based on a journal article showing that only 29.3 percent of Kiwis born in the 1980s say it is “essential” to live in a democracy. The story adds: This is a dramatic drop off from those in older cohorts – almost half of…

Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on Place from Aotearoa New Zealand Edited by Ingrid Horrocks and Cherie Lacey (Victoria University Press, $40) This review was originally published on the Scoop Review of Books. When I was coming to the end of my six-year stint in London, British people would often say to me, ‘I quite understand why…

The New Zealand Initiative think tank yesterday launched The Local Manifesto, calling for more responsibility to be devolved to – and greater freedom for – local councils. It’s a call I broadly agree with, especially since the think tank points out that local councils are currently too much beholden to central government and not answerable…