During the first reading of New Zealand’s Modern Slavery Bill last month, one member of parliament warned it would create perverse incentives to look the other way. Another raised the compliance cost from his experience on an Australian board. Read more

By 1974, at the Allensbach Institute she had founded a quarter-century earlier, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann had given a name to a puzzle first visible in her election research of the 1960s. West Germans would tell her pollsters one thing in private; in public they would say something else, or nothing at all. Read more

Observers of European politics know Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a right-wing, populist party, probably extreme, certainly friendly to Russia. Less visible from the outside is that the AfD is not an ordinary opposition party that might win an election, govern badly and then be voted out. Read more

When Jim Chalmers stood up on budget night and announced the end of negative gearing on established properties, he assured Australians it was worth breaking a promise for “right and justifiable reasons.” Grant Robertson, New Zealand’s finance minister, said something remarkably similar in March 2021 when he broke his own promise not to extend the bright-line test on property. Robertson called his earlier commitment “too definitive.” A New Zealand Herald columnist observed that this sounded a lot like “too honest.” New Zealanders know how this story ends. Read more

Ahead of New Zealand’s 2017 election, I floated the idea of a grand coalition between National and Labour in a few columns. The circumstances back then made it appealing. Read more

A German economist writing satire about New Zealand sounds like the opening line of a bad joke. The joke gets longer when you learn the plot: two Martian auditors land in the Wairarapa expecting humanity at its best, are promptly fined for parking without consent, and proceed on a reluctant tiki tour of the country in the company of a Wellington bureaucrat named Ben, who has quietly decided his career is over and he may as well help them. Read more

Russian power has always sat on a contradiction. The country can put satellites into orbit and tanks across borders, but it cannot build a normal economy. Read more

It is hard to convince anyone they need to change when they think nothing is broken. The story of the emperor’s new clothes captures it. Read more

Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651, amid the wreckage of the English Civil War. We know him for his defence of the state: without a sovereign authority to impose order, human life reverts to a “war of every man against every man”, where existence is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Read more