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Across the Tasman, anger has propelled Pauline Hanson’s One Nation from a fringe outfit to the most popular party, on 31 percent in a recent poll, ahead of both Labor and the Coalition. Yet Australia’s preferential voting, which redistributes losing candidates’ votes, could still return a Labor government. Read more

In May 2025, University of Otago Vice-Chancellor Grant Robertson eloquently explained why universities, as institutions, should be neutral on matters of public and political debate. If universities take stances on political issues, he said, they place members of their communities with different views in a difficult position. Read more

Once a year, as the days shorten, a great migration begins. From the warm offices of Wellington and the cafes of central Auckland, the political class sets out for Mystery Creek, where the gates of Fieldays open and the country remembers that it has a countryside. Read more

When Victoria University of Wellington’s great little prediction market, iPredict, announced that it would be shutting down back in 2015, it had a couple hundred thousand dollars of traders’ deposited funds in the bank. It was a very small, very limited, academic enterprise. Read more

When The New Zealand Initiative set out 235 recommendations for the next government last month, the one this paper chose for its headline was the proposal to pay younger workers less. The news sense was sound, because it is the recommendation that sounds least fair. Read more

Government is awash in consultation processes. So much so that “consultation fatigue” is a real term. Read more

The debate about New Zealand’s Supreme Court has been framed as a question about the current court – its composition, its appointments, its judicial philosophy. This column frames it differently: as a question about what the current court inherited, and from whom. Read more

If the country sees a few lucky breaks, Budget 2026 shows a return to surplus in 2029. The period of structural deficits will have lasted almost a decade. Read more