Politicians do like being tough on crime. Flexing law and order muscle is a feature of the patriarchal Daddy State, and is beloved by the very same conservatives who deplore the workings of the Nanny ...

On a similar quest, Labour’s likely future leader and campaign chair Kieran McAnulty was in Australia this year to observe how the centre-right government of Anthony Albanese won re-election.

Truly, these are tough times for our nation’s leaders. In future, how on earth are they going to find the sort of money they’ve been […] ...

Heavens to Betsy. Let me get this right. In her own opinion column, a female journalist (the fearsome Andrea Vance) used a bad word to refer to female politicians who had just extinguished the ability ...

As Donald Trump zigs and zags on tariffs and trashes America’s reputation as a safe and stable place to invest, China has a big gun that it could bring to this tariff knife fight. Behind Japan, China ...

Over the past week, L.A. musician Jessica Pratt and her band have performed in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland. A reclusive presence on stage, Pratt’s voice is so unusual and her music so well ...

Here’s a great, previously unreleased demo from the late 1950s/early 1960s by the Falcons, a group that bridged doo-wop and soul. Some Falcons members had been in the classic Nolan Strong and the ...

One of the odd aspects of the government’s plan to Americanise the public health system – i.e by making healthcare access more reliant on user pay charges and private health insurance – is that it is ...

The film industry was probably naive to think it would be spared from Donald Trump’s war on globalisation. If you believe Trump, every dollar being spent on foreign film crews, FX houses and film ...

As a spectacle, politics can be pretty boring. MMP politics isn’t a cage fight, or even (ultimately) a struggle between individual parties. Moreover… Under MMP, not even megatons of public exposure to ...