Nicola Willis vs Ruth Richardson? Alien vs Predator? Thankfully, everyone may now be having second thoughts. We all deserve better than a contest between these two over who can be the most socially ...

The track record of modern singers trying to create new Christmas songs proves that it is harder than it looks. Yet back in 1956, the Hepsters (and since then, whoever made this lovely video of their ...

If something isn’t really broken, no wonder people feel suspicious when government promises to “fix” it to the potential benefit of corporate interests. In 2011, Parliament passed legislation that ...

No bread, all circuses. Allegedly, the cupboard is bare when it comes to putting extra money on the table to offer nurses, teachers and junior doctors the wages (and staffing relief) that they deserve ...

For gangs, the Misuse of Drugs Act (1975) has been one of the best recruiting tools they’ve ever had. Criminalisation of a raft of illicit drugs not only provide s them with a wildly lucrative black ...

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 ...

For many councils, the Luxon government’s plan to restrict the ability of local councils to increase rates to a range of between two and four per cent annually, is a recipe for : (b) increasing user ...

Politicians are often urged to reach consensus on certain issues, so that everything doesn’t just flip back again when there’s a change of government. Unfortunately, […] ...

Decades ago, Alexander Cockburn wrote a column pointing out that the true believers in the power and precision of the defence industry’s latest weaponry tend to be (a) their gullible government ...

For months, the economic recovery has been said to be imminent, and the forecasters at the banks keep promoting that message, even though the former predictions of good times in 2025 have now been ...

The spectacular improvements in reading achievement announced by Education Minister Erica Stanford on Monday were almost too good to be true – so it isn’t surprising that the figures justifying those ...