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It is a new thing for New Zealand to have a chief science advisor to the Prime Minister. Sir Peter Gluckman’s laudable brief is "to promote discourse that will lead New Zealand to better apply evidence-based knowledge and research across all domains of public endeavour". Read more
Tony Abbott’s recently announced Australian Cabinet is conspicuous for its lack of women, and apparently this is a big deal. With only one woman out of a cabinet of 19, even Afghanistan boasts more females in its cabinet. Read more
Newly elected Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, announced his 19-person Cabinet on Monday, with just one female minister, Julie Bishop. Not that Australians would notice much. Read more
Imagine the following situation: Your next-door neighbours are going to have a party. They know it will be noisy and it might last till the wee hours. Read more
Nothing arouses the passions like a sport the whole country can get behind, a sport with such wide appeal it’s embraced by the masses and is accessible to anyone and everyone. I am, of course, talking about yachting. Read more
Government spending has been rising for the past one and a half centuries. The increase itself is startling, but even more worrying is the composition of government spending in the developed world. Read more
New Zealanders are an irascible lot when it comes to recreational fishing. Around 50,000 people have made submissions opposing options for tightening recreational snapper fishing limits. Read more
If there is one word that best describes the current state-owned asset sales programme, it would probably be ‘compromise’. In 2008, when the Government was faced with the challenge of tackling rising levels of public debt (projected at 36 per cent of GDP for 2013) in a low-growth economy, all the while nursing a balance sheet heavily overweight on A-rated electricity assets, the choice was clear: sell one to pay the other. Read more
The National-led government is introducing changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) and fears are being expressed that they will favour economic development ‘at the expense of the environment’. The Prime Minister implicitly acknowledged this fear last weekend when he referred to the need to strike the right ‘balance between our environmental responsibilities and our economic opportunities’. Read more
Remember the days when economic news coverage of Europe wasn’t about its impending collapse? After years of doom and gloom about the eurozone’s economy, figures released this week from Eurostat suggest that the dark stormy recession cloud may soon be lifted. Read more