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.

Myth One: Iran was building nuclear weapons and had to be stopped. Not true. Instead, it is entirely legal for member states of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT) to pursue ...

To an eery degree, the US is repeating the precedents it set in Iraq, in 2003. After the 9/11 attack, US President George W. Bush became obsessed with causing regime change in Baghdad, bypassed the ...

In the interests of efficiency, maybe Brooke van Velden should just outsource her Workplace Relations and Safety Ministry to Business NZ and be done with it. Because (obviously) corporate wishes are ...

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 ...

For obvious reasons, people in positions of power tend to treat the leaking of unauthorised information as a very, very bad thing, and – to maintain the appearance of control – they will devote a lot ...

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 ...

The election of any Pope tends to be retro-fitted in ways that make the choice seem inevitable. God’s will, no less. If the new Pope had been Italian (“Time for the papacy to return home!”) or a ...

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 ...

While Donald Trump is being widely cited as a reason/explanation for Anthony Albanese’s landslide victory on the weekend, that’s like blaming the icing for the state of a badly baked cake. In no ...