Articles in ‘Opinion’

There are two pieces of legislation wending their way through Parliament at the moment designed to further entrench the crazy notion that the Treaty of Waitangi created an obligation on governments nearly 200 years later to treat anybody with a Maori ancestor in some kind of preferential way. One is the Public Service Bill, introduced to Parliament last month and now being…

Through all of history, everywhere in the world, recorded or otherwise, it has been proclaimed that The End is Nigh. Preachers, politicians, protestors, pundits of every ilk and hue; from the pulpit to the podium to the sandwich board in the street, all manner of doomsayers have sung and shouted and chanted their various predictions as to the impending demise of Mankind. One day,…

But its not all doom and gloom, we can empower ourselves and those close to us to minimise the likelihood of being affected by it. In actual fact, there’s no one better equipped than ourselves to take those crucial steps. One year ago, almost to the day, the results of this country’s latest crime and victim survey, conducted by the Justice Ministry, was released. A report…

Whatever reservations one might have regarding the wisdom of holding an election on the day of a full moon, Britain has just done just that, and the result has been a stunning but completely predictable victory for Boris Johnson and the Conservatives. I say completely predictable because many mainstream media polls failed to predict it; and much accompanying commentary in the…

A few years ago, when I wrote my autobiography, I included a chapter called “The challenge of making economic policy in a democracy”. In that chapter, I tried to debunk a lot of commonly held myths about economic policy. There are lots of them: “Government should control what private landlords charge for rental accommodation to protect low income people”. “Import controls and…

New Zealand is in danger of losing many of its precious heritage buildings as councils and owners struggle to cope with earthquake (seismic) issues and New Building Standards (NBS). Earthquake strengthening is now a huge concern for planners, builders and owners – and, because it’s a public safety issue, rightly so. Unfortunately, the extent of its impact is only now being…

Our township was carved out of dense bush in the 1860’s when immigrants moved onto the land and created a community from scratch with just hand tools, their own labour and a desire to make a better life for themselves and their families. At first there were scattered houses - not tidy weatherboard cottages, but slab huts and ponga whares – it took a while before proper wooden…

It would seem that ‘progress’, as defined by Auckland Transport (AT), is actually ‘regression’. I always considered progress as advancement by moving forward. According to Auckland Transport, moving backwards into the past is really the way forward. A return to pre 1985 speed limits is how the ‘visionaries’ of our local regional transport network view our driving future. Never…

Right now, in New Zealand, a quiet revolution is taking place. It isn’t technological, or a change to the education system, or a new and widespread understanding of an holistic approach to health and wellbeing. Rather, it involves the steady, systematic, and stealthy overturning of more than eight centuries of established rights and freedoms that New Zealanders have inherited…

Regular readers of “elocal” will think I have a fixation about house prices. I’ve written on the subject twice already this year, most recently just two months ago. But several things have prompted me to write on the subject again. First, despite all the hand-wringing about the unaffordability of housing, and the political commitments to make housing more affordable, house…

There is a well circulated expression of opinions including demands, rejections and mostly avoidance from the political parties who are inclined to view this subject as related to votes and this appears to nullify their ability to provide sound and meaningful policy and meaningful policy with hesitancy of involvement. The New Zealand population have been active in the last decade…

The heated exchanges that occurred at a recent Ministry for the Environment meeting in Pukekohe are symptomatic of the pressures building on our growers and farmers. They are becoming increasingly worried about the future and Government policies are the key reason. They turned out in force to meet Ministry for the Environment officials and Freshwater Leaders Advisory Committee…

Politicians around the world have been calling for faster and faster action to reduce emissions. Our own Prime Minister has joined the political hype-train by announcing climate change is "my"/her generation’s nuclear free moment (who made everyone under 40 "her" generation? and why are we now pitting different generations against each other?) Politicians around the world have…

A few weeks ago, the Government announced that as from 2022 teaching New Zealand history would be a mandatory part of the school curriculum, at both primary and secondary level. As somebody who was an historian before he was an economist, I was delighted. It is important that all New Zealanders, whether born here or born overseas, have an understanding of where we have come from…

Seven hundred-odd kilometres south of Papakura, as the crow flies, the Department of Conservation is waging war on introduced pests. Great stuff, many people might think, giving the matter a quick nod of approval before carrying on with their busy lives. This is what DOC does, after all. It conserves. That’s what conservation means, doesn’t it? They work tirelessly to preserve…

Several months ago, it was abundantly clear that KiwiBuild was a complete failure. In the 2017 election campaign, the Labour Party’s biggest promise was to “deliver 100,000 quality, affordable houses for first home buyers over the next decade”. It was recognised that it would take some time to crank up the programme to achieve this, but the initial aim was to build 16,000…

One of the issues almost guaranteed to provoke a strong reaction at many a social gathering in New Zealand is any suggestion that New Zealand should be exporting more bottled water. There have been noisy demonstrations in public, well covered by television news channels, strongly opposed to such exports. One of the commitments made by the incoming Labour-New Zealand First-Green…

A few weeks ago, the New Zealand Herald carried an article by Dr Douglas Fairgray which seemed to argue that, when it comes to determining the price of houses, supply doesn’t matter. He didn’t put it quite like that, but that was what he appeared to be saying. He noted that the Minister for Urban Development, Phil Twyford, was seeking to reduce urban land prices by “flooding the…

Driving around Auckland the other day, I saw that one of the candidates for the Auckland mayoralty is promising to sack the board of Auckland Transport. He’s got my vote was my immediate reaction! Of course, I know that the performance of Auckland Transport is not the only important issue in this local body election, but for me it is arguably the most important single issue. …

“We are one,” Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern repeatedly told New Zealanders after the horrific Christchurch massacre. But are we really? We all share a love for this wonderful country with its democratic rights and freedoms. However, with the separatist ideology now prevalent in most political parties, the bureaucracy and public services, we are certainly not being governed as one…