Public Address Word of the Year 2020: The Vote!
It's that time again! You can now vote for the Word of the Year 2020. Thanks very much to all the people who nominated for the long list in the form below, and to Hadyn Green for his good work…
Recent Posts
Public Address Word of the Year 2020: Discussion and nomination
In the normal course of things, I launch the Public Address Word of the Year with a post looking back at all the previous winners. But 2020 patently has not been a normal year, so I'll skip that part. (You…
Election '20: The No Threshold Hypothetical
The final count of the 2020 general election has been released, with five parties making it into Parliament. ¶ If New Zealand had no threshold, and parties just had to get enough votes to be entitled to be in the first…
Mum
Ten years ago this week, Mum died. ¶ Her death wasn't surprising: my mother Alison had been living with a terminal breast cancer diagnosis for two and a half years. ¶ But it was still shocking. One evening, she was sleeping in…
Rewarding competence
If you were listening to New Zealand’s punditocracy in the days since Labour won the general election with a record-setting outright majority, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Labour had actually lost. ¶ Last time around pundits could barely deal with…
Election '20: The Special Votes
The 2020 General Election has a preliminary result. For reasons I am unable to really explain, we will not have even a preliminary result for the end of life choice and cannabis legalisation referendums for some weeks (I dropped the…
The long road to "Yes"
One day in 1985, I came down from the loft where I was working as deputy editor of Rip It Up magazine, looking for lunch, and walked into a scene. There, on the corner of Queen and Darby Streets, a…
Cannabis: legalisation versus decriminalisation
One thing I've been hearing fairly regularly, usually from more conservative voters, is that they're wary of voting "yes" for legalisation and regulation of cannabis, but that they'd definitely get behind decriminalisation if that was on offer. ¶ I think most…
The cannabis referendum – a doctor's perspective
Cannabis is part of our culture: 80% of adults have tried it sometime. Intuition tells us that legalising cannabis will increase use – science suggests that is not likely. Our Dunedin and Christchurch studies show that cannabis use peaks in our…
ASA: Let's not talk about this
Last week, major newspapers carried a full-page ad as part of the campaign for a "No" vote to the referendum question about supporting the Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill. The ad was authorised by the SAM NZ Coalition, which takes…
ASA: Let's not talk about this
Last week, major newspapers carried a full-page ad as part of the campaign for a "No" vote to the referendum question about supporting the Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill. The ad was authorised by the SAM NZ Coalition, which takes…
Low-Hanging Fruit
In a couple of months, the 53rd Parliament will meet in Wellington, and approximately 120 MPs will be sworn in, many of them for the first time. ¶ They will all have political goals, some aligning with their party platforms, some…
Compensation for pre-acquittal remand; or, The Blog Post Ten Years in the Making
i. David Bain Ultimately, David Bain was acquitted. To be able to lawfully punish him the Crown had an onus to prove, at a fair trial, that the jury could be sure he was guilty. This, the Crown never did.…
Can the Christchurch terrorist be deported or transferred to Australia to serve his sentence?
No. ¶
An unhelpful column about cannabis
The bar to get a opinion published about legalising and regulating cannabis is, you'll know, not terribly high at the moment. Anyone can have a crack. But there's a column published on Stuff that I want to take a closer…
August 1 Views: Artefacts, art and Grand Designs
SATURDAY AUGUST 1 ¶ Artefact (Prime, 7.30pm). The series presented by Dame Anne Salmond screened on Māori Television, but is totally worth revisiting if you saw it the first time. Dame Anne tells the stories of taonga that highlight the history…
July 25 Views: Punk, People and Stars
SUNDAY JULY 26 ¶ Country Calendar (TVNZ 1, 7.00pm). Tonight, kiwifruit growing in the King Country. Crazy! ¶ Normal People (TVNZ 1, 10.30pm). Holy cow, if you thought it was slow on a binge-watch, imagine what it's like in weekly doses. Nevertheless,…
July 18 Views: Pasifika comedy, London drama, Aussie kids
SATURDAY JULY 18 ¶ ANZ Premiership Netball (Sky Sport 3, 5.00pm). Top of the table Central Pulse meet next-on-the-ladder Mystics today; tomorrow, the Pulse meet the Tactix, also at 5pm, followed by Steel v Magic at 7pm. On Monday, it's Steel…
July 12 Views: Tom Sainsbury's sex scandal
MONDAY JULY 13 ¶ Bodyguard (TVNZ 1, 8.30pm). It's the final; if you haven't seen this already on Netflix, get ready, the ending is batshit. ¶ Unforgotten (Vibe, Sky 006, 8.30pm). I wonder if Sanjeev Bhasksar's character has got rid of that…
More on the repurposed hepatitis C drugs and their potential as a Covid-19 treatment
Back in April, I wrote about trials in Iran of a fixed-dose combination of two existing anti-viral drugs used to treat hepatitis C – sofosbuvir and daclatasvir – that could point to an effective treatment for Covid-19 symptoms. ¶ At the time, data…
The cannabis referendum: the evidence
If the government has not lined up behind a "Yes" vote in this year's cannabis referendum the way some reformers would have liked, one entirely laudable thing it did do was commission some science around the public's choice. ¶ That science…
July 5 Views: Murders, Devils and Kinks
MONDAY JULY 6 ¶ Washington (History, Sky 073, 7.30pm). The brilliant Doris Kearns Goodwin is the executive producer of this six-part series about America's first president. It combines interviews with live action and is narrated by Jeff Daniels. It's engaging, said…
Paula Bennett and the Scientology leaflets
I wrote earlier in the week about the Scientology front organisations Drug Free World and Drug Free Ambassadors and their quite prominent role in anti-cannabis reform "coalition" assembled by Family First and a new local branch of the American prohibitionist…
The Scientology front operation behind the "No" campaign on cannabis
Last night, One News ran a follow-up story to its Colmar Brunton poll results on the cannabis referendum, headed here as Government accuses big American anti-cannabis group of interfering in NZ politics. ¶ In truth it wasn't just the government: Justice…
Towards the referendum: this might actually be a trend
Back at the beginning of April, when we had much else on our minds, I wrote this post urging some caution in interpreting the results of the latest Horizon poll, conducted in February, on voting intentions in this year's cannabis…