No, this post isn’t about either Brexit or the soccer. It’s about Finance Minister Bill English, who’s continuing his decade-long quest to spread lies about tax to trick New Zealand’s well-off into feeling overly sorry for themselves. ¶ Here’s a Stuff…
From the age of eight when I landed in my brown corduroy shorts and walked off the plane into horizontal sleet, England was my home. I was there for 18 years, joking that you don’t get that for murder .…
As readers know, there’s all manner of turmoil sloshing around the UK this week following the Brexit vote. The PM’s gone, the campaign to replace him is on already, Labour’s blown up, and Scotland could either scupper the Brexit or…
The United Kingdom elects 73 MEPs to the European Parliament every five years, from twelve regional constituencies. Each region has a number of MEP’s, proportional to their size. Proportion is important, because it’s one of the few election processes in…
A road trip last week took me to Hamilton, briefly. For reasons I can't quite explain, while I've been through or to the Tron dozens of times, I'd never visited the gardens before. Given my predilection for petal perving, this…
I discovered this week that the national album chart includes streaming results, which is both inevitable – streaming revenue is now the biggest single category in recorded music revenue – and a bit depressing. ¶ Until now, local and indie artists have been…
The famously torrid debate over Homosexual Law Reform in 1985 was not the only racous public meeting to take place at Auckland Town Hall in that era. The year before saw The Great Marijuana Debate, which was chaired by the…
Tomorrow I’m seeing the orthopaedic surgeon who amputated my right leg in October 2014. I saw him once after I was discharged but this is the first time I’ll see him now that I’m properly ‘healed’. ¶ It took a while…
One memory always comes to mind when I think about the year leading up to the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act in 1986. I was on Queen Street, nea where I worked, when I saw a man getting…
A few years ago, I was chatting with another father at a children’s playground in Trondheim, when the subject of høstens vemod came up. ¶ “Høstens vemod is a very important Norwegian concept,” he told me. “Perhaps the most important concept…
These last few weeks have been dire for the government, across housing, crime, employment, and caring for kids. Yes, I’m biased, but I haven’t seen National have this bad of a stretch for a long while. ¶ We had a Budget…
I do not know precisely the circumstances of the new video for Lawrence Arabia's song 'Another Century'. But it features people dancing, a cat and several tortoises, so I'm sold right there. Also, it's a great song, a collection of…
Congratulations to New Zealander Robert Martin from Wanganui who has just been elected to an important United Nations position. He is now a member of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the first person in the…
This week's Media Take looks at a development that has barely troubled the manstream headlines but is the subject of intense debate in some Māori communities. In April, the Te Reo Māori bill passed its final reading in Parliament, after…
Unthinkably, it could have been worse. In the same 24 hours as Omar Mateen carried out the deadliest mass shooting in American history, another man, James Wesley Howell, was arrested wth multiple assault weapons and bomb-making ingredients, before he could…
As he tells it, Roger Shepherd's new book, I'm in Love With These Times: My Life With Flying Nun Records, didn't start out as the memoir it is. ¶ It was going to be the Flying Nun book, the definitive history…
Several years ago I was contacted by a man seeking help for his autistic son. As a researcher on autism I regularly get questions on the topic. But this story was shocking. ¶ Their adult son Ashley was locked up in…
The first time I contacted Dr Ben Goldacre was in 2009, as his public profile was beginning to really take off, thanks to his Bad Science column in The Guardian, the book of the same name and his witty, acute…
The last time that I seriously put pen to paper (digitally speaking) was in September 2014, shortly before my grandfather died. ¶ My grandfather had a good death. Until a fortnight or so before the end, he was in remarkably fine…
Think of the most famous and newsworthy black man who is not Barack Obama. Kanye? Jay-Z? Steph Curry? In the mid-1970s, Muhammad Ali was 10 times that famous, infinitely more newsworthy. ¶ In October 1974, only three years, after live satellite…
Media Take editorial meetings tend to be discursive affairs, occasionally to a fault. And so last week, we were talking about Taika Waititi's success, with Hunt for the Wilderpeople being licensed for all territories and displacing Taika's Boy as the…
It must be all of two years since Shayne Carter undertook to invite me into his former Grey Lynn man-cave and play me the new solo album that had sprung from his immersion in classical music. He was enthusiastic about…
On 16 May 2016, a long-awaited report into New Zealand’s fisheries hit the inboxes of media, politicians, and fishing industry bosses. It was complex, detailed and damning. ¶ In addition to data suggesting our oceans were being plundered, there were reports…
On Monday, One News reported the case of Warren Edney, who suffers excruciating pain as a result of an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis. His specialist has him prescribed him the cannabis-based medicine Sativex to ease that pain. ¶ ¶ Although Sativex…
This afternoon I watched Labour and the Greens announce their signed Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate in changing the government. ¶ Good for the leaderships of both parties for putting this together. I’ve always been a Labour person, but if I…