Across the Tasman, anger has propelled Pauline Hanson’s One Nation from a fringe outfit to the most popular party, on 31 percent in a recent poll, ahead of both Labor and the Coalition. Yet Australia’s preferential voting, which redistributes losing candidates’ votes, could still return a Labor government. The same anger is loose across the democratic world, the product of a decade of crises that squeezed household budgets and loosened party loyalties. What it does to each country’s politics...

Last month’s Schumpeter Comes to Wellington argued that the outcry over public service cuts in New Zealand sits in a long tradition of failed catastrophism. This month’s Long Read widens the lens and asks why generation after generation makes the same mistake – and why warnings about AI destroying work are no more convincing than the warnings that preceded them. Thirty years ago, Jeremy Rifkin predicted the end of work. Within a generation, he wrote in 1995, automation would leave most of the...

Any day now the June Curia-Taxpayers Union political poll will be released. It’s less than five months to the 2026 election, the time that polling numbers start to matter. Last month a party which rebranded as Opportunity (formerly The Opportunities Party or TOP) scored 2.8 percent in the Curia-TU poll. In April Opportunity cracked through to 3.3 percent in the 1 News Verian survey. For a party with a seriously low profile since the departure of founder Gareth Morgan those figures in...