Kiwipower, KiwiMart, Wealth Taxes, and Te Tiriti: What survives negotiations? Every election campaign we, the voters, are treated to a pantomime in which parties make promise after promise about what they would do if given the power to rule these small isles. Most of us have been around long enough to recognise that a great deal of these plans are poorly thought out fiction but we will attempt to discern the realistic from the outlandish. The others will vote Green until they become a parent,...

This reporting is amongst the worst I have seen. And it's funded by the tax-payer. How much beneficiaries are left with after paying the rent Here is the source table from the government report: The RNZ reporter has described 'equivalised incomes' as "average incomes". This is a significant error. As the government report explains: "Equivalisation means total incomes are adjusted by family size and composition to allow total incomes to be compared across families. Different scales were used...

We rarely lose a constitutional principle abruptly. It is chipped away until one day, when it is too late, we realise it is gone. A politically neutral public service that we can trust is one such principle. On 9 September almost 10,000 public servants went on strike. A coordinated public-service strike 47 days before voting begins is unprecedented. The PSA has always been a political union. It says it campaigned against the National Government in 1999. But this year it has gone much further....