The Opportunity Party wants to be known as the party of ideas. Now polling near five percent, I decided to test one. The party’s website offers a calculator. You enter your income and land value, and it reveals how much better off you will be under its radical tax proposal. Their so-called ‘Tax Reset’ promises a cash payment of $19,400 a year to every adult, the ‘Citizen’s Income’, funded by a 1.75 percent annual tax on land. I tried to invent someone who would pay more net tax under the...

A month before 2023’s election, Winston Peters ignited a brush fire in the media after he told a campaign meeting in Nelson that Māori were not indigenous to New Zealand. His reasoning was simple: “We come from Hawai-iki. Where's our Hawai-iki? We think it is in the Cook Islands. We think it’s in Rarotonga... but we’re not from here.” He noted that his tribe Ngāti Wai “came to Aotearoa about 900 years ago or longer”. And “if our story says we came from Hawai-iki or this place from the...

The proposal to subsidise plug-in solar — small solar panel units that households can hang off the balcony and plug straight into a wall socket – indicates how far the debate over our power system has drifted from its fundamental objective: to provide a reliable and economic supply of electricity A utility-scale solar farm looks cheap only if you ignore what it costs to keep the lights on when the sun isn't shining and ignore the cost of the batteries, gas peakers, and transmission capacity...