With election year just around the corner, it is only right and proper that the government should be being held to account on what it has failed to deliver. If the Luxon administration’s handling of ...

Labour is not of course, proposing to do any such thing. Its version of a CGT is not a property tax. Belatedly, long after the property boom has collapsed, Labour is proposing to tax the profits made ...

Finally, Labour has released its capital gains tax policy. Labour’s CGT would levy a 28% tax on sales of commercial properties and investment housing, and the $850 million it is expected to raise will ...

First, some good news. Zohran Mamdani has won the mayoral race in New York and as the prophet Leonard Cohen once said, taking Manhattan is […] ...

As Donald Trump zigs and zags on tariffs and trashes America’s reputation as a safe and stable place to invest, China has a big gun that it could bring to this tariff knife fight. Behind Japan, China ...

Decades ago, Alexander Cockburn wrote a column pointing out that the true believers in the power and precision of the defence industry’s latest weaponry tend to be (a) their gullible government ...

When you wheel out Judith Collins as your weapon of last resort, you’ve already lost the battle for public opinion, and are pitching your messages solely to the party faithful. This week, unions are ...

No bread, all circuses. Allegedly, the cupboard is bare when it comes to putting extra money on the table to offer nurses, teachers and junior doctors the wages (and staffing relief) that they deserve ...

One of the odd aspects of the government’s plan to Americanise the public health system – i.e by making healthcare access more reliant on user pay charges and private health insurance – is that it is ...

These are the perennial political questions that every incumbent government has to face. Do people feel better/wealthier/more secure now than they were three years ago? Not much, it seems. In last ...

In the shadow of the Holocaust at the end of WWII, the world passed a raft of United Nations/Geneva conventions to ensure that states could “never again” inflict such horrors on a racially defined ...

Young people have been going to the dogs ever since oh, 1912. The proposed social media ban for under 16 year olds (14 years is another age restriction being mooted) is but the latest attempt to ...