Inside the velvet glove
Jacinda’s insidious choices
Dear Comrade Jacinda
Cui bono - to whose advantage is this happening?
Kiwi Life
For New Zealanders to be losing our democracy may be due to sheer carelessness, ignorance, or even stupidity, not to…
Deliberately promoting decline
In New Zealand, a once great nation is being trashed
The Captain and the Kings depart
The remarkable Giles Auty When the wonderful Giles Auty, artist, critic and writer, so recently died, following on the death…
Kiwi Life
What has happened to the West, ignoring the lessons of history? Sweden, for example, long regarded as one of the…
Kiwi Life
‘Trustworthy, accurate and reliable news stories are more important now than ever. Support our newsrooms by making a contribution.’How wonderfully…
Do all lives still matter?
Or only those blessed by identity politics?
Covid-19 and the creeping state
Did the New Zealand government act illegally on lockdown laws?
Cultural notes
Childhood’s end Shouldn’t we target the sheer hypocrisy, the pretence that constantly frightening youngsters with prophecies of doom – now…
Disaster’s long march through the institutions
Derelict thinking throughout central and local body government and indeed all our management (including academic) areas, is now recognised as…
Endangered species
Not long ago, visiting the hospital unit of a local rest home, I listened to a gathering of those too…
Made-up Maori
In what may seem a strange request, I recently replied to a government department asking to be addressed in English,…
Marxism’s rotten fruit
In his brilliant Intellectuals – From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, Paul Johnson highlights the hypocrisy of what…
Christchurch – and saying goodbye to so much
Our saddest times are when those we love leave us. When there is not even time to say goodbye, the…
Fake New Zealand
That sleeping giant, the public, is waking up this side of the Tasman, but late to redress the reality that…
Brexit notes
Parris and the mob No doubt many readers viewed with incredulity Speccie columnist Matthew Parris’s nostalgia for the democratic process…
Wimmin’s notes
Men aren’t doing it by themselves, either The recent triumphalist article by Speccie writer Declan Mansfield, ‘Sisters aren’t doing it…
The bully boys and girls have gone too far
On both sides of the Tasman, too many of our MPs haven’t listened to the brilliant black American academic, Thomas…
Little Alfie
The questions around little baby Alfie’s death aren’t going to go away. They raise a timely and extremely important issue.…
Best practice democracy?
People protesting against both the concept and practice of authoritarian government has now become a worldwide phenomenon. It seems high…
Harvey Weinstein Syndrome
As with most popular movements, what starts from good intentions frequently spirals out of control – or beyond what its…
