The Post: When violence beckons as a political solution, we must find a better way

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If you are in a party of seven people around a restaurant table, one of you – on average – will believe that political violence is now justified. This was the grim finding of a Curia poll, reported earlier this week, that had 14% of New Zealanders saying violence may be needed “to get the country back on track”.

Such surveys are, of course, a free hit, a chance to vent; I suspect few Kiwis would actually bear arms for their cause. But still: the poll points to something bad. And so do other stats.

Earlier this month, psychology researchers reported that 17% of white New Zealand men – around one in 10 of the total population – believe they are victims of discrimination. And while some of those men will genuinely be struggling, at least economically, many are simply reacting angrily to having their behaviour challenged by #MeToo and other such movements.

One-third of young men believe, against all the evidence about gender pay gaps and domestic violence, that equality for women has “gone too far”. Political insiders, meanwhile, predict an especially ugly election campaign next year, one potentially scarred by a renewal of anti-immigrant rhetoric.

On the populist front, we already have New Zealand First’s Shane Jones threatening to “exterminate” any public servant activity that slows down his beloved fast-track process, while Winston Peters calls broadcasting regulators “the Stasi” for daring to hear complaints against Sean Plunket’s The Platform.

Each data point, like a reading on a political thermometer, signals a rising temperature. Although New Zealand is not yet overturned by the roiling anger that we see in places like America, a non-negligible segment of the population is poised for unrest.

And there are lessons to learn from overseas. The political scientist Katherine Cramer, who has spent years interviewing rural Americans, argues that Trump voters feel they are denied their fair share of three key things: good incomes and the other fruits of the economy, political decision-making power, and respect for their way of life.

One can see all three forces – economic, political and cultural – at play in New Zealand, where 60% of the population lack the liquid assets needed to sustain themselves for just three months at the poverty line. Economic precarity is, global research suggests, the single greatest predictor of support for authoritarian populists.

OECD data shows most Kiwis think their government doesn’t listen to them. Politics is too top-down, too distant from ordinary people’s lives. No wonder disaffection is growing and local election turnout lamentable.

How, then, can reasonable, non-violent people respond to this rising tide of anger?

Central here are two forms of security, their duality embodying a wider need for both “hard” and “soft” responses.

On the hard side, our politicians – especially the women and ethnic minorities most often targeted – will need greater physical protection, and the police must take online threats more seriously.

But as well as facing down the unacceptable elements of political anger, we should acknowledge that it sometimes has comprehensible roots. So we also need a politics that provides people with material security: one that reduces economic disparities, ensures everyone has the financial foundation of a better future, and restores the Kiwi dream in which hard work buys an affordable house and a good family life.

Our outdated political system, meanwhile, must open up more space for people to participate in democracy – not just on election day but on every other day of the year.

Cramer’s final driver of authoritarian support – a perceived lack of respect for certain lifeways – also merits a dual approach.

Respect shouldn’t be accorded to authoritarian worldviews where they involve xenophobia and other bigotry. We must be clear that some politicians are now testing democratic limits and weakening human-rights norms. We have to defend persecuted minorities and turn up to protests.

But we also mustn’t fall into the trap of screaming “dictator” at every turn. We have to recognise that urban liberal politics can sometimes seem condescending.

I frequently disagree with farmers, for instance, over their unwillingness to take responsibility for their planet-heating emissions and riverine pollution. But I am uncomfortable with the reflexive urban dislike of farming, the failure to appreciate the hard manual labour and care for the natural world that – at its best – that sector represents.

In short: we won’t get far with either a purely “soft” approach (“we just need to hear everyone’s opinions”) or a purely “hard” one (“anyone who dissents from metropolitan liberalism is a proto-fascist”). We need a complex double movement, navigating between extremes.

Alongside the hard space of protest, then, we must create the softer spaces of encounter: the forums where reasonable people from different backgrounds can meet each other and articulate their views robustly – but with an underlying respect for one another.

We have to find ways to take down the political temperature, lest it take us down instead.

The Spinoff: How effective have the healthy homes standards really been?

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Before Aisling* moved into her Cuba Street rental in April this year, she’d never had respiratory issues. But a few weeks ago, after a winter of sleeping in a room where the mould just kept coming back, she ended up in Wellington’s urgent care medical centre. “I couldn’t take a proper breath at all,” she says. 

The doctors gave Aisling a steroid inhaler and some antibiotics, and told her the breathing problems were “probably to do with the room”. Hers was an internal bedroom, somehow colder even than the nearby corridor, its gloom leavened only by a dusty old fan and a window letting onto another one of the rooms. Every week she’d wipe down the wall behind her bed, and liberally apply Damp Rid, but “no matter how much I cleaned it, there was still mould”.

Not helping matters were two slow leaks, one in the next-door bedroom and another in the bathroom upstairs. Her landlord said neither could be fixed – but did send the flatmates an email telling them not to dry clothes inside. 

At $200 per week, the room was, by Wellington standards, relatively cheap. “But just because it’s cheap, it shouldn’t be at the expense of your health,” Aisling says. 

Such grim experiences were supposed to have been banished by the 2019 healthy homes standards, which require landlords to install a fixed source of heating, insulate homes where practicable, put extractor fans in both bathroom and kitchen, maintain water pipes in good order, and fix any large holes in the walls. But what difference have the standards actually made? 

The best evidence of their effectiveness – or otherwise – comes from an annual survey of renters and landlords commissioned by the Ministry for Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Whereas previous surveys were run in spring or summer, this year’s survey was, for whatever reason, conducted in winter, rendering it only partially comparable. 

Nonetheless, it provides important insights. And on the surface, compliance with the healthy homes standards is improving. The proportion of landlords HUD rates as “strongly committed” to the standards has risen from 39% in 2020 to 54% this year. 

In 2020, just 64% of renters reported having a bathroom fan in good order, but that figure is now 84%. The proportion reporting their house has at least one kind of acceptable heating has gone from 67% to 88%. And the proportion who say the living room can be brought up to a comfortable temperature “if I turn the heating on” has risen from 50% to 81%.

These, however, are measures of what might be termed outputs: objects delivered. What about the actual outcomes – individuals’ experiences of living in a rental property? On that score, sadly, matters look less promising.

For all that there is better heating, only two-thirds of renters use it regularly during cold winter weather, the same as in 2020. Dampness and mould, meanwhile, had been declining: from 47% of renters reporting issues in 2020, the figure was down to 38% last year. But it was back up to 45% in 2025. This may result from the latest survey’s being run in winter – but still suggests half of New Zealand’s rentals are unacceptably damp.

Elsewhere, the proportion of properties with unresolved drainage issues has actually increased in the last five years, from 18% to 22%, according to renters. Similarly, 25% of renters report their property has “unreasonable gaps or holes”, up from 22% in 2020.

How to explain this discrepancy between outputs and outcomes? Three answers suggest themselves. The first is that the standards have not addressed some fundamental problems. Far more properties may have heat pumps – but while electricity prices remain sky-high, and warmth continues to leak from uninsulated rooms, many tenants can’t afford to use them.

Second, a hard core of bad landlords remains undisturbed. According to HUD, 6% of landlords, owning potentially thousands of properties, are “in denial” about the standards. This may be the same 5-7% of landlords who boldly told the survey that it is physically possible to insulate their properties’ ceilings and floors – but they have refused to do so. 

The third, and most troubling, explanation is that enforcement of the standards remains weak. Labour did introduce one potentially consequential innovation: rather than wait for tenants to complain (and potentially face a revenge eviction), government agencies can mount proactive inspections.

Unfortunately, the nation’s 600,000 rentals are being investigated by just 35 inspectors – a workload of a mere 17,000 properties each. Last year fewer than 1,000 “interventions” by inspectors concerned a breach of the healthy homes standards, and most resulted in relatively inconsequential “warnings”. Just nine produced a Tenancy Tribunal outcome. For context, there are probably individual Wellington streets that boast more than nine fundamentally unsound properties.

Such failings are exacerbated by a flaw in the legislation every bit as large as the gaping holes still found in some rentals: literally anyone can issue a certificate saying a property complies with the standards. A third-party firm can set itself up as “a healthy homes assessor” without the phrase meaning anything. Landlords can self-certify.

All of which suggests tougher regulation may be needed. That could involve accreditation of those issuing the compliance certificates, requiring them to pass some kind of exam and meet basic integrity standards, or the introduction of a vehicle-style warrant of fitness. 

Under the latter scheme, rental quality would be rigorously inspected, on a regular basis, by the government or trusted third parties. This might be accompanied by stronger punishments – a fine sufficient to put the worst landlords out of business, rather than a polite warning. 

Absent this kind of stiffening of regulatory intent, situations like Aisling’s are liable to recur. Since her trip to urgent care, and with the arrival of summer, her breathing problems have eased. Understandably, though, she doesn’t fancy another winter of mould, and is dealing with the issue in the time-honoured Kiwi manner: looking for another flat.

The Post: Ideas for the electricity market the Government didn’t come up with

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Early in my career, I received an email from an inattentive – or possibly just confused – fan delighted by all this anti-inequality work being carried out “by Max Bradford”.

The unintended joke, which older readers will have got straightaway, is that that Max was not an egalitarian commentator but a 1990s politician perfectly happy to see inequality rise, as long as it served his Cabinet’s attempts to remake government in the image of the market.

Bradford was, in particular, responsible for the market-based reforms that gave us the current electricity system. And it is this system that is now dominating headlines – “the only game in town”, as one insider put it to me last week.

Power prices are forcing regular factory closures, while over 350,000 households endure energy poverty. Next year’s election will take place after what could be another politically brutal winter, and the government knows it.

Not that its response this week suggested as much. Torn between Act’s Bradford-esque desire to fully privatise electricity supply, and New Zealand First’s pro-nationalisation rhetoric, Energy Minister Simon Watts delivered a grab-bag of incoherent tweaks. Commentators were unimpressed: even the generally pro-business NBR said he had “failed to deliver a solution”.

Apart from a vague plan for extremely expensive imported gas, and even-vaguer noises about toughening regulation, Watts’s main promise was to give the state-owned gentailers more capital if they want to boost generation. Yet these are organisations loaded with cash.

As the Council of Trade Unions (CTU) pointed out earlier this week, the gentailers have paid shareholders over $13 billion in dividends since they were part-privatised 12 years ago. That is at least twice their capital investment in the same period, the CTU estimates. The gentailers could have built more capacity, but have chosen otherwise.

Critics have described Watts’ proposal as, in essence, a feeble plea for profit-oriented firms to go against their basic nature and disturb a system that suits them well. And it is certainly true that, in recent decades, the world has learned just how hard it is to get private firms to pursue the public good – via the fabled “invisible hand” – in areas where there is no natural market.

Evidence review after evidence review has found no overall positive effect from privatising prisons, schools, buses and the like. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher’s carelessly privatised, debt-laden and heavily polluting water companies are among the great policy disasters of our age, right up there with America’s grotesquely privatised health system.

Unsurprisingly, then, global efforts to challenge the status quo are gradually reviving. The Frontier report into our electricity sector, which the Government commissioned but then effectively buried this week, may have recommended full privatisation. But it also displayed a striking clarity about the sector’s problems, proposing other, more useful interventions that could have seriously curbed the gentailers’ excess profits.

In the UK, meanwhile, the Labour government has established Great British Energy, a state-owned company that is spending billions of pounds on offshore wind and other renewable schemes. Polling shows it has clear public support.

In Australia, Victoria’s Labor party has just revived the State Electricity Commission, privatised in the 1990s but now rejuvenated with A$1b in funding. Again, it’s pursuing renewable energy; again, it’s an electorally successful proposition.

Back home, the CTU this week made an intriguing proposal, urging politicians to use the dividends from the state’s remaining 51% of the gentailers to gradually repurchase the privatised 49%. Wholly state-owned gentailers could then be more easily directed to bring on new supply.

Given the failures of part-privatisation, it’s an idea worth contemplating. But even when fully state-owned, the gentailers were hardly model enterprises.

Some would harken back still further, to the pre-1990s Electricity Corporation of New Zealand, which valorised engineers over corporate-style managers. But even conventional state control can have its downsides. Engineers may over-build, and ministers may manipulate state-owned enterprises for political ends.

One possible solution is to run such enterprises in more deeply democratic ways. A model here is Paris’s water supply, privatised – weirdly for the French – in the 1980s but renationalised in 2010, after independent audits found water charges were wildly excessive and investment levels disappointing.

The new public operator, Eau de Paris, saved €35 million through increased efficiency in its first year alone, allowing it to cut charges by 8%. Nine in 10 Parisians are satisfied with its service.

Central to this success is citizen oversight. A City Water Observatory– with members drawn from NGOs, unions, universities and elsewhere – vigorously scrutinises Eau de Paris from outside. The Eau de Paris governing body, meanwhile, comprises not just city councillors but also staff delegates, water and sanitation experts, and representatives of both residents and environmental groups.

This broadly democratic make-up helps balance the equally broad range of goals a public body must serve, while the accountability mechanisms ensure transparency and efficiency. Let us hope that our own election campaign next year will canvass similar ideas.

The Spinoff: The Treasury’s dire warning – New Zealand may have to look a bit more like Europe

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Amid a slew of apparently terrifying graphs and stern warnings about the public finances, a startling truth has emerged from the Treasury’s latest long-term forecast: New Zealanders may have to resign themselves to paying taxes at a rate most Europeans would take for granted.

The revelation arises from something called the Long-term Fiscal Statement (LTFS), a 40-year forecast of government spending and revenue that the Treasury regularly produces. Normally these statements get ignored: at Wednesday’s launch of the latest iteration, Dominick Stephens, the Treasury’s chief economic adviser, noted it had been “beating this drum for 20 years”.

The ambient fear about New Zealand’s public finances, however, means that this latest statement may have more impact than most. It will certainly embolden conservatives who believe drastic spending cuts are needed lest the country go bankrupt.

Sensational headlines can, of course, be generated by those who like such things. As an ageing population pushes up superannuation and healthcare costs, the fiscal statement projects that, on current trends, state spending would reach 45% of GDP by 2065, while revenue remained at 30%. This would imply annual deficits of tens of billions of dollars; the borrowing needed to close the gap would balloon out to twice the country’s annual income.

In truth, though, the picture is not so bleak. These projections all assume no changes would be made, when in reality they will. New Zealand’s public institutions are sufficiently strong, and the citizenry sufficiently engaged, that corrective action would be taken well before disaster struck. 

We also start from a relatively strong position, at least compared to some other nations. The government’s debts, accounting for assets like the Super Fund, are currently just one-fifth of national income. The government does have what the Treasury calls a “structural” deficit – an enduring tendency for outgoings to exceed incomings – but, for better or worse, Nicola Willis’s cost-cutting is forecast to eliminate that in a few years’ time. There is currently no reason whatsoever to panic about the state of the public finances.

And although the Treasury is required by law to look out 40 years, it is debatable how much such projections mean. By that stage, we may all have been enslaved by robots.

Looking ahead a couple of decades – roughly one generation – may be more useful. By 2045, even if nothing changes, the Treasury’s projection is that government spending will be around 35% of GDP. To balance the books, revenue would have to rise to match. But as the fiscal statement makes clear, this would only put New Zealand in the middle of the rich-nation pack.

To recap: even if the New Zealand government does nothing to change its spending patterns for the next 20 years, even if it takes no steps to deliver healthcare more efficiently or constrain the cost of New Zealand Super, it would only need to raise tax revenue to the levels currently enjoyed by Slovakia, Hungary and the UK. Even if one insists on looking out further, to 2065, the cost of unchanged Super and healthcare could be funded by raising tax to 37% of GDP – roughly on par with the Netherlands and Germany, and significantly below Denmark.

These are all countries with far stronger economies than ours. So there is, once again, no cause for panic. That said, planning should start now: as the Treasury pointed out on Wednesday, making changes early and gradually is far better than waiting till the last minute.

It need not be all about revenue-raising, of course. If we are to pay extra tax – the well-off in particular – it would be good to get more from it than just preserving the lifespans and retirement incomes of the older generation. Efficiencies there could free up funds for climate mitigation and the like.

So we should be seeking ways to deliver healthcare better, potentially through stronger prevention and community care services. That said, a recent report from the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists warns that although many countries have promised healthcare efficiencies, actually delivering them turns out to be quite hard. Meanwhile, as the Treasury sagely notes, technological advances like AI “may help ease some [spending] pressures” but “cannot be relied upon to close the gap between revenue and expenditure”.

Reducing Super costs is also an option. We could raise the retirement age to 67 but keep it at 65 for people medically unable to work longer (if there is a feasible way to do that), or implement means-testing – though the latter brings immense practical and political challenges.

In the end, though, any spending gap could be closed with tax reforms that would be totally unobjectionable in comparable European countries: a capital gains tax (CGT), for instance. “Taxing all types of income more evenly,” the Treasury notes, “would reduce the incentive for people to reclassify their income to minimise taxes … [and] make it easier to use income taxes to raise additional revenue.” 

The income made from selling assets probably accrues disproportionately to older generations, making a CGT an especially appropriate way to fund higher healthcare and Super costs. The same could be said for inheritance and wealth taxes.

So the case for panicking about the public finances remains unconvincing. The case for tax reform, by contrast, just got a whole heap stronger.

The Post: Wellington’s new waste plan is a step toward a greener city

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In the late 1970s, my grandmother Kae Miller was briefly famous for persuading the Porirua City Council to let her live on its landfill, as a protest against excess consumption and waste. A one-woman tip shop, operating out of a shed made from old packing crates, the “Porirua tip lady” – as she was known – helped visitors re-use rather than discard their goods, until the council changed its tune and evicted her a couple of years later.

Half a century on, Kae would have been dismayed to see waste piling ever-higher – but heartened by the signs that, at long last, those piles might soon start shrinking.

Of particular note: without much fanfare, many local councils have started weekly kerbside collections of food scraps. Auckland, Hamilton, Christchurch, New Plymouth, Timaru and Tauranga all do it. The latter estimates it has halved the volume of waste going to landfill, turning 10 million kg of food scraps into compost for farms and orchards instead.

Next up is my hometown, Wellington. Amidst the city council’s infighting and dysfunction, few have noticed one of the bright spots in its recently approved long-term plan: a major upgrade to the way the capital handles its waste.

This re-think has been a long time coming. For years, the council was – bizarrely – barred from shrinking the Southern Landfill, because sewage had to be piped there and, under a set formula, mixed one part sludge to four parts rubbish.

So the new Moa Point plant – well over-budget, admittedly – doesn’t just transform sludge treatment: it’s the foundation stone for wider reductions in waste. Whereas the council had planned a new 100-year landfill, it can now make do with a 35-year extension of the current one.

Progress, like something mechanical, clicks together slowly, incrementally. Local councils are constantly under attack but, on this issue at least, Wellington is heading in the right direction. Next up: kerbside organics collection, starting in 2027.

Food scraps and garden waste make up a startling 57% of Wellingtonians’ weekly kerbside rubbish. Even when one includes waste from demolition and other commercial sources, organic material comprises one-quarter of the Southern Landfill. Starting to divert that – as well as the roughly one-quarter of landfill made up of sludge – could be transformative.

It matters for the climate, too. When food scraps are properly composted with plenty of oxygen around, they don’t release vast amounts of methane; but when flattened under the landfill’s oxygen-less piles of rubbish, they do. Nearly one-tenth of our planet-heating methane emissions come from organic waste.

Ideally, we wouldn’t need organics collection because everyone would do their own composting. But, as an ardent composter myself, I can tell you that’s totally unrealistic: most people lack the required space, knowledge and commitment. A council trial in 2022 showed kerbside collection works twice as well as trying to get people home composting.

And once the green matter is collected from its sealed containers kerbside, private operators can turn it into compost and clean energy. What was once waste becomes profit. It’s a sizeable step towards a circular economy that finds new life for materials rather than simply discarding them.

Some councillors complain that this isn’t “core” business, but tackling waste is surely one of the basics. Surveys and submissions show residents back the organics plan. And what, in any case, is a more “core” activity than protecting the planet?

The organics collection will also prompt further change. So much green matter having been redirected, rubbish collection will drop from weekly to fortnightly, collected mostly via bins not bags. Recycling, though largely unchanged, will be slightly enhanced.

Collection will become more efficient, too. Today, 60% of Wellingtonians pay for costly and inefficient private rubbish collection, requiring multiple unco-ordinated trucks to circulate around the suburbs.

Under the new system, most residents will be covered by a co-ordinated council scheme, albeit one that’s still contracted out. This should save money: the scheme’s estimated cost is no more than $7.21 a week per household, less than most pay for private collection. (Within that, the organics component will be up to $2.90 a week.)

The waste plan is, inevitably, imperfect. At least initially, the new collection system won’t touch the city centre, owing to concerns about bins cluttering up packed CBD streets and inadequate waste storage areas in apartment blocks.

Meanwhile, households who already compost, and otherwise minimise their waste, will subsidise those who don’t. But as a member of the former club, I’m able – and happy – to take that hit for the greater good.

Organics collection is, like recycling, low down the hierarchy of waste-minimisation activities. We must do more to prevent food waste occurring in the first place: reform supermarket practices, buy only what we need, and not let food go off.

But council-run composting is still a great innovation – and one which would, I think, meet with my grandmother’s approval.

The Spinoff: The one Australian democratic innovation New Zealand should adopt

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There is an anecdote that, for Iain Walker, perfectly illustrates the potential for getting ordinary Australians more deeply involved in politics. In 2016, in his capacity as the executive director of the New Democracy Foundation, he was helping run a “citizens’ jury” in which 50 regular people were brought together to consider whether South Australia should host a nuclear waste disposal facility.

On the opening day, a member of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission – an elite panel that had already backed the nuclear waste plan – was standing next to one of the jury members, a tradesman in concrete-splattered work gear. In the latter’s hands was the 320-page Royal Commission report, curled into a tube.

When the Royal Commissioner asked what he’d made of the report, the tradesman responded: “Well, I’ve had it in my ute and I’ve been reading kind of a chapter every couple of days. I’ve got to tell you, I didn’t understand Appendix H at all. Chapters three through seven make total sense. [But] I think you missed a few things around costings, etc., and I’ve got a lot of questions around that.”

For Walker, the anecdote underscores just how much political and media elites underestimate members of the public and their ability to take part in decision-making. Following a report from the above jury, a subsequent larger one – this time featuring 350 people – was convened. It came out strongly against the nuclear waste plan and, partly as a result, the idea was shelved.

Such stories are repeated across the 40-plus citizens’ juries that Australian government agencies have run. The idea behind these forums – the larger version of which is sometimes called a citizens’ assembly – is that in the right conditions, ordinary people may be better problem-solvers than politicians are.

A citizens’ jury brings together a group of people designed to be representative of a region or country, their mix of age, income, gender and ethnicity making them a “mini-public” or “the nation in one room”. They are given time to engage with the evidence, listen to experts and make consensus-based recommendations which the relevant government agency will respond to or – ideally – implement. The jury’s discussions are invariably better than those taking place in parliament, because its members aren’t bound by party lines or pushed into knee-jerk positions by a poorly informed public.

In New Zealand, only a handful of citizens’ juries have been held, and only one has had real impact: an assembly run by Watercare in 2022 that decided Auckland’s next major water source should be recycled “greywater”. However, a recent Porirua citizens’ assembly, in which tangata whenua and tangata tiriti sub-assemblies merged their ideas for how to tackle the climate crisis, shows there is life in the form yet.

Speaking on the phone from Australia, Walker acknowledges that this democratic innovation still faces major obstacles. Prime minister Anthony Albanese, for one, has been publicly unenthusiastic about citizens’ juries.

But the Liberals’ outgoing leader in the senate, Simon Birmingham, said after the last election that his party should embrace them, and the climate-focused “teal” independents are big fans. Even some Labour heavyweights, among them treasurer Jim Chalmers, have acknowledged voters will start to “drift away” from the party unless it can break long-standing deadlocks on issues like tax.

“That’s where you start to see the entry [for citizens’ juries],” Walker says. “The hardest step in politics, the hardest step in a reform conversation, is the first one. The first person to say, ‘I think we need to reform our tax system or industrial relations’ – all the arrows come their way. And that’s the problem a citizens’ assembly can solve.”

New Zealanders probably associate Australia less with democratic innovation and more with vicious attack ads and the debacle that was the Voice referendum. But Walker says the drive to reinvent Australian democracy has come a long way. “When we were standing up in 2011, saying, ‘Our democracy is about to get a lot worse’, people laughed at us. People thought we were out of our minds. You can probably guess we don’t hear that any more.”

The case for reform was only strengthened by the chaos of “what you could say was our Marie Kondo period of prime ministers – we had five in five years where they no longer sparked joy [and] we threw them away.” Citizens’ juries still seemed “too weird” to the average punter. But then Ireland stunned the world by using citizens’ assemblies to forge a public consensus that both abortion and gay marriage – long the subjects of bitter and entrenched division in the profoundly Catholic country – should be legalised.

Even in Walker’s backyard, citizens’ juries have achieved major feats, including, in 2014, setting out a multi-billion-dollar, 10-year budget for the City of Melbourne. How did Walker and colleagues equip those ordinary people for such a Herculean task?

First, he says, they got the city council to put the budget in concrete terms – “how many pavements, how much road, how many childcare centres, how many parks, how many after-hours services”. Second, the jury members were willing to get engaged because the problem was a pressing and relevant one: Melbourne’s politicians were caught between the unenviable options of a 43% rates rise or cancelling a swathe of projects. “To a reasonable person, it’s like, ‘Yeah, that [dilemma] is worth my time. I’ll get involved.’”

Finally, the jury members had tonnes of time: six all-day Saturdays, spaced three weeks apart. The end result: a set of recommendations, containing a mix of tax rises and asset sales, that “heavily influenced” the council’s final budget.

Democracy, Walker argues, must continually evolve. Despite his reservations about conventional politics, he describes election day as “one of the most innovative electoral processes out there”. Its key elements – including voting on a weekend, the secret ballot, Australia being the first country to allow women to stand for parliament, and compulsory voting – were all revolutionary in their time. But, he adds, “What have all these innovations got in common? They’re all over 100 years old … What’s missing, what no one thought was needed 100 years ago, was a format for regular people to mix. We need to build that institution.”

First, though, politicians must believe that ordinary people will make a constructive contribution. They must also accept they can’t predict what a citizens’ jury will decide – and, above all, acknowledge that the current system is badly flawed. That realisation, Walker thinks, is slowly dawning. This year’s Australian election was “the first time I’ve woken up … and heard a major party’s very senior representative say we need to look at [reforming democracy]. It’s the first time I’ve woken up after a federal election where a large number of independent candidates have asked us for advice on how to implement it.”

In New Zealand, democratic activists argue there are plenty of issues where politics is deadlocked, the trade-offs are complex, or the issues are otherwise ripe for a citizens’ jury. Reform of GMO laws, proposals for a four-year parliamentary term, cannabis law reform … the list goes on. In Australia, Walker says, awareness of the need for democratic innovation “has never been higher”. Whether that’s true on our side of the ditch is another matter.

The Post: How this Government is adding fuel to the inflationary fire

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Every time we buy a $10 block of butter or a $20 slab of cheese, we’re reminded of the cost-of-living crisis. Less obvious is the extent to which our bills are being inflated by this Government.

Just paid an extra $25 to get your car registration? That’s this Government. When a further $25 is piled on next year? That’s this Government. When you have to pay an extra $30 to renew your passport, or another $50 to file an appeal in court? This Government again.

The sharp increase in the state’s fees and charges, known technically as administered inflation, has so far caused little fuss. But it’s an embarrassment for National because it so directly undermines the party’s already-dubious claim to have conquered inflation.

Labour’s spending was never the main driver of rising costs, that being global supply-chain shocks and increased corporate margins. Inflation’s decline had little to do with National’s cost-cutting and everything to do with the Reserve Bank’s hiking of borrowing costs.

Indeed, far from taming inflation, the Government is making it worse. Although overall inflation is 2.7%, roughly where policy-makers want it to be, it is rising once more.

That is in part because administered inflation last month hit a startling 10.8%. This, the Reserve Bank believes, is the highest increase in public service fees and charges for at least 35 years. The Government is administering a significant price shock.

The extra vehicle registration fees will increase Kiwis’ costs by $530m. Cutting free and discounted public transport for young people raises household costs by $327m. Restoring the $5 prescription fee is a $620m hit to family budgets, while importers are being stung by $70m annually in extra Customs fees.

Council rates are also rising sharply, at an average of 12.2% this year, partly because National promised to “co-invest” in water infrastructure pre-election and then promptly broke that promise.

The Government has conspicuously abandoned its claim that its policy will be cheaper than Three Waters, an implicit admission that it is hiking water bills higher than they need to be. Its cuts to transport infrastructure and the like also force councils to raise rates.

More administered inflation is on the way. Having promised no fuel tax hikes this term, National has merely saved them up for later: a 22c rise, slated for 2027-29, will cost households over $1.4b.

A huge hole in the roading budget could well be filled with billions of dollars’ worth of road tolls. And some speculate that next year’s Budget, if it needs to find space for election-year tax-cut giveaways, could contain even more fee hikes.

Why does any of this matter? First of all, it reveals yet another incoherence at the heart of this Government’s economic policies.

Journalist Bernard Hickey, whose The Kākā newsletter has most tellingly highlighted this issue, says any reduction in inflation from state spending cuts has been “swamped” by the fee hikes.

Those hikes also feed through into other forms of inflation. In January, the Civil Aviation Authority more than doubled domestic passenger landing fees and increased other charges. Air New Zealand, accordingly, claims its airport charges have risen 6% this year, a cost it will pass onto consumers.

This upwards pressure on inflation forces the Reserve Bank to keep interest rates higher than it would like; meanwhile, ministers are breaking the decades-old convention around the bank’s independence and putting pressure on it to cut those rates more quickly. All this is quite contradictory.

The Government can of course claim that, if it hadn’t hiked fees and charges so sharply, it would have had to find those funds somewhere else. But that’s exactly what it should have done.

For the capital investment component, borrowing the money would have ensured future generations paid their fair share. And the day-to-day spending could have been managed without extra user-pays if the Government had not, for instance, restored $2.9b in tax breaks for landlords.

Hence the significance of the administered inflation shock. It is yet another choice by this government to give the well-off an easy ride while burdening hard-up households with cost after cost.

User-pays, which typically involves flat-rate fees, takes the biggest chunk out of the smallest budgets. Often, it also mis-characterises common-good services – such as access to justice – as private benefits.

One might have expected Labour to have made more of this debacle – although given the state of the public finances, the party may fear it will be unable to reverse the fee hikes, and thus cannot oppose them too loudly.

But it’s benefiting regardless: the latest polls show National has comprehensively lost its status as the party most trusted on the cost of living. Voters may not understand the finer points of inflation policy, but they know a mess when they see one.

The Post: Why all of us drinking less might help reduce hazardous consumption

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If you raise a glass of wine or beer to your lips this weekend, consider this question: even if you’re only a moderate drinker, should that beverage have been harder to come by in order to combat alcoholism?

This issue was brought to mind by RNZ’s revelation this week that booze lobbyists were consulted by the Ministry of Health on the design of its strategy to combat the harm that drinking can cause. This, inevitably, allowed the industry to make some dubious claims.

Spirits New Zealand’s chief executive, Robert Brewer, appeared to downplay the severity of the issue by arguing that hazardous drinkers constituted “just” 16% of adults. One out of every six would seem like a lot to most people.

The more subtle problem, though, lies in the Brewers Association’s claim that the ministry had erred by proposing “broad-based initiatives”, such as excise taxes and limits on the availability of alcohol, rather than those targeting only “harmful” consumption.

Aiming initiatives only at the worst offenders can, of course, seem sensible. It is also wrong.

To understand why, consider something called the prevention paradox, first identified by epidemiologists several decades ago. The paradox is that, for a given disease, people at high risk of contracting that disease constitute the minority of cases. Most cases – the bulk of the problem, in other words – are contributed by those deemed low-risk.

Take crime as an example. Around 2% of the population is deemed high-risk, and according to a 2018 government analysis, they will commit 15% of all crimes over the next 15 years.

That is massively disproportionate to the size of the group. But it also leaves the vast majority of crimes being committed by people who are not deemed high-risk. The “medium-risk” group are responsible for 28% of crimes, and “low-risk” people the remaining 57% of the total.

The 2018 analysis offers a compelling plain-language explanation: “High-risk people offend more on average, but low and medium risk-people offend more in total because these groups are much larger.” The implication for policy? “Both universal and targeted approaches are needed to prevent crime.”

The same arguments apply in areas like transport. A handful of genuinely dangerous drivers will cause a disproportionately large number of accidents. Overall, though, most accidents will be caused by people who consider themselves relatively good and normal drivers, simply because – once again – those people make up the bulk of the population.

As a result, public health experts argue that among the most effective anti-harm measures would be an overall reduction in car travel, generated by providing better public transport and intensifying cities so that fewer people have to drive to work. And, where people do still need to drive in urban centres, we should shift to lower speed limits for everyone.

This can seem irritating, or jarring: why should you, a “perfectly” safe driver, have to dawdle through town at 30km an hour? Unfortunately, as the prevention paradox tells us, millions of relatively safe drivers will otherwise generate the majority of damaging or even fatal accidents.

As with crime and accidents, so too with the big commercial creators of health-related harm – industries like tobacco, alcohol and gambling. Professor Boyd Swinburn of Auckland University told me this week there’s a “very tight” connection between the average level of consumption of such activities and the proportion of people with high and problematic levels.

Research indicates that if the average alcohol intake was reduced by 10%, the number of heavy drinkers would fall by a quarter. This highlights a second argument for broad-brush solutions.

In a world saturated by alcohol advertising and consumption, it is unsurprising that so many people develop an unhealthy relationship with the substance. If there is simply less of it in their surrounding environment, their exposure – and their likelihood of problem drinking – will probably decline.

One can see the same logic with driving. To some extent, we take our speed cues from those around us, so if relatively safe drivers drop their speeds, at least some of the people tempted to drive recklessly will change their behaviour.

Not all of them, though – hence the crime analysis’ argument that we need targeted as well as universal measures. Nor should we take too hard a line on everyday activities.

Drinking, for instance, and its associated substances like beer and wine, have a long and glorious association with fellowship, entertainment and relaxation. Consuming them in moderation can be one of the great joys of life.

But people should not complain too much about the mild inconvenience of there being fewer liquor outlets, narrower alcohol-purchasing hours, and higher taxes on booze. The bulk of the population might even benefit from consuming slightly less while enjoying it more – and, in the process, creating a social environment that helps those who are most at risk.

The Spinoff: How to design a wellbeing ‘meta-law’ that could actually make a difference

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Some politicians play the game better than others, but the smartest ones change the rules of the game itself. Most laws create something: a new penalty for shoplifting, a different type of school, an enhanced entitlement to paid parental leave. Some laws, though, change the basis on which all other decisions are made.

You could call them embedding laws or meta-laws. Some are uncontroversial. The 1993 Electoral Act, for instance, is the bedrock of the democratic system, determining how elections are run, MPs elected, and political parties registered.

Other such laws, though, embed a specific view of the world. For a long time, left-wingers have complained that the 1980s neoliberals entrenched a market-fundamentalist mindset through three interlocking pieces of legislation. The 1986 State-Owned Enterprises Act put profit ahead of the public interest. The 1987 State Services Act, while it was on the statute book, made government departments operate more like private companies. And the 1989 Public Finance Act nudged governments to borrow and spend less. Rather than do a specific “thing”, these acts changed the terms on which all government agencies did their “things”.

The last Labour government had a penchant for passing meta-laws – albeit with mixed success. The Zero Carbon Act reorients policy towards climate action, and creates an independent commission and reporting processes that seek to embarrass governments into cutting emissions. David Parker’s 2023 Taxation Principles Reporting Act, which forced governments to justify their policies’ impact on equality, was designed to nudge all future tax laws in an egalitarian direction. Jacinda Ardern’s 2018 Child Poverty Reduction Act contained no policies to reduce child poverty, but created official measures and targets against which future governments could be held to account. But while the Zero Carbon Act has had enduring influence, the others have not: Parker’s law was repealed the moment National took power, and Ardern’s is largely ignored.

Embedding acts, in short, are no sure thing. Another recent attempt, this time from the right, is David Seymour’s controversial Regulatory Standards Bill. Although a pure reporting mechanism, with no hard power of its own, it nonetheless creates processes that seek to elevate private property rights and nudge ministers away from legislating in the public interest. How far it will succeed is an open question.

Welsh lessons

The latest idea for a meta-law, however, holds far more promise. The Wellbeing Alliance Aotearoa, a recently formed NGO, is running a campaign called Tomorrow Together, the centrepiece of which is a proposed Future Generations Act. The act is modelled on the Welsh equivalent, which requires public bodies to follow “sustainable development” principles and promote the country’s long-term cultural, social, environmental and economic wellbeing. Public agencies have to set wellbeing objectives and take “all reasonable steps” to achieve them. The act also established a future generations commissioner, who makes recommendations that public bodies must – once again – take all reasonable steps to follow.

Finally, the act requires Welsh ministers to set national indicators that show whether wellbeing is really on the rise. They include carbon emissions, community safety, poverty rates, productivity growth, the number of Welsh speakers, and participation in democratic decision-making.

There is much to like here, but also a few things to give one pause. Of the 50 indicators, fewer than half are headed in the right direction, suggesting they may not have much influence over state action. It is hard to maintain government, media or public focus on so many measures. And, being set by ministers, the indicators are neither determined nor owned by the public.

Picking five to 10

How, then, might a wellbeing act gain more teeth? The answer to this question begins with understanding why, year after year, economic debate is dominated by the demand for governments to run a budget surplus. Surpluses have assumed this status not just because they are often desirable but also because they generate a simple and widely understood measure of “success”.

While our governments run budget surpluses, however, they are often racking up environmental and social deficits, polluting the countryside and allowing poverty to rise. The budget gets balanced on the backs of the poor, and at the expense of the planet.

Governments sometimes pay a price for this, if media stories of social misery and environmental pollution become too powerful to ignore. But the quest for a surplus continues to dominate debate because, by contrast, other measures are vague and amorphous. What does a social or environmental “deficit” look like? Even if we knew, which ones would matter most? How would we measure them? And how would we stop governments from inventing their own, easily satisfied targets?

Social and environmental measures, in short, need to be made more concrete, for both policymakers and the general public. The first step is probably to pick just five to 10 measures to target. (This would avoid the fate of the last Labour government’s “wellbeing” approach, which got bogged down in 141 different measures.) Why so few? Because many people, among them the Nobel prizewinner Joseph Stiglitz – one of the godfathers of wellbeing economics – believe a small suite of measures is needed to focus attention. “One can grasp five to 10,” Sitglitz told the Treasury in 2023.

How should we select those measures? A government could of course pick them itself, but that would have neither true democratic legitimacy nor real staying power. Imagine, instead, that we had a genuine national conversation – an overused phrase, admittedly – about the social and environmental measures most important to us. Who knows what people might choose – safety in their community, swimmable rivers, connections to whenua and reo, higher living standards, something else?

Discussions could be held up and down the country, allowing individuals to come together, articulate different versions of the good life, and aggregate their views into a national vision. A citizens’ assembly – a representative sample of, say, 100 New Zealanders, “New Zealand in one room” – could be convened to make the final call, in full view of the wider public and with complete access to experts and evidence. (Countless other process choices, of course, would have to be made.) The resulting suite of five to 10 measures, embedded in legislation, would have immense democratic legitimacy, embodying the considered will of the public. And it could be renewed every decade or so.

Countering the power of the ‘surplus’

To sharpen matters still further, though, imagine if the national conversation generated targets for each wellbeing goal: the best cancer survival rates in the world, for instance, or a halving of child poverty within a decade. That would hone government accountability to a well-defined point.

And we might go further still. If we could estimate, however roughly, the spending needed to reach each target, and we added them all up, we would effectively have a measure of the social and environmental deficit – the amount by which spending on those outcomes was “under” the line even while the government’s budget surplus was “over” it.

This might constitute, finally, a number to compete with the hallowed surplus, creating a sharp-edged way to hold governments to account for their social and environmental failures. Imagine the effect of Jack Tame saying to a future prime minister, “Sure, you’ve run a $1bn surplus, but what about the social and environmental deficit, currently at $23bn and worsening?”

Embedding our shared goals

The ideas above are naturally speculative. But even if all this were practicable and came to pass, how much difference would it make? Meta-laws can be undone, and even those that survive may have less power than their framers imagined. But the lesson from laws like the Public Finance Act is that they can have enduring power if they encapsulate elite opinion, the public’s “common sense”, or – ideally – both. And this would plausibly be the case here: wellbeing economics is now mainstream policy thinking, and most people care about far more than just GDP growth.

The results of such a priority-setting process, and the measures and targets selected, would not necessarily be the ones I would choose, nor those that you, the individual reader, would prefer. But that’s democracy. The point is not to advance our own narrow interests but to orient politics, in an enduring manner, towards the social and environmental goals endorsed by New Zealanders as a whole. That is the kind of accountability worth embedding.

The Post: National is shedding compassion and showing its mean streak

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“The basis of private prosperity is government activity.” These words were uttered not by some socialist agitator but by Jack Watts, a 1950s National minister of finance. William Massey, a conservative prime minister from 1912 to 1925, similarly believed that people should pay tax “in proportion to their ability and in proportion to the requirements of the country itself”.

Contrast this with Christopher Luxon’s approach to governing, in which “excessive” state spending is constantly attacked and restoring $2.9 billion in tax breaks for well-off landlords takes precedence over properly funding the health system. It is striking just how far the National Party has drifted from traditions that were once its anchor.

Formed in 1936 by the merger of Reform and United, the National Party – and indeed its predecessors – have always had a mean streak. The infamous “Massey’s Cossacks” brutalised waterfront workers in 1913; four decades later Watts’ government did essentially the same thing.

But as might be expected from a conservative party, National has often, well, conserved things.

When the great Labour prime minister Michael Joseph Savage described his creation of the welfare state as “applied Christianity”, National leader Sid Holland may have retorted that it was “applied lunacy”. But when he won power, Holland preserved virtually all Savage’s achievements.

Again, the contrast with the current administration – which tore up Labour’s legislation with frenzied disregard for democratic process – could hardly be sharper.

National has also sometimes pursued “One Nation” conservatism, the idea that we have obligations to others and should support the poor, even if communities shoulder more of that burden than the state. Under Keith Holyoake’s 1960s National government, economic growth was broadly shared, and disparities fell.

Contrast that with the current doubling of homelessness in some cities. In a devastating recent interview with journalist Bernard Hickey, Auckland City Missioner Helen Robinson said she knew of people forced to sleep rough despite having pneumonia.

Others had been denied emergency accommodation because they were deemed to have “contributed to their own homelessness”. But, under the Government’s new rules, that “contribution” can be something as innocent as giving up stable housing in order to move cities.

At this point one has to ask: what have we become? Do we want to be a country in which desperately ill people are denied housing on the flimsiest of pretexts or for minor imperfections? How is this even vaguely consistent with any notion of “compassionate” conservatism?

Although obviously not a cheerleader for this Government, I have tried to give ministers their due, praising reforms in schooling, infrastructure and elsewhere. But when people with pneumonia are being left on our wintry streets, what am I supposed to say? What is anyone supposed to say?

I know of seasoned government-relations professionals, too worldly-wise to be a partisan for either side, who now absolutely despair of this administration. I have heard public servants speak wistfully of the “tight but fair” era of Bill English, comparing it favourably to Labour’s undisciplined largesse but also to the open contempt some current ministers have for public servants, experts, and indeed basic facts.

Some commentators compare the current climate to the dark days of the early 1990s, when poverty and unemployment soared. And although this government is not – thankfully – slashing benefits by one-quarter like Ruth Richardson did, still there are parallels.

In the early 1990s, two Porirua pre-schoolers burned to death when their state house was set alight by a candle. Their family had resorted to this primitive lighting method after National hiked their rents and they could no longer afford the power bill.

Such house-fire deaths are now soaring again, reaching their highest level in a decade. Many involve “non-traditional” forms of heat and light, including candles and even barbecues brought inside, as families seek “to reduce the cost of living”, Fire and Emergency’s Pete Gallagher told RNZ.

What links the early 1990s and today? Ideology. ACT’s Silicon Valleyesque, “move fast and break things” worldview is partly to blame. But the bigger party has been infected, too.

National has often been suspicious of rigid ideology, preferring a more pragmatic approach. In the early 1990s, though, its attacks on the state took on a quasi-religious quality.

Today, rough sleeping has doubled because National holds a rigid ideological view that emergency housing numbers must plummet. A numerical target has taken precedence over pragmatism, and indeed compassion.

Some people have of course made the positive move from emergency accommodation into state homes. But those are dwellings Labour built. And National has scrapped plans for another 3000 state houses, amplifying a homelessness crisis for which they are substantially responsible.

This is a long way from the party’s better traditions. Nor can ministers claim ignorance of the beliefs of predecessors like Watts and Massey, whose statements above are drawn from a history of tax entitled We Won, You Lost, Eat That! The author? Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith.