Politics

The ruling National Party has been very comfortably re-elected at the weekend’s election in New Zealand, delivering Prime Minister John Key a third three year term as the countries leader. Mr Key’s personal popularity with the electorate was a crucial feature during the election, and despite the various late attempts to throw the campaign off track National were actually able …

The anti-corruption campaign which has swept across China in the last two years has gone global, as Beijing seeks to enlist the help of western democratic governments in pursuing officials who flee overseas. Underlining Beijing’s rising economic and political clout, Communist party officials have already launched an investigation into assets and individuals based in New Zealand, a country that counts China as …

Would-be Kiwi politician Kim Dotcom’s “moment of truth” passed with some concerning (but not unexpected) revelations about government spying activity in New Zealand. Despite the heavy press presence and the rather dramatic way in which the “evidence” was unveiled, there didn’t appear to be much that would have surprised the Prime Minister, or which will hurt him in the last …

You have to feel sorry for John Key that he’s been subjected to so many off-stage alarums and excursions during this, the dirtiest election campaign of my lifetime. It started with Hager’s Dirty Tricks book, dropped close to the campaign, leaving insufficient time to check the details. Hager calculated on our media being sufficiently full of gullible journalists who would …

It was the bomb that was supposed to flip the election on its head. The documents set to unveil a vast conspiracy by the Prime Minister against Kim Dotcom. John Key’s Moment of Truth. What a flop. There was no smoking gun. No game-changing piece of information. Instead, politically charged hearsay recounted as claims about New Zealand’s mass surveillance drew …

I’ve always been reluctant to believe in media conspiracies, but having watched the way in which Radio New Zealand and TVNZ have been covering this election campaign I have to conclude that those driving the election coverage on those channels are either wildly Left-wing or plain ignorant, and I’m genuinely not sure which explanation is the more plausible. The media …

Today’s CPI gives the lie to Simon Bridge’s claim that power prices only rose by 2.3 % in the last year. Labour’s Energy spokesperson David Shearer says.  “Its official; the CPI index says power prices increased by 4.2% in the last quarter. This is the second highest quarterly increase in electricity prices measured by the CPI index this century. The …