New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has made finding a solution to the Manus Island standoff a priority. The remaining refugees and asylum seekers of the Lombrom Naval Base insist that their new locations in Lorengau closer to community areas will be unsafe, and refuse to leave. During this crisis, the Turnbull government has become visibly Read more
Why do we balk at paying people to do good? In New Zealand the average salary for the CEO of a top 50 listed company is $1.68 million and the average salary for a CEO of a charity is just over $220,000. Some analysts suggest the average CEO salary in the broader not-for-profit sector is as low as $100,000. Read more
It was at the time of those terrible raids and terrorist allegations, during which any media coverage of the affair was very one-sided, and the Tuhoe were portrayed as a threat to national security. In light of this, the prospect of travelling into the heart of the Ureweras and staying with this group of people Read more
Andrew Dean may just turn out to be the voice young New Zealanders have been waiting for. Dean is 26, and stressed by an economy that just does not add up for any but a tiny proportion of 20-somethings. They have student loans to pay off. Houses are beyond their reach. They face low wages, Read more
It should go without saying (but often doesn’t): the fact that 2030 New Zealand will be much more ethnically diverse is by no means a bad thing. But it’s also necessary. As the baby boomers age, our population will become disproportionately elderly, with a dependency ratio of about 2.6 people aged between 15 and 64 Read more
As a country we’ve been slowly becoming more Americanised over the years – it’s aways been something of a cultural bogeyman that threatens the Kiwi way of life, right from the time American TV shows first started airing here. Some of these changes are small and understandable – we are becoming a much smaller world, Read more
The Catholic Enquiry Centre is New Zealand’s first Catholic organisation to adopt the new .nz domain name. Until yesterday the Catholic Enquiry Centre’s virtual home was catholicenquiry.org.nz however from around 1:15pm yesterday the New Zealand Catholic Enquiry Centre can be reached at www.catholicenquiry.nz. “It’s a positive way to brand the Centre”, Catholic Enquiry Centre Director, Fr Allan Jones Read more
Water is creating lots of dairy millionaires, but at what cost to our environment? Recipe for prosperity: take flat land, skilled farmers, fertiliser and cows. Add cheap water. Fold in new technology, lashings of debt and permissive environmental rules. Voila! In a decade or two you have a thriving district with next-to-no unemployment, a rising Read more
I have just read a headline in the New Zealand Herald (6 June 2014) in which All Black coach Steve Hansen describes Jerome Kaino as “a caged animal” who will be doing all that he can to prove that he is at home among the big beasts of the international game.The names given to men’s rugby and Read more
At its simplest, the groundbreaking work by French economist Thomas Piketty proves no more than what we thought we already knew: the rich get richer. Whether the poor also get poorer is another matter. What would the taxi driver who took me across Beijing last year in a Toyota tricked out with three smartphones have Read more