Articles from ‘elocal magazine’ in ‘Opinion’

For more than five decades, New Zealand has been trapped in a quiet, grinding decline. Productivity has flat-lined. Living standards have slipped down the OECD rankings. Wealth has concentrated upward while poverty has spread downward. Our young and capable leave in record numbers, chasing wages and opportunity elsewhere. Those who remain are told this is normal, inevitable, and global. · It isn’t. · And it doesn’t have to be this way. At Davos…

“New Zealand should learn from the problems emerging in Australia's new anti-hate legislation, not seek to replicate them, says the Free Speech Union. "Australia's Parliament passed sweeping new laws in an emergency late-night session with barely three days of public consultation," said Jillaine Heather, Chief Executive of the Free Speech Union. · The Bondi tragedy was horrific and antisemitism is a genuine problem. But when legal experts,…

If the first step is exposing neo-piracy, the second is asking a harder question: what replaces it? Critics of the current monetary order are routinely dismissed with the same lazy retort — “fine, but what’s the alternative?” The implication is that debt-based, privately issued money is the only system possible, and any deviation would mean chaos. That is simply false. In Part One of this series, Neo-Piracy, we traced how modern financial…

Christopher Luxon is back from holiday. And if his State of the Nation speech is anything to go by, it might actually be a very boring election year indeed. The Prime Minister delivered his first big set-piece address of 2026 on Monday to a 700-strong business audience at Auckland’s newly opened International Convention Centre. Hosted by the Auckland Business Chamber and former National leader Simon Bridges, the speech was long on slogans but…

In my last column, I laid out the sorry state of the Green Party as 2026 kicks off. Scandals piled up, staff jumped ship, polls slid south, and the leadership clung to excuses about algorithms and the Coalition Government being responsible for turning people off the Greens. All this despite a coalition in chaos and a Labour Party that’s barely visible. The symptoms are clear, but what’s the disease? Today, I’m digging into the deeper mess: a…

The most revealing moments in Christopher Luxon’s “State of the Nation” address were not the confident passages on growth, exports, or geopolitics. They were the subjects never mentioned at all. · Across more than forty minutes, the Prime Minister offered a fluent defence of fiscal restraint, export-led recovery, global engagement, and security alignment. But on two foundational questions facing New Zealand—money creation and energy…

The Green Party should be flying high right now. They’re not. As the 2026 election year begins in earnest, the Greens find themselves in a deeply anomalous position: polling has slumped, internal organisation has been shaken by staff departures and scandals, and the co-leaders seem strangely detached from the scale of their problems. The political conditions could hardly be more favourable for an opposition party like the Greens. The…

After six columns dissecting the MisManageMyHealth debacle, the diagnosis is clear. Decades of privatisation built a fragile system, leaving our health IT infrastructure splintered and under-resourced. A near-monopoly concentrated the risk, handing 1.8 million New Zealanders’ records to a one-man private empire. The watchdogs were ignored and muzzled: successive Privacy Commissioners’ warnings went unheeded, and regulators were kept toothless…

The release of the United States’ 2025 National Security Strategy under President Trump is more than a geopolitical reset — it is a brutal mirror held up to countries that dismantled their own economic sovereignty while assuming globalisation would protect them. View the U.S. 2025 National Security Strategy here · For New Zealand, that mirror is unforgiving. · Once ranked 3 in the OECD in the 1960s, New Zealand now hovers closer to 40, with…

Vino Ramayah, the CEO of Manage My Health, couldn’t have summed up the contradiction at the heart of this mess any better. In one interview, he told RNZ last week that the doctor-patient relationship was “sacrosanct”, insisting his company would never compromise it. Then he admitted they’d “dropped the ball” on security, allowing hackers to stroll in “through the front door” with a stolen password. This wasn’t some elaborate cyber espionage; it…