Michael Bassett bassettbrashandhide.com Political historian Michael Bassett CNZM is the author of 15 books, was a regular columnist for the Fairfax newspapers and a former minister in the 1984-1990 governments. Have you noticed the ways in which New Zealand’s mainspring seems gradually to be unwinding with Jacinda Ardern’
Stephen Hickson University of Canterbury Stephen Hickson is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of Canterbury. He is currently the Director of the Business Taught Masters Programmes. An entire generation has never experienced life with high inflation. But that is set to
Chelsea Follett Malcolm Cochran fee.org Chelsea Follet works at the Cato Institute as a Researcher and Managing Editor of HumanProgress.org. Malcolm Cochran is a research associate at HumanProgress.org Last week, a group of Sri Lankan protestors took a refreshing dip in President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s pool. It
Bryce Edwards Victoria University of Wellington – Te Herenga Waka democracyproject.nz Dr Bryce Edwards is Political Analyst in Residence at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the director of the Democracy Project. It’s ordinary people who are suffering the most from the current cost of living crisis. In other
Neil DeVotta Wake Forest University Neil DeVotta is a Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University. His research interests include South Asian security and politics, ethnicity and nationalism, ethnic conflict resolution, and democratic transition and consolidation. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa formally resigned on July 15, 2022,
The Reserve Bank has a statutory requirement to keep inflation under control and to keep it within a band of 0-2%. For five quarters in a row, inflation has exceeded the statutory limits, yet Adrian Orr still remains the Reserve bank Governor. Yesterday inflation hit 7.3%, the highest in
Like me, most BFD readers would be old enough to remember when Russia was feted as the emerging economic superpower. Through the late ’70s and early ’80s, the communist giant was hailed as the economic Next Big Thing that would put those upstart capitalist Yanks in their place, once and
Larry Bell PA Pundits – International Larry Bell contributes posts at the CFACT site. He heads the graduate program in space architecture at the University of Houston. He founded and directs the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture. He is also the author of Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind
Information Opinion I came to New Zealand in the 1980s as an expat. It was a lovely place. Friendly people, low levels of traffic, fabulous beaches, jobs easy to come by. I thought I had come to heaven. I raved about the place to family and friends back home. Now,
Faced with a perfect storm of falling poll numbers, rising and rampant inflation and poor, reactive decisions of their own making, the Labour Government has been forced to roll over fuel excise and road user charge cuts yet again. They’ve painted themselves into a corner on fuel prices, and
Blade Runner, released in 1982, is cinematographically one of the most beautiful science fiction movies. Its sequel Blade Runner 2049 had big shoes to fill. In the opening scene, the sky is illuminated by gas flares erupting from industry. The Blade Runner is “Deckard”, played by Harrison Ford in one
The three years of the Covid pandemic have been an instructive masterclass in the madness of elites. Every supposedly responsible group, from governments to “expert advisers”, collectively lost their heads and ran hysterically screaming to the worst possible policy prescriptions imaginable. One of the stupidest ideas of this conglomeration of
I’m pretty sure Thomas Sowell doesn’t know everything — but what he doesn’t know about certain topics probably isn’t worth knowing. Especially economics. Sowell’s Basic Economics is foundational reading. In it, he devotes an entire chapter to examining the fallacies of government interference in the housing
In 1996 I arrived in Hong Kong. There I worked in various capacities including factory inspections within a territory ranging from Japan across to India and down to New Zealand. Over a decade I probably performed over 300 factory inspections: checking all sorts of things – health, safety, employee age, remuneration,
