It's time we went back to first principles on ACC. Because there's been so much politicking over it, the corporation's original intent tends to be lost in the increasingly acrimonious mists of spin and misinformation.
Deep down, most New Zealanders are environmentalists. It runs in our blood, is laid down in our bones. But many of us seem to have a deep aversion to it being suggested how certain actions might be having an adverse effect upon the natural world around us.
If rather too much is being made of the Government's supposed current woes, that is probably because, in general, it had such an easy ride for its first three years.
The annual Queen's Birthday Honours list induces in your columnist a case of split personality.
So the Government is going to set up a "working party" to look again at teacher-pupil ratios in schools. I hope it is going to include some educational experts, and not just stack it with "analysts" and economists, because, as we now see, even this supposedly numerate approach to devising educational infrastructure can come up short.
Paula Rebstock is a well-educated person with an impressive CV. She has worked in Treasury, for the Labour Department, in the Office of the Prime Minister, and headed the Commerce Commission. I wonder if she's ever spent time in a soup kitchen.
Smoking is bad for our health.
Apologies for returning to an old hobbyhorse, but now the Government and TVNZ have conspired definitively to put TVNZ 7 out to grass, and with it the last vestiges of public service television in this country.
My friend's father had been a prisoner of war. That much I knew and not much else; and I knew it because he had named his only son after the man who, he said, had saved his life, by sharing his...
Roll up, roll up! Anybody out there, corporations or multinationals want a piece of the action in this country, just sing out. Make yourselves known.
What has the Accident Compensation Corporation got to do with JRR Tolkien?
Death may not be a particularly cheery subject to reflect on, but on occasion it pulls us up short and requires us to examine ourselves, our societies, and asks us to learn.
It does make you feel old - and a little out of the loop. Having trouble recalling when you were last invited to a foam party?
Last week, the Government announced a new 960-bed prison will open in Wiri, South Auckland, in 2015. It will be a prison with a difference: the flagship for the new public-private-partnership mode of building, funding and running state institutions.
I have two early memories of what I wanted to be. At about 4, I was desperate to become a carpenter.
I have been thinking about immigrants of late. And I'm partly prompted to put pen to paper about them by the snide, patronising and sometimes outright racist attitudes that are thoughtlessly propagated about them.
The word "science" come from the Latin root scientia, which means knowledge.
I shared a long ride with a Canterbury earthquake survivor at the weekend. It was an eye-opener.
What was it exactly that possessed John Key in 2008 to say he would resign as Prime Minister before sanctioning a rise in the age of pension eligibility in this country?
The great inequality debate was given impetus internationally last week by revelations of astounding bonuses still being awarded to top bankers in the United Kingdom; and pointed relevance in this country by the row over the salary rise of Christchurch chief executive Tony Marryatt, and the noisy ousting, particularly in Auckland, of the protesters of the Occupy movement.
