deb te kawa nō aotearoa

An amazing advert!

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At the root of all our problems stands one travesty: politicians’ surrender to the super-rich | George Monbiot There are many excuses for failing to tax the ultra-wealthy. The truth is that governments don’t tackle the problem because they don’t want to, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

It is THE fundamental problem. To survive and prosper we must make billionaires history. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This is your home poster, Forresters Lane, Wellington, 29 Mar 2019, New Zealand, by Michael O'Neill [photograph], Ruby Jones [artwork] [and Phantom Billstickers, poster]. Field Collection, 2019. © Te Papa. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Te Papa (CA001228/001/0008)

Remembrance and hope this March 15.

Garlands over-lie-ed to make a point.

To be fair it is fake: but was doing and still does the rounds in my Tahitian whanaunga whatsapp group.

I’m less interested in policy shopping lists. I’m watching for how parties scope/frame problems,who gets to shape it, how coherent they are about governing it, what window that coherence creates for action, and how they say they will be accountable.

Wicked problems are about complex policy trade-offs. My point is beyond that: ie policy positions are now so volatile that the real test is governance: which party can hold a problem steady long enough for the system to act.

Under MMP, most policy is negotiated after the election. So the real question for voters is not just what parties promise, but how they will govern from day one. That’s not minutiae: it’s the operating system of government.

It was a great question: appreciated the opportunity to unpack my thinking. x

My working hypothesis is public policy is volatile and many of the problems intractable, inexplicable and not easily solved: I am looking for how parties will govern in that environment.

💯

We tend to vote on policies we like, I am focussing on how will they govern.

Show me the ethics framework around this stuff.

Also, implement a data sovereignty framework. Aotearoa's public sector data is a public asset, not something to be processed offshore under another jurisdiction's law because the vendor's server farm is cheaper.

Mandatory disclosure of the total cost: licence fees, implementation, training, and remediation (esp the last one, the hidden cost of AI/LLM output that still needs a person to fix it. We risk implementing this tech without accounting for the time someone will spend quietly cleaning up after it.

For AI and digital, it might look like an independent procurement assessment function: arm's length from the Executive, where vendor relationships already exist, with standing to ask hard questions before the contract is signed and after.

Great question: important assumptions first: policy doesn't always mean doing things. Sometimes the most important commitment is building the capacity to know whether things are working. Assurance. Diagnostics. Independent verification. Public interest governance. 🧵

The political consultants, russian bot farms and lawyers got paid. But the infrastructure didn't get built. I'll be looking for parties that know the difference.

Three Waters showed what happens when Te Tiriti is treated as a target for anti-Māori rage rather than a foundation for good governance. Mobilising hate is easy. The costs that hate generates are not.

ps: Feel free to add x

These aren't partisan questions. They're accountability questions. Good governance doesn't belong to any party. Neither does poor governance. I'll be applying the same standard across the board. More to follow in the coming months. xx

Merit and diversity are not opposites: they're both requirements for competent governance. I'm looking for a party willing to establish independent oversight of nominations and appointments. The public deserves to see competent, representative people around these tables. Not just the usual networks.

My second issue: who gets appointed to what, and on what basis. Nominations to boards, agencies, and advisory roles tell us a great deal about how a government intends to govern: often more than the manifesto does.

Copilot in Word, Outlook, and Teams can draft and summarise. But it also produces output that needs careful editing for tone, accuracy, misses context and is full of anglo-assumptions. That's not a productivity tool. That's a new task wearing a productivity tool's badge.

First: AI, digital and data sovereignty. Vendor enthusiasm is not a business case. When Microsoft and Google boosters are in the room, I'll be asking who benefits, who pays, and whether the evidence base is independent. Taxpayers' money, etc., etc., etc.

An election is coming. I'll be watching policy commitments carefully: not through a party lens, but through a public interest one. This is a thread on the things I'll be looking for over the coming months 🧵#nzpol #nzvotes #nzvotes2026

MAGA's rhetoric of western civilizational emergency is so weird. They look at ICE arresting grandmothers and they see the ancient Greeks defeating the Persians or the Franks stopping the Islamic invaders in 732.

Everyone else sees ICE arresting grandmothers.

newrepublic.com/article/2076...

The right openly positioning itself in orientation with the semblance of knowledge and the semblance of skill like this - and in opposition to actual knowledge and actual skill - tells you everything you need to know about the modern right.

Merit, it turns out, is remarkably hereditary, and strikingly pale, and almost exclusively male.