Energy policy becomes most honest when the easy slogans run out. New Zealand wants lower emissions, reliable electricity, affordable industrial energy, reg
Category: English
New Zealand Review’s English channel publishes reporting, explainers, reviews and practical guides about New Zealand society, culture, health and everyday life.
Wellington’s short-term rental rate hike is a housing-policy stress test
A short-term rental can look like a private decision: an owner lists a spare unit, a visitor books a weekend, a city gains a bed without building a hotel.
Auckland’s motorcades are a reminder that diplomacy needs city trust
A diplomatic motorcade is meant to project order. Clean route, controlled timing, visible security, protected guests, a city briefly rearranged around nati
The Pacific tuna fight is about labour, sovereignty and the price of cheap fish
Tuna can appear on a supermarket shelf as a simple product: a can, a fillet, a lunchbox protein, a price. What disappears behind that simplicity is the oce
The Telstra outage shows critical infrastructure can fail in surprisingly small places
Critical infrastructure usually fails in public imagination through dramatic images: a storm tears down lines, a cyberattack locks screens, a flood takes o
China’s reusable-rocket recovery is a space-economy signal
A rocket stage falling back toward Earth can look like a spectacular engineering image, but the real story is economic. If a launch system can recover and
Christchurch’s newbuild surge is a recovery story, but not the whole one
Christchurch has lived with the language of recovery for so long that it can be hard to know when a visible change is genuinely new. A crane on the skyline
New Zealand’s school-reform fight is really about classroom complexity
School reform is often sold in clean sentences. Lift achievement. Clarify the curriculum. Improve attendance. Strengthen literacy and numeracy. Hold school
New Zealand should be careful before narrowing who gets to vote
Voting rules look technical until they decide who counts as part of the political community. NZ First’s proposal to restrict voting to citizens only, repor
Australia’s online-hate inquiry is really a test of platform accountability
Online hate is often discussed as if it were only a content-moderation problem: remove the worst posts, suspend the worst users, publish a transparency rep