It's not hard to divine the public narrative of Waitangi Day 2018: the Prime Minister and her party have enjoyed a positive, significant and possibly even historic week in the North. ¶ Something has changed at Waitangi wrote Simon Wilson in…
Jackson has posted some great photographs of Laneway 2018 in Capture. I'm glad he did, because, as is sometimes the case at the big events, I didn't take any. Well, inside the gates that is. I did take this pic…
The other day, I was watching people discussing the tacks on the Island Bay cycleway and wondering at the vitriol that is so often directed at cyclists. It reminded me of a conversation I’d had with my Dom a few…
Laneways 2018, a photographic essay. Getting in early, we managed to avoid the log jam that happened midway through the afternoon. It did mean though that by around 8pm, after listening to Unitone Hifi blow the bass through the tree…
In these complicated times, many musical artists have been obliged to expend some of their precious creative essence on new ways to earn the money that would allow them to continue being musical artists, as opposed to, say, hospitality workers…
We spent New Year's Eve down at Silo Park for the second Wondergarden festival and had a great time. I thought the event production – staging, light and sound – was a significant step up from the year before, and it was…
There is a good way to conduct government-initiated referendum, and there are bad ways to conduct them. ¶ During the course of this Parliament, New Zealand will conduct one or perhaps two, referendums – one of the legalisation of cannabis use (a…
Not for the first time, we woke in New Zealand today with too much to look at in Washington; less the Trump trainwreck than a blockbuster movie of a trainwreck where the director has tried to stuff too much into…
What do these musical artists have in common? Alt-J, Tricky, the Skatalites, Mulatu Astatke, Mac DeMarco, Calexico, M83, The Residents, Tame Impala, Freddie Gibbs, Thundercat and the Sun Ra Arkestra. ¶ Answer: they have all played, or are soon to play,…
There’s another news story about a citizen’s arrest of a tourist driver. ¶ I got asked about citizen's arrests on Twitter, and thought people who don’t follow me on Twitter might also be interested in the answer. ¶ Citizens' arrests do exist,…
I hate end-of-year "best of" lists. I mean, I like reading them, but they make me feel inadequate. They're always full of records I haven't heard – or even heard of. Some writers conjure great insight into every pick when I'm…
The Public Address Word of the Year 2017 is "Jacindamania". ¶ Hundreds of readers of the award-winning blog site Public Address voted this week on a longlist of words nominated in a discussion on the website. ¶ The winning word was one…
It doesn't really match Jacinda Ardern's campaign promise to "legalise medical cannabis", but her government’s new medical cannabis law does a couple of significant things straight off the bat: the introduction of a statutory defence for possession (only for the…
Look lively lovely logophiles! It's that time of the year when Public Address readers convene to debate and then vote on the word or phrase that sums up the year that's been and gone. ¶ Will it be a year of…
Anyone who follows me on Twitter will be aware that there is something of a controversy about new cycleways in central Auckland suburbs. I've sat down a couple of times to try and write a proper post about it, but…
Early december is when the best of everything that ever was, or at least in the last 11 months, is hoisted onto our screens as if nothing else ever mattered. ¶ Instagram has several helpful apps that use fancy algorithms (actually…
The New Zealand Herald's website recently published Joanna Hunkin's fascinating well-researched, if a little nostalgic, look at the profound changes in the commercial environment for New Zealand music artists in the past 15 years. ¶ She correctly identifies the early and…
Yesterday evening on Checkpoint, Michelle Cooke told the story of Robert Erueti – a story of the most abject failure of practice and policy. And more than that, of simple moral sense. ¶ As the report tells it: ¶ Mr Erueti was evicted…
For the last ever episode of Media Take this year, which we boldly themed on "the future", we invited on Dan Taipua, creator of the concept of Aotearoa Futurism, which, as described in the two-part programme he made for RNZ…
The story of New Zealand developing its own cuisine is a story of immigration. As the last major landmass on Earth to be inhabited, it was teeming with flora, and with fauna unfamiliar with being chased down for lunch. Regional…
I travelled to Wellington recently to meet with a few academics. I’m starting a PhD next year, so I needed to discuss my topic, my proposal and other logistics. It was very exciting for me and I always enjoy being…
What happens when you don't spend enough time understanding good research is this: you take facts which are true and mould them to an explanation that suits, and a solution that suits your ideology even better. ¶ The NZ Initiative report…
I On Thursday, Newsroom journalist Sam Sachdeva sent this tweet: ¶ There have been a whopping 6254 written questions submitted to Govt ministers by the Nats in the last month; for comparison, there were 964 during the equivalent period after the…
SoccerPractise play Golden Dawn tonight to mark the release of their eponymous debut album, which is on your favoured streaming service and and will presumably turn up some time today on their presently empty Bandcamp page. ¶ The album is the…
The 2015 publication of what has become known as the the "Chinese-sounding-names" story on Auckland home ownership was, says Harkanwal Singh, "a really pivotal moment for me, working in a New Zealand newsroom. Because that's when I realised that things…