Loose Threads: What the Spirit of S …

Read through the interpretive hinge In May I wrote here about a photograph of New York’s mayor on the W train, and about how seldom our own political conversation celebrates the daily work of public officials rather than treating it with suspicion. I argued that the work of celebration is itself a joyful constitutional act, that we have the apparatus for it but are somewhat sh...

Administrative Burden: The Woman …

I look at how the unpaid labour of dealing with the state falls for the most part on women, drawing on Herd and Moynihan’s theory of gendered burden and on what raising a child in Aotearoa demands of mothers. This is the fourth post in a series about what it actually costs to navigate the state. Last month I examined how burdens fall hardest on the least resourced, and I introduced t...

Panel: The Māori Crown relationshi …

The Māori–Crown relationship: The why, the who, and the howPublic Sector, Spring 2026 I joined Helmut Modlik, Chief Executive of Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira, and Steven Sutton on a panel at the Hāpai Public Aspiring Senior Leaders Masterclass, a workshop for tier three and four managers on the relationship between Māori and the Crown. I argued that for nearly 200 years Te Tiriti o Waitang...