Starmer, Free and Frank Advice, and What Three Jurisdictions Reveal About One Constitutional Problem On 7 May 2026, the night before local elections in which his party faced what most forecasters predicted would be a historic rout, Sir Keir Starmer emailed every civil servant in the United Kingdom. The email was, on its face, an…

There is a conversation happening at the moment about who should be Prime Minister. It is, as these conversations tend to be, almost entirely about personality. Who is likable? Who connects? Who looks the part, sounds the part, and seems like someone you could have a beer with or trust in a crisis? I have…

The Government is reorganising the place-based policy advisory system, abolishing regional councils, and replacing the Resource Management Act, all within the next eighteen months to two years. This post uses recent Scottish research on placemaking to think through what these reforms might achieve and where they might struggle. Hopefully by the end, you will have…

A reading from Aotearoa of what the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences thinks is wrong with evidence in government, and what their diagnosis reveals about the limits of technocratic thinking. Today’s Loose Threads sits alongside the implementation series I have been building. It is about a report from the United Kingdom’s Academy of Social Sciences…

The Government’s “Simplifying Local Government” consultation landed this week, proposing to replace regional councillors with Combined Territories Boards composed of mayors, who would then develop regional reorganisation plans within two years. I am not going to comment on the details: I am doing that for clients, and the release of any analysis will be subject…

A nation’s character is revealed not just by how it handles a crisis, but by how it chooses to remember it. When the crisis is over, when the emergency powers have been invoked and the extraordinary measures taken, the real test begins: the reckoning. What questions are asked? What is examined? What do we let…

Public administration scholarship about Aotearoa appears to have trapped itself in an analytical loop, endlessly diagnosing what New Public Management did and how successive reforms have tried to fix it. This obsession creates two problematic myopias that allow scholars to sidestep the constitutional questions that should anchor any serious analysis of how the state operates…

Our foreign policy debate has calcified around a choice that doesn’t exist. America or China. Values or economics. Security or trade. The framing is everywhere: in select committee hearings, in ministerial speeches, and on radio talk-back. It is also, I think, wrong. Not wrong in the sense of morally misguided, though it may be that…

When Te Arikinui Spoke and Whānau Answered In one weekend, Te Ao Māori spoke with two voices: Te Arikinui Kuini Ngāwai Hono i te Pō delivered her first public address as Māori Queen at Koroneihana, and the people of Tāmaki Makaurau elected Oriini Kaipara to Parliament. These moments were not isolated. Together, they signalled a…

Today’s post is part of my Loose Threads series: a place where I pick up strands in the public conversation that have been left dangling, half-woven, or quietly dropped. Today, I offer a view balanced by two data points: the Robodebt Royal Commission in Australia and a recent project I was involved in, where a…