In my small town fuel costs haven’t directly affected me too much. I walk to work anyway and we tend to go through one tank of fuel every three weeks. I feel for people who are dependent on commuting long distances via car though, especially through traffic.

I don’t see any return to the old prices being likely as globally we’ve been seeing systematic destruction of petrol production infrastructure in the Middle East and Russia, squeezing supply, and the wars that caused the destruction are only continuing. I think this represents a substantial economic motivation to support a few long term changes in NZ:

• As we are already seeing, people will purchase less petrol and seek alternatives such as public transport;
• Governments will adopt policies to support electrification of transport, logistics, agriculture, and industry (solar is already getting bipartisan support)
• Private businesses will make their own investments into electric infrastructure as it becomes more cost-effective for them to do so compared to running eg. diesel trucks or generators or boilers, or a fleet of petrol cars.
• single-use plastics made from petroleum products will become rare, and whichever materials scientists and chemical engineers can produce good replacements will have a product that will make millions.

As a fellow survivor of the Covid shenanigans I can also see this becoming a political shitshow of the highest order, with those opposed to change doing their best to claim that everything is fine and that everything should continue as it was.

Hearing some of the research coming out of the Hugging Face incident, I can’t stress how alarming I find this. Apparently we’ve created software that we’re not too sure how to control and we’re also happy to let it ramble over the internet. It also does not appear beholden to attempts at safeguards on its activities and is willing to deceive its human creators.

Some of us are fine when the only alarming target has been Hugging Face, but what if someone points their AI tools at payment processors, banks, military installations, scientific research institutes, etc.?

The poor kid. How terrifying and horrible. I hope this prompts (again) some reflection on NZ’s dog laws and general attitudes towards dog ownership.

I once house-sat for a lady who had a black lab and that dog was very strong and broke the metal clip on a lead once when she saw a cat while tied up at a picnic table; I can’t imagine any family requiring a stronger, scarier pet than that.

A few weekends ago, I walked past a local high school pushing my baby in a pram. There was a man inside taking the chance to run his dog on the school field. He didn’t give two shits when his dog started behaving aggressively, barking at the pram and following us down the fence line.

Sheesh, people. If you have dogs, train them and keep them under control, and especially supervise them around young kids.

This is probably not the kind of reform our Prime Minister has in mind, but I’d like to tinker slightly with our system and allow a ranked choice of electorate candidates (keeping the party vote system as is). That way, voting for minor parties will not be such a risk of wasting your vote in electorate seats.

For me, this is an issue that seems to fly under the radar but is vitally important. How many people have you heard complain about the duopoly of the two major parties? This would go some way towards making those parties campaign on their merits rather than on tradition, and I hope it forms part of any coalition agreements we see emerging from this election. (Will it? Probably not, since it’s not a big deal for most people right now.)

It works for council elections, it can work for general elections too.

I always find this topic fun. I’ve flown into Queenstown, Dunedin, Nelson, Christchurch, Wellington, Auckland, Gisborne, Hamilton, and Whangarei. I can totally understand the difficulty of Queenstown as it’s a busy airport surrounded by mountains.

My most clench-worthy flights have come from landing in Whangarei in bad weather, though: it’s exposed on a hill and has a short runway, and having lived around the airport I know exactly how much runway is left while the plane is still going quite fast. (It’s not much.)

Surprisingly, apart from being fogged in during a layover, I haven’t had any bad landings at Wellington.

This is an interesting legal development overseas that has potential repercussions for NZ, particularly in light of the proposed social media ban for teenagers.

As a teacher I can’t stress enough how harmful I think this ‘engagement bait’ social media is for our kids. It’s addictive for adults too, but theoretically they’re better equipped to understand what they’re getting into.

Over the past decade I’ve seen steadily declining literacy rates and I attribute this directly to the increase in screen time, particularly of short-form content like Instagram and TikTok and the algorithmic feed that Facebook provides, and the corresponding reduction in book-reading that our children engage in. It’s scary.

I’m interested to see whether this kind of finding sticks and is replicated elsewhere, and if it turns into the kind of fight that tobacco companies engaged in back in the day, where they were gradually forced to rein themselves in bit by bit with their similarly addictive product.

I’m pleased to see things finally get to this stage. I remember commuting by train as a student while the idea for this project was being kicked around by politicians. I don’t live in Auckland any more, and don’t think I ever will again, but I hope this project makes the Auckland CBD a thriving place to be.

My eyes were opened when I used the train to get around Sydney as a tourist. If we can approach that level of infrastructure we’d be lucky, but it seems like the basic idea of a central loop to support frequent train services has now been built.

Meanwhile, the regions languish.

Interesting to hear their policies. I actually used the investment boost for my small side hustle business, which was nice come tax return time. I don’t think Labour’s policies quoted here will benefit me as my own circumstances are just too small potatoes (think thousands rather than millions).

I’m not necessarily opposed to changes to the system, as my own circumstances don’t necessarily matter a great deal, but I’d also be interested to knowing what might give the greatest overall benefit to business-people.

To add to the discussion of housing costs: building houses is so expensive, slow, and difficult that people are pushed into buying and keeping old and cold houses with maintenance issues. Not only that, they pay top dollar, and can’t afford to replace them with nice new houses.

I wonder when NZ will move away from the quasi-free-market-but-funded-by-the-government system in health (and education). It leads to outcomes like this which are clearly inefficient. I’d like to see more centralisation.