Nine Jewish groups have written to Albanese Government calling on it to reject Segal’s “Antisemitism” plan that “risks undermining democratic and multicultural values”, by “conflating antisemitism” with “criticisms of the policies or actions of the State of Israel”. theklaxon.com.au/segal-threat...

Jesus Christ, this guy is out there talking about how he uses LLMs in his reviewing and his editorial work. You are literally given these tasks because of your expertise, and it is an outrageous insult to your wider scholarly community to defer that to anyone or anything else.

"Measuring Administrative Burden: Bringing the State “Back in” as a Reflexive Actor in Burden Reduction" by Pierre-Marc Daigneault, Marc Journeault, Laurent Lauzon-Rhéaume, & Lisa Birch examines how governments measure administrative burdens. doi.org/10.1111%2Fpa...

Best of the Year: Newsroom details the advice of the Royal Commission and experts who lived through the Covid-19 response on how to do better next time.

This

Xiaoyu Guan, Fabian Homberg, Haibo Yu and Qing Li present a meta-analysis to examine the relationship between public service motivation and employee turnover intention, synthesizing findings from 52 independent samples with pooled sample size n=80,486 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I see the socials are full of people complaining about violent immigrants. Here’s something some of those voices should read before they speak. forms.justice.govt.nz/search/Docum...

Genuinely perplexed by the position that Crown appointees shouldn’t be allowed to submit on bills. Conflict of interest is a legitimate concern requiring management. Democratic participation is a fundamental right requiring extraordinary justification to curtail. These are not the same thing.

The Whakatipu #takahe breeding season is off to a good start, with approx 6 nests in the Greenstone and several from the new population in the Rees. www.doc.govt.nz/news/media-r... Great pic by takahē ranger Lisa van Beek. #conservation #rails #birds

The empirical literature on Richardson's fiscal prescription is not contested. It was bad. The health outcomes were bad. The child poverty outcomes were bad. The housing outcomes were bad. The relational state was undermined for the control and contract state.

Waiting for analysis on the material impact of the Mother of All Budgets, and just how structurally bad it was, instead of analysis on fudge. FFS.

Open access: Dag Ingvar Jacobsen investigates how political fragmentation impacts managerial turnover, finding that turnover probability is unrelated to fragmentation, but increases with municipality size & decreases with economic surplus & geographical centrality www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

"Here’s the critical point for the West: the Chinese have a vision for the future. Ask the Americans, British or Australians what they tell partners about the future, and they have nothing. The institutions they built are falling apart" devpolicy.org/china-the-gl...

Comment: The Government is enabling ministers to have the final say in wide areas of NZ public policy – with risks to our democracy, writes Sir Geoffrey Palmer.

As promised, this story has now come out from behind the paywall. Cheapskates, fill your boots. www.nzherald.co.nz/business/com...

There's a type of politician we have nurtured in Aotearoa. Very niche. They confuse longevity and vindication. And, they never live with the consequences of the divisive constitutional debates they fan, any more than they take responsibility for the consequences of doubling child poverty in 1991.

For those who think I'm managerial and a technocrat when I bang on about institutional performance: independent verification isn't an efficiency fetish. It's transparency.

Too many laws passing without 'proper scrutiny', Geoffrey Palmer says

NZDF confirms medals for 85 Cook Islands WWII veterans after decades of denial

Dates now on the record: Police Minister Mark Mitchell was told of a McSkimming complaint on Oct 14 - three weeks before the date he’s given publicly as when he first heard of concerns.

Democracy is about voice and representation on multiple levels. Reducing it to representing our preferences (expressed occasionally by a single yes/no) diminishes our power as citizens, it doesn’t increase it.

An observation on merit-based appointments: A wider field of qualified candidates provides more reference points for comparison and makes it easier to test selection criteria.

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Read Nevil Gibson's review of 'Garrison World', in the NBR – 'a career best for Victoria University Professor Emerita Charlotte Macdonald'. Full review: www.nbr.co.nz/book-review/so...

Sound of the AI bubble going pop pop. On a related note, hard to know whether our policy advisory system is on top of this: what with budgets assuming in productivity savings, and those charged with overseeing those assumptions, knee deep in the technology.

Today's block words *FIFA* *soccer* *worldcup* Easy. Carry on.

Successful medical drone delivery could offer faster healthcare access for remote communities

I expect some work within the party (and other political parties) on the place of AI in their work. Given that LLMs cannot, by definition, analyse documents I would take a cautionary approach.

Pantone: this year’s color is Cloud Dancer white Natives:

Shopping small is meaningful!

New preprint! @marentierra.bsky.social @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I have been working on what CAIL means to showcase & propagate the idea of thinking very differently to tech industry norms on "artificial intelligence" Towards Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacies doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 1/

We are beyond Westminster. We have been since 1840, when Te Tiriti o Waitangi established a plural policy advisory system. But we now live in turbulent political times, characterised by coalition governments, permanent campaigning, heightened partisanship, and policy spin as gaslighting.

Palantir of course is run by a gleefully evil CEO who smilingly characterized all Palestinians as “useful idiots” at a public Q and A session. He claimed Palantir tech was used only to kill “terrorists” in Gaza - so no connection at all to the genocide there. Yet this firm now manages NHS data.

🧐 How could we examine the contextual embeddedness of #Thinktanks in contexts of de-democratization❓ Andrea Krizsan, Katarzyna Jezierska & Adrienne Sörbom study two extreme cases of de-democratization within the #EuropeanUnion: #Hungary & #Poland 👇 doi.org/10.1093/pols...

Sure, Galloway is better than Peterson But he still believes the natural order of things requires men to be supreme. Men must protect, provide and procreate. It's dressed in progressive language, but it's fundamentally a patriarchal box to trap men in www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

New paper with @liqianhui.bsky.social in @pmreview.bsky.social investigates relation between #redtape & #collaboration among #teachers. We uncover curvilinear relation, some red tape may be beneficial but beyond that collaboration benefits diminish. In #openaccess www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

"the issue isn’t that we need more 'boy-friendly' reforms. It’s that boys are socialized to compete only with boys and to read girls’ success as illegitimate or emasculating. The result is dissonance, resentment, and disengagement for boys—and hostile climates for girls." time.com/7335723/auto...

TOMORROW | Devolving growth: What are the challenges and opportunities for new strategic authorities? How can new strategic authorities develop effective local economic strategies? www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/event/devolv...

Time to appoint a reform commission composed of blokes from the rowing club.

Today we have a young woman calling for a culture of accountability in policing, a minister blaming a female public servant for taking her health and safety obligations to children seriously, and another menz claiming he is the victim of a female MP doing her job.

How much will strategic authorities receive as part of their Integrated Settlements? From the Institute for Government:

Jealous. Whenever I write about reducing administrative burden in Aotearoa, I usually get wing-nuts emailing me and telling me I am a working-class traitor. I remind them the Maori economy includes thousands of small whānau owned and run businesses that can do with less paperwork: they disagree.

“A prolific political commentator with a modest academic footprint.” Still laughing. But also thinking about the actual academics who suffered in the wake of it. Might I add: actual peer reviewed academic work we desperately need.

🚨 New working paper 🚨 Can LLMs with reasoning + web search reliably fact-check political claims? We evaluated 15 models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and DeepSeek on 6,000+ PolitiFact claims (2007–2024). Short answer: Not reliably—unless you give them curated evidence. arxiv.org/abs/2511.18749

If your business model doesn’t work without breaking the law, you’re not in business. You’re in organized crime.

Devolving growth: What are the challenges and opportunities for new strategic authorities? Join us for our event on how new strategic authorities can develop effective local economic strategies @rebeccamckee.bsky.social @akashpaun.bsky.social 🎟️ www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/event/devolv...

📣 Working from home results in lower performance ratings📣 Managers give lower performance ratings to teleworkers than to office workers, even when holding performance constant. Female teleworkers face an even greater disadvantage.

Well done to those calling for a lobbying register. I’ve just read that those proposing it believe everyone in the policy advisory system needs to be on their register: iwi, hapū, whānau, small businesses, academics, researchers, lobbyists, industry advocates – the whole damn lot. I told you.