I reported last week how New Zealand is facing an employment crisis. The official Q2 labour force survey from Stats NZ showed that New Zealand’s unemployment rate increased to 5.2% in the second quarter of 2025, up from 4.7% in Q2 2024. The underutilisation rate also rose by 3.5% over the year to 12.8%. As
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Robert Gottiebsen at The Australian argues that the Coalition risks inciting deep animosity among a core part of its traditional supporter base, including farmers and shareholders. This cohort is being targeted by Labor’s proposed 30% tax on the unrealised capital gains of superannuation balances of more than $3 million. Gottliebsen believes that Labor would most
Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
The latest benchmark revision from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, covering data up to March of this year, revealed that the U.S. economy created 911,000 fewer jobs than initially measured. While a downward revision was widely tipped by analysts, with the consensus estimate of 600,000 fewer jobs being created, the actual figure surprised significantly
“Remarkable:” Record day of wind and solar curtailment as renewables surge and rooftop PV holds sway
Shortly before Britain went to the polls for the 2010 General Election, then Opposition Leader David Cameron released the Conservative Party’s manifesto, pledging to cut net migration into the U.K. from 200,000 people per year to “tens of thousands of people per year”. At the time, polling showed that immigration was the second most important
Data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) last week showed that the combined recurrent spending of the federal and state governments rose by 7.7% in 2024-25, to $1.02 trillion. In contrast, government revenue increased by just 4% during the financial year. The increase in recurrent spending was driven by a number of factors.
As a beverage, coffee has been popular for a long time, with the discovery of the stimulant effect of the plant in Ethiopia early in the 14th century or thereabout, its cultivation in the 15th century in the Arabian Peninsula, from where it spread throughout Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries1.
The latest polling shows that support for the Susan Ley-led Coalition has collapsed. Newspoll shows that the Coalition’s primary vote has bombed to just 27%, well below Labor’s 36%. This marked the worst primary vote in Newspoll history. The Coalition’s two-party preferred vote has also plummeted to just 42%, down significantly from the 44.8% two-party
Australia already had the highest concentration of international students in the world before the pandemic hit. As illustrated below by Salvator Babones, an Associate Professor at Sydney University, Australia had more than twice as many international students as the United Kingdom as a share of its population and roughly three times as many as Canada