Germany

Ten years ago, Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Andrew Butler asked me to speak at the Auckland launch of A Constitution for Aotearoa New Zealand, their first draft.

In two polls taken in the second half of August, One Nation stood five or six points ahead of the Coalition. In a third poll, it trailed by one.

It does not happen often that I set my alarm to just before 4am to watch the results from a provincial election in Germany. But that is what I did yesterday for Saxony-Anhalt, in Germany’s east.

Bürgen is leaving New Zealand. After decades on our supermarket shelves, the grainy loaves with the German name will soon be gone.Except the name was never German.

Drones near airports, at least in New Zealand, are usually a nuisance rather than a threat. They are often flown by careless amateurs who have not read the rules.

We have a new colleague at The New Zealand Initiative. Our latest senior fellow is Major General John Howard, retired. He built this country’s defence intelligence and is the only New Zealander given an executive role inside the United States’ Defense Intelligence Agency.

When the European Central Bank raised interest rates on June 11, its first increase since 2023, the news was unwelcome across the eurozone. It was especially unwelcome in Germany.

Observers of European politics know Alternative for Germany as a right-wing populist party, probably extreme and certainly friendly to Russia. Less visible from the outside is that the AfD is not an ordinary opposition party that might win an election, govern badly and then be voted out.