Josie's Post column arguing we don't need more bipartisanship is here:

Who would want disunity and a festival of Chris on Chris squabbling? Who could oppose the agreeable consensus of a post-politics parliament?

Well, me.

I sense there is unusual public appetite for grown-up conversations about trade-offs and what we have to give up to get what we want.

The Opportunity Party’s idea is that parties would make smart bipartisan agreements in the national interest if only politicians were not so rubbish. It’s the kind of shallow profundity you hear at a dinner party, with all the depth of a consommé.

The point of democracy is to choose.

Democracy is meant to manage policy by disagreeing: messily, even angrily. Regular elections surface conflict and tensions between us that already exists.

Groupthink during Covid gave us polarisation, suppressed debate about inflation and debt that we will still be paying for in 2030, and implanted the fiasco of lotteries for managed isolation in hotels.

Perhaps you think those choices were all perfect. But perhaps some choices may have been even more perfect if we had tolerated more debate and less kindness.

Facile ideas about unity cannot substitute for the tough choices we need to make about the best things to do first.

In 80 years, National has never sought re-election with such rare incompetence in the basic task of making a case for itself. In a leaders’ debate, Christopher Luxon mentioned the Government’s achievements in education, infrastructure and housing. Even National’s opponents have to give them those three. So why has it taken until we’re in the home straight before National started to make those topics the centre piece of its daily announcements?

It is telling that Labour is not ahead. Too much of the time, Labour has been campaigning for a restoration of the Ardern government.

If they can’t run their own campaigns competently, when they have total control over them, why would they be able to run the country?

We have never been in the position before where both Labour and National are exceptionally weak and the Prime Minister’s party doesn’t dominate its partners.

Josie's Post Column is here.

If you want to know where New Zealand will be in 30 years time, our education results today tell us. The decline in our Pisa results from 2006 to 2018 has been forecast to effectively reduce our social and economic living standards by about 4%. Fixing that would make a bigger difference than every election pledge made this year combined.

More than four out of 10 kids in Singapore hit the top levels in maths; only one in 10 here. I don’t think Singaporean kids are naturally smarter at maths. They’re doing something different.

Research by the new Parents’ Alliance has found that parents are ambitious for their children across ethnicity, income and political belief. If 18% of Māori and 17% of Pasifika students are chronically absent, compared to 8% of Pakeha and 6% of New Zealand Asian (as the ERO’s Left Behind report found in 2024), it’s not because their parents want less.

It’s because we expect less.

Josie column on education reform is here.