If you are watching the bizarre goings on at Waitangi, keep an eye out for which politicians use the term “The Treaty”, and which refer to what was signed on 6 February 1840 as “Te Tiriti”. The Treaty is the term that was used originally, and it described a three-clause document that ceded sovereignty over New Zealand for ever to Queen Victoria. In return, the Queen guaranteed Maori chiefs control over their lands and “taonga”, and in the third clause guaranteed Maori the same “rights and...

These days, making sense of the chaos and confusion coming out of the White House is a full-time job. Threats, bribes, illegal use of the National Guard, family kleptocracy, foreign adventures, some well-intentioned, others the product of no serious prior contemplation, keep all Americans on tenterhooks. The world watches with uneasy anticipation, and selective condemnation. My association with the United States goes back 65 years since I first arrived at graduate school in North Carolina...

When I first heard of their plans to do away with regional councils and replace them with boards of mayors I thought the timing rather odd. After all, we have just had local elections, and telling the newly-elected they are redundant seemed needlessly insulting. But it quickly became clear that these were proposals, and not some sort of ministerial coup d’etat. Chris Bishop and Simon Watts seem to be proposing to use the next three years to fine-tune their ideas. The goal is laudable: to...