Damien Grant: We think we vote for radically different futures....

.....History proves we don’t

If your team won yesterday you may be feeling a twinge of joy. If not, perhaps you are feeling a sense of disappointment. Either way, let me bring you back to an equilibrium.

Elections, with a very few consequential exceptions, do not matter.

Damien Grant: Electorate candidates deserve your vote on merit, not tactical gaming

I’ve spent this election hauling myself around remote electorates hosting debates with former Labour MP Anna Lorck, thanks to the excellent folks from the Taxpayers’ Union, and interviewing political leaders with fellow Stuff columnist Verity Johnson.

I’ve met a retired All Blacks captain, a Certified Parrot Behaviour Consultant, a couple of mayors and, with some trepidation, a former police detective. Let me tell you, those who are running for an electorate seat put in the mahi. Hard, relentless, grinding hours spent debating, door knocking, presenting, memorising party lines and talking to potential voters, random strangers and other candidates.

Damien Grant: I’d rather doom-scroll the Paris riots than spend an evening listening to a Luxon speech. But...

“From the very beginning, from the first moment, I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others.”

Thus said Elizabeth Bennet to William Darcy, as she rejected his proposal. For younger readers, imagine Bridget Jones delivering a similar line to Colin Firth.

Decisions are hard, and New Zealand faces a choice as compelling and consequential for our nation as that which confronted Bridget Jones as she weighed the merits and limitations of her two suitors.

Damien Grant: We escaped the whims of kings....

.....Did we just create a new kind of dependence?

Henry II had four legitimate sons. His heir and namesake, Henry, died before he could ascend to the throne. His second would rule as Richard the Lionheart. The third, Geoffrey, pre-deceased his father but had a son, Arthur of Brittany. And then there was John.

When gangrene from a crossbow wound took the life of King Richard outside the town of Châlus, there was uncertainty as to who had the greater claim to the throne: Arthur or John.

Damien Grant: The biggest change to New Zealand in a generation is flying under the radar

The Resource Management Act defines its purpose as being to “promote the sustainable management of natural and physical resources”. The operative word was sustainable. Your land was not yours. You were a brief custodian and your rights over it were constrained by who had come before and who would come after.

The Act began in 1991 at a relatively svelte 382 pages. It went through more revisions and reinventions than David Bowie and, when it was finally laid to rest, was a bloated 1008 pages.

Damien Grant: New Zealand’s books are burning....

.....but where are the hard decisions?

On September 2 1666, the 330th Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, was summoned to a small conflagration. A fire had taken hold and the alderman required his permission to contain it.

The prescribed means of containment was to destroy the adjacent buildings but, well, the owners of these adjacent buildings were unhappy at this violation of their property rights.

Damien Grant: Nicola Willis has betrayed the principles she once championed

“We must back our risk-takers, innovators, and entrepreneurs who put their capital and livelihoods on the line to produce a product, idea or new way of doing things.

“We must back the hard workers, those who go the extra mile, who toil day in day out to make progress for themselves and their families. The dairy owner who works twelve hours a day, six days a week, with one week off at Christmas.”

The above two paragraphs are inspiring; words I could have written in defence of the diligent, productive and determined Kiwis who have worked impossible hours to build and own their small share of the Foodstuffs co-operative and did so in a country that believed in protecting the property rights of its citizens.

Well. I did not write them. Nicola Willis did. They come from her maiden speech.

Damien Grant: The worst economic policy since buying back BNZ was mooted

On occasion I will visit a supermarket. This is usually a task that I leave to my long-suffering travelling companion but when she has failed to purchase the right brand of peanut butter, I venture into the void to find, to my dismay, that Sanitarium discontinued this product in 2024.

However, once present in this cornucopia I wander around in a daze, with the same wonder that befell soviet leader Boris Yeltsin when he visited a Texas supermarket back in 1989. For research purposes, I dropped into my local Pak’nSave where I was shocked, shocked I declare, to discover 35 pre-cooked sausages on sale for $19. That’s 54c a sausage!

Damien Grant: Tamatha Paul calls English ‘a bastard language’ - She’s missing the point

English is a bastard language, claims Tamatha Paul. She declared, with a confidence devoid of comprehension: “It’s a bastardisation of Greek, Old Norse, Latin…”

Seems disrespectful. Let’s break this down.

Damien Grant: The tax lesson that starts with a surf trip....

....and ends with a warning for Labour

Who is Ceteris Paribus? Sounds like a Roman general who came to a sticky end fighting Asterix in the backwoods of Gaul. Sadly not. That is as fun as this column gets.

Let me paint you a picture; you painting a fence for $300 a day. It isn’t much but it is honest work. Enough to pay the rent, Netflix and a few beers come Friday.

Damien Grant: Ex-Navy officer Chris Penk can see the iceberg ahead....

......yet National threw him overboard

Last Wednesday I was presenting to the Construction Industry Council. An excellent organisation, despite their lapse in judgement regarding the calibre of their guest speakers.

As I waited my turn, between checking my phone for the revelation on who would emerge as this week’s Prime Minister and silently checking X, a senior executive from the construction division of MBIE was addressing the conference on upcoming and ongoing reforms.

Damien Grant: One blunt speech, one apology, and a Prime Minister losing control

There is, the Prime Minister observed, a “parent-child mentality” when it comes to businesses relationship with government. “ I have literally sat in boardrooms across New Zealand, and the conversation goes: 'I wonder what the government's going to do? I wonder what the government's going to think?'. Who cares what the government thinks or does? Our job is to be adult, adult, adult.”

The Prime Minister was right although I’m not sure it was wise to say it out loud.

Damien Grant: NZ’s inflation is moving faster than you think....

Like an accelerating e-scooter, NZ’s inflation is moving faster than you think

Picture the Waitemata. It’s expansive. The bridge to your left, Rangitoto on the right, CBD behind you and an e-scooter weaving wildly just out of your vision. Ice cream in hand, pistachio and mango, clear sky allowing the winter sun to warm your soul. We really are lucky to live in such a beautiful country.

When the idiot on the e-scooter ploughs into your side, tipping you forward so your face breaks the fall and the ice cream scatters across the creosote, which matters more; the speed that the e-scooter was travelling at the moment of impact or, alternatively, how far it had been ridden in the previous hour?

Let’s talk inflation.

Damien Grant: New Zealand First is important, but it is not, yet, serious

Dear reader. Last weekend I went to the New Zealand First conference and election launch at the Due Drop Events Centre in Manukau. You know the one. It is meant to resemble a Polynesian fale. Reminds me of two praying mantises engaged in a death match.

Moving on.

For three decades the Odysseus of New Zealand politics has navigated the turbulent seas of electoral fortune. He fell to Helen Clark’s sirens touting the baubles of office, only to wrench himself free. He was caught under Ardern’s spell to spend three years trapped by his own Calypso before being tossed into the lotus island of obscurity.

Damien Grant: Inside the Cerberus coalition....

Inside the Cerberus coalition: The deep ideological divides behind the political growls

As you approach Hades, treading into eternity, you traverse the River Styx. The toxic stream that Achilles was dipped in by the ankle. Upon entering the underworld, you will be confronted by a monstrous three-headed dog on his eternal patrol.

Mythology does not explain how Cerberus coordinates his duties. Three minds. One body. Does it bite itself or act with a hive mind? The questions that challenged the ancients remain unresolved.

Let us examine our own Cerberus. National. Act. New Zealand First.

Damien Grant: The maths behind TOP’s biggest promise falls apart

It had been my optimistic belief that I could ignore The Opportunities Party. Like Scientology, Aromatherapy and anything to do with Gwyneth Paltrow, some things are so ridiculous no commentary is necessary.

Sadly; it seems some of you have been telling pollsters you intend to vote for a party that was so moribund they advertised for their current leader by posting in the Situations Vacant section of the internet.

Damien Grant: Why default is inevitable under our current fiscal trajectory

I’d ignored the Budget. I am good at ignoring things. Dental appointments. Column deadlines. Parking fines. Eventually they catch up with me. Like death, taxes and tooth decay.

It was the American polymath Benjamin Franklin who is credited with the quip that only death and taxes can be certain and a few wags have pondered that perhaps he meant debt and taxes. It’s a good joke but what Franklin actually wrote was “... excepté la mort et les impôts.”

That’s French. Franklin was writing in French. Dette and mort don’t rhyme. And given everyone his age had false teeth I think tooth decay should have been included. I am off-track.

Damien Grant: If Chris Luxon is proud of our nuclear-free position.....

If Chris Luxon is proud of our nuclear-free position he should not be leading a centre-right political party

During a cold evening in late January 1940 the First Lord of the Admiralty, one Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, gave a speech on the dire situation on the continent. Chamberlain was still Prime Minister but the MP for Epping gave a sombre assessment on neutral powers seeking refuge in anonymity.

Damien Grant: Buckle up, the future is going to be magical and terrifying

Predictions are tricky. In 1943 the chairman of IBM speculated the world would have a demand for, maybe, five computers. Al Gore declared there would be no snow on Mt Kilimanjaro by 2016. Thomas Edison famously stated that the “…baby of the 21st century will be rocked in a steel cradle”. The inventor of the light bulb didn’t foresee the rise of plastics.

I have a fraction of the insight of these great minds and insufficient wisdom or humility to prevent me from joining them in making absurdly incorrect predictions. Buckle up.

Damien Grant: Nicola Willis talks fiscal discipline — then Winston Peters enters the chat

We saw two very different visions of our economic future last week, from two parties in the same government. Let’s take a closer look.

Nicola Willis has discovered fiscal discipline. She has promised her budget will begin a process of reducing the public service headcount by nearly nine thousand and cutting most agencies operating budgets by 2% in the coming year and 5% in subsequent years.