Penn Raine: Fair suck of the sav

At his leaving party in London a NZ friend was told by his co-workers that they thought ‘Kiwi’ stood for Keen, Interested, Without Intelligence. He said he thought it was a joke. Probably. When working there I too was told something similar, that Brits in general thought that we’re nice, co-operative but just a bit thick.

This view of us is not one that stereotypically we hold of ourselves. I used to have students write with dismal regularity that we’re globally renown for being the clean and green country belonging to God. That we are celebrated for being first in giving women the vote (the century before last I pointed out) and Everest. Then there’s the AB’s, occasionally, with the more widely read having mentioned Ernest Rutherford.

Mike Hosking: We were lied to on tax

Has the Government's desire to bail out their dire fortunes in the election, in fact, made them worse?

The revelation that the Government was indeed considering a wealth tax this budget has been blown wide open by the release of budget papers - and the Prime Minister confirming that he killed it.

For months now there has been a suspicion of this. I first got wind of it in a speech the Statistics Minister Deborah Russell made in Queenstown months back, on the work that David Parker had done around the so-called super rich.