Political punditry is definitely a matter of perspective. If you were a Fox News commentator during the last US presidential election, Mitt Romney’s campaign was a dead cert winner; if you were Nate Silver, Obama was going to romp home. (Of course, if you rely on Fox News for your political commentary, you probably deserve to be duped.)

Here in New Zealand, in Election 2014, I’ve just read two very different accounts of the two main parties’ campaigns – Andrea Vance’s ‘The slick and the dead calm‘ and Tim Watkin’s ‘If this was Labour we’d be calling it a mess‘. On the one hand, Ms Vance describes National’s campaign as “slick, polished and organised to the last detail”, while Labour’s “is ad hoc, chaotic and oddly low-energy”.

Her description of Team Key?

National leader John Key whizzed his way across Auckland on Monday, barely pausing for a…

When National opened the books ahead of the election with the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update (Prefu), the projected surplus for 2014/15 fell from $372 million to $297 million. In a way, the decrease in the projected surplus was an electoral bonus for National. John Key and Bill English have been painting National as sound fiscal managers, while accusing Labour of spending projected surpluses before they’ve been achieved. The Prefu’s decrease in the 2014/15 surplus allowed National to keep their budget halo intact (“We’re still achieving a surplus as promised!”), while being able to warn that conditions were not so rosy as to allow Labour’s proposed spending increases.

David Parker’s mantra has been that all Labour’s policies were fully costed. He and Cunliffe have been desperate to appear just as fiscally responsible as National, such that Labour (and indeed even the Greens!) were boasting that they would in fact be paying…

The destruction of the White House is a scene most commonly associated with fictional alien invasions or terrorist plots on the big screen, but today marks two hundred years since an enemy force marched on Washington and set fire to the famous residence. This is the relatively unknown yet remarkable story of how one of the junior officers in the force that torched the White House went on to become the founding father of one of New Zealand’s earliest settlements and ultimately met his fate during a skirmish with one of the most revered and feared of all Māori chiefs – Te Rauparaha.

Arthur Wakefield was only ten years old when he joined the Royal Navy in May 1810. The British had enjoyed naval supremacy since their famous victory at Trafalgar, less than five years earlier, but the fate of Europe was still uncertain with Napoleon’s armies waging war across…