The Weekly Hoon: Luxon’s MMP musings; NZ’s jobspocalypse; Big data centres & sovereignty

The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night featured co-hosts Bernard Hickey and Peter Bale talking with regular guests Cathrine Dyer and Robert Patman about geopolitics, the economy, climate change and politics.

This edition also included discussions with special guest Don Christie, the MD of Catalyst IT, who talked about Catalyst’s manifesto for Election 2026, and the need for sovereignty around Aotearoa’s data and resilience around our data centres.

* Bernard and Peter talked about the developments in New Zealand’s political economy in the last week, including PM Christopher Luxon’s surprise decision yesterday to commit National to holding a referendum on MMP, without talking to his coalition partners or his caucus about it, and the latest figures showing youth employment under-utilisation of 37%.

* Peter, Bernard, Catherine and Don then talked about the implications of big data centres in New Zealand, and the need for local data sovereignty and resilience.

* Peter mentioned articles from The Guardian and FT-$ (gift) as useful reads on the Ceuta migration issue.

The Hoon’s podcast version above was recorded on Thursday night during a live webinar for over 200 paying subscribers and was produced and edited by Simon Josey.

The Hoon won the silver award for best current affairs podcast in last year’s New Zealand Podcast awards.

(This is a sampler for all free subscribers and anyone else who stumbles on it. Thanks to the support of paying subscribers here, we’re able to spread my public interest journalism here about housing affordability, climate change and poverty reduction other public venues. Join the community supporting and contributing to this work with your ideas, feedback and comments, and by subscribing in full. Remember, all students and teachers who sign up for the free version with their .ac.nz and .school.nz email accounts are automatically upgraded to the paid version for free.

Ngā mihi nui.

Bernard

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