Matthew Hooton: An editor’s indulgence
Sunday, 12 July 2026
Matthew Hooton is editor-in-chief of The Post and Sunday Star-Times.
OPINION:
Brainwaves
Every new editor is allowed at least one personal indulgence and mine launches today with “Brainwaves”.
Each week from today, the Star-Times will publish pieces from four emerging academics profiling their work, with all eight universities involved. The idea is that each week you’ll read something you’ve never thought about before - and which no one else in the world may ever have thought about before either.
To push the idea, my very first external meeting as editor-in-chief of The Post and the Star-Times was with AUT’s brilliant senior faculty communications manager, Nicola Hopkins. She agreed to raise the idea with her colleagues across the other seven universities and, well, here we are today.
This week, we start with AUT’s Haoyang Yu’s work suggesting excessive greed might lower investors’ long-term rates of return, the University of Auckland’s Cam Hoffbeck taking a look at tuatara’s intestines, Victoria University of Wellington’s Wayne Aquila’s research on the personal cost to athletes of high-performance sport, and the University of Otago’s Sebastian Alvarez-Costes’ new approach to collecting DNA from rare Hector’s and Māui dolphins.
We haven’t and won’t be editing the writing at all - what you read is direct from the scholars’ laptops, with some help as required from their universities’ communications teams to turn perhaps 100,000 words of academic writing into around 750 words for you.
Some of the work will have direct economic relevance to New Zealand, or to our social fabric and constantly evolving cultural inheritance. But the universities know they are also expected to take turns profiling scholars working in areas that many readers - and taxpayers - might think lacks relevance to our country.
So be it. I’m a wisdom-of-crowds guy. I think that our scholars and their supervisors will do a better job collectively identifying what topics our best minds should engage with than any government bureaucracy. And not everything produced in our universities has to be immediately ‘useful’ in an economic or social sense anyway. It is enough that much of it simply adds to the shared intellectual wealth of our country and the world.
Problematic pokie project
If you need any more evidence that government bureaucracies don’t always get everything right, Amelia Wade reveals that Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) documents suggest it intended to spend as much as $19m of taxpayers’ money on yet another botched government IT project. These stories are funny in episodes of the ABC’s Utopia or the BBC’s classic Yes, Prime Minister. But fiction is the only place they should be tolerated.
In this case, it seems that one of those overseeing the 2014 project was DIA’s then-deputy chief executive, Paul James. You might think that could be career limiting, but you’d be wrong. In 2015, James was promoted to chief executive of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage by then-State Services Commissioner Iain Rennie, now Secretary to the Treasury. In 2018, then-State Services Commissioner Peter Hughes appointed him chief executive back at the DIA.
For Hughes and the incumbent, Sir Brian Roche, the role as commissioner comes with the further title of Head of the Public Service, the equivalent in our system of Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes, Prime Minister.
The commissioner’s job is to “protect and enhance the legitimacy and integrity of the Public Service” as well as “preserve, protect and nurture the spirit of service that sits at the heart of the Public Service and everything it does”.
It is for those overseeing the commissioner - currently the Minister for the Public Service and Digitising Government Paul Goldsmith, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and ultimately taxpayers and voters - to decide the extent to which those responsibilities are being met.
Beyond the immediate waste of taxpayers’ funds is what the DIA project was meant to achieve, which was to help better regulate pokie machines. To the extent the botched project meant that didn’t happen, we can question whether the delays in updating compliance technology meant at least some New Zealanders have become addicted to pokie machines who wouldn’t have otherwise.
When bureaucrats squander money, they don’t just leave taxpayers out of pocket but create real victims in our community. What might the Problem Gambling Foundation have been able to do with a one-off grant of $19m back in 2014?
Looked at that way, any remaining comedy value in such fiascos disappears. There could be hundreds of pokie addicts who could have been helped but haven’t been. That’s a disgrace.
Apology to quiz fans
While writing about accountability, apologies to fans of our weekly quiz. We stuffed up. Last week we accidentally re-published the quiz from a month earlier. We’ll do our very best not to let it happen again. The good news, hopefully, is that the weekly Brainwaves will help us all do a bit better each week when doing the quiz.
What do you think? Email sundayletters@stuff.co.nz. Please include your full name and address.