In this year's America's Cup, the government and Auckland Council made cash and in-kind contributions worth $250m to Team New Zealand. This is an enormous figure for a minority sport where practically no international spectators were present and where the ‘benefits’ are no more than amorphous claims like ‘putting New Zealand technology on the map’.

My cousin was only a few hours old when Oranga Tamariki – New Zealand’s child welfare agency – came with their court order to take her away.

This might come across as if I’m trying to exonerate myself: ‘You weren’t paying attention, but I was.’ But I’m as culpable as anyone – and especially culpable as a trade unionist, an activist, and a writer – for laughing off the local white supremacists as nothing more than a rabble.

I was thirteen years old when Helen Clark pinched my land. She told the country my family were ‘haters and wreckers’. I suppose this is another way of saying, it’s personal. Clark, New Zealand’s second-longest-serving Labour Prime Minister and apparently Australia’s choice for the next United Nations Secretary-General, is at the centre of a national tantrum after Marama Fox, the co-leader of the centrist Māori Party, told media that her party ‘cannot support [Clark’s] nomination [for Secretary-General]’.

The pound is falling. Frustrated Londoners are picketing outside Boris Johnson’s home. Nigel Farage, the triumphant UKIP leader, proudly declared Britain’s ‘independence day’. Yet the weirdest thing, at least from our distance, is that the celebrations and backlash seem to come as a surprise to the British establishment: the polls were tight, but the bookies were predicting a remain result, and in any case how could one vote for Brexit when it’s an ‘act of economic self-harm’?

The geography of tax avoidance and evasion – far-flung yet interwoven – means reform is, in isolation, ineffective. The structures merely move. Gabriel Zucman, an academic from the London School of Economics and the author of The Hidden Wealth Of Nations: The Scourge Of Tax Havens, estimates that $7.6 trillion (8 percent of individual financial wealth) is held in tax havens. That means approximately $190 billion is lost in tax revenue.

New Zealand’s conservative Prime Minister John Key is indicating that his country’s offer to accept 150 refugees a year from Australia’s immigration system still stands and could include taking some, or all, of the 267 asylum seekers. The offer reflects the general paradox in New Zealand’s approach to refugees and asylum seekers: in a theoretical sense, it looks and feels comparatively generous, yet in a concrete sense it’s not nearly enough.

There is distance in experience, we as observers and Others as victims, and with that comes the distance in our ability to understand their pain. For that reason it seems rather voyeuristic for the well-meaning masses to co-opt the private tragedy of Aylan Kurdi’s death and transform it into a moment of public grief. This is not our struggle. Aylan was not our child. He did not die in order for us to have an emotional and political experience. Yet that is exactly what is happening.

Rather than being about applied science and international values, the developed world’s response to climate change has always been about applied ideology. In the lead up to the Kyoto Protocol the Australian government pressured Pacific countries to abandon their advocacy and proposals for strict emission reduction targets. The primary motive was to protect Australian capitalism against reform.

The sentiment is common, even if the frankness isn’t. Few Australians would be willing to admit their private thoughts on public television like Dawn Fraser did. Few could do it with the same irony too (Fraser’s father is from Scotland). But what’s more interesting than the sentiment, frankness or irony is the history underpinning the idea that those who aren’t performing the Australian identity should return to ‘where their parents came from’.

For a man who has lived through almost one third of New Zealand’s modern history, Prime Minister John Key seems to know very little about it. ‘New Zealand was one of the very few countries in the world that were settled peacefully,’ he said a few months ago. ‘Maori probably acknowledge that settlers had a place to play and brought with them a lot of skills and a lot of capital.’ Many New Zealanders will nod gently while whispering to each other in conceited agreement: ‘Yes, we were not nearly as savage as those Australian settlers.’

Australian sport is often talked about as the great equaliser: a sacred space where camaraderie can overcome intolerance and exclusion. Skin colour and surnames are irrelevant and athletic ability is the only measure of success – except when it isn’t.

Recently Australia has rediscovered an old crime, one it intends to charge Indigenous people with: identity fraud. Apparently the 'white blacks' of Andrew Bolt's imagination are back. Somewhere in Australia there is a mob of pretenders who are lining up to claim the privileges of Indigeneity.

For those who find success outside of New Zealand it’s considered poor form to criticise the mother country. The job of an international success is to act as a salesperson rather than a citizen. Arguably this was as true for Katherine Mansfield as it is for Eleanor Catton.

Australia has a comedy problem if a guy who dresses in blackface, brownface and yellowface is considered a ‘genius’. In what other country could a comedian earn a pass, let alone praise, for resurrecting minstrelsy? Not many, if any. That’s what Chris Lilley does: racial cross-dressing.

Tony Abbott is the ‘prime minister for aboriginal affairs’, but the height of his ambition appears to be employing Indigenous rubbish collectors. Tony Abbott is committed to ‘closing the gap’ … except that his Indigenous staff are paid less than their colleagues. Tony Abbott promises Indigenous engagement and reform but he has done little to break the cosy Canberra consensus.

‘People have the right to be bigots you know’. I spent hours trying to decode that statement. ‘People have the right to be bigots you know’. It took that long to realise there wasn’t much to decode: in less than ten words, George Brandis has summed up the Coalition’s only principle – the commitment to protecting its own. Tony Abbott explains further: ‘All of us deplore racism… but we are also a people who can engage in very robust free speech without fear of prosecution.’