New Zealand Green Party leader James Shaw has established a Parliamentary first in embracing an open plan office with his staff. He suggests other Cabinet Ministers should follow suit.

Being in the office space business I know a bit about this but will probably be accused of talking my own book in slamming them. Instead, I’ll refer readers to the evidence.

Google “Open-plan offices” and you will find dozens and dozens of mainly university analytical research studies on this topic from all over the world, including two to my knowledge from New Zealand. Without exception they all say open plan offices are a lousy idea with any advantages swamped by their disadvantages.

During the 2017 Presidential election being, God knows why but I am, curious about speech and idioms, I noted one oddity. That was that in all of his speeches Trump repeatedly used the phrase “and by the way”.

Over the subsequent two years I’ve observed without exception, all American politicians, regardless of their political stripes, have picked this up and can’t speak for more than two minutes without using it.

It may be Trump’s major legacy.

In recent years I’ve been a constant critic of our newspapers. There’s a single reason for that, namely my life-long love of them, thus I’ve hated watching their decline. In fairness this has been forced upon them by collapsing readership and thus falling advertising revenue. But the New Zealand Herald is fighting back and by and large is now a damned good paper. So too with the ever improving Dominion Post under the new editor.

A couple of weeks ago both excelled, demonstrating excellent judgement. Why? Because they scarcely bothered to report the pathetic children’s crusade march through our cities.

The media had fun teasing the government after it transpired that the photo of a happy mother and her 10 year old daughter shown on the cover of the budget and bought from an agency, were in fact Aussies. To rub salt into it, it transpired the mother had come across last year looking for modelling work, couldn’t crack it and returned home a few months later.

Thank God for that. Read her comments as reported, this I remind you from a woman in her 30s.

The next Scottish census in 2021 is to include data on sexual orientation and gender identification. Why?

To that question came some amusing response from diverse bureaucrats and politicians.

All correctly emphasised that “sex is a biological given that does not change, even with surgery and hormones”.  Gender on the other hand, it was claimed, was defined as “the internal sense of who we are”. That’s certainly news to the Oxford dictionary which basically says it’s a defining word for either of the two sexes.