Taxing times

If we ever – Sir Geoffrey Palmer willing – get a written constitution, it will need to have a set of very strictly enforced conventions around this, the immediate post-election period.

This is not because anything dangerous can happen once the votes are in and counted. It’s because it’s quite the most tedious phase of our democracy: the Backseat Driver period. Every journalist, commentator, sector group, lobbyist, Uber driver, social media self-appointed worthy and pub bore insists on issuing the government-to-be a to-do list, complete with cringemaking imprecations like “I’m looking at you, Grant Robertson” and “Jacinda, when are you going to feed