New Zealand's 'public secret': house prices won't come down until we really want them to | Iain White
Many of us express concern about the country’s soaring house prices - but we also vote for policies that let them stay that way
It was the anthropologist Michael Taussig who coined the term “public secret” – a collective social understanding, a truth generally accepted but not articulated.
Public secrets, he argued, can be important to the functioning of institutions and societies: they allow the existence of seemingly contradictory positions, help maintain current power relations, and assist in reconciling the inevitable tensions of policy or complexities of politics.