Reports & Media

Last year, Cabinet papers promised that New Zealand’s agricultural-product regulator would be required to use assessments from trusted overseas regulators. The Bills now before Parliament instead say the regulator must merely “have regard to” them. Read more

During the first reading of New Zealand’s Modern Slavery Bill last month, one member of parliament warned it would create perverse incentives to look the other way. Another raised the compliance cost from his experience on an Australian board. Read more

The strongest protection tenants can have is plenty of other potential places to rent, from different landlords eager to rent them a home. When zoning rules make it very difficult to build new housing, existing landlords do not face much potential competition. Read more

By 1974, at the Allensbach Institute she had founded a quarter-century earlier, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann had given a name to a puzzle first visible in her election research of the 1960s. West Germans would tell her pollsters one thing in private; in public they would say something else, or nothing at all. Read more

An alcohol licensing regime should have one big job: to ensure that licensed outlets operate responsibly, first by vetting applications and then by monitoring compliance. Its measures should be proportionate to the risks being addressed, and cost-effective. Read more

Housing targets have long been a political football – and an emotional subject. Would it not be better to take some of the heat out of the housing debate and ask more systematically how we could better plan for future housing supply? Read more

Imagine that a public health authority publishes a report on the nation’s diet. After 22 years of data and a 100-page methodology, it announces the four least nutritious food groups. Read more

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single politician in possession of good polling must be in want of an election. Similarly, politicians lacking public support are wary of the electoral meatgrinder that awaits them. Read more

Housing targets have long been a political football. They are also an emotional political subject. Read more