MEDIA

Senior Research Fellow Benno Blaschke joined Heather du Plessis-Allan on Newstalk ZB to preview the New Zealand Initiative’s upcoming report, No Minister: A free and frank analysis of the public service. Drawing on a survey of current and former public servants and 40 interviews with officials, Benno said 71% of public servants believe they serve the public rather than the elected government. Read more

Dr Oliver Hartwich joined Kerry Woodham on Newstalk ZB to discuss Saturday’s election result, which played out much as he predicted in his August research note Unravelling MMP: How the 2026 election could break the voting system from two sides. With overhangs engineered on both the left and the right, Oliver said the result shows MMP is still poorly understood and too easily gamed. Read more

New Zealanders work long hours, yet Australians earn roughly 30% more per head. That's a missing $20,000 for every New Zealander, or around $100 billion a year across the economy. Read more

Wellington (Tuesday, 3 November 2026) - New Zealand heads into the election with two big problems barely mentioned on the campaign trail: rising government debt and stalling productivity. A new report from The New Zealand Initiative, NZ Unbound: Freeing up growth and fixing the books, says the answer starts with getting value for money. Read more

Our Executive Director Dr Oliver Hartwich joined Wallace Chapman and the panel on RNZ’s The Panel to make the case for an independent body to cost election promises. He traced the idea back to a 2007 paper he helped write at the London think tank Policy Exchange, which became the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility under George Osborne in 2010. Read more

Dr Oliver Hartwich joined Ryan Bridge on Newstalk ZB to assess ACT’s manifesto, which proposes $22 billion in savings over four years. He said it stands apart because ACT is the only party that wants to shrink government back to 2017 levels, while the other parties merely promise to cut debt and return to surplus. Read more

Our Senior Fellow Dr Bryce Wilkinson, a former Treasury director, joined Mike Hosking on Newstalk ZB to make sense of the fiscal plans dominating the election campaign. He read National’s numbers as a continuation of its effort since 2024 to return to surplus: holding the line on spending despite rising interest costs and an ageing population, and relying on economic growth to lift revenues and close the gap. Read more

Wellington (Thursday, 8 October 2026) - New Zealand has more information about emerging security threats than ever before, but Cabinet is still too slow to turn warnings into action, a research note released today by The New Zealand Initiative finds. In Too slow to notice: Four fixes for a fast Cabinet, Major General (Ret) John Howard MNZM and Dr Reuben Steff say the problem is speed, not information. Read more

Wellington (Wednesday, 23 September 2026) – Fifty-one New Zealand business leaders have signed an open letter asking every political party to uphold private property rights and freedom of contract. The signatories include chief executives, chairs and directors of companies in banking, construction, education, energy, farming, finance, fishing, grocery, insurance, manufacturing and property. Read more

Our Executive Director Dr Oliver Hartwich joined Ryan Bridge on Newstalk ZB to discuss an open letter signed by around 50 business leaders calling on political parties to respect private property rights, freedom of contract, and lawful agreements. Oliver argued that policies like rewriting already-signed retirement village contracts, cancelling lawfully granted mining approvals, and threatening firms with nationalisation (including National's supermarket break-up plan) form a broader pattern of "post-rational politics," where any policy that polls well with focus groups is fair game, regardless of party or merit. Read more

Wellington (Wednesday, 23 September 2026) — Parliament has passed the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill, ending the Resource Management Act's 35-year reign. The New Zealand Initiative says the Acts settle the system's architecture but defer almost every decision about how it will behave to national direction that does not yet exist, to be written by whoever is the Minister after next year's election. Read more

Dr Oliver Hartwich joined Lisa Owen on Checkpoint with RNZ to discuss the open letter signed by more than 50 business leaders, spanning construction, grocery, property, banking, and investment, calling on political parties to uphold private property and contract rights. He argued that proposals to buy back BNZ, split up supermarket chains, break apart electricity "gentailers," and re-regulate retirement villages all share the same flaw: they're designed to poll well with focus groups rather than solve real problems, several of which stem from past government decisions such as pandemic-era money printing, restrictions on oil and gas, and decades of restrictive planning law. Read more