Some people think we live in relatively safe times. Those people are naïve. Read more
When a councillor in New Zealand’s Carterton District was elected on a platform of fiscal responsibility, she could not have expected to be barred from participating in budget deliberations. Yet that is exactly what happened when council bureaucrats deemed her campaign promises a “conflict of interest” that disqualified her from key financial decisions. Read more
It is hard to believe today, but a TV interview about genetic modification (GM) once upended an election campaign. That interview cast a long shadow over the use of GM in New Zealand. Read more
Some essays are timeless. In 1964, Richard Hofstadter diagnosed what he called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. Read more
Perhaps geography is still destiny after all. The closer a Pacific nation sits to American shores, the more Washington seems to care about Chinese influence. Read more
It wasn’t that long ago that New Zealand’s housing market made international news because of its insanity. In 2016, The Guardian tagged Auckland as the “hottest property market in the world” – and part of a housing crisis. Read more
Jordan Peterson’s recent keynote at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in Sydney laid bare a critical divide within classical liberalism. Peterson champions individual responsibility and free markets. Read more
A few years ago, when I was still a classics lecturer, I started to notice a disturbing trend. Scholars were being denounced on Twitter (RIP) for wrongthink. Read more
I’m Barbara Oakley, and I’m delighted to be spending nearly six months with The New Zealand Initiative. My husband, Phil and I are thrilled to return to New Zealand. Read more
I didn’t think it was going to go like this. But here we are. Read more
Waitangi day debates about New Zealand’s sovereignty often fixate on a single moment: the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. This focus is understandable, given the Treaty’s significance to both Māori and the Crown. Read more
If you believe last week’s hysterical headlines from Germany, you might think the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is about to take power in Europe’s largest economy. The reality is more complicated. Read more
If you believe some of its critics, the pending Regulatory Standards Bill is a demonic measure to end New Zealand society as we know it. This is beyond false; it is ridiculous. Read more
In Hayek’s Bastards, the distinguished historian Dame Anne Salmond takes issue with Act’s Regulatory Standards Bill, which she sees as the attempt of a fringe party to impose its ideologies and which she thinks would “elevate individual rights and private property above all other considerations in law-making” and thus undermine democracy. Salmond presents the bill as a result, not of the normal processes of democracy, but of a global conspiracy of ‘neo-liberal’ think tanks tracing their lineage to 20th-century thinkers such as Friedrich von Hayek. Read more
Regular Stuff columnist Damien Grant is a great friend of The New Zealand Initiative. In fact, he’s a member. Read more