Imagine you lived in the middle of a dry desert and people from the coastal lowlands approached you with an ingenious proposal: to join their new flood insurance scheme. Unless you are very altruistic or insane, you would politely decline the offer. Read more
Spend any time working in local government and you will soon stumble across the long-running funding fight between New Zealand’s two tiers of government. In the white trunks is central government, frustrated by the inability to make progress on projects of national significance due to what it perceives to be local self-interest, particularly when it comes to infrastructure. Read more
Politics, not finance, is the prime factor stopping local authorities from being more pro-growth and pro-housing. That is a primary conclusion of a report, Local Government: Myths, Facts and Challenges, that The New Zealand Initiative released this week. Read more
Travelling to Hong Kong to study its welfare system may seem like a strange choice to some people. Like travelling to North Korea to study good governance, or Greece to study fiscal prudence. Read more
A terrible spectre haunts New Zealand. Cash transactions come with no guarantee that they are not part of a money-laundering scheme. Read more
If you wanted to launder money, iPredict would hardly be your best choice. It would be unlikely to even make anyone's Top-20 list – or at least the Top-20 list of anyone sane. Read more
Last week the cat was set amongst the pigeons after the Herald ran a story saying that Auckland Council was trying to raise the urban density limits in the green leafy suburbs that surround the inner city without public consultation. Squawks of alarm were immediately heard from Auckland 2040, a community group dedicated to protecting the character of the city’s residential neighbourhoods. Read more
There is a great deal of debate on the causes and solutions of the housing crisis but little disagreement that the problems we face are enormous: The number of new homes consented dropped from a record 39,800 in 1973 to a little over 24,700 last year. Over the same period, New Zealand's population grew by 50 per cent. Read more
Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and their gun-slinging, bank-robbing outlaws once ruled the lawless western frontier. With only rudimentary government to manage civil society, life in the Wild West was nasty and brutish. Read more
Bankers are overpaid, bonus payments are useless and there is an inflation of fancy job titles in banking. That was the essence of a speech recently delivered at Frankfurt’s Goethe University. Read more
Most of the time, I look at policy in Canada and despair at how much worse things are back home. But the past few months have reminded me that Canada gets a couple of things right that New Zealand simply hasn’t managed to figure out yet. Read more
Last week’s town hall meeting in Khandallah on Wellington City Council’s proposed medium-density re-zoning was an eye-opener. I have been exceptionally frustrated by town planners’ inability to zone enough housing to meet the demands of a growing population. Read more
Over the last four months as part of our education research project I have visited a number of schools around New Zealand and I was struck by two things. The first: despite some of these schools being labelled as under-performing, the vibrant corridors were packed with eager young children with real potential. Read more
As it turns out, a side of bacon with your breakfast could prove a deadly gamble with your health. You may as well take up smoking, sunbathe excessively, or inhale asbestos. Read more
Most of the time, I look at policy in Canada and despair at how much worse things are back home. But the past few months have reminded me that Canada gets a couple of things right that New Zealand simply hasn’t managed to figure out yet. Read more