OPINION

Shortly after being chosen by his party as Australia’s new Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull singled out one international leader as his role model: his New Zealand counterpart. “John Key has been able to achieve very significant economic reforms in New Zealand by doing just that, by taking on and explaining complex issues and then making the case for them,” Turnbull told the media. Read more

This week the people of Central Hawkes Bay, Wairoa, Napier and Hastings voted two-to-one against a proposal to merge their authorities into a mega-council. The move is a third black eye for the National-led government in recent years, which seems to view bigger-is-better as the model for local government. Read more

In ground-breaking research conducted by the University of Cambridge, it has been discovered that “people consistently consume more food and drink when offered larger-sized portions, packages or tableware.” In other words, if you are offered more food, you tend to eat more food. Anyone who has visited a buffet restaurant could have drawn the same conclusion. Read more

Last week, I wrote in this column that Europe’s refugee crisis could undo the EU. This week, I notice how much progress has been achieved in that respect over the past seven days. Read more

Do older Australians hate younger Australians? This is a question that some were left pondering after attending a recent presentation by John Daley of the Grattan Institute on the urbanisation challenge facing Australian cities. Read more

When Cal Tech economist D. Roderick Kiewiet looked hard at the stack of American regulations affecting health and safety, he found a mess. Read more

I came to New Zealand as a refugee from Rwanda almost 20 years ago. The refugee world once seemed so far from us. Read more

It is really hard not to sympathise with calls for increasing the refugee quota. Seeing the pictures from the Mediterranean tugs at the heartstrings. Read more

The final week of September will mark ‘Banned Books Week’, a celebration of the freedom to read and a challenge to literary censorship. It is certainly good timing: the New Zealand Film and Literature Board of Review’s decision to temporarily ban a novel is the first since the law was enacted 22 years ago. Read more

“At least Germany is getting some good press recently,” a friendly businessman just told me a few days ago. “That’s quite a change from what we have seen before.” What he was referring to was the European refugee crisis, in which the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel was suddenly regarded as humane, caring and compassionate -- and not as brutal, egotistic and authoritarian as in its dealings with Greece. Read more

After the recent review of Child, Youth and Family (CYF), the Office of the Children’s Commissioner (OCC) has come to the conclusion that the system is failing children on far too many fronts. In fact, the Children’s Commissioner goes as far as to doubt that children are better off in state care at all. Read more

Sometimes it is easier to see things clearly the further you remove yourself from them. For me it has been like that with Europe. Read more

We this week released Elisabeth Prasad's report running some of the numbers on whether compensating live kidney donors makes sense. She finds that the typical kidney transplant saves the Ministry of Health on net about $125,000 over the longer term: dialysis is expensive. Read more

Question: Do the likely benefits from the Health & Safety Reform Bill (or any other Bill) exceed the costs? Answer 1: They do if you hire the right economist Answer 2: They do if you assume the benefits are large enough to exceed the costs Public policy decisions have to be made on some basis. Read more

Earlier this week, my colleague Jason Krupp discussed the consequences of overzealous urban planning. Drawing from a recent paper by urbanist Alain Bertaud, the premise is that too much planning control impedes the efficient functioning of cities, producing unintended and undesirable outcomes. Read more