New Zealanders need a competent, productive, merit-based public service. Those attributes matter for effective government and, thereby, community wellbeing. Read more
New Zealand’s universities are in crisis. AUT announced 170 academic redundancies last year. Read more
The primary point of collecting blood plasma is to meet the medical and therapeutic needs of patients. We collect blood and plasma in order to ensure that we can preserve and promote the health of current and future patients. Read more
Good infrastructure is essential for modern life. Just think about your day. Read more
This manifesto draws on the body of research compiled at The New Zealand Initiative over the past decade to bring together a coherent plan to improve our education system, and to restore it to a place of international pre-eminence. New Zealand’s once world-leading school education system is in a state of deep malaise. Read more
A pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19) continues both worldwide and in New Zealand. Although estimates are that half the New Zealand population have been infected, more likely almost every citizen has come into contact with the virus in some way. Read more
2022 marked a turning point in New Zealand’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The country reopened to international visitors in the middle of the year, and by the year’s end, most sectors of the economy got back to something close to business as usual. Read more
Central banks, above all, are responsible for overseeing financial stability and controlling inflation. Many central banks, including the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ), have inadvertently fueled excessive inflation through their responses to Covid-19, resulting in massive losses on taxpayers. Read more
In 2011 the Ministry of Education embarked on a ten-year strategy to rejuvenate New Zealand’s aging classroom estate. Part of this strategy involved establishing large, open plan classrooms, populated by many more children than are found in cellular classrooms. The Ministry conducted no research on the effects of these ‘Modern learning Environments’ on students’ learning prior to compelling schools to adopt them. Read more
Taxpayers commonly work hard to earn the money that governments take in taxes. Knowing the effort sacrificed they naturally want governments to spend that money wisely and well. Read more
Last month, the Initiative published an essay listing six mistakes Graeme Wheeler and I argue the world’s major central banks widely made in responding to COVID. The New Zealand media interpreted this as an attack on the RBNZ. Read more
A research note released today by The New Zealand Initiative mainly attributes the outbreak of inflation in many economies to central bank mistakes. Co-authored by Graeme Wheeler, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and Bryce Wilkinson, Senior Research Fellow at The New Zealand Initiative, the paper argues that central banks overall: were too confident about their monetary policy framework; were too confident about their models; were too confident they could control output and employment; lost their focus on price stability and took on too many mandates; faced conflicts in some cases with conflicting ‘dual mandate’ objectives; and were distracted by extraneous political objectives, such as climate change. Read more
Alarming results have come from a pilot of new literacy and numeracy assessments for NCEA. The new assessments are scheduled to be introduced as part of the Ministry of Education’s review of the NCEA system. Read more
The New Zealand Initiative rebuts the Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety’s claim to a select committee that New Zealand’s labour productivity growth rate since 1991 was 46% below that of Australia. On figures recently supplied by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, the correct figure was 30%. Read more
Last month, the Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety, Michael Wood, appeared before Parliament’s Education and Workforce Committee in support of the Government’s Fair Pay Agreement Bill. He was asked for his response to the New Zealand Initiative’s case that the wage rates were not showing a ‘race to the bottom,’ a decline in either employees’ share of income, or labour productivity growth since the Employment Contracts Act in 1991. Read more