Looking at government's bid to overhaul the country's health and safety laws, it's tempting to look at the matter and say any measure - no matter how radical - that makes the workplace less dangerous is a good thing. It's even easier when the particular legislative sea change is fronted by a tragedy. Read more
Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, announced his 19-person Cabinet on Monday, with just one female minister, Julie Bishop. Not that Australians would notice much. Read more
Tony Abbott’s recently announced Australian Cabinet is conspicuous for its lack of women, and apparently this is a big deal. With only one woman out of a cabinet of 19, even Afghanistan boasts more females in its cabinet. Read more
Tony Abbott’s recently announced Australian Cabinet is conspicuous for its lack of women, and apparently this is a big deal. With only one woman out of a cabinet of 19, even Afghanistan boasts more females in its cabinet. Read more
Newly elected Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, announced his 19-person Cabinet on Monday, with just one female minister, Julie Bishop. Not that Australians would notice much. Read more
Should New Zealand be letting inexperienced and unqualified teachers loose on children in our toughest communities? That’s exactly what Teach First is doing. Read more
Less than a week after David Cunliffe's ascension to the Labour leadership, the details of his policies remain unsurprisingly sparse. However, there is no doubt where the inclinations lie on tax policy. Read more
A grey outlook on Europe’s pension reform | Dr Oliver Hartwich | Business Spectator The crisis of its monetary union may be Europe’s most pressing economic problem for the coming years, but it is not the continent’s greatest challenge in the long run. Europe’s demographic change is an even more serious issue. Read more
When the government took the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill to its third reading, it marked a shift in the past 20 years of planning in New Zealand by potentially centralising planning approvals to Wellington. The basis of the deal is that the Auckland council agrees to expedite its approvals process and cuts down potential development approval times from years to months. Read more
Think that New Zealand is the only nation that faces house price inflation? Well we are not, but we are in a club of mostly Anglosphere nations that experience rabid house price inflation. Read more
The idea of a living wage is not new. New Zealand’s Arbitration Court determined in November 1936 that a basic weekly wage of £3.16s for an adult male would be sufficient to maintain a husband, wife, and three children in a fair and reasonable standard of comfort. Read more
Before you start thinking that there is a radical new health or safety (or better still, health and safety) measure in place to ban hundreds and thousands biscuits in schools, a more serious matter is at stake: are schools banning hundreds and thousands of students? This matters, because OECD data shows that school systems that transfer disruptive students out of schools, as a system, tend to perform lower and are less equitable. Read more
If Australia’s new government needed a reminder of what economic challenges lie ahead, the recent Global Competitiveness Report 2013-2014 delivered it. For the first time since the World Economic Forum started gathering data on the economic attractiveness of different countries, Australia dropped out of the global top 20 and is now in 21st place. Read more
This report is a summary of fieldwork abroad on how different jurisdictions deal with their housing markets, and the interaction between regulation, local government and building. Key points Switzerland and Germany have remarkably stable prices compared to New Zealand, while Texas has had stable and low house prices for an extended period. Read more
Wellington (12 September 2013): Would-be home owners don’t have to resign themselves to ever increasing house prices according to the latest research from the New Zealand Initiative, which found three overseas markets who are getting it right. In brief, the research found: In Germany and Switzerland, where the right to build is entrenched and local government funding is linked to population growth, house prices were stable but high; In Texas, where projects outside of zoned municipal areas are run by private developers, house prices had been maintained at a low level for an extended period; and Britain’s planning system, which shares many attributes with New Zealand, has delivered housing shortages, steep house price inflation, and smaller, more urban dwellings. Read more