Reports & Media

Erica Stanford has had a lot on her plate in her first year as a Minister. In her education portfolio, she has set a cracking pace, with work well underway on a knowledge-rich curriculum for primary and secondary schooling. Read more

For some time now free speech advocates in this country have been enviously following the passage of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act through the UK Parliament. The act gave teeth to the freedom of speech provisions in the 1986 Education Act by allowing students and academics whose free speech rights had been trampled on to seek redress though the courts, and also established a new ‘Free Speech Czar’ for English universities. Read more

As Marx once said, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them... well, I have others.” Of course, this quote was from Groucho, not Karl. Read more

Last week I received my rates invoice from Christchurch City Council. To my dismay, I learnt that my rates for the city council and regional council combined have increased by 11%. Read more

New Zealand’s government sacked the entire board of Health New Zealand (Te Whatu Ora) last week, replacing it with a sole commissioner. The move marked more than just another shake-up in the country’s beleaguered health system. Read more

In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin argued that the “Tragedy of the Commons” is commonplace. If you wanted to deliberately engineer a commons problem, the management of the Conservation Estate would make for a pretty decent guidebook. Read more

It’s hard not to marvel at Silicon Valley’s technological innovations. But I’m dumbfounded by the social science experiment they’ve been working on. Read more

The record net migration loss of 60,100 New Zealand citizens in the year to May 2024 is an orange warning light for New Zealand. But fears that it represents a worrying brain drain are statistically premature. Read more

Health New Zealand has been quite economical lately. I don’t mean ‘economical’ in the fiscal sense, of course. Read more

New Zealand’s most recent Public Services Commissioner announced his retirement in September 2023. He retired in February 2024. Read more