Reports & Media

When students across New Zealand say they are not learning anything at school, we should listen. After nearly six months speaking with New Zealand’s schools and universities, I have witnessed firsthand how this nation has become the unwitting laboratory for one of education's most destructive experiments. Read more

There is a fun sign at the Wairau Road Pak’nSave explaining the store’s story. The story began in 1987 when Foodstuffs acquired an interest in the land. Read more

The Regulatory Standards Bill before Parliament provides no enforceable legal right to compensation for the cost of regulation. It only suggests that compensation can be warranted when regulation takes or impairs property. Read more

Parliament faces tighter constraints when it wants to spend money than when it wishes to regulate. The Regulatory Standards Bill would set the two on slightly more equal footing. Read more

Who knew that fixing something that works would become New Zealand’s signature planning move? In 1988, New Zealand boasted 453 special purpose governance entities. Read more

The government's latest Resource Management Act (RMA) consultation promises improvements to a broken system. The proposals for new national directions for infrastructure, the primary sector, and freshwater raise a critical question: are they preparing the ground for a property-rights-based resource management system or merely tinkering at the edges? Read more

The Netherlands has long been Europe’s model of commercial pragmatism. Its business leaders built their fortunes on free trade, open markets, and meticulous efficiency. Read more

Supreme Court Matters: Revolution by Judicial Decree A Review of Professor Peter Watts KC’s “Ellis v R: A Revolution in Aotearoa New Zealand, Welcome or Not” Revolutions conjure images of violent uprisings, the storming of institutions, and the forcible overthrow of existing orders. But constitutional foundations can be destroyed through more subtle means. Read more

This week, Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee is hearing oral submissions on the government’s Regulatory Standards Bill. I support the Bill, most submitters oppose it. Read more

A book currently climbing the German bestseller charts caught my attention recently, not least because its title poses a question that seems at once paradoxical and profound. Jan Loffeld’s Wenn nichts fehlt, wo Gott fehlt (“When nothing is missing where God is missing”) examines a growing phenomenon across Western societies that transcends conventional secularisation. Read more

The way the government went about rolling back 33 pay equity claims lodged under the last government’s Pay Equity legislation was clumsy at best. The changes were made under urgency and applied retrospectively. Read more