Reports & Media

If your school has strong NCEA results, is it because it’s performing well, or because it serves a lot of children from more privileged backgrounds? Schools with identical NCEA outcomes could have wildly different performance if one of them got there through extraordinary efforts to overcome the disadvantages that its students brought with them to class. Read more

To start with a disclaimer, I am not a medical expert. I have no degree in epidemiology, nor can I claim any expertise in public health management. Read more

Travel bans bought New Zealand a little time, nothing more. We hope the Government is using this time well to prepare for the more widespread Covid-19 outbreak that seems likely to arrive, sometime. Read more

Since 2008, a contagion spread through the developed world: people felt that elites and politicians were looking out for each other and forgetting them. With this new coronavirus, murmurings about a travel ban has begun since Christmas as the virus jumped beyond China. Read more

New Zealand is vulnerable to the same threats to their freedoms Australia is struggling with – and arguably the risk has already arrived. The worst assault across the ditch comes initially out of US and UK universities where a hybrid utopian movement of the most dangerous aspects of postmodernism and collectivism has been rebooted in the form of social justice, intersectionality and identity politics. Read more

Social norms can persist well past their use-by date because they can be so hard to change. Nobody wants to move first, lest they be considered the weirdo. Read more

The government has crossed a bright-line rule in its proposed changes to Kiwisaver. Its proposal to require default funds to divest of any fossil fuel stocks is incredibly unlikely to have any direct effect on greenhouse gas emissions. Read more

A paradox exists within the personal grievance provisions of the Employment Relations Act 2000. By prohibiting “unjustified dismissal,” the provisions were designed to guard the jobs of ordinary workers. Read more

I skived off last Friday afternoon for the first day of the cricket test at the Basin Reserve. Relaxing on the grass there really is one of the good things. Read more