Reports & Media

Lamenting your loneliness? Forget taking advice from Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people, and carry on listening to Eric Carmen’s All by Myself. Read more

It would take a world champion wowser to declare last weekend’s CubaDupa festival anything but an outstanding success, replete with two days of street food, live music, street artists, and throngs of happy attendees. If such a po-faced complaint were to be made it would probably focus on the number of drunk people wandering the streets late at night, and the menace they represent (noise, fights, minor crime and so on). Read more

It is hard to put a number on some things – like how many refugees the government should admit. If you asked how many software engineers the government should let into the country per year, I would have a hard time coming up with an answer. Read more

If you are a born optimist, you may have concluded by now that the euro crisis is over. Indeed, we have not heard much about it lately. Read more

Spurred on by the Labour Party’s recent pledge to deliver three years of free tertiary education (should they be elected in 2017), New Zealand’s student unions are again calling for universal free education. But in praising countries where universal free tertiary education exists, advocates often gloss over what makes free tertiary education possible in the first place – like higher taxes. Read more

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of New Zealand’s political system in the Key era is its broad stability. That is not to say New Zealand politics is boring or there was no movement in the polls. Read more

Talk to a teacher at a state school and most will tell you competition is a dirty word. When it comes to relationships between schools, cooperation rules. Read more

Take a good look at the person sitting next to you at work. They might have a lot more influence on your life than you give them credit for. Read more

The late Ronald Reagan once said “There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination and wonder”. At The New Zealand Initiative we share his optimism. Read more

Is it time to stop measuring poverty, Jenesa Jeram asks. Whenever commentators get stuck debating the numbers on poverty, there are inevitably calls to stop the academic pontificating and "just do something''. Read more

Left-wing blog The Standard veered beyond its usual polemic last week with a guest post that painstakingly laid out how Auckland Council had spent $1.24 billion on a new IT system with little to show for it so far. The piece, written in response to Bernard Orsman’s scoop in the New Zealand Herald, was notable for its familiarity with major IT project processes, and how far Auckland Council had strayed from industry best practice. Read more

More than a few folks have emailed me the latest from The Guardian on the coming intergenerational war. Youth incomes have been going backwards in too many countries. Read more

Too many New Zealanders are walking around with a shameful addiction. Your family members, colleagues or even spouse may be secretly struggling. Read more