Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He is a regular commentator in the media on public policy and constitutional law. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014, after 16 years as a commercial litigation partner. He is an honorary fellow of the Legal Research Foundation, a charitable foundation associated with the University of Auckland and was its executive director from 2001 to 2009. He is a member of the editorial board of the New Zealand Law Review and was a member of the Council of the New Zealand Law Society, the governing body of the legal profession in New Zealand, from 2011 to 2015. He is a former chartered member of the Institute of Directors, a member of the University of Auckland Business School advisory board, and a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.
Phone: +64 4 499 0790
Last month France celebrated the storming of the Bastille, an assault that became a flashpoint for the French Revolution. As a fortress and prison, the Bastille was emblematic of the French monarchy. Read more
While New Zealand is in political Neverland, I am taking refuge in rural France. Just an hour north of the vineyards of Bordeaux, it is no great hardship. Read more
After 11 years as a cowboy in America’s wild west, Clark Stanley claimed to have created a medical cure-all from secrets learned from a Hopi medicine man. He began marketing his Snake Oil Liniment in the early 1900s. Read more
Literacy rates in New Zealand present a paradox. Our renowned Reading Recovery programme is an international export success. Read more
Is it possible to have too both too much and too little of something at the same time? This may sound like a problem posed by quantum physics but the question arises with something much more prosaic: bus drivers. Read more
“Local competition” is among factors cited by dairy owners for wildly varying prices for every-day grocery items like baked beans. The issue came to light in a leaked email from a dairy-owner in the lower North Island to her partner. Read more
Tracey Martin wants to regulate the meaning of a commonly used word. It is a breath-taking ambition, even for a politician. Read more
Does it matter if businesses do not respect their regulators? According to Finance Minister Grant Robertson, it does. Read more
Confidence in the guardians of 21st century commerce really matters. If consumer confidence is misplaced, it can have disastrous consequences. Read more
Next week Parliament will have its first chance to debate Commerce Minister Kris Faafoi’s new Commerce Amendment Bill. If passed, the Bill will grant the Commission’s wish - and allow it to use its powers of compulsion to undertake ‘market studies’ into the state of competition in any market. Read more
Read The New Zealand Initiative's submission to the Education and Workforce Select Committee on the Education Poverty Reduction Bill. Read more
In Franz Kafka’s The Trial the chief cashier of a bank, Josef K, is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents from an unspecified agency for an unspecified crime. At one level, The Trial is a satire of bureaucracy. Read more
This submission on the Commerce (Criminalisation of Cartels) Amendment Bill (the Bill) is made by The New Zealand Initiative, a think tank supported primarily by chief executives of major New Zealand businesses. In combination, our members’ revenues account for one third of New Zealand’s economy and provide employment to more than 150,000 people in New Zealand. Read more
“I know an old lady who swallowed a fly” is a nonsensical story that has delighted children for decades. Its tale of an old woman, who swallowed increasingly large animals, each to catch the previous one, is as humorous as it is absurd. Read more
If monetary policy is the Reserve Bank’s smash hit, its prudential regulation of financial markets is its B-side track. Yet the bank’s role as prudential regulator deserves scrutiny. Read more