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
What will Britain look like after Brexit? This is the dominant question in British politics right now. Read more
Read The New Zealand Initiative's submission to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee on the Employment Relations (Allowing Higher Earners to Contract Out of Personal Grievance Provisions) Amendment Bill.
Read more
A weighty package from the Cato Institute, the US think tank, landed on my desk shortly before Easter. It contained an impressive 300-page tome called The Human Freedom Index 2016. Read more
Sometimes it is possible to want something too much. It can cloud your judgment and lead to decisions you will later regret. Read more
Water, water, everywhere – or so it has seemed. In the past few weeks we have had a deluge of controversies over water. Read more
For every complex problem there is always an easy solution – neat, plausible, and wrong. Or so once quipped HL Mencken, the American journalist, satirist and scholar. Read more
I am married to an immigrant. It is not something I often need to confront. Read more
Running away from a problem will rarely solve it. No matter how fast you run, sooner or later the problem will catch up with you. Read more
At the beginning of 2017, New Zealand finds itself probably in the best position it has been in for decades. Key figures like economic growth, unemployment and inflation show a country in great shape. Read more
Everyone is familiar with the idea of keeping up with the Joneses. It comes from an early 20th century American comic strip featuring the social-climbing McGinis family and their struggle to keep up with their more affluent neighbours, the Joneses. Read more
When assessing John Key’s legacy, context is critical. Key came into office in late 2008 in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Read more
“Regulation above all else” is exactly what ridesharing wunderkind Uber must feel as it faces up to select committee hearings in Wellington this month. Despite promises of a new regulatory framework that recognises the role of global technology in improving safety and consumer protection, the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Transport have fallen well short. Read more
Equipping today’s students with the skills needed for tomorrow’s jobs is perhaps the 21st century’s greatest challenge. But how confident are we that our tertiary education sector can innovate to meet the future needs of students? Read more
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the tyrannical state develops an artificial language called Newspeak to align thought and action with the ideology of the Party. Its aim is to entrench the tyranny of the Party by making other modes of thought impossible. Read more
It is said that if something is not broken you should not try to fix it. Fair enough. Read more