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
Can you remember back to a time when fizzy drinks weren’t maligned, but instead a rare treat? When you and your eagle-eyed siblings watched over the soda pouring ritual with great intent, studiously making sure the levels were equal, and that no one was preferred (by so much as a drop)? Read more
Chances are if you have had any discussions about migration in the past 12 months they have been about foreigners or Kiwis returning from Australia. But foreign migration is not the only cause of human traffic. Read more
Todd Treweek’s had a bad week. As the Herald reported on Wednesday, the Dunedin chef’s just been busted for his tenth parking offence. Read more
Everyone has heard a variant of the story of the student who goes to the guru in India to ask how long it will take to reach enlightenment. The guru says, “It often takes three or four years but, because you are working so hard at it, it will take 10.” There are lessons in this for the Labour Party. 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
The festive season is well behind us, but this week I feel like the Grinch who stole Christmas. Like the Yuletide, this strikes annually. Read more
Roger Partridge, chairman of The New Zealand Initiative interviews the think tank's executive director Dr Oliver Hartwich about his Business Spectator column and views on Brexit. Read more
Reading the headlines, you might think the world is going to hell in a handcart. Once again there is carnage in global financial markets. Read more
If Donald Trump were seeking election in New Zealand, he’d have no need to promise a fence to keep out migrants. Nature has given us our own moat. Read more
A year ago this week, the John Key-led government was sworn in for its third term. This followed a remarkable election night victory, revealing voters had turned their backs on both Kim Dotcom and David Cunliffe’s lurch to the left. Read more
Last night, The New Zealand Initiative released a new book, New Zealand by Numbers. Its first aim is to counter the perception that New Zealand is a country riddled with problems. Instead, it celebrates positive developments within our nation that happen too slowly to make the headlines. Read more
Since the publication of The Spirit Level in 2009, and its ‘devastating critique’, The Spirit Level Delusion, in 2010, debates in the media and among politicians have been gripped by wealth inequality fever. The latest instalment is French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century – a book which is at the centre of its own maelstrom over the accuracy of its analysis. Read more
Last week the New Zealand Initiative joined the chorus of approval for Finance Minister Bill English’s sixth budget. And rightly so. Read more
Last night, former Australian Prime Minister Hon John Howard OM AC spoke to guests of the Initiative on 'Trans-Tasman Relations in the Pacific Century'. Today we have an excerpt from our chairman's welcome speech, and next week we will publish an excerpt from Mr Howard's speech. Read more
Opponents of the concept of publishing school league tables advised this week that parents would be confused and misled by such information. Instead, they expect parents to study ERO reports, search school websites, browse through newsletters, interview teachers, and generally undertake their own due diligence to find out whether schools are turning out “kids who have taken control of their own learning” rather than just focusing on “readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic”, as one school principal put it. Read more