Reports & Media

There is an old saying that when you are in a battle with yourself and you win, you still lose. Perhaps the same thing can be said of our housing shortage. Read more

This week, the Reserve Bank finally got a new Governor. Adrian Orr, formerly chief executive of the Super Fund, replaced caretaker-governor Grant Spencer. Read more

If you are as lucky as me and found yourself watching Parliament at 9pm on Tuesday night, you would have seen the debate on the Government’s proposed regional fuel tax legislation. The legislation will allow Auckland initially, and other regions later, to tax petrol and diesel up to 10 cents per litre for transport projects. Read more

New Zealand’s republicans have a point. There is a nefarious foreign influence dictating too much in New Zealand. Read more

Few countries run as much on informal relationships as New Zealand. It is both due to our small size and our aversion to hierarchies. Read more

Loyal readers of the Initiative’s work will know there are more than a few problems with New Zealand’s secondary school qualification. As Briar Lipson’s report released earlier this month showed, the system makes it rather too easy for students to be directed through ‘safe’ pathways to qualifications of little quality. Read more

Perhaps it is a product of New Zealand’s geographic isolation, which creates concern not to be left behind. But since moving here from England my education hogwash-o-meter has been reading unusually high. 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

There is no shortage of opinion pieces or expert commentary making the case that Kiwis are financially illiterate. Apparently we’re not good with savings, we don’t plan for the future, and we do not take even simple actions (like switching out of our default KiwiSaver funds) to optimise our future financial security. Read more

US President Donald Trump’s new protectionism is populist, wrong and dangerous. Sadly, that does not mean that his loudest opponents can automatically claim the moral high ground. Read more

When concerned parents ask me why kids all seem to pass NCEA with little or no effort, I sometimes use the subprime mortgage crisis as an analogy. This is how it goes. Read more

An Auckland apartment complex has just taken advantage of the new Unitary plan and opened without any carparks. The developers point out the proximity of public transport. Read more

If you wanted to know how well New Zealand’s education system and Kiwi students were doing, you really wouldn’t want to start with NCEA data. Getting a comparative assessment of students’ strengths was never the point of NCEA. Read more