Reports & Media

The launch of the first report on recreational fisheries caused quite a stir. The media sent alarms that decreasing daily bag limits were inevitable, and that we were running out of fish. Read more

Open the pages of any major newspaper and you will be inundated with reasons why New Zealand needs to tackle its housing affordability crisis. It needs to be fixed to stop bank balance sheets from imploding, to free capital trapped in unproductive assets, or to put that all-important first rung on the housing ladder within greater reach of first home buyers. Read more

New Zealand maintained its third place ranking in this year’s Economic Freedom of the World reports, but it’s hardly a place allowing markets in everything. And that can be costly. Read more

The Auckland housing situation has been developing for several years, if not decades, but only recently has the government acknowledged it is at a crisis point. The continued denial that a crisis was looming allowed the problem to grow into something that will take considerable time and effort to fix. Read more

Last week New Zealand's local government sector got together and publicly thumbed its nose at central government’s latest attempt to coerce councils to deliver services more efficiently. More specifically, a group of mayors from across the country took issue with the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 2), calling it “amalgamation by stealth” and “anti-democratic”. Read more

Last month, we launched a report on the government’s interest-free student loan policy. To summarise briefly, the scheme has had no particular benefits in improving access to tertiary study, but has been rather costly both for the government and for the tertiary sector. Read more

If sugar is the new tobacco, then soda drinkers must be the new smokers. So what can we expect next in the war against sugar? Read more

A health minister caught snorting cocaine would be news. A health minister seen snorting fake cocaine might be news. Read more

Did the Canadian experiment work? It is far too early to tell, and anybody claiming otherwise may be trying to sell you something, writes Eric Crampton There’s a reasonable consensus that not building enough houses, apartments, or terraced housing is at the root of Auckland’s lack-of-homes problem. Read more

A couple of months ago, I was part of a panel discussion on the future of tertiary education, hosted by the Tertiary Education Union. It wanted a forecast of the future of skills in a world of technological change: what should universities be teaching to prepare students for the world ahead? Read more