Sometimes, a consultation process makes me wonder just how the consultation document got out of the door in the first place. Submissions closed last week on the Reserve Bank’s Keeping Cash Local consultation process. Read more
In this episode, Oliver talks with Dr Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, associate professor of history at the Australian Catholic University, about why the West has largely lost the ability to think meaningfully about its own past. She calls this the ahistoric age and argues that the statues we topple and the national days we fight over are evidence of it rather than signs of real engagement with history. Read more
When I specialised in marketing for the business part of my economics degree, I came across a puzzling group of people: consumers. Ask them about their product choices and they will tell you what they care about, how diligently they compare different items and how much weight they put on quality. Read more
Everyone knows that culture matters, at least in a vague sense. But showing how it matters has been like pinning jelly to a wall. Read more
Dr Oliver Hartwich talked to Wallace Chapman on RNZ's The Panel about NZ First's plan to pay parents $5,000 a year for a child's first three years, and why the money is unlikely to shift a fertility rate that has slipped to just under 1.6 children per woman. Schemes like it overseas have typically failed, including Australia's baby bonus, which rewarded parents who were having children anyway, and Dr Hartwich suggested that anyone serious about lifting fertility should look instead at the cost of housing, which pushes couples to start families later. Read more
1. INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY 1.1 This submission on the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s Keeping Cash Local consultation is made by The New Zealand Initiative (the Initiative), a Wellington-based think tank supported primarily by major New Zealand businesses. Read more
In this episode, Oliver talks with John Howard, senior fellow at the New Zealand Initiative, about why he sees no negotiated settlement over Iran in the next 30 to 60 days, and what prolonged disruption in the Strait of Hormuz exposes about New Zealand's fuel and fertiliser supply. They also ask whether the increase in defence spending from 1.1 to 2 per cent of GDP is being converted into actual hardware and personnel, and assess Defence Minister Chris Penk's opening months in the job, including his $300 million announcement on attack drones. Read more
Last week, Eric Crampton made the case for passing the RMA replacement Bills, while noting some risks in their current form. Nick Clark argued that Parliament should pause them. Read more
It’s only going to get weirder from here, folks. Trump did not like existing social media platforms, so he launched his own, Truth Social, in 2022. Read more
New Zealanders have long seen university as the best educational route to the good life. Trades and industry training is seen as a second-best option. Read more
In 1987, on a school trip to the German countryside, my maths teacher made a prediction. Dr Müller had worked at IBM before turning to teaching in our industrial city, Essen. Read more
In this episode, Michael talks with Dr Helen Walls, who served on the ministerial advisory group on literacy and numeracy. Helen is generally supportive of New Zealand's primary literacy reforms but warns that pre-planned programmes, overuse of decodable books, slideshow-led lessons and pedantic grammar teaching can crowd out meaningful reading and writing. Read more
Major General John Howard talked to Ryan Bridge on Newstalk ZB about the Defence Minister's announcement that New Zealand will get long range, one-way strike drones, with the Minister wanting a New Zealand company to make them. Howard pointed to the size of New Zealand's exclusive economic zone and to cost in explaining why the drones are one way, and called it a great decision to invest in lower cost capabilities that deliver strategic effect and deterrence. Read more
Ask a well-informed European to name the Council of Europe's constitutional advisory body, and you will usually get a pause. I had to look it up myself last week, which is awkward for a Europe columnist, and worse for one with a doctorate in law. Read more
In this episode, Eric talks with Adam Jarvis, an Emergent Ventures fellow, about what happened when Anthropic held back the public release of its most powerful AI model, Mythos, and the US government then effectively banned non-US citizens from using the version it released instead, Fable. Adam argues that New Zealand is unusually well placed to host hyperscaler data centres, and that the binding constraint is not power or bandwidth but the country's inability to give investors a fast and certain answer. Read more