Reports & Media

This week, we were happy to see the changes to NCEA announced by Education Minister Chris Hipkins. It is encouraging that the Minister’s NCEA Change Package mirrors so many of the recommendations in our 2018 report, Spoiled by Choice: How NCEA hampers education, and what it needs to succeed. For example, the announced package includes: Read more

During the Global Financial Crisis, many banks around the world failed spectacularly (though fortunately none in Australia or New Zealand). Some financial institutions were bailed out at enormous costs to taxpayers. Others went under, causing severe disruption to their economies.To prevent such a scenario ever playing out again must be a constant worry for any financial markets regulator and central bank.This is why the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) published proposals last December to increase the amount of capital... Read more

Especially since the Brexit vote, policymakers aiming for political stability might be reluctant to ask citizens about their opinion. They should not feel that way. As with sports, practice makes perfect when it comes to voting. The Swiss lead by example. They vote on everything, even the silly stuff. In November last year, for example, the Swiss voted on cows and their horns. Allegedly, owning a full set of horns is about bestowing dignity to the cows. Read more

The problem with being an expert is that people regularly ask you for predictions. As if your knowledge of something would automatically let you know the future. That sure would be nice, but expertise is different from prescience.Thus, when I am asked for predictions, I usually brush it off politely. My standard line is that questions about the future should be directed to astrologers, not mortal economists.However, there are exceptions. Read more

New Zealand’s freshwater management is in need of a refresh. The kinds of systems that work for allocating and managing water when water is abundant are not the systems that work when water becomes increasingly scarce. And increasing pressure on our aquifers and rivers has made water increasingly scarce in places like Canterbury. The problem is well-recognised. We have had decades of reports telling us of the looming problems, not only in water abstraction (taking water from the aquifers and... Read more

Readers of The New Zealand Herald should welcome its recent introduction of a $5-weekly subscription to access premium content. So should non-readers. If successful, New Zealand will benefit from an additional stream of high-quality journalism worth paying for. As the global spread of media paywalls attests, informative and accurate online news is hard to produce solely via advertisement sales. (For one, robust analyses on politics, economics, and current affairs are not as “clickable” as homemade cat videos and tabloid stories.)... Read more

It took the Australian Government years to decide whom to task with building its next generation submarine fleet. It was still not enough time to prepare them for the cultural clash that followed. Back in 2016, the Australian Prime Minister – Malcolm Turnbull, most probably – awarded the AU$50 billion contract to French company Naval Group over rival offers from German and Japanese firms. As the ABC recently reported, building submarines involves far more than high-tech engineering, quality materials and... Read more

Everyone knows the old joke about the traveller who, on asking directions to a better place, is told he shouldn’t have started from here. But stepping back from it a little, we always start from here. Read more

Last October, Minister for the Environment David Parker announced a two-year agenda for an improved freshwater management system. Following on from an election campaign in which freshwater management featured prominently, the announcement should not have come as a surprise. Read more