Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014, after 16 yea
Returning the word privilege to its older use would do more than restore a definition. It would restore our capacity to see the actual injustice in the room: not that one young woman stands at the front, but that so many of her classmates now stand at the back.
Until the left learns to distinguish between inequality and decline, it will keep misdiagnosing the patient. And patients eventually stop visiting doctors who never cure them.
What is not legitimate is constitutional change by judicial increment, case by case, without mandate and without the possibility of correction.
NZ First’s mining proposal is a genuine attempt to correct incentive misalignment in one important sector. It deserves cross-party attention.
Judicial review must not become a means by which judges effectively update decades-old statutes to reflect their own contemporary policy preferences.
Maduro deserved his fate. But ‘he deserved it’ is not a framework.
Change the incentives and behaviour will change – and outcomes along with it. Leave the architecture untouched, and nothing will. If we want a state that works, we must build one whose incentives make success – not failure – the rational choice.
The question is not whether Maduro deserved his fate. The question is what kind of world we are building when we cheer the method that delivered it.
Salmond calls for open minds. On this point she is right. But an open mind is not one that refuses to evaluate claims. It is one that is willing to have its own claims evaluated. It is not one that protects ideas from criticism, but one that welcomes criticism as the price of progress.
New Zealand’s education establishment is fighting because these reforms expose that their romantic ideology – the idea that kids learn naturally without explicit teaching – has systematically failed. And the ones who paid were the children who needed school most.
When bank capital requirements are excessive, the real victims are New Zealand borrowers. The banks themselves will adapt. But borrowers will face higher costs and constrained credit.
Even parliament’s clearest words no longer anchor the law.
