Policy report
Recipe for disaster: building policy on shaky ground
The Christchurch earthquakes provided a few more important lessons for policy. The government must plan ahead to make post-disaster recovery simpler and it must avoid creating the prolonged policy and regulatory uncertainty that hindered Christchurch’s recovery.
Report
The new New Zealanders: why migrants make good kiwis
When it comes to immigration, a natural but complicated question to ask is: “Is immigration good for New Zealand?” There are a number of ways immigration affects New Zealand and New Zealanders, and a number of concerns and fears New Zealanders have about immigration. This...
Journal article
The need for localist reforms
This article looks at constitutional and contractual resolutions to central-local relations, looking to see in what ways each approach could benefit the power and autonomy of local councils. Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Andrew Butler recently released their draft constitution for New Zealand, which joins a...
Journal
Policy Quarterly special issue: local goverment
Editorial note: Local government in New Zealand exists within a fairly well-defined narrative. New Zealand is the most centralised nation within the OECD. Central government is by far the dominant partner in the central-local relationship and recent innovations in local government have tended towards further...
Report
The local manifesto: restoring local government accountability
This is the final report in a New Zealand Initiative series on local government. It aims to restore accountability, transparency and community responsibility to local government. We propose doing this by setting clear roles for each tier of government, with limits on the ability of...