Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He is a regular commentator in the media on public policy and constitutional law. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014, after 16 years as a commercial litigation partner. He is an honorary fellow of the Legal Research Foundation, a charitable foundation associated with the University of Auckland and was its executive director from 2001 to 2009. He is a member of the editorial board of the New Zealand Law Review and was a member of the Council of the New Zealand Law Society, the governing body of the legal profession in New Zealand, from 2011 to 2015. He is a former chartered member of the Institute of Directors, a member of the University of Auckland Business School advisory board, and a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.
Phone: +64 4 499 0790
This month’s big housing story was not the Reserve Bank’s rate rise, whatever the media coverage suggested. Mortgage rate rises, the effect on house prices, whether the spring market will stall – all of it was reported, correctly, as housing news. Read more
The 2026 election campaign has not got off to a good start for business – or for the country. National, Labour, the Greens and New Zealand First have each made dangerous promises to intervene in private commercial arrangements. Read more
Two speeches from the Crown’s most senior lawyers over the past month have answered a question that should never have been in doubt: Who makes the law? Attorney-General Chris Bishop spoke to the Law Association on 6 August. Read more
In April 1901, a Bavarian immigrant baker named Joseph Lochner was arrested in Utica, New York. Unlike the larger bakeries, which worked two shifts, Lochner employed a single crew: his bakers arrived in the evening, prepared the dough, slept a few hours on the premises and baked before dawn. Read more
The Financial Markets Authority is having a bad year. Its chair resigned in May. Read more
Suppose a public official holds an office with limited powers. The limits are not in doubt. Read more
Outside Chris Bishop’s office in the Beehive hangs a framed copy of a court judgment. Last week, in a speech to the Law Association, the Attorney-General explained why he keeps it there. Read more
1. Introduction and Summary 1.1 This submission on the Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill (the Bill) is made by The New Zealand Initiative (the Initiative), a Wellington-based think tank supported primarily by major New Zealand businesses. Read more
Warren Pyke is, by all accounts, a serious practitioner. Thirty-five years acting for the underprivileged, the vulnerable, the mentally ill, the villainous and a great many “ordinary folk” is real civil-liberties work. Read more
The debate about New Zealand’s Supreme Court has been framed as a question about the current court – its composition, its appointments, its judicial philosophy. This column frames it differently: as a question about what the current court inherited, and from whom. Read more
This is The New Zealand Initiative’s 2026 Prescription for Prosperity. Since 2017, the Initiative has prepared a briefing for the incoming government. Read more
Imagine that a public health authority publishes a report on the nation’s diet. After 22 years of data and a 100-page methodology, it announces the four least nutritious food groups. Read more
Local government is hard to defend. Rates are rising at more than three times inflation. Read more
Mike Smith, the climate activist suing six of New Zealand’s largest companies over greenhouse gas emissions, is unhappy. On Tuesday, the Government announced it will amend the Climate Change Response Act 2002 to stop cases like his and others like it. Read more
In this episode, Oliver talks with Roger Partridge about the Government’s decision to legislate to stop the Smith v Fonterra climate change case. They discuss why Parliament was right to step in after the Supreme Court reinstated a claim the Court of Appeal had unanimously struck out, the causation problems at the heart of the case, and why media claims of an attack on judicial independence get New Zealand’s constitutional order backwards. Read more