With regulations in Auckland controlling the minimum size of new apartments and requiring all newly built apartments to have balconies, is it time to move outside to the gardens? When more and more junk food is thrust upon us each day, it has never been so important for tenants and home owners alike to have access to fresh fruit and vegetables. Read more

Imagine if the New Zealand Rugby Union’s collective agreement with players mirrored the agreements negotiated by the teachers’ unions. The pay scale for teachers has all teachers starting on more or less the same salary, and stepping up in small increments over seven years or so to a fixed maximum. Read more

Can you remember back to a time when fizzy drinks weren’t maligned, but instead a rare treat? When you and your eagle-eyed siblings watched over the soda pouring ritual with great intent, studiously making sure the levels were equal, and that no one was preferred (by so much as a drop)? Read more

Chances are if you have had any discussions about migration in the past 12 months they have been about foreigners or Kiwis returning from Australia. But foreign migration is not the only cause of human traffic. Read more

Todd Treweek’s had a bad week. As the Herald reported on Wednesday, the Dunedin chef’s just been busted for his tenth parking offence. Read more

Everyone has heard a variant of the story of the student who goes to the guru in India to ask how long it will take to reach enlightenment. The guru says, “It often takes three or four years but, because you are working so hard at it, it will take 10.” There are lessons in this for the Labour Party. Read more

Talk to a teacher at a state school and most will tell you competition is a dirty word. When it comes to relationships between schools, cooperation rules. Read more

The festive season is well behind us, but this week I feel like the Grinch who stole Christmas. Like the Yuletide, this strikes annually. Read more

Reading the headlines, you might think the world is going to hell in a handcart. Once again there is carnage in global financial markets. Read more

If Donald Trump were seeking election in New Zealand, he’d have no need to promise a fence to keep out migrants. Nature has given us our own moat. Read more

A year ago this week, the John Key-led government was sworn in for its third term. This followed a remarkable election night victory, revealing voters had turned their backs on both Kim Dotcom and David Cunliffe’s lurch to the left. Read more

Last night, The New Zealand Initiative released a new book, New Zealand by Numbers. Its first aim is to counter the perception that New Zealand is a country riddled with problems. Instead, it celebrates positive developments within our nation that happen too slowly to make the headlines. Read more

Since the publication of The Spirit Level in 2009, and its ‘devastating critique’, The Spirit Level Delusion, in 2010, debates in the media and among politicians have been gripped by wealth inequality fever. The latest instalment is French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century – a book which is at the centre of its own maelstrom over the accuracy of its analysis. Read more

Last week the New Zealand Initiative joined the chorus of approval for Finance Minister Bill English’s sixth budget. And rightly so. Read more