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
As 2022 draws to a close, it is clear the Government's May 2022 'Immigration reset' is not working. Skills shortages and immigration settings remain at the top of chief executives' list of concerns in the Herald's recent Mood of the Boardroom survey. Read more
No one can doubt the importance of military credibility in deterring hostile aggressors. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, even a pacifist post-World War II Germany and the previously neutral Nordic countries have learned that lesson. Read more
Fair Pay Agreements have been passed into law amidst a fiery debate in parliament. Legislation for the agreements passed its final reading in Parliament last night - making it easier for workers to band together and negotiate better conditions and pay. Read more
This week’s third-quarter inflation figure from Statistics NZ underlines what a mess the Minister of Finance and the Reserve Bank have made of monetary policy. Inflation may have peaked at 7.3%. Read more
Businesses should brace for next week’s return of the Government’s Fair Pay Agreements Bill. The Bill had its first reading in April. Read more
Mike Hosking discusses Roger Partridge's NZ Herald column on protecting highly productive soils. Read more
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman once quipped that David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage defined who counts as an economist. Because every economist understands comparative advantage and its related notion of "opportunity cost" and practically nobody else does. Read more
Every New Zealander has a stake in the performance of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. As we have seen this year, if the Bank gets monetary policy settings wrong, it can trigger inflation, pushing up the cost of living and causing stress for consumers and businesses alike. Read more
Like a slowly downloading webpage, is a whole-of-government strategy to solve the interminable housing crisis starting to take shape? Recent reports predict house prices nationwide could fall from their late 2021 peaks by up to 20%. Read more
Last month, Ireland taught the All Blacks a thing or two about rugby. Yet New Zealand has even more to learn from the Irish about productivity and prosperity. Read more
A time traveller from the end of the last millennium could be forgiven for thinking the 21st-century world has lost its way. At the end of last century, even the most uncharitable could only marvel at humanity's progress. Read more
New Zealand has been living with the prospect of a return to compulsory, sector-wide collective bargaining for nearly half a decade. Labour campaigned on its so-called ‘Fair Pay Agreement’ policy in 2017. Read more
The GFC had many casualties. In New Zealand, one was the former Securities Commission. Read more
Commercial regulatory agencies wield enormous power. They can take away a business’s licence to operate; impose restrictions on how it operates; and take enforcement action by exercising powers of interrogation, search and seizure that the police can only dream of. Read more
The Commerce Commission is losing the respect of the business community and its system of governance needs overhauling, says the New Zealand Initiative think tank in a new report released this morning. To read more click here. Read more