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| Roger Partridge | Chair and Senior Fellow | roger.partridge@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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The question at this week’s third nib-New Zealand Initiative Health Innovators’ Summit was: “What?” The answer was different from the two earlier conferences. In 2024 and 2025, the lesson had been “not to wait for government.” Lloyd McCann’s Tāmaki Health, our largest privately-owned primary-care network, was building team-based care across 52 clinics. Sir Bill English was championing the social-investment ventures, Manawanui and Impact Lab. The room had been told, in effect, that better operators would have to save the system. Both returned this year, but the conference mood had changed. Health Minister Simeon Brown opened with recent Government commitments Ezekiel Emanuel, the American health policy academic, told the room New Zealand was “solidly middle” by rich-country standards. The country did not need to spend vastly more, but to spend better – by fixing incentives, infrastructure and information. Hamiora Bowkett, the government-appointed Crown Observer at Health New Zealand, asked whether compulsory insurance, national, social or private, should fund more of the system. Most high-performing systems use compulsory insurance. New Zealand does not. Brent Pattison, the new CEO of Heritage Lifecare, argued for aged residential care as step-down infrastructure that eases hospital pressure. Claudia Wyss, a former health-sector chief executive, made the strongest structural case. She wanted a ring-fenced health levy modelled on ACC, insulating funding from annual budgets. And she wanted a review of the boundary between ACC and Health New Zealand, which funds patients with identical needs differently depending on whether their condition arose from an accident. Neither is something a primary-care network or aged-care provider can deliver. They are statutory questions only Parliament can answer. The bottom-up case has not weakened. But every entrepreneur in the room was operating inside funding arrangements not designed for the next forty years. A fifteen-minute primary-care consultation cannot be funded out of an eight-minute payment. An older New Zealander cannot insure herself in a market that prices her out. Two years ago, the room was excited about what entrepreneurs could achieve. This year, no one believed it would be enough. |
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| Dr Michael Johnston | Senior Fellow | michael.johnston@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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Tom decided to organise a conference for teachers like him. He wanted to promulgate effective, well-researched practice. In contrast to many education conferences, he only accepted presentations based on sound research evidence. It went so well that he started an organisation, researchED, to organise similar conferences around the world. Thirteen years and more than a hundred conferences later, the researchED movement has taken off. Tom has become an international authority on classroom management. In 2015, he was appointed advisor on school behaviour to the UK Department of Education. In 2018, The New Zealand Initiative hosted New Zealand’s first researchED conference at Auckland Grammar School. More than two hundred teachers and principals attended. Last Saturday, Long Bay College and the Initiative hosted New Zealand’s second researchED event. We were supported by a generous donation from Dame Jenny Gibbs. Education Minister Erica Stanford opened the conference, addressing more than five hundred attendees, a record for researchED events in Australasia. The fifteen speakers focused on evidence-informed practice to help teachers implement the Minister’s reforms. These include a knowledge-rich curriculum, teaching based on the science of learning, and structured literacy instruction in primary schools. Tom Bennett gave the first keynote address, sharing tips for classroom management. He quipped that much of his advice comes from his previous life managing unruly nightclub patrons in London’s Soho district. In the second keynote, Professor Pamela Snow from Melbourne’s La Trobe University presented evidence supporting structured literacy. Emeritus Professor James Chapman, New Zealand’s godfather of structured literacy, reinforced her message in his presentation. In addition to their sound advice, Professors Snow and Chapman gave well-deserved accolades to the many primary teachers who were present. They have already achieved an impressive uplift in five-year-olds’ basic reading skills. Other speakers included Distinguished Professor Gaven Martin from Massey University and Dr Helen Walls, New Zealand’s foremost expert on primary school writing. Both served on a Ministerial Advisory Group I chaired for Minister Stanford. I presented my own research showing that students benefit when the assessment for a subject gives students incentives to engage in effective learning behaviour. Several principals expressed enthusiasm for hosting future conferences at their own schools. researchED is now set to become a regular event in New Zealand. |
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| Dr Oliver Hartwich | Executive Director | oliver.hartwich@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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The joke gets longer when you learn the plot: two Martian auditors land in the Wairarapa expecting humanity at its best, are promptly fined for parking without consent, and proceed on a reluctant tiki tour of the country in the company of a Wellington bureaucrat named Ben, who has quietly decided his career is over and he may as well help them. What follows is a short excerpt, abridged, from my new novella The Martian Audit. The Martians are hovering above Auckland in their spacecraft. The ship’s navigation computer screamed. Invisible cones were piercing the sky above the city, extending from the volcanic summits to the sea.
“What is this?” Xylos demanded. “My sensors cannot identify their purpose.” The cones were legally defined but physically empty. No structures. No signals. No aircraft. Just geometry. “Those aren’t temples,” Ben said. “They’re viewshafts. We legally protect the ability to see certain volcanic cones from certain points in the city. If you build anything that interrupts the sightline, you get prosecuted.” Xylos processed this. “So the cones are protecting a view?” “Yes.” “Of a grass hill?” “Yes.” “From a specific observation point?” “Yes. Usually a spot on a motorway.” “And can citizens stop at this observation point to appreciate the protected view?” “No. Stopping is illegal. It’s a motorway.” Xylos was silent for a long moment. His visor flickered through several colours before settling on a pale, confused blue. “Ben. You have legally protected the ability to see a grass hill from a location where looking at it is prohibited. And the cone itself is empty. There is nothing inside it. You are not protecting a structure. You are protecting absence.” “We call it amenity value.” But the Martians are just getting started. Elsewhere they meet a doctor flying to Brisbane, an engineer in a caravan with a tarpaulin for a roof and a senior official whose talent is to absorb ideas and turn them into workshops. At the end they conclude that invasion is more trouble than it is worth and recommend invading Australia instead. Never mind their coffee is worse. Think tanks do not normally publish novels. German economists rarely write satire. Something had to give. Download your free copy of The Martian Audit from our website in PDF or EPUB for your e-book reader. |
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