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| Nick Clark | Senior Fellow | nick.clark@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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Local councillors often receive hundreds of pages of complex reports just days before critical votes, covering financial modelling, engineering specifications and legal implications. They get no independent advice or analytical resources beyond what they can assemble themselves. This creates a structural imbalance. Mostly part-time councillors face full-time administrative staff armed with legal, planning, and other technical expertise, institutional memory, and significantly more financial resources. The result is information asymmetry that weakens democratic oversight and leaves elected representatives struggling to fulfil their governance responsibilities. Many councillors report feeling overwhelmed by heavy workloads, intense pressure and public criticism. Attracting and retaining capable people is becoming increasingly difficult. Artificial intelligence offers a solution, not by replacing human judgment, but by strengthening councillors’ analytic capabilities. AI tools transform how people can process information. AI can generate plain-language summaries of documents in seconds. It can interrogate those documents, identify risks, suggest targeted questions, search the web for similar or different expert perspectives and more. Several New Zealand councils are already experimenting with AI. Hutt City Council says its staff saves 38 minutes daily through AI tools – equivalent to 20 working days annually per person. Auckland Council is launching an AI-powered digital assistant. Nelson City Council used AI to process thousands of public submissions effectively. These examples focus on administrative efficiency and customer service, which is excellent. So far missing, though, are AI tools to help elected representatives. They have the potential to strengthen democratic oversight. The question is whether there is the will to embrace them. Willingness and ability to use AI remain key barriers. New Zealanders are sceptical – A recent international survey showed New Zealand has the most public wariness about AI. Concerns about security and privacy risks, algorithmic bias, and over-reliance deserve attention, and councils must address them. AI is no substitute for councillors having foundational knowledge and experience. Councils will need to help their elected representatives use it wisely. Without change, the information asymmetry between elected representatives and staff will only worsen. Administrative staff will continue to drive local councils’ agendas and control the flow of information while councillors fall behind. It is time local leaders are equipped with smart tools that match the information age. Nick Clark’s research note, Smart Support for Councillors: AI Tools for Local Government, published on 12 June. |
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| Dr James Kierstead | Research Fellow | james.kierstead@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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These measures are sorely needed. There is now overwhelming evidence that we have a problem with academic freedom in this country. Readers who doubt this could consult the report I released last year, Unpopular Opinions: Academic Freedom in New Zealand. In its current form, the bill would require universities to have policies on freedom of expression, to set up an internal complaints procedure for those who feel their speech rights have been violated, and to report on the climate for free speech on their campus every year. All of this is very welcome. At the same time, the current draft of the bill lacks any mechanisms to ensure that universities comply with its provisions. In other words, the bill lacks teeth. Our submission, available on our website, attempts to give the bill teeth. Our model throughout was the United Kingdom’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. We recommend establishing an Academic Freedom Ombudsman (AFO) modelled on the UK’s Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom. The AFO would help ensure that universities comply with the law on academic freedom and advocate for academic freedom at the national level. We also suggest bolstering the complaints process, which as the bill stands would be run entirely by university managers. We suggest making it possible to appeal internal decisions to an external body appointed by the AFO, and for complainants to bring civil proceedings against universities for breaches of their duty to academic freedom. Finally, we suggest some minor changes to the wording, including strengthening and clarifying the provision for institutional neutrality. That this bill has been introduced at all is very heartening. In its current form, though, university managers may simply pay lip-service to it while undermining its true intent at every opportunity. Our recommendations would make sure that universities instead fulfil the obligations to academic freedom that they have ignored or gleefully contravened for far too long. |
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| Roger Partridge | Chair and Senior Fellow | roger.partridge@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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The theory supposedly claims that making the rich richer benefits everyone as wealth “trickles down.” It sounds plausible and feels unfair – making it the perfect villain. There’s just one problem. No economist ever proposed this theory. No Minister of Finance ever modelled it. Instead, the term was coined in 1932 by American humourist Will Rogers to mock Herbert Hoover’s policies during the Great Depression. It was satire, not scholarship. Yet somehow, the joke gained a life of its own. The latest in a long line to wrestle this phantom is Dr Neal Curtis, writing in Newsroom. An academic in critical theory rather than economics, he joins the chorus claiming New Zealand has been enslaved by the trickle-down idea since the 1980s reforms. Treasury officials must be confused: all those years managing budgets and analysing trade-offs when, apparently, they were just opening taps and waiting for the wealth to cascade. In reality, the critics have things backwards. Wealth doesn’t trickle down. It gets pulled up. Businesses prosper by convincing customers that their products are worth buying. Every dollar a company earns is a dollar someone chooses to spend. The rich don’t get money from the sky. They get it from us. Voluntarily. Workers prosper the same way – selling their labour to those who value it. Not trickling, but trading. Markets aren’t plumbing, where wealth flows downwards. They’re networks where money flows toward whatever people value most. These same critics also attack a more recent phantom: the Regulatory Standards Bill. This proposed law requires ministers to “please explain” when proposed reforms depart from basic principles like property rights and the rule of law. None of the principles are new. Yet the critics fear the Bill somehow threatens democracy. Like trickle-down, they have created a threat from thin air. How do these phantom theories come to life? Perhaps because some people are happier blaming imaginary monsters for economic problems than bothering to understand them. Phantoms are useful. Complex problems often require complex solutions. Blaming imaginary theories requires only imagination. When inequality rises, blame trickle-down. When wages stagnate, trickle-down again. It’s shadow-boxing at its finest. Trickle-down economics deserves recognition – as economics’ most successful bogeyman. Forever attacked, never defended, because there’s nobody home. It lives only in the minds of its critics, eternally irrigating grievances. Forever trickling. Forever false. |
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