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| Roger Partridge | Chair and Senior Fellow | roger.partridge@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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He has the wrong end of the stick. In 2024, Smith persuaded the Supreme Court to revive a claim the Court of Appeal had unanimously struck out. The Court of Appeal had said climate change is “quintessentially a matter that calls for a sophisticated regulatory response at a national level supported by international co-ordination.” Parliament had already provided that response: the Emissions Trading Scheme, the Climate Change Response Act, and a framework of emissions targets and reporting obligations covering most of the economy. Whether that framework goes far enough is a political question. New Zealanders can vote for a government that strengthens it, or for one that does not. That is democracy. Smith wanted the High Court to impose legal liability under a tort of “damage to the climate system,” never recognised anywhere in the common law world. The Court of Appeal had unanimously held that existing law could not support his claim. Smith wanted the courts to invent law that did. That is not democracy. It is the opposite of democracy. Judges are appointed, not elected, and cannot be removed by voters. The Supreme Court does not face an electorate at the next election. Parliament does. Parliament is sovereign and the democratic branch of government. It can hear submissions, take expert advice, and weigh costs and benefits. Courts hear two parties about one dispute. When Parliament legislates to stop the courts from inventing new categories of legal liability on issues Parliament has already legislated about, it is exercising the function that democracy gives it. Smith complains that “if Parliament can cancel a live court case, then no legal claim is secure at all, once it becomes politically inconvenient.” This, too, has it backwards. Parliament is not cancelling any claim that the existing law supports. It is declining to allow the courts to develop a new claim that the law does not support. The courts will continue to apply the law of tort to nuisance, negligence, and every other established cause of action. What they will not do is invent a new one on an issue Parliament has already addressed. Doing otherwise would be an affront to democracy. |
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| Nick Clark | Senior Fellow | nick.clark@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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Last week’s announcement by Ministers Simon Watts and Chris Bishop continues this approach. Councils will have three months to submit proposals to merge themselves or risk a government-led process that could impose mergers on them. The choice is framed as ‘flexibility’ but it is really Hobson’s choice – accept amalgamation or be forced into it. Either pathway would produce fewer, larger councils. The premise is that 78 councils are too many for a country of our size. International evidence does not clearly support this. Switzerland has 2,100 communes with a population of 8.7 million. Denmark, after its 2007 consolidation programme, retained 98 municipalities for a population of 5.7 million. New Zealand is the fourth-most consolidated country in the OECD, with one council per 74,000 residents, compared with Switzerland's one per 4,000. The government's own Infrastructure Commission examined the efficiency case for amalgamation in 2022. Its report, Does Size Matter?, found no simple relationship between council size and cost efficiency. Instead, it suggested the right size depends on function, geography, and delivery model. Auckland provides a cautionary tale. The Super City was formed in 2010 out of a regional council, four city councils, and three district councils. Post-amalgamation savings evaporated within a few years and Auckland’s operating expenditure per capita soon returned to around the national average. Its 2025 voter turnout was a dismal 29 percent, indicating widespread disengagement. The New South Wales state government attempted a similar reform exercise in 2016-17, proposing to force 152 councils into 112. Strong local opposition led to political and judicial decisions reversing several of the forced mergers. I am currently preparing a report for the Initiative outlining an alternative – that more local democracy works better than less, with more and smaller councils (or at least beefed-up local boards within merged councils). These should be aligned with communities of interest, making decisions and undertaking functions best placed at a local level. If regional councils are abolished, locals should be able to establish elected bodies dedicated to specific purposes, like we had prior to 1989. A localist approach must come with stronger accountability, including real authority for elected members over their bureaucracies. This would help distinguish genuine local democracy from what years of consolidation and bureaucratic sprawl have produced. New Zealand’s local government problems are real, but fewer, larger councils are not the answer. |
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| Dr Michael Johnston | Senior Fellow | michael.johnston@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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Physics students of lesser intellect struggle with the intricacies of Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. Many would give their eye teeth for some help from the great man himself. They need struggle no longer. Einstein has been reincarnated as an agentic AI. Created by young Indian tech entrepreneur Advait Paliwal, agentic Einstein will help – not only with physics, but with any subject. Einstein is designed to interface with Canvas, a popular online learning platform used by many universities in New Zealand and around the world. Students give agentic Einstein their Canvas login details and Einstein does the rest. It attends online lectures, reads assigned research papers, and participates in discussion forums. Best of all, Einstein does a first-rate job on course assessments, all but guaranteeing top marks to even the most indolent and dim-witted students. That frees their time to engage in more productive activities, like scrolling TikTok and litigating minor grievances online. Some old-school educators are opposed to agentic Einstein. They say that if students don’t do the work for themselves, they won’t learn anything. That attitude misses the point. In modern youth parlance, learning is ‘just so twentieth century.’ In the age of agentic AI, education is not about learning. Employers simply need to know that graduates are clever enough to outsource their thinking to AI. At a time when many university students can barely read or write, an A+ grade is a reliable indicator of proficiency with AI. Far from being banned, tools like Einstein should be made compulsory. Having said that, those Luddite educators may have a pesky point. Despite being a genius, when it came to his school studies, the real Einstein was a typical teenage boy – defiant and inclined to take shortcuts. Given the chance to use a tool like agentic Einstein, the real Einstein would probably have jumped at it. Had he done so, he may never have acquired the knowledge he needed to complete his great work. Einstein’s work on quantum theory was vital to the development of transistors and semiconductors, essential components of modern computers. So, if the real Einstein had used agentic Einstein, agentic Einstein may never have been invented. |
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