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Insights 22: 19 June 2025
The Australian: Dr Oliver Hartwich on the dangers of abandoning transparency
 
NZ Herald: Roger Partridge on why bigger budgets don't equal better performance
 
Newsroom: Dr Eric Crampton on rethinking land use beyond primary production
Learning from the Dutch
Dr Oliver Hartwich | Executive Director | oliver.hartwich@nzinitiative.org.nz
Next week, The New Zealand Initiative will take more than three dozen business leaders to the Netherlands. Why the Netherlands? 

Our international delegations visit small, successful economies. After three previous visits to Switzerland, Denmark and Ireland, we now turn to the Dutch. 

Both New Zealand and the Netherlands are maritime economies with strong agricultural sectors. But the similarities end there. 

Dutch workers produce nearly twice as much per hour as Kiwis. They are supported by almost double the capital intensity – that is, investment in machinery and infrastructure per worker.  

The Netherlands’ productivity is not down to luck. It is the result of decades of deliberate policy choices about improving, making themselves a more attractive economy, and mobilising enormous amounts of capital.  

Consider regulation. Twenty years ago, the Netherlands did something radical. Instead of talking about cutting red tape, they first measured it. They calculated the exact costs of dealing with all the forms Dutch businesses had to fill in regularly. That gave them a baseline. 

The Dutch government then set itself a target to reduce compliance costs by 25% within four years. They achieved it, saving the economy €4 billion annually.  

The Dutch also excel at turning constraints into opportunities. Living below sea level forced water management mastery. Now, they are exporting their expertise globally.  

Limited land availability made the Dutch agricultural innovators, feeding millions from a country smaller than Canterbury.  

They capitalised on their advantages, too. Rotterdam leveraged its position to make its port a gateway to Europe. 

Our delegation will explore these Dutch successes first-hand. We will see Rotterdam’s automated terminals where driverless cranes work continuously. We will visit Wageningen’s “Food Valley”, where startups reimagine agriculture and technology. We will have a guided tour of a facility in Utrecht that captures heat from wastewater.  

Critics might argue that different contexts make direct policy transfer impossible. But that would be missing the point. 

We do not go out into the world to copy individual policies. Instead, we want to understand the underlying philosophies and approaches. The Swiss taught localism. Denmark showed us infrastructure efficiency. Ireland demonstrated what openness to foreign investment can do.  

Each of our previous visits expanded our imagination. We hope next week’s visit will do the same, giving us new insights that could help transform New Zealand’s future. 

We will let you know what we learn on our return. 
What to do about teaching?
Dr Michael Johnston | Senior Fellow | michael.johnston@nzinitiative.org.nz
For two decades, New Zealand’s school education system has been in a death spiral.  

In 2007, the Ministry of Education adopted a curriculum bereft of knowledge. A few years earlier it had implemented NCEA, an unorthodox ‘standards-based’ approach to school qualifications. NCEA encourages fragmented teaching and rewards superficial learning. 

Around the same time, Teachers Colleges were absorbed by the universities. The universities’ initial teacher education (ITE) programmes do not prepare new teachers well for the profession. Trainees have too little classroom experience during their training. The quality of the professional mentoring they receive is highly variable. The coursework focusses on the wrong things. 

Data, both domestic and international, demonstrate the dismal consequences. Our young people are less literate and numerate, and generally less knowledgeable, than they were 20 years ago. 

Education Minister Erica Stanford is on a mission to turn things around. A new, knowledge-rich curriculum is on the way. Work is being undertaken to reform NCEA. 

Improving ITE will be more difficult. The Minister cannot simply decree reform. Two key institutions are beyond her direct control. 

Universities have academic freedom. Politicians cannot dictate the content of their courses – and that includes ITE programmes. If universities want to include ineffective literacy instruction methods in their ITE, they can do so. The Minister cannot stop them. 

That brings us to The Teaching Council. To register as a teacher, ITE graduates must meet the Council’s Standards for the Teaching Profession.  

Ideally, the Standards would incentivise universities to improve their ITE programmes. If they required teachers to demonstrate effective classroom instruction, for example, universities would have to ensure their graduates could do so. 

Unfortunately, the teaching standards provide no such incentive. They are vague and are not rigorously assessed. And again, there is little the Minister can do about it. Most of the Teaching Council membership is elected by the teaching profession. 

An amendment to the Education and Training Act, currently before select committee, will begin to move things in the right direction. The amendment will require the Teaching Council to consult the Minister before changing teaching standards. This is only a minor change, but it puts the Council on notice. 

The Minister is right to tread carefully. Overtly politicising teachers’ professional standards would be a mistake. She has taken the curriculum by storm, but with teacher education, a softly-softly approach is more likely to yield durable results.  
The demise of a Wellington icon
Dr Bryce Wilkinson | Senior Fellow | bryce.wilkinson@nzinitiative.org.nz
Minister Chris Bishop has swung his ministerial wrecking ball at Wellington. He will strip the Gordon Wilson Flats of its heritage protection. At last, the bulldozers can begin.  

What a loss to world culture this will be. Forget Paris, Cairo or Rome. For over a decade Wellington has been conserving its own decaying monument to another time.  

Workers lugged giant stones across desert sands to build the Egyptian pyramids. Wellington achieved its own monolithic effect with prefabricated concrete, and a harbour view as a bonus.  

Rome’s Pantheon boasts a perfect dome crowned with exquisite geometry. It draws pilgrims from around the globe. Our local slab honours bureaucracy with a stolid cuboid. It draws graffiti artists and pigeons from across metropolitan Wellington.  

Istanbul’s majestic Hagia Sophia bridges Christian and Islamic civilisation in layers of brick, marble and mosaic. Our flats bridge nothing, but their deserted corridors and broken windows form wind tunnels that provide spiritual resonance with our windy city. 

Windsor Castle grandly commands the Thames with turrets, ramparts and royal banners. The flats ordain The Terrace with rust stains and sheets of fluttering polythene.  

In the US, Lady Liberty lifts a beacon to immigrants and poets yearning to breathe free. The flats lift poles to scaffolding while poets yearn to breathe elsewhere. Liberty’s copper patina ages gracefully, while Gordon Wilson’s rusty steel reinforcement ─ just ages.  

Tourists queue for selfies in front of the Eiffel Tower while seagulls vie for nesting rights atop Gordon Wilson. 

Architects study Barcelona’s La Sagrada Familia, which blooms upward like ocean coral, vibrant with faith and wonder. In Wellington, bio-hazard officers and earthquake engineers can study the Wilson flats. Others might run sweepstakes on what the next strong wind will blow away. 

Heritage NZ may mourn the passing of our heritage icon. Those who care about the rights of building owners and the need for useful assets will rejoice, albeit with irritation at the wanton waste. The rest will just be glad to see the end of an embarrassing eyesore.  

But the red tape gridlock that created and perpetuated this situation remains in place. Bowling derelict buildings should not require the intercession of a Minister of the Crown. RMA reform will fail if it does not significantly strengthen private property rights. 
 
On The Record
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