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| Dr Michael Johnston | Senior Fellow | michael.johnston@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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Australia was not alone. There was an international rush to adopt digital technology in classrooms. Principals were afraid their schools would be left behind. Eyewatering sums were spent on replacing pens and paper with keyboards and screens. Now, many jurisdictions are suffering from buyers’ remorse. Research increasingly shows that digitising classrooms does nothing to improve learning. Overreliance on technology actively harms it. Analyses of international test data have shown negative educational effects when digital technology is used intensively in classrooms. Neuropsychological research shows that children taught handwriting tend to become better readers than those who rely on keyboards. These are just two of many examples. Guided by findings like these, many policymakers now seek to limit technology use in classrooms. Some countries, including New Zealand, have banned cell phones in schools. Others are reducing the amount of time students spend on devices. Now we stand at the threshold of a new technological revolution in education – generative AI. Once again, techno-utopians are excited. And once again, educators fear being left behind. When Rudd announced his revolution, there was little research on the educational impact of digital technology. This time around, there will be no excuse. There is already enough research on the educational harm generative AI can cause to justify extreme caution before letting it loose in schools. In one study, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that AI use can reduce students’ brain engagement with academic tasks. Experimental participants asked to use AI to write essays were compared with others who used only internet searches or no technology at all. Brain scans of the AI users showed lower neural connectivity in areas associated with memory and creativity than the other two groups. This comes as no surprise. Nearly two years ago, a New Zealand Initiative report, Welcome to the Machine, warned that allowing students to use AI for tasks they had not yet learned to do for themselves would inhibit learning. Policymakers would do well to heed the lessons of history. Like any technology, AI can be used for good and ill. Its adoption should be guided by evidence, not by fear of missing out. |
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| Roger Partridge | Chair and Senior Fellow | roger.partridge@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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But that is what the Bank is now attempting. It wants banks to establish more than 1,200 cash service sites across the country, at an estimated annual cost of $104 million. An 84-page consultation document details coverage maps and cost projections. What it conspicuously lacks is a legal basis for any of it. This is not a grey area. Parliament had the opportunity to grant the Reserve Bank powers to compel banks to provide cash services. It chose not to. The Bank pressed on regardless. Its consultation opened in February. When questions arose about its authority, it extended the submission deadline to July. On Sunday, three days after the original deadline passed, Reserve Bank Governor Anna Breman appeared on TVNZ’s Q+A. Jack Tame asked whether the Bank has the power to do what it proposes. Breman could not confirm it. She promised an answer “within a couple of weeks.” A regulator that cannot tell the public whether its own proposal is lawful has more than a timing problem. It has a problem of overreach. The Reserve Bank could not compel banks to run postal services from their branches. It could not order them to sell insurance or open cafes. Everyone can see why: these things have nothing to do with the Bank’s job. Telling banks where to place their cash access points is no different in principle. It is just less obviously absurd, which makes it more dangerous. Governor Breman has said she hopes banks will set up a voluntary scheme for rural cash services. But how voluntary is a scheme your regulator is pushing you into? When the institution that grants your banking licence expresses a “hope,” banks know that hope carries weight no ordinary suggestion does. The Reserve Bank is operationally independent from politics for good reason. But that independence comes with a condition: the Bank must stay within the boundaries Parliament chooses to give it. A central bank that rejects those boundaries is not independent. It is unaccountable. Finance Minister Nicola Willis should be asking how this consultation went out without anyone first checking the Bank’s legal authority. That was a governance failure. It needs to be put right. |
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| Nick Clark | Senior Fellow | nick.clark@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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Since the 1850s, this exercise required statisticians to ask every person in the country where they live, how many people they live with, what languages they speak, what faiths, if any, they observe, and much more. The results were invaluable but increasingly expensive. The 2023 census cost $326 million, roughly $63 per person counted, assuming they were counted, which not all of them were. Naturally, the solution is not to improve the census. Rather, it is to stop asking people things and instead look up what government agencies already know about them. Then publish the results every year. Then call it a census. Previously New Zealand had one census every five years. From 2030, it will have one every year. The mathematics speak for themselves, though whether the mathematics reflect the actual population is a separate question, which the legislation addresses by not addressing it. What the new annual census will not do is count households. Administrative records track individuals, and individuals, when they go home at night, become administratively invisible. The government knows a great deal about you. It knows rather less about who you are having dinner with. This gap is flagged as unresolved by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development in the regulatory documents supporting the Bill. It is resolved in the Bill itself through the mechanism of not appearing in the Bill. People who interact less frequently with government systems will now be estimated rather than counted. These tend to be precisely the people most in need of accurate counting. The government suggests this is an opportunity for tailored solutions, to be developed in due course. The traditional census addressed such problems through door-knocking backed by legal compulsion. That, too, is being repealed. Former Government Statistician Len Cook has compared administrative data to driving by the rear-vision mirror. The government's elegant refinement is to remove the mirror entirely, confirm that the view was always adequate and classify the result as an improvement in visibility. The 2023 census, imperfect, under-resourced, the last of its kind, will anchor the new system until 2031. Every year, without fail, New Zealand will know approximately where it stands. |
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