Open Journal Systems at the Victoria University of Wellington Library
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The Housing Haves and Have-Nots: the house price boom and inequality of wealth in New Zealand
Get PDFThe rise in house prices since the turn of the millennium seems likely to have increased the inequality of wealth in New Zealand. On average, house-owners were wealthier than others before the boom, and during the boom real house prices more than doubled. Yet the available data shows little evidence of an increase in inequality in wealth or even of a growing proportional disparity between the net wealth of property owners and others. Difficulties in accurately measuring these changes in wealth are reviewed
New Zealand Retirement Income: Policy as an ‘Eco-system’
Get PDFThe New Zealand retirement income system involves a range of policy areas and initiatives beyond New Zealand Superannuation and KiwiSaver. These interact with each other, and with wider social and economic trends. The potential for prolonging working lives, self-funding/decumulation and trends in homeownership need to be considered alongside the sustainability of current policy settings. A unified policy approach is required to ensure the adequacy of retirement incomes for older people and also intergenerational equity
Wellbeing and Public Policy: Can New Zealand be a leading light for the wellbeing approach?
Get PDFDelegates left the Third International Conference on Wellbeing and Public Policy with great expectations following three days of inspirational addresses by some of the world’s most prominent thinkers and policymakers. In this article we ask: what is required for a wellbeing approach to public expenditure to be successfully implemented and sustained? The wellbeing approach arose out of concerns about whether the current suite of measures used by policymakers provides sufficient information on the full range of contributors to or components of the good life. Sometimes divided on what wellbeing is and how to measure it, proponents of the wellbeing approach agree that the ultimate goal of public policy should be to improve wellbeing for all citizens. In order for this wellbeing approach to be successful, we believe it must address three main challenges: measurement, representation and engagement. We must be clear about how wellbeing will be measured, whose wellbeing we will assess, and the extent to which all New Zealanders are represented in the conversations that will determine the first two issues
The wisdom of crowds versus the madness of crowds
Get PDFDeclining trust in northern liberal democratic institutions poses serious challenges to legislatures (parliaments). That mistrust extends to traditional media at a time when new digital media are fanning ‘fake news’ and a ‘madness of crowds’. Will the ‘wisdom of crowds’ on which liberal democracy critically depends prevail over the ‘madness’? Can parliaments resolve that tension positively? In New Zealand trust in political institutions is still high, but voter turnout has slid, especially among the young. Parliament has work to do
It Burns
Get PDFAn exploration of questions of indigeneity, the Left, art, and the relations between them.
 
Towards decolonising constitutionalism: An introduction
Get PDF2016 saw the publication of two important, but fundamentally divergent, works on Aotearoa New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements. Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Andrew Butler’s A Constitution for Aotearoa New Zealand and He Whakaaro Here Whakaumu Mō Aotearoa, the 2016 report of Matike Mai Aotearoa, the Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation. While Palmer and Butler’s vision is one of reforming and strengthening our current Westminster constitutional system, Matike Mai’s is one of transformational, creative change, in which there is room for tino rangatiratanga—substantive self-determination—to be realised. Here, after situating this work theoretically, I explore and contextualise these two texts as they represent, respectively, a modern ideal-typical Pākehā position on constitutionalism in Aotearoa New Zealand, and a critical, Māori constitutional discourse from which this orthodoxy can be interrogated. Through this comparison, I argue that Pākehā constitutional orthodoxy continues to talk past Māori constitutional aspirations because it fails to account for its own ideological and ontological biases, representing itself as occupying a space of reality and neutrality, rather than domination. Because this orthodoxy perceives tino-rangatiratanga claims through this lens of self-affirming bias, it perpetually misapprehends and mischaracterises these claims— as either seeking mere property and management rights (these being already constitutionally provided for), or, if something more substantial, as unrealistic, divisive, and extreme.
 
No Search Results in Fairness: Addressing Jurors' Independent Research in the 21st Century
Get PDFThe right to a fair trial is one of the fundamental pillars on which the criminal justice system stands. In the digital age of the 21st century, that pillar has increasingly come under siege due to the rise of the "Googling juror". In light of the recent proposals by the Law Commission to address this problem, this article does two things. It begins by investigating the reasons why jurors conduct independent research in the digital age, before proposing methods to prevent jurors from doing so. This article argues that jurors are researching in greater numbers than in the past due to cognitive changes to people's brains in the digital age. Those cognitive changes are the increasing use of the Internet as a transactive memory partner, people's need for instantaneous knowledge and people's reliance on the Internet for everyday needs. Given these findings, this article argues that the Law Commission's proposals are insufficient; to deal with the problem the judicial system must modernise. This article puts forward three proposals: deploying more technology in the courtroom, implementing a comprehensive system of judicial education and empowering jurors to ask more questions. It finally concludes that if the judicial system modernises, trial by jury can and should persist. 
International Law and the Practice of Legality: Stability and Change
Get PDFDrawing on the practice-turn in constructivism and in international relations (IR) theory more generally, we argue that a particular approach to managing stability and change is inherent in, and indeed characteristic of, legality and the rule of law in international as in domestic law. Our "interactional law" framework places particular emphasis on what we call the "practice of legality". This concept is central to understanding how law can both enable and constrain state actions, and why international law is a distinctive language of justification and contestation. In turn, the focus on stability and change is helpful because it directly confronts some of the persistent doubts and assumptions about international law, in particular in relation to international politics. Our work is animated by the intuition that the dominant views in IR and international law scholarship underestimate international law's capacity to mediate stability and change, in part because they focus on the surface of law (treaties, statutes and so on) and external factors (interests, enforcement). They neglect the deeper structure of what makes norms "law", and the distinctive practices that account for both its relative stability and its capacity for change
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