Tonight we’re launching our latest report: In the Zone. We there make the case for an improved localism.
New Zealand government is highly centralised. Local government has remit over relatively little. That, by itself, is not necessarily a problem – reasonable people can disagree about how much devolution is really a good idea. But we are missing out on one big advantage of federal systems like America and Canada. In federal systems, different provinces or states can try out different policies and learn from each others’ successes and failures. Those are always limited by the powers that the provinces have relative to central government, but that kind of learning can work. When America embarked on welfare reform in the mid-1990s, it explicitly harnessed its ability to run 50 different state-level experiments to find out what worked. New Zealand’s policy reforms instead hit all, or none.
We suggest using existing…
View original post 377 more words
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments