Business Thinker
Last Year – 21
From Calling time on the Commerce Commission to lambasting the government over its Covid response, reform agenda and Three Waters proposal have ensured that former Bell Gully executive chair Roger Partridge has elevated his public position as a significant opinion-maker through his role at the New Zealand Initiative where he has an ability to highlight issues that most might otherwise miss.
The Initiative’s report on the regulators, issued first in 2018 (Who Guards the Guards?) and then in 2022 (Reassessing the regulators: The Good, the Bad and the Commerce Commission) ensures that Partridge’s NZI has lifted the country’s critique of its institutions.
Co-founding the think tank the New Zealand Initiative he has been at the forefront of dealing with issues confronting the continued development of New Zealand economic and social institutions and effectiveness, heightened recently by his views on the need to deal more effectively with the pandemic.
Partridge has presided over a public policy think tank that has articulated many of the concerns that often fail to see the light of day with a roster of business, policy and economic viewpoints from its membership who have pronounced upon a range of issues that hold New Zealand back, including Partridge’s view on the way the government has handled – or mishandled – the Delta lockdown crisis.
Described as Senior Fellow and Chairman of the New Zealand Initiative, he led Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014, after 16 years as a commercial litigation partner. He was also executive director of the Legal Research Foundation, a charitable foundation associated with the University of Auckland.
