I look at how the unpaid labour of dealing with the state falls for the most part on women, drawing on Herd and Moynihan’s theory of gendered burden and on what raising a child in Aotearoa demands of mothers. This is the fourth post in a series about what it actually costs to navigate the…

Review of the NZTA Compliance Response Framework (2026) DTK and Associates reviewed the NZTA Compliance Response Framework for the Director of Land Transport, as part of the Director’s programme of assurance reviews. The review used a literature review, a focus group, Q methodology with 35 participants from inside NZTA and the regulated sector, and follow-up…

I read the Ministry for Regulation’s first map of the 267 regulatory systems in Aotearoa through the administrative burden lens and ask what the map does not yet show, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The Ministry for Regulation has published its first comprehensive map of the regulatory landscape. It is called The State of New…

I look at how administrative burdens fall hardest on those with the fewest resources, and at recent research showing that public willingness to ease those burdens depends on judgements about who deserves help, with examples from Aotearoa. This is the third post in a series about what it actually costs to navigate the state, whether…

I go back to the founding 2015 article by Moynihan, Herd, and Harvey, set out its three costs and its argument that burden can be a political choice, and propose a fourth cost, the burden of impermanence. This is the second post in a series examining the real costs of dealing with the state in…

I open the series by asking whether the Ministry for Regulation’s focus on cutting compliance costs is the right frame, and I set out the three kinds of cost people bear when they deal with the state: learning, compliance and psychological. This series examines a deceptively simple question: what does it actually cost to navigate…

In this guest lecture at the University of Canterbury I draw on the evaluation of the Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund that Dr Lindsey Te Ata o Tū MacDonald and I completed for Te Puni Kōkiri. The fund reduced the learning, psychological and compliance costs on whānau, and we found that this did not happen by…

Independent Evaluation: Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund (2023) Te Puni Kōkiri commissioned DTK and Associates to complete an independent evaluation of the Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund, which invested $128.98 million between October 2021 and June 2022. Over that period the Māori first-dose vaccination rate rose from 69% to 91%, and the second-dose rate from 49% to…