Some kind press

Philip Matthews provides a kind write-up about me in the weekend's Dominion Post and Christchurch Press. An excerpt:

As one of the New Zealand Initiative's ancestors was the Business Roundtable, it is sometimes called a Right-wing think tank. Crampton would rather say they "like market-oriented solutions". He cites a report on interest-free student loan policies that recommended shifting money spent on subsidies for mostly rich kids into better tertiary preparation for poor kids.

"I thought that was a very Left-wing recommendation to stop giving money to privileged people and put it where it's going to do good for people who don't have as much. I prefer to think of it as just looking for policy solutions that work."

Politics can become bogged down in short-term thinking based on voter appeal and what is expected from party affiliations. It tends to be binary and reactive. People in think tanks like this one are public intellectuals who can step past those political boundaries, and it is telling that one of Crampton's key influences and close mentors when he taught at Canterbury University was the late Denis Dutton, another North American contrarian and original thinker.

Dutton was more famous for what he did outside the university than what he did within it. In other words, he was acting as a critic and conscience of society, which is harder than ever in the current tertiary environment. Putting ideas out there and appearing in the media to discuss or defend them is "not in the normal nature of an academic department," Crampton says. He has found he can have more direct impact on government in his current role than he ever did as an academic staffer.

Canterbury was his first academic job after graduate school at George Mason University in Washington DC. Before that, he studied at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. New Zealand's relaxed regulatory environment appealed to a classical liberal who stands for political and civil liberties and limited government.

The piece ran as a full-page B.3 spread in the Dom; advantages of a slow summer news season.