An Infrastructure Commission report says we are keeping up with infrastructure better than we might have thought from the grumbling. But the challenge of providing for the future remains. I was astonished to learn that the quantity of our infrastructure has been keeping up with economic growth. Your paper almost certainly has daily reports of…
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This is a response to Jim Wilson’s account to his spiritual journey related in ‘From Yahweh to Papatuanuku: My Long Road Home’. His is a far richer and more interesting story than mine. I’d summarise myself as child of the Enlightenment or – perhaps more accurately– the eighth-plus grandchild of the Enlightenment. I also describe…
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Hardly anyone says what are ‘the principles of the treaty’. The courts’ interpretation restrain the New Zealand Government. While they about protecting a particular community, those restraints apply equally to all community in a liberal democracy – including a single person. Treaty principles were introduced into the governance of New Zealand by the Treaty of Waitangi Act…
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.AUKUS is a backward-looking policy. The World needs to move forward. Economists think that the more interconnected countries are by trade and investment, the less likely warfare will occur between them. On many occasions countries have consciously intensified those interconnections as an alternative to war. Examples include the federation of the American states into the…
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The underlying economics of the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill rests on intellectual property rights. I have written elsewhere about the tension between information as a public good which economic efficiency requires to be freely available and yet, because it is costly to produce, may require payment to those who create the information. Any practical resolution of…
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The claim that there are currently 14 layers of management at Health New Zealand, raises wider issues of how we organise systems. I want to write a column about current proposals to redisorganise Health New Zealand but, frustratingly, the Coalition Government has not released evidence of its claim that the successor to the District Health…
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David Seymour describing himself as an ‘old-fashioned lefty’ caused a flurry in the commentariat. The responses were not always informed. One thought he was saying he was a Marxist. In fact it is relatively recent when Marxism became an important strain on New Zealand’s left. Our Communist Party formed only in 1921, after the rise…
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‘New Zealand international Review’, July/August 2024, Vol 49. No 4, pp.19-20. I recall thinking when the ‘Agreement between New Zealand and Singapore on a Closer Economic Partnership’ (ANZSEP) was signed in 2001 that an agreement between the two tiny economies was a bit of a squib. In fact The deal has proved a cracker, providing…
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New Zealand is again having to reconcile conflicting pressures from its military and its trade interests. Should we join Pillar Two of AUKUS and risk compromising our markets in China? For a century after New Zealand was founded in 1840, its external security arrangements and external economics arrangements were aligned. Britain, then the international hegemon,…
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The Minister of Housing’s ambition is to reduce markedly the ratio of house prices to household incomes. If his strategy works it would transform the housing market, dramatically changing the prospects of housing as an investment. Leaving aside the Minister’s metaphor of ‘flooding the market’ I do not see how the announced strategy is going…
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Whether Britain leaving the European Union was right or wrong, good or bad is for the Brits to decide. But there are lessons about international trade to be learned from Brexit, especially as it is very unusual for an economy to break so completely from its major training partner. In Econ101 we are taught Ricardo’s…
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If you don’t understand how things work you make foolish mistakes. To explain how the government got into its cancer drugs muddle, we need to explain first how New Zealand’s pharmaceutical purchasing system works. There is a parallel between Pharmac and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. The Government sets the monetary policy framework with…
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Evaluating the impact of social policies will be very difficult but the government does not seem to be doing much real evaluation. A couple of terms that have recently become fashionable are ‘cost-benefit analysis’ (CBA) and ‘social-investment analysis’ (SIA), typically proposed by people who have never done either. They sound good but have their limitations….
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Mainstreaming need not be inherently anti-Māori. It will be if it is done badly because it will be anti-those-in need, and proportionally more of them are Māori. That the Coalition Government says it will deliver public services on the basis of need rather than, say, race deserves consideration, even though many will jump unthinkingly to…
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Since 2008 Statistics New Zealand has measured material hardship in households with seventeen questions in the Household Economic Survey. This note reports on my brief exploration.[1] The Unit of Measurement The hardship questions are asked of a household and responses are reported on that base. The data reported below is by individuals so a household…
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What does Budget 2024 tell us about the current government? Muddle on? Coalition governments are not new. About 50 percent of the time since the first MMP election, there has been a minority government, usually with allied parties holding ministerial portfolios outside cabinets. For 10 percent of the time there was a majority government and…
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There was no less razzamatazz about the 2024 Budget than about earlier ones. Once again the underlying economic analysis got lost. It deserves more attention. Just to remind you, the Budget Economic and Fiscal Update (BEFU), is the Treasury’s independent assessment and so can be analysed by other competent economists (although they may disagree with…
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How to run a successful pressure group. In 2013 a group of idealists, led by Jordan Williams and David Farrar, established the Taxpayers’ Union. To celebrate its first decade as surely New Zealand’s most successful political pressure group NZTU published The Mission: The Taxpayers Union at 10, ten short interviews (by David Cohen) of people associated…
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The 2018 Social Security Act suggests that Labour may have retreated to the minimalist (neo-liberal) welfare state which has developed out of the Richardson-Shipley ‘redesign’. One wonders what Michael Joseph Savage, Peter Fraser and Walter Nash would have thought of the Social Security Act passed by the Ardern Labour Government in 2018. Its principles were…
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This was written to clarify m y think, and has been shared around. May 2024 version) The background to this note is that by early 2024 the ‘principles of the treaty’ (i.e. Te Tiriti o Waitangi) was a political hotpoint. The most public was ACT’s proposal to have a referendum on the treaty principles.[1] The…
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