The Fast-Track Approvals Bill enables cabinet ministers to circumvent key environmental planning and protection processes for infrastructure projects. Its difficulties have been well canvassed. This column suggests a different way of thinking about the proposal. I am going to explore the Bill from the perspective of its proponents with their focus on short-term material output…
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‘It has been said that figures rule the world. Maybe. I am quite sure that it is figures which show us whether it is being ruled well or badly.’ Goethe I was struck at a recent conference on equity for the elderly, how many presenters implicitly relied upon Statistics New Zealand. We take SNZ for…
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Is the economy in another long stagnation? If so, why? This is about the time that the Treasury will be locking up its economic forecasts to be published in the 2024 Budget Economic and Fiscal Update (BEFU) on budget day, 30 May. I am not privy to what they will be (I will report on them in…
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Introductory Notes for Brightstar Seminar: The Delivering Equity for Older People in New Zealand Grand Millennium Hotel, Auckland on Apr 30 & May 1, 2024 Thankyou for the invitation to contribute to this panel. About twenty years ago, Suzie Carson and I were investigating wellbeing via the Household Economic Survey. We got what at first…
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It is all very well cutting the backrooms of public agencies but it may compromise the frontlines. One of the frustrations of the Productivity Commission’s 2017 review of universities is that while it observed that their non-academic staff were increasing faster than their academic staff, it did not bother to analyse the trend. In today’s…
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Commentary on Malcolm McKinnon’s Poverty and Progress in New Zealand: thoughts on WB Sutch’s work in historical and intellectual context. Stout Research Centre, 24 April, 2024 When Bill Sutch was first told by his physician that he had advanced terminal cancer, he responded ‘that can’t possibly be true, I have far too much to do’….
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One Could Reduce Child Poverty At No Fiscal Cost Following the Richardson/Shipley 1990 ‘redesign of the welfare state’ – which eliminated the universal Family Benefit and doubled the rate of child poverty – various income supplements for families have been added, the best known being ‘Working for Families’, introduced in 2005. The result of the…
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There is a constant theme from the economic commentariat that New Zealand needs to lift its economic growth rate, coupled with policies which they are certain will attain that objective. Their prescriptions are usually characterised by two features. First, they tend to be in their advocate’s self-interest. Second, they are unbacked by any systematic empirical…
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Do we treat the government finances with the common sense that household’s manage theirs? It is a commonly held view that we should treat the government as if it is a prudent household. We don’t when it comes to its debt. Currently the government says it wants to constrain its net debt to between 20…
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Budget tensions are becoming evident within the Coalition Government. Winston Peters made numerous political points in his speech to the NZF annual conference. But the attack on his own government’s fiscal policies raised issues of substance. ‘Today in the Sunday Star Times, journalist and former advisor to the Labour Government, Vernon Small, refers to the…
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Note written for circulation in March 2024 There’s almost no issue on which outgoing Labour MP and former Finance Minister Grant Robertson would find agreement with former National and Act leader Don Brash. But when Robertson was asked during his exit interview with the Herald whether he thought it was worth considering Brash’s idea of…
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Is she hinting that the Coalition Government will have to back down on key promises it made in Opposition? The Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, is telling an evolving story about her fiscal challenges. In Opposition she was confident that she could deliver her promised income tax cuts. Appointed minister, she reported the (Treasury) ‘books’…
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This note was to try to clarify my thinking about what was going on in WP’s speech to the party on Sunday 17 March. It was, of course, a speech to the NZF annual conference which makes numerous political points – some valid. But the attack on his government’s tax policies is something in addition….
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What seemed a booming success a couple of years ago has collapsed into fraud convictions. I looked at the crash of FTX (short for ‘Futures Exchange’) in November 2022 to see whether it would impact on the financial system as a whole. Fortunately there was barely a ripple, probably because it was too small and…
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Note written for circulation in March 2024 This note explores housing tenure in the part of the distribution where the poverty line is, defining the line by the SNZ material hardship indicator. The note does not explore the AHC income-expenditure measure,[1] partly because there are insufficient observations but mostly because, as explained in the appendix,…
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The Government says it will give localities more control over healthcare decisions. But how? New Zealand’s political reflex is that any problem can be resolved by further centralisation. Students will be officially banned from having cell phones at school from Term 2. The decision could have been left to individual schools. Each knows a lot…
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Not so much from a lack of nominal income but from rising mortgage interest rates The just released Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) estimates child poverty for the year ending June 2023 show the proportions of children on nine different poverty measures are higher than they were in the June 2022 ending year. SNZ warns that…
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The Sorry Story of Earthquake-Prone Buildings. The Treasury requires that when new or amended legislation is proposed, a Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS) be provided – ‘a high-level summary of the problem being addressed, the options and their associated costs and benefits, the consultation undertaken, and the proposed arrangements for implementation and review’. In its hurry…
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Public policy towards tobacco consumption remains politically sensitive. In 1983, a young researcher was told by a medium-level Treasury official that Treasury policy was to abandon excise duties on tobacco. The senior Treasury economist that I consulted, famed for his commonsense, snorted ‘we need the money’. He explained that no-excise-duty was the ambition of a…
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This is a background to my column ‘Te Tiriti as a Social Contract’. (February 2024) In 1956, historian Ruth Ross presented her investigations of the treaty signed at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 to a seminar concluding, ‘The [Māori and Pakeha] signatories of 1840 were uncertain and divided in their understanding of [Te Tiriti’s] meaning;…
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