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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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