Where does the grumpiness threatening the nation’s stability come from? Why is everybody so grumpy? Politically grumpy, I mean. Not just in New Zealand; Australia, the US, Britain, much of the rest of Europe all have a restlessness which is indicated by dissenting populist parties. The political fragmentation is on the left and the right….
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There is insufficient support for neoliberal economic policies so political parties of the hard right are adopting populist causes. To succeed the neoliberal revolution of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson had to change the culture of New Zealanders from their belief that the government was usually the solution to a problem to a society which…
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Understanding its history helps understanding where it is going. The ideas which underpin Kiwisaver entered into the New Zealand political dialogue in the late 1960s when the Labour Party, then in opposition, was looking at how to progress the welfare state. It observed that many European nations had occupationally based, earnings-related retirement pensions funded by…
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The column focuses only on the business activities of Ron Brierley Brierley’s main impact in New Zealand was in the 1970s and early 1980s, which was a strange time for the New Zealand economy. Its business was far from dynamic; it was said that the most successful New Zealand entrepreneurs at that time were those…
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Chapter 2 of ‘In Open Seas’. Ignoring the fact that humans are social has been a failing of much economic policy thinking. It underpinned the neoliberal changes on the 1980s and 1990s which were based upon the assumption that an individual’s consumption or income was the focus of policy. But a person’s income (or consumption)…
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We may regret we have not put enough effort into building resilience. I was wrong when I argued that the Muldoon Government should have hiked petrol tax to ration petrol when it ran short following the Second Oil Shock in 1979. The Iran revolution’s reduction of oil output amounted to about 4 percent of world…
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The turmoil in the world economy from Trump’s attack on Iran will delay New Zealand’s economic recovery. Back in 1993 I was perhaps the first to announce that the economy seemed to be in recovery. The notion was seized upon; apparently, the long Rogernomics stagnation was over, and economic growth would soon be booming. That…
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Andrew Sorkin’s new book, 1929: The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History sheds light on how financial markets work. Economists argue over how exactly the Great Depression of the early 1930s occurred. We are pretty much agreed on what happened in New Zealand – our ability to borrow internationally became very limited while the terms…
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Chapter 7 of ‘In Open Seas’ In the last 200 years, world per capita incomes (measured by market output) have risen over ten times on average– more so in the most affluent countries. In the previous 200 years they are thought to have risen about 10 percent. Can the miracle growth of the last two…
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Land and Money: How Britain colonised Australasia in the long 19th century by John Lepper 2 vols, Kerr Publishing. This review was published in Newsroom on 19 February, 2026 Some decades ago, a colleague was presenting a paper on the peripheral labour force – today we call it the ‘precariat’ – to a room of…
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There are politicians who are more than a comms team. Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer was not doing well in 1990, so he announced his government would halve unemployment. That would have been an impressive achievement – then the unemployment rate was about 5 percent – so much so, it gave the government a temporary boost…
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New Zealand International Review January/February 2026 Volume 51 Number It is common to say that Arnold Nordmeyer is the greatest Labour prime-minister-who-never-was. His failure was a matter of timing. The misfortune for Grant Robertson, who challenges Nordmeyer for the title, was that he was gay. Three decades after homosexuality was decriminalised, a gay candidate for…
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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney outlines an architecture For some decades the United States of America domination of the world has been falling. This is most obvious in economic terms. The US is no longer the world’s largest economy. It is easy to say that China is because of it has larger a population but…
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New Zealand is a small, isolated nation and needs to design itself accordingly. We should avoid uncritically imitating larger nations. Among the news websites I read is a British daily which once a week interviews a local writer on the books they grew up reading and which influenced them. That’s fifty-odd a year; most interviews…
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This column is a response to the complaint that we have poor economic performance because we have summer holidays. It praises them. Summertime, and the living is easy. We used to take our kids to Coes Ford on the Selwyn River near Christchurch for mucking around in the water. Great memories. Apparently, you can’t nowadays….
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The government is still borrowing for consumption. I do not think anyone understands the politics of the spat between Ruth Richardson, who chairs the Taxpayers Union, and Nicola Willis – including those two. The underlying economic issue is analytically clearer. The technical term for it is ‘fiscal consolidation’. It is easiest to understand it by…
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Journal of New Zealand Studies; NS40 (2025): Critics of the restructuring of the New Zealand economy in the 1984 to 1993 period have suffered from there being no good defence of the changes that were made. There are memoirs by various actors and the odd academic article, but they do not address the two elephants…
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How we connect economically with the world is critical. The British Labour Government is struggling. Partly it is because they were badly prepared in opposition; the Conservative Government was making such a charlie of itself that Labour expected that it would do better and gave little thought as to how it might. But while it…
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The Minister of Finance says it is but, parochialism aside, are we doing anything to ensure it really is? One of the necessary skills of a politician is to hold on to at least two contradictory positions at once. * Consider how, following the report of 72,000 New Zealanders ‘permanently’ leaving the country in the…
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The tensions between different approaches to the economy are surfacing as the election nears. As we head towards next year’s election, the tensions between the coalition partners are becoming increasingly evident. There are always these tensions, even before MMP when there were but two significant parties, but they were hidden within the caucuses. For instance,…
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