Our current fiscal settings promise that we will eventually face a public debt explosion. A major cause would arise from the ...

This review of ‘Conversations about our country with Jim Bolger’ by David Cohen was first published in the ‘NZ International ...

With the passing of Jim Bolger, New Zealand has lost a politician defined by another era, but who helped usher in the modern ...

Winning office is not the same as achieving change. A recent Economist columnist divided politicians and their political advisers into either ‘jock wankers’ or ‘nerd wankers’. It’s a distinction which ...

Public policy frequently suffers because we don’t look at alternatives. Thus far the Labour Party’s only ‘new’ election (economic) policy is to remove GST from fruit and vegetables. Even the ...

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 ...

Centre right voters have three realistic options this year. The National Party, which is currently at something of a low ebb but which remains the primary vehicle for conservative and moderate liberal ...

Do its Property Right Provisions Make Sense? Last week I pointed out that it is uninformed to argue that the New Zealand’s apparently poor economic performance can be traced only to poor regulations.

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 ...

The proposal to organise fresh water, storm water and waste water into four entities reflects the contempt that New Zealand’s central government has for local communities. It is not the only example ...

This column started out to explain how the proposed structural outsourcing of public surgery was partly a consequence of the peculiarities of our fiscal borrowing practices. In summary, the ...

What are the economic and political implications if the New Zealand economy stagnates for five and more years? Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told Morning Report that ‘We've got the worst recession* ...