Trying to organise the electricity system around a competition model based on financial markets does not make sense.
Read MoreHas Our Electricity System Burnt Itself Out?
The lucky lockdown? Is this the kick in the butt NZ needs?
Heading into another level four lockdown with delta finally loose in the community, it looks like our luck might have run out. But maybe not. Maybe this will be the lucky lockdown; the kick up the bum this country needs
Read MoreThe Executive Is not just Politicians; the Bureaucracy Counts.
Politics in New Zealand is presented to the general public as theatre or sport. What is really going on is often misunderstood.
Read MoreHow Broken is the Public Service?
Geoffrey Palmer has said that the public service has been so run down since 1984 that it could not today implement changes of the magnitude that the Lange-Douglas Government did.
Read MoreAre We Nudging Enough?
Inside the Nudge Unit by David Halpern, provides new insights into behaviour which New Zealand public policy is steadily taking into consideration.
Read MoreMichael Cullen’s Policy Achievements
Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
Read MoreIn Defence of Social Democracy
Michael Cullen’s memoir Labour Saving provides one of the most coherent defences of social democracy written by a New Zealand politician.
Read MoreHousing Policy is Dealing with Three Huge Problems
Analysis of the housing market is difficult, so superficial solutions do not work. Perforce, this column has had to go into more technical detail than usual. It concludes, ‘The lesson is that the mainly neoliberal regime for the housing market since the early 1990s does not work: it has under-supplied quality housing, generated unsustainable house price inflation and excluded many “worthy” people from home ownership (and given a rough time to those who depend upon rental accommodation). That should not surprise any properly trained economist; many of the assumptions which underpin the standard market analysis do not apply to the housing market. The nostrums based upon such simple analyses will continue to fail no matter how plausible they sound.’
Read MoreFrom 'go hard, go early' to 'whatever': Labour loses Covid urgency
Labour’s Covid-19 response is losing its sense of urgency, something that’s becoming increasingly clear in the vaccination rollout, testing, immigration and much more
Read MoreDrawing a red line with China
As the new podcast Red Line makes clear, China is changing before our eyes and New Zealand faces some increasingly stark, challenging, and maybe defining, choices
Read MoreQuestioning the government’s “ACC is about physical injuries” narrative
In trying to defend their decision not to make a special extension of the ACC scheme to include victims of the mosque attacks, the government seems to be pushing a narrative that the ACC scheme is about physical injuries. I have two objections to this. First, it’s ahistorical. Second, the physical/mental divide is dubious and problematic.
Read MoreBrash Arguing
Newsroom’ recalled Édith Piaf’s ‘je ne regrette rien’ to head an article in which Don Brash expressed much the same sentiment.
Read MoreDebt is A Part of A Modern Economy. It Still Is, Even If We Call it ‘Colonial’
Congratulations to the real Team of New Zealand and farewell to the fakers
The Black Caps won the hearts of a nation this week with one of the great sporting triumphs. Another supposedly proud New Zealand sports team… not so much
Read MoreUnemployment Insurance
Providing for the redundantly unemployed is admirable but difficult and expensive to implement.
Read MoreHow Are We Progressing with the War on Poverty?
Child Poverty Levels Are only Slowly Coming Down, What Next?
Read MoreA Boringly Benign Economy or Going Through a Concerning Climacteric?
What was the big change the Treasury saw in its budget 2021 forecasts? (Treasury GDP graph Shown above.)
Read MoreDebt Dilemmas and Discussions
If you know the answer to how much public debt New Zealand should bear, you do not understand the issue.
Read MoreThe Class of Labour
Do some offshore trends presage the future of New Zealand politics?
Read MoreLabour gets to be Labour, delivering a step-change budget 30 years in the making
Join the dots from 1991 to election night 2020 to today… This is the day that Grant Robertson and Jacinda Ardern entered politics to deliver
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