The Panel: Oliver Hartwich on why New Zealand needs a fiscal watchdog
Our Executive Director Dr Oliver Hartwich joined Wallace Chapman and the panel on RNZ’s The Panel to make the case for an independent body to cost election promises.
He traced the idea back to a 2007 paper he helped write at the London think tank Policy Exchange, which became the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility under George Osborne in 2010. He said New Zealand’s current system amounts to parties marking their own homework: consultancies can only cost what a party chooses to give them, which leaves every election dominated by tedious, predictable accusations of fiscal holes in someone else’s plans. An independent watchdog wouldn’t decide which policies are right, he argued. It would simply give voters a common set of numbers. He noted the Initiative first proposed the idea in 2014 and that parties across the spectrum keep backing it in principle, but that it tends to stall because it limits their flexibility once in office. To be credible, he said, the body must end up fully independent of Treasury, as the UK’s did.