If the country sees a few lucky breaks, Budget 2026 shows a return to surplus in 2029. The period of structural deficits will have lasted almost a decade. Read more
The worst-kept secret of this afternoon’s budget is that the entitlement to a fees-free year of tertiary study will be scrapped. On 8 May, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters ‘leaked’ the policy change on Newstalk ZB. Read more
The strongest protection tenants can have is plenty of other potential places to rent, from different landlords eager to rent them a home. When zoning rules make it very difficult to build new housing, existing landlords do not face much potential competition. Read more
Last year, Cabinet papers promised that New Zealand’s agricultural-product regulator would be required to use assessments from trusted overseas regulators. The Bills now before Parliament instead say the regulator must merely “have regard to” them. Read more
During the first reading of New Zealand’s Modern Slavery Bill last month, one member of parliament warned it would create perverse incentives to look the other way. Another raised the compliance cost from his experience on an Australian board. Read more
By 1974, at the Allensbach Institute she had founded a quarter-century earlier, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann had given a name to a puzzle first visible in her election research of the 1960s. West Germans would tell her pollsters one thing in private; in public they would say something else, or nothing at all. Read more
Housing targets have long been a political football – and an emotional subject. Would it not be better to take some of the heat out of the housing debate and ask more systematically how we could better plan for future housing supply? Read more
An alcohol licensing regime should have one big job: to ensure that licensed outlets operate responsibly, first by vetting applications and then by monitoring compliance. Its measures should be proportionate to the risks being addressed, and cost-effective. Read more
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single politician in possession of good polling must be in want of an election. Similarly, politicians lacking public support are wary of the electoral meatgrinder that awaits them. Read more
Imagine that a public health authority publishes a report on the nation’s diet. After 22 years of data and a 100-page methodology, it announces the four least nutritious food groups. Read more
Housing targets have long been a political football. They are also an emotional political subject. Read more
Observers of European politics know Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a right-wing, populist party, probably extreme, certainly friendly to Russia. Less visible from the outside is that the AfD is not an ordinary opposition party that might win an election, govern badly and then be voted out. Read more
When Jim Chalmers stood up on budget night and announced the end of negative gearing on established properties, he assured Australians it was worth breaking a promise for “right and justifiable reasons.” Grant Robertson, New Zealand’s finance minister, said something remarkably similar in March 2021 when he broke his own promise not to extend the bright-line test on property. Robertson called his earlier commitment “too definitive.” A New Zealand Herald columnist observed that this sounded a lot like “too honest.” New Zealanders know how this story ends. Read more
Ahead of New Zealand’s 2017 election, I floated the idea of a grand coalition between National and Labour in a few columns. The circumstances back then made it appealing. Read more
Local government is hard to defend. Rates are rising at more than three times inflation. Read more