This submission in response to the Grocery Industry Competition Bill is made by The New Zealand Initiative (the Initiative), a Wellington-based think tank supported primarily by major New Zealand businesses. The Initiative has been actively involved in the Commerce Commission’s market study process investigating retail grocery competition. Read more

Taxpayers commonly work hard to earn the money that governments take in taxes. Knowing the effort sacrificed they naturally want governments to spend that money wisely and well. Read more

Last month, the Initiative published an essay listing six mistakes Graeme Wheeler and I argue the world’s major central banks widely made in responding to COVID. The New Zealand media interpreted this as an attack on the RBNZ. Read more

A research note released today by The New Zealand Initiative mainly attributes the outbreak of inflation in many economies to central bank mistakes. Co-authored by Graeme Wheeler, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and Bryce Wilkinson, Senior Research Fellow at The New Zealand Initiative, the paper argues that central banks overall: were too confident about their monetary policy framework; were too confident about their models; were too confident they could control output and employment; lost their focus on price stability and took on too many mandates; faced conflicts in some cases with conflicting ‘dual mandate’ objectives; and were distracted by extraneous political objectives, such as climate change. Read more

Read our submission, written by Dr Bryce Wilkinson to the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. This submission responds to the Bank’s 1 June 2022 consultation paper, Supporting New Zealand’s economic stability. Read more