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The Green Party’s “Poverty Action Plan” is all about tackling poverty, although the outcomes may differ from what the party expects. While it is meant to help struggling Kiwis, the plan will instead provoke emigration, disincentivise work and saving and stifle investment in education and skills, capital, enterprise and innovation. Read more

Use of the disembodied “we” in official policy documents usually suggests a false agreement about future resource use when, in fact, there are deeply entrenched opposing interests. To fail to acknowledge the conflict is to fail to resolve it. Read more

The Government’s plan to recover from the Covid-19 crisis has essentially been about finding new ways to spend. As a result, public debt is expected to increase from 19% of GDP in 2019 to a whopping 54% by 2024 and remain elevated for decades to come. Read more

It’s been hard to get a decent night’s sleep lately. Stories of the Government’s mismanagement of its quarantine facilities and of the pandemic worsening abroad make for restless nights thinking through safer ways of running those operations. Read more

The Cold War is mainly history today with more people remembering the spies than the ideological warfare. But at its heart, it was an ideological battle, which makes comparisons with today’s tensions between China and the West natural. Read more

The Government’s plan to recover from the Covid-19 crisis has essentially been about finding new ways to spend. As a result, public debt is expected to increase from 19% of GDP in 2019 a whopping 54% by 2024 and remain elevated for decades after. Read more

Germany is leading the way with a debate on its constitution, the Basic Law. After seven decades in operation, politicians of all parties want to remove racist elements from it. Read more

Even before the Covid-19 crisis, there were gaping inequities in the educational outcomes of students in New Zealand. For example, in its latest (2018) round of PISA testing, the OECD found that New Zealand had the worst socioeconomic gradient (i.e. Read more