Well, now we know what is likely to happen with taxes under a Labour government. National’s promised inflation-indexing of the lower income bracket tax thresholds will be gone, we will likely have some kind of water tax, but big changes like capital gains taxes are off the table until after a report from a Tax Working Group and the 2020 election. Read more

Elections are not quite the advance auctions of stolen goods that H.L. Mencken warned about. Read more

We just don’t know how lucky we are to live in New Zealand. In Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, John Watson decided that the world had gone mad when he found instructions on the side of a packet of toothpicks. Read more

The thing I miss least about being in academia is the administration. I don’t mean faculty governance – it is important that academics be involved in that lest everything be taken over by the administrators. Read more

Our executive director at the New Zealand Initiative, Oliver Hartwich, has always had a strange antique monkey’s paw on his desk. I never thought much of it – perhaps a bit creepy but maybe it’s normal for Germans. Read more

For some pundits, elections are magical times in which pundits’ favourite policy hobby-horses transform into the election-winning platform for any party that might listen. I will recommend something a little different for Labour’s incoming leader. Read more

The announcement of a new way of funding urban infrastructure is a bit like announcing a way of clearing that first big slip on the road from Kaikoura to Blenheim. It’s an important and necessary start but it is only a start. Read more

Peter Jackson took a few liberties with Tolkien’s text for the Lord of the Rings films. Most of them, I didn’t like. But one addition I rather liked came at the start. Read more

If your main exposure to economics is hearing bank economists talk on morning radio, you might not have the most accurate picture of what economists do. Trying to guess what interest rates might do, or telling stories about the latest moves in the stock market, are not really what economics is about. Read more