As New Zealanders face rising costs of living, ACC's proposed levy hikes threaten to add another financial burden. It is time for a critical look at our accident compensation system. Read more
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) just released its Annual Report for 2024, providing an opportunity to examine how the central bank views its own performance. The Governor’s statement is revealing, praising a “Great team, best central bank” while ignoring the serious macroeconomic mismanagement by the current leadership. Read more
I am kicking myself that we at the Initiative had not read Federated Farmers’ submission to the Banking inquiry before drafting our own. Their submission exhibits a creativity that I had thought New Zealand had lost decades ago – sometime around 1987, if we had to pin a date on it. Read more
The government's Resource Management Act (RMA) reform is shaping to be a tale of two approaches: one necessary but potentially problematic, the other more fundamental and promising. Last weekend, Ministers Chris Bishop and Shane Jones unveiled a long-awaited list of 149 projects that will be included in the government’s controversial Fast Track Approvals Bill. Read more
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has just issued his government’s plan for the final quarter of 2024. If that sounds more like a corporate earnings call than political leadership, you would not be far off the mark. Read more
New Zealand moves inexorably from the ‘faff around’ to the ‘find out’ phase of the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill process. On Friday, Google’s New Zealand blog noted that if the bill becomes law, Google would be “forced to stop linking to news content on Google Search, Google News, or Discover surfaces in New Zealand and discontinue our current commercial agreements and ecosystem support with New Zealand news publishers.” Google described the Bill as setting a ‘link tax’. Read more
They say you can’t beat Wellington on a good day but in one important respect, ‘they’ are wrong. Christchurch will have Wellington beat, hands-down, unless Christchurch Council manages to screw this up. Read more
Every three years, Inland Revenue undertakes a long-term insights briefing on the tax system. This year’s could spark a shift away from tedious and fruitless discussions of Capital Gains Taxes. Read more
There are reliable links between being bullied at school, poor attendance and poor academic achievement. New Zealand has serious problems with all three. Read more
The Finance Minister this week announced a crackdown on public servants working from home. The push comes as part of a wider focus on productivity and efficiency-increasing measures from the government. Read more
The Government is determined to give local government a shake-up, with stern tellings-off about getting ‘back-to-basics’ and reforms to refocus councils on core services and efficiency. One of its ideas is that mayors could be given access to independent staff advice, separate from their chief executives and council staff. Read more
For decades after World War II, Austria was a model of political stability to the point of boredom. The centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and the centre-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) dominated the political landscape. Read more
Policies and regulations, most of the time, are a bit of a mess. Even if policies made sense when first conceived, sludge accumulates over time. Read more
Max Rashbrooke's recent research note, "High earner tax rates: New Zealand in context," makes a case that rich people in New Zealand pay less tax than they would on the same income in some of the highest-taxed countries in the world. But is this really the case? Read more
There should be a German word for it: that moment when one realises a dessert one has always associated with one country actually belongs to several countries – or perhaps, to none at all. As a German who has lived in both Australia and New Zealand, I have often found myself caught in the crossfire of the great Pavlova debate. Read more