Media have reported that there may be a debate between Nicola Willis and Ruth Richardson over fiscal policy. I thought it would be useful to lay out what I see as the key fiscal problem, and put context around it.

Now I’m not unbiased here. Nicola I regard as a long standing friend. We were opposition staffer colleagues together over 20 years ago. She is one of the most awesome and competent people I know. I also admire how she has managed to be an amazing mother to four young kids, while also having a successful career at senior levels in business and politics.

As a Young National in the 1980s and 1990s Ruth was one of my political idols. She saved New Zealand from fiscal disaster. She now Chairs the Taxpayers Union which I co-founded (but left the board around 30 months ago to give me more time to be a parent). I am also a big Ruth fan.

So I’m very fond of both of them. But I can also critique people I’m fond of. I thought John Key was great and had a superb relationship with him – and I also was critical at times of some of his decisions.

So what is the real problem New Zealand has that has Ruth and the Taxpayers Union so worked up?

Structural Deficits

The Government inherited a structural deficit from Labour. This is not a one off. The last three Labour Governments have left structural deficits for incoming National Governments to fix. This is not a bug, but a feature. They’ve done it every time. The last responsible Labour Finance Minister was probably Arnold Nordmeyer. This is why Labour should never be in charge again – they always leave a structural deficit.

Now it is important to understand the difference between a structural deficit and a cyclical deficit. A cyclical deficit is a temporary one. You have a global economic shock (Asian Financial Crisis) which reduces tax revenue for a year or two, or you may have something that requires a temporary large increase in expenditure such as the Canterbury earthquakes of Covid-19 support. But after that, the government books should return to surplus.

A structural deficit is much much worse. If left alone, it means you never get back into surplus. It means debt will just keep increasing, and interest on that debt keeps increasing. This then means less money for areas like health and education – or even greater levels of borrowing.

The economically prudent strategy is you run a moderate surplus normally so debt reduces, and then when you have an economic shock, you can afford to go into deficit for a year or two and keep the interest in the debt from getting too large.

So structural deficits are very very bad (especially for a small economy). So how does a New Government get rid of a structural deficit? There are broadly three paths.

Increase taxes

This is what Labour would do. They blow up spending so high, that they then claim they need to increase taxes to fund it. National was not elected to increase taxes. NZers already pay more in tax than Australians at every income level.

Labour and Greens pledged in 2017 to keep spending to under 30% of GDP. If they had kept to that, we would not have a structural deficit. Tax revenue would be more than sufficient as spending would be around $17 billion a year lower. We do not have a tax problem, we have a spending problem.

Cut Spending

One can get back into surplus by cutting spending. By this I don’t mean just reprioritising spending, but actually cutting the overall level of spending by the Government.

This is laudable but easier said than done. Governments can relatively easily cut future spending or entitlements, but taking away current programmes can result in a political backlash that can doom you or force you to back down later.

As an example of this we have Keir Starmer’s Government in the UK. They also inherited a fiscal mess, and they did some policies which I thought were the right thing to do such as cutting back the winter energy fuel payments. However this caused (amongst other things) a big backlash against the Government, with angry pensioners saying this is not what they voted Labour for. Labour have crashed in the polls. Starmer has a hugely negative approval rating, and nine months later they were forced to backtrack on it anyway so the net result was they didn’t actually save any money, and they just doomed themselves to be a single term Government.

The Government has cut spending in many areas. They have reduced the KiwiSaver subsidies (note this doesn’t reduce people’s current incomes – it just means they get less of a subsidy in future). They are the only Government in history (I think) to reduce the number of public servants. Bill English froze numbers, while Nicola and now Judith have seen them actually drop. And there has been a huge drop in spending on contractors and consultants.

Nicola was one of the only Ministers I can think of who rejected the sunk cost fallacy and refused to let Kiwirail force her to spend $3 to $4 billion on new ferries and port infrastructure on the basis they had already committed to so much spending, no politician would dare risk letting it go to waste. Nicola called their bluff and with help from Winston we ended up with new ferries for a much cheaper overall cost. But at the time of the decision, it was not known what the eventual outcome would be – it was a risky – but correct call.

Also I think Nicola deserves a lot of praise for how she handed the Reserve Bank demands for more money. Initially both the Board and Governor were staunch in their demands. Nicola could have buckled as she didn’t want to risk having a Reserve Bank Governor resign in a spat with the Minister. But she stood firm, and Orr resigned.

And the Government made changes to the pay equity law that would have made the structural deficit far far worse if unchanged. For doing so she was called the c word by a journalist in a column, and Labour decried the change as a war on women. But I’ll make you a bet. There is no way Labour will pledge to return to the pay equity law it its previous state in the first year of Government if they win. Quite simply there is not $14 billion available for it.

However despite all these worthy savings, core crown expenditure has been increasing not decreasing.

In Robertson’s 2023 Budget, he forecast spending of $141.3b for 2024/25 and $147.6b for 2025/25. By PREFU they were $143.4b and $149.2b.

In Nicola’s 2024 budget she allocated $143.9b for the upcoming 2024/25 year – so $2.6b more than 2023 BEFU and $0.5b more than PREFU . And she projected spending of $147.7b for 2025/26.

In Nicola’s 2025 budget she allocated $150.3b for 2025/26 which is $2.7b more than both what Grant was projecting and what she herself projected in 2024.

Labour and their union allies have for two years been claiming that this Government is implementing austerity policies. This is simply deluded or a lie. There is no austerity.

However it is almost beyond doubt that if Grant Robertson had remained Finance Minister, we would be spending massively more. Grant never found an operating allowance he could keep to. He always had modest spending increases projected in the budgets, and ended up spending way way more. To be fair to Grant he was relatively fiscally restrained in his first term, but in hindsight Parliament made a huge mistake voting the Government so much extra money for Covid-19 with so little restraints on it. No-one thinks the Government shouldn’t have done a wage subsidy for employers who were forced to close down for weeks or months. But Labour used the excuse of Covid-19 to massively increase spending not temporarily but permanently. They funded journalism, arts etc – all in the name of Covid-19!

So Nicola Willis is spending more than Grant Robertson said he was going to spend, but beyond doubt is spending less than what Grant Robertson would have spent.

The problem is the level of spending remains at a level, where a path back to surplus is fragile at best, and unrealistic at worst.

This takes us to the third potential path to get out of a structural deficit.

Economic Growth (and fiscal restraint)

This path is basically let’s increase spending (which an aging population and health care needs puts upwards pressure on) but at a slower pace than revenue rises. If you have strong economic growth then that plus the impact of fiscal drag on tax brackets means tax revenue rises faster than spending and the deficit reduces over time, and eventually you get back to surplus.

This is basically what Bill English did. It is worth noting that Cullen projected 09/10 spending to be $61.9b, PREFU had it at $65.8b and Bill English first budget had it at $65.3b. So more than Cullen promised, but slightly less than what was projected at the election.

Now this approach is one that seemed sensible when National first came into office. Restrain spending, and let economic growth get you back to surplus. If you had asked me my opinion back then (I do not get asked on fiscal policy!) I would have said that was the sensible strategy.

The problem is economic growth has not been strong enough. The hangover from high interest rates from high inflation carried on longer than expected, and Trump’s tariffs have dented confidence etc. Labour claim the subdued economic growth is because National cut spending, but as I point out they haven’t – they’ve just spent less than what Labour would have – spending in real and per capita terms has not been cut.

So it is unclear if the books will be projected to return to surplus in three years, when we get an update next week. And the longer the path to surplus is, the less likely it is you will achieve it. There may be a change of Government. There may be another global shock. What is important isn’t so much whether the surplus is projected to be $100 million or a deficit of $100 million. What we need to see is a credible path to debt reducing significantly so that by the time of the next global shock we have a buffer.

So I do think it is very reasonable to critique the Government and the Minister of Finance on the fact that the path to repaying debt is fragile. If we are not running healthy surplus by the time NZers are silly enough to elect Labour again, then Labour will use that as an excuse for massive tax hikes.

The moderate fiscal restraint path was arguably the right decision in 2023 and even 2024. But my worry is that it is not going to work, and the Government does need to look at some more significant spending cuts – and yes some of them may be politically painful.

But before we go down that path, it is important to look at what are the constraints on the Minister of Finance doing that. And they are significant, and not ones that the Minister can unilaterally ignore.

Manifesto commitments

I am a big fan of parties keeping their manifesto promises. Not just because you can become unpopular if you break them, but trust in democratic institutions breaks down if people think Governments don’t deliver what they promised. Labour miserably failed to deliver on many of their promises – but to be fair not so much by changing their minds, but just by total incompetence.

The rise of populist parties in Europe and the US is partly driven by the public thinking the system doesn’t work. So political parties should work hard to keep faith.

National in 2009 and 2010 did break a couple of their promises. They scaled back their tax cuts package as it became apparent that they were inheriting s structural deficit. And they also did increase GST, but did it by way of a tax switch.

You could make the case that Nicola and National should have reneged on the tax cuts they campaigned on. My friends at the NZ Initiative tend to take that view. But I think that would have been the wrong call.

When Key and English changed their tax cuts package, NZ was caught up in the GFC,. This was a global economic shock, and the public accepted that you may need to change things as the facts change. But in 2023 there was no global economic shock. Yes Labour did leave a structural deficit, but you can’t point at an event as having changed things in the latter half of 2023.

Also the tax cuts were broadly fiscally neutral due to savings elsewhere. More importantly they were needed. NZers were in a cost of living crisis and these tax cuts were targeted at low and middle income households. Someone on $1 million a year got the same tax cut as someone on $80,000. In fact the tax cuts were basically just a partial compensation for fiscal drag from not having inflation adjusted tax brackets. Nicola delivered partial inflation indexation – which was a major campaign demand from the Taxpayers’ Union. I’d like to see indexation made automatic, once we are back in surplus.

Coalition Agreements

If you want to have a stable government, you need to do everything you can to deliver commitments made to your coalition partners. Now ACT’s agreements generally didn’t want more spending, but NZ First did have some.

Cabinet risk appetite

The Minister of Finance (unless they are Muldoon) is not a law unto themselves. They can’t unilaterally tell their colleagues that they are chopping $10 billion from their portfolios. They certainly do have tough bilateral meetings looking for savings, but the senior leadership of Cabinet basically agrees to the overall fiscal strategy and how hard you cut spending, if you do – and where.

Yes the Minister of Finance is a very key player in these discussions, but they are not God. They have more say than the No 20 in Cabinet, but the reality of how things work is the six to eight senior most Ministers tend to collectively decide what the risk appetite is.

Coalition Partners

As I have said ACT is fiscally very conservative. They would cut spending everywhere, except Pharmac, if they could. NZ First is not traditionally fiscally conservative. Their demands are usually huge amounts of money for provincial projects, for oldies, for favoured industries such as racing and most of all for whichever ministry Winston is in charge of. MFAT don’t even know how to spend all the money Winston gets for them. To be fair Shane Jones has been much more fiscally conservative this term, and I often hear praise from Ministers for him in terms of his willingness to reduce spending in some areas. Basically NZ First will resist spending cuts in areas that are core to them, but may be persuadable in areas they are agnostic on and even enthusiastic in areas they dislike (taxpayer funded public health activists).

What I would do

So one can recognise the constraints around cutting spending, and also acknowledge there has been considerable fiscal restraint in various areas, but also come to the conclusion that it still isn’t enough. We are still spending around 34% of GDP on core crown expenditure, when Labour and the Greens in 2017 said that we shouldn’t go beyond 30%.

Here is a few examples of what I would have done differently (some with benefit of hindsight) or would do in future.

1. Public Sector numbers. Yes the Government did reduce the numbers. The media ran such a hysterical campaign in conjunction with the PSA (every minor reduction was a major story) that NZers think staff numbers were cut by 25%, when in fact it was under 5%. I think cutting numbers back to 2017 levels is unrealistic, but I do think Cabinet left it too much to chief executives. I might suggest agencies be reduced to 2017 levels but adjusted for population and economic growth since then.
2. Free Tertiary Fees. National’s policy was to change the free tertiary fees subsidy from the first year of study to the final year. I welcomed this at the time as it would cost taxpayers less, and provide an incentive to finish. It also meant no real uproar from students. But now the fiscals are so challenging, this is a luxury we can’t afford. It is still a subsidy to a group of people who will go on to be very wealthy due to their degrees. It has not got poorer people going to university. National should scrap the thing entirely. And as no one is currently receiving free fees, you don’t risk as great a backlash. You justify it on the basis of the data showing it goes overwhelmingly to people from wealthy families, and is not helping poorer families access tertiary education.
3. School Lunches. At the time it seemed a smart move to keep free school lunches but save money by going to some centralised providers. Who would be against saving money. But with the benefit of hindsight I think this was a mistake. If they had cancelled the entire programme they would have had a few weeks of bad headlines, but then nothing – there would be nothing left to report. Now you get an endless litany of stories where School A or School B complains about their meals. The Government should have said that parents manage to feed their kids every weekend, and through 14 weeks of school holidays and it is their job to also feed their kids on school days. Recognising there are some kids whose parents are not particularly competent, you could have a voucher system for meals for the odd kid who turns up without lunch. I recognise that this is probably now too late to change though.
4. Have a spending cap. I would cap spending for each year at whatever was in Grant Robertson’s last budget. This would mean that if Labour tries to claim it is austerity, you can say “No it’s exactly the same as what you said you would do”. Yes Labour would have ended up spending more but they can hardly openly claim their Budget forecasts were junk as they have no fiscal discipline.

I could give more examples, but I’m not setting up a political party. The point I am trying to make is I do think the current approach isn’t going to work to get us back into repaying debt quickly enough. I think the Government does need to risk some political backlash by cutting more spending so that debt doesn’t keep rising. But I also think the Government and Nicola Willis have done many good things fiscally, and that the Minister of Finance does have constraints, as I have outlined, as to what she can do.

My hope from any debate between Ruth and Nicola is that it will help shift the Overton Window from Labour claiming the Government is cutting too much spending, to a realisation that actually they are not cutting enough.

The political challenge is that almost all voters generally support a reduction in spending – so long as it is in areas that doesn’t disadvantage them. But I do think New Zealanders do recognise the massive increase in spending under Labour was unsustainable and that reducing debt is a must have, not a nice to have.

The ODT reports:

When speaking to 1News yesterday, Ms Leary was asked “do you use ChatGPT to generate any of your questions?”

Ms Leary told the reporter she did not “directly use ChatGPT to ask questions”.

“I use AI to help me analyse documents. I formulate my own questions.”

This was a lie.

In the email to Ms Costello from Ms Leary, there were 20 questions and a range of prompts.

The prompts promised that “below are sharper, more specific and more prosecutorial question sets tailored precisely to Ingrid Leary’s style.”

They came from her parliamentary email at 11pm on Tuesday.

Another prompt said “these are designed to trap the minister, create clear contrasts and highlight delay [and] resident harm”.

Ben Thomas has a great take on this.

Heh.

1News then showed her the email, and Leary claimed she was “not aware of that email”, did not recall sending the email and could not comment.

Ms Leary then said she would “check with her office”, and suggested the email could have come from a someone else in her office.

“There are others in my office who have access to my emails, so I’ll need to find out what’s happened.

Further lies.

Ms Leary later told 1News she did, in fact, use ChatGPT and the email did come from her.

There was just no reason to lie. There is nothing wrong with using ChatGPT to suggest questions for select committee. Leary should have just said “Yes of course I used ChatGPT to suggest questions. It’s a great tool and can read through a huge amount of documents in seconds, and highlight areas of focus. However I then decide for myself which actual questions to pursue”

It is interesting to look at the list of Maori MPs who have won general electorates in NZ. The list is:

1. James Carroll, Liberal, 1893
2. Rex Austin, National, 1975
3. Ben Couch, National, 1975
4. Winston Peters, National, 1978
5. Ian Peters, National, 1990
6. Clem Simich, National, 1992
7. Sandra Lee, Alliance, 1993
8. Jill Pettis, Labour, 1993
9. Georgina Beyer, Labour, 1999
10. Paula Bennett, National, 2008
11. Simon Bridges, National, 2008
12. Mike Sabin, National, 2011
13. Jami-Lee Ross, National 2011
14. Louisa Wall, Labour, 2011
15. Shane Reti, National, 2014
16. David Seymour, ACT, 2014
17. Paul Eagle, Labour, 2017
18. Harete Hipango, National, 2017
19. Dan Bidois, National, 2018
20. Kiri Allan, Labour, 2020
21. Shanan Halbert, Labour, 2020
22. Jo Luxton, Labour, 2020
23. Tama Potaka, National, 2022
24. Willow-Jean Prime, Labour, 2020
25. Arena Williams, Labour, 2020
26. David MacLeod, National, 2023
27. James Meager, National, 2023
28. Tamatha Paul, Greens, 2023

So the breakdown by party is:

• National 15
• Labour 9
• Alliance 1
• ACT 1
• Greens 1
• Liberal 1

Of Labour’s nine Maori MPs who won an electorate seat, five of them were in the 2020 landslide. Prior to that there had been only four. Just four Maori MPs in general electorates over 104 years!

At Patreon I write:

Over 2025, Curia has been asking in the monthly Taxpayers’ Union poll whether those in employment work in the public or private sector. If public sector, we further ask if they are a public servant or work in the wider state sector. If private sector, we further ask if they work for a for-profit entity or a not-for-profit.

I can reveal here the exclusive results of NZers voting preferences broken down by which sector they work in. And there are some huge differences. Let’s first look at public vs private sector generally.

That data is paywalled, but many may find it interesting.

Ash have released their latest annual survey of Year 10 students with over 30,000 taking part.

This is a great trend. Only 1% of Year 10 students are daily smokers and the proportion who vape has also been declining over the last two years or so.

As always the most healthy option is to neither vape nor smoke. But if people need to get a nicotine fix, vaping is far less harmful than smoking.

The daily smoking rates by ethnicity and sex are:

• Māori boys 2.7%
• Māori girls 2.2%
• Pacific boys 1.6%
• Pacific girls 1.2%
• Other boys 0.8%
• Other girls 0.3%

Would be good to get all those groups to under 1%.

Chris Bishop and Simon Court announced:

“The economic benefits of our new planning system are significant. Independent analysis shows the new planning system is projected to boost GDP by an additional 0.56 per cent every year by 2050, worth up to $3.1 billion annually. A cost benefit analysis estimates $13.3 billion in savings over 30 years through reduced administrative and compliance costs. 

There is probably no other reform that could increase economic growth this much. An extra 0.56% a year is absolutely massive.

“Officials also estimate that up to 46 per cent of consent and permit applications required under the RMA could be removed under the new system. Based on 2023/24 volumes, that represents between 15,000 and 22,000 consents no longer needed.”

A 46% reduction in needed consents is huge. Unfortunately some planning staff will always make getting consent difficult and time consuming – even with a law change. But if many more things can bypass even needing Council permission – that is a game changer.

Fewer, faster plans: more than 100 existing plans will be reduced to 17 regional combined plans that bring together spatial, land use and natural environment planning in one place, making it easier for New Zealanders to know what they can do with their property.

Over 100 plans and over 1,000 zones is a crazy level of complexity.

“The new planning system will protect the environment by setting clear, science-based limits on what impacts are acceptable, ensuring councils and communities know exactly what must be protected and where development can occur. Mandatory regional spatial plans will safeguard important natural and biodiversity areas, while nationally consistent rules will provide a fair, modern framework for managing indigenous biodiversity and natural hazards.”

It is possible to improve environmental protection and also reduce compliance costs.

This reform package will make it much easier for renewable energy projects to get consented and built. That is a win-win.

The Guardian reported:

Britain’s budget watchdog has said the early leak of its budget documents before Rachel Reeves made her speech was the “worst failure” in its 15-year history as it emerged a similar breach had occurred earlier this year.

The details of how this “leak” happened resonated with me, as I have some experience with this. Basically they uploaded the budget to their website in advance of the Budget speech, and used the same URL format as previous years. This allowed someone to guess the URL, and bingo the Budget was out early.

In the early 2000s I was an opposition staff member and we knew the official crime stats would be out that evening. I went to the Police website to grab the stats from the previous year, so I could do comparisons once they were released. I noted the URL included the date of the crime stats, and thought I would see what happened if I changed the year from 2000 to 2001. To my huge surprise the latest crime states appeared on my screen.

I printed them and rushed them to the Spokesperson. This allowed the Spokesperson to ambush the Minister with the stats at question time (and they had worsened) which caused a stir, as they were not meant to be public – so the Minister was unprepared and looked pretty foolish.

Happy with my day’s work, I moved onto other mischief. But by chance around six months later I was having dinner with a friend who worked in the Commissioner’s office. I asked him if there had been any blowback over the opposition getting the data before the Minister.

You can imagine my surprise and delight when I was told that the Minister had been apoplectic with rage, was convinced that senior police had leaked it deliberately, that the relationship between the Minister and Commissioner had been destroyed and even worse the Minister had brought in private investigators to investigate Police HQ and try and find out who leaked it.

Once I recovered from my uncontrolled laughing, I told the staffer that there had been no leak, and I simply found it on the Police website by guessing the URL. To be fair back then website publishing was less sophisticated, and not all sites had the ability to time when something was published.

Anyway the staffer told the Commissioner, and the Minister’s private investigation of Police HQ was called off. But I will admit to a warm glow about having made the Minister apoplectic with rage.

I can understand that mistake being made in 2001, but am truly staggered that a UK government agency would make the same mistake in 2025. Basically if something is embargoed, don’t publish it until the embargo time. Hoping no one guesses the URL is stupid.

Cameron Slater exclusively reported on allegations by long-time union leader Matt McCarten against Willie Jackson and his wife around bullying at the Manukau Urban Maori Authority. I blogged about this four days ago.

With the exception of The Platform, no media outlet has reported on the allegations. This is highly unusual. Even if you don’t think the allegations stack up, the fact a union leader is accusing a Labour MP of workplace bullying and locking a union out is newsworthy. You would expect the media would at least do a “He says, she says”.

Could this explain the silence? But normally defamation threats make media more determined to report a story. Surely Maori TV of all places would be reporting on this?

And now we have just learnt that Stuff have known all this for weeks.

The key thing here is that Tova doesn’t just repeat McCarten’s allegations. She says she spoken to multiple staff who all allege bullying, and they have detailed specific incidents, which have been corroborated.

That was four weeks ago. What happened to the story? Did Stuff kill it? Why?

Why has no other media outlet, bar The Platform, touched this story?

The result is trust in media declines even further.

The latest 1 News – Verian poll is very good for the Government. The party vote is:

• National 36%
• ACT 10%
• NZF 9%
• CR 55%

• Labour 35%
• Greens 7%
• TPM 1%
• CL 43%

So a whopping 12% lead on the party vote. This would give the Government 67 seats – the same as it got at the last election.

Also of importance is net economic optimism or confidence. The last poll it was at -3% and now it is at +12% – a net 15% improvement.

Also of interest was a poll question on whether the TPM co-leaders should go. Only 33% of Maori say they should stay and 45% say they should go. Of course they are not the real co-leaders. They are effectively the co-deputy leaders, and Tamihere is the real leader.

Two of the most leftwing (and pro-Hamas) MPs in the UK have been setting top their own political parties. They are Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. The infighting just between those two was hilarious enough as Sultana saying Corbyn was part of a sexist boys club. Defamation suits were threatened between them, but finally they agreed to work together.

Then they had their first conference and The Independent reports:

Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana will be dropped as Your Party leadersafter members voted that a “collective” headed by a non-MP should make major decisions about its future.

The far left really take Life of Brian as a documentary!

It saddens me somewhat that some on the left see the Free Speech Union as a centre right institution. They ignore that it has stood up for the rights of pro-Palestinian activists, opposed the gang patch law etc.

One example of the great work they have done is detailed by journalist Portia Mao. Read about how pro-Beijing activists have been trying to silence here through both the HDCA, and also through defamation suits. All because she has written stuff he doesn’t want published.

A NZ Initiative report looks at grade distribution in NZ universities from 2006 to 2024. they find:

• Es static at 3%
• Ds from 9% to 5%
• Cs from 20% to 17%
• Bs from 47% to 38%
• As from 22% to 36%

If you assign an average score of 87% for an A, 72% for a B, 57% for an C, 45% for a D and 20% for an E, then the average score in 2006 was 69% which was a B- and in 2024 was 71% which was a B.

Simon Wilson, like many on the hard left, sees the West as basically malignant, and that its achievements were based on oppression. This is not an uncommon view from the left.

David Harvey does an excellent lengthy response to Wilson’s assertions.

Read it all, but here are some key aspects:

The article argues that Hammurabi had law and therefore rule of law isn’t Western; India had universities and therefore Western universities are not unique and Japan had novels and therefore literature is not Western.

These are all non sequiturs.

Civilisations develop particular institutional trajectories, not monopoly patents on ideas. The relevant question is not who invented something first, but where did our institutions come from? Which civilisation’s intellectual tradition shapes the society we actually live in?

New Zealand’s legal and political system is not Babylonian, Mayan, Indian, Arab, or Chinese. It is English common law, Westminster parliamentarism, and Greco-Roman intellectual tradition, synthesised through Christianity and the Enlightenment.

Claiming “Hammurabi existed, therefore Western legal tradition isn’t special” is historically and conceptually incoherent.

This is key – it is not who invented the idea, but who made it an enduring institution.

The abolitionist movement, parliamentary government, separation of powers, constitutionalism, and human rights came from the West, not despite it.

To claim Western civilisation “was built on slavery” ignores slavery was universal across all civilisations and still is present in some cultures. The West eliminated it first and globally through moral reasoning grounded in Christianity, natural law, and Enlightenment liberalism.

This is not triumphalism; it is historical fact.

In New Zealand slavery was legal and common prior to any Western colonialism. It was effectively made illegal by the Treaty of Waitangi. It did persist in the Chathams until the resident magistrate in 1863 issued a proclamation formally releasing the remaining Moriori from slavery.

One estimate of the prevalence of slavery in New Zealand prior to 1840 is that half of the North Island population were slaves.

On Q+A former Police Commissioner Andy Coster has said that he did informally brief both Chris Hipkins and Mark Mitchell on the fact McSkimming had an affair.

Putting aside that the issue wasn’t the affair per se, but the allegations of sexual assault and improper use of police resources, there is something very puzzling about this claim by Coster.

If he had already briefed Mitchell on the issue, why did his office instruct seconded Police staff in Mitchell’s office to hide all e-mails about McSkimming from Mitchell and his staff?

It is also worth noting that Coster claims he informed Deputy Public Service Commissioner Heather Baggott of the McSkimming affair. She has explicitly denied this. Also both Mitchell and Hipkins have explicitly denied Coster informed them. The IPCA noted:

There is a significant conflict of accounts between Commissioner Coster and Ms Baggott. We prefer Ms Baggott’s account because of the lack of reference to the matter in the file note prepared by the legal adviser at the meeting on 24 March 2023. The purpose of that meeting was to discuss probity and integrity issues to inform advice to Ministers. It is hard to conceive that if the topic of the relationship was raised, it would not have been recorded.

So the witnesses and the file notes all contradict Coster on his claim Baggott knew. Also it seems Baggott wasn’t even working at the PSC when Coster claimed he briefed her.

Radio NZ reports:

New Zealand’s minimum wage might have increased substantially over the past five years, but it hasn’t helped lift the wages of the population overall.

As a result, the median wage has drawn significantly closer to the minimum, and commentators say it will take a big productivity boost to boost incomes more generally.

We should focus on lifting the median wage through productivity, and tie the minimum wage to the median wage so that it gets automatically lifted as productivity increases.

The increase in the minimum was particularly noticeable during the period of 2020 to 2023, when it rose sharply and in 2023 was 72 percent of the median.

Infometrics chief forecaster Gareth Kiernan said New Zealand’s minimum wage was high relative to average wages when compared with other countries.

In 2023, it was fifth-highest in the OECD compared to the median wage of fulltime workers.

“I think it’s partly a function of the last Labour government’s belief that by putting up the minimum wage, they could make those people who were at the lower end of the income spectrum better off without necessarily thinking through the process or the logic around what does that actually do to costs?

I think setting the minimum wage at two thirds, or 67% of the median wage would be a great policy. It is generous – higher than most OECD countries. But it would stop a bidding war for unsustainable further increases, and would focus governments on increasing wages through productivity gains, not through statute.

“If you’re not able to sort of grow your productivity and get more output per hour of labour that you’re putting in… then there’s no way that you can lift incomes on a sustained basis, whether that’s at the bottom end of the spectrum or further up as well.

There was almost no productivity growth in the world until 1600. We are fortunate to live in an era where innovation has allowed us to lift our standard of living so much.

ACT have listed the achievements of the Coalition Government over the last two years that they played an important role in. It is a long list, reproduced below.

Law & Order

• Increased funding for Corrections to lift prison capacity.
• Abolished Labour’s prisoner reduction target.
• Oversaw a 16% drop in youth crime.
• Brought about a 20% drop in the District Court criminal backlog
• Defunded Section 27 “cultural reports”.
• Strengthened consequences for Kāinga Ora tenants who engage in repeated antisocial behaviour.
• Strengthened Firearms Prohibition Orders.
• Made gang membership an aggravating factor at sentencing.
• Enabled greater use of remote participation by victims in court proceedings.
• Piloted military-style academies for young offenders.
• Restored Three Strikes for the serious repeat violent and sexual offenders.
• Toughened sentences for attacks on sole charge workers or those working in a business connected to their home.
• Given greater weight to the needs of victims at sentencing.
• Introduced tougher measures for serious young offenders.
• Successfully campaigned to overturn race-based prosecution guidelines.
• Advanced a member’s bill to criminalise non-consensual explicit deepfakes.
• Introduced tougher penalties for shoplifters.
• Giving Kāinga Ora more powers to evict unruly tenants.
• Rewritten the Arms Act to prioritise public safety while respecting the rights of law-abiding LFOs.

Economy & the Cost of Living

• Cut wasteful spending to bring down inflation and give the Reserve Bank the confidence to lower interest rates.
• Restored the Reserve Bank’s focus on tackling inflation.
• Repealed the Ute Tax.
• Repealed the Auckland Regional Fuel Tax.
• Repealed/reworked the earthquake regulations which only ACT opposed.
• Tightened sanctions on people who can work but choose not to look for a job.
• Eased restrictions to accessing credit under the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act.
• Restored interest deductibility for residential property.
• Restored the option of 90-day trials for all businesses.
• Repealed “Fair Pay” Agreements
• Unveiled a new contracting gateway test to provide certainty to workers and businesses.
• Simplifying Health and Safety Law to reduce compliance costs.
• Changes to the personal grievance process
• Enable Pet Bonds for renters with pets.
• Restored 90-day ‘no cause’ terminations.
• Advanced a member’s bill to allow mutually agreed settlements for termination of employment.
• Advanced a member’s bill to liberalise Easter trading rules.
• Restored tenants’ and landlords’ notice periods to 21 and 42 days.
• Introduced legislation to improve access to building products available overseas.
• Delivering regulatory relief for consumers and businesses dealing with costly and time-consuming AML rules.
• Reversed blanket speed limit reductions and enabled faster speed limits on our safest roads.
• Established the Ministry for Regulation to cut red tape to make doing business simpler and remove unnecessary costs for New Zealanders.
• Established a Red Tape Tipline so Kiwis can report the most pressing regulatory issues to be fixed.
• Commenced regulatory reviews to reduce compliance costs across multiple sectors.
• Passed the Regulatory Standards Bill to provide more transparency and accountability for bad law makers, raising the political price for those who want to make laws that increase costs on your family or business.
• More than doubled the speed of overseas investment approval decisions, and changing the Overseas Investment Act to make it easier to invest in New Zealand.
• Reversed the oil and gas ban and passed legislation to promote the use of Crown minerals.
• Progressing a supermarket ‘fast-track’ to increase competition.
• Rolled back climate reporting requirements for financial institutions.

Backing Rural New Zealand

• Secured and completed a select committee inquiry into rural banking.
• Ensured methane is measured correctly.
• Slashed methane targets.
• Got rid of He Waka Eke Noa and ensured no emissions tax on farmers.
• Making freshwater farm plans more affordable and practical.
• Kept agriculture out of the Emissions Trading Scheme.
• Scrapping SNAs and bringing in biodiversity credits.
• Cutting red tape around importing agricultural and veterinary products.
• Increased the cap on RSE workers.
• Passing legislation to improve public safety and ease regulatory burdens on firearms clubs and ranges.

Defending Equal Rights & Democracy

• Stood alone for the Treaty Principles Bill.
• Abolished the Māori Health Authority.
• Ended race-based health waitlists.
• Secured a Government directive to deliver public services based on need, not race.
• Removed compulsory Treaty education from schools.
• Restored local referendums on the introduction of Māori wards.
• Repealed section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act to ensure child safety, not race, is at the centre of state care decisions.
• Scrapped diversity quotas for government procurement.
• Removing unelected Ngāi Tahu representatives from Environment Canterbury.
• Reviewing special entrance pathways for medical degrees.
• Successfully campaigned to overturn race-based prosecution guidelines.
• Increased investment in defence to protect New Zealand’s sovereignty and national security.
• Broadened the scope of the Covid inquiry with a second phase including public hearings.
• Halted work on hate speech laws.
• Advanced legislation to protect free speech in universities.
• Initiated a social media inquiry to gather all the evidence on its benefits, harms, and possible solutions that respect parental responsibility rather than a kneejerk ban without proper consideration.

Health

• Delivered Pharmac its largest-ever budget to fund or widen access to 66 medicines.
• Delivered a record funding boost for GPs.
• Enabled 12-month prescriptions from 2026
• Streamlined medicine approval through the ‘Rule of two’ so New Zealanders can benefit from medicines widely available overseas.
• Restored the sale of medicine containing pseudoephedrine.
• Enabled access to weight loss drugs for prescription.
• Enabled access to Melatonin off the shelf.
• Allowed prescription of Psilocybin for cases of depression where other treatments haven’t worked.
• Repealed the Therapeutic Products Act which would have imposed excessive and costly regulations on consumers, businesses and exporters.
• Lowered the bowel cancer screening age and reversed Labour’s change that gave people different access to screening based on race.
• Outlined expectations that Pharmac should have appropriate processes for ensuring that people living with an illness, along with their carers and family, can participate in and provide input into decision-making processes around medicines.
• Removed the ban on medical conferences to improve access to lifesaving medicines, help upskill the health workforce, and deliver an estimated $90 million in economic benefits.
• Allowing charities to run online lotteries such as those run by the Heart Foundation, Coastguard NZ, and local hospices to ensure they have the funding they need to operate.

Building & Infrastructure

• Launched a framework for long-term Regional Deals between central and local government to deliver reliable, more affordable infrastructure.
• Launched a refreshed framework for Public Private Partnerships so taxpayers benefit from private-sector commercial discipline.
• Replacing the Resource Management Act with a system based on property rights to make it cheaper to build new housing, infrastructure, supermarkets, factories, and more.
• Created new guidelines for market-led infrastructure proposals to make it easier for people and businesses to contribute innovative ideas for solving New Zealand’s infrastructure problems.
• Reforming the Infrastructure Funding and Financing Act to ensure we have the tools to pay for growth.
• Made overseas building products available so the cost of building is lower.
• Cut red tape for garden sheds and small structures near property boundaries.
• Begun public consultation on the 30-year National Infrastructure Plan.

Education

• Restored charter schools, now with the option of state school conversion to provide families with the choice of an education that works for them. Eight charter schools already open, nine more already announced for next year.
• Streamlined early childhood education regulations.
• Delivered an action plan to improve school attendance and started publishing attendance data weekly.
• Taken a firmer stance on prosecutions for parents of students who refuse to send their children to school and won’t engage with support offered to them.
• Improved the school lunch programme to feed more students for less money.
• Passed legislation to uphold freedom of speech in universities.
• Reviewing funding of Early Childhood Education to ensure it is simple, fair, and gets value for money with a commitment that there will be no reduction in overall funding.
• Restored balance to the Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories curriculum.

A change of government next year would see most of this put at risk.

It is becoming more and more frequent to see companies liquidate owing huge amounts of money to IRD, ie the taxpayer. While part of being in business is the risk of failure, it is unacceptable to have businesses continue to operate by virtue of simply not paying their taxes.

The NZ Initiative has a report on this, and a solution.

This is not a small problem. There is currently $8 billion in tax arrears owing.

They proposed a law based on the German model, being:

• If a a company fails to remit its collected taxes, such as GST and PAYE, by their due date, they have somewhere between 30 and 90 days to remedy this.
• If they have not remedied this within the deadline, they must place the company into a formal insolvency process like administration or liquidation
• If a director failed to place the company into insolvency by the deadline, they would assume personal liability for the unpaid GST and PAYE

I think this looks like a very good model, and one that all parties in Parliament should look at. No one wants companies going bust owing taxpayers huge amounts. This would presumably also apply to unions, such as UNITE which failed to pay PAYE on time over a long period.

The Initiative suggests the deadline for action should be 30, 60 or 90 days. I think 30 is far too short. If you accidentally missed a payment just before Xmas, and were away for a few weeks, you could suddenly find yourself personally liable.

I think 90 days is about right. If a business is having financial problems, it can take some time to work out if it is just a cashflow timing (your customers are late paying you, but they will), or a structural issue (you are losing money).

As readers would know, the US podcaster Candace Owens has been going down the conspiracy path for some time. She has been openly anti-semitic and has posted bizarre theories that Charlie Kirk wasn’t in fact killed by Tyler Robinson, but by Israel and TPUSA insiders.

I thought Owens was simply a grifter. She just said more and more outrageous stuff because she knew it got attention, clicks, listens and revenue. It was all just a way to make money.

But now I wonder if she is seriously mentally ill, as she is now alleging …. well see for yourself.

Yes, she is claiming the French Government is trying to assassinate her, along with the Israeli Government. And they also killed Charlie Kirk it seems.

Such detail – a French female assassin, and a male Israeli one.

And Candace is so important, that it costs $1.5 million dollars to kill her.

Egypt is involved also. It was a joint Israel-Egypt-France operation!

I suspect the next stage will be she does a Jussie Smollet and arranges an attack on herself, to prove her delusions are real.

It is probable she is still just grifting, and doesn’t believe a word she says. But I don’t think you can rule out mental illness. It reminds me of an incident in the 1990s when I was in Young Nationals.

One of the Young Nationals office holders was admitted as an in-patient to Wellington Psych Unit. I visited them a couple of times. It was coming up to a general election, and I mentioned Young Nats were working at National HQ on election night (this was pre-Internet, when we chalked results up on a giant board). He asked if he could come along. I asked if that is allowable, and he said it was – he wasn’t the subject of a compulsory treatment order.

When I went to pick him up on election day, I heard the charge nurse saying to him how all the staff thought him going to this event was a terrible idea. This got me slightly nervous. Then as we were driving over, he asked me if I knew why he was in the psych unit.

I had deliberately not asked, but I told him I assumed he had been suicidal. But he wasn’t. He told me he had been having severe delusional fantasies. More specifically he thought that because he had sometimes been critical of the Government, that it was trying to assassinate him, and Cabinet had established an Assassination Sub-Committee chaired by Murray McCully. He explained that his delusions were so powerful he literally boarded up all the windows at his house, wouldn’t go outside etc.

At this stage I started to share the nurse’s views that him going to National’s election night function might not be a great idea, especially as Murray McCully was actually going to be there! He did say though that he was better now, and now realised it wasn’t real.

When we got there, I immediately hunted Murray down and told him that it would be really useful if he could avoid this particular Young National. He of course asked why, so I told him. Murray commented that if there was an Assassination Sub-Committee of Cabinet, he would be the logical chair of it. I told him that would not be a helpful comment to make!

I relate this story, because believing multiple Governments are trying to assassinate you is not a normal thing. It can be paranoid delusions. So either Owens is a world-class grifter, or she needs serious help.

There are a couple of pieces of reported progress with education recently. They are anecdotal but are at least in the right direction.

1. The government has found out what many parents, who pay for private tuition, have known for a long-time. That is: small group or individual intensive tuition actually works. The Ministry claims to have been measuring this through “progressions”.

2. The Ministry reported to the Education and Work-Force Committee that the new Maths and English curriculum have been well-received and there are some good, anecdotal, signs.

A major issue is that the Office of the Auditor General (OAG) has produced a report that makes it clear that the Ministry of Education has pretty much no idea how students between Y1 and Y10 are doing (as well as pretty narrow data for Years 11 – 13).

Key statements are:

“The Ministry of Education does not have comprehensive information about student achievement or progress in Years 1-10.”

“The Ministry of Education needs to work with others to address gaps in its information.”

These two statement are stark given an experience in 2017 that shows the significance of the impact of Ministry incompetence.

From 2013 – 2018 I had oversight of South Auckland Middle School. It was a Charter School with the genuine focus on improving education for marginalised children.

The school started on Day 1 2014 with 120 students – and – as soon as possible went to 180 (with 100 students on a waiting list). Children were chosen through a police supervised ballot. There were special features of the school such as a split-day (academic morning, Arts and Activities afternoons) 15 children per class, a project based curriculum – alongside high-quality core subject teaching.

As a researcher/statistician/economist/educator I was determined to measure the effects of what we were doing.

1. A tool called E-ASTTLE was valid at the time in the NZ system. With the assistance of Evaluation Associates I designed a spreadsheet to measure each student’s progress for Maths and Reading via E-ASSTLE testing three times per year. This tool told us how much progress students made against norms for each year with us.

2. I tracked every student who left SAMS at Year 10 and went into local schools to do NCEA.

3. We fully engaged with Ministry contracted evaluations – Martin Jenkins and Cognition.

All of the results were outstanding.

1. Across the four years with us students were making two years progress for each year in Maths and Reading. This was done through our normal classroom teaching and not through extra tuition.

2. Our students were achieving Level 1 NCEA at 85+% in their first year out. Even better than outstanding given that our students were Decile 1 and over 85% were Maori and Pasifika and that stats were well above national averages.

(It is a sad but important note to make that – after I left the Villa Education Trust in 2021 – the CEO – Karen van Gemerden – now with NZPAA – decided to take the view that the Middle School was not responsible for the subsequent results of the students. If you don’t know how your students do when they leave – you have no idea if your programme is working. The key purpose of a Middle School is to enhance achievement in the qualification years.)

3. Both the Martin Jenkins report and the Cognition report were entirely positive. E.g. Cognition concluded:

“In summary we find and conclude that in both schools, the management and staff are actively involved in continuous development, and the delivery, of a unique programme of teaching and learning which is based on a comprehensive ‘local’ curriculum that is aligned with the New Zealand Curriculum, and which provides for the personalised needs of priority learners ‘many of whom have been failed by the current education system.”

Given that we could show that our model was working and, probably more importantly, we had developed a way of measuring “student progressions” with validity – I invited the Ministry of Education to meet with myself and Michael Absolum from Evaluation Associates.

We met with a senior manager who still holds a high level leadership role in the Ministry.

We patiently outlined how the measurement methodology we had developed was exactly what the Ministry kept saying publicly that they were working on – for six years at the point.

We offered the tool to them, for free, and it could have been rolled-out broadly and enhanced practices in the whole NZ Year 1 – 10 system.

The senior manager – in the meeting – without further evaluation – said NO!

Not only is there the consequence of the OAG report, but students/families have been further impacted for 8 more years and any “data” currently released from the Ministry of Education/Minister is treated with well-deserved scepticism.

Dr Oliver Hartwich or the NZ Initiative previously asserted that the solution to the issues created by NZ’s Ministry of Education involved a truckload of TNT. They haven’t changed under the new government and Erica Standford recently rates the 4/10 for policy advice.

Why do we constantly allow bureaucrats to undermine the delivery of high-quality systems for the good of NZ society?

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