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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

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 New Zealanders, the plan will instead disincentivise work, saving, investment in education and skills, capital, enterprise and innovation. Read more

Some conversations are difficult, but critical. This week, Sir Peter Gluckman, the Rt Hon Helen Clark, and Rob Fyfe released a short ‘conversation paper’ called Re-engaging New Zealand with the World. Read more

The proverb “All that glitters is not gold” is a line from William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Any doubts about the Bard’s wisdom were dispelled this month when New Zealand’s “gold standard” quarantining was shown to be fool’s gold. Read more

We all know the analogy about barring gates after the horse has bolted from the barn. It speaks to the futility of doing something too late solve a problem. Read more

It says a lot about this economic crisis when a forecast of -4.5% annual growth is regarded as good news. Yet that was the forecast the International Monetary Fund released yesterday. Read more

The public health system is a political football. Every change of administration is an opportunity to boot the ball at a different set of goalposts. 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