I wrote an article on education for the National Business Review today, which you can read at the link below, or underneath if you prefer: https://www.nbr.co.nz/node/230708 National Party leader Judith Collins has released a “Tech 2030” plan. She believes it would help make our tech sector “bigger than our dairy sector in 10 to 15 years”. It’s hard to imagine a more unrealistic goal. Why? First, the OECD note that our school children’s “long term change in maths performance …

We're at a cross-roads. The deepest thinkers and strategists in the United Kingdom have come to a stark conclusion that was expressed today in the lead article on the front page of The Times by the new Health Secretary: Sajid Javid told MPs this afternoon that he views July 19 as the “end of the line” for lockdown restrictions as he said the nation must learn to live with coronavirus. NZ and Australia, by contrast, are still pursuing an elimination strategy. The two approache

Minister of Health Hipkins has just told The AM Show the vaccine rollout has "gone as fast as it can given the availability of vaccines in NZ ... if we could have got more vaccines into the country faster, then yes of course we could have gone faster. But ultimately supply has been the thing that's constrained that". Newshub reports that NZ initially ordered four different vaccines, but only in January opted to switch to a Pfizer-only strategy after seeing its success oversea

Our PM said today, regards the vaccine roll-out: "It's not at all delayed ... This is as we anticipated - you'll recall from the very first moment we were talking about our vaccine plan, we were talking about the fact that it would take the best part of a year". If "not at all delayed" means that NZ is on course to take longer to distribute the vaccine than it took Pfizer to invent the vaccine, then the statement certainly symbolizes a victory for free markets and a failure o

Could the following Tweet from Ganesh Nana, the Head of the Productivity Commission, whose job it has been, at least traditionally, to help design policies to increase GDP per hour, end up being the undoing of the government (especially since his appointment symbolized its' priorities)? "Please remember GDP is not really a great measure of anything useful” GDP measures the value-added of firms, aggregated up into a total. The Commission was established to help find ways to in

The headline today in a bunch of news outlets is that Auckland is the world's most "liveable city" which just goes to show ... that such rankings are meaningless nonsense. Shame on the Economists "Intelligence" Unit (EIU) for publishing this kind of stuff. Auckland's housing affordability crisis, traffic congestion, weak infrastructure and sewerage-pouring-into-the-harbour-when-there's-heavy-rain notwithstanding, the EIU has apparently chosen to give the city the top ranking

As expected (and due to its staff being unelected so not accountable to the public in the same way as our Members of Parliament) the RBNZ is slapping down yesterday's critique that it is speaking to issues unrelated to its remit. The NBR article is here: https://www.nbr.co.nz/story/reserve-bank-defends-its-pitch-wider-audience The pertinent parts include the following: the Assistant Governor "does not accept MacCulloch’s criticism [although] he does acknowledge the Bank has c

Yesterday I wrote an opinion piece about the RBNZ overstepping the mark for the National Business Review. You can read it here: https://www.nbr.co.nz/node/230349 or below. A Law unto Itself: The Reserve Bank of NZ One of the biggest strategic mistakes committed by our Reserve Bank has been its proclivity in recent times to make dogmatic assertions on topics having little, or nothing, to do with its core remits. Those remits are to ensure a sound financial system and stable pr

The Head of the Productivity Commission has given an interview today with the National Business Review. Here's a quote from the article, "Even as NZ's productivity rates lag behind those of other small, advanced economies, Commission Chair Ganesh Nana hopes the push to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions might help narrow the gap. Nana told NBR NZ had to adopt a different approach if the country was to lift its productivity & produce more value, for less effort. It wou