Kainga Ora is the government's house building agency. It's been building a lot of social housing. Kainga Ora has its own (but independent) consenting authority, Consentium.  It's a neat idea. Rather than have to deal with building consents across each different territorial authority, Kainga Ora can run building consents, inspections, and Code of Compliance Certificates through Consentium.  I really really like the idea of making building consenting contestable.  Councils have local monopolies on this stuff. Having alternative sources of building consents and certificates that fo ..read more

I'd been wondering about the proposal to dig a really long tunnel to route through traffic away from Wellington's central city.  It seems the kind of thing that you might decide to do, after running congestion charging for a while and seeing that the project is warranted, rather than deciding on ahead of having that information from revealed preferences and prices. The thing won't be cheap.  So I was happy to see this in my inbox this afternoon to help me think through it.  The Wellington Long Tunnel could be a transformative project to take enough traffic out of the city, e ..read more

A couple days ago I pointed to NZIER's figures on the case for strengthening the Christchurch cathedral. I think it's better to view this whole exercise as making clear what we'd need to believe if we wanted to believe that the regulatory apparatus surrounding the cathedral since 2011 is other than massively value destroying. Recall that the Bishop wanted to demolish the cathedral and build a facility more in tune with current needs. Reinstating would be too expensive, and the final building not suitable for modern purpose. A bunch of people who figured they knew better than the then-Bishop wh ..read more

Stuff's Federico Magrin does a whip-round on the updated Treasury estimates of net fiscal impact by income decile.  An early version of that paper had been presented at a workshop last year January or February, but for whatever reason wasn't able to be released until after the election. Bit of a shame where there were a lot of claims floating around about who was paying how much.  The work uses 2018/19 tax and income data. Key charts: Households below the sixth equivalised disposable income decile receive more in transfers than they pay in tax. The sixth decile is a wash. The top fo ..read more

The afternoon's worthies: Immigration restrictions on spousal work rights are dangerous. 28 months jail for tobacco smuggling Pseudoephedrine is legal. Now we just have to wait for pharmacies to stock it. Really neat stuff on NZ board directors.  When Wisconsin school districts got to decide how to pay their teachers, shifting to flexible pay "raised salaries of high-quality teachers, increased teacher quality (due to the arrival of high-quality teachers from other districts and increased effort), and improved student achievement." HT: John Dickson. RBNZ's estimates of the neutral intere ..read more

More bits as I clear through the tabs.  Kevin Rudd's view on south Pacific security. 20,000 hard refusals on the 2023 census, up from 6000 in 2018. Andrew Heaton talks with Zach Weinersmith about space settlements. General Practitioners really ought to be allowed to prescribe for ADD/ADHD.  TVNZ in financial trouble, but still doesn't offer a subscription-version of its streaming offering for those who can't abide the ads.  The demographics of Parliament Climate Commission recognising potential for carbon sequestration through reinjection in geothermal wells. Excellent.  T ..read more

Will look forward to reading the Climate Commission's latest report. This bit, from Jim Rose over at Carbon News, is a bit concerning: The world is not on track to meet the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees target, the commission says, and New Zealand is likely to continue contributing to global warming after 2050. That’s because the country’s current target doesn’t require biogenic methane to reach net zero by 2050 and has no requirement for long-lived greenhouse gases to be reduced beyond net zero. “This means that it is possible to achieve the 2050 target and still have net positive emissions ..read more

The afternoon's worthies, as I close the tabs from one of the many open browsers.... Joel MacManus tracks down the management-book origins of Prime Minister Luxon's favourite terms, from 'chunk it down' and 'big rocks' to 'gates of implementation' - which seems original to the PM.  Portuguese rules create black markets in port. Now I'm wondering whether NZ accession to the crazy European naming rules mean our port producers will have to come up with a new name for it. Rules that make it hard for landlords to remove problem tenants lead them to discriminate against potential tenants ..read more

This week's column in the Stuff papers. A snippet: Tabarrok warned that America had two political parties – “the Tax and Spenders and the No-Tax and Spenders” – and neither was fiscally conservative. In the two decades after Tabarrok’s warning, the federal government never achieved a balanced budget. America’s federal deficit ranged from 1.1% of GDP to over 14% of GDP and gross federal debt doubled, rising from 60% of GDP to 120% of GDP. New Zealand’s Public Finance Act aims to avoid those kinds of outcomes. The fiscal architecture is neutral about whether core government spending should be a ..read more

I keep a bit of a watching brief on the old BERL social cost of alcohol figure. It turns up in weird places.  As aide memoire, BERL produced the number as commissioned work in the late 2000s that was meant to follow the method set by Collins & Lapsley in Australia.  The Collins and Lapsley method has a few problems. But BERL compounded those problems with choices that seemed designed to generate a larger number for the tallied social costs.  For example, Collins & Lapsley had aetiological tables that tried to attribute the fraction of different disorders that might be at ..read more