The infrastructure industry yesterday issued a “hurry up” message to the Government, telling it to get cracking on developing a pipeline of infrastructure projects. The hiatus around the change of Government has seen some major projects cancelled and others delayed, and there is uncertainty about what will happen with the new local body-driven three-water projects. In a comprehensive survey of its members, InfrastructureNZ found that the hiatus and the uncertainty meant that the industry was fast losing confidence and was losing key staff overseas. This reaction is in contrast to the Prime Min ..read more

Foreign Minister Winston Peters is understood to be planning a major speech within the next fortnight to clear up the confusion over whether or not New Zealand might join the AUKUS submarine project. So far, there have been conflicting signals from the Government. RNZ reported the Prime Minister yesterday in Bangkok as saying only that the Government was open to exploring what entry into Pillar Two of AUKUS might involve. “We’ll work our way through that. All we’re saying at this point is exactly what the previous Government said. We’re open to exploring it, and we need to understand it,” he s ..read more

Turning what Labour called the “holiday highway” into a four-lane expressway from Auckland to Whangarei could bring an economic benefit of nearly two billion a year for Northland each year. And it could help bring an end to poverty in one of New Zealand’s most deprived regions. The New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) has produced a study of the impact of an expressway for a consortium of Northland businesses. Its says a four lane road could boost GDP in the north by up to $2 billion a year. The report, which was commissioned by a group of Northland businesses and  released ..read more

While commentators, including former Prime Minister Helen Clark, are noting a subtle shift in New Zealand’s foreign policy, which now places more emphasis on the United States, many have missed a key element of the shift. What National said before the election is not what the government is doing now. It would seem that the harder foreign policy line long preferred by NZ First Leader Winston Peters has prevailed over National’s traditional support for an independent foreign policy as promoted by former Ministers like Murray McCully and Gerry Brownlee. Peters, in a series of recent interviews an ..read more

As the public sector redundancies rolled on, with the Department of Conservation saying yesterday it was cutting 130 positions, a Select Committee got an insight into the complexities and challenges of cutting the Government’s workforce. Immigration New Zealand chiefs along with their Minister, Erica Stanford, appeared before Parliament’s Education and Workforce Committee to provide a briefing on their performance and strategic intentions. The Committee heard the story of a Department that did not have enough staff or resources to deal with the massive increase in Immigration and refugee visa ..read more

The future of farming went on the line yesterday when the Climate Change Commission presented its first review of New Zealand’s target of net zero emissions by 2050. The Commission said New Zealand’s target was unlikely to be consistent with the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of holding temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. If everyone in the world contributed the same level of warming per capita as New Zealand, total warming would peak with a temperature rise of five degrees and decline to around 4.3 degrees by 2100, the Commission said. Even more embarrassing, if global emissions were allocated to cou ..read more

Foreign Minister Winston Peters is now going to Washington next week for talks with US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. He is currently in Brussels at a NATO summit. The visit, with programmes in New York and Washington D.C., will focus on major global and regional security challenges and includes meetings with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UN Secretary General António Guterres. “Our travel this week to Egypt, Poland, Belgium and Sweden has highlighted the challenging strategic environment facing the world today,” Peters said this morning. “Spending time in New York and Washingto ..read more

While the new Government repeatedly vows to cut waste from within the Government, it has created seven new ministries and abolished only two left over from the Labour Government. A new study says that the more Ministers a government has, the more it will spend and the more difficult it is to cut some bureaucratic functions. New Zealand Initiative Research Fellow Max Salmon argues in a report published last week that public service bloat starts in the Beehive. “Taking the average of parliamentary democracies of similar size to New Zealand, we have 44% more ministers, nearly triple (282%) the nu ..read more

Treasury’s first report on the economy since the change of government presents a damning indictment of Labour’s economic management. The problem for National is that it is so damning that logically,  coupled with a rapidly slowing economy,  Finance Minister Nicola Willis should respond to it by postponing or even cancelling the party’s promised tax cuts. Former ACT leader Richard Prebble is the latest in a growing list of centre-right figures arguing that the time for tax cuts is not now. But National seems to believe that to cancel the cuts now would open It up to questions about br ..read more

Faced with a barrage of criticism over the promised tax cuts from usually supportive commentators, Finance Minister Nicola Willis yesterday reaffirmed her intention to include them in this year’s Budget. The Government is up against it over the cuts just about every way it turns. Commentators like Fran O’Sullivan, Matthew Hooton, and Liam Dann have all argued that the cuts should be at least be postponed or moderated, if not scrapped altogether. At the same time,  the CTU economist and former economic advisor to Grant Robertson, Craig Renney, is saying the fiscal hole created by the cuts ..read more