Category: Economic Issues
With net migration predicted to exceed 40,000 this year, immigration is shaping up to be a key election issue. The turnaround in migration numbers is not being caused by a blow-out in the number of non-New Zealanders entering the country, but rather by fewer Kiwis departing for Australia and more coming home.
The Minister of Finance Bill English is clearly both determined and ambitious about National’s long term debt and spending reduction plans. He would like to see government debt reduced down to 10 to 20 percent of GDP by 2020 and government spending lowered to 25 percent of GDP in six or seven years time.
Judged in conventional terms, the National-led Government’s sixth Budget looks pretty good. As promised, the Minister of Finance can point to a small surplus in the Underlying Operating Balance (before gain and losses) in the financial year starting on 1 July and increasing surpluses in future financial years.
Last week, Lord Nigel Lawson delivered a lecture to the Institute for Sustainable Energy and the Environment at the University of Bath in the UK, and given it is seven years since he was in New Zealand and we last featured his analysis of the state of climate change, we wanted to provide NZCPR readers with an update.
The owner of the popular Ponsonby Chapel Bar and Bistro got into trouble recently for publishing an on-line ad for staff that said, “We need female bar & floor staff … drop us an email if you or a friend needs a job.” His sin was to mention that they needed female staff. According to the law, that is gender discrimination!
Decision makers can be informed or mislead on policy decisions depending on the quality of supporting research. It is important to ask what the conclusions are, but also how those conclusions were arrived at in terms of assumptions, methods, and data reliability. A case in point is research on identifying a living wage rate for New Zealand.
The Labour Party’s grabbing of headlines over the alleged poor treatment of suppliers by Australian-owned supermarket chains is an early reminder that the 2014 general election campaign has already started. Labour Party MP Shane Jones used Parliamentary privilege to make such alarming claims that a Commerce Commission Inquiry has been launched.
You'd have to say the current National led coalition hasn't done so badly on the economic front. Our public accounts, notably the core government budget balance, are in the best state for years. The government has foreshowed a billion dollars or so new spending initiatives, but as yet we don't know the details, including how they'll be financed.
Ideas shape nations. Many big ideas are borne out of a country’s history and tradition. New Zealand’s pioneering heritage gave us our number 8 fencing wire “we can do it” approach to life that defines our Kiwi attitude.
When history is said to repeat itself, it is never for good reasons. George Bernard Shaw captured this when he said: “If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”
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