croaking cassandra » Michael Reddell

Thomas Coughlan has a column in the Herald this morning, under the heading “Nicola Willis is just the right amount of Tory”. To this centre-right voter it isn’t obvious Willis is (or sees h...

https://croakingcassandra.com/2024/04/06/tougher-than-that/

I was away last week so have been rather late in getting to the Budget Policy Statement and associated material released last Wednesday. It does not make for pleasant reading, at least if one car...

https://croakingcassandra.com/2024/04/02/not-very-bothered-by-deficits/

Almost all government agencies are in cost-cutting mode at present, under instructions from the incoming government. All sorts of things they, or the previous government, thought were nice to hav...

https://croakingcassandra.com/2024/03/23/a-government-agency-planning-more-nice-to-haves/

The Productivity Commission closes its doors on Thursday and goes out of existence. There have been a couple of recent articles on the demise of the Productivity Commission, and the chair (Ganesh...

https://croakingcassandra.com/2024/02/27/goodbye-to-the-productivity-commission/

I’ve used here before the snippet from older books that in the decades before the Second World War it was generally accepted that New Zealand had the highest value of foreign trade per capita o...

https://croakingcassandra.com/2024/02/06/once-were-a-trading-nation/

I’ve been rather tied up with other stuff for the last few weeks (including here) which is why I’ve not previously gotten round to writing about the first piece of monetary policy communicati...

https://croakingcassandra.com/2024/02/05/the-conway-speech/

A while ago I stumbled on the report of Kristy McDonald QC, dated 22 February 2022, which had been commissioned by Hon David Clark, then Minister of Commerce, into aspects of the appointment of t...

https://croakingcassandra.com/2024/01/30/conflicts-of-interest/

Regular readers will recall that I have, intermittently, been on the trail of the approach taken to the selection (and rejection) of external MPC members when the current crop were first appointe...

https://croakingcassandra.com/2024/01/18/avoiding-scrutiny/

In my post on Monday I drew attention (again) to the fact that New Zealand has made no progress at all in reversing the decline in relative economywide productivity (relative to other advanced co...

https://croakingcassandra.com/2024/01/10/productivity-woes-continued/

2024 will mark 40 years since the great acceleration of policy reform that began with the election on the 4th Labour government in July that year and ran for the following decade or so. I’m s...

https://croakingcassandra.com/2024/01/08/40-years-on-2/