Mrs MacDoctor and I have just had a relaxing week in Vanuatu, celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary. Internet access was painfully slow, so there has been no blogging for more than a week and not much news about New Zealand. I see that I have not missed much, just another unexciting budget from Bill English. [...]

No, not gay marriage (though that might). What will end in tears is Labour/the Greens NZ Power policy. I have already blogged how the policy itself is economic incompetence. And, despite Brian Rudman and Bryce Edwards waxing lyrical about the policy being similar to the Pharmac model, I have demonstrated that this is also a [...]

Following on from yesterday’s post Matt McCarten makes a strange comparison between Labour’s blast-from-the past policy of power price control and Pharmac: At home, the parallel in the health sector is Pharmac, which uses its buying monopoly to negotiate prices with multinational drug companies. It saves us billions of dollars. I haven’t heard the Government [...]

Labour and the Green’s odd electricity price control policy has clearly been designed with only one real purpose in mind – to disrupt the sale of Mighty River Power and reduce the amount realised on the sale, to the detriment of National. This type of “scorched earth” thinking from the left is hardly unusual; Cullen’s [...]

If ever there was a dangerously inappropriate political football, it is the potential sale of Crafar farms to the Chinese company, Shanghai Pengxin and the hysterical xenophobia it has induced. While the furor has managed successfully to paint National into a very uncomfortable corner, it has also made all future overseas purchases significantly more difficult. Like [...]

The stoush between Ports of Auckland and the Maritime union appears to be heating up. Len Brown has at last showed up and planted himself down firmly on the side of PoAL, which is as it should be. It would have been utterly bizarre for the Mayor to side with the union against a business [...]

The mask slipped briefly on Cunliffe yesterday. “if the Government is going to sell off precious state assets then we would not rule out re-nationalising some of them. And people need to be aware of that regulatory risk.” Today he is back-pedalling a lot: “At no time have I said that would have to be [...]

(apologies to Country Joe and the Fish) John Key says that the election provides National with a mandate for asset sales. He is right. Many people from both the left and the right are complaining that the “majority” of the country (i.e of a few polls) do not want asset sales and that Key should [...]

So that was the New Zealand elections. Excuse me while I yawn. While the pundits will all be gasping with shock and horror at the “sudden” rise of New Zealand First (The Winston Peters Party), there should be no surprise at that result. The history of MMP is that small parties in coalition government take [...]

Now here is a very bad idea. Only students doing courses that benefit the economy should receive interest-free loans, according to a suggestion from a leading accountancy group. The idea in KPMG’s Agribusiness Agenda 2011 was prompted by “long-term decline” of graduates entering agriculture. While I have sympathy for the agribusiness sector, because it is [...]