Bad incentives, not bad people, keep breaking New Zealand’s institutions – and only structural change will fix them. New Zealand has never spent more on public services, administered by a workforce that has grown by a third in less than a decade. And yet hospital waiting lists stretch into years, students leave school unable to read, and infrastructure crumbles. More money. More people. Worse results. If resources are not the problem, what is? The answer lies in the incentives built into...

An Open Letter to the Prime Minister.   Dear Prime Minister   I am writing you this as an open letter as last year, on the 5 th  of December at the Federated Farmers meeting at Mystery Creek I had the pleasure of hearing your speech. It was a good speech and while I don't agree with all your positions, that isn't the reason I am writing this.   In the Q and A afterwards, I asked you a question about the cost of the Net Zero policies on the average New Zealander. As an example, I mentioned how...

“America First” was long the guiding principle of President Trump’s approach to policy. And his understanding of what putting America’s interests first really means was always limited by his background as a real estate developer with no formal training in economics. He had hardly got his feet under the desk in his first term as President when he withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement which had been explicitly designed to benefit all the signatories...