In particular, comprehensive capital gains taxes (CGT).
When you are making a big deal about fairness — as both Chris Hipkins and Anthony Albanese did in Brisbane as the direct pathway to Australian citizenship for Kiwis was announced — it’s pertinent to look at other blatant examples of unfair behaviour here and question why our leaders repeatedly fail to do something about it.
This is called leadership.
Labour leaders must simply lack the spine which led Sir Bob Hawke and Paul Keating to introduce just such a CGT regime to Australia in 1985. Read more >
The Queen is dead. Long live the King. Hopefully, that politician — who will in likelihood be crowned tomorrow — will be one with an appetite to lead a much-overdue political reset.
The next Labour prime minister must reign with a softer heart and a harder head.
He must trust New Zealanders with the full extent of what has morphed into a hidden agenda on co-governance, rather than disguise the impact of change under a mountain of spin.
He must be hard-headed enough to face up to Labour’s powerful Māori caucus and take all New Zealanders into his confidence by sharing what’s in store with what is, in fact, a constitutional revolution.
Right now the Government has alienated too many people with its parliamentary stealth tactics over Three Waters in particular. This is not what New Zealanders expected when Jacinda Ardern promised at the 2017 election that she would run an open and transparent government. Read more >
Hallelujah! Chris Hipkins has drunk the climate Kool-Aid and come to the very public realisation that “you can’t offset your way out of the climate crisis”.
It’s about time.
The upshot of successive government policies is that New Zealand will face a bill of possibly up to $10 billion to buy sufficient tonnes of overseas carbon offsets during this decade. That’s if we can’t make good on a pledge to cut this country’s emissions by 147 million tonnes over the 2020s via the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement.
Given the economic and moral imperatives — and this is a rocky financial period for New Zealand — this country has only one choice: fundamentally, reduce emissions. Read more >
When Dame Jacinda Ardern made an elevator pitch to powerful US businesspeople in BlackRock’s New York boardroom in May last year, Larry Fink was suitably impressed.
Fink leads the world’s biggest investment fund, which has US$9.4 trillion ($15.6 trillion) of assets under management, with projections that it will exceed US$15 trillion in five years’ time, according to Morgan Stanley.
He was attracted by the simplicity of Ardern’s messaging — and undoubted star power — and New Zealand’s commitment to moving further towards 100 per cent renewable electricity.
A seed was sown, which finally came to fruition this week with the announcement that BlackRock would launch a $2 billion climate infrastructure fund to invest in private-sector solar, wind, green hydrogen and battery storage technology assets. Read more >
It’s an open secret in top business circles that Chris Luxon has been courting businessmen Fraser Whineray and Andrew Grant to be part of a potential Luxon administration.
Like any incoming prime minister before him, intent on transformative change, Luxon will have to make sure he has the right allies and change agents in place.
Both men served with him on Dame Jacinda Ardern’s Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council. When Luxon stepped down as chief executive of Air New Zealand to start preparing for a political career, Whineray took his place as chair.
Luxon confirmed to me this week that he had wanted both businessmen to make a public contribution to New Zealand’s future. But each has credible reasons for declining a public role at this stage. Read more >
Fran O’Sullivan is Head of Business at NZME.
