The question of who runs New Zealand is infrequently examined in the media (or even that much in our universities), but it obviously deserves the attention of anyone interested in understanding politics or wanting any kind of social change. Fortunately, for the last five years the Listener has been publishing its annual Power List in an attempt to do just this. Although it’s always more journalistic and celebratory than analytical and critical, the exercise does nonetheless always shine a light on the people involved in running New Zealand. And it indicates some significant trends. This year there has been some major changes to the list, partly representing the fact that the outgoing Labour Government’s favoured businesspeople, ‘thinkers’ and lobbyists are now out in the cold as a change of government brings about different influences, but also because the Listener probably wants to dazzle us with new faces that are supposedly wielding great undiscovered power. This blog post offers a critical summary of, and commentary on, the Listener’s list. [Read more below]
The business community has lost confidence in the Labour Government, yet isn’t convinced that the National Party will carry out the necessary changes that they support. That’s the message from the Independent Financial Review’s triennial pre-election business survey. In many ways it mirrors the Independent’s pre-election business survey that preceded Clark’s Labour Party coming to power in 1999. That survey of employers reported that they believed the National government should be voted out and that the Labour Party was then the preferred choice of business. [Read more below]
Farmers in New Zealand have always been keen to 'socialise their losses and privatise their profits' - especially back in the days of minimum price subsidies. The latest farmer scheme to extract huge amounts of money from the state is in Tenure Review, whereby farmers essentially swap with the government low-value land for high-value land. The Government throws some money to the farmer as well, and gets to turn the low-value land into conservation land. Ann Brower, a political scientist, has recently exposed this 'obscure but huge transfer of wealth and resources' in the NZ Herald, after spending 'a year digging into the politics and economics' of it all. READ MORE BELOW
