"The Mood" of NZ's (Weak and Inbred) Boardrooms reflects on their own ineffectiveness, which has cut productivity, not on our MPs quality.

The Mood of the Boardroom Survey & recent remarks by some of this nation's CEOs reflect on the (dubious) quality of New Zealand's boardrooms more than anything else. Namely that most are woke & weak. The fact that our CEOs put ACT Party Leader David Seymour outside the "top ten" of "impressive" Members of Parliament, with a rather poor score of 3.4 out of 5, reflects just one thing. That our CEOs nearly entirely vote National and lack imagination. A bunch of them even called Seymour "divisive". How revealing. One of the most talented leaders of a political party for a generation in NZ - who studied engineering & philosophy - who's the real deal - trying to untangle the constitutional & clarity-of-property-rights mess we've landed ourselves in, is labelled "divisive". What it reveals more than anything is that NZ's Big Corporate CEOs will not themselves push productivity enhancing reforms in their own firms, which ultimately is what the ACT leader is trying to do for NZ, should they be labelled "divisive". They'd prefer, instead, to be Mr Nice Person. Look at the qualifications of many of them - the typical one being in Accounting. Other than that, its a law. Lawyers often get on Boards because Kiwi firms want someone to help with compliance - not a person with imagination about where the future of the company should be.

Since the Mood of the Boardroom Survey, a bunch of CEOs have come out as supporters of higher taxes, particularly capital gains taxes. Big ANZ Bank Monopoly Boss Antonia Watson, said that taxing properties at the point of sale was fair. Talk about virtue signaling. When you've made record profits out of people's mortgage misery arising from oligopoly powers to the extent your share price has risen over 50% the last several years, and you shake people down for outrageous bank fees in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, you then have the audacity to say that others should pay capital gains taxes to make things fairer. Not to be outdone, ASB chief executive Vittoria Shortt says NZ has to collect more tax to invest in the infrastructure the country so desperately needs. Seems she's not heard of France where motorways are managed by private companies (under government concessions) and are responsible for the upkeep, modernization & safety of the roads. In exchange, they collect tolls from road users, which ensures that the cost of maintaining high-quality infrastructure is shared among those who use it, rather than relying on funding by taxpayers.

If the Big Bank Oligopoly Bosses want to practice Corporate Social Responsibility, they should do so correctly. The market failure applying to them, which our government is having problems correcting, is monopoly powers. Voluntary actions that are good for society should, in their case, be confined to not exploiting those powers - by bringing down bank fees & surcharges. However, since doing so would lower their profits & their personal pay cheques, the CEOs of the Big Banks (and a bunch of other large NZ firms) don't want to go down that road. Instead their plan is to shake others down to repair the social damage that they are doing by advocating the public pay higher taxes.

Before the Productivity Commission was de-commissioned, it identified lack of "managerial capability" as a contributor to our low productivity. In other words, though its tempting to blame the government for getting in the way of business, there's a lot about Kiwi business that is about getting in the way of itself. Many of our CEOs & Boardrooms are not capable. As a top ten rich-lister once observed to me, "When you have the wrong person at the top, things will never work". The staff can't make up for a boss who is the wrong boss. One thing that struck me when I used to attend the meetings of the NZ Initiative was the degree to which the Big Chief CEOs of NZ Incorporated had so happily embraced all manner of woke causes - not because they believed in them - but because such causes had become a way of furthering their own corporate careers. Spare New Zealanders the Mood of the Boardroom. We should be grading them - who do they think they are grading us and David Seymour?

Sources:

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/529263/anz-backs-capital-gains-tax-what-about-the-other-bank-bosses

Forget PM Luxon: The Biggest Capital Gains-Wanna-be-Tax-Dodgers in NZ are Labour & Greens own MPs.

The Labour Party is trying to lay the foundation for capital and asset taxes in NZ. To build their case, in cahoots with their mates in the Main Stream Media, they're trying to make the likes of PM Chris Luxon look bad for making money by selling off houses & making capital gains. So lets have a proper debate on capital taxes, rather than the drivel our biased Main Stream Media "economics expert journalists" (none of whom have ever studied economics) pour out every other day. One of the strongest arguments in favor of capital gains taxes is that Kiwis (& other nationalities) pour too much of their life savings into housing, rather than investing in more economically productive assets. Much of the wealth that the typical Kiwi has historically built up comes from the appreciation in the value of their own home. Most also have a mortgage on that asset. I remember once attending a presentation by Yale Nobel Laureate Bob Shiller who observed that buying up one asset so that it comprises almost your entire portfolio and, in addition, borrowing / leveraging up to buy that one class of asset, goes against nearly every (diversification) principle in finance.

To try avoiding this sort of scenario, many nations do have capital taxes, including in the United States. In America that tax includes your own home. There's an exclusion letting homeowners who meet specific requirements to exclude up to around $250,000 of capital gains from the sale of their primary residence. Lets see how those numbers would affect NZ's Labour and Green Party Members of Parliament who want capital taxes. Most own their house, and most have made more than $250,000 in capital gains on it. Opposition Leader Hipkins owns his house in Upper Hutt; Willie Jackson owns "family homes" in both Auckland & Rotorua (why he calls them all "family homes" in his Declaration of Interest, and doesn't call one of them an Investment Property is beyond me). Capital gains tax supporter Green MP Swarbrick owns her own apartment in Auckland. And the list goes on and on.

So lets give Labour Party's caucus what it wants - a capital gains tax. And lets make sure its the real deal - one that has integrity - one that ensures there will no longer be an incentive to hold a biased portfolio that heaps most of one's life savings into one's own house. It will catch Chris Hipkins. It will catch Chloe Swarbrick and Willie Jackson and nearly every Labour Party MP. Oh, but it turns out that is not what the Labour caucus want. They want capital taxes, but one that excludes their own family home - that is, excludes their own assets, but catches everyone who has more than them. They define anyone who owns more than them as having an "unfair" amount of wealth. So the truth is the Labour caucus hates capital taxes as much as the National caucus. Labour MPs want capital taxes but only provided their own assets are exempt. They have no interest in economic efficiency, but just a simple desire to soak people they call "the rich". The Labour caucus should stop being such darn hypocrites and attacking PM Luxon when they are the biggest wanna-be tax dodgers in the country.