Over a year ago, in October 2023, after the Election, we Blogged, as well as published the same Opinion in the Herald, an article called, New thinking is Required to take NZ forward. It said, "The IMF forecasts NZ’s GDP growth will rank 180th out of 189 nations in 2024 .. National must engineer a boom, and fast, to pay the bills .. However, it will do little in terms of dismantling the monopoly powers of many large firms across a swathe of industries .. The reason is that it remains a pro-business, not pro-market, political party .. Labour will rebuild. The party will argue that the only way for us to enjoy world-class health & education is to better fund them with capital taxes .. If GDP growth does not start to quickly take off, then a revamped Labour Party will gain traction. Without such growth, National will run short of funding and make the Opposition’s soon-to-be-revised capital tax proposals look more attractive". Not bad, eh?
So what should National have been doing the past year?
First, anti-competitive behavior should've been criminalized & penalties increased by a factor of 100. When Foodstuffs was found guilty of buying up land near its stores & putting covenants on the titles before re-selling so no-one could start up a supermarket close by, the fine worked out at about $10,000 per store - a slap of the wrist. Why didn't National criminalize anti-competitive behavior under Sir John Key? Because Big Business lobbied against it. The NZ Initiative, the private sector economic adviser to National, stated at the time, "Three cheers for competition (& Paul Goldsmith): On Tuesday, Minister of Commerce Goldsmith decided not to proceed with the .. criminalization of cartel behavior". Foodstuffs is a board member of the Initiative. PM Luxon & Finance Minister Willis should've made a strong statement of intent upon being elected that NZ's consumers would no longer be fleeced by Big Business. They should've adopted US President Teddy Roosevelt's approach to monopolies - "Talk quietly and Carry a Big Stick". Willis and Luxon have talked a big game, yet carried a tooth-pick. Their legal approach should've borrowed from ex-New York Attorney General's Elliot Spitzer's - fearsome. He prosecuted some of the most legendary icons on Wall Street.
Second, the likes of Fulton Hogan, Fletcher Building & Tonkin-Taylor, of which Lester Levy, the newly appointed boss of Health NZ, was Chair, should've been removed from further involvement in the future of infrastructure in NZ. Due to the failure to get large projects built on time & within budget these past 20 years, deals should've been done under China's Belt & Road Initiative which they offered us - like to build a second Harbour Bridge in Auckland, do what tunnels & infrastructure Wellington needed to stop that city failing, rebuild Dunedin hospital, complete all outstanding motorway projects, and install high-speed rail from Auckland to Hamilton to Tauranga, all before the next election. The workers would've come from China and then gone back to China after the jobs were done. That's a fast track. I'm no fan of China's politics, but the economic benefits to NZ would've outweighed the costs.
Third, the red-tape & regulations holding up foreign investment in NZ should've already been torn down a year ago (aside from the banning of foreign capital to buy unproductive real-estate assets). The Coalition is doing too little on this front, and is already too late.
Fourth, our model of health-care should've immediately been reformed upon National taking office, toward either the French, Singaporean or Taiwanese models (the latter was designed by my former colleague at Princeton, Uwe Reinhardt). That is, all Kiwis should be free to choose from where they get their health-care, public or private, with the bill paid by social insurance / the government. That shift would've led to a boom in private sector health-care investments. Since its the biggest sector in the country by employment, a boom in GDP would've followed, on top of the boom coming from the freeing up of foreign investment, massive infrastructure programs and greater competition, as our inbred corporate class realized they couldn't stack the cards against the consumer without going to jail.
These policies are called disruptive. Had they been done, NZ would be in a boom now, and National on the way to a landslide win in Election 2026. You can't steer NZ to prosperity with a conservative, Sir Bill English, steady-as-she-goes, style Finance Minister, who worked for Sir John Key, who's not bold enough to do the above policies, and a PM who's not willing to take risks & who hangs out with .. Sir John Key. There's still time to change.