Eight browser windows each full of tabs. Something's gotta give.
- Excellent quips from our Treasury Secretary in response to RBNZ pleading for even more money.
- All the BS speech restrictions that apply on election day.
- I don't get how Brian Albrecht doesn't yet have a syndicated national column in the US. Gold!
- Bits from me and a few others on whether National or Labour is 'better for business'
- My column at Newsroom this week expanded on last week's post on the NIMBY problem.
- British Columbia's Supreme Court backs the Squamish Nation's push to build a pile of needed apartment towers on Squamish land in Vancouver, batting back NIMBYs.
- A Commerce Commission that were on its game would be checking into just how the existing cartels have managed to block a new nurses' training school from training new nurses.
- Excellent piece by Bill Watson on competition policy versus actual competition.
- Interesting ideas from Andrew Body and Simon Jensen on improving prudential bank regulation in NZ. But there's still the bigger question of whether we ought to split monetary from prudential.
- Noah Smith thinks a three-state solution is needed. I can't see how that works while Hamas runs Gaza, but maybe somebody will figure it out.
- "The region's pipes are ageing at a faster rate than they can be fixed." Wellington is such a mess. But I simply don't buy the claim that "Our councils are pushing their ratepayers to the limit in order to fund [Wellington Water]." Our council is set to spend $350m earthquake strengthening a building that could be bulldozed and just built a convention centre and is spending $100m more than necessary on a central library.
- Queenstown has the country's worst housing shortage. The Infrastructure Commission points out that Queenstown's new plan will enable about 31-149 houses over ten years. Neither National nor Labour are really serious about housing.
- The final chapter in BusinessDesk's excellent series on the state of the NZ public service and the legacy of Peter Hughes. I still think an incoming government should fire Hughes pretty much on day 1 rather than let him see things through to February.
- Years back we'd been arguing for a variant on city deals. They're in fashion now, with some risk of monkey-paw problems.
