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  • Should the Reserve Bank target unemployment as well as inflation? Will the new government abolish the dual mandate?

    nonaBack in 1989 – near the end of the fourth Labour government – the inflation-busting Reserve Bank Act was passed. Labour has shifted well away from the Rogernomics of that decade, and in 2021 Grant Robertson added maximum sustainable employment to the bank’s mandate - with the support of coalition partner NZ First.

    Read more: Should the Reserve Bank target unemployment as well as inflation? Will the new government abolish...

  • The next three years – the job ahead for Labour, Greens and Te Pāti Māori

    The Fabians had a session on Nov 14th reflecting on the elections. Our panel of Simon Wilson, Senior Writer at NZ Herald, Bridie Witton, Stuff Press Gallery Reporter and Ollie Neas, freelance writer used the election results as a springboard to target some of the key issues for Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori as they head into opposition.

    Coverage can be found here

  • Rob Campbell on Pae Ora Health Reforms

    Thank you for the opportunity to discuss the Pae Ora health reforms with you.

    Since I was sacked by the Health Minister I have taken time to reflect on the experience and to make a considered assessment of what I learned in the process. My intention tonight is to share that with you, making the assumption that we share common ground in wanting to have an effective, efficient, excellent and equitable public health service.

    If anyone does not want that, I don’t really have anything useful to share with you.

    Read more: Rob Campbell on Pae Ora Health Reforms

  • Interview transcript: Ambassador Wang Xiaolong with NZ Fabian Society

    Hello, my name is Mike Smith, from the New Zealand Fabian Society. It's my great pleasure today to interview Ambassador Wang Xiaolong from the People's Republic of China to talk with us about China's values. I heard Ambassador Wang speak at a meeting convened by the Institute of International RelationsNZIIA last year and in the course of that meeting, he addressed the question of China's values and said, "China's choice for values, social system and path to modernity is made by our own people, based on our own history, culture and realities. All these choices have proven to be suitable and effective to solve China's problems and meet the needs of the Chinese people".

    Read more: Interview transcript: Ambassador Wang Xiaolong with NZ Fabian Society

‘Brexit’ and political instability in the United Kingdom; ongoing prime ministerial instability in Australia and presidential unsuitability in the United States define the main symptoms of the disruptions elsewhere in the Anglosphere. The central question for tonight’s discussion is, therefore: might New Zealand also face an electoral disturbance like that recently experienced in these three other Anglosphere countries?

 

To answer that question I intend to identify, from a leadership perspective, three dimensions of populist disruptions that I believe have been under-emphasized or ignored altogether in orthodox analyses: namely, the disruptive effects of end-cycle politics; an unrecognized but underlying leadership stability, and; the contributory fault of mundane leadership failures. What then follows is an analysis of the leadership challenges faced by four Anglosphere countries–the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand. This will show that faddish generalizations about a populist wave undermine accurate diagnoses of each country’s different institutional and constitutional weaknesses, or barriers to offering competitive and unifying national leadership.

Notwithstanding these differences, I’ll also address the common problems facing leaders across Anglosphere countries and then turn to disruptions that have already taken place in our domestic politics and discuss the forces that I believe will underpin election ’17, before ending with a handicapping of possible election outcomes.

The driving hypothesis in this paper is that while populism has been on the rise, and represents one of the premier symptoms of alienation from, and anger at, politics and the perceived unfairness of the market economy, it only attacks where institutional or constitutional weakness exists. Like a virus, populism attacks when and where the host body is weak and this varies from country to country. In New Zealand’s case, however, populist reaction has already largely played out and so for those who believe that the conditions exist for a populist uprising here I will be arguing that they are, in effect,
waiting for Godot.

You can read the full paper here.

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