Posted: 3:50 pm on 10th April 2012
CIS Research Fellow Oliver Marc Hartwich is to become the new Executive Director of the New Zealand Initiative. We wish him well in his new role where he will continue his advocacy for market solutions to policy problems. We are looking forward to a fruitful relationship between The New Zealand Initiative and The Centre for Independent Studies.
Posted: 3:00 pm on 2nd December 2011
The return of economic nationalism In the recent general election in New Zealand, a solid bloc of voters cast their ballot for what can best be termed economic nationalist parties – those who do not necessarily see the free market, particularly if it undermines certain uncompetitive or traditional sectors, as being in the best interest of the nation. Two minor parties together gained a surprising and unpredicted 10% of the…
Posted: 8:44 am on 30th November 2011
At the time of writing, and special votes aside, Labour has 27% of the party vote. This is the worst result since 1928, before the New Zealand Labour Party was the major party of opposition, and pips the 28.2% they gained in the first MMP election in 1996 election under Helen Clark. 1996 was also coincidentally the last time that there were two minor parties in politics that gained a reasonable portion of the…
Posted: 1:44 pm on 29th November 2011
So the results are in across the Tasman, or at least most of them are in. The centre right National Party under centre left leader John Key has won 48% of the vote, which gets it 60 of the 121 seats in Parliament under the German-style MMP voting system used over there. Put more bluntly, you win a landslide and you don’t get a majority leading a few people who…
Posted: 1:21 pm on 28th November 2011
An initial thought on the NZ election: The overriding theme seems to swing toward economic nationalism by the wider electorate. This was witnessed by NZ First getting 6.8% of the vote, The Conservative Party getting 2.7% of the vote, and a National Party that has been quite prepared to get hands on with economic management. Of course both the Labour Party and the Greens ran strong campaigns on the inherent badness of foreign ownership and ‘controlling our own…
