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| Dr Oliver Hartwich | Executive Director | oliver.hartwich@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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New Zealand’s health system faces severe challenges. Yet our Summit, sponsored by nib, showed reasons for hope. Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey highlighted how relevant the ideas of localism and subsidiarity are in health. He explained that it is crucial to tailor services to specific communities. Building on this theme, our chief economist, Eric Crampton, presented our new report on the Canadian First Nations Health Authority. The report describes how their indigenous-led healthcare initiatives work for them – and what lessons they hold for New Zealand. Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei’s CEO Tom Irvine agreed, not least because his iwi is engaged in addressing the needs of his local community. Maria English, CEO of ImpactLab, then demonstrated how measuring the impact of their programmes can guide future interventions and improve outcomes further. Technology featured prominently in many discussions. There is widespread frustration in the sector with outdated systems. Who would have thought that sending faxes is still a routine part of sharing information between doctors and hospitals in 2024? As our health research fellow and GP, Dr Prabani Wood, highlighted, such technology deficiencies makes it harder to deliver the continuity that is crucial in primary health care. Our speakers emphasised solutions that do not require massive government intervention. They are right. Waiting for government to intervene usually takes much too long. Yet the government must play its part in fixing systemic issues. Parts of the system are broken in ways that only government can sort out. This year’s Health Innovators’ Summit explored plausible solutions to New Zealand’s health crisis. But those solutions require willingness to embrace change, trust local knowledge, and focus on measurable outcomes. Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei’s Tom Irvine paraphrased a well-known Māori proverb to sum up what is required to reform New Zealand’s health system: “He aha te mea nui o tēnei ao, he tangata, he takiwā, he kaupapa.” (What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is place, it is purpose.) Emphasising people, place and purpose characterise localism. It is for the people, guided by data, towards a better future. Watch Lester Levy's keynote address at the Health Innovators' Summit here. |
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| Dr Bryce Wilkinson | Senior Fellow | bryce.wilkinson@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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Many market economists predicted this change. So did Massey University’s AI-based GDP tracker, GDP Live. Borrowers will be pleased. Those needing interest income, less so. Of course, the MPC had to weigh up conflicting considerations. The economy is slowing down. Government spending is tighter, more people are losing their jobs, and businesses are not investing as much. Against this, non-tradables inflation is still high. How different is this from what the RBNZ was expecting in its May 2024 statement when it projected further increases in the OCR in 2024? The June quarter CPI rise of 0.4% was a welcome 0.2 percentage points below the RBNZ’s May 2024 forecast rise of 0.6%. As an annual rate, it was under the 2% CPI target. But this result does not entirely explain why the Bank is now forecasting a 0.8% rise for the current (September) quarter when in May it was forecasting a 1.3% rise. Another question is why the greater weakness in economic activity is not expected to materially reduce quarterly CPI increases beyond the current quarter. (Unemployment rates are now forecast to remain higher than they were in May forecasts until the June quarter 2026.) A further puzzle is that Massey University’s AI tracker, GDP Live, assessed real GDP growth to be positive in the June 2024 quarter, whereas the RBNZ thinks it was markedly negative at 0.5%. Time will tell which forecast is correct. The magnitude of the Bank’s change of view is most starkly shown by the difference between in its OCR projections in May and August. In May it projected a rate of 5.7% for the December 2024, now it is projecting 4.9%. In short, the MPC’s twin decisions this week to both reduce the OCR and to generate expectations of further reductions this year indicate a substantial change of view. New Zealand started raising interest rates earlier than Australia, and by more. Inflation has fallen in both countries, but New Zealand’s decline has been slower. Australia held its official interest rate in its recent review. These calls are more art than science. That is why the current system of regular scheduled reviews is important. Review, learn and change accordingly. |
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| Dr Michael Johnston | Senior Fellow | michael.johnston@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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For one thing, laws have to be passed to define them. That takes time. The public must be consulted. Politicians get involved. For another, to charge someone with a traditional offence, police have to go through the inconvenient rigamarole of gathering evidence. They have to present that evidence in court. Even then, judges and juries can be unhelpful. To get a conviction over the line, a case has to be proven ‘beyond reasonable doubt.’ The New Zealand police have found a creative way around this quagmire. They are training their officers to ‘recognise, record, and respond’ to ‘hate incidents.’ According to police materials, a hate incident is “anything the complainant feels is hateful towards them as a member of a minority group.” The new approach is as elegant as it is efficient. Gone is any need for legislation, with all the associated definitional problems. A hate incident is literally anything a complainant from a minority group says it is. With hate incidents, the evidentiary process is also greatly expedited. In fact, there’s no need for any evidence at all. Best of all, the courts, with their vexatious insistence on ‘due process’ and ‘burden of proof’ will not be involved. Regrettably, not all police are happy with the training. A few antediluvian officers think the constabulary should stick to enforcing actual laws. Some of those malcontents contacted the Free Speech Union (FSU) to complain that they didn’t sign up to be ‘thought police.’ Representatives of the FSU met with Police Commissioner Andrew Coster to discuss the concerns of the officers who had contacted them. The Commissioner said that he is concerned too, although not about the hate incident initiative itself. No, what bothers Commissioner Coster is the attention the FSU has drawn to the new approach. He is worried that the publicity might “undermine public confidence in national institutions.” In fact, the very name of the Free Speech Union contains the solution to his difficulty. The police training manual on hate incidents provides him with the means to shut down this seditious pressure group. You see, while the hate incident provisions rightfully leave the fraught matter of definition up to complainants, the manual does provide some helpful examples. As it turns out, one of those examples is using the heinous slogan, ‘Free Speech.’ |
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