A ministerial tweet (really?) draws attention to the $300m venture capital up for grabs in new trough

A new source of public funding for business development – let’s call it another trough, folks –  was officially launched in Auckland yesterday.

According to a report in  Deal Street Asia, Associate Finance Minister David Parker announced the launch of the Elevate NZ Venture Fund in Auckland in a Twitter post.

Maybe he did.  But fair to say the Point of Order Trough Monitor was triggered when a heads-up was emailed to news media on Tuesday to advise of the launch.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson, Economic Development Minister Phil Twyford and David Parker followed up with a joint press statement emailed to journalists, one of two statements on the launch posted on the Scoop website around 11am yesterday.

Replacing neoliberal economics – the ideas of Joseph Stiglitz perhaps influenced authors of the Wellbeing Budget

A view of economics that might well be reflected in Grant Robertson’s Wellbeing Budget was expressed by American Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz last month in an article headed The Economy We Need.

After 40 years of market fundamentalism, he wrote, America and like-minded European countries are failing the vast majority of their citizens.

“At this point, only a new social contract – guaranteeing citizens health care, education, retirement security, affordable housing, and decent work for decent pay – can save capitalism and liberal democracy.”

Stiglitz, an economics professor at Columbia University and chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute, is the author, most recently, of People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent.

He has elaborated on his early-May article in After Neoliberalism in which he contends:

“For the past 40 years, the United States and other advanced economies have been pursuing a free-market agenda of low taxes, deregulation, and cuts to social programs. There can no longer be any doubt that this approach has failed spectacularly; the only question is what will – and should – come next.”

Taxpayers Union frets at social spending – but look who is in the queue to complain about being short-changed

The Taxpayers Union was unlikely to see much merit in the Wellbeing Budget and has issued a bundle of statements to complain –

• The Government’s ‘wellbeing’ focus is just an excuse for billions of dollars of poorly-targeted spending (here),
• Between 2018 and 2021, social security and welfare spending is expected to sky-rocket from $26 billion to $32.4 billion a year, a 25 percent increase in just three years. (here).  “Fiscal discipline has been jettisoned in favour of a classic Labour welfare spend-up.”
• Pouring another billion dollars into KiwiRail shows terrible business acumen (here).  “As a State Owned Enterprise, KiwiRail is required to be as profitable as possible, yet it has never paid a single cent in dividends to the Government – despite receiving more than $5 billion of Government funding since 2008. Pouring an additional billion dollars into KiwiRail will not change reality – KiwiRail will never be a profitable company.”
• Race-based spending initiatives announced in the Wellbeing-Budget (such as an extra $80 million for Whanau Ora) will lead to wasteful and unfair outcomes (here).  Taxpayers’ Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke says many Maori and Pasifika spending initiatives are either vague or over-ambitious. For example, “why is the Government spending taxpayer money to ‘strengthen personal identity and connection to the community’? Is it even capable of achieving that?”
• With business investment growth expected to fall from 6.8 percent in 2018 to 0.7 percent in 2019, the Government needs to reconsider its economic strategy (here). “Tax cuts for businesses and individuals would be a great start.”

But The Maori Council’s disappointment that Maori have been short-changed can be found in their post-Budget statement, headed Government has failed Maori across the board.