Posts Tagged ‘treasury’

Who did the Treasury Hack?

Written By: - Date published: 8:22 am, May 29th, 2019 - 292 comments

New Zealand Treasury head Gabriel Makhlouf has said that Treasury’s website was attacked 2000 times in 48 hours.

Hickey on surpluses and Key’s bullshit

Written By: - Date published: 9:17 am, December 4th, 2016 - 36 comments

Bernard Hickey: “It is extraordinary for the Prime Minister to call the Treasury’s short and long term forecasts a “load of nonsense” and yet rely on the medium term ones to promise all manner of riches to voters on the eve of an election.”

Treasury predictions – not good

Written By: - Date published: 8:08 am, November 27th, 2016 - 66 comments

Brian Fallow in The Herald summarises the take-home messages from the latest Treasury report. National have us on track to disaster.

Brownlee is dragging Canterbury down

Written By: - Date published: 11:34 am, April 8th, 2016 - 85 comments

The Christchurch rebuild gets its second fail grade from Treasury. And what of the rebuild work that has been done with failed reinforcing steel?

Nats failing Christchurch and lashing out at Treasury

Written By: - Date published: 7:02 am, December 1st, 2015 - 128 comments

A Treasury report calls the Christchurch rebuild plan “unachievable”. Gerry Brownlee immediately springs in to action – attacking Treasury. Christchurch deserves better than this…

Inequality – Treasury report

Written By: - Date published: 7:22 am, June 29th, 2015 - 22 comments

Last week Treasury came out with a detailed and interesting report, Inequality in New Zealand 1983/84 to 2013/14. It is no surprise to find that the last Labour government acted to reduce inequality, the current National government has acted to increase it.

Oram on the budget and Treasury fantasies

Written By: - Date published: 7:09 am, May 25th, 2015 - 75 comments

Extracts from Rod Oram’s piece in the SST as posted on Facebook. “What’s missing from [the budget], and the six before, is any glimpse of the world we live in, let alone the political leadership we need to survive and thrive in it.”

Hiding the government’s failure on poverty

Written By: - Date published: 2:00 pm, October 17th, 2014 - 81 comments

Thanks to Radio New Zealand, we now know that National got no real plan to address poverty, but also that they really, really don’t want to be honest about it.

Polity: The young ones

Written By: - Date published: 7:27 am, May 21st, 2014 - 7 comments

Rob Salmond at Polity looks at what our young have to look forward to in 2019  with National’s hands-off housing screwup. How an average family would fare under National’s do-nothing approach to the housing crisis then?

Polity: Madness: Our house

Written By: - Date published: 1:18 pm, May 20th, 2014 - 24 comments

How an average family would fare under National’s do-nothing approach to the housing crisis? Not very well. Even at the Treasury forecasts in the budget (which seem highly optimistic), this median New Zealand family, is projected by Treasury to have their disposable income go backwards over the next five “rock star” years. That is a disgrace

Polity: English lies on impact of tax switch

Written By: - Date published: 9:22 am, January 15th, 2014 - 15 comments

Rob Salmond at Polity has been having a look at Bill English’s “neutral” tax change in 2010…

Bill English recently heralded his tax switch as making net tax more progressive. He lied. It actually made net tax at least $500 million more regressive.

Tax cuts – because it worked so well last time

Written By: - Date published: 8:47 am, March 29th, 2013 - 190 comments

The ideological loonies advising the government want us to go even further down the stupid and damaging path of income tax cuts. Surely even the Nats have too much sense to listen this time.

Treasury advocates own disbandment

Written By: - Date published: 12:42 pm, February 2nd, 2012 - 100 comments

Treasury has blown the dust off its 1980s economics textbooks and offered the same old failed prescription. Their moronic suggestion to cut education spending to finance tax cuts can be dismissed out of hand. But their suggestion of core Crown spending cuts has some merit; I know where we can get $75m that’s being spent on useless advice and incompetent forecasting.

The future is already not so bright

Written By: - Date published: 9:02 am, December 6th, 2011 - 33 comments

Tax take is down, deficit is up, growth forecasts for next year are down. Nice to be told all this one week after the election, eh? Still John and Bill are relaxed and optimistic that the future will still be bright.

Nat asset sales lies

Written By: - Date published: 7:07 am, November 23rd, 2011 - 53 comments

Last night TV1 revealed National’s lies on the explosive topic of asset sales.  The Nats have no official advice to back up their asset sales claims, and information is being withheld from the public.  Not good enough – vote them out.

Treasury on the minimum wage

Written By: - Date published: 9:16 am, November 11th, 2011 - 35 comments

Labour want to raise the minimum wage to $15.  The Nats say that will cost jobs (they want to lower the minimum wage instead). Documents obtained by 3 News show that Treasury think the Nats are wrong.  A vote for increasing the minimum wage will not cost jobs.

Treasury warned on risk of Hobbit hustle

Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, December 2nd, 2010 - 15 comments

Remember how Peter Jackson and Warner Bros pulled the old Hollywood shakedown on us? By making a hollow threat to film elsewhere they got an extra $30 million and a law passed just for them. This was supposedly necessary to save a vital economy gain for the country but the Government knew that was bollocks all along.

Neo-liberalism at work

Written By: - Date published: 5:16 pm, November 16th, 2010 - 15 comments

So people get sick and become less productive. I would have thought that that was pretty much stating the obvious.

Spending tax payers money trying to quantify how much imaginary wealth these sick people could have created for their employers if they had been perfectly well, seems to me to be bordering on lunacy.

Treasury: peering into the dark with a broken torch

Written By: - Date published: 12:09 am, November 2nd, 2010 - 55 comments

I saw Labour’s press release yesterday about the latest Treasury monthly statements. Basically, Treasury says ‘the economy’s a whole lot worse than we expected but we stand by our growth forecasts in the Budget’. Odd, because the Budget forecast 1.6% growth so far this year and it has actually been 0.7%. How good is Treasury at forecasting?

Treasury’s Welfare Proposals

Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, October 13th, 2010 - 61 comments

Treasury have made their submission to the Welfare Working Group. Amongst the usual beneficiary-bashing and demands for privatisation, there are a couple of rare admissions that workers’ rights need strengthening. Which do we think will make it through…

Back into recession

Written By: - Date published: 7:15 am, October 6th, 2010 - 78 comments

The NZIER survey of business opinion shows that the economy shrank in the September Quarter. The December Quarter was already forecast to be negative and the Christchurch quake will make it worse. So, we’re almost certainly back into recession. That’s going to blow out the government’s debt. The underlying cause is peak oil.

Treasury assesses Nats’ economic performance

Written By: - Date published: 10:45 am, May 21st, 2010 - 11 comments

What does Treasury make of National’s economic plan according to the Budget papers? Here’s the outlook for when National is kicked out of office at the end of 2011: Workers’ share of the economy will have fallen from an already miserable 43.6% to 41.5%. GDP per capita will be lower when National leaves office than when they entered it. Real wages will drop 2%.

Bennett: a complete failure

Written By: - Date published: 11:06 pm, March 28th, 2010 - 72 comments

What a complete failure Paula Bennett is. If you could bear to sit through her interview on Q+A yesterday, you would have heard nothing but vacuous crap completely divorced from reality and her actual policies, which are opposed by Treasury, Health, and the Attorney-General. There are 67,000 more working age people on benefits than when Bennett became minister and she has no plan to reverse that.

Key & English lose us $21mil in 3 months

Written By: - Date published: 3:23 pm, November 4th, 2009 - 40 comments

Back in February, former currency speculator John Key and former Treasury adviser Bill English started talking about suspending contributions to the Cullen Fund, which was set up to help fund superannuation. ‘It’s losing so much money’, they wailed. Some people pointed out that the markets were already recovering, that investments could now be bought at […]

Treasury provides cover for Nats’ rightwing agenda

Written By: - Date published: 9:07 am, October 30th, 2009 - 19 comments

National’s favourite public servant (who got himself a nice pay rise), John Whitehead, has been offering dire warnings of the future. $2 trillion in debt by 2050! Something must be done! Naturally, the Treasury has an extreme right-wing solution – cut everything: cut health – yeah, a less healthy workforce that’ll be great for the […]

Flat tax: works for Lithuania and Albania, eh?

Written By: - Date published: 1:33 pm, October 13th, 2009 - 34 comments

Predictably, the ideological vanguardists at Treasury are rolling out the flat tax argument again. For some unknown reason Radio NZ hasn’t published the Treasury papers they obtained under the OIA but the idea this time seems to be to use the money raised from higher GST, capital gains tax, land tax, changes to tax treatment […]

McGovernment

Written By: - Date published: 5:06 am, September 30th, 2009 - 12 comments

This increasingly ramshackle government continues to astound. They’ve basically done nothing in a year when the country has been dealing with the worst economic crisis in decades. When they have tried to tackle big issues, the result has been incompetent policy produced entirely for political reasons – framed as moderate while paying off big business. Take Treasury’s view of […]

Gordon Campbell on Treasury and the resurrection of Brash

Written By: - Date published: 1:33 pm, July 22nd, 2009 - 12 comments

Gordon Campbell has a great piece over at Scoop about Treasury’s latest ideological outburst and the resurrection of Don Brash. He points out the futility of choosing a man who played a large role in creating our wage gap with Australia in the first place to head a commission designed to close it: Brash wants […]

OIA confirms: No reason to cut Cullen Fund contributions

Written By: - Date published: 12:02 pm, July 6th, 2009 - 72 comments

Well, we told you so. The Nats lied for weeks that a credit rating downgrade would be imposed on us if we didn’t cut contributions to the SuperFund. We didn’t fall for that for a minute. Even before the Budget, we pointed out that, except for the extraordinary conditions of the last two years, managed […]

What to do with Treasury

Written By: - Date published: 2:28 pm, December 5th, 2008 - 38 comments

It’s good to see Treasury’s extreme right-wing prescription for New Zealand has not been wholly embraced by the National Party – and it’s easy to see why. While Bill English (a former Treasury wonk himself) no doubt agrees with the policy ideas and direction outlined by Treasury, he has the disadvantage of being accountable to […]

Treasury – Labour left us in good shape

Written By: - Date published: 12:23 pm, December 5th, 2008 - 17 comments

Treasury’s briefing to Bill English as the new Minister of Finance must’ve pissed him off big time. Aside from the expected ideological burp (already covered in depth by No Right Turn) it reads like a long list of Labour achievements and calls on National is reign in its irresponsible promises. Here’s a taste of some […]

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