Bernard’s Saturday Soliloquy for the week to July 13

Auckland waterfront, July. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The Kākā

TL;DR: My top six things to note around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the week to July 13 are:

1. The National-ACT-NZ First Coalition Government watered down vehicle emissions standards this week, compounding the climate emissions damage from an increasingly incoherent set of policies.

2. The policies the Government has announced since November have added at least an extra 12 million tonnes of emissions to Aotearoa’s forecast track by 2030 and 61 million tonnes by 2050, official advice and documents showed. Those extra emissions would ramp up the Government’s Paris Agreement emissions liabilities towards $20 billion, which ministers have not factored into their decisions and which Treasury refuses to account for.

3. The economy is now tanking through a winter of business and consumer discontent, which is expected to force the Reserve Bank to cut the OCR by late November, and possibly as early as next month. Luckily, those lower rate cuts aren’t expected to fire up house prices too much because the Reserve Bank just introduced debt limits to stop landlords borrowing more heavily as rates fall.

4. Aotearoa now has a massive opportunity to quickly and cheaply decarbonise our transport fleet and electricity network by buying ever-cheaper batteries, panels and EVs from China at a time when Europe and the United States are turning away from Chinese imports.

5. This week’s implosion of Joe Biden’s Presidential re-election campaign has created a risk our Government hitches our strategic wagon to President Donald Trump’s United States, a super power that would adopt the autocratic and undemocratic practices we don’t like in China.

(Full paying subscribers can see and hear more detail, analysis and commentary in my podcast above and below the paywall fold, as well as our daily Journal of Record and daily Pick ‘n’ Mix sent earlier this morning. If we get more than 100 likes, we open this articles up for full public access and sharing online. Join our community of paying subscribers so as to be able to read and listen in full, comment below and in our exclusive Chat room, and get access to our ‘Hoon’ webinars.)

---

Six things to note from this week to July 13

1. An incoherent and reckless set of climate policies