Bernard's Saturday Soliloquy for the week to April 12

The neutron bomb of Trump’s “America First” policies hit the global economy this week when the US President doubled down on tariffs to force concessions from China. Apart from anything else, it is projected to cost the average US household US$4,700 per year and punish the poorest Americans the most. Photo: Getty Images

Six long stories short from our political economy in the week to Saturday, April 12:

1. Donald Trump exploded a neutron bomb under 80 years of globalisation, but Nicola Willis said the Government would cut operational and capital spending even more to achieve a Budget surplus by 2027/28. That even tighter fiscal policy conflicts with the Reserve Bank’s easing of monetary policy, which it continued this week. Willis’ tightening will also amplify recessionary headwinds from overseas and undermine a nascent local recovery.

2. Simeon Brown ploughed ahead with a gaslighting strategy for the decades-in-the-making staffing and infrastructure crises unfolding in plain sight in regional hospitals such as Nelson and Gisborne, which doctors openly called bullshit on again this week, and which was obvious in multiple reports of A&E waits, surgery delays and untold unnecessary and expensive pain and stress. (See more below in Pick ‘n’ Mix)

3. Surveys of businesses and mortgage brokers published this week showed our housing-market-with-bits-tacked-on-economy hasn’t responded to last year’s rate cuts, and that was before Trump started a tariff war between our two largest trading partners.

4. PM Christopher Luxon announced plans to spend an extra $9 billion to ‘upgrade the lethality’ of our defence forces, dropping his argument, for a day, that ‘there was no spare money’ to invest more on housing, health, transport and schools.

5. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment reiterated¹ the recommendation of the Climate Commission that pine forestry be taken out of the Emissions Trading Scheme. Climate Minister Simon Watts said the Government wouldn’t do that.

6. David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill was ejected from Parliament at its second reading this week by all MPs except ACT’s, reinforcing the public rejection by 90% of submitters and the biggest street protests in a generation.

(There is more detail, analysis and links to documents below the paywall fold and in the podcast above for paying subscribers. If we get over 100 likes from paying subscribers, we’ll open it up for public reading, listening and sharing, although we’d love it if you subscribed to join The Kākā’s community and support making this journalism public. Students and teachers who sign up for the free version with their .ac.nz or .school.nz emails are automatically upgraded to the paid version for free. Our special offers right now are: $3/month or $30/year for under 30s & $6.50/month or $65/year for over 65s who rent.)

The six big things from our political economy this week

When the facts changed, New Zealand’s Government didn’t