Briefly in Aotearoa’s political economy on Wednesday, January 14:
The Lead: The Ministry of Transport advised Infrastructure, Transport, Housing and RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop in August last year that the Government’s motorway-heavy plans would cost a “quarter of a trillion dollars” to build and run over the next 20 years, which would have to be paid for with new user-pays charges of $49 billion. Bishop agreed in a speech shortly after asking for the just-released advice that “tough decisions” would be required. See and hear more detail and analysis below and in the podcast above.
The Sidebar: Signs late last year of green shoots emerging in the economy have yet to bloom into a full-blown recovery, with the first batch of data published in 2026 showing a frustratingly-familiar mix of stronger business confidence but weak retail sales and investment. See and hear more detail and analysis below and in the podcast above.
Elsewhere in the news today: ANZ increased its floating mortgage rates last night by 10 basis points, bringing it back into line with its competitors 1News; Oil prices rose 3% overnight on fears a revolution in Iran would choke off its two million barrels a day of oil exports Reuters; and, 11 central bank Governors, including those of Australia, Canada, the UK and New Zealand, issued a joint statement supporting Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s fight for Fed independence.
In the Scoop of the Day: Henry Cooke reports for The Post-$ that the Government went against official advice when scaling back climate reporting rules for businesses, pushing the threshold four times higher than officials recommended, despite concern about international relations.
In the Chart Pack of the Day below, we include details of the latest surveys of business confidence, employee confidence, vehicle sales and retail sales.
Today’s Deep-dive of the Day is from Katie Todd at RNZ about how workers are arriving in Queenstown and leaving within weeks because the cost of living is too high.
Join us as a paying subscriber to get more analysis and detail below the paywall fold and in the podcast above. Paying subscribers can also comment below and join The Kākā community in webinars and our chat room. Paying subscribers also enable me to do this journalism. If paying subscribers ask in the comments below and ‘like’ the article more than 100 times, I will open it up for full public reading, listening and sharing later today.
The expensive rubber hits the RONS roads
