Briefly in Aotearoa’s political economy on Wednesday, January 21:
The Lead: ACT Leader and Epsom MP David Seymour, who usually favours fewer land use restrictions and more housing supply, has come out strongly against housing densification around his constituents’ backyard pools in the leafy inner-city suburbs of Auckland, although he’s fine if the apartments are somewhere else, closer to a train station or bus route. NZ Herald-$
The Sidebar: Seymour says he’s frustrated ‘political posturing’ is preventing development and he’d like housing to become more affordable in price-to-income terms, either through higher incomes, or lower prices. He says it’s not possible to lower prices because home owners don’t want that. Hear and see more detail and analysis below and in the podcast above.
Elsewhere in the news: PM Christopher Luxon is expected to announce the election date later today, with November 7 picked by some pundits Stuff; Overseas overnight, US President Donald Trump threatened a new 200% tariff on champagne imports if French President Emmanuel Macron didn’t join his UN-alternative Board of Peace, which he has also invited Luxon to join and which costs US$1 billion to join Reuters; The US dollar and US bond prices slumped on a renewed ‘Sell America’ push in the wake of the latest tariff threats, while the asset seen as a safe haven, gold, jumped to a fresh record high and is heading for US$5,000/oz. Reuters
In the Scoop of the Day: Wellington Hospital’s Emergency Department hit a ‘code red’ situation with too many patients and too few staff 575 times between January and October last year, versus no code reds for all of 2024, Harriet Laughton and Tom Hunt report this morning for The Post-$.
In the Chart Pack of the Day: The BusinessNZ-BNZ survey of services businesses in December was published yesterday and found a sharp improvement in new orders, sales and stocks into expansion territory for the first time since February 2024, although employment remained in contraction.
Today’s Deep-dive of the Day is from Mildred Armah at Stuff, who details the case of Katrina Graham, a 43-year-old Christchurch woman on a supported living benefit with type 2 diabetes, who says she has spent more than a year living with painful, recurring ingrown toenails, digging them out herself with household implements because she can’t afford the cost of having them properly removed.
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