When the Facts Change

Billions has been spent on the construction of Auckland’s City Rail Link, largely at the cost of taxpayers and ratepayers. The current Auckland council zoning rules, however, prevent the building of high-rise residential and commercial buildings at Mt Eden, Kingsland and Morningside stations. Sooner or later, something has got to give. CBRE director of residential research Tamba Carleton joins Bernard Hickey to discuss the need for Auckland to grow up, and grow upwards, in order to make the most of it’s brand new tunnel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Reserve Bank gets another chance to cut interest rates next week. So far 2025 has seen the RBNZ make three consecutive cuts to the official cash rate, which was widely expected by economists up and down the country. But next week, for the first time this year, there’s doubt. Kiwibank economist Sabrina Delgado joins Bernard Hickey to assess our central bank’s options leading into next week’s monetary policy statement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many bosses now want their workers back in the office full time, but for a while in the immediate aftermath of Covid, workers had the power to demand the flexibility to stay home. Now the jobs market has sagged, the balance has shifted and a new hybrid way of working is becoming more common. Bernard Hickey speaks on this week’s When The Facts Change with Robert Half NZ MD Megan Alexander about these trends, including those younger workers who prefer a nice open plan office to a pokey, mouldy flat. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s no secret that Aotearoa is facing a range of monumental infrastructure challenges — much has been made lately of the state of our water pipes, ferries, railways and roads. Successive generations of decision makers have kicked the infrastructure maintenance can down the road, and now we are facing a huge bill if we want to keep pace with our growing population. Infrastructure NZ chief executive Nick Leggett joins Bernard Hickey to discuss the scale of the infrastructure challenge facing New Zealand, and how overseas countries have approached similar issues. Ultimately, it all comes down to one key question: how big do we want our population to be in the future? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘Abundance’ is the hottest word in the political economy right now all around the world. A book by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein called ‘Abundance: How we build a better future’ argues the centre-left should adopt urbanisation and electrification as central aims to improve affordability of housing and transport, rather than framing emissions reduction as an expensive and painful necessity that the right has successfully weaponised into electoral suicide. This week on When The Facts Change, Bernard Hickey talks to Rewiring Aotearoa about what could be done right now to electrify our transport fleet and the cost of living savings within our grasp. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Reserve Bank cut the Official Cash Rate this week, as expected, but one of the six members of the bank’s rate setting committee voted to hold the OCR. That surprised markets and pushed up the wholesale interest rates that drive fixed mortgage rates. Bernard Hickey speaks with Kiwibank’s Mary Jo Vergara about a very uncertain outlook for rates in the wake of Donald Trump’s Liberation Day shock. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the year of growth, Nicola Willis has presented a growth budget. But does the Investment Boost initiative, which speeds up depreciation for businesses, promise the kind of growth that the economy needs? In this special Spinoff pod for budget day, Toby Manhire asks Bernard Hickey for his take on the headline changes, and whether or not David Seymour’s earlier commentary that his colleague Brooke van Velden had “saved the budget” through its controversial and hurried changes to the pay equiry scheme, has been proven true. Plus: what are the cumulative impacts of the changes to KiwiSaver and Best Start, as compared to the SuperGold cohort? And how much did the global political and economic volatility influence the documents published today? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fresh off a pre-Budget speech that took aim at the recent changes to pay equity, Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins joins Bernard Hickey to discuss the government’s plans to cut $4.4 billion of spending over the next four years. What are the potential downsides of Nicola Willis’ austerity approach to budget management? What other types of debt might we be accruing without realising it? Listen in to find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2010, the NZ Green Building Council introduced the Homestar sustainability certification, a framework that aims to allow designers, architects and builders to build better, more environmentally friendly, energy efficient housing. The upfront cost of building to the Homestar certification can be more, but the potential savings over time - not to mention the quality of life improvements - are significant. Brad Olsen from Infometrics, an economic consultancy that has just published a detailed report on the Homestar certification, joins Bernard Hickey to dig into the broad range of benefits of Homestar-rated housing, for both the planet and the back pocket. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Bernard Hickey dives into the psychology of the housing market and talks to realestate.co.nz CEO Sarah Wood about why so many home sellers are holding on and simply not selling, rather than lowering their price to “meet the market” and “clear the market” in a way other markets do when there’s too much supply and not enough demand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More than half of consumer spending is dominated one way or another by a collection of monopolies, duopolies and quadropolies that generate higher prices and profits than would be normal if there was true and tough competition, as a myriad of market studies and inquiries have found for supermarkets, fuel retailing, building materials, electricity, banking, insurance and real estate agencies. Twenty years of finger-wagging and report writing has failed in all of these sectors, except for telecommunications, where an aggressive breakup of a monopoly (Telecom) and regulation of number portability and interchange fees, along with the arrival of third competitor in 2degrees, sparked a flourishing of competition and ever-lower prices for ever-more data. The Reserve Bank called it the “2degrees Effect” in creating deflation for a significant part of the economy. Bernard Hickey talks to Monopoly Watch spokesman and one of the founders of 2degrees, Tex Edwards, about how to create the “2degrees Effect” for supermarkets, banking and electricity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bernard Hickey talks to the co-founders of Christchurch-based AI start-up, Contented. Lucy Pink and Hannah Hardy-Jones tell their story from meeting over coffee and jam, to working with US news publishers to turn live-streamed council meetings into news articles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Donald Trump’s bigger-and-stupider-than-expected tariffs have upended the global trading system and are threatening to create a new financial crisis. Bernard Hickey talks with Kiwibank chief economist Jarrod Kerr about the latest day “when the facts changed”, and what might happen next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If New Zealand’s economy was a grass paddock, it would be in pretty rough shape. We’re coming out of a pretty bad drought (economic recession) and there’s widespread political disagreement about how to get our worn-out field of brown grass back to the lush green pasture it once was. Bernard Hickey speaks to Kiwibank economist Sabrina Delgado about what looks promising (green shoots) and what looks worrying (brown roots) in the meadow of our national economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For 30 years, a little-known number in government circles has quietly stymied investment for future generations. Set by Treasury, the ‘discount rate’ was once set at 10%, and it meant future benefits and costs were heavily devalued, becoming worth almost nothing after six or seven years. In a nutshell, higher discount rates discourage long-term investment and incentivise short-term projects. Treasury has recently reduced the discount rate to 5%, but is that enough? Bernard Hickey talks with Arthur Grimes, senior fellow at Motu Research and professor at Victoria University, about a big shift to new discount rates that could make big future projects much more viable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bernard Hickey chews the monetary policy fat with returning guest Reserve Bank chief economist Paul Conway. Was inflation targeting (a policy framework first introduced in Aotearoa 35 years ago) actually our greatest invention? Was quantitative easing a success? Is inflation different now? And should Reserve Banks and Governments work more in tandem, rather than against each other? Listen in to find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we dive deep into the worlds of AI, defence technology businesses and the great technological arms race between China and the US. Bernard is joined by Sean Gourley, a New Zealander who founded US-based tech success story Primer, an AI intelligence company helping governments understand the mathematical patterns underlying modern warfare. Gourley shares his insights about New Zealand’s position in this great contest, along with the opportunities for New Zealand to grow high-value businesses (think Rocketlab) in the AI and tech space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adrian Orr resigned as Reserve Bank Governor this week after 7 years in the job, but three years early, effective immediately and without explanation. Bernard Hickey talks in an emergency edition of When The Facts Change with NZ Initiative executive director Oliver Hartwich, an Orr critic, about his legacy and how his replacement should change the bank, and with Kiwibank chief economist Jarrod Kerr about Orr’s operation of monetary policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even as New Zealand’s economy was in the depths of a recession, the Reserve Bank kept a firm grip on monetary policy, only easing up in mid-2024. This week, Bernard Hickey sits down with Kiwibank chief economist Jarrod Kerr to discuss whether the Reserve Bank should be hitting the accelerator now, rather than simply lifting its foot off the brake. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Described by The Spinoff’s Duncan Greive as “the most important figure in New Zealand technology you’ve never hear of”, Rowan Simpson has had a guiding hand in Aotearoa’s most successful tech companies. His new book “How to be Wrong: a crash course in startup success” shares the close calls and near misses that happened on the way to success (read: the staggering purchase of Trade Me by Fairfax Media in 2006). He talks to Bernard Hickey about his journey through tech, the keys to startup success, and whether he ought to have just bought in to residential property instead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices