Category: Economic Issues
The retirement of implausible baseline climate scenarios is now starting to have real-world consequences as decision makers realize they’ve been making decisions that have had unnecessary real-world, negative impacts on their constituents and clients.
While Budget 2026 shows prudent short-term management, it falls short of the more ambitious structural reform needed to put New Zealand’s finances on a truly sustainable long-term footing. While the direction is positive, the trajectory is tediously and unnecessarily slow.
The Government’s latest Budget continues the pattern of short-term political management rather than the deep structural change New Zealand now desperately needs. While some restraint is being shown in public service numbers, the hard decisions on superannuation, welfare dependency, and genuine incentives for self-reliance are once again being avoided.
What is very clear is that New Zealand can no longer justify basing major national policies on a scenario that has now been formally rejected by the very international body whose advice underpinned our entire climate agenda. A full and immediate political reset is essential - one that removes these flawed “implausible” assumptions RCP 8.5 and SSP5-8.5 before they inflict even more damage on New Zealand households and businesses.
The international committee responsible for the official scenarios that feed into climate modeling has just published the next generation of climate scenarios. Big news: The new framework has eliminated the most extreme scenarios that have dominated climate research over much of the past several decades — specifically RCP8.5. This is an absolutely huge development which will have lasting impacts across research and policy.
With hundreds of thousands of voters still undecided, the 2026 election remains fluid. In an environment of ongoing global uncertainty, questions over economic security, political stability, and constitutional integrity are likely to dominate voter decisions.
Those in charge of the neotribal corporations have grandiose ambitions. Not content with righting historical wrongs, their ambitions extend to acquiring both vast amounts of capital and the political power.
The Middle East crisis has not only disrupted global shipping routes and fuel flows; it has revealed just how dangerously exposed New Zealand has become. Unlike many countries, we entered this crisis having deliberately dismantled our refining capacity, constrained our gas supply, and imposed ideologically driven climate policies that deliberately increased energy costs throughout the economy. The end result is a country acutely vulnerable to global shocks.
The focus of climate and disaster policy should shift from futile attempts to control natural variability to adaptive strategies that enhance resilience. Recognising the limitations of human influence over climate, resources should be directed toward strengthening infrastructure and community preparedness. It’s time to lift the burden from the minds of New Zealanders: there is no Climate Emergency and - along with Net Zero - it can be put to bed with Rip Van Winkle.
As we begin the final year of the Coalition’s first term of Government, it is instructive to look at the commitments they made when first elected. At that time the country faced significant challenges as a result of six years of mismanagement by Labour.
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