Labour’s newly unveiled “Future Fund” is being sold as a bold economic vision for New Zealand – a sovereign-style investment vehicle to boost infrastructure and innovative businesses.
If the Future Fund is not it, what are the good ideas floating around that would hit the mark? Or should Labour just focus on more basic messaging like "no asset sales", "targeted investment in X Y and Z", "wealth tax/CGT". Whilst it is pretty easy to criticize a half-baked idea, it is much harder to come up with something genuinely better
And speaking of half-baked ideas what about the $62 billion funding gap regarding Roads of National Significance which are now commencing to be built by the Coalition (interview J Tame with C Bishop). These were originally announced without even any business plan. More on the subject of half-baked ideas: W Peters' Future Fund was to be funded by foreign investment not local so fundamentally different to the Labour proposal. Bryce you do not mention that other than not selling off assets, Labour has signalled a plan and offered a vision to stem the exodus of Kiwis and make them want to stay It cannot be under-estimated how much we are all looking for this.
I am also hoping that it is part of a set of initiatives that will be revealed over the coming months, that someone conceived as a cohesive strategy, rather than just a buch of ideas thrown together.
Bryce, you nailed it with "a drift toward corporatist, ad-hoc solutions instead of coherent strategy." Spot on.
Labour's Future Fund proposal feels like fishing in the dark, no more likely to land a big one than National's fishing for overseas investors.
What we desperately need is a clear economic vision, fostering new, high value-add industries. We must break our addiction to selling raw organic commodities.
Yes, it requires a form of "picking winners", though not so much individual companies, but strategic sectors where self-sustaining ecosystems can be built at scale. Funding gaps that might otherwise prevent those developments as well as catalytic accelerators. We must back startups that build wealth from exports, not just those with perceived social good as tends to happen now.
Our biggest hurdle is a failure of political imagination. National's faith in offshore investors and Labour's faith in a state-controlled fund are two sides of the same outdated coin. Neither party has grasped the fundamental need to strategically "pick" and nurture entire industry ecosystems for high-value, wealth-building growth
As already mentioned, picking individual winners to invest in is fraught, picking strategic areas of existing strengths less fraught. But until NZ companies (both trendy start ups and behemoths) stop on -selling to overseas markets, when “the price is right”, i’d much rather see this $200m plus corporate welfare go towards a free dental service for everyone earning less than $65.G p.a. (to pick a figure out of the ether)
If the Future Fund is not it, what are the good ideas floating around that would hit the mark? Or should Labour just focus on more basic messaging like "no asset sales", "targeted investment in X Y and Z", "wealth tax/CGT". Whilst it is pretty easy to criticize a half-baked idea, it is much harder to come up with something genuinely better
And speaking of half-baked ideas what about the $62 billion funding gap regarding Roads of National Significance which are now commencing to be built by the Coalition (interview J Tame with C Bishop). These were originally announced without even any business plan. More on the subject of half-baked ideas: W Peters' Future Fund was to be funded by foreign investment not local so fundamentally different to the Labour proposal. Bryce you do not mention that other than not selling off assets, Labour has signalled a plan and offered a vision to stem the exodus of Kiwis and make them want to stay It cannot be under-estimated how much we are all looking for this.
I am also hoping that it is part of a set of initiatives that will be revealed over the coming months, that someone conceived as a cohesive strategy, rather than just a buch of ideas thrown together.
Bryce, you nailed it with "a drift toward corporatist, ad-hoc solutions instead of coherent strategy." Spot on.
Labour's Future Fund proposal feels like fishing in the dark, no more likely to land a big one than National's fishing for overseas investors.
What we desperately need is a clear economic vision, fostering new, high value-add industries. We must break our addiction to selling raw organic commodities.
Yes, it requires a form of "picking winners", though not so much individual companies, but strategic sectors where self-sustaining ecosystems can be built at scale. Funding gaps that might otherwise prevent those developments as well as catalytic accelerators. We must back startups that build wealth from exports, not just those with perceived social good as tends to happen now.
Our biggest hurdle is a failure of political imagination. National's faith in offshore investors and Labour's faith in a state-controlled fund are two sides of the same outdated coin. Neither party has grasped the fundamental need to strategically "pick" and nurture entire industry ecosystems for high-value, wealth-building growth
As already mentioned, picking individual winners to invest in is fraught, picking strategic areas of existing strengths less fraught. But until NZ companies (both trendy start ups and behemoths) stop on -selling to overseas markets, when “the price is right”, i’d much rather see this $200m plus corporate welfare go towards a free dental service for everyone earning less than $65.G p.a. (to pick a figure out of the ether)
Could someone provide a critical compare and contrast piece on the labour Party proposal and say the Norwegian sovereign fund?