Professor Robert MacCulloch: Paying for cycleways

Did Labour's Hipkins & National's Willis & Bishop bust the Ferries & break NZ's State Highway 1 System Linking North & South to pay for pork-barrel-politics cycleways in their own electorates?

Contrary to popular belief, NZ always did have the money to pay for state-of-the-art rail-enabled ferries linking the North & South Islands, even at a cost of several billion dollars. It is not a matter of finding the funds, its a matter of using the scarce resources the country already has to maximum effect & not wasting them on stupid projects. Are there tools to help make these decisions? Yes, they go by the name of cost-benefit analysis.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 19/6/24

More money flows through the infrastructure pipeline – and Public Works Act changes aim to hasten the flow

Infrastructure is big deal in the Beehive news agenda today.

The government is making it easier to build infrastructure by modernising the Public Works Act.

And it is braying about the billions of dollars being pumped through something called the National Infrastructure Pipeline, which provides a national “view” of current or planned infrastructure projects, from roads, to water infrastructure, to schools

Bob Jones: Academic pretensionism

Few people would argue when I say many university academics, notably in the humanities, have an inflated view of themselves. There was a time when they were treated with awe but those days are well gone. The financially driven degradation of universities as intellectual institutions into degree factories, issuing degrees and diplomas for every conceivable activity, the majority having no intellectual dimension, were covered in my comic novel “Degrees For Everyone”.