Michael Coote: On the Money - Can perpetual bonds avert COVID-19 tax increases in New Zealand?

The 52^nd New Zealand Parliament, which opened on 7 November 2017, finds its terminal countdown months in 2020 blighted by the COVID-19 pandemic.  This Parliament is finally extinct as of Saturday 19 September 2020, the date nominated by the prime minister for a general election.  

The Ardern tripartite coalition government’s Great Lockdown emergency measures are causing huge and mounting national compensatory expenditure blowouts that will have to be funded somehow.  In the short run ramped up national debt and expedient money printing will fill the breach, but afterwards the resultant liabilities must be addressed. 

Michael Coote: On the Money - Phony War Looms in Parliament

The National Party has gone through revolution since the abrupt resignation of its former leader, ex-prime minister Bill English.  This greyest of grey men was not likely to have relished time as the humiliatingly outflanked opposition leader facing acting prime minister Winston Peters for six weeks whilst prime minister Jacinda Ardern took maternity leave from her job.

Political commentator Barry Soper recalls that Mr English seconded the motion to expel Mr Peters from National in the early 1990s.  The reversal of fortunes looming must have been relished by Mr Peters and dreaded by Mr English.  Far better for the latter to drop out of Parliament, grab hold of one of former National prime minister John Key's reinstated mates rates knighthoods, and, transmogrified as Sir William, sally forth boldly in search of fat corporate sinecures to cash out any residual value of his extinct political career.  That path was already well worn by Sir John in service of his own personal chivalric cause.