The SME Stream

Herald Now senior correspondent Katie Bradford says a new report reveals not getting scope and design done early enough is driving up costs.

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Long-term Government borrowing costs have hit significantly high levels all over the world, and experts are discussing the long-term implications of this.

The US, Japan, Germany and many other countries have reached the highest levels of Government debt in nearly two decades, inspiring economists to coin the term 'debt doom loop'.

Sam Dickie from Fisher Funds explained further.

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Forsyth Barr’s Zoe Wallis breaks down what the OCR decision means for interest rates, markets and the NZ economy.

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Banks aren't expected to increase fixed rates after the latest OCR hike. 

The Reserve Bank raised the Official Cash Rate another 25 basis points yesterday, bringing it to 2.75%. 

Governor Anna Breman says they are moving it towards a neutral level of around 3%. 

Co-operative Bank CEO Mark Wilkshire told Ryan Bridge the hike was largely expected, so those rates were already built in. 

He says the increase will be passed through to variable home loans quite quickly, but they're not expecting to see fixed rates rise. 

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Question for you: is National's tax strategy working?

What I'm talking about is the blatant strategy they have of swamping social media and traditional media with warnings about Labour, the Greens, and the Opportunity Party's taxes in a bid to freak you out so badly it drives you back to National.

The reason I'm asking is that I'm not entirely convinced this is working. It just seems desperate and embarrassing from National.

For example, National has been accused of dishonesty because it's running social media videos featuring a number of National MPs warning about Labour's nine taxes.

Now, Labour doesn't have nine taxes. At best, it has two: the capital gains tax and the bed tax. The others are taxes it's ruled out.

You and I might have legitimate doubts about Labour's ability to rule out those taxes because we all know coalition negotiations can change everything. But that's what National should say. They should make that argument.

Pretending Labour has nine taxes that it doesn't have is embarrassing and, honestly, it's no better than what Tamatha Paul of the Greens has been doing when she's accused National MPs of buying houses for rent, when that is blatantly not true.

National's social media feed at the moment is a line-up of really lame, try-hard memes about tax. I don't know who finds these funny. I don't know who the target audience is because I look at them and think they're cringeworthy.

There's one that looks like a trailer for a Pixar movie about a little boy named Chris who gets told off by a teacher for stealing other kids' money. Then there's one with a Star Wars reference to tax, with Chris Hipkins' face imposed over the top. Again, it lands really poorly and just looks cringe.

I think the problem is that I'm not convinced tax is what people are worried about right now. People are more concerned about what's actually going on in their lives: the rates bill, the power bill, the grocery bill and the possibility that each of those might go up again.

They're more worried about that than paying capital gains tax on a house that hasn't had any capital gains in years.

Now, maybe the strategy will eventually pay off. It's entirely possible that, at some point, voters will engage their brains about how they're going to vote, the tax issue will click and it will be worth a few points to National. Maybe talking about it ad nauseam, as they are at the moment, will help make that happen.

But it's coming at a cost right now.

It looks desperate. It looks a bit dishonest. And it's led to comparisons with Tamatha Paul, who is as loose as you like with the facts. Frankly, when you start getting compared to the Greens and Tamatha Paul, it's probably time to ask whether the strategy has gone a bit too far.

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Methanex now... might Huntly's gas-fired generator be next?

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In episode 70 of Leaders Getting Coffee our guest is Alex Martelli, a young innovator who is changing the way people buy real estate.  

She’s a born and bred Aucklander who spent her entire schooling and university years in the city.  But somewhere in there a desire for travel was instilled, and she spent 11 years traveling the world and working with some of the biggest real estate brands.

She admits that her first break was a result of being in the right place at the right time. But she’s a hard worker and that first opportunity led to an international real estate career that many would crave. Her experiences in Sydney, London and Hong Kong formed a desire to innovate and bring her learnings back to the residential property market in New Zealand.

Once back, she founded Martelli Buyers Agents, an agency directly focussed on working exclusively with the buyers of residential real estate.

She’s now three years in and her business is growing faster than the market.

Early on, she was told that her ideas would never work in New Zealand, and so, along the way she’s had to educate the market about the role of the buyer’s agent, a concept new to New Zealand, but well understood, and in some cases compulsory, in other parts of the world. Those early non-believers have since been turned around and she now enjoys the support of the wider industry that she’s a part of.

On the Leaders Getting Coffee podcast, Alex speaks with Bruce Cotterill about the role of a buyer’s agent in the real estate transaction, the broad spectrum of people using the service and the benefits to buyers. She also discusses how her team works alongside traditional real estate agents to ensure the best outcome all round.

And there’s even room for a robust discussion about the state of the current real estate markets around the world, and the ongoing challenges for New Zealand property, a market that still hasn’t recovered to the heights achieved in 2021.  

Above all, this is an enjoyable discussion with a young leader who is putting the skills she developed overseas to the test in New Zealand’s highly competitive real estate industry, all while introducing a new service that many people will find highly valuable.

Leaders Getting Coffee – Episode 70 with Bruce Cotterill and Alex Martelli, Founder and CEO of Martelli Buyers Agents

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Australasian venture-capital heavyweight Blackbird has closed a record $1.25 billion sixth fund – and its New Zealand general partner Phoebe Harrop Meadows says Kiwi companies are central to its investment strategy.

The fund, described by Blackbird as the largest venture-capital raise in ANZ history, underscores the firm’s rise from a small Australian startup investor into one of the region’s most consequential backers of technology companies.

Having backed the likes of Canva, Halter, Marloo, and Partly, Blackbird has structured the new fund into two roughly equal pools: about $600 million for investments from pre-seed to Series A, and a similar amount to support companies later in their growth. 

That allows it to write the first cheque when a company is little more than a proposition, then retain firepower to keep investing as the business scales.

The Goldilocks fund

In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Harrop Meadows explains why the unusually large fund is not simply a bigger pile of money chasing startups.

“It’s a sort of Goldilocks size,” she says, large enough to invest across a company’s life, but still built around identifying exceptional founders at the very beginning.

That is a marked contrast with the conventional division between early-stage venture funds and later-stage growth investors. The model is finding fertile ground in New Zealand. More than half of Blackbird’s new early-stage investments over the past year have been in Kiwi-founded companies, although Harrop Meadows stresses that measure is by number of companies rather than dollars invested. 

Harrop Meadows, who grew up in New Plymouth, studied law at the University of Otago, before heading to London to work at Bain & Company, then in growth-equity investing ahead of joining Blackbird in 2021, says New Zealand is like a “Galápagos island of ideas”, where founders often start companies not because startup status is fashionable, but because they have encountered a problem they feel compelled to solve. 

Listen to the full conversation with Phoebe Harrop Meadows on The Business of Tech, available on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Opposition Leader Chris Hipkins is waiting for the Government to release its pre-election fiscal update before explaining how Labour would fund a freeze to fuel taxes over the next three years.

Speaking to Canterbury Mornings, Hipkins said Labour would need to wait until the government's books were opened to determine how it would fund the election promise, but he backed the party's plan to ease petrol costs for Kiwis.

"What I'm being really clear about is that we're not going to ask New Zealanders in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis to pay another 25 cents a litre every time they fill up the car."

Hipkins also discussed Labour's policy to guarantee jobs for all graduate nurses, the latest Roy Morgan poll numbers, and the Paris Agreement, which currently divides the coalition government.

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The Reserve Bank Governor's defending the latest hike to the Official Cash Rate. 

The central bank's raised the cash rate another 25-basis-points to 2.75%. 

Anna Breman says they'll need to assess the impact of the past two OCR hikes before deciding whether to hike again. 

But she told Mike Hosking yesterday's hike was needed to rein in high inflation. 

She says if the OCR had been left unchanged yesterday, the Reserve Bank may have had to act much more aggressively later. 

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