Many bosses now want their workers back in the office full time, but for a while in the immediate aftermath of Covid, workers had the power to demand the flexibility to stay home. Now the jobs market has sagged, the balance has shifted and a new hybrid way of working is becoming more common. Bernard Hickey speaks on this week’s When The Facts Change with Robert Half NZ MD Megan Alexander about these trends, including those younger workers who prefer a nice open plan office to a pokey, mouldy flat.

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It’s no secret that Aotearoa is facing a range of monumental infrastructure challenges — much has been made lately of the state of our water pipes, ferries, railways and roads. Successive generations of decision makers have kicked the infrastructure maintenance can down the road, and now we are facing a huge bill if we want to keep pace with our growing population.

Infrastructure NZ chief executive Nick Leggett joins Bernard Hickey to discuss the scale of the infrastructure challenge facing New Zealand, and how overseas countries have approached similar issues.

Ultimately, it all comes down to one key question: how big do we want our population to be in the future?

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‘Abundance’ is the hottest word in the political economy right now all around the world. A book by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein called ‘Abundance: How we build a better future’ argues the centre-left should adopt urbanisation and electrification as central aims to improve affordability of housing and transport, rather than framing emissions reduction as an expensive and painful necessity that the right has successfully weaponised into electoral suicide. This week on When The Facts Change, Bernard Hickey talks to Rewiring Aotearoa about what could be done right now to electrify our transport fleet and the cost of living savings within our grasp.

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The Reserve Bank cut the Official Cash Rate this week, as expected, but one of the six members of the bank’s rate setting committee voted to hold the OCR. That surprised markets and pushed up the wholesale interest rates that drive fixed mortgage rates. Bernard Hickey speaks with Kiwibank’s Mary Jo Vergara about a very uncertain outlook for rates in the wake of Donald Trump’s Liberation Day shock.

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In the year of growth, Nicola Willis has presented a growth budget. But does the Investment Boost initiative, which speeds up depreciation for businesses, promise the kind of growth that the economy needs? In this special Spinoff pod for budget day, Toby Manhire asks Bernard Hickey for his take on the headline changes, and whether or not David Seymour’s earlier commentary that his colleague Brooke van Velden had “saved the budget” through its controversial and hurried changes to the pay equiry scheme, has been proven true. Plus: what are the cumulative impacts of the changes to KiwiSaver and Best Start, as compared to the SuperGold cohort? And how much did the global political and economic volatility influence the documents published today?

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Fresh off a pre-Budget speech that took aim at the recent changes to pay equity, Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins joins Bernard Hickey to discuss the government’s plans to cut $4.4 billion of spending over the next four years. What are the potential downsides of Nicola Willis’ austerity approach to budget management? What other types of debt might we be accruing without realising it? Listen in to find out.

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In 2010, the NZ Green Building Council introduced the Homestar sustainability certification, a framework that aims to allow designers, architects and builders to build better, more environmentally friendly, energy efficient housing. The upfront cost of building to the Homestar certification can be more, but the potential savings over time - not to mention the quality of life improvements - are significant.

Brad Olsen from Infometrics, an economic consultancy that has just published a detailed report on the Homestar certification,  joins Bernard Hickey to dig into the broad range of benefits of Homestar-rated housing, for both the planet and the back pocket.

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This week, Bernard Hickey dives into the psychology of the housing market and talks to realestate.co.nz CEO Sarah Wood about why so many home sellers are holding on and simply not selling, rather than lowering their price to “meet the market” and “clear the market” in a way other markets do when there’s too much supply and not enough demand.

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More than half of consumer spending is dominated one way or another by a collection of monopolies, duopolies and quadropolies that generate higher prices and profits than would be normal if there was true and tough competition, as a myriad of market studies and inquiries have found for supermarkets, fuel retailing, building materials, electricity, banking, insurance and real estate agencies. Twenty years of finger-wagging and report writing has failed in all of these sectors, except for telecommunications, where an aggressive breakup of a monopoly (Telecom) and regulation of number portability and interchange fees, along with the arrival of third competitor in 2degrees, sparked a flourishing of competition and ever-lower prices for ever-more data. The Reserve Bank called it the “2degrees Effect” in creating deflation for a significant part of the economy.

Bernard Hickey talks to Monopoly Watch spokesman and one of the founders of 2degrees, Tex Edwards, about how to create the “2degrees Effect” for supermarkets, banking and electricity.

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Bernard Hickey talks to the co-founders of Christchurch-based AI start-up, Contented. Lucy Pink and Hannah Hardy-Jones tell their story from meeting over coffee and jam, to working with US news publishers to turn live-streamed council meetings into news articles.

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