Thanks Aaron, will post the link up on the post

Hi John,

Agreed with your points. I hope it is clear that my irritation is with the policy discussion stemming from the council – not from the report per see. There is no way I could criticise a report without reading it.

However, as Eric pointed out this is the nature of politicians, which is a pity really …

Given some of the statements made concerning the leaky buildings issue it is necessary for me (as one of the authors of the Covec report) to clarify a couple of points that have been raised. First, the fact that the Govt obtains tax revenue from spending on leaky building repairs does not by itself mean that there is an economic justification for the Govt to necessarily fund repair. Second, as has been correctly pointed out, such tax receipts should not be considered additional ‘bonus’ revenue and we have not described them as such in our report.

The report is not yet available for release but we hope it will be later this week; from our perspective it is therefore unfortunate that it has been publically discussed already.

However, we do believe that there is a strong policy rationale for some form of Govt intervention to reduce the high costs of the current dispute resolution process for leaky buildings. For the country to spend an estimated $11bn to fix an $8bn problem strikes me as rather inefficient. If the implementation of a more efficient resolution process were to require the Govt to contribute towards some of the repair costs to eliminate the incentive for parties to use the existing litigious processes, we think that a full cost-benefit analysis would likely support such a policy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi

Economists are gods among insects. Never let anyone tell you different.