This week on Q+A

Sunday 19th May, 9am

This Sunday, we review the mid-term Budget with Finance Minister Bill English and ask what’s in it for middle New Zealand and whether the Government’s meeting its own goals of re-balancing the economy in favour of investment in jobs in the export sector.

We ask Labour finance spokesman David Parker and Greens co-leader Russel Norman for their take on the Budget and how they would run the economy differently if they had control of the Treasury benches.

Also on the programme, we interview Vladimir Putin’s unofficial biographer. Masha Gessen is a Russian American living in Moscow. Her book traces the former KGB agent’s ruthless rise to power and leaves us in no doubt about the danger he poses to his own people and the wider world. It goes without saying that the author is living dangerously in a state accused of lethally suppressing its critics.

On the panel this week, Auckland University political scientist Dr Raymond Miller, former Green MP and social activist, Sue Bradford, and Dr Oliver Hartwich, executive director of the New Zealand Initiatve, the think tank born of the merger of the Business Round Table and the New Zealand Institute.

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