Peter Williams Hosts Taxpayer Talk: David Baker on Exposing Inefficiencies in our Building Sector

05/13/25 • 46 min

This week Peter Williams is joined by social media sensation, David Baker, from Rapid QS. David is a quantity surveyor by trade, specialising in pricing residential buildings—and has spent the last year blowing the whistle on why so many public housing and infrastructure projects cost so much.
But price is just the start—David also raising growing concern with agencies being unable to explain why the costs are so high, and has stated a wide-ranging social media campaign to expose these costs and inefficiencies within the industry.

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Peter Williams Hosts Taxpayer Talk: Hon Ruth Richardson on Budget 2025

This week on Taxpayer Talk, Peter sat down with Ruth Richardson, Minister of Finance during the National-Bolger Government, and catalyst of major economic reforms during the 90s.

One of New Zealand's most respected Ministers of Finance, Ruth remains a deep thinker on the country’s dangerous fiscal position and how we can extract ourselves from it.

With this year’s Budget only a few weeks away, she sets a path back to fiscal sustainability and tackles universal superannuation, the health system and the corporate tax rate.

You can listen to the episode on our website, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio and other good podcast apps.

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Taxpayer Talk: Peter Williams with Levi Gibbs on a Path to Surplus

“The rainy day has come. We believe it is crucial that the Government cut debt now.”

Those words from Taxpayer’s Union researcher Levi Gibbs talking about his new paper “A Path to Surplus” released just a few days before Budget 2025.

Levi Gibbs joined host Peter Williams on a special edition of the Taxpayer Talk podcast to discuss the in-depth paper which analyses both the debt and the annual budget deficit, and offers solutions to reduce both.

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