If National wins ...

[elZorro]

Helen Clark just coasted on what Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson had achieved already with (the)economy and Cullen ran it (the debt?) down to please Helen until in their last year they were in for a Budget deficit the next year.

As far as the execrable Len Brown goes he will be eased out next year one way or the other and my bet is that the right wing Labourite Phil Goff will become Mayor and apply some common sense to Len's grandiose bankrupting Transport dreams.

MVT, I hope that Phil Goff gets in as Auckland Mayor too. However, the first part of your post, I don't agree with. It belittles what positive changes there were, in those three terms. Wikipedia has a balanced opinion of this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_...of_New_Zealand

Stacked up alongside what National has done in the last 6-7 years, Labour didn't need to sell off assets, they didn't post any deficits while they were in office, and no-one will ever know how much better the economy would have performed if Labour had been able to stay in after 2008. Treasury boffins mocked up forecasts for ongoing deficits in about 2008, and those are what National keeps quoting as verification of their expertise with the economy. They were just guesses, without the knowledge of record dairy receipts that were going to come through by 2013. Even then, National couldn't post a surplus. Unsurprising, when they are more comfortable with higher unemployment, lower taxes for the wealthy, and encouraging the spread of offshore manufacturing by providing R&D grants to bigger businesses, while ignoring the regions in other areas.

[Daytr]

Its yet another quite remarkable post from our eminent economist MVT.
I'm just wondering how Helen Clark could ride on the coattails of Douglas & Richardson when there was another 6 years until Clark became PM.
Perhaps Ayn Rand was filling in those intervening years MVT? LOL
NZ was in far better shape under Labour than it is now and we certainly weren't up to our eyeballs in debt and now about to face the very real chance of a recession. I saw a report a couple of days back that the average dairy farmer will be losing $250k pa at the current payout level from Fonterra.

[elZorro]

Its yet another quite remarkable post from our eminent economist MVT.
I'm just wondering how Helen Clark could ride on the coattails of Douglas & Richardson when there was another 6 years until Clark became PM.
Perhaps Ayn Rand was filling in those intervening years MVT? LOL
NZ was in far better shape under Labour than it is now and we certainly weren't up to our eyeballs in debt and now about to face the very real chance of a recession. I saw a report a couple of days back that the average dairy farmer will be losing $250k pa at the current payout level from Fonterra.

Yes, the average dairy farmer will run at a loss this year. I guess this doesn't apply so much to the established farm owner, who may have a lower residual loan outstanding, and has a sharemilker who provides the herd on the property. The variable order sharemilkers will be hit harder, and they tend to employ workers too.

Bernard Hickey has an interesting article on the glut of savings - people don't want to take risks any more.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/economy/ne...10+August+2015

[winner69]

EZ, did you write this?

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/opin...nomic-meltdown

Lucy has a myopic view of the economy though.

[BlackPeter]

BP, getting a bit fed up with derogatory terms. You have called me racist on this thread on many occasions & now a bully.

Daytr, you might be here a bit economical with the truth. I never called you a racist. I did call however some of Labours and NZF's actions racist ... and I might have used this attribute as well for some of Winston's campaigns. As far as the other term is concerned - just look into the mirror and you will see .

[elZorro]

EZ, did you write this?

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/opin...nomic-meltdown

Lucy has a myopic view of the economy though.

I'm amused at the choice of words from Jane Bowron, but overall it's a bit mean to dairy farmers - as usual, it's not a black-and-white issue. Jane Bowron is pointing the finger at the National Govt mostly. Where is the proper direction from these people, she's saying. They did hope that the dairy cheque would solve a lot of the issues with the economy, it's why the govt booted out the regional group in charge of irrigation in Canterbury, so they could railroad more dairy conversions. Now large areas of the Canterbury plains are without shelter belts, and are even more reliant on regular doses of river-fed water from multimillion dollar centre-pivot irrigators. You can't change these farms back to cropping in a hurry. In lots of other ways, farmers increased their average costs of production over the last few years (because they could afford it on the higher average payouts), and now they're in a tight spot. It's a matter of whether the dairy payouts will move back up again, and for several reasons, that might take a year or three to find out.

[craic]

If I buy a house in Auckland at an inflated price because I expect to make a profit and the predicted collapse occurs, I can only blame my own action. If I buy a dairy farm at the grossly inflated prices that some Farmers/investors were paying when they thought that they had found the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow and then the crock is empty, then that's life.

[elZorro]

If I buy a house in Auckland at an inflated price because I expect to make a profit and the predicted collapse occurs, I can only blame my own action. If I buy a dairy farm at the grossly inflated prices that some Farmers/investors were paying when they thought that they had found the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow and then the crock is empty, then that's life.

That's one way of looking at it Craic, but when did the National Govt start saying that maybe it's not a good idea to speed up dairy conversions? Until very recently they've been encouraging the idea, even vocalising it. They haven't been so good at boosting other types of industry in NZ. Sure, they'll turn up for a photo opportunity after the odd entrepeneur or company calls them in, after the hard work has been done. In some of the operations, it has been at the expense of another factory somewhere else, sometimes it's robots replacing staff. They're throwing taxpayer money at large overseas listed companies, just on the off-chance that they'll keep a few R&D people in NZ, but manufacture somewhere else. Not good enough.

Sir Peter Talley also has grim scenarios for the government to ponder.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/indu...jobs-education

[craic]

I suppose you expect the National party to warn people against investing in housing in Auckland as well? or maybe in the sharemarket because its bound to crash again. We make our own mistakes and if politicians were expert in anything, they probably wouldn't be politicians.









auckland

[elZorro]

I suppose you expect the National party to warn people against investing in housing in Auckland as well? or maybe in the sharemarket because its bound to crash again. We make our own mistakes and if politicians were expert in anything, they probably wouldn't be politicians.

Those who can, do, those who can't, become politicians? Doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

But you have detoured with my argument, Craic. I'm saying that the National govt has visibly backed those they thought would be winners, they have been clear about that. Dairy farmers, big businesses, those with scale, have all been overweighted on their radar. I think that's partly because they then have fewer points of contact to deal with, and the PR looks better. My argument all along, is that this kind of attitude is not inclusive enough for the rest of NZ. We are all taxpayers in effect, all of us.

Coupled with the lobbying from big business and farmers, the National Party has taken a fair bit of the funding that ended up in their party coffers, and spent it with arguably the best neo-liberal political campaigners in the world. They started doing this eleven years ago, and now Crosby-Textor has probably shaped a lot of the policies and dirty politics that the National Party is going along with. They are rotten to the core - we are seeing the results - our economy is well on the way to recession, no budget surplus in sight, the only way they grow the GDP now is with record immigration, there is no hope for any substantial pickup within a year or two.

Where are the fresh new high-tech export manufacturers that will broaden our economy and keep us in first world status? They should have been on the go since 2009, but instead, the number of enterprises nose-dived when National came to power.

Maybe 'nose-dived' isn't the right word. Perhaps what I should say is that the numbers dropped back, and the obvious growth in enterprise numbers and employees faltered, flatlined, and eventually after 7 years, it got back to where Labour had it in 2008. Crap results from a National govt that is supposedly pro-business. They are not pro-growth, that's for sure. Meanwhile, our population increased quite a bit. Hence, more are on the dole, or out of the workforce.