Labour will have a new focus on "bread & butter issues" like cost of living, Hipkins said when he replaced Ardern as PM. Let's take him at his word and look at how, literally, the cost of bread has been changing. The figure below shows "bread & cereals" have increased the most ever since Hipkins' became PM in January 2023 (compared to any other time over the past decade since statisticians began compiling this time series). Its an earth-shattering double digit rise in both of the first two quarters of 2023. The "bread and butter" PM has made bread and butter unaffordable.
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Hipkins also likes people referring to him by his nickname, "Chippy", which conjures up ordinary folks buying potato chips & fries in The Hutt where he was brought up. So how has the price of potatoes fared? Gosh, they're up nearly 70% since Labour took office. Looks like Chippy has made chips unaffordable as well.
Hipkins also likes people referring to him by his nickname, "Chippy", which conjures up ordinary folks buying potato chips & fries in The Hutt where he was brought up. So how has the price of potatoes fared? Gosh, they're up nearly 70% since Labour took office. Looks like Chippy has made chips unaffordable as well.
Click to view
Truth is, "Chippy", the "bread and butter" PM, doesn't know how to reduce the cost of bread and butter and chips, or pretty much anything, for that matter. Redistributing wealth from one bank account to another, which is how he says he is making things more "affordable" to those with less, doesn't actually change the cost of anything.
Sources:
https://figure.nz/chart/0ByKhsHZZX7N8W2x-ny1TpHM6n1cvTNON
https://figure.nz/chart/WNZOpEoBKRyz4hBh-ke17xHkve98VAlzi
Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.
2 comments:
Nice find Robert.
I'll have a lotta fun posting the 2 graphs on social media and maillists
Kinda nails it.....
Believe me I'm no supporter of the present inhabitants of the Beehive, but I do grow milling wheat and potatoes for a living. God help me. I would like to point out that the increase in bread has been driven largely by the war in Ukraine and the price of potatoes by the abnormally wet first six months of this year. I know this government believes its policys can influence both those factors, but they can't. Wether the supermarkets will return the benefits to consumers of the price correction that should be coming in those products is another matter.
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