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Friday, March 22, 2024

Professor Robert MacCulloch: Grant Robertson left NZ in declining & tattered state


The Day our Worst Finance Minister Ever Leaves Parliament, NZ falls into recession & drops out of the world's top 10 highest well-being countries.

Whilst Grant Robertson was talking himself up in Parliament about his wonderful political career and how proud he was of his achievements, the result of his past six years as Finance Minister were clear for all to see. We've just fallen out of the world's top ten "happiest" countries and are in recession, practically to the day he gave his farewell speech.

Our problems are largely due to Robertson's excessive fiscal expansion, done on borrowed money, during the pandemic, which amazingly was one of the largest in the world in spite of us having the least number of cases during that time of Covid compared to others. Why did Robertson not figure that our 2020 success in keeping the virus out meant that far less government borrowing & spending was required? In 2020, for example, our tourism industry was not much affected - many people holidayed domestically instead of going overseas.

On top of one of the world's largest fiscal expansion, the Reserve Bank went mad & printed more money than virtually any other Central Bank. Those two decisions by Robertson & Orr threw NZ into the recession we are now experiencing today. By my account, we are one of only a tiny handful of nations on the planet in recession. Unbelievable. Robertson & Orr snatched economic defeat from the jaws of a Covid victory. For that, both of them should have been fired way back. Instead they remain two of the most highly paid people in the country, both on salaries between $500,000 & $1,000,000, as VC of Otago University and Governor of the RBNZ. Its pay for non-performance.

What is most unforgiveable about Grant Robertson's tenure as Finance Minister & Deputy PM is that, in the aftermath of our greatest health crisis ever brought on my Covid, he left our health system in a declining & tattered state. The only thing he needed to get right, more than any other, was to ensure our health-care was world class, because a new type of virus could obviously afflict us again at any time. But he threw always billions on everything but health-care. Clearly he deserve the title, "Worst Finance Minister Ever".

Maybe its also time our Big Media investigated the false claim made by Hipkins just a few months ago in the run-up to the election that NZ was one of the fastest growing countries, after Japan, of all. What garbage - but he was never challenged on that claim - except of course from DownToEarth Kiwi.

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.

6 comments:

Rob Beechey said...

Robertson bathed in his own self congratulatory valedictory speech as he laid another steaming pile of excrement over the country. Instead of holding he and his totally incompetent buddy, Orr responsible for trashing our economy, the MSM fawned over him as if he had just walked on water . Even motormouth Hosking chose to cherish their friendship while the rest of us will pay a very high price for the most destructive finance minister that New Zealand has ever experienced.

Ken S said...

Thanks Robert for yet another excellent article. Your headline paragraph had me laughing out loud (I do enjoy a bit of irony) and just about made the rest of the article redundant. Proud to be called a fanboy.

Anonymous said...

It will be interesting to see how lomg before otago university goes bankrupt, with grant robertson running it.

Anonymous said...


Robertson and Orr - each a national disgrace.

Anonymous said...

How many new ICU beds are there after all the COVID debacle ?
None, zip, nada - what a disgrace.

However, Robertson goes off grinning like a Cheshire cat into the sunset, with out looking back and being self disgusted.

Anonymous said...

Robert, please keep up the good work. It's guys such as yourself who are standing up to the evil left and hurting them with facts, truth and reality that has them in tatters.

We need to face the evil left and save them from themselves. So, keep up the great work.

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