It‘a cold and dark and we just want to be at the beach like our poser friends in Bali or Europe.
But we endure this gloomy season safe in the knowledge that one day, in a month or so, springtime will come, the days will get longer and everything about life will just feel easier. Easy, breezy and warm.
Contrast that to the economic winter we’re simultaneously enduring and you can see there’s an immediate problem.
Unlike winter, which we know will end soon, this economic funk has graced us longer than the GFC's.
Inflation is back on its way up.
We may have bounced out of recession for a few quarters but there’s also a good chance we’re currently back in negative growth territory.
That’s after now three years of unaffordable food, mortgages, well, pretty much everything.
Politicians are arguing - again at the weekend - about who's to blame.
The answer of course is a party and a reserve bank that went too far responding to a virus, and then continued down spending like a drunken sailor.
Trump hasn't helped, just recently.
The problem for National is that voters don't seem to care much who started a fire, they just want the thing put out.
And they need to feel the numbers. Not the OCR announcement, but the mortgage re-fix on a lower rate.
Food price inflation's still going up. So things might be getting more expensive less quickly, but they're still going up in price.
Only once people feel different will the polls respond.
The biggest problem for the Coalition on waiting for that to happen, is not that some might convert to Labour voters in the meantime, but that they might jump ship altogether and move to Brisbane.
Ryan Bridge is a New Zealand broadcaster who has worked on many current affairs television and radio shows. He currently hosts Newstalk ZB's Early Edition - where this article was sourced.
3 comments:
I went to dinner the other night with a group of friends. Everyone at the table has their kids leave for Australia, mine left yesterday. Twelve young people gone and all for the same reason, no opportunity in this Country.
I don’t care about politics, it really has done nothing to brighten my day.
I do care about the future of NZ, without the young people there is little future.
The politicians of all stripes need to get a grip on the economy and start creating good paying career enhancing jobs or we are sunk.
The government has a persistent structural deficit and it continues to borrow. In astrophysics this set up is called a "black hole" - nothing escapes from it. Luxon and Willis seem to think the urban economies will turn the corner on the back of the rural sector doing well. I hope they're right but the country as a whole would be doing much better if the government finances had been sorted early in the current term.
From the Adam Smith institute.
A country bleeding away young talent signals to the world that it is no longer a viable place for innovation, ambition, or opportunity. This harms foreign investment, deters skilled newcomers, and undermines the UKs standing as a global hub for creativity and entrepreneurship.
Swap out the UK for NZ and it pretty much says it all.
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