Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 16/8/23

Dairy prices have slumped and international student numbers are flagging – but Robertson rejoices in the pace of wage growth

While dairy farmers were lamenting the impact on prices of a flagging demand for dairy products in the critical China market, Education Minister Jan Tinetti was noting the importance of China in the international education business.

Almost 12,000 Chinese students were studying in New Zealand, she said when expressing her delight that China’s Minister of Education, Huai Jinpeng, is in Wellington and Christchurch this week.

Mike Hosking: The wage gravy train can't last forever

One of life's lessons is that the more things swing one way, the greater the eventual correction.

McLeod Transport in the Bay of Plenty are looking at becoming landlords because they can't get workers.

The broadest of questions once again has to be asked of the Government.

Just how badly do they want to cripple business and constrain the economy with their mad immigration policy? How many examples of extreme madness do they need before they work out they’ve got it horribly wrong?

Mike Hosking: We're writing a recipe for economic ruin

There was some sobering economic reality at my place yesterday.

My street had a truck vacuum in it, sucking all the crap out of the drains, so there was the obligatory 800 metres of cones and two stop go people.

Stop/go people have had a 28 percent wage rise on average this past year. I know this because I told you yesterday - the Seek job ad numbers tell us the 28 percent has taken them to about $46,000 a year.

Do you know that journalists - varies I assume from organisation to organisation - start in the low $40,000s, so flipping a stop/go sign is more valuable than journalism.

Weird, eh?

Mike Hosking: Job numbers are a serious economic red flag

What I wasn’t expecting in yesterday's unemployment number is that it would go nowhere.

Just think about it, how is that possible? Everyone was forecasting 3.1 or 3 percent, down from 3.2 percent.

Why? Because given what we know about work and the desperate shortage of skills and massive demand for labour, how is it possible we have so many people jobless and yet not able to find a single day's work?

Surely, in hospitality as it reopens, or timber yards that are selling everything they can get their hands on, there is a bit of work about the place the last of the jobless can fill?

Owen McShane: The Gender Wage Gap and Communication Connectivity

The gender wage gap may seem unconnected to development economics, the RMA and local government. But the connection is real, if only because the recent debates remind us that when society experiences a rapid rate of social change, then many individual attitudes are likely to depart to some distance from reality.

While the gender wage gap may not be closing enough for some, the very idea of a wage gender gap has been a matter for social concern only since the sixties. And indeed I feel as though I am trapped in a dinner party of some forty years ago. Of course, gender wage gaps do exist.