as some sort of claim to support your post that GDP is solely affected by govt policy.

but then later the same day on the post “Show Pony” you say..

“there was a drought, a bursting housing bubble, a global spike in oil and food prices in the first half last year. They caused the recession, not Labour.”

as some sort of claim that GDP is solely affected by anything other than govt policy.

Care to explain ?? Or prefer to remain wallowing in the smell of hypocrisy ..

Of course it did. Because the ECA was designed to empower employers to lower wages, and benefits were cut in 1991 to encourage that too.
So employers could get unemployed workers (who were work tested in a way that compelled them to apply for any available job, whatever the wages and conditions, and irrespective of their qualifications) to take shit jobs.

That’s exactly why the income gap between Australia and New Zealand spiraled out in the ’90s.

I spent much of the 90′s travelling for a large corporate. I got to visit dozens of small outfits in the electrical/automation business. One thing I can assure you of is that many of the guys working in them had world class skills and worked damn hard. Yet it was obvious to me that they were largely wasting their time all running about cutting each other’s throats chasing pissant little jobs. As a result contracting in the country amounts to little more than a frack you contest, the client screwing the contractor before the deal is signed, and the contractor screwing the client after.

From time to time I’d try to hint that maybe, just maybe there was merit in some of them setting aside their egos and consolidating their undoubted energy and skills into a larger enterprise that could tackle some genuinely profitable jobs overseas. But it never happened. Now a decade later I look about and only see a handful of survivors still grimly grinding their way, never really making it.

The biggest barrier to improving productivity here in NZ is a dearth of confident, competent business leaders, people with the capacity to take on the world and win

It is scary how many of the neo-liberals of the 90s are being resurrected.

Indicative of a governemnt that has no vision, and naturally falls back on its already discredited ideological allies for ideas.

Unemployment fell following the introduction of ECA and kept falling until the recession of the late 1990′s then resumed falling once the economy recovered. It remained falling before and after the introduction of ERA.

Here is a link that shows unemployment declining from 1991 http://www.dol.govt.nz/PDFs/lmr-hlfs-mar2006.pdf

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/personal-finance/2661911/Higher-pay-doesn-t-always-mean-higher-skill

Provides real insight to English, Brash, Douglas & their new right productivity fictions. The real story behind this research entails the wide range of pressures and incentives for businesses to get smaller – de-regulation, de-unionisation, contracting out, dependent contractors, less red tape etc.

Makes life much easier for their monopolist mates who make the perfectly rational calculation that it’s better to have a huge share of smallish cake that a shrinking share of a growing one.