This country feels like it is adrift. Wandering without direction. Leaderless.
It’s coming up more and more often in the media now – almost continuously since the do-nothing budget in fact. Just yesterday in The Herald for example, Nat cheerleader Fran O’Sullivan was bemoaning the lack of leadership:
The John Key Government’s own growth strategy is a case in point. For example, the shambles over the mining strategy and the failure to put some ballast under the PM’s financial services hub project. Until recently, NZTE has been a relative shambles … the list goes on.
It’s unfathomable that a private sector operator like Key doesn’t put a few more skilled ministers alongside Steven Joyce and Tony Ryall to form a speed team to get major change bedded down.
After three years of economic crises, endlessly debating is no longer an option.
Bernard Hickey was chiding both the government and the Reserve Bank:
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand did nothing today, as expected.
It did nothing to stop New Zealand’s slide in relative poverty.
It did nothing to turn around New Zealand’s woeful export performance of the last decade. …
The Reserve Bank did nothing today even though it knows inaction on its part and the government’s part will mean our gross national income per capita will keep sliding.
It’s time someone did something.
An NZPA piece was pointing out that the Nats’ budget predictions for job growth are simply made up numbers:
The Ministry of Economic Development has not done any analysis of where the 170,000 new jobs promised in the budget will come from.
Acting Economic Development Minister David Carter told the commerce select committee today he was not aware that any analysis had been done.
“Bear in mind the Government hasn’t said it will create the 170,000 new jobs – the budget said there will be 170,000 jobs,” he said.
Bear in mind that the 2010 budget said there will be 170,000 new jobs too, and that didn’t happen. Pressed further Carter said that the “booming private sector” and “food processing” could create the jobs, but as I/S points out these sectors currently about 12,000, and less than 200,000 people respectively, so they’re not suddenly going to have room for 170,000 more.
Meanwhile, with all that going on, or should I say not going on, what are the Nats actually doing? How are they spending the expensive and valuable resource of government?
A bill aimed at changing the nasty habits of some freedom campers passed its first reading in Parliament today.
What’ya reckon, will that fix the economy? No, me neither. The Nats haven’t got a clue how to run a successful country, and most of the things they do try just make matters worse. Three wasted years. We’re drifting…
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