English misleads the House, again

Written By: - Date published: 8:50 am, April 21st, 2010 - 15 comments
Categories: bill english, Economy - Tags: ,

Bill English continues to tell outright lies about the economic performance of this country under Labour. This time it’s even more blatant. You don’t have to do any maths to check if he’s lying or not, you just have to go to the latest GDP stats.

Here’s what English said:

In the 3 years from September 2005 to 2008 this economy grew by less than 1 percent. However, that figure was outstripped by annual population growth of 1.1 percent, meaning that over the last 3 years of the previous Labour Government, per capita income growth was negative

No it wasn’t you liar and you know it. Proving it is as simple as going to the GDP release table 6.2

Every year Labour was in power GDP per capita rose. The 2008 September year was 1.8% higher than the September 2005 year, even after inflation.

And what’s English’s record? Abysmal. In the last year, GDP per capita was down 3.7% from the peak.

Take a look, Mr English, this is what a real record of economic achievement looks like:

If you like, we can go further back and see the last time GDP per capita dropped. It was the last time English was in government:


(source for back years: Stats NZ Infoshare)

This has reached the point of purposely misleading the House. Labour’s got to do something. You can’t just sit by and let lie after lie go unchallenged. In the very least, you’ve got to challenge him to provide proof of this claims so that you can show them to be lies.

15 comments on “English misleads the House, again ”

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  1. Sanctuary 1
    21 April 2010 at 9:01 am

    English is a dismal, negative monetrist who seemingly delights in running down his country. One can only imagine he does this to justify his own miserable, unimaginative and dreary economic agenda.

  2. tc 2
    21 April 2010 at 10:26 am

    These porkys have been going on for months yet we seem to have an opposition that simply watches this rather than do something about it like getting Blinglish answering some ‘misleading the house’ type charges.

    Goff’s got to go… when he’s not boring the world with his overlong answers full of rhetoric nobody cares about (if they’re awake at the end) the rest of the opposition appear to either be muzzled or out to lunch. We pay an opposition to do a job they aren’t doing currently.

  3. tsmithfield 3
    21 April 2010 at 10:26 am

    Could you clarify a point for me.

    Does this table include an adjustment for the deflators as per table 5.2 & 5.3. The reason I ask is that the final table says the comparisons are not seasonally adjusted although there are other tables in the set that provide seasonal adjustments.

    This is all relevant because the figures should adjust for inflation, seasonal factors etc to be truly comparative. Perhaps the data set that English referred to included all necessary adjustments whereas the table that Marty refers to doesn’t. Not saying this is the case, but some clarification would help.

  4. James Barber 4
    21 April 2010 at 10:30 am

    anybody think ignoring the glaring trend upwards from 1993 to 1997 is a tad silly of those who wrote this?????????

    I may not agree with National policies and I think they are usually economic suicide but don’t look at a trough of a bell curve and say it’s clear evidence of mismanagement. Labour got into power in 1999 and before then we had seen a decent amount of GDP growth, not as fast as we would like but still growth.

    • lprent 4.1
      21 April 2010 at 10:54 am

      Of course National needlessly stuck us in a god-awful artificial recession with the “Mother-of-all-budgets” prior to that. It was one of the most stupid things I’ve ever seen a government do. It even put most of Muldoons crap from a previous National government in the shade.

      • burt 4.1.1
        21 April 2010 at 12:54 pm

        The Mother-of-all-budgets was a needless thing due to National being stupid and nasty… Oh boy they brain wshed you well lprent. Lety me guess, because National were going to win in 2008 Labour took a pre-emptive strike and put the economy into recession late 2007 to help them out….

        You have a very twisted memory of 1990 for someone who claims to have superior intelligence.

        • lprent 4.1.1.1
          21 April 2010 at 1:05 pm

          …for someone who claims to have superior intelligence.

          Always amuses me to see dipshits like you repeating myths. Show me where I have ever claimed that I had “superior intelligence” – I’ll bet that you can’t.

          I’ve frequently pointed out certain levels of stupidity in others (including you), and referenced my various degrees at times. Neither are the same as your claim. However I’ve always been aware of other people around me who can outperform me in various tasks.

          It appears to me to be a claim that has been promulgated by some of the idiotic trolls that I’ve banned from here previously. I guess they don’t like my method for seeing them off. Must have been hurting their wee egos.

          I’ve seen this assertion around various blogs, in particular from that blowhard fool barnsley bill, and I’ve commented on it before. However I think this is the first time someone has been stupid enough to say it here.

          BTW: You’re not welcome back until you can either substantiate your assertion, or are willing to acknowledge it as a mistake.

        • burt 4.1.1.2
          21 April 2010 at 10:16 pm

          lprent

          Fair call on the ‘superior intelligence’. I over egged that one. I apologise.

          May I rephrase;

          You have a very twisted memory of 1990 for someone so inclined to remind us how outgunned we are when debating science, economics and law with you.

          For goodness sake lprent, a statue was enacted to protect tax payers from outgoing govt’s telling out right porkies about the state of the nation to curry support from disenfranchised voters because of what happened in 1990.

          [lprent: thank you. ]

          • lprent 4.1.1.2.1
            21 April 2010 at 10:41 pm

            BTW: It wasn’t because of what happened in 1990. It was because of what happened in 1984. The Fiscal Responsibility Act was passed in 1994 shepherded through the house by the person responsible for the mother-of-all-budgets – Ruth Richardson, and was directly related to the forward loading of debt on to future generations by Muldoon.

            It was about the only thing that I have any praise for her at all.

            The mother-of-all-budgets was just damn stupid. I was running the inventory for Cargo King at the time. You could see the retail sales plummet like a stone in the six months after the budget was passed. People got laid off left, right and centre because business confidence dropped like a lead balloon. Which in turn was because the benefit cuts were far too abrupt and cut beneficiaries disposable income to negative amounts. That cascaded into layoffs at the remaining manufacturing and staff reductions throughout retail.

            It was a truly artificial recession because there was no urgent need to do it apart from some rather pathetic taxcuts for the wealthy. The scale of the cuts caused a massive increase in the costs of the beneficences that they were trying to reduce the cost of. The nett effect was that they wound up with increasing debt that reduced the governments ability to reduce taxes subsequently. This was despite dramatically cutting the levels of government services.

            Wasn’t a major hassle for me. I left and started doing contract programming.

          • burt 4.1.1.2.2
            21 April 2010 at 11:14 pm

            By 1994 I had been contract programming in Aussie for 2 years and here for 5 years, I had also developed and supported business applications and employed people in my own business, which I started in 1991. The constant restructuring was gold to me, as had been the introduction of GST and the shift to accrual accounting in govt.

            There was noting artificial about that recession lprent, the ying and yang of govt storming off in different directions after every tea break had destabilised all the dependable sectors in the economy and govt debt was horrific. The country simply couldn’t afford the last u-turn of the Labour govt, there was not enough head room in the economy post the ’87 crash to attempt to initiate a return to the policies that stagnated the economy pre ’84.

            But hey I wasn’t running inventory at Cargo King so what would I know.

            • lprent 4.1.1.2.2.1
              21 April 2010 at 11:24 pm

              Anyone who was involved in restructuring in the 90’s or even putting basic accounting systems in place in the 80’s (as I did) was in a goldmine.

              But CK was pure retail and like all retail we saw the drop in consumer spending immediately and heavily directly after the budget. That flowed throughout the economy. The issue wasn’t if those changes should have been made (that can be debated forever), it was purely how they were made that was so destructive. It was too fast a change in consumer spending for the economy to adapt to.

              That was why it was artificial. The rest of the world had a boom time through the 90’s. We didn’t, and it was in a large part due to that idiotic budget put together by moronic ideologues.

              By 1995, I’d shifted to purely working on mainly (ie 80%+) export based projects. That way I didn’t have to put up with dickhead governments screwing up as much.

  5. vto 5
    21 April 2010 at 11:24 am

    Misleading… common.

    Why politicians occupy the lowest rungs of the respect ladder.

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