Though artificially boosted by high immigration and disaster rebuilds, the NZ economy is in the doldrums, and National are a failure even by their own goals and targets:
MBIE failing to meet self-imposed targets
The government department charged with growing the economy, the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE), isn’t sure if it will hit the goals it set itself when it was created five years ago.
MBIE admits it has got a fair way to go before it even gets close to achieving its primary objectives.
When it was formed in 2012, the ministry set itself goals including making housing more affordable, lifting household incomes, getting unemployment below 4 percent and increasing exports to 40 percent of GDP by 2025.
But five years later, the ministry still was not sure if it would hit any of its targets.
I predict that National will soon abolish all targets, and that this will be “a sign of our success” (slightly facetious, but only slightly). In more of the same news last month:
NZ economy records weakest growth since start of 2015
New Zealand’s economy appears to be slowing, with the weakest quarter of growth in almost two years announced as earlier quarters were revised downwards.
On Thursday Statistics New Zealand said that in the final three months of 2016 the economy expanded by 0.4 per cent, below the 0.7 per cent predicted by market economists and the slowest quarter of growth since the start of 2015.
It came as Statistics New Zealand said that it now believed the economy grew by 0.8 per cent in the September quarter, revising the original estimate down from 1.1 per cent. Annual growth fell to 2.7 per cent.
The figures come at a time when New Zealand’s population is growing at more than 2 per cent per annum, driven mainly by record inward net migration of more than 70,000 people a year.
On a population basis, the economy grew only 0.5 per cent per capita, and declined slightly in the final three months of the year, First New Zealand Capital economist Chris Green said. …
Further reading:
Weak end to 2016 could mark a cooling of NZ’s economy
New Zealand Economy Grows Less Than Forecast; Kiwi Drops
Economy at mercy of Auckland housing – manufacturer
Just to be clear, I think that “growth” is entirely the wrong measure of economic success, and that we need to be aiming for sustainability. But in terms of National’s competence as a government, even by the conventional goals that they have set for themselves, they are failures.
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