National is very proud of the latest GDP-growth figures (third highest in OECD!), but are they helping you? And are they what they appear?
First up Bill English is open – they’re not helping you, we’re not getting much wage growth.
And that’s a lot because they’re not quite what they appear. GDP/capita growth is <1% (vs the 3.6% growth headline figure).
So really what we’re seeing is National boosting its numbers by piling a bunch of people into the country.
Once again: migrants – lovely people; diversity – a great thing. But with 68,000 people coming into the country over the last year we’re giving ourselves a housing and infrastructure headache, and depressing the wages of those already here.
As detailed before, there are jobs we need to import people for (thanks to a lack of National planning & training: carpenters for those houses we need), but a lot of the time we’re just bringing in retail/cafe/farm managers, chefs etc because employers don’t want to pay Kiwi wages.
I’m still all for a better measure of economic “health” than GDP & its growth (and lets please also measure environmental & social health!), but at the very least lets go off GDP/capita, so the figures can’t be skewed this way, and the numbers actually relate to people.
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