The Government’s Economic Development Plan

Tiger Mountain 2

“Spare us” was my reaction after reading the linked .pdf–standard blue skies fare.

This country suffers daily from almost 30 years of the neo liberal consensus between the main political parties. The NZ underclass are the children of Roger’n’Ruth, as much as the “me me me, mine mine mine” middle classes and managerial layer.

An economic development plan worthy of the title would involve repealing the Reserve Bank Act, State Sector Act, and returning SOEs to Govt. Dept. status, and restoring power generation and supply to public ownership.

Even the Reserve Bank fer crissakes is recommending a Govt spend up on infrastructure projects! But no, Mr Robertson clings to the miserly fiscal cap and sends “signals” to business.

This Govt. has delivered a number of very useful reforms, e.g. Pay Equity for carers, and setting a higher wage floor. I hope they are somehow re-elected against National’s increasingly “Trump junior” style negative campaigning. Generations “rent” and “student loan” will be in the ascendancy as voters come 2023, when it will be time to kick the structural elements of Rogernomics to the curb once and for all.

Stuart Munro. 4

Economics, not being an objective discipline, struggles with implementing real solutions to contemporary problems, much less strategies to improve future outcomes.

As Croaking Cassandra was saying the other day, since the neoliberal turn our economic outcomes have lagged those of our trading partners, and the message of this pdf is that the government is still pretending that isn't so.

We know the CGT was a required modest step to address housing inequality, but for reasons Labour is not disposed to discuss, it's off the table. A competent opposition would have them on the rack for that, but National is more of a howling shitstorm than an opposition. It's fair to say that no or ineffectual action is what the government prefers – which is after all the attraction of neoliberalism to the political class, it absolves them of responsibility, at least in their eyes.

So what should a modest centrist government be doing that they are not?

Well they should begin of course by constraining the out of control unskilled immigration normalized by the previous government. It drives wages and conditions down, thus impoverishing the rest of the economy. Conditions matter, and with record suicide running at over twice the road toll, employers imposing unnecessary stressors like the split shifts that cost Wellington bus drivers their jobs need to be viewed distinctly unsympathetically.

They should be prioritizing cost of living rorts, and in particular rates and utilities. We are at the long end of a global supply chain, but that does not apply to our power companies, whose product is locally produced. Nevertheless, we now have some of the most expensive domestic electricity prices in the world (thankyou Roger Douglas and all your disgusting fellow traitors). There's really no excuse for this, and none of the pathetic burble about markets or 'shopping around' makes it a whit better. The privatizations took place on the promise of cheaper prices and have not delivered them. The companies therefore have no-one but themselves to blame if they are returned to public ownership with minimal compensation – they lied to and defrauded both government and citizens. There are two economic objects in reducing cost of living in this fashion – to make our workers more internationally competitive, which they cannot be if they are being rorted six ways from Sunday, and to increase the cashflow within the economy, which makes small businesses and startups more viable.

Urgently address rent-rorting and housing insecurity. Although it has been congratulating itself for turning around housing construction, the government is still falling short of demand growth driven by migration. We could really use several hundred thousand extra houses in numerous locations, and in accord with adapting to a more sustainable model, tiny houses are an obvious answer. They use less labour and materials in construction, their portability lends them flexibility, and their energy footprints are likely to be much smaller than those of conventional housing. Far from encouraging them however, councils are aggressively overcharging on permits for them, with permit costs of 30-40k being now typical. Government could drive that down by producing lines of standardized plans with permit and rate caps. You know of course that most prospective tiny house dwellers would have preferred conventional dwellings, but they are forced to these alternatives by the epic incompetence of successive governments, who have pissed away their jobs to migrants and their housing to speculators – (thanks Roger Douglas and all your fellow traitors).

tc 6

from the PDF: "Businesses and households can access affordable, clean energy to achieve our economic potential…"

Can these 2 (robertson/twyford) actually define affordable in $$ terms and exactly how do they expect to do that with the rampant profiteering from generator through to retailer.

PR brochure ware IMO from a couple of the ABC beltway brigade .