What to do when your GDP is crook as a dog

Diary of the last ten hours

7.15 am

More than A Feilding reader Shamubeel Eaqub is on the radio offering sensible economist thoughts about our economy.

Would I write more kindly about Cameron Bagrie’s thoughts if he were a subscriber? Would never glue mite, but I invite him to click the subscribe button and test the hypothesis.

The economy depends, in the end, on all of us being enterprising and driving hard for that extra dollar and obviously I am doing my bit, no worries you’re welcome.

7.16am

Anyway, what’s old mate Shamubeel recommending in this time of the GDP taking a fair old pasting?

Does he worry about the debt we’re accumulating? No, not yet, not as a proportion of GDP, not with interest rates this low.

He suggests the larger question is how are we going to get growth in a meaningful way. What are we going to do differently, and what are we going to do to improve our productive capacity?

There’s a dissonance, he says, between what what we profess to value and what we deliver as policies.

Saying it is one thing, finding the answers is more of a challenge. Let’s see if we can come up with some today.

8.18am

A politician is being lionised in an Auckland morning newspaper for telling it like it is and using the words nanny and state and nice to have and empty purse. That might possibly make him a visionary; it might also make him a tedious carper.

That’s probably allgood with him as long as you spell his name right and keep his party name stewing inside the brains of voters. But you know what Sparky? I don’t feel like playing.

Nice work if you can get it, though. He must be loving how all you have to do is shake the voter tree at the moment and dejected National party supporters fall out.

One further thought. I don’t know if peppy 80s is the vibe their billboards and ads are going for - I’d have thought preppy 80s Wall St was more their jam - but to me it all feels soaked in an Altered Images video.

Once, years ago, I was on the phone to their party’s regional organiser buying tickets for an event they were holding. Guest speaker: Bob Jones.

Ten please, I told her.

Oh that’s a table, so you get 20% off! she said brightly.

Oh great, the others will be pleased to hear that, I said.

No, no, don’t tell them! she told me, that means you get your two tickets for free!

I did, once, try to vote for them. 1999 election. All I can say is I was in a very sore mood about the might of the State.

But inside the booth, pen in my hand, bringing it toward the ballot paper, swear to God I burst out laughing. Could not for the life of me do it.

11.00am

How’s that GDP looking? Crook as a dog?

Yeah, nah, yeah.

Shrank by 12.2 per cent in the June quarter. A record.

And do we know why this has happened?

As a matter of fact we do. That’ll be the world wide pandemic.

11.01am

Let’s pause for a minute to deal with paleo hucksters and noisy techbros and people who get chapped lips if they read too much Facebook at one go, who will declare as noisily as they can that this has happened because we got all Chicken Licken about a flu, and now Money Has Been Lost And Oh The Humanity.

Let us cross to a Facebook session last Sunday with Ashley Bloomfield to hear him explain priorities and consequences in his patient way:

If we were the United Kingdom, if you look at our population base now, and if we followed the route that Britain had followed we would have had 3500 deaths from Covid-19 by now.

and

20 per cent of those deaths would have been amongst healthcare workers.

and

We’ve already seen that it’s ten times more deadly than the influenza virus that circulates in the community every year. This is a serious infection.

11.02am

Now the whining starts and never stops: Look at all these other countries. They didn't take as big a hit. What have we done to ourselves?

No, they didn't take as big a hit. But they took a bigger hit with infections and deaths. And let’s see how the economic numbers play out over the longer period.

More to the point, it was more or less guaranteed that if our borders shut our tourism would take a body blow. The impact on our GDP wouldn’t be anything but large because tourism makes a larger chunk of our economy than it does in other broader, better economies.

We can have lots of overseas tourists; we can be near - or at - virus-free. But we can't have both.

11.03am

Having thoughts about: It’s official. For the first time in 11 years we’re officially in a recession.

As 11 years of growth go they were, if you look closely, a little bit non-marvellous.

It’s not news to say it, but seems to bear forever repeating: the growth we’ve had has been largely composed of immigration, and housing Ponzi.

We enjoyed the money yielded by tens of thousands of immigrants from overseas and took a free ride by not putting in the necessary additional infrastructure.

We let everyone go on pretending that houses kept getting more valuable, and the banks would come up with the mortgage money to make the bullshit real. Thus have the prices of the houses kept growing to 9 and 10 and 11 times the income of dispirited young people hoping to get in on the dismal racket.

In all the years of talking about diversifying we have kept going for the easier options. In many ways, that is how you might best characterise the tourism business. There's a lot to it that’s as straightforward as putting a clipboard in someone’s hands and standing them by the door of a bus.

Sir Paul Callaghan set out in clear terms why this is not a great prospect for becoming more prosperous. What we can earn per head in tourism compares poorly with other possibilities. Those other possibilities tend to be more elusive and challenging, though. That’s because they ask us to be smarter and make more effort. It’s not easy. But that’s where we really need to be going.

Obviously that’s the easy part to say. The harder part is to set out what some of those better options might be.

3.45pm

Devonport man realises he’s run out of time to lay out a bunch of thoughts about how we might do the far from easy job of achieving diversification and productivity improvement in our economy, and setting out some of this better options. Even though he totally has some ideas.

Decides to share a thing he wrote for Greenpeace back in level 4 and come back for another go tomorrow.

3.46pm

Here’s a thing I wrote for Greenpeace back in level 4. It’s about Goodbye Pork Pie and economic transformation. It contains what I suggest might be better options.

4.02pm

If you love women, says Michele A’Court, you should totally support this. Hey, that's me! You bet! I’ll even copy and paste:

This Suffrage Day, 19 September, marks 127 years since women won the right to vote in New Zealand. We can be very proud that Kate Sheppard, Meri Te Tai Mangakāhia (Te Reinga, Ngati Manawa and Te Kaitutae) and their fellow petitioners achieved this world-first milestone in the battle for women’s equity and opportunities – proud and inspired.
Here at Te Wāhi Wāhine o Tāmaki Makaurau, the Auckland Women’s Centre, we continue to support women. We are proud to keep progressing causes such as safety from domestic and sexual violence; acknowledging unpaid care work; pay equity; and women’s empowerment.

This Suffrage Day, will you Donate a Kate? Support the Auckland Women’s Centre by donating $10 – the banknote featuring the great Kate Sheppard.

With your $10 you can help women achieve equity, safety and wellbeing by supporting our safe, inclusive and supportive space.

Your contribution (of however many Kates!) will enable us to continue our work in our community. We have women walking through our doors everyday, and we want to be able to help them all. 

So will you Donate a Kate? or 2 or 3 or 10?

Where can you donate? Why, right here. I’ve even added a bit of a flourish. Please know, the Kiwiana irony comes from a place of the purest aroha and respect.

For the ladies, a Kate