Coronavirus - New Zealand
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@nzzp said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@canefan said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
At least he appeared contrite at the time.
Well, eventually
Doesn't mean to say he was contrite. But you have to front the media and act like it
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@Kirwan said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@Crucial said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@pakman said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@Crucial said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@voodoo said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
And yet, L1 is a month away....
It all started from one person. We have to make sure that one person isn’t waiting to surprise us.
To be honest I’m not noticing a hell of a lot of difference to normal at the moment apart from closed borders and less flight options.@Crucial Do you mean that your normal routine isn't impacted, or that it feels like 'business as usual' when you're out and about?
Feels like business as usual. Sure there are changes at shops and I’m not trying to go to pubs or cinemas. But I also don’t feel that constrained.
I appreciate that others might though and some businesses still find it too difficult to operate.Is it still 1000 people a day joining the dole? How many redundancies are we up to? How many businesses have gone under? What’s the unemployment rate now? (Have seen massive increases here for other countries)
We had that one publicised suicide from a business going under, is that rate increasing compared to last year?
How many people have lost there homes as their businesses fail or they have lost their jobs?
While I’m glad you and I seem not to be greatly effected, I’m trying not to have my head in the ground about the pain this is causing others. It’s not business as usual.
And it would be nice to see some analysis of the above from the government’s cheerleaders (the media). If anybody has answers to the above please post here.
Wooah!
My comment was an observation based on the small amount I am experiencing personally. I am fully aware that people are suffering and certainly don't have my head in the sand.
The comment was about the 'openness' of the country at the moment and how it is fairly close to normal for everyday life (excluding tourism, group activities etc)
Changing group sizes and numbers allowed into shops isn't going to solve the major problems. A trans-taxman bubble would help in a few areas but not widespread. Those tourism based businesses will be concentrating on getting cashflow not buying new equipment or upgrading a building.
This is going to be a slow haul back for many but it will happen. A rush that could send us backwards would be the worst decision made in a long time.
I get the frustration with the high level of risk aversion but we really are at a crossroads where one path gives confidence to rebuild and give people jobs, the other will have everyone (including businesses) holding back a bit just in case things turn back. -
Flightless Kiwi economy to land with a thud
No national leader has been as feted as Jacinda Ardern during this pandemic. But while she might have popular support, the facts are she is pushing the NZ economy off a cliff.By ADAM CREIGHTON
No national leader has been as feted as Jacinda Ardern during this pandemic. Young and progressive, New Zealand’s Prime Minister was popular before the crisis. Since she imposed the favoured pandemic solution of the left — a hard lockdown, shutting practically all business and no socialising with anyone outside your home — her star has only risen.
“Laughing in the face of seismic shakes, she has calmly steered her country in the face of a massacre, an eruption and a pandemic,” The Guardian cooed on Tuesday. Steering it into an economic abyss, perhaps.
New Zealand’s economy is in strife. Without major change, our constitutional cousin is in decline. Its public finances are in tatters, its biggest export, tourism, has been obliterated — Air New Zealand announced 4000 job losses this week — and New Zealand police now can enter people’s homes without a warrant.
“New Zealand is going backwards, falling behind the vast majority of our OECD partners in virtually every social and economic measure that matters,” said Roger Douglas, a former New Zealand Labour treasurer and the famed architect of Rogernomics.
New Zealand ranks fourth last in the OECD for labour productivity growth, and last for multi-factor productivity growth, according to economist Michael Reddell, based on OECD data. Health and education are gobbling up more of the budget as the population ages, with less and less to show for it.
The country’s Massey University reckons economic activity will tank 16 per cent in the second quarter, while government forecasts pencil in a 4.6 per cent decline this year ahead of an 8.2 per cent rebound in 2022.
“I doubt the economy will bounce back as the government hopes; and the Treasury forecasts, as bad as they are, will prove optimistic,” former NZ Treasury secretary Graham Scott said.
In one year, New Zealand has blown 30 years of hard-fought fiscal rectitude. Its public debt will explode from the equivalent of 19 per cent of gross domestic product last year to 54 per cent by 2022, on the government’s own figures.
Scott said expanding the deficit, expected to blow out to 10 per cent this year, was the right thing to do. “But looking further out, comparisons with other countries, such as the US and UK, are no basis to justify our large debt ratios; we’re a small, open economy with vulnerable export industries,” he said, noting the share of exports in GDP had been falling steadily for nine years.
That makes Labour’s ban on oil and gas exploration all the more bizarre. With 0.3 per cent of global GDP, New Zealand can only shoot itself in the foot by shunning fossil fuels. The Prime Minister and Finance Minister, who have not worked in the private sector, spruik the totems of modern left governments — renewable energy, trees, higher tax, equality — but without much to show for it. Plans for a billion trees and 100,000 houses have come close to almost naught, and a capital-gains tax was dumped. Labour made a song and dance about reducing child poverty too, but on six out of nine measures tracked by Statistics New Zealand it is unchanged or worse since 2017, including the share of children living in “material hardship”, which has risen to 13.4 per cent.
It’s hard to see how shifting to a four-day working week, the Prime Minister’s latest reform idea, will fix the country’s problems.
Jacinda Ardern floats the idea of a four day working week
Sky News contributor Nicholas Reece says New Zealand "has long been the social laboratory for progressive reform" as prime minister Jacinda Arder...“The real problem with the Ardern government is they have no idea whatsoever apart from how to throw money at things,” Douglas told The Australian. The targeted “investment” approach to welfare pioneered when previous prime minister Bill English was treasurer has been junked in favour of open slather. “Our $12bn wage subsidy, for instance; about a third was a donation to people who don’t need it,” he said, explaining how well-off lawyers and accountants had obtained the payments.
New Zealand’s international investment position was negative $171bn at the end of last year, more than half its GDP. “To keep international investors’ trust, we must remain squeaky clean in our fundamental economic institutions,” New Zealand Initiative chief executive Oliver Hartwich said. “Even Mexico, Nigeria and Venezuela are not as indebted to the rest of the world as New Zealand.”
The nation’s draconian response to the coronavirus was questionable, given it is an island with a massive moat and a small population spread over an area the size of Italy. Despite those obvious advantages, the stringency of its lockdown was higher than practically any other country, according to Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. Deaths per million were the same as Australia’s — just four.
In any case, it wasn’t outsized compassion that drove the lockdown sledgehammer but the brutal reality of an underfunded health system. With about 140 intensive care unit beds and few ventilators — far fewer than Australia per capita — it was woefully underprepared. Ardern is more popular than ever, and by all accounts is a good person and a great communicator. But if a COVID-19 vaccine remains elusive, New Zealanders may come to question her wisdom as they fall further down the global pecking order. Without economic growth, there won’t be money for more ICU beds.
If we want to fete other countries for their response to the virus, how about Japan? It didn’t smash the civil liberties of its people for weeks yet it managed to keep deaths very low. Eschewing big-government solutions, Shinzo Abe would have had to “transition” to get the left’s attention.
ADAM CREIGHTONECONOMICS EDITOR
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@voodoo what a steaming pile of manure.
Pushing the economy off a cliff isn't reporting it's an opinion. No problem with it as an op ed but its pretending to be a balanced piece of reporting.
The govt's forecasts are all wrong because these other people say so. Lets get a quote from Roger Douglas and throw in every negative stat we can possibly conjure up.
Per capita going into the pandemic NZ and Australia had pretty much the same number of ICU beds.
NZ is approaching normality now - Australia sometime in July, August, September....
Talking about borrowing and then talking up Japan who have the highest debt to GDP in the world is just lazy.
Don't get me wrong there's kernel of truth in everything written but its so skewed as to be pretty much bog paper IMO.
Reads like its written by an embittered right winger - "smashing civil liberties" " get the left attention"
At least it proves NZ isn't alone in having a pathetic fourth estate
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I'm bemused that people still proclaim "New Zealand police can now enter people's homes without a warrant" like it's a new thing: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2012/0024/latest/whole.html#DLM2136636
Roger Douglas is always worth listening to, but then I remember his track record on unemployment too.
As for labour market productivity, unfortunately the stats cited by Michael Reddell are nothing new. I remember first encountering them in 2006, and among the data was cited a Cabinet paper from 1978 lamenting exactly the same thing. The 1978 crew didn't solve it, and neither did we...
On the borrowing, most rhetoric from the National party seems to be that they have a better plan. But they don't seem to say much about not borrowing themselves. Both major parties seem to be more Keynesian than austerity focused.
I started writing this, the phone rang, and then I see @dogmeat has done a better critique
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@dogmeat said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@voodoo what a steaming pile of manure.
Pushing the economy off a cliff isn't reporting it's an opinion. No problem with it as an op ed but its pretending to be a balanced piece of reporting.
The govt's forecasts are all wrong because these other people say so. Lets get a quote from Roger Douglas and throw in every negative stat we can possibly conjure up.
Per capita going into the pandemic NZ and Australia had pretty much the same number of ICU beds.
NZ is approaching normality now - Australia sometime in July, August, September....
Talking about borrowing and then talking up Japan who have the highest debt to GDP in the world is just lazy.
Don't get me wrong there's kernel of truth in everything written but its so skewed as to be pretty much bog paper IMO.
Reads like its written by an embittered right winger - "smashing civil liberties" " get the left attention"
At least it proves NZ isn't alone in having a pathetic fourth estate
Contradicts itself massively.
Scoffs at the 4 day week idea floated without understanding that it meant 'same productivity over less time' the says that Labour has no ideas except throwing money at problems.
How about getting companies thinking about 4 day weeks if possible? Costs the govt nothing but creates more opportunity for travel to regions and consequent spreading of spend, in turn creating jobs in places under pressure.
It may only be one small idea, but an exaple that disproves hi assertion. -
@voodoo said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
In one year, New Zealand has blown 30 years of hard-fought fiscal rectitude. Its public debt will explode from the equivalent of 19 per cent of gross domestic product last year to 54 per cent by 2022, on the government’s own figures.
This is just a silly comment, unless you're pretending that Covid-19 doesn't exist.
I just read some of the comments on the Australian ... some of them are comedy gold. They make this place seem like a left wing hang out in comparison.
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@voodoo said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@Nepia yeah the Australian has gone massively right wing in its readership and to a lesser extent (but still noticeably) the writing
About as much as The AGE and SMH went left.
The Australian has PvO and that raving loon Phillip Adams.
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@barbarian said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
I wouldn't give Adam Creighton's writing much critical thought. He's an ideologue who has campaigned vigorously that lockdowns are a bad idea, and now spends his days furiously trawling the internet to find 'experts' who support his view.
Unlike the majority of economic writers, he at least knows what he's talking about:
He started his career at the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority. He holds a Bachelor of Economics with First Class Honours from the University of New South Wales, and Master of Philosophy in Economics from Balliol College, Oxford,
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@voodoo said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
Jeez, I didn't write the thing! Just thought some of you might like to see what the australian press is saying. For the record, Creighton is always negative IMO, and I would certainly class him as an opinion writer rather than a reporter.
I don't think anyone was taking a shot at you - more the garbage in the piece itself (and the hilarious comments section from me).
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@antipodean said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@barbarian said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
I wouldn't give Adam Creighton's writing much critical thought. He's an ideologue who has campaigned vigorously that lockdowns are a bad idea, and now spends his days furiously trawling the internet to find 'experts' who support his view.
Unlike the majority of economic writers, he at least knows what he's talking about:
He started his career at the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority. He holds a Bachelor of Economics with First Class Honours from the University of New South Wales, and Master of Philosophy in Economics from Balliol College, Oxford,
You would have thought that after all that study he had learned the value of proper research instead of firing half cocked
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@Hooroo I'm guessing that demand has dropped off for them, with reduced respiratory infections, fewer arrivals, and fewer hospital workers in contact with patients. However, it would be good to continue random testing and antibody testing, to get good data and stay on top.
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