The news today has been grim. The rise in the unemployment rate from 3.4 per cent to 3.6 per cent comes on top of alarm about rising grocery and petrol bills, astonishing mortgage interest rates, falling house sales, gloom, doom in abundance.
It is now clear that the golden weather New Zealand has enjoyed for the past decade has come to an end. For now. It will return, because this is what economic cycles are about.
We have just finished the longest period of sustained economic growth in my adult lifetime. Every quarter for the past decade seems to have seen lower unemployment, more people in work, growing prosperity for almost everybody. My children do not know anything else, and nor do many other New Zealanders.
You will not, however, have known this if you depend on the news media for your information. The media only highlight the bad news. For the entire decade of rising prosperity, the media has focussed only on such things as factory closures (never the many more high-tech openings), Kiwis moving to Australia, climate change, rising interest rates, rising house prices, any number of things that have made out times are bad, despite them being the best in decades. Good news does not sell.
Had you looked, you might have found, buried in the business pages, the news that we have been enjoying virtually the lowest unemployment rate in the entire developed world, and that so successful have our businesses been, that more New Zealanders have been in work than at any time in our history and many employers have been desperately seeking skilled staff. It’s why so many of us now have plasma and LCD televisions and 4WD cars. But good news does not sell.
New Zealanders have been far from alone in rising prosperity. The huge modernisation of China and India has been driving economic growth around the world, and we have taken advantage of that. Thanks to economic reforms two decades ago that left us with the least protected, least subsidised, most efficient farmers in the world, our dairy farmers in particular have been able to prosper on the back of rising consumer demand in newly prosperous countries. Quite frankly, if that means my cheese costs more, I am happy to pay it.
We are just a speck in the ocean at the bottom of the globe, 4.2 million out of the 6.6 billion people who live in some 200 countries of this world. But we are doing rather well, despite the undeniable temporary economic setbacks we are now experiencing along with most of the world.
The last time New Zealand had an economic golden age of continuously rising prosperity was in the 1950s and 1960s until 1973. After World War II, we prospered on the back of post-war reconstruction of Europe until the First Oil Shock and Britain’s joining the European Community, both events which happened at the end of 1973. During that year, we had full employment and our dollar was worth an amazing $US 1.48.
How quickly the tide changed. We were a protected economy at that time, propped up by our formerly guaranteed access to the British market which ended with Britain’s accession to Europe. Once we lost that market, unemployment and inflation spiralled often out of control because of how we tried to deal with it. The reaction of the Kirk-Rowling Labour Government of the day, and the Muldoon National Government of 1975-1984, was to borrow massively overseas to support our lifestyle and to use subsidies and industry protection at a time this kind of state socialism was increasingly out of use elsewhere. Remember Communism?
The path we followed for years after 1973 meant we were saddled basically with two decades of raging inflation (often around 20 per cent) and continuously rising unemployment, which peaked at 11.1 per cent in 1991. The Lange Labour Government elected in July 1984 introduced many of the policies that got us out of the mess, such as lower taxes (the top personal rate previously was 66 per cent), free, unprotected and unsubsidised competitive private enterprise, a more efficient public service and an independent Reserve Bank to keep inflation under control. The National Government that replaced it in 1990 pursued many similar courses, resulting in the economic tide turning with that awful 11.1 per cent unemployment rate in 1991.
Since then we have had what amounts to a political consensus on our main economic framework, hence the rising prosperity we have been enjoying until now. This political consensus continues. New Zealand is in the mainstream of best economic practice. There will continue to be debate about it and that is what democracy is all about, but none of our main political parties wants to cause harm. Our economy is much, much stronger than it was in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
The news media’s diet of doom and gloom today is no different from what has been pushed for the past decade, except that today, there really is an economic downturn. It’s world-wide, not just here, caused by the collapse of the speculative international money markets.
We are a much stronger country economically than we used to be, and we will weather this international storm well. We could do better, but we used to do much worse. The media won’t tell you this, because good news doesn’t sell.
23 Comments
May 8, 2008 at 8:15 pm
A lot of our economic growth over the last decade has been funded by borrowing.
NZders are more in debt now than they were 10 years ago and most of that debt has been spent on unproductive assets, i.e houses.
Labour has raised taxes over 9 years, and have made the public service bloated and inefficent.
Productive over the last nine years has been less than 1% per year. In nine years of the previous National government it was closer to 3%.
Labour has wasted the economic growth over nine years in NZ compared to our Oz counterparts who pay less take, have more take home pay and are 30% more wealthier than NZders.
I think you will be surprised by how long the lower part of the economic cycle will be and it will hit the people who are least able in our society.
Typical Labour.
May 8, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Good column Poneke. It is good to read something with an accurate historical perspective. The comment by Mark about debt is not correct. Total Crown Debt as a proportion of GDP has decreased from 38% to 29% in the past 10 years. Private debt has gone up. It is the problem with an increased sense of prosperity, they borrow more to get the plasma screens, the 4wds and the overseas holidays.
Australia is arguably better off but only because they can dig a hole in the ground and find wealth. Their race relations suck and I feel more comfortable in New Zealand.
Cullen’s wise stewardship of the economy means that the Government can spend now to keep the economy going. If we had a George Bush style tax cut for the rich we would now be in deep deep dodos…
May 9, 2008 at 12:12 am
A decade is a long time in an economy. I remember, at the beginning (although we didn’t recognise it then as the beginning) of this economic cycle, waking up to Morning Report and hearing the National Bank Business Confidence Survey being reported. And if it reported a higher number of businesses lacking confidence (which seemed to be the permanent state of affairs), I would have this inward groan because it seemed to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and we would lurch into another downturn.
And then, somehow, we seemed to grow up. I haven’t heard the Business Condfidence Survey for a while. Maybe I just don’t hear it or maybe it’s not reported (although I suspect, in the current climate, it’s going to come back with a vengeance) but it does seem to fit your thesis that our media do tend to dwell on the negative.
The really bad news, I think, is in the state of the media itself. I’m a newspaper junkie from way back. I really really love newspapers. But increasingly I’m finding them to be laden with the trivial and vacuous; snippets of stories with little rigour or analysis. Perhaps that’s an over-simplification. There are still journalists that carry the torch but they are rarely on the front page.
And as for television. Better minds that I have analysed the ‘news’ content of the two main channels but, to my mind, it’s not a case of being on the slippery slope but wallowing in a murky puddle at the bottom of it. I heard Alistair Campbell on 3 News the other night reporting on robbery or something of that nature where hae called them “three thugs”. FFS (pardon the expletive) I can work out for myself whether these people were thugs or not; I want you to tell me the news not how to interpret it. I despair.
As foot-dragging luddite, I’ve always held to the belief that newspapers (and television) would survive in the digital age. Quality will out. But now I’m not sure. They’re under attack from a generation weaned on computers and from information gleaned from a myriad of sources. The newspapers’, magazines’ (the Listener, anyone?) and television’s fatal mistake, it seems to me, has been to play to the competition at their own game. The audience has no time/ a short attention span? Right, make the items short. They want entertainment and sensation? Right, trowel that on thickly. Talk about (shades of Business Confidence Surveys) creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Poneke, you make the very valid point that good news doesn’t sell. I was thinking about this and trying to envisage a paper (for example) that did present good news. It’s not that I disagree with your assertion but I wonder, in the present media environment, whether this is possible or, more importantly, credible. Newspapers in particular have drunk too long at the poisoned well of PR. When I see a ‘good news’ story it’s usually not difficult to spot the source and it’s usually a lobby group or PR company. It’s a jaundiced view but it’s the reality of what a lot of media has become.
In the last month (since I discovered the world of blogs), I have found more intelligent, well-researched and rational (allowing for the odd, and sometimes very odd, exception) comment and analysis on your site and Public Address. I have learnt more about climate change, the mechanics of broadband and discourse on Noel Coward’s “Brief Encounter”, to mention just a few subjects, than I could ever hope to find in the mainstream media. Correct those last two words. This is, for me, becoming the mainstream media. The sadness is that I’m reading it on a laptop whose failing, flickering screen which works only when it’s at an angle of 98.5 degrees so I can’t take it to bed to read.
I wish it was in a newspaper.
May 9, 2008 at 12:22 am
While I appreciate the optimistic tone, I think we need to acknowledge that New Zealand’s relative position in OECD GDP per capita purchasing power parity has not improved, and indeed continues to worsen. I’m not sure that justifies wise stewardship of the economy.
Particularly given the clearly articulated goal of lifting us into the top half of the OECD. So what ever happened to that? Was that a core promise?
May 9, 2008 at 6:51 am
Poneke:
Call me a curmudgeon if you must, but I’d rather not have the media playing Pollyanna any more than Jereimiah. Then again, I guess us peasants are too fricking stupid to decide what to think, and how to feel, for ourselves.
And with all due respect, if you’ve just lost your job perhaps the last thing you need — or want — is a patronising cry of ‘put it in the proper historical perspective’ or ‘look on the bright side, at least interest rates are going to go down’.
May 9, 2008 at 9:13 am
Poneke,
you mention “astonishing interest rates” – When I got my first mortgage in 1987 our interest rate was 22.9%! We had a $50K mortgage which, if interest rates stayed constant, would have cost $350K to pay back!
Interest rates are relatively high compared to 5-6 years ago (5.75% anyone?), but really not that astonishing….
I did think that 10% was a kind of ‘tipping point’. As soon as interest rates hit 10% I thought that peoples perception of interest rates would change, especially those that didn’t experience 1980’s type interest rates…. and so it came to pass…..
Great article also.
May 9, 2008 at 9:15 am
I’m not sure 180000 children living in poverty is a great reflection on our booming economy. Mark is right, the boom has been generated by an enormous increase in the money supply, primarily from mortgages and not by some amazing wealth creation process. The government has been very good at transferring debt from the public to the private sector.
The asset bubble created from that, which was fueled also by strong inward migration post 9/11, has now burst and we will now see a deflation process kick in.
What has been strange about this cycle is that the writing has been on the wall for so long but the sheer volume of money has kept things going for much longer than anyone expected. Mind you Fred Harrison in the UK had it mapped out beautifully in his 2005 book: “Boom, Bust: House prices, banking and the depression of 2010″.
I don’t disagree with your view on the current level of journalism. I tend to flick through the papers just to see what has happened and then hit the web for proper analysis.
The web also allows you to choose your own stories. There’s plenty of uplifting stuff out there and it’s a shame that newspapers tend to ignore it.
May 9, 2008 at 9:52 am
Couple of points on this thoughtful post:
The problems were already emerging before 1973: in fact we had a major economic shock at the end of 1966 when the wool price collapsed. Wool back then was even more important to our economy than dairying is today. Brian Easton has calculated that structural downward shift in the wool price and that – to quote him – “the nation’s effective spending power – that is its real income – was cut by about 7-10 percent, which was about five to seven year’s growth in per capita incomes.”
The Holyoake govt did make some changes to civersify the economy (National Development Conference, tax breaks for tourism and so forth) but also boosted borrowing. The reason 1973 hit us so hard was we were already, economically speaking, treading water.
What is being talked about now is nothing like that sort of slump. Even at the bottom of the economic cycle we’re probably going to have annual growth a bit above 1%. Back in the 1960s through to 1993 annual GDP growth of between 1-2% was what we got at the top of the cycle.
A point on business confidence in response to James’s comment: there’s two surveys, the National Bank one , which comes out at the end of each month, and the NZIER one, which is quarterly.
They still get reported, but perhaps not has prominently as they did in the 1990s, because, as you may remember, Bolger kept talking about the importance of confidence. If you have a prime minister talking about confidence all the time, followed by surveys which show there isn’t much confidence, they tend to be well covered.
As many have noted, the most important stat in the surveys is how people think their own businesses are going to perform, rather than the ‘headline’ figure about how they feel about the general outlook. The headline figure is almost totally linked to how they feel about the govt of the day. There was a huge upshot in that figure at the end of 1990, for example, because Labour had been booted out. But the economy itself was worsening.
Same in reverse in 1999. In fact, the upturn began in the fourth quarter of 1998 and we kept ’surprising on the upside’ as economists say in their funny little way.
May 9, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Thanks for the history lesson. As a foreigner trying to come to terms with the quirks of the NZ economic and political engine, background information makes a ton of difference. There are a lot of behaviours that still leave me scratching my head, but I can say the same of Canadians, too.
On the topic of personal wealth, we had a presentation (http://www.macdiarmid.ac.nz/news/stories/rsnz.php) at work by Paul Callaghan a couple months ago. He makes an assertion that part of the reason for the wealth-gap between NZ and Aussi is the historical lack of personal savings packages here that could be used to re-invest in the nation. In his view, KiwiSaver is a step in the right direction. The next part of that comes down to the availability of fund managers who know how to invest in NZ for NZ.
May 9, 2008 at 3:58 pm
I think your paradigm of progress is floored; I suggest you read The party’s over: oil, war and the fate of industrial societies
By Richard Heinberg
(you can do a review for us)
[Poneke says: You floor me. Heinberg is an arch-scaremonger of Armageddon scenarios. Every such scaremongery scenario in history has failed to occur.]
May 9, 2008 at 10:22 pm
I am probably considered fortunate: educated, earnign a salary of the higher side of the average. I managed to pay off my student loan (and I willingly lived in the UK for six years to do this and save for a house). And I am worried about my mortgage rates and the price of petrol let alone the eye watering cost of bloody cheese. Mostly because I am single and so these burdens all fall to me.
But every morning I get to see Welly Harbour. And taste good coffee. And I can walk in the bush and breathe clean air. Yeah it might be Pollyannaish – but I wouldn’t want to be worrying about my interest rates in any other country.
May 10, 2008 at 10:46 am
[Poneke says: You floor me. Heinberg is an arch-scaremonger of Armageddon scenarios. Every such scaremongery scenario in history has failed to occur.]
An energy crisis is like leukemia; it is basic. Shell has just pulled out of a massive wind farm project in the Thames Estuary due to the price of generators and support ships being in short supply (supply and demand).
Eventually we will see whether Heinberg is scaremongering or prescient.
I would feel better about the last twenty years if so much of our economic growth hadn’t been something other than fluff (???)(real- estate development).
May 10, 2008 at 11:11 am
Indeed, New Zealand is a great country.
What better place to be poor. But do we have to be poor?
The issue for us all is how much has Labour in recent years benefited from benign global conditions?
How much did they contribute to recent prosperity or not.
Did it happen because of Labour , or despite them?
How well has New Zealand fared over the Labour years as opposed to other countries?
How well prepared has Labour left New Zealand for the tough times ahead?
Has their stewardship of the economy left us particularly vulnerable?
You backward looking optimism is commendable Poneke and I certainly hope we avoid the econo-calypse that Bruce Sheppard predicts, which I blogged on http://www.nominister.blogspot.com the other day.
It is great to see the blogs addressing a debate on Labour’s economic record, a constant theme at No Minister; a shame to see the mainstream media tends not to consider it at all.
May 10, 2008 at 12:44 pm
New Zealand is a great country. What better place to be poor. But do we have to be poor?
Fairfacts, I have no sympathy for you. For at least the past couple of years, I have read (and enjoyed, because you have a novel style) your interminable bleats on No Minister and in the journz mailing list about how badly off you are and how it is all the fault of someone or something called “Liarbour,” who apparently won’t give you a job. You moan about how much you pay in rent and how expensive food is and given that you seem to spend all day every day in the blogosphere attacking Helen Clark in ways so lurid that you would make Ian Wishart blush, you really seem actually not to have a job. Yet you spent several months this year travelling overseas, according to your own posts on No Minister. Some poverty.
If you really are the experienced British immigrant journalist that you say you are, you might find yourself more employable if you kept your more rampantly over the top political opinions a bit more to yourself than multiple daily blog posts, which every editor in the country will read and repel from, and not because of any political bias — our editors like their journalists to at least maintain public impartiality, which their newspapers, magazines, radio and television bulletins require. For good journalistic reasons.
If you can’t keep a lid on your more extreme beliefs, then Go Wellington has openings for bus drivers, and will even help you get a bus licence. The pay is more than the benefit your poverty-crying comments suggest you are on, and the bus company does not care a hoot about the political views of its drivers. One regular driver on my route is an unreconstructed Maoist who thinks Shining Path and the real Dear Leader are demigods. The two of you would have wonderful debates in the tearoom at Kilbirnie Depot each morning when you sign on.
May 10, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Poneke, with out trying to threadjack here (I very much enjoyed the article), while we are on the subject of journalists and politics, I was wondering what your opinion was on political endorsments by the media. I’m doing a mass comm degree, hoping to get into a post grad journalism course, so I’m having the “press must be politically objective” message hammered home again and again.
Yet the New York Times for example endorsed Obama, and there was the infamous Herald campaign against the EFA. As someone whose worked in the field for a while, how are things like that thought of?
May 10, 2008 at 3:54 pm
mickysavage – it’s private debt that worries me as NZders have borrowed and invested in unproductive assets called houses.
If we want the economy to grow and get higher wages we should be saving and investing in productive assets but this hasn’t been the case.
Labour hasn’t ensured this and our growth in productivity has been low as a result.
You have heard all the slogans over none years:
Closing the gaps
Lefting us back into the top half of the OECD
Knowledge economy
Carbon Nuetral, etc.
This has been all spin by the Labour-led government while they have spen the last nine year blaming National and wasting taxpayers money.
We have gone backwards in this country and our public services are now showing how bad things have gotten.
Why do you think NZders are fleeing for Oz?
May 10, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Great post! If I may be so bold as to add a couple of contextual items….
The events of the early 70s were against an international background similar in may ways to today. The United States had been piling up debt thanks to the Vietnam War even as it implemented the policies of the “Great Society” and funded several trips to the Moon. By the early 70s the US dollar was in the toilet. Nixon imposed price controls in the United States for 90 days. The Arabs, upset at the huge loss in value (oil being traded in dollars), increased the price of oil first by small amounts but significant proportions, (a rise from $6 / barrel to $7 or $8/ barrel is a large percentage) then again when the Yom Kippur War provided a useful pretext. This all kicked off inflation and higher interest rates globally just as we have seen since the US embarked, once again, on fiscal madness in pursuit of foreign military adventures. Instead of the “Great Society”, Bush cut taxes. The effect on the US debt has been the same.
I think it may be early days to declare ourselves safe. Almost all of our trading is done in the US dollar, which is still vulnerable. I’d be happier to see more of our trade in Euros and Yen and AU$. We have been declining against those currencies even as we and everyone else have been rising against the US$.
As for local investment, it’s obvious why Kiwis invest in their houses rather than any other asset. The “markets” in NZ have seen value destroyed by the incompetence and hubris of others in a way that can’t happen if you buy your own house. You may make poor buying decisions, but at least they were your decisions.
My retirement fund with AMP lost 10% of its value over the last 6 months. That is no small amount of money. I would have been better off to put my retirement savings in a basic savings account in any bank on the high street. Whereas my property, sold at the peak of the market, nearly doubled in value in just 4 years.
As for the media, people who read my own blog and comments I strew about the web will know I have long since given up hope of anything resembling balance on economic policy and results from NZ media, particularly the daily newspapers. They have long ago been captured by one ideological clique or another, each with its barrow to push. In some cases, it is obviously part of a global policy by the proprietors to undermine public faith in politics and politicians in order to inflate the value and power of editorial opinions. This generational campaign has largely succeeded.
Newspapers can generally adequately report the events at local level, unless those events fall inside bounds of the publications ideological concerns. A recent example would be the way the DomPost handled the report on submissions for new tunnels through Mt. Victoria.
It’s important people know they aren’t reading the “news” in our newspapers. The truth lies outside the bounds of the media narrative. The broader narrative is one determined and defined by the foreign proprietors of almost all of our daily newspapers. having travelled a fair bit over the past year, I see the same themes in several countries from media owned by the same small group of people. It doesn’t matter if you live in NZ, Australia, Canada or the US, the same people want you to believe the same things.
This is why in 2008 I have turned to blogosphere to attempt to work around it and to bring this critical issue for our democracy out into the open.
Poneke, I share your feeling that we have been misled, but it isn’t just because good news doesn’t sell. Good news from “leftist” governments, as the media define them, already suffer editorial discrimination regardless of sales potential.
Mark: Australia has resource wealth that NZ doesn’t. That makes a huge difference to national wealth. Australia also did not “liberalise” their labour market to the same extent as NZ did. Unions there still have the power to hold the line on wages. This is another reason why workers in NZ sliding toward the minimum wage are leaving for better money n Australia. The stats show the largest groups heading for Australia are the young and low-skilled. Australians also pay more user fees than we do. The top Aussie tax rate is well over 45%…..much higher than our own.
One could argue, and some have, that reason Australia is more attractive than NZ is BECAUSE they did not follow our lead on weakening the bargaining power of workers.
May 10, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Steve: The dairy boom is quite close to the mining boom when looked at as a percentage of GDP.
That leaves aside the huge New Zealand tourism boom, and the development of our substantial wine and film industries. I think the argument that Australia is the “lucky” country, well, it has a some merit, but it’s mostly a way of excusing ourselves from tackling the difficult issues.
I used to think like you, until I saw the numbers.
However, I agree with you that the employment contracts act was a disaster, for the reasons you state. Unfortunately, Labour is replaying the disaster, at the other end of the spectrum. They’ve been picking on the bourgesoise, when every country in the world is crying out to attract skilled tradespeople and the educated middle class. So not surprisingly, we have huge outflow to Australia.
May 11, 2008 at 11:58 am
I share your feeling that we have been misled, but it isn’t just because good news doesn’t sell. Good news from “leftist” governments, as the media define them, already suffer editorial discrimination regardless of sales potential.
I don’t see this as political or ideological at all. I have spent most of my adult life in newsrooms working as a journalist. Whether something is “left” or “right” does not come into newsroom decisions, believe me. Doom and gloom is what does, as far as economic stories go. Simple as that.
Hence falling unemployment, year after year, is reported, if it is at all, in the business pages, while one quarter in which the unemployment rate rose from 3.4pc (the lowest in the OECD) to 3.6pc makes the front page and makes the television and radio bulletins (which falling unemployment rarely did).
It’s not some political conspiracy, it is how journalists work, all over the world. But it tends to make people think things are worse than they really are.
May 11, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Poneke: Your experience in newsrooms will absolutely exceed mine. No doubt about that.
My own perception of ideological bias is based on years of reading daily newspapers and watching the ideological language and terms employed there daily to “condition” readers to respond in desirable ways to certain words: “radical”, “extreme”, “leftist”, “socialist”….and so on. There are many more.
News copy, columns and editorials / leaders are full of these terms and they are presented in ways that make it clear they are ‘bad’ things and the reader doesn’t need to know all the details…….It’s enough they are being told. It’s enough that the labels, once applied, stick.
Thanks for the insight into newsrooms. Maybe the sort of bias I have in mind doesn’t originate there. But that it exists is easily proven. For example, the NZ Herald’s active and daily hostility to the present government is currently a daily reality.
May 11, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Steve: English journalist Jeremy Paxman argues much the same as Poneke is doing here in his book `The English: Portrait of a People’. He talks about how the base-line discourse upon which any two English people, no matter their differences, can agree is that the country is going to the dogs.
I’m up to my eyeballs in the media every day (though it’s broadcast, not print) and I see two main aspects to this. One is the `bleeds it leads’ imperative, relying upon peoples’ fascination with disaster and misfortune; and the other is the media’s role as the fourth estate.
A good watchdog should be sceptical, critical, and conservative, and this criticism must necessarily be directed most against those in power, so media in almost all liberal democracies take a jaundiced view of the current administration, whoever it may be. For much the same reason newspapers print barely-edited press releases – it’s there, and it’s easy – they take on aspects of the opposition’s discourse. I think we’ll see this after two terms of a National government in the future, as well, and even the most loyal Labour partisan can see why the media object to the Electoral Finance Act. The `school of fish’ principle applies here – once a tipping point of public opinion is reached, it’s very difficult to swim against the tide. It takes a very big fish indeed to turn the school around, but it can happen.
I’d certainly prefer this state of affairs to that of a sycophantic press reporting the great doings of government. Good governments can weather bad press, but a bad government given good press is a terrible thing indeed.
L
May 12, 2008 at 6:13 am
“We are a much stronger country economically than we used to be”
When precisely? This government has destroyed productivity growth. House price inflation has not made anyone resident in NZ better off, it has merely given them the impression they can borrow more to fund a lifestyle. The overvalued exchange rate has hurt genuine business but has been disguised by unsustainable debt funded expenditure.
The NZ economy is more vulnerable now than it has been at any time since 1984.
The government has protected its own financial position at the cost of over taxation stifling real growth and has established a horrendously expensive system of middle class welfare and state reliance.
You cannot compare the housing booms in other countries to NZ, they have not been as extensive or as driven by debt and cheap credit as the boom in NZ has been.
May 12, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Thank You Poneke.
Though as a blogger I am free to express ‘outrageous’ viewpoints.
Yes, isn’t it outrageous to be right of centre, with opinions stradding ACT and National, surely no more outrageous than backing Labour or the Alliance (what’s left of it), or the Greens.
Such an heinous crime going against a centrist or soft left consensus.
But in the newsroom, despite my differing political opinions, I shared the same values of my colleagues, in going for a good story, regardless of its any political ramifications.
Indeed, one of my latter stories when I last had an employer, was about unions, earning much praise from my more lefter colleagues for me being nice to them.
Regardless of political views, we are and can all be professional.
Indeed, one of your colleagues, whom once worked for a Labour minister ,produced a fine story in one of the weekend papers that I am sure the government would not have liked.
Likewise, should I ever get the chance to write about a Prime Minister John Key having his fingers in the till, or being found in bed with a string of rent boys, I would tackle that with as much enthusiasm as I would if Helen Clark were guilty of the same misdemeanours.
Just one other thing.
In my earlier post, I just asked rhetorical questions, though it was obvious where I was leading.
I left it to others to condemn the economic record of the Clark-Cullen government.
And they did so in spades.
Suggesting I am not alone.
And not so outrageous after all.
While this is the blogosphere, perhaps I am becoming more mainstream after all.