NZ 2023 Election Thread

To post in this sub-forum you must have made 100 posts or have Trust status or have completed our ID Verification

Forums › Politics › NZ 2023 Election Thread

1 | ... | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | ... | 102

BDFL - Memuneh
79263 posts

Uber Geek

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#3137358 1-Oct-2023 13:27

@GV27:

He hasn't actually told me what he wants me to substantiate. He's just posted a link to something about when we raised our OCR's relative to Australia.

Anything. Anything you post that's not opinion should have evidence. If you claim something, provide evidence.

Shouldn't need to be asked for. It should be a natural part of the discourse.

The alternative is to disregard whatever someone posts by saying it's not factual.

GV27

5896 posts

Uber Geek

#3137363 1-Oct-2023 13:57

BarTender:

GV27: ignoring the fact there were plenty* of people going "are we sure this is a good idea?" at the time.

*Citation needed.

Ideally a citation that has a timestamp showing that was the view at the time based on evidence based information rather than purely partisan and idealistic views.

Preferably with the timeline against the governments response and leveraging international trends.

There seems to be a lot of keyboard experts saying that the governments response could have been better, but the vast majority of those views have changed a lot over time and either intentionally or disingenuously ignores the international events going on such as watching Italy hospital system being utterly nailed with thousands of deaths per day and then exactly the same thing happening 14 days later to the day in the UK and the US following 2-3 days behind that.

It's my view that considering what the government was working with especially in the health sector where we have Māori and Pacific Islanders consistently having really poor health outcomes for decades there was no alternative.

In regards to the response I don't think Labour and associated agencies could have possible done any better with the information that they had to hand making extremely rapid cross agency decisions that typically are never that nimble.

Anyone who was working with central government during those early days as I was would know that is the truth.

As a country I have not a single doubt in my mind NZ would have had at a minimum 15,000 more deaths from COVID had National been in power.

Firstly, apologies for missing this. I have a family and a job and cannot live in this sub 24 hours a day.

But here we go: Here is a a bunch of commentary around the Covid response and the RBNZ role in it:

https://www.interest.co.nz/news/107712/former-rbnz-chairman-arthur-grimes-warns-real-danger-rbnz-destablising-asset-prices-its

https://www.interest.co.nz/opinion/111643/independent-economist-rodney-dickens-gives-rbnz-both-barrels-arguing-its

https://www.interest.co.nz/public-policy/116900/one-term-governor-joins-brash-spencer-grimes-and-mcdermott-criticising-rbnzs

https://croakingcassandra.com/2022/02/10/inflation-2/

How much more commentary would you like around the failures around forecasting and the economic response?

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/486053/worse-than-unsatisfactory-rbnz-and-govt-criticised-over-inflation-housing-boom#:~:text=The%20paper%20said%20the%20RBNZ,late%20to%20correct%20their%20mistakes

Here's a good quote from 2021:

https://www.interest.co.nz/news/110539/businesses-urge-rbnz-not-remove-punch-bowl-low-interest-rates-economists-recognise-party

“In addition, goods price inflation looks to be on the rise. The degree of monetary easing needs to be lessened, initially through stopping bond purchases.

“Unless an unexpected downward shock were to occur, monetary policy needs to be tightened. It is already well behind the curve and will become more so the longer a tightening is delayed.”

There also seem to be a lot of keyboard warriors out there who want to conflate our helth response with our economic one and that other countries making mistakes mean we should not examine the quality of our own decision making.

The final part of your post which I have italicised is telling. You want me to produce evidence to a standard which does not exist (literally my point about there being no independent review of the RBNZ decisions made during the Covid period) and then offer up baseless speculation like this. So in other words, you get to make hyper-partisan statements with no basis other than personal speculation but want to set standards for me to make a point.

Unless of course, you have some actual evidence about the response of a hypothetical National government led by Bill English, which I'd be really interested in seeing.

GV27

5896 posts

Uber Geek

#3137368 1-Oct-2023 14:04

freitasm:

Anything. Anything you post that's not opinion should have evidence. If you claim something, provide evidence.

Shouldn't need to be asked for. It should be a natural part of the discourse.

The alternative is to disregard whatever someone posts by saying it's not factual.

I've added some links from RBNZ commentary to highlight the discussions and punditry from several commentators and former RBNZ governors.

Obvious caveat is Brash I'm not sure how credible his opinions are as a former RBNZ governor given his subsequent activities.

Will try to add in references where I can from this point on to show what I'm referring to. 👍

BarTender

3606 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3137376 1-Oct-2023 14:44

GV27: Didn't realise I had to provide citations given you don't seem to be expecting anyone else to do it, but if you can point to anything I said that makes Australia's OCR timing relevant, go right ahead.

By the way, Public Debt to GDP is different to Private Household Debt. And a great way to get your government debt down is not building a bunch of the infrastructure you campaigned on and not indexing your revenue take relative to the inflation you mandate which households have to cover the cost of, at the same time as you deliver fewer and fewer services. So at this point, your argument is that flagship policy failure is actually shrewd economic management. And that's before we get into the long-term implications of the debt associated with house prices shooting up 30% in one year, followed by massive interest rate rises. Can't have that one both ways.

What you have is a list of things that look pretty good if you're determined to ignore what they actually mean and the implications of them. But that's entirely in keeping with how this government has managed the country - only talk about the things you think have improved, don't actually go too deep on the detail and just stop measuring anything that might make you look bad.

At some point, people figure out that's not a great way to run a country.

So I was referring back to this post: https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=184&topicid=306395&page_no=48#3135950

The gist of your argument is: 'Labour printed too much money as part of COVID, spent a portion of it on non-COVID related things like building houses and "plenty of people going "are we sure this is a good idea?" at the time"'

The counter factual to that is, NZs Public Debt to GDP has been historically low, continues to be low and the investment in public housing has been woeful over the years.

The additional counter factual to house prices shooting up by 30% in one year is that Australia, UK and USA and most other OECD countries have all increased at the same rate. That along with Interest rates tracking upwards at a similar rate.

But getting back to the point.

Who are the "plenty of people going are we sure this is a good idea?"

Just wanted a reference showing during March 2020 until December 2022 with NZs Public Debt to GDP either borrowing or printing money international economists have said it was a terrible idea.

https://debtmanagement.treasury.govt.nz/investor-resources/credit-ratings

The international credit rating agencies have consistently given the very small economy of NZ a positive outlook? Where are they wrong?

ezbee

2405 posts

Uber Geek

#3137384 1-Oct-2023 15:32

RBNZ Governors are not the infallible Pope.

They also have the advantage of only needing to look at a narrow few KPI's.

That myopia on internal inflation.
Employment, Housing, People living in cars at your local park, social cohesion is some else's remit, not RBNZ

Ignoring practical aspects of imported inflation where all our consumer goods, many services and good portion of energy comes from.

Suppose one needs to consider what going to a hard landing on market liquidity would do.
Suddenly cutting credit lines and freezing economy without time for any adjustment.

It would be nice to flush speculators out of the market and drive overgeared into bankruptcy.
I remember when we used to have proper recessions :-)

These would take a lot of others with them, unable to refinance their home loan, or without a job to pay loan or rental.
You have to accept your GDP will suffer along with having technical recession as economy goes cold turkey.
For those worshipping at that temple.

Maybe you can outbid imported inflation for all the manufactured items and energy we import with drastic drop in rest of economy.
It seems doubtful given even our local food prices seem pegged to export market prices.

So to a degree he is right a proper recession that gives pain to speculators and highly geared would flush cash out of the market.
He might get his inflation target.
But price ?

Markets will change and there are times one needs to just prop the boat up on a sandbank while the tide is out so its ready when it comes in.

BarTender

3606 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3137388 1-Oct-2023 15:41

GV27: Firstly, apologies for missing this. I have a family and a job and cannot live in this sub 24 hours a day.

But here we go: Here is a a bunch of commentary around the Covid response and the RBNZ role in it:

https://www.interest.co.nz/news/107712/former-rbnz-chairman-arthur-grimes-warns-real-danger-rbnz-destablising-asset-prices-its

https://www.interest.co.nz/opinion/111643/independent-economist-rodney-dickens-gives-rbnz-both-barrels-arguing-its

https://www.interest.co.nz/public-policy/116900/one-term-governor-joins-brash-spencer-grimes-and-mcdermott-criticising-rbnzs

https://croakingcassandra.com/2022/02/10/inflation-2/

How much more commentary would you like around the failures around forecasting and the economic response?

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/486053/worse-than-unsatisfactory-rbnz-and-govt-criticised-over-inflation-housing-boom

Here's a good quote from 2021:

https://www.interest.co.nz/news/110539/businesses-urge-rbnz-not-remove-punch-bowl-low-interest-rates-economists-recognise-party

“In addition, goods price inflation looks to be on the rise. The degree of monetary easing needs to be lessened, initially through stopping bond purchases.

“Unless an unexpected downward shock were to occur, monetary policy needs to be tightened. It is already well behind the curve and will become more so the longer a tightening is delayed.”

There also seem to be a lot of keyboard warriors out there who want to conflate our helth response with our economic one and that other countries making mistakes mean we should not examine the quality of our own decision making.

The final part of your post which I have italicised is telling. You want me to produce evidence to a standard which does not exist (literally my point about there being no independent review of the RBNZ decisions made during the Covid period) and then offer up baseless speculation like this. So in other words, you get to make hyper-partisan statements with no basis other than personal speculation but want to set standards for me to make a point.

Unless of course, you have some actual evidence about the response of a hypothetical National government led by Bill English, which I'd be really interested in seeing.

Breaking down the above articles.

October 2020 https://www.interest.co.nz/news/107712/former-rbnz-chairman-arthur-grimes-warns-real-danger-rbnz-destablising-asset-prices-its

May 2021: https://www.interest.co.nz/news/110539/businesses-urge-rbnz-not-remove-punch-bowl-low-interest-rates-economists-recognise-party

August 2021 https://www.interest.co.nz/opinion/111643/independent-economist-rodney-dickens-gives-rbnz-both-barrels-arguing-its

July 2022 https://www.interest.co.nz/public-policy/116900/one-term-governor-joins-brash-spencer-grimes-and-mcdermott-criticising-rbnzs

They are fairly consistent that interest rates shouldn't have been as low as they were at the time.. and thus shouldn't have corrected upwards as quickly thus reducing the need to QE as much.. Or how I read things.

Then this article is an interesting one: https://croakingcassandra.com/2022/02/10/inflation-2/

"But, and it is only fair to recognise this, the (large) mistake made here seems to have been one repeated in a bunch of other countries, where resource pressures (and core inflation) have become evident much more strongly and quickly than most serious analysts had thought likely (or, looking at market prices, than markets themselves had expected)."

"I won’t, but suffice to say neither the Minister of Finance, the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, or Simon Bridges or David Seymour emerged with much credit – at least for the evident command of the analytical and policy issues. ... I suppose it is awkward for the politicians – who wants to be seen championing higher interest rates? – and yet that is the route to getting inflation back down, and the sooner action is taken the less the total action required is likely to be"

So unless I am missing something all the above articles say the challenge is that interest rates have historically been too low. The RBNZ shouldn't have gone as low as they did and if they hadn't then they wouldn't have needed to raise the rates higher and that there is no political will from any of the political parties to advocate for higher interest rates.

And all of fault is squarely on RBNZ or am I missing something here?

ockel

2031 posts

Uber Geek

#3137399 1-Oct-2023 16:54

Technofreak:

A couple of quick observations.

I'm presuming you referring to the 10 k less deaths during Covid. Some experts (Professor Gorman is one) will argue the predicted death numbers from Covid were way over estimated. On that basis a 10k reduction on a "inflated" figure doesn't mean much. Also some experts will tell you that we are yet to see the deaths from other causes that have been exacerbated by the effects of lockdowns, thus having a nullifying effect on any actual reductions achieved during lockdown.

WRT to health spending, unfortunately spend in any area isn't necessarily a good indicator of increased or better outcomes.

That macrotrends healthcare spend is total system spend (public, private etc). Its not Govt spend as it implies that the Govt spend $32bn on healthcare in 2020. Which it didnt.

Our Governmental spend is USD3k per capita on healthcare for 2023. In USD terms its up 30% on 2017. Essentially we pay $5k per person per annum for our public healthcare system (not too dissimilar to the NHS).

Sixth Labour Government - "Vision without Execution is just Hallucination"

Equinox IT

Cloud spending continues to surge globally, but most organisations haven’t made the changes necessary to maximise the value and cost-efficiency benefits of their cloud investments. Download the whitepaper From Overspend to Advantage now.

Technofreak

6530 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#3137409 1-Oct-2023 17:47

ockel:

That macrotrends healthcare spend is total system spend (public, private etc). Its not Govt spend as it implies that the Govt spend $32bn on healthcare in 2020. Which it didnt.

Our Governmental spend is USD3k per capita on healthcare for 2023. In USD terms its up 30% on 2017. Essentially we pay $5k per person per annum for our public healthcare system (not too dissimilar to the NHS).

I didn't realise that. So those figures are meaningless when it come to determining how much the government did or didn't increase the health spend.

Sony Xperia XA2 running Sailfish OS. https://sailfishos.org The true independent open source mobile OS
Samsung Galaxy Tab S6
Dell Inspiron 14z i5

tdgeek

29746 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3137421 1-Oct-2023 18:32

GV27:

There also seem to be a lot of keyboard warriors out there who want to conflate our helth response with our economic one and that other countries making mistakes mean we should not examine the quality of our own decision making.

Ive travelled, a lot. NZ is 5 million, I as have many others here have been to cities that double that. NZ has no pull, we ride the international wave. Whatever decisions we make are squat. We ride the wave of overseas countries importing off us, or us exporting to them. Supply and Demand 101. Perhaps the RBNZ should have paused for 3 years, same for the Government so no support was given, that would avoid borrowing, QE, and so forth, so NZ would be Great Again. But unhappily if our international partners cannot export to us, and now they are not keen from our imports, then what?

We ride the wave, that is patently obvious.

tdgeek

29746 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3137424 1-Oct-2023 18:52

GV27:

and punditry from several commentators and former RBNZ governors.

We want facts not punditry. Someone smart can take a bad look and minimise it. Or take something good and maximise it. So its just opinion. Not fact

I will probably give up asking why is Labour being bagged 9:1 on this thread if not more? We all know Labour/Greens/TPM will lose, so why is there no or little commentary on why National/ACT and potentially NZF will be great? IMO that commentary has been 0.0 That's telling.

tdgeek

29746 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3137425 1-Oct-2023 19:04

BarTender:

"But, and it is only fair to recognise this, the (large) mistake made here seems to have been one repeated in a bunch of other countries, where resource pressures (and core inflation) have become evident much more strongly and quickly than most serious analysts had thought likely (or, looking at market prices, than markets themselves had expected)."

Suffice to say, NZ is just NZ. A massive one off issue where every country was wrong footed. No country could tale a step back and a number of meetings and come up with a great option. If they did (deaths aside) it would still be a best guess. But in these threads using the word "hindsight" is not really allowed... There could have been a scenario where 30% of countries went down one track and had no housing crisis, no extra inflation, no GDP issues, and the other 70% did. Which NZ was a sad part of. But that wasn't the case. There is far more talent and skill and knowledge on these issues than NZ (due statistically to a tiny population)

So, as all countries had the same challenges and responses, as NZ did, its fair to say EVERYONE did the best they could in a rapidly escalating situation. It could have been like SARS. LETHAL, but not many deaths as it passed quite quickly. Or not. Hindsight is a great thing, but again, not really allowed to say that here...

tdgeek

29746 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3137426 1-Oct-2023 19:06

ezbee:

RBNZ Governors are not the infallible Pope.

Im assuming National will re write the role of the RBNZ

Handle9

11386 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3137439 1-Oct-2023 20:03

A typically buffoonish performance by Winston today on Q&A. His resemblence to Trump grows by the day.

quickymart

13932 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

#3137499 1-Oct-2023 21:25

But speaking of Winston, unsurprisingly he's whining about his interview on TVNZ today:

https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/10/01/winston-peters-attacks-tvnz-says-he-wants-broadcasting-portfolio/

Query - not that I want to see him dead or anything, but he keeled over tomorrow, would New Zealand First have it in them to continue, or would the party just shut up shop?

[Mod edit (MF): as requested]

Technofreak

6530 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#3137511 1-Oct-2023 22:12

quickymart:

Not posting from The Daily Blog as GV and Technofreak don't like it. But speaking of Winston, unsurprisingly he's whining about his interview on TVNZ today:

https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/10/01/winston-peters-attacks-tvnz-says-he-wants-broadcasting-portfolio/

Query - not that I want to see him dead or anything, but he keeled over tomorrow, would New Zealand First have it in them to continue, or would the party just shut up shop?

How thoughtful of you to tell me what I don't like. 👌 I thought we lived in a free country where we were free to make up our own minds. 👍

Just so as there's no confusion, I don't like Winston in case you were wondering. I'm heartbroken to hear he's not happy about his interview on TVNZ. I hear Willie isn't happy about it either. What a great pair. I'm happy they're both unhappy. 🤣

I'm sure Shane (credit card) Jones will step up if Winston were to step aside for any reason.

Sony Xperia XA2 running Sailfish OS. https://sailfishos.org The true independent open source mobile OS
Samsung Galaxy Tab S6
Dell Inspiron 14z i5

1 | ... | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | ... | 102