Unemployment up to 5.9% – rock star economy has collapsed and choking on own vomit

By
Martyn Bradbury
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34
0

Screen Shot 2015-08-06 at 6.40.24 am

So Unemployment is up to 5.9%, looks like the rock star economy has collapsed and choking on own vomit.

The  easy immigration policy of National has swamped our ability to create the jobs necessary to keep the unemployment rate down.

This news follows the meltdown in dairy, news the end of the Christchurch will cost 14 000 jobs, house prices rising $511 per day, and a growing poverty gap between the young and the old while Gen Xers get swallowed in debt.

Gen Y and Gen X of Aotearoa – you have nothing to lose but your credit rating should have been National’s 2014 election slogan.

The remarkable thing is that despite all the evidence that National rule for the benefit of corporates while Labour rule for the benefit of the economy, you put NZers in a room and they will tell you that National are the better managers of the economy.

National have done nothing in 7 years other than put all our cows in one Beijing paddock, waited for natural disasters to rebuild from, helped inflate a property bubble to create the pretence of growth and taken intergenerational theft to a level never seen before in recent political history.

Yet middle NZ love Key more than a shark loves blood.

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It’s like a cargo cult of no personality that lacks any cargo. Middle NZ are so addicted to the illusion of wealth the property speculation provides them that they will vote National even if John Key gets caught on film poking the eyes of kittens out.

Self interest has never looked so venal.

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34 COMMENTS

  1. Unemployment “rate” of 5.9% only tells half the story.

    Unemployed total has risen 41% since National took office.
    From 105,000 to 148,000.

    Despite the Nats best efforts to hide and massage the figures.

    • I wonder what the REAL unemployment figures are. Probably a lot worse than the cooked up b..s figures that National tells us. You can’t even trust the DoS figures under National.

    • Just to put the unemployment rate into perspective. Australia have just announced an increase from 6.1% to 6.3%.

      • We won’t be far behind, Grant.

        In fact, the recent 2013 census showed that the Household Labour Force Survey actually under-reports unemployment. So we may be at 6.1 or 6.3 already.

        • Frank, you may well be right.

          But I suspect the Aussie numbers are also a bit soft. I had a quick look at the Roy Morgan numbers for Australia and also saw the blog you wrote on this topic in February 2014.

          I must bow to your superior knowledge of this topic.

      • Just to put the unemployment rate into perspective. Australia have just announced an increase from 6.1% to 6.3%.

        And that’s not surprising, you can see see Abbott’s policies starting to bear fruit in that increase.

        They’re only into Abbott’s first term, plenty of increase in jobless yet to come.

        BTW Australia are far more honest in how they count the unemployed. Over here, if you work 2 hrs a week you are classed as employed.

    • We need an accurate, “un-fudged” figure for not just unemployment, but for under-employment, which is massive, with people opting for part-time work when they really need full-time, or who take on casual contracts, born out of desperation. And we need more data on age groups. I suspect there will be a very large group aged 50-plus, who cannot get back into full-time paid employment. And the youth rates will be staggering.

  2. That’s ok , Martyn – now they’ve got kids working for bloody free at The Warehouse !!!!

    Nice way to undermine wages and conditions in this country – and that prick Key wants to sign the TTPA and further degrade peoples quality of life and hand our sovereignty over to global corporate interests???!!!

    Bloody hell !!!

    Just bloody , bloody hell !!!

  3. yep, the Lambo’ is up on blocks, the stash bag is empty and the rockstar’s hands are shaking

    will it take a property collapse and negative equity homelessness to wake up the selfish kiwis? who knows, but with the international milk price auctions heading South and Fonterra sacking over 500 full time well paid people it is well past time for folding that tray table away and fastening seat belts!

    • No no no.

      There can’t possibly be a property market collapse, because there is a shortage of supply and apparently it’s only going to get worse.

      And because there’s a flood of hot money about to hit us from China. What’s happened with the Chinese stock market isn’t a crash, it’s just a wee correction (which surely must be over now) and it wasn’t fuelled by debt and it wasn’t that many Chinese participating anyway. So they’ll be wanting to put lots of their money safely away in New Zealand property.

      So nothing to see here. Despite the exponential rise of our property values in New Zealand it’s not a bubble, this time it’s different, and if it’s not a bubble there’s nothing to burst.

      And it you believe all that….then you must own Auckland property.

      • You have that desperate tone down perfectly!

        Now – popcorn or chips’n’dips for the coming comedy show?

    • If the rock star economy has shit itself and the free-falling milk prices are going to force dairy farmers to walk off their dairy farms, who’s going to buy the dairy farms then?

      Bugger – I just thought about that scenario a bit more – it might be speculators and colonists with 0% interest loans.

      Bugger!

  4. Despite your enthusiastic use of some rather cliched metaphors (my university English tutors would have a heart attack!), you have summed it up well.

    Seven years of the Key Regime has been an unmitigated DISASTER for NZ, we have gone BACKWARDS. Their failings are far too many to list here, though you have made a good start. For example, that “easy immigration policy” that you allude to is a total disaster, especially for Auckland, as a very large majority of those so-called “investor” migrants bring NOTHING of real value to NZ, apart from adding fuel to the Auckland housing bubble.

    And, behind all this, the core issue, that is driving many of the dysfunctions, is the slavish adherence to the failed ideology of “the market”, and the blind faith in the (fraudulent) neoliberalist and globalist doctrines, which, after 30 years of enriching the rich and impoverishing everybody else, are clearly a total failure; yet those same ‘Middle NZ’ donkeys (eee-awe, eee-awe!!!) close their eyes to all the evidence and keep on voting for their own impoverishment. Unbelievable!

  5. No, no, Martyn. You can’t possibly be right. After all, Hosking assured his viewers that the HSBC regarded NZ as having a great economy despite some downturns. You know the bank I mean, the one with money laundering and tax evasion issues.

    • My young grandson has a speech impediment (or it might be my swearing and gesticulating when Mike Hosking’s smirking up-himself face is on the screen), but he calls him Mike Tossking.

      Out of the mouths of babes.

      • Yes probably frank,

        Martyn I was told last week by a friend that Minister of finance English was at a meeting he was at and after asked about his Government performance Bill English said, (my words) Government was “obsolete” & near end of use and that Government should be disbanded, and he enlarged by saying “let business run the economy?????”

        Scary.

        • I’m tired now so I’ll keep this brief

          Actually I’ll take that notion up. The collapse of government or of empire. Loosely translated as accumulate skills not credentials. Credentials like university degrees cause that’s how debt accumulates in the first place.

          Create your own networks based on mutual exchange. Then build on that.

    • Also read that a while back but when it happens it will all be Labours fault and John Armstrong will praise Key for his cleverness/lying, as he did today!

      • I’m sure that the following are also Labour’s fault;

        * The sinking of the Titanic (bloody benes weighing down the ship)

        * World War 1 (bloody trade unionist doing, um, you know, stuff…)

        * The global financial crisis (a previous right-wing poster actually blamed Labour for that one)

        National, of course, are never responsible for anything. How could they be – they’re nowhere near the tillers of government.

        From John Key (on OIA information that was heavily redacted before release to Radio NZ);

        “You’ve got to understand that we don’t make the call on what’s released and what’s not. That’s the responsibility of the departments,” he said.

        http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/political/280582/saudi-farm-a-%27sweetheart-deal%27-labour

        So National’s ministers are not even responsible for their departments anymore.

        This really is a hands-off, do-nothing government.

        • I do not attribute Sinking the Titanic and World War One –
          to Labour.

          GST they introduced, floating the dollar was theirs and in fact the last farming recession and people walking off the land was also one of their high points – all in the 1980’s.

  8. So much careful pre-conditioning over the last 30 years by unseen hands bent on personal profit went into luring Kiwi’s into trusting millionaires, that we are now stuck in this never ending nightmare of lies, continual obfuscation and corruption.

    I can only begin to imagine just what has really gone on with this government that is buried at the moment. The sordid Saudi millionaire bribery deal and the real reason for it will be but the tip of this iceberg.

  9. National have done nothing in 7 years other than put all our cows in one Beijing paddock, waited for natural disasters to rebuild from, helped inflate a property bubble to create the pretence of growth and taken intergenerational theft to a level never seen before in recent political history.

    That’s grossly unfair, they’ve done way more than that.

    Borrowed $50bn +.
    Facilitated a sham public consultation on climate change and come up with an abysmal and embarrassing target.
    Given tax cuts to offshore film investors.
    Stood by while our flagship wine industry now has 80% foreign owhership.
    Quietly shelved the Royal Commission’s recommendations on refining MMP.
    Initiated a process to change the flag.
    Colluded with bloggers and PR flunkies to white-ant our democracy.

    In general, set NZ on its way to being a basket-case ripe for foreign ownership and control – in short, they’ve just been doing their job.

    • New Zealand’s Debt Clock: W3Schools

      …but all this debt will be written up, a la George Orwell’s 1984 as caused by Labour.

      “The past was erased, the erasure forgotten, the lie became truth”

  10. Don’t you think it interesting, and mildy pathetic, that there are a lot of down votes on comments made, obviously by the little gnats poring over the posts frothing in disagreement, yet nobody has actually posted a comment trying to defend the nats, or put a positive spin on the news.
    Because they can’t.

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