The Government’s borrowing requirement is set to dwarf pre-Covid levels. Over the five-year forecast period, Westpac sees the Government raising $140b in bonds, $12b higher than the previous forecast of $128b.
Westpac is now pointing to 6% OCR because of huge immigration pressures, that’s the umpteenth time in a row the economists have been wrong about an OCR peak.
Yes our economy has been malformed and warped by the Covid response, but all those screaming at those ramifications ignore why we had to take on that debt in the first place!
COVID!
It’s bizarre that Covid which has shaped all these symptoms in our economy and society, from debt to crime, is not mentioned at all!
It’s like it is Taboo to even speak of it!
This silence damages the Left because we are unable to explain why we are facing the symptoms of the cure we took to protect life in the first place!
We faced a once in a century novel pandemic. We had to make decisions that hurt and damaged many lives.
We all sacrificed for the greater good because that was the best means of dealing with a novel virus.
Were there mistakes?
Of course and there were consequences, and those consequences were worth the alternative which was tens of thousands of dead in a mass death event altho would have mutilated this nation.
Critics pointing at the lack of a mass death event as proof that there never was one ignores what we had to do to ensure that didn’t happen!
It’s the most idiotic argument!
The ease with which we rewrite the recent past, to determine with the luxury of hindsight that Covid was just a cold when it has killed tens of millions around the globe is sophistry.
3283 – NZ (population 5m)
24755 – Sweden (10m)
9162 – Ireland (5m)
191211 – Italy (59m)
Those are the numbers.
That’s how many died from Covid and the population of each nation, compared to Ireland we are talking about 6000 lives difference.
That’s the price we sacrificed to protect as many people as we could, to leave no one behind.
There were sacrifices made that generated unequal consequences in an unequal society.
Labour’s mistake was believing society could just go back to how things were when things were so unequal, we needed the transformative change Jacinda promised but couldn’t deliver.
But the decisions made were courageous and righteous and saved 6000 NZers lives.
That’s a price that was worth paying then, and it is a price that any honourable leader would implement again if faced with the same situation!
Too often we ignore what was saved to rage against what went wrong.
Labour need to rouse that universal shared experience that was Covid and remind us all what we saved with those decisions and that the duty now is to see those challenges through.
New Zealanders leaned into Labour in crisis, because they see in Labour someone who wants to help them, where as in National and ACT they see someone who will kick them when they are down.
Chippy is likeable, Luxon wants you to like him.
When the books get opened this week, the World will be able to see how significant the China economic slow down is and NZs exposure to that decline.
There is every possibility those numbers spark the sense of an economic crisis with the stock market tanking and voter’s Kiwisavers getting smashed.
Voters will ask themselves in that sense of crisis, ‘who will look after me, Labour/Greens or National/ACT’.
Chippy and Grant or David and Chris Luxon.
Who will look after you when you fall over?
Chippy and Grant will help you up on your feet and dust you off while Chris would lecture you about not falling over as David kicks you for being weak.
These are the choices in front of us this election.
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The young people’s future certainly was sacrificed in order to protect the elderly – for a while at least.
Thank God you still have no idea what you’re babbling about. I was getting worried my mental health that you might start making sense.
They may have saved us from death but it appears the poor and the working class are now far worse off and the rich are better off. This has been noted.
Yep. In order to protect the health of New Zealanders we had to inflate house prices by 50%.
That’s the system no one wants to interrogate
Bollocks! Rather be alive and poor than dead.
Covid has links to crime because this government decided on the ridiculous 4 month lockdown in Auckland meaning vast police resources were tied up locking us off from the rest of planet earth and not dealing with crime! Combine that with jail emptying, woke policing and judiciary to maintain the jail emptying foundation and you get the progressives crime wave we now endure! Its that simple! In short, its on this government!
Apart from Labour’s inability to clear the air re neo-liberalism I think Labour did a great job containing the hideous virus so fuck off you critics. Just you go off and do what critics do which is fuck all except to criticise.
All Labour has to do is talk us all down from neo-liberalism which still has us normal people standing on a cliff edge with a gun at our heads and for all you right wingers it must be explained to you that I’m writing metaphorically. Neo-liberalism is a mechanism used by instinctual, habitual crooks to legitimately remove our money from us and place it condescendingly in their pockets. That’s why Pfizer has made billions from tardy right wing action specifically in the U$A. Russell Brand provides excellent coverage of that whereas RNZ and TVNZ doesn’t. Funny that. If national had been the gubbimint the mortality rate here in AO/NZ would have been quadrupled, particularly amongst the profitably powerless poor. ( Try saying that quickly without spitting everywhere.)
Died WITH Covid, not of. NZ standard of measurement!
Heard this ‘with’ the other day. I think it is a trope, which is almost as bad as a disease in this case.
As far as I can ascertain reliable stats on covid separate out those who died strictly from covid and those who died from an overwhelming other cause.
But covid measures being affected by people already sick were still necessary – BECAUSE THE EXTRA DEATHS BROUGHT ON AS A RESULT OF COVID, OCCURRING IN MULTIPLES TOGETHER, WERE GOING TO OVERWHELM THE HOSPITAL AND MORTUARY SYSTEM.
People who try to think things through, understood this and knew Covid couldn’t be left to rage through society at its own pace or we would be totally struggling to try and cope. Than we’d be sorry wouldn’t we!!!!!!!!!!!!! And say that gummint hadn’t done anything and why hadn’t they and ….
The question was did the lockdowns have to be so tight and long? One of the reasons was that many people thought they knew better than those who had studied the medical information; they kept on with their ordinary lives despite the rest of us because they needed the pay, or the church said a blessing that made them safe etc.
And the government knew they would be criticised whatever they did, and weren’t sure what to expect BECAUSE NO-ONE KNEW FOR SURE – it had to be experienced to learn about its effects. And life doesn’t have a guarantee of security and safety, we get what we get until someone spends a million hours to discover a remedy that we then take for granted!
This is one subject where you and I are on the opposite side of the fence. Nonetheless, you could always smash the “with” trope to death by providing the necessary proof that supports your argument.
In return I’ll provide a series of links that shows just how fuzzy this ‘with’ or ‘of’ argument actually is. This is in no way definitive, either way, especially since these links are from the early days, but they do show just how muddied the waters really are as far as this ‘with or ‘of’ point really is.
How to understand – and report – figures for ‘Covid deaths’
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-to-understand-and-report-figures-for-covid-19-deaths-/
CDC Report Finds Underlying Conditions in 94 Percent of COVID-19 Deaths
https://www.jems.com/coronavirus/cdc-report-underlying-conditions-94-percent-covid-19-deaths/
Covid: Disabled people account for six in 10 deaths in England last year – ONS
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-56033813
Our Most Reliable Pandemic Number Is Losing Meaning
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hospitalization-numbers-can-be-misleading/620062/
Population-level COVID-19 mortality risk for non-elderly individuals overall and for non-elderly individuals without underlying diseases in pandemic epicenters
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.05.20054361v2
I guess you are saying our death toll is therefore even lower and makes for an even better contrast between the results of NZ’s approach to that of other nations.
Labour playes the covid card in 2020 and were thanked with an oppetunity to rule with no hand brake from Greens or NZF .
What did they do with that opportunity to right the wrongs of past errors . A BIG FAT NOTHING.
A great image and message. This is very timely. The irrational default response of blaming Covid measures for everything is the childlike response that NZs have to political matters.
This was demonstrated when John Key talked about some concerns raised as ‘trying to turn such things into political matters’. When thinkers and everyone should know that everything is political – and only dummies and degenerates try to separate and sequester. (And this situation will lead us to experiencing sequestration – coming your way soon you complacent clods).
I agree , without retrospect, we did what would have done in 1919 if we had the ability.
In retrospect, even at the time … we attended a crab on our toe as the wave of climate change began to curl over us. I thought it was the indictment of our immediate before really serious things way of existence.