Just Left

More on "Gen X and Y: just leave"

Here's a video of Bernard Hickey talking about his blog post on breakfast TV. Worth a watch, even if it is a little bit scary.

Envy of Angels

A Friday reminder of good writing - if you've not heard the song, buy it on iTunes or something. 

"Envy of Angels" by the Mutton Birds, 1996 I believe. Don McGlashan performed it live during a talk about the importance of place in writing, and why he loves Auckland, at an event on 20 June. The song is about the city.

Look over there, you used to say,
the shape of the land beneath the street.
Ridges and valleys and underground streams,
you have to know whats under your feet.
So you can make things strong enough,
to take the weight.
The weight of all the people
that haven't been born.

That's what you said to me,
and it's the envy of angels.

Listen to that, you used to say.
Can you hear someone drawing plans?
Can you hear someone cutting wood?
Can you hear someone walking the land?
And all the time I wanted to be,
somewhere that wasn't so new,
where you don't have to dig youself out - 
a place to stand.

Far away,
from the envy of angels.

Driving to your place after dark,
the light of the town behing those hills.
I'm wanting so much to see you again.
I can almost touch the new tar seal,
in front of my wheels,
they're painting the signs,
measuring the land,
marking the lines,
laying foundations,
making it strong,
for all of those people,
Who haven't been born.

Just like you said.
And it's the envy of angels.

Just like you said.
And it's the envy of angels.

That current account deficit...

So the numbers out of StatisticsNZ today make slightly scary reading. The current account deficit in the March 09 year is 8.5% of GDP, or around $15bn. The net balance between NZ's assets and liabilities is up to 98.2% of GDP - $186.2bn.

Is it a problem? Well, some people say yes and some people say no. In part it depends what kind of economy you want. I regard that large external debt as a problem because I want to see more of the income New Zealanders generate retained and spent in New Zealand, and I want us as a community to not be susceptible to bullying by the corporate representatives of those to whom we owe all that money (i.e. the "Ratings Agencies". This year's Budget could have been a lot better without that pressure.

I don't really buy the arguments that some who say it's not a problem present, as they odon't have the same goals I do for our future economic development. I am more interested in thinking like this at the Treasury (arguing that net of debt costs, the inflow of foreign capital leads to higher real incomes per capita as it has largely been spent on productive investment, but it isn't a commonly heard argument, and explicity doesn't make the case that the situation is sustainable.

Just from a risk mitigation perspective, it's probably not good to have the whole value of your annual production sitting as a debt load you have to service. So we should probably try and turn it around.

Then the question is how you change things.

There are two ways to close the current account deficit. One is to think about the trade side, and one is about the investment side. I'd be very happy to see a multipronged approach to the issue given how large the debt is and how long it will take to turn around.

On the trade side, you simply want to achieve large trade surpluses that help pay for the costs of the debt and more than meet the costs of our goods and services imports. Given that we want imports, reducing them as a policy response (through trying to minimise them or through trying import substition approaches) has no good track record, and is a bit like denying yourself the whole point - things we want that we do not make.

If exports are your focus, the NZ Institute and others have pointed out that our exports as a share of GDP have not really lifted much in the past twenty or thirty years. A range of policy approaches have not worked - not Muldoonist fiat and protection, not Rogernomics scorched earth, not Labour's modest rebalancing and re-growth of industrial policy. (In the latter case it may be a little too early to tell, to be fair.)

So we need new approaches. I don't know if that's a scale issue or an approach issue: should we invest another $200m a year in market opening, trade promotion, business plan development, sector programmes, picking winners, whatever, here? Or do we need completely new approaches - and if so, what are they?

On the investment side, we did have some hopeful things happening, but things have gone backward with the change of government. KiwiSaver and the NZ Super Fund were leading to the accumulation of new financial assets by government and by the public, but both have been put on the shelf. The Crown contribution to national saving has been turned by policy and by recession into a Crown contribution to the national debt.

It's a simple equation. If we want Kiwis to own more of their own country, and/or more of other people's countries (which has the same effect on the deficit), then we have to save more as a nation. Individually and collectively we need to consume less and save more.

Some things that might help with that?

• changes to the tax burden - esp the weird non-taxation of residential property
• relative shifts in tax burden from income to consumtion and from savings to consumption (tho this has distributional impacts that would need to be fully compensated for if looked at, in my view)
• restoring cut savings assistance programmes, esp. KiwiSaver and the NZ Super Fund

There must be more, though: your thoughts?

Government could be part of the solution, though the public mind seems to be that a big surplus is an excuse for a tax cut, instead of commendable savings for the future through lower public debt. It would also only be able to contribute to national savings through cutting already-low levels of public spending (not really a viable option), or through increasing taxes - which is politically close to impossible at the present time.

I think we need to have a bigger and brighter public debate to decide whether we really think this is a problem, and if so, how to tackle it. At the moment the country is only really whinging about it - something we love to do, sure, but which isn't going to change anything.

"Dear Generations X and Y: leave ASAP"

A great blog post by Bernard Hickey worth reading: "Dear Generations X and Y: leave ASAP". Do have a read!

He's critiquing two major things in the Budget - the lack of will to implement a capital gains tax, and the ceasing of payments into the NZ Super Fund.

What they mean in the long run is far higher taxes for people my age, to pay for the boomers. Hickey has a great sarcastic and scary list of the things that that generation has had a free ride on, paid for first by their parents, second by selling the family silver, and in the future by their kids paying high taxes.

Hickey's solution is to leave 

My solution is to urge you to join the Labour Party and to get rid of this visionless, backward looking Government whose first major policy act in this year's Budget was to start to steal New Zealand's future.

Espiner on the Money?

An interesting blog post from TVNZ Political Editor Guyon Espiner today:

"Buzz goes flat at the Beehive"

Parliament is in session but the Press Gallery is unusually quiet.

In the white concrete annex to the Beehive, where the nation's political scribes reside, you'll find them, slunk down in their seats bemoaning the lack of real political news or skulking about the corridors perplexed at the paucity of policy being generated by the Beehive.

Normally the hacks would be saved at about 4pm on a Monday when John Key holds his post-Cabinet press conference, allowing journalists the opportunity to tackle the Prime Minister on the government's latest policy and pronouncements.

But Cabinet, I'm told, had a light agenda on Monday. And that's my point. Cabinet, it seems, has had a pretty light agenda for the last month.

...


I know too that this is a conservative government and that as the name suggests they tend to be about maintaining the status quo.

But surely I'm wrong? Surely the government isn't out of ideas? Surely, not after half a year in office?

I am not so sure about this. The Government seems to be good at getting other people to do things it thinks might not be popular, and thus what may look a bit like not doing much on the political news front may not be the case in substance.

You can think of a few examples - the deep reviews of regulation in many areas, with a bias towards restoring the primacy of Commerce Act approaches instead of sector specific regulation that can actually work; making CEs do the hard work of firing public servants instead of the government taking responsibility for it; cutting the guts out of public transport funding in Auckland but only trumpeting the increase in roading building funds.

There are probably more in your area. The line by line reviews were part of it too, allowing a "big saving" to be trumpeted at Budget time, but the effects of the real cuts (e.g. to support for gifted students) to be dribbled out later.

So from a news perspective Guyon could be right. But in substance I'm not sure he is. That implies more, but harder, work for the journos to do: hunting down stories and getting them out there. And given the state of commercial broadcasting including TVNZ and the pressure all across the media to cut costs, how likely is that sort of depth? That,  however, is a story for another day.

LoLNATZ

When you have friends like this...

I'm glad that when we were in government, our coalition partners didn't put out press releases like this. More confusingly, I agree with Douglas. Hattip: Red Alert.

Another Symbolic Victory

Thursday, 18 June 2009

ACT New Zealand Finance Spokesman Sir Roger Douglas today congratulated Prime Minister John Key for another symbolic victory over Finance Minister Bill English and economic rationalism, with the announcement that the Guardians of the New Zealand Superannuation fund have been directed to invest 40 percent of their fund in New Zealand.

"Madness reigns supreme - by directing the Guardians to invest more in New Zealand, the fund will have lower returns and will be less able to reduce the burden of funding superannuation in the future," Douglas said.

"This only enforces the emerging trend we have seen between Mr Key and Mr English. Mr Key announces a stupid idea - be it a cycleway or forced investment in New Zealand - Mr English realises the idea is stupid, and distances himself from it.

"The Prime Minister then becomes hell-bent on scoring another symbolic victory over the Finance Minister - who backs down and Mr Key gets his way. But these battles are only resulting in pyrrhic victories - neither the cycleway nor forced investment will make New Zealand better long term.

"The trend is towards an obsession with massaging Mr Key's political image, at the expense of New Zealand's long term prospects.

"Who will this help? It won't help future taxpayers, who will be forced to pay more in taxes for others' retirement. It won't help the Guardians with their decisions, since they now have to balance two competing goals. Everyday New Zealander's will be the losers with the only winner being the NZX," Douglas said.

Strange Priorities for a 'New Zealand Political Icon'

Sir Roger Douglas was heralded as the great white hope of the ACT Party at the last election. He was parachuted into the number 3 spot on the ACT party list, ahead of anti-EFA campaigner John Boscawen, and Sensible Sentencing Trust misogynist David Garrett.

One has to admit (whether you agree with his politics or not) Sir Roger has an impressive track record. First elected to parliament in 1978 1969 as the Labour MP for Manurewa Manukau, appointed Minister of Finance by David Lange in 1984, drove the economic reforms of the Fourth Labour Government. Once he fell out with the Labour Party, he left and formed the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, otherwise known as ACT New Zealand. Few people can lay claim to have had such a role in building (for better or worse) the New Zealand that we know today.

While life on the ACT Party back benches under MMP must be a far cry from the front benches of the Fourth Labour Government, Sir Roger has been keeping himself busy by making comments regarding the direction of the Government - comments that I imagine neither John Key nor Rodney Hide have found particularly helpful.

So it was particularly interesting (and quite telling) to see that Sir Roger is now the sponsor of Heather Roy's Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Private Members Bill*.

When New Zealand is in the midst of economic recession, the man that many right-wingers proclaimed to be the greatest Minister of Finance New Zealand has ever seen - a neo-liberal economic genius even - is relegated to sponsoring a bill which determines whether or not university students' associations should have compulsory membership.

Sir Roger is now a mere MMP tool of the party he founded. How humiliating.

POST TEXT: My opinions (as a student and a student president) on students' association membership are well documented online. While I don't think this is a priority in the current economic climate, I am no longer a student so don't feel I have a right to say whether or not students' association membership should be compulsary or not. I hope any comments posted here are in regards to the role Sir Roger plays in the National/ACT government, and not a VSM/CSM debate.

* Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of Private Member's Bills is that they are sponsored by non-Ministerial MPs, hence why Roy has handed this to Sir Roger. If this is correct, it is a strange reflection on ACT's prioirties. When plenty of other legislative issues are being dropped in the name of the economic recession, ACT has chosen to use one of it's three Private Member's Bills to wage an obscure freedom of association crusade.

Budget '10 and Budget '11

I've been thinking about the government's political strategy in the lead up to next year's election (as you do).

It's clear that this year's Budget was all about not scaring the horses - with two horses in particular the focus of the affair. Horse 1 was the general centrist voter: the message to them was, "we're not slashing". Horse 2 was the ratings agencies: the message to them was, "we're going to get on top of that debt curve".

What about the out-years? Well, there are cuts in public services in the outyears and they will start to hurt. But I don't believe they will come to pass. Instead, I think that the next couple of Budgets will see the government coming up with "new money" to avoid cuts. 

They could do that in numerous ways. They might seek to sell state assets to the NZ Super Fund. They might rely on the Treasury's forecasts being too pessimistic. They might decide that with the glut of debt on the market internationally, a slight downgrading in NZ's path back to surplus can be sustained. 

They might do all sorts of things, but what they won't do is allow electorally damaging cuts to actually happen - at least, not prior to the '11 election. For it is clear now, after six months, that the prime focus of Mr Key's National Government is Mr Key's National Government. The agenda is re-election. The aim is power. The desire is to win. There is not much else there. Everything else comes behind that driving ambition for National. 

After years of solid investment that have undone the damage of the last nine-year-slicing-at-the-state National government, people recognise and appreciate the level of public services they have. They only elected National when it made the case that it would not damage them like it did last time. It therefore faces serious political risks if it does something else. Which is why they will, in my view, flex the budget and drop this year's cuts as it becomes politic to do so.

Bearing in mind that focus, and notwithstanding the hypocrisy of this next point, the positioning National seeks to impose on Labour is already clear. "Whack it on the bill" is the motif. National will try to portray anything Labour proposes as "adding to an unsustainable debt that our kids will have to pay back," regardless of whether their own policies have already been doing that or not. 

That's something for Labour to watch out for - we cannot be seen or in fact be, fiscally imprudent come the next election. I believe that every promise we make will have to be funded, with cuts to something else or new revenue. Otherwise we'd be handing National a gift horse we don't need to give.

More importantly of course is that the '11 campaign will and should be about the future - and National's theft of it from the next generation through their short-sighted and reactionary economic, environmental and social policy. But to focus on that debate we need to leave no hostages to fortune.

$35M for private schools, $2.5M cut for physically disabled kids

I missed this exchange in Parliament yesterday but I'm pleased I spotted it on scoop today. 

Goff does a very good job at exposing the National Government's priorities.  It is these small things that remind people that while National campaigned on being moderate (Labour-lite) and focusing on the "issues that matter" they are really cutting funding to the polices that matter.

Hon Phil Goff: Why, then, did the Budget cut $2.5 million in funding for the most vulnerable people in our community, the children in the physically disabled units in schools, with a consequence that those schools and those pupils will now suffer a loss of physiotherapy, speech therapy, and occupational therapy, to the serious detriment of those pupils?

Hon Phil Goff: What does the Minister say to the parents and the teachers of those children, who tell me that those children’s safety and well-being will be damaged by the Government’s cuts; and will he front up to schools like the Mount Roskill primary, intermediate, and grammar schools and tell the families who are affected why he has picked on them in order to disadvantage their already disadvantaged children?

Hon Phil Goff: Why did the Minister deem it to be more important to provide an extra $35 million to private schools, when most of the children at private schools come from advantaged backgrounds, than to take $2.5 million off severely disabled children, who are the least advantaged in our school system and in our community?