All sizzle and no sausage
The government has plans for growth. Lots of them - 350 plans and only 62 priorities! But more isn’t better. There needs to be a strategy behind the plans.
The reality is that the plans are not working. New Zealanders work harder and earn less than most other people in the developed world. While GDP figures say the economy is growing, wages aren’t rising, except for Chief Executives – their pay has increased dramatically. Inequality has grown over the past 30 years. Most New Zealanders are struggling to pay the bills and worried about keeping their jobs.
Finance Minister Bill English sees our low-wage economy as a competitive advantage, saying that New Zealand’s 30 percent lower wages than Australia’s should attract more business. But this approach has benefited the few, but harmed most of us. New Zealand’s productivity per worker has stagnated and our wages have fallen behind the rest of the developed world. Wages are so low that the government has to provide tax credits for working families.
The government’s plans help foreign investors buy our coastal property, houses, farms and local companies, and provide incentives for environmentally-destructive mining, deep sea oil drilling, coal production and intensive dairy farming. This pumps up the short term economic data, but the figures are misleading. As the saying goes, “it’s all sizzle and no sausage.” In reality we are living off a speculative bubble, with high housing prices and environmental damage, selling off our assets and making a few people richer.
The government’s gamble on more and more commodity production has gone sour. Our farmers are hostages of the boom-bust cycles of commodity prices. The milk powder price has halved since the estimate in the government budget just a few months ago. The result will be continued deficits and more government debt, compounding the growing mountain of foreign owned private debt. 1973 was the last year when New Zealand recorded a current account surplus, meaning we have been spending more than we have been earning as a nation for the past 40 years.
We need a clear vision that brings us all together to build a better economic future. The Green Party has a clear vision for our economy. Our future lies in working smarter, not working harder for lower wages, and creating incentives for a high value, sustainable economy.
We need to invest more in the businesses of the future, and in education and skills that will enable workers to benefit from higher value production and better incomes. We need to build businesses exporting higher value added products, not commodities. We need to support clean technology and grow jobs in the fast growing sectors of the world economy, not prop up polluting industries.
We need better regulation to ensure competition and fair prices, and a long term plan to transition towards a low emissions economy, instead of the failed Emissions Trading Scheme.
The Green Party policies behind this vision are on our website at www.greens.org.nz. Join us in creating a more sustainable and prosperous future.
Barry Coates is a Green Party list candidate just outside Parliament. He is an economist with a Masters in Management from Yale University and was formerly Executive Director of Oxfam New Zealand.
The government has plans for growth. Lots of them - 350 plans and only 62 priorities! But more isn’t better. There needs to be a strategy behind the plans.
The reality is that the plans are not working. New Zealanders work harder and earn less than most other people in the developed world. While...
The government has plans for growth. Lots of them - 350 plans and only 62 priorities! But more isn’t better. There needs to be a strategy behind the plans.
The reality is that the plans are not working. New Zealanders work harder and earn less than most other people in the developed world. While GDP figures say the economy is growing, wages aren’t rising, except for Chief Executives – their pay has increased dramatically. Inequality has grown over the past 30 years. Most New Zealanders are struggling to pay the bills and worried about keeping their jobs.
Finance Minister Bill English sees our low-wage economy as a competitive advantage, saying that New Zealand’s 30 percent lower wages than Australia’s should attract more business. But this approach has benefited the few, but harmed most of us. New Zealand’s productivity per worker has stagnated and our wages have fallen behind the rest of the developed world. Wages are so low that the government has to provide tax credits for working families.
The government’s plans help foreign investors buy our coastal property, houses, farms and local companies, and provide incentives for environmentally-destructive mining, deep sea oil drilling, coal production and intensive dairy farming. This pumps up the short term economic data, but the figures are misleading. As the saying goes, “it’s all sizzle and no sausage.” In reality we are living off a speculative bubble, with high housing prices and environmental damage, selling off our assets and making a few people richer.
The government’s gamble on more and more commodity production has gone sour. Our farmers are hostages of the boom-bust cycles of commodity prices. The milk powder price has halved since the estimate in the government budget just a few months ago. The result will be continued deficits and more government debt, compounding the growing mountain of foreign owned private debt. 1973 was the last year when New Zealand recorded a current account surplus, meaning we have been spending more than we have been earning as a nation for the past 40 years.
We need a clear vision that brings us all together to build a better economic future. The Green Party has a clear vision for our economy. Our future lies in working smarter, not working harder for lower wages, and creating incentives for a high value, sustainable economy.
We need to invest more in the businesses of the future, and in education and skills that will enable workers to benefit from higher value production and better incomes. We need to build businesses exporting higher value added products, not commodities. We need to support clean technology and grow jobs in the fast growing sectors of the world economy, not prop up polluting industries.
We need better regulation to ensure competition and fair prices, and a long term plan to transition towards a low emissions economy, instead of the failed Emissions Trading Scheme.
The Green Party policies behind this vision are on our website at www.greens.org.nz. Join us in creating a more sustainable and prosperous future.
Barry Coates is a Green Party list candidate just outside Parliament. He is an economist with a Masters in Management from Yale University and was formerly Executive Director of Oxfam New Zealand.
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