Every time Grant Robertson, as Minister for Finance, opens his mouth about the economy, the word Covid pops up.
When I hear those two words in the same sentence, I cringe. To my mind, Covid is a bad word, not because I think it will kill me, but because it has an insatiable appetite for money.
”While GDP is likely to move around a bit as we continue to recover from COVID, our economy is nearly 6.7 percent bigger than before the start of the pandemic, ahead of most countries we compare ourselves with,” Robertson said.“While GDP is likely to move around a bit as we continue to recover from COVID, our economy is nearly 6.7 percent bigger than before the start of the pandemic, ahead of most countries we compare ourselves with,” Robertson said.
The Government is propping up the economy on borrowed money after splashing out large on investments that we didn’t get a good return on. Dumped Pfizer vaccines; copious PCR test kits; masks for mandatory masking; state-funded hotel isolation; several years of track and tracing, propping up media, and funding the ongoing advertising for Covid vaccination that didn’t stop the spread anyway.
What I don’t understand is which countries are tracking worse economically than we are. It can’t be our Asian neighbours because the IMF says they have better economic prospects than we do.
The projection of 1.1 percent GDP growth [for NZ] in 2023 is the weakest of all advanced Asian economies that New Zealand is compared to. The average for the region is expected to be 1.8 percent.
…the IMF is projecting the real gross domestic product (GDP) rate to be 1.1 percent in 2023, down from 2.4 percent in 2022. In 2024, it’s projected to be 0.8 percent. This is a downgrade from October last year, when the IMF forecast New Zealand’s GDP to be 1.9 percent in 2023.
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Is Robertson harking back to Ardern’s 2022 ‘Wellness’ Budget? The outcome of a partnership with Finland, Iceland, Scotland and Wales to create Wellbeing Economies, the claim that transforming economies, through “shared well-being for people and the planet by 2040” has benefits.
Globalists think having more people on the same page and sharing the same goals creates better individual results but it’s impossible to see how this translates to reducing hospital waiting lists, repairing roads, building more houses and feeding the poor.
What would go a long way toward rebuilding the Finance Minister’s credibility would be a bit of honesty: namely, admitting that the goal of zero Covid was not achieved, nor is it likely ever to be achieved.
This week the Government decided to keep the seven-day isolation period for Covid-positive employees. This is a wrong decision. Businesses are well over losing productivity to repeated episodes of employees spending a week on the couch.
Besides the safety blanket of isolation, there are other Covid measures we can happily live without, such as testing, masking and mandatory vaccination. Our economy will continue to erode as long as we hang onto policies that don’t work.